The Latin imperative of quarere, quaere, seems to have developed into the substantive query in English, with the earliest attestations of this dating from the mid sixteenth-century. These thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Anglo-Norman instances may be earlier examples of this development. However, the context remains ambiguous, and in both cases the word may also be interpreted as a straightforward imperative (‘enquire’) either in Latin or in Anglo-Norman (sub quere¹); cf. queritur and quero.