When the members of the English and French natio were about to cross swords at the Council of Constance, a clergyman in the little town of Bielefeld, a few hundred miles further north, completed a world chronicle with the title Cosmidromius. His name was Gobelinus Person, and in his introduction he made the following observation:

As a consequence, Gobelinus continued, it was now possible that a local community, depending on the means of measurement, belonged to two different provinces. By calling his contemporaries, who defined boundaries based on linguistic criteria, vulgares, Gobelinus indicated that he did not approve of this change. He perceived the replacement of natural with cultural demarcations as a bottom-up process, which was generally considered the wrong direction in late medieval society.

If we compare Gobelinus’ clear-cut distinction with other writings of the fifteenth century which deal with the political significance of vernaculars, we come to a contrary conclusion. The identification of political and linguistic boundaries seems to have been introduced top-down, from royal courts to princely estates to city councils to villages etc. In the following paragraphs, I will present the case of the German lands as an example of a more general process in Western Europe.