The paper is a case study investigating the nominal and adjectival morphology in the English text of bounds to S 179, a post-Conquest forgery. The aim of the study is to determine what linguistic means of authentication were applied by an eleventh- century forger who devised a text which was supposed to look 200 years old at the time of its production, as well as to search for modern features which give the forgery away, at the same time allowing an insight into early Middle English. The study represents research into “transitional”, post-Conquest English (Faulkner 2012) and the status of English under the Norman rule.

This article aims at understanding how scientific writing was evolving from the medieval to the Early Modern times through the study of two copies of the same text belonging to both periods: the Agnus Castus Herbal. This text offers the possibility of studying the fluidity of this specific type of discourse in a time of a profound technological innovation, reflecting the way the texts were not only produced but also perceived. For those making decisions on how to present this old material to new readers and through a new medium, the influence of the new humanist views and the powerful middle-class may have influenced the final resolutions. The Agnus Castus Herbal was a very popular tract in the Middle Ages, a fundamental part of medical treatments at the time, and was probably still of great interest in the early sixteenth century. Its Early Modern English counterpart – published in 1525 – is the first Herbal printed in England.