My specialty in undergrad was 15th and 16th century poetry. His contemporaries' writing (and writings from the early 15th c.) was no harder to read than Shakesp

My specialty in undergrad was 15th and 16th century poetry. His contemporaries' writing (and writings from the early 15th c.) was no harder to read than Shakespeare.¹ The biggest challenge would be the irregularities of spelling—before the printing press and for at least a century afterwards, English spelling was inconsistent and flexible (and frequently was left up to the compositor for printed materials which led to different spellings for a word in the same document to make line breaks work better). ⸻⸻⸻ 1. A notable exception would be Edmund Spenser who wrote in a style that was archaic even to his contemporaries.