Business Communication in English begins in the early 15th century. Im-petus for using English instead of the previously-used Latin or French firstcame from the central government, which encouraged the use of English asa patriotic gesture during the war against France. Following this lead,writers of business letters eagerly switched to English but retained thehighly formal letter writing style of the ars dictaminis. The survivingbusiness letters from the period show a progressive discomfort with thisstyle throughout the century and illustrate for us the dangers of relying onreceived rules in letter-writing.

The Earliest Business Letters in Engiish:An OverviewMalcolm RichardsonTexas A&M University

ONE OF THE HALLMARKS of a mature academic discipline isthat its practitioners systematically study its origins and develop-mentfor only with a knowledge of the past can the present befully understood. The mature academic discipline I have in mindis Business Communication, which after years of being the uglystepsister of many English and Business departments is at lastcoming into its ovm. A recent article in this journal, Luella M.Wolf's "Brief History of the Dictamen: Medieval Origins of Busi-ness Letter Writing,'" underscores both the growing scholarshipon the origins of modem business writing and the insights we inBusiness Communication can gain by knowing something ofhow business writing was approached in earlier times.

In this essay I would like to describe exactly how businessletter-writing in English began, at least as far as modern scholar-ship can show us. The earliest business letters in English, thosedating from the 15th century, are not only interesting speci-mens of style in themselves but also illustrate for us the dangersof a writing discipline which becomes so much an exact sciencethat it loses the art which had once made it effective. Also, forthe benefit of future researchers, I will describe where these let-ters may be most readily found.

20 THE JOURNAL OF BUSINESS COMMUNICATION 17:3

THE LATIN AND FRENCH HERITAGEOF ENGLISH BUSINESS LETTERS

As Luella Wolff points out, modem business letter writinghas its roots in the arsdjctamm/s or the drc^ameM, a very stylizedform of letter-writing which was perfected in Italy by the 12thcentury. After a long period of development, the form spreadthroughout Europe because of its use by the papal and imperialchancelleries, which were departments of government that pro-duced all of the paperwork (written by hand, of course) fromtreaties to office memos.^ The dictamen was not part of theregular university curriculum in either France or England,'' butsince it was the basis of much legal and administrative writingthere was clearly a need for those skilled in its use. Until aboutthe 13th century, virtually all literate men and women were insome kind of clerical orders, with the result that the dictamenwas practiced almost exclusively in the Church and in thosedepartments of government which used churchmen as their ad-ministrative staff. Consequently, the various national govern-ments of Europe and the Papacy all used a relatively uniformLatin letter-writing style.

Outside of government and ecclesiastical circles, England hadby 1350 reached a high level of economic sophistication. Record-keeping and private letter-writing were becoming essential tomany involved in business, and the art of letter-writing began tofilter down the social ladder. A relatively large class of profes-sional scribes and notaries grew to meet this need. They had tobe familiar with every possible letter-writing form, not to men-tion most of the legal forms necessary to everyday life in 14thcentury England: deeds, petitions, charters, indentures, etc.Some of these professional "scriveners," as they were usuallydesignated, worked for the government, some for private indi-viduals, but many simply for themselves as free-lance, all-purposescribes. All had at least one basic skill in varying degrees ofcompetency: the dictamen.

During the 14th century, special courses were offered at theEnglish universities in the art of letter-writing.'' These were"special" courses in the sense that they were not part of the reg-ular courses in Grammar and Rhetoric and were apparentlylooked down upon by university officials. (The parallels withthe early days of Business Writing courses in American universi-ties are painfully obvious.) Students came to these "noncredit"

EARLY HISTORY IN BUSINESS LETTERS RICHARDSON 21

courses to learn letter-writing skills they would need in theirdaily business lives, skills which they could never learn in thetheologically-oriented university classroom.

