Book contents
- The New Cambridge History of the English Language
- The New Cambridge History of the English Language
- The New Cambridge History of the English Language
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors to Volume II
- General Preface
- Abbreviations for Corpora and Other Electronic Resources
- General Editor’s Introduction
- Introduction to Volume II
- Part I The Textual Record
- 1 Early English Inscriptions, Glosses and Documents
- 2 Vernacular Speech in Writing
- 3 Orality in the History of English
- 4 The Story of English Orthography and Its Analysis
- 5 English Manuscript Traditions
- 6 Text Editions and the Philological Tradition
- 7 The History of Books and Printing
- 8 Historical Corpora of English
- 9 Historical Thesauri of English
- 10 Assessing Loanwords and Other Borrowed Elements in the English Lexicon
- 11 Historical Slang
- 12 Phraseology: From Phrasal Verbs to Proverbs
- 13 The Language of Dialect Writing
- Part II Lighthouse Works and Authors
- Part III Genre and Medium in the Record
- Part IV Modelling the Record: Methods and Theories
- Appendix: List of Corpora and Other Electronic Resources
- Index
- References
1 - Early English Inscriptions, Glosses and Documents
from Part I - The Textual Record
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 October 2025
Book contents
- The New Cambridge History of the English Language
- The New Cambridge History of the English Language
- The New Cambridge History of the English Language
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Contributors to Volume II
- General Preface
- Abbreviations for Corpora and Other Electronic Resources
- General Editor’s Introduction
- Introduction to Volume II
- Part I The Textual Record
- 1 Early English Inscriptions, Glosses and Documents
- 2 Vernacular Speech in Writing
- 3 Orality in the History of English
- 4 The Story of English Orthography and Its Analysis
- 5 English Manuscript Traditions
- 6 Text Editions and the Philological Tradition
- 7 The History of Books and Printing
- 8 Historical Corpora of English
- 9 Historical Thesauri of English
- 10 Assessing Loanwords and Other Borrowed Elements in the English Lexicon
- 11 Historical Slang
- 12 Phraseology: From Phrasal Verbs to Proverbs
- 13 The Language of Dialect Writing
- Part II Lighthouse Works and Authors
- Part III Genre and Medium in the Record
- Part IV Modelling the Record: Methods and Theories
- Appendix: List of Corpora and Other Electronic Resources
- Index
- References
Summary
Practices of literacy have changed over the centuries, these changes all relating – in Richard Hoggart’s famous formulation (1957) – to the ‘uses of literacy’. As a result, the written texts surviving from the medieval period demand careful qualitative analysis of the linguistic data they supply so that they can be appropriately assessed. In this chapter, the focus is on a key set of early witnesses for the history of English: the ‘documentary’ texts that survive in large numbers from the Old and Middle English periods. Such texts survive in various formats and contexts, and in each case close examination of the modes of presentation adopted reveals not only the sociocultural functions these texts were intended to perform, but also their validity as witnesses for the history of the language. A broad view is taken of what is meant by a ‘documentary’ text, including not only such artefacts as letters, charters and wills but also glosses and inscriptions. Witnesses examined in this chapter include vernacular inscriptions on stone, metal or bone, Old English glosses and late medieval English letters. These texts were all created within complex discourse communities, and that complexity requires deep engagement with the particular circumstances of individual textual production.
