The regionally marked variants which are eradicated can be shown from a Yorkshire petition which contains northern vocabulary and morphology. It is dated from around 1424-26, which is relatively early for a petition to be drawn up in the English language. It is the marked northern usage such as whilk , mickell and the third person singular present indicative - s which gradually disappear in the writings of Yorkshire people during the fifteenth century, but this levelling is most clearly seen in the writings of the lawyers who had been trained in London and may have studied in the university and had continued business or connections with the courts in the capital. They were on the whole, a geographically mobile group. The English of some of the Yorkshire wills are also considered in this study.
Wills share certain characteristics with medieval letters and are therefore of much interest.
In the fifteenth century, many wills were still drawn up in Latin. The number of English wills increases steadily as the century progresses. It is true that not everyone left a will, and that wills only represent a certain section of society, but it does represent the part which was likely to have been more literate. For most of the wills, we do not know just who wrote them, and it is for this reason, they are not usually considered suitable for linguistic studies. In this study, I focus on the evidence of dialect levelling during the fifteenth century for this genre of text from Yorkshire, and the reduction of marked northern features mentioned above.