One teacher of letter-writing was Thomas Sampson, whotaught at Oxford in the late 14th century. His method of teach-ing (the only method at the time) was by imitation, providingsample letters to his students, who then adapted them to theparticulars of their assignments. After mastering Sampson'sletters, the students would presumably be able to handle almostany type of business letter. For this reason, Sampson's pupilsnumbered not only regular university students but also appren-tice scribes, stewards of noble houses, and anyone else whoneeded a quick, practical education in business writing. The titles(given by their modern editor) of the model letters provided bySampson reveal not only the mundane practicality of his courseobjectives but incidentally some of the continuing motifs of col-lege life from the Middle Ages until now: "A letter to a brotheror sister from a scholar in great need of money"; "A scholarwrites to a friend asking him to discover whether his fatherwould approve of his abandoning the Arts course for Law"; "Ascholar seeking employment writes to a knight asking him touse his influence to obtain a post that is vacant"; "A scholar indebt to his manciple writes to his father for money."^

Professional scribes did not need to learn their trade at uni-versities, however. Most probably were trained as apprentices toexperienced scribes, often under the auspices of the Church andlater in Scrivener's Guilds. From at least the 14th century on,the legal section of Londonwhich was developing around theoffices of the royal Chanceryteemed with all manner of youngmen eager to learn the basic tenets of the dictamen and theEnglish system of legal writs. We know all too little about thetraining of these scribes or clerks, but the uniformity of style inearly business writing suggests that the professional letter-writerswere expected to maintain a rigid standard unknown today.

In consequence, by 1400, business correspondence was handledlargely by a class of professional scribes, most of whom wereaffiliated in some way with the Church. These men wrote ex-clusively in Latin or French and followed the rules of the dicta-men closely. After 1400, however, nationalistic forces graduallypushed out Latin and French, and as a result business writingbecame the property of the merchant and agricultural classes aswell as the Church and central government.

2 2 THE JO URNAL OF B USINESS COMMUNICA TION - 1 7 : 3

THE EARLIEST ENGLISH BUSINESS LETTERS

We might logically suspect that writing letters in English goesback farther into history than writing imaginative literature, theformer skill an apparent prerequisite to the latter art. In fact,just the opposite happened: whereas literature in English has atradition unbroken even by the Norman Conquest, Englishletter-writing really dates only from the 15th century, when theMiddle English literary tradition was already in decline. Theearliest preserved private letter in English dates from 1392; anddespite a few scattered government letters here and there,English letter-writing did not really get underway on any scaleuntil the 1420s.

The reasons for this delay are complex and still poorly under-stood. Certainly Latin and French were relatively "stable" lan-guages in comparison with English, which was fragmented byregional dialects and by wholly unstandardized spelling. Practi-cally speaking, since the scribes were trained and employed bythe Church and the aristocracy (which regarded French as theonly true language of a noble, even though by 1400 in Englcmdnobles probably spoke English most of the time), they wouldnaturally prefer to write in the official languages of theirpatrons. Finally, the middle class, for which the use of Latinand French was the greatest inconvenience, had no tradition ofletter-writing. The guilds and town corporations dutifully kepttheir records in Latin and French until they were freed fromthis burden by the example and encouragement of Shakespeare's"mirror of all Christian kings," Henry V (1413-1422).

Henry invaded France in 1415 and began the last phase of theHundred Years War, which was to end disastrously for the En-glish, although not until long after Henry's premature death at35. Probably as a propaganda measure to win the support of themiddle class, Henry began to send his correspondence homefrom the war in English, thereby becoming the first Englishmonarch to use the written vernacular with any regularity. Hesent home two major series of letters, one a more or less publicseries to the mayor and aldermen of London tracing his progressin the war,* and another to his Chancellor giving orders aboutadministrative details.

With this last series, technically known as Chancery Warrants,'the writing of business letters in English begins. We do notknow how many Henry actually sent, but nearly a hundred have

EARLY HISTORY IN BUSINESS LETTERS RICHARDSON 23

survived the depredations of the centuries, enough to see clearlythe pattern of business letters for most of the next century.They were neither written nor signed by the king, but werecomposed by his dictamen-trained secretaries. The following is afair specimen of the style of Henry's correspondence, a ChanceryWarrant written in 1418 and addressed to his Chancellor,Thomas Langley, Archbishop of Durham:

By the king. Worshipful father in God, right trusty and well-beloved: for as much as we have been fully advised to make ourMaster Masonas master Steven wasone called Colchester, who ismaster mason both of the church of York and of Westminster, wewill that you send for the said Colchester and that you give him hischarge and do make him a patent under our Great Seal such as hasbeen accustomed before this time in that case. Given under ourSignet [Seal] in our town of Bemay in Normandy the second day ofJune,*

Henry's letters are all much like this, unified not only by therules of the dictamen but by the "strictly-business" tone setdown by Henry and his clerks. There is not a word wasted inthe whole series, although the letters tend to be full of legalisms("the said Colchester") which sometime make them seemwordier than they really are. All things considered, they are notonly the first but also the best English business letters in thedictamen style.