Keywords
Information
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The New Cambridge History of the English LanguageDocumentation, Sources of Data and Modelling, pp. 27 - 49Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2025
References
Bailey, Martin. 1993. Two kings, their armies and some jugs: the Ashanti Ewer. Apollo, 1 December: 387–390.Google Scholar
Beadle, Richard and Richmond, Colin (eds.). 2005. Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century III. Oxford: Early English Text Society.Google Scholar
Benskin, Michael and Laing, Margaret. 1981. Translations and Mischsprachen in Middle English manuscripts. In Benskin, Michael and Samuels, Michael L. (eds.), So Meny People Longages and Tonges: Philological Essays in Scots and Mediaeval English Presented to Angus McIntosh. Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, pp. 55–106.Google Scholar
Boffey, Julia and Meale, Carole. 1991. Selecting the text: Rawlinson C.86 and some other books for London readers. In Riddy, Felicity (ed.), Regionalism in Late Medieval Manuscripts and Texts. Cambridge: Brewer, pp. 143–169.Google Scholar
Coates, Richard. 1997. The scriptorium of the Mercian Rushworth gloss: a bilingual perspective. Notes and Queries 44: 453–458.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, Matthew. 2017. Lydgate at Long Melford: reassessing The Testament and ‘Quis dabit meo capiti fontem lacrimarum’ in their local context. Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 43: 77–114.Google Scholar
Davis, Norman (ed.). 1971. Paston Letters and Papers of the Fifteenth Century I. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Drout, Michael and Kleinman, Scott. 2010. Doing philology 2: something ‘old’, something ‘new’: material philology and the recovery of the past. The Heroic Age 13. www.heroicage.org/issues/13/pi.php.Google Scholar
Fell, Christine. 1991. Runes and semantics. In Bammesberger, Alfred (ed.), Old English Runes and Their Continental Background. Heidelberg: Winter, pp. 195–229.Google Scholar
Fernandez Cuesta, Julia and Pons-Sanz, Sara (eds.). 2016. The Old English Gloss to the Lindisfarne Gospels. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Foster, Michael. 2012. From courtesy to urbanity in late medieval England. Parergon 29: 27–46.Google Scholar
Gieben, Servus. 1967. Robert Grosseteste and medieval courtesy-books. Vivarium 5: 47–74.Google Scholar
Griffith, David. 2011. A newly identified verse item by John Lydgate at Holy Trinity Church, Long Melford, Suffolk. Notes and Queries 58: 364–367.Google Scholar
Hardwick, Charles and Luard, Henry. 1856–1867. A Catalogue of Manuscripts Preserved in the University of Cambridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hines, John. 1990. The runic inscriptions of early Anglo-Saxon England. In Bammesberger, Alfred and Wollmann, Alfred (eds.), Britain 400–600: Language and History. Heidelberg: Winter, pp. 437–455.Google Scholar
Hines, John. 2011. New light on literacy in eighth-century East Anglia: a runic inscription from Baconsthorpe, Norfolk. Anglia 129: 281–296.10.1515/angl.2011.039CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hines, John. 2020. New insights into early Old English from recent Anglo-Saxon runic finds. NOWELE 73: 69–90.Google Scholar
Hoad, Terry (ed.). 1978. Sweet’s Second Anglo-Saxon Reader: Archaic and Dialectal. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Hogg, Richard and Fulk, Robert D.. 2011. A Grammar of Old English: Morphology. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Klaeber, Frederick, rev. Fulk, Robert D., Bjork, Robert E. and Niles, John D. (eds.). 2014. Klaeber’s Beowulf. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.Google Scholar
Kotake, Tadashi. 2016. Did Owun really copy from the Lindisfarne Gospels? Reconsideration of his source manuscript(s). In Fernandez Cuesta and Pons-Sanz (eds.), pp. 377–396.Google Scholar
Kuhn, Sherman. 1945. E and æ in Farman’s Mercian glosses. Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 60: 631–669.Google Scholar
Kytö, Merja and Peikola, Matti. 2014. Philology on the move: manuscript studies at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Studia Neophilologica 86, special supplement: 1–8.Google Scholar
Labov, William. 1974. On the use of the present to explain the past. In Heilmann, Luigi (ed.), Proceedings of the 11th International Congress of Linguists. Bologna: Il Mulino, pp. 825–851.Google Scholar
Lendinara, Patrizia. 2016. The unglossed words of the Lindisfarne Gospels. In Fernandez Cuesta and Pons-Sanz (eds.), pp. 329–359.Google Scholar
Lenker, Ursula and Kornexl, Lucia (eds.). 2019. Anglo-Saxon Micro-Texts. Berlin: de Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Lewis, Charlton and Short, Charles. 1879. A Latin Dictionary. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Liu, Yin. 2017. Stating the obvious in runes. In Peikola, Matti, Mäkilähde, Aleksi, Salmi, Hanna, Varila, Mari-Liisa and Skaffari, Janne (eds.), Verbal and Visual Communication in Early English Texts. Turnhout: Brepols, pp. 125–139.Google Scholar
Lowe, Kathryn. 2019. Creating and curating an archive: Bury St Edmunds and its Anglo-Saxon past. In Jahner, Jennifer, Steiner, Emily and Tyler, Elizabeth (eds.), Medieval Historical Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 192–207.Google Scholar
MacCracken, Henry. 1972. The Minor Poems of John Lydgate. Revised edition. Oxford: Early English Text Society.Google Scholar
McIntosh, Angus, Samuels, Michael L. and Benskin, Michael, with Laing, Margaret and Williamson, Keith. 1986. A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press.Google Scholar
