ABSTRACT
The focus of this article is a thirteenth-century Latin legal glossary used for at least two centuries as a reference tool for reading English royal charters, whether newly issued and confirmed, or preserved in archives. As such, the glossary was a worthy predecessor of what Charles Trice Martin aptly called a ‘record interpreter’. This Latin glossary belongs to a family of glossaries generally known to medieval scribes and later historians as Expositio vocabulorum or Expositiones vocabulorum, though other titles were used. Compiled after the Norman Conquest, these glossaries contain varying numbers of Anglo-Saxon and pseudo-archaic legal terms accompanied by definitions in Latin or law French.2 Copied by scribes for centuries, these glossaries occasionally aroused the passing interest of antiquarians like Henry Spelman, who referred to it by the English title Exposition of Old Words? While there has been some academic interest over the last century, the text did not fall within the purview of Thomas Wright in his edition of Anglo-Saxon glossaries, or Felix Liebermann in his edition of post-Conquest Latin treatises indebted to Anglo-Saxon law.4