Henry's patriotic gesture was enthusiastically welcomed bythe English, with the result that even before Henry's death in1422 many letters and documents which had previously been inLatin or French were switched wholly or partially to English.Guilds, such as London's Brewers' Guild, happily began keepingrecords in English, confident that, at long last, all the memberswho could read at all could understand the guild records.' Theboon was perhaps greatest to the merchant class, even thoughfewer of their letters have survived. Yet even the families of thenobility seemed to welcome the change, for virtually all the cor-respondence that survives from the nobility in the middle ages isfrom the 15th century, and in English. Since England never hada law compelling anyone to write a private letter in any set lan-guage, the reluctance of the English to use their own languagebefore the 1420s seems decidedly perverse to us, but such wasthe strength of tradition and the influence of the court.

24 THE JOURNAL OF BUSINESS COMMUNICATION 17:3

THE STYLE OF EARLY BUSINESS LETTERS

Before describing some of the major collections of theseletters, we should first understand what men and women of the15th century expected in the way of business-letter style. As arule, letter-writers attempted to follow the dictamen, at leastthe simplified dictamen as practiced by the professional scribes,who still either composed the letters for the sender or had theirstyle imitated by those literate enough to try their hand atletter-writing. In general, this was almost identical to the stylefound in government documents of the age,'" the result ofhaving scribes who had to be familiar with all legal, administra-tive, and personal form letters and who understandably wishedto limit the number of forms they would have to use, with theimportant result that public form letters became the models forprivate ones.

The rules of the dictamen were complex and are still inade-quately described, especially in English." The form variedaccording to the intent of the letter, although private businessletters of the time usually obscure the subtle distinctions madeby the king's secretaries or the royal Chancery clerks. Basically,a business letter of the 15th century could be made up of thefollowing formal sections:

1. Address: In royal or aristocratic correspondence, usually(as in Henry V's letter, above) "right trusty and wellbeloved;"in private letter, often "worshipful sir/madame," "worshipfuland wellbeloved cousin/mother/brother," etc.; "right worshipfulsir and my dear master"; and innumerable variations.

2. Salutation: "We greet you well"; "I recommend me toyou," etc.

3. Notification: "And we let you wit [know] that . . . ."4. Exposition: "Whereas . . ."; "for as much as . . .," etc.5. Disposition or Injunction: In royal letters, something like

"wherefore we wol [will]"; in private correspondence, usuallybeginning "wherefore," "therefore," etc.

6. Valediction: "And God have you in his keeping," or a sim-ilar phrase.

1. Attestation and Date: "Given at . . .," "Written at . . .,"and the date, sometimes noted by the year of the king's reign(i.e., "the sixth year of King Harry the Sixth").

To simplify it even more, the body of most letters was dividedinto two parts. The first section largely gave background, often

EARLY HISTORY IN BUSINESS LETTERS RICHARDSON 25

describing or recalling to the reader's mind the immediatesituation which caused the writer to send the letter. The secondpart told the reader what the writer wanted done in response tothe situation just described. The logical progression of thoughtis unusually clear, much more so than in many modem businessletters, particularly since the medieval reader would be accus-tomed to look for turns of thought at words like "whereas."The following excerpt from a letter written by William Paston,about 1430, to the Vicar of the Abbot of Cluny illustrates thestrength of the style:

My right worthy and worshipful lord, I recommend me to you.And for as much as I conceive verily that you are vicar general inEngland of the worthy prelate the Abbot of Cluny and have his pow-er in a great many articles . . . whereupon I pray you with all myheart that [you grant to one of your priors the power to accept cer-tain monks into the order of a monastery near me since they haveno abbot to accept them at present].'^

For all its virtues of uniformity and clear logic, the dictamenstyle had its real limitations. Most obvious to us now is its for-mality and rigidity, neither of which, however, seemed tobother letter-writers of the 15th century. What did seem tobother them later in the century was the inability of the dicta-men style to convey either complexity of thought or eleganceof style, both of which became more important as England be-came familiar with classical letters and the more graceful styleof their Italian contemporaries. Refinement came slowly and thedictamen was not really superseded until well into the 16th cen-tury (and not even then in government correspondence). Buteven by the end of the 15th century, ordinary business letterswere beginning to abandon the dictamen, leaving only the Ad-dress and the Valediction (which are with us today in alteredform).

