Statements such as this one by Françoise Piponnier and Perrine Mane point toward the fact that costume historians regularly encounter two important lexicological phenomena when dealing with the vocabulary of cloth and clothing in later medieval Britain: first, that a multitude of languages and, often, what we might now assume to be language mixing, “codeswitching,” or else borrowing occurs frequently in surviving documentary evidence, and second, that the fourteenth century in particular has more than its fair share of new lexical items from across the multilingual spectrum. Historians of cloth, clothing, and related material cultures frequently express the difficulty of accurately matching a name to a garment, and, generally speaking, modern terminology often proves the most efficacious, despite the misconceptions this might occasionally foster.

While sticking to contemporary vocabulary may assist accuracy in our attempts to name garments, nonchalant medieval (and particularly late medieval) attitudes toward language “mixing,” the frequency of borrowing, and piecemeal preservation in the various learned tongues of wardrobe keepers can create difficulty. Often, for example, it can even prove difficult to assign a specific language to a word, as the medieval abbreviation system regularly focuses “concentration on the essential semantic, as opposed to the morphological, information on the material.” Laura Wright’s recent identification of specific noun phrases drawn from English in late medieval macaronic business writing (where Latin or French forms the base language) has cast new light on the often multilingual nature of fourteenth-century record-keeping. Monolingual dictionaries are not always able to include evidence from such mixed-language (or non-language-specific) texts, and hence our understanding of the history of a particular lexeme—especially a technical lexeme such as may be found in wardrobe accounts, etc.—can be left wanting.

Historical linguistics dealing with late medieval Britain is in the midst of a mixed-language season of late, as the study of the dynamically versatile, multilingual medieval texts continues to hold scholarly attention.