Contexts and contingencies

The simple answer to the question of my title is that medieval English was the vernacular language spoken and written by men and women in the British Isles from the period of the initial Germanic invasions in the fifth century through the rise of the Tudor dynasty in the early sixteenth. While Old and Middle English differed markedly in their vocabulary, sound, and grammar, they share – at least from our twenty-first-century hindsight – features that distinguish them from Modern English: a sound system that made, in particular, the pronunciation of long stressed monophthongs relatively stable until the Great Vowel Shift in the fifteenth century; an initial, and then subsequently dissipating, use of grammatical gender in nouns; an elaborate, and also dissipating, case system; a distinction between the singular and plural (and then informal and formal) forms of the second-person pronoun; a vocabulary descending from the Germanic dialects, augmented by French and Latin after the Conquest; and, finally, a set of literary forms (epic, romance, hagiography, lyric) whose idiom and subject matter distance them from post-Renaissance, post-Reformation imaginative writing.

The more complicated answer is that medieval English was but one of several languages spoken and written during this period: a vernacular that took second place to Latin in the institutions of intellectual debate; that took a back seat to French in the cultures of court and government; but that, for some theologians, theorists, and litterateurs during these centuries, voiced powerful and personal relationships to God, to man, to woman, and to nation.¹ The narrative of medieval English, too, is not a story of an evolving standard but a tale of many regional and social variations. The dialects of Old and Middle English differed in sound and sense. But they differed, too, in how they represented cultural imaginations. Even the briefest and most superficial survey – from the Northumbrian form of Cædmon’s Hymn, through the alliterative romances of the Middle English Midlands, through Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale, to Caxton’s account of trying to buy eggs in Kent – demonstrates that “medieval English” was far from a uniform mode of expression.

Our definitions of medieval English, like our definitions of all language states or systems, rely on two different criteria of assessment. A history of English written on internal evidence (changes in sound, grammar, and vocabulary) might not necessarily correspond to a history written on external evidence: the stories of migration and invasion, the Norman Conquest, the development of scribal habits of Insular writing, the movements among regional and metropolitan people in response to economic challenge, the Black Death, the invention of the printing press, the assertion of Tudor hegemony. And whether we accept internal and external evidence, the linearity of nineteenth-century philological history may no longer apply. Language change does not move towards an identifiable goal. There are no teleologies to linguistic (or to literary or to social) history. The ideals of Neogrammarian sound laws have been challenged, as modern linguists have recognized the influence of allophony and analogy in changing speech forms and have queried, too, the absolute value of orthography in representing phonemic conditions.²

My two epigraphs exemplify the ways in which recent scholars have addressed the question “What was medieval English?” from these newer perspectives. Tim Machan’s opening avowal to his 2012 Speculum article does not simply introduce a reassessment of the place of Geoffrey Chaucer in the history of the English Language.³ It provokes a new conception of the ways in which that history has been written, taught, and valued. Machan shares with a host of recent writers the position that our periods of English have been defined as much by philological as by ideological and pedagogical criteria. Machan recognizes that “histories of the language risk telling us only about how we have come to frame the limited evidence that we have” (173). Such evidence may include the uses of the second-person pronoun – a set of practices that, as Machan exposes, operate on the blurry lines between the grammatical and the social. In an extended foray into morphological analysis, Machan shows how the distinctions between thou-forms and you-forms did not, necessarily in Chaucer, regularly fall along the patterns of French tu and vous. Scribal variation in the manuscripts undermines just what linguistic “data” may be, and our literary expectations – that Chaucer sustains the distinctions between formal and informal for coherent, social, and dramatic effect – may be unfulfilled by close analysis.