EARLY ENGLISH BUSINESSLETTERS: THE SOURCES

Considering the ephemeral nature of most business corre-spondence, we have a surprisingly large quantity of businessletters from the later 15th century. Most of these letters are in

26 THE JO URNAL OF B USINESS COMMUNICA TION - 17 :3

large collections of family correspondence which escaped de-struction only because the family was involved in a lawsuit orother legal wrangle and its correspondence was impounded bythe government. We are fortunate that many of these collectionswere uncovered among the public records and published in the18th and 19th centuries by antiquarians and antiquarian socie-ties who recognized their historical and linguistic importance.

In reading these letters, we need to bear in mind that "busi-ness" in the 15th century was very different from modern busi-ness. Most of the investment in England was still in real estateand most of the investors were upper-middle-class or of thelower nobility. The letters characteristically mix business withpolitical and family news, although in those days of dynasticmarriages and brutal power politics virtually everything in one'slife was "business" in one way or another. The distinction be-tween "private" and "business" life had to wait for a morestable, prosperous age. We have few letters from people in themerchant class, and these, while of considerable interest, are thepoorest written and the most difficult for modem readers todecipher.

The basic collections of 15th century business letters are asfollows:

The Cely Letters

The Celys were a well-to-do London family who grew pros-perous in the wool trade. Their letters are the only collection ofmerchants' letters which have been preserved and printed," andhence should have immense value for students of business writ-ing. Unfortunately, one of the things they teach us is that themerchant class worked diligently but ineptly to imitate theletters of their social betters, slavishly following the dictamenstyle, which fortunately was suitable for the short messagesthey usually sent. However, this letter from William Cely toGeorge Cely illustrates some of the reasons why the dictamenstyle went out of fashion:

Right worshipful sir, after due consideration I lowly recommendme unto your mastership. Furthermore, please it your mastershipto be informed that Margery his daughter is passed to God. It [she ]was buried this day, on whose soul Jesus have mercy. Sir, I under-stand it [she] had a great pang; what sickness it was I cannot say,

EARLY HISTORY IN BUSINESS LETTERS RICHARDSON 27

etc. Item, sir, Bottrell [a competitor] is departed out of Calais and isin England, and this day his wife goeth to [him] with all her stuff,and they be commanded that they shall not come within the townof Calais as long as my Lord Chamberlain is Lieutenant of Calais,etc. No more unto your mastership at this time, but Jesus keep you.Written at Calais the xxix day of August [1482].

Whether or not this letter seemed as ludicrously insensitive toGeorge Cely as it does to us may be open to question, but noone even in the 15th century would have argued that this is anymodel of stylistic elegance. The undeniable efficiency of thedictamen in conveying the desires of the writer was at the ex-pense of what is now and traditionally has been one of the chiefgoals of business letters, persuasion. This rhetorical deficiency,which is present in the Cely letters in only a slightly cruderform than that in the letters of the aristocracy, was eventuallyto undermine and destroy the dictamen in business writing asthe English became increasingly sophisticated in their businessdealings.

The Cely collection contains 247 letters, most of which seemto have been personally written by members of the family andbusiness associates rather than by professional scribes. When readconsecutively, the letters reveal a story of fast dealing, of roughcompetition, of unexpected profits, of even more unexpectedlosses, and of unreliable family members who can't always betrusted with delicate jobsthe usual tribulations in the life of afamily-run business in any age. While not always absorbingreading (business letters rarely are to those outside the businessin question), the Cely letters are our most important link withearly English business writing.

