ABSTRACT
Osbern Bokenham was from a family associated with Old Buckenham, Norfolk, but spent most of his life as an Augustinian friar convent of Stoke Clare near the Suffolk, Essex border. In his 'Life of St Agnes' he tells us that he will writes simply according to 'þe language of Suthfolk speche'. BL MS Harley 4011, which has Bokenham's Mappula Angliae, copied by two scribes near the middle of the fifteenth century, and located by the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English in Suffolk. Bokenham confirmed his authorship of the Mappula by an acrostic by which the first letter in each chapter serves to spell out his name. His work, He says, is adaptation of Ranulph Higden's Latin Polychronicon, and the passage on diversity of the English people and their language printed here has become well-known to students of the history of English from an earlier translation of it made in about 1385 by John Trevisa.
