ABSTRACT
Chaucer's Host contrasts it with plain style, and protests that it is difficult to understand. The letter, which provokes some sympathy with his complaint, is the earliest of a series addressed by the Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London to King Henry V when he was campaigning in France. Its original preserved in the Public Record Office in Guildhall Letter-book. The language of the letter is representative of other London documents of the time, and so significant development of Standard English, but it included here as much because it is the representative of a particular epistolary and administrative style. This style could be termed 'high style', but is better described as 'curial style': style associated with the court centre of power and government. To these ends, the syntactic and cohesive outline of the curial style elaborated by the lavish use Latinate lexical borrowing, and the long sentences and phrasal and lexical pairings become rhetorical in effect.
