It interests me that Coke had to make his argument for plain English from French in Latin, and then translate it to English. But by 1731 a law had been passed by Parliament requiring that lawyers must write:

"… in the English tongue and language only, and not in Latin or French or any other tongue or language whatsoever."⁽⁴⁾

Of course, by that time, the English tongue had incorporated, by way of campfire liaisons and the general marketplace, so much French, Latin, German and whatnot that the notion of language purity could not be raised without a great deal of giggling. English has never had an Academy, where learned men and women consign certain vocabulary to the flames.

English has always been a bit of a tart. Like Queen Eleanor. And with the Internet, it gets tartier by the minute.

What was beginning to entrench itself was a notion of a shared, democratic understanding. The literature of the 1700s played a central role in what would come to be the plain language movement. Jonathan Swift lacerated the lawyers in Gulliver's Travels:

"... This society hath a peculiar cant and jargon of their own, that no other mortal can understand, and wherein all their laws are written, which they take special care to multiply; whereby they have wholly confounded the very essence of truth and falsehood, of right and wrong."

The American revolutionary Tom Paine burned the notion of clarity into everything he wrote, including this powerful call to letters:

"As it is my design to make those that can scarcely read understand, I shall therefore avoid every literary ornament and put it in language as plain as the alphabet. "

By the nineteenth century, Charles Dickens was on the lawyers' case in Hard Times:

"In the taking of legal oaths, for instance, deponents seem to enjoy themselves mightily when they come to several good words in succession, for the expression of one idea; as, that they utterly detest, abominate, and abjure, and so forth ... We talk about the tyranny of words, but we like to tyrannise over them too; we are fond of having a large superfluous establishment of words to wait upon us on great occasions; we think it looks important and sounds well."