Excerpt from The Oak Book of Southampton, of A. D. 1300, Vol. 1: Including the Anglo-French Ordinances of the Ancient Guild Merchant of Southampton The writing is not all by the same hand, or even of the same date. The earliest portion of the book, comprising Chapters IV and V, is a specimen of good penmanship of the beginning of the fourteenth century, and has been assigned by competent judges to the year (c.) 1300. Internal and external evidence both go to prove that this is the correct date. Many of the other documents are dated and belong for the most part to the fourteenth century; only two or three entries of less importance, confined to Chapters I, II, XII and XVII, belong to the fifteenth, or even sixteenth, centuries. The language of the oldest and most important entries is Norman French (or, as it is now often called, anglo-french); other entries are in a mediaeval Latin, which often is but thinly disguised French or English; only a few later notes are in English. More need not be said here, as the question will be fully dealt with in another volume. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.