 Most of the authors use language closer to the vernacular, use archaic or dialect terms, and structure their work as if to be read aloud to a mixed group of listeners.A more recent interpretation suggests that these qualities are due to alliterative poetry's status as a popular mode closer to the vernacular, or to its tendency to preserve older linguistic forms through poetic formula and convention, rather than resulting from conscious antiquarianism or cultural chauvinism.Several academics, beginning with James Hulbert, have suggested that the Revival's poets could have had a more noble audience, and were part of a conscious regional identity encouraged by powerful northern and western magnates - the Mortimer Earls of March, the Bohun Earls of Hereford and the Beauchamp Earls of Warwick - as a political counterweight to the court.