So, too, phenomena such as the Great Vowel Shift and Middle English lengthening in open syllables have recently been reassessed as changes that seem systemic only in retrospect. Matthew Giancarlo, in his wide-ranging Representations essay of 2001, demystifies the Vowel Shift, showing it to be a product of Neogrammarian presuppositions: a shoehorning of complex, and at times conflicting evidence into a chain of causes and effects.⁴ Giancarlo argues that our codes of language change involve “recasting of data into intuitable forms” (52), and that nineteenth-century philologists “tacitly reduce[d] the English language to a single tradition and a unified dialect that implies a standard language uniting not only the literary tradition but also the entire language itself” (42). Even lengthening in open syllables – something that I was taught to recognize as a real, genuine, datable sound change – has come under renewed scrutiny. Did these changes in vowel length (in the words of Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero) conspire “to optimize syllable quantity according to the position of the syllable in the word,” or were they rather “purely compensatory processes,” prompted by other changes in syllabic context?⁵ From our vantage point, such sound changes look relentlessly teleological, as if they were moving inexorably to historical difference. And yet, from the vantage point of philological revisionism, they may be less laws than legacies. As Bermúdez-Otero puts it, after a long and erudite review of the grammatical and phonological evidence and the arguments of Roger Lass, Donka Minkova, and Paul Kiparsky, our “traditional handbook formulations” may reflect neither the evidence nor the arguments, but instead, may sustain claims now a century old. Karl Luick (the nineteenth-century Austrian linguist) may, in the end, deserve “the credit of having single-handedly manufactured the two most important ‘objects’ of English historical phonology: the Great Vowel Shift and the ME Length Adjustment” (180).

The single-handed manufacture of the objects of historical phonology may compare, too, with the manufacture of the objects of literary history. Contesting the long-standing fascination with what R. M. Wilson called “the lost literature of medieval England,” Christopher Cannon reexamines early Middle English writing to argue that every object of inspection carries with it an implicit narrative of change.⁶ The meaning of the works he studies (the Ormulum, The Owl and the Nightingale, the Ancrene Wisse), much like the meaning of all literary documents, lies in their relationship to what surrounds them. There is a kind of literary allophony to Cannon’s analysis, a claim that everything is contingent and relational. “Early Middle English writing,” he argues, should be “allowed to exist as a set of consequential things” (10).

I see the history of medieval English as a set of consequential things: a story of languages emerging in relationship to personal pasts, poetic practices, and manuscript transmissions; a world of local prayers, French lives, and Latin literary categories. My goal in this chapter is explore some of the contingencies of medieval English by examining how particular material objects raise questions about multilingualism and media. In the course of my chapter, I will address some exemplary documents – some well known, some newly discovered – to see the personal amidst the philological.

One of the most striking personalities to emerge from this philological history is Abbot Samson, who appears in Jocelyn of Brakelond’s early thirteenth-century Chronicle of the Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds. Matthew Townend, in his chapter “Contacts and conflicts” in the recent Oxford History of English, uses Jocelyn’s account of Samson’s verbal prowess as evidence for “a trilingual culture exemplified within a single person.” But it is much more.

This carefully constructed piece of rhetoric characterizes what medieval English was for someone of its time. It is a statement about the skills of speaking and reading. It is a statement about not simply the “language” of England but the languages of England: the French, Latin, and varieties of regional vernacular that enabled social eloquence. England, as we have long known, was a trilingual society for the better part of three centuries, but men such as Abbot Samson in the late twelfth or John Gower in the late fourteenth century may have been unusual in their imaginative uses of three languages.⁸ And yet, to understand what it meant to be eloquent in medieval England is to understand what it meant to live in a polyglot world. English, by Jocelyn’s time, was both a vehicle for preaching to the populi as well as a medium of writing to the literati. Such a medium may well have differed from the medium of speech. That Samson preached in “linguam Norfolchie,” where he was born and raised, evokes a language marked by human history. And, if this is a passage about individual verbal skill and social expectation, it is a passage, too, about the aesthetics of rhetoric and performance, about the relationship between the surface and the substance. Words such as ornatui, elegantissime, and decorum all point to the expressive life of words on the page, in the mouth, and in the built world of the church.