The Paston Letters

The letters of the Paston family of Norfolk are absorbingreading most of the time, an unexampled look at the personallives of a large and prosperous land-owning family of the laterMiddle ages. Justifiably regarded as the finest social document of15th century England, the Paston collection fills two healthy vol-umes in the standard Middle English edition.'" The Pastonswereengaged in the usual business endeavors of the upper middle classand the lesser nobilityreal estate, agriculture, the law, andmarriageand their letters present to us an unforgettable picture

28 THE JOURNAL OF BUSINESS COMMUNICATION - 1 7 : 3

of a family trying to survive the economic and political instabil-ity of the later 15th century. Most of the letters are written inthe dictamen style, but, as the Pastons approach and enter the16th century, we can see the old style passing away and a morefluid, modern style arising. For this reason, the Paston lettersare the central documents in the early history of English busi-ness letters, if only because they are the only unified collectionwhich begins in the earliest period of English letters in the 1420sand continues without interruption to the threshold of theEnglish Renaissance. The Pastons were much better writers thanthe Celys, and their letters are generally more detailed, personal,and persuasive (in the rhetorical sense) than other letters oftheir contemporaries. Gnly about one-third of the large collec-tion can really be called business correspondence, however, theremainder being mainly family newsletters. The second volumeof the Gxford edition is made up of letters to the family and isitself a superb cross-section of early letters.

The Plumpton Letters

Similar in many other respects to the Paston letters, the let-ters of the Plumpton family lack the historical and linguisticinterest of the more famous series and have yet to receive amodern edition.'^ They do illustrate the changes in letter-writingstyle between the earliest letter (1461) and the latest (1551)and include letters from the celebrated Earl of Warwick ("theKingmaker") and Richard, Duke of Gloucester (the futureRichard III). Only a few of the letters can be construed asbusiness letters, however.

The Stonor Letters and Papers

These are more directly concerned with business affairs, onceagain the business of great landowners." The items in Englishbegin immediately after 1420 and end about 1483, when thepapers were seized by the government after Sir William Stonorjoined the Duke of Buckingham's rebellion against Richard III.

The Shillingford Correspondence

The correspondence is a refreshing exception to the iron ruleof the dictamen in the 15th century. Most of the letters and

EARLY HISTORY IN BUSINESS LETTERS RICHARDSON 29

memoranda in the only available edition'' are no better orworse than one might expect from local and government of-ficials of that time, but Shillingford's own letters are unusuallygood reading. As mayor of Exeter, he became involved in alawsuit between the city and Edmund Lacy, Bishop of Exeter,who was what would now be called a "slum lord." Shillingfordhad to go to London to try to win over the Chancellor to hisside and to present his case as best he could. A man of some ed-ucation and no small amount of humor (or temper), Shillingfordfills his letters to his town councilmen with shrewd reasoningand attention to detail, often adding realistic bits of dialoguefor effect. He knew his audience was eager for newsand newsthey got, with a vividness which no other letter-writer of thecentury was able to bring to paper. We have all too few of hisletters. The ones we have were found at Exeter in the late 19thcentury in an old cupboard in the Council Chamber and underthe tiles of the Guildhall roof.

Other Sources

Outside of the Cely letters, the best source of middle classbusiness writing in 15th century England is found in Chambersand Daunt's Book of London English, 1384-1425,^^ an in-valuable assortment of letters, memoranda, guild records, andother documents. Most of the letters are official correspondencebetween the city fathers and the king. They are not really busi-ness letters except in the widest sense, but anyone investigatingthe early history of English business writing can find no bettersource readily available.

Secondary sources for early English business writing are, forall practical purposes, nonexistent. The best general study ofletters during this period is the chapter, "English Letters and theIntellectual Ferment," in C. L. Kingsford's Prejudice and Pro-mise in XVth Century England.^^ A readable discussion isfound in the introduction to Laetitia Lyell's A Mediaeval PostBag.^ Otherwise, we must look to the future for full treatmentof this important chapter in the history of business writing.

