.
According to linguistic Michael Samuels, there were four main types of London dialects. The first identified by Samuels, known as Type II, is found in a group of manuscripts copied in London in the mid fourteenth century. The next London variety, termed Type III, is the language of London in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, recorded in, for example, the earliest Chaucer manuscripts (Horobin, 18). Type III, the language of Chaucer, as used in his work Troilus and Criseyde was subsequently replaced all the other Types. Type III became known as the "Chancery Standard-, or more recently called "King's English-, which was used by the clerks employed in the various offices of the medieval administration (Horobin, 17). The process by which Type III replaced Type II and the relationship between this later variety and present-day Standard English is a highly complex and controversial subject that lies beyond the focus of this paper, but the importance of this information lies on the fact that Chaucerian English was standardized (Horobin, 20). .
Interesting, as with any topic related to the English language, there is much debate as to Chaucer really being the founder of the Type III dialect. Much of the debate centers on the scribes, who copy the texts, which, according to Simon Horobin, the scribes should be credited with the different types of written texts because they themselves are writing them down. He argues that even though Chaucer first wrote down in the English he was accustomed to, the scribes were the ones, through copying, changing and adding their own words due to what they heard around them or would change a word because they wouldn't understand a word used by Chaucer were the ones that shaped the written English form. (Horobin, 38).
My argument here is not that the scribes couldn't have or didn't change certain words or made variations to the spellings within a text, indeed they probably did, a language is always changing and if a scribe didn't recognize a word, maybe he did change it.