Menner, Robert. 1934. Farman vindicatus. Anglia 58: 1–27.10.1515/angl.1934.1934.58.1CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mooney, Linne. 1996. More manuscripts written by a Chaucer scribe. The Chaucer Review 30: 82–87.Google Scholar
Naismith, Rory. 2019. Reading money: an introduction to numismatic inscriptions in Anglo-Saxon England. In Lenker and Kornexl (eds.), pp. 13–28.Google Scholar
Ohala, John. 1993. The phonetics of sound change. In Jones, Charles (ed.), Historical Linguistics: Problems and Perspectives. London: Longman, pp. 237–278.Google Scholar
Okasha, Elizabeth. 1992. Literacy in Anglo-Saxon England: the evidence from inscriptions. Medieval Europe 1992: Art and Symbolism. Vol. 7 (pre-printed conference papers, University of York), pp. 87–88.Google Scholar
Page, Raymond. 1996. On the baffling nature of Frisian runes. Amsterdamer Beiträge zur Älteren Germanistik 45: 131–150.Google Scholar
Romaine, Suzanne. 1982. Socio-Historical Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Scragg, Donald. 2019. Cryptograms in Old English as micro-texts. In Lenker and Kornexl (eds.), pp. 117–130.Google Scholar
Smith, Jeremy J. 2007. Sound Change and the History of English. Oxford: Oxford University Press.10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199291953.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Jeremy J. 2020a. Transforming Early English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.10.1017/9781108333474CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Jeremy J. 2020b. The pragmatics of punctuation in Middle English documentary texts. In Stenroos and Thengs (eds.), pp. 205–218.Google Scholar
Smith, Jeremy J. and Kay, Christian J.. 2011. The pragmatics of punctuation in Older Scots. In Pahta, Päivi and Jucker, Andreas (eds.), Communicating Early English Manuscripts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 212–225.Google Scholar
Somerset, Fiona. 2013. Feeling like Saints: Lollard Writings after Wyclif. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Stenroos, Merja and Mäkinen, Martti. 2011. A defiant gentleman or ‘the strengest thiefe of Wales’: reinterpreting the politics in a medieval correspondence. In Pahta, Päivi and Jucker, Andreas (eds.), Communicating Early English Manuscripts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 83–101.Google Scholar
Stenroos, Merja and Thengs, Kjetil (eds.). 2020. Records of Real People. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Tamoto, Kenichi (ed.). 2013. The Macregol Gospels or The Rushworth Gospels. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.10.1075/z.180CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Thengs, Kjetil V. 2013. English Medieval Documents of the Northwest Midlands: A Study in the Language of a Real-Space Text Corpus. PhD thesis, University of Stavanger.Google Scholar
Accessibility standard: WCAG 2.0 A
Why this information is here
This section outlines the accessibility features of this content - including support for screen readers, full keyboard navigation and high-contrast display options. This may not be relevant for you.Accessibility Information
The HTML of this chapter
conforms to version 2.0 of the
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
(WCAG), ensuring core accessibility principles are addressed and meets the basic
(A)
level of WCAG compliance, addressing essential accessibility barriers.
Content Navigation
Table of contents navigation
Allows you to navigate directly to chapters, sections, or non‐text items through a linked table of contents, reducing the need for extensive scrolling.
Allows you to navigate directly to chapters, sections, or non‐text items through a linked table of contents, reducing the need for extensive scrolling.
Index navigation
Provides an interactive index, letting you go straight to where a term or subject appears in the text without manual searching.
Provides an interactive index, letting you go straight to where a term or subject appears in the text without manual searching.
Reading Order & Textual Equivalents
Single logical reading order
You will encounter all content (including footnotes, captions, etc.) in a clear, sequential flow, making it easier to follow with assistive tools like screen readers.
You will encounter all content (including footnotes, captions, etc.) in a clear, sequential flow, making it easier to follow with assistive tools like screen readers.
Short alternative textual descriptions
You get concise descriptions (for images, charts, or media clips), ensuring you do not miss crucial information when visual or audio elements are not accessible.
You get concise descriptions (for images, charts, or media clips), ensuring you do not miss crucial information when visual or audio elements are not accessible.
Visual Accessibility
Use of colour is not sole means of conveying information
You will still understand key ideas or prompts without relying solely on colour, which is especially helpful if you have colour vision deficiencies.
You will still understand key ideas or prompts without relying solely on colour, which is especially helpful if you have colour vision deficiencies.
Structural and Technical Features
ARIA roles provided
You gain clarity from ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) roles and attributes, as they help assistive technologies interpret how each part of the content functions.
You gain clarity from ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) roles and attributes, as they help assistive technologies interpret how each part of the content functions.