None of this is truly new for the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Throughout the pre-Conquest period, English was a language among others, and one capable of aesthetic evaluation. In his History of the English Church and People, Bede could avow that English was one of no less than five languages in Britain (“quinque gentium linguis”): English, British, Irish, Pictish, and Latin.⁹ In later centuries, contact and conflict with Scandinavian-speaking peoples shaped life in English, even at a time when Ælfric was advancing a notion of school instruction “in utriusque linguae” (in both Latin and the vernacular).¹⁰ Throughout this time, as well, the “ornaments of words” illuminated speech and writing. Asser’s Life of King Alfred famously recalled how, as a young boy, Alfred was drawn to learning by the beauty of the initial letter in a book of English poetry: “et pulchritudine principalis litterae illius libri illectus.”¹¹ And rhetorical prowess – whether on the field of battle or the pulpit of the church – gave immortality to everything from The Battle of Maldon to the Sermo Lupi ad Anglos.

For four hundred years after the Conquest, French, English, and Latin interlarded manuscripts of history and literature. By the early fourteenth century, the narrator of the macaronic poem beginning Dum ludis floribus in the famous text of London, British Library, MS Harley 2253, could conclude:¹²

The language of schoolroom notation is Latin; the streets of his lodging ring with French; but the poet remains a speaker of an English (to appropriate Jocelyn’s words), “ubi natus et nutritus erat.” And yet, when we see this poem not in a modern edition but on its manuscript page, we see it sharing space with poems in English and in French – as if the trilingualism of this final stanza invites us to look back, not just at the life of a single writer, but at the culture of the manuscript as a whole.

All of these examples (and there are many others) point to a set of shared environments that extend beyond the confines of traditional, linguistic periods defined by phonological or morphological change. English is not an absolute or essential category but a relational term. English defines itself against what is not English, and within the vernacular itself, there may be regional or social variations that take on the status of a “language” defined as the idiom of “ubi natus et nutritus erat.”

English lived in the mouths of its speakers, but it survived in the hands of its writers. Historical linguistic evidence lies almost wholly in the written documents of men and women. But such documents are not transparent vehicles. They are physical objects whose appearance, arrangement, ornamentation, and social use all contribute to their personal and cultural value. If the recent fascination with “the history of the book” has taught us anything, it is that literary and linguistic meaning are embodied in letter shapes, textual organization, and codicological form.¹³ Old English literature emerges from this recognition: from the young Alfred’s fascination with the beauty of a letter, to the Exeter Book Riddle’s praise of the physicality of a biblical codex.

To make the case for medieval English, then, is to make the case for the environments that shaped its self-conception. Thomas Hahn wrote, in his chapter for the Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, that, for authors such as Laʒamon and Orm, “each attempt to put pen to parchment forced a reconsideration of the resources and possibilities of literacy,” and that our review of such attempts generates an “extraordinary impression that every act of writing requires a reinvention of vernacular literacy.”¹⁴ I would extend this observation to the range of medieval English writing. One way of answering what medieval English was would be to say: it was the period when every act of writing required a reinvention of vernacular literacy, when every attempt to put pen to parchment necessarily involved a reconsideration of the resources of dialect, of spelling, grammar, form, and social expectation. The English of the Middle Ages compelled each speaker to assess the worlds in which he or she was born and raised and mark them against the audiences they needed to address. You know, Chaucer addressed his readers in Book II of Troilus and Criseyde, that in the course of history the forms of speech have changed, and words which once were powerful and meaningful may seem, to us, foolish and strange. And you know, too, he notes at that poem’s conclusion, that every act of writing carries the potential of miswriting, and that people from the provinces may recast his English into local forms.¹⁵ At these moments, Chaucer, as much as Jocelyn of Brakelond, voices a conception of medieval English as the tongue of people living with diachronic change and synchronic variation.