CONCLUSION

The earliest phase of English business writing illustrates,above all, the dangers inherent in slavishly accepting the received

3 0 THE JO URN A L OF B USINESS COMM UNICA TION 17:3

opinion on how to write a business letter. It may be true, in thewords of a noted scholar of medieval studies, that "if the lan-guage seems to the modem ear tiresomely verbose and artificial,it is only fair to remember that every age has its own methodsof getting business through."^' Yet it is also fair to rememberthat the needs of early business writers quickly outgrew themethods they were expected to use in their writing. Long be-fore the dawn of the English Renaissance, business writing hadaltered to meet the practical needs of the business community.And then, as now, the technical, social, and human challengesof a more complex new age casually pushed aside the carefullycodified assumptions of its predecessor.

ttt

NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. The Journal of Business Communication, Vol. 16, No. 2, Winter1979, pp. 3-11.

2. The English Chancery developed into a court of equity by about1500, but in preceding centuries was largely a secretariat and as such had agreat influence on English language and letters. See John H. Fisher, "Chan-cery and the Emergence of Standard Written English in the Fifteenth Cen-tury," Speculum, Vol. 52, 1977, 870-99.

3. H. G. Richardson, "Letters of the Oxford Dictatores," in FormulariesWhich Bear on the History of Oxford, c. 1204-1420, ed. H. E. Salter,W. A. Pantin, and H. G. Richardson, Oxford Historical Society, n.s.. No. 5,Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942, p. 332.

4. The standard works on medieval business writing education inEngland are Richardson's "Letters of the Oxford Dictatores" and his"Business Training in Medieved Oxford," American Historical Review, Vol.46, 1940-41, pp. 259-80, on which my comments are based.

5. Richardson, "Letters," pp. 398-403.6. Printed in R. W. Chambers and Marjorie Daunt, A Book of London

English, 1384-1425, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931, pp. 61-89.7. Chancery Warrants were authorizations from the king for the Chan-

cery to take some action, ranging from issuing a safe-conduct pass to amessenger to appointing a bishop. Henry V's Chancery Warrants in En-glish are mostly unpublished and are found in the Public Record Office,London, classification numbers C81/1364 and 1365.

8. An unpublished warrant, C81/1364/58, modernized.9. The Brewer's Guild credited Henry V personally for encouraging the

use of the vernacular. Their proclamation is printed in the original Latin inChambers and Daunt, p. 16, and in English translation in Albert C. Baugh,A History of the English Language, 2nd ed.. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1957, pp. 183-184.

EARLY HISTORY IN BUSINESS LETTERS RICHARDSON 31

10. The dictamen letter was the basis for an enormous amount of legaland diplomatic forms. In England, for example, the king's authorizations,grants, etc. were usually in the form of Letters Patent, while his admini-strative orders were called Letters Close. The standard works in English onthis subject are Hubert Hall, Formula Book of English Official HistoricalDocuments, 2 vols., 1908-1909; rpt. New York: Burt Franklin, 1969, andhis Studies in English Official Historical Documents, 1908; rpt. New York:Burt Franklin, 1969. Unfortunately, neither book makes any concessionsto the nonspecialist.

11. The following is adopted from Hall's Studies.12. Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century, ed., Norman

David, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971, Vol. 1, pp. 6-7.13. The Cely Letters, 1472-1488, ed. Alison Hanham, Early English

Text Society, No. 273, London: Oxford University Press, 1975. All ofthese and the succeeding letters are printed in the original Middle English.

14. By Norman Davis (see no. 12, above). A more accessible versionfor the modern reader is the Everyman Library edition, 2 Vols., Londonand Toronto: J. M. Dent and Sons, Ltd., 1924.

15. The only edition is Plumpton Correspondence, ed., Thomas Staple-ton, Camden Society, First Series, No. 4, London, 1839.

16. The Stonor Letters and Papers, 1290-1483, 2 vols., ed., C. L. Kings-ford, Camden Society, Third Series, Nos. 29-30, London: Royal HistoricalSociety, 1919.

17. Letters and Papers of John Shillingford, Mayor of Exeter, 1447-50,ed., Stuart A. Moore, Camden Society, Second Series, No. 2, London,1871.

18. See no. 6 above.19. Charles Lethbridge Kingsford, Prejudice and Promise in XVth Cen-

tury England, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925, pp. 22-47.20. Laetitia Lyell, A Mediaeval Post Bag, London: Jonathan Cape,

1934, which also contains modernized versions of many of the lettersdiscussed here.

21. W. A. Pantin, "Some Oxford Letters from Bern MS. 69," in Formu-laries Which Bear on the History of Oxford, p. 261.

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