"The Latin of Æthelstan's charters is of a most extraordinary nature.
...The object of the compilers of these charters was to express their
meaning by the use of the greatest possible number of words and by the
choice of the most grandiloquent, bombastic words that they could find.
Every sentence is so overloaded by the heaping up of unnecessary words
that the meaning is almost buried out sight. The invocation with its
appended clauses, opening with pompous and partly alliterative words, will
proceed amongst a blaze of verbal fireworks throughout twenty lines of smallish
type, and the pyrotechnic display will be maintained with equal
magnificence throughout the whole charter, leaving the reader, dazzled
by the glaze and blinded by the smoke, in a state of uncertainty as to the
meaning of these frequently untranslatable and usually interminable
sentences. [268]

The charters are no less remarkable for the length of the sentences
than for the extraordinary nature of the words pressed into use, most of
which continued in use until the end of the O.E. period. In Latin there is a
preference shown for most unusual words, and they are frequently made
to bear a perverted meaning that was alien to them....Indeed, words may be
said generally to be chosen more for sound than meaning. The resources
of the Latin language were inadequate to supply the craving for pompous
words, and Greek was freely brought into requisition. ...There are also a few
Hebrew words...

This highly embroidered, flatulent Latinity was an outcome of the
rhetorical schools of Italy and Gaul in the fifth century. It is well
exemplified in the tumid diction of Theodoric the Great's secretary
Cassiodorus. But it was in Celtic hands that it reached the acme of
artificiality, pomposity, and obscurity. There are few more curious
monuments of pedantic involution of meaning, turgidity, and delphic
obscurity than the tract known as Hisperica Famina..."

--A page from an 1898 lecture by W H Stevenson.