Old English at the margins

English inhabits the material and the multilingual from the start. Some of the earliest examples of Old English are glosses: interlinear and marginal translations of historical or holy Latin. Whatever information they may give us about lexis, morphology, or phonology, the real lesson they bequeath is that the English language was both heard and seen amidst another tongue. What is perhaps the most iconic of early Old English poems – Cædmon’s Hymn – survives in its early Northumbrian form in manuscripts of Bede’s Latin History. Of the four texts of this Northumbrian version, three of them have the poem in the margin or the foot of the page, while the fourth has it on the final page of its manuscript. When Bede’s History came to be translated, in the Alfredian period, Cædmon’s Hymn appeared in the body of the text (and Bede’s own remarks about the problems of rendering the English into Latin paraphrase were, of course, eliminated). As Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe had argued, this history of the Hymn represents a “promotion from margin to text proper,”¹⁶ and a shift from regional Northumbrian to the aegis of Alfredian West Saxon. Surveying the entire tradition of copying, reception, and translation of the poem, O’Keeffe concludes that “The differing level and nature of extralinguistic cues in Latin and Old English implies that Cædmon’s Hymn was read with different expectations, conventions and techniques than those for the Latin verses with which it travelled” (46). Certainly, this is true of Cædmon’s poem. But I think it may be true, as well, for other texts, traditionally thought of as “non-literary,” where the lines blur between the linguistic and the extralinguistic.

One of the most visually stunning, if critically under-analyzed, documents of Old English is the inscription surrounding the Chi-Rho page of the Codex Aureus. The Codex remains one of the great legacies of early Anglo-Saxon religious book art. Along with the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells, it represents the brilliant Insular tradition of inscription and illumination. Written in the mid eighth century, most likely in Canterbury, this book of Gospels disappeared in the Viking raids of the late ninth century, only to be ransomed back by a certain Aldorman Ælfred. On folio 11r of the Codex – the page that re-initiates the Gospel story with Matthew 1:18 and, like similar pages in Lindisfarne and Kells, offers a stunning Chi-Rho Christogram of its own – Ælfred records the story of the book’s capture, ransom, and return. In vivid, personal Old English prose, his story surrounds the Latin text: starting at the top of the page, finishing at the bottom, and signed with the names of himself, his wife, and his daughter along the right-hand margin.

Students today can find many reproductions of this page: in Christopher de Hamel’s beautiful History of Illuminated Manuscripts, for example, or online at many websites, such as that of University of Southampton English Department, where it sits above the text in Old English and a Modern English translation.¹⁷ I first encountered its Old English, however, as I am sure generations of students did, in the section towards the end of Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse titled “Examples of Non-West-Saxon Dialects.” There, it follows an edition of Cædmon’s Hymn in its Northumbrian dialect, Bede’s Death Song, the Leiden Riddle, Mercian Hymns, Kentish Charters, and Aldorman Ælfred’s Will. Following the text of the Codex Aureus inscription, Sweet printed a Suffolk Charter, a Kentish Psalm, and Late Northumbrian and Mercian Glosses.¹⁸

In this environment, the Codex Aureus inscription becomes a document of regional dialect and history: a piece of writing relegated to the marginality of gloss and oddity, whose value lies in its “linguistic interest” and in its “side-light on the Viking ravages.” But such a presentation understates this document’s importance for a broader understanding of what medieval English was. The inscription is a first-person narrative of vernacular eloquence. It is a voiced text whose drama emerges from its physical place on the manuscript page – a page whose Latin stands in a dialogue with the Old English.¹⁹

Ælfred begins with a statement in Latin. But the modern transcription of this statement belies its symbolic import. He does not spell out “Ihesu Christi” (this is an editorial expansion), but instead abbreviates the name with his own version of the Chi-Rho Christogram. Ælfred’s small, Insular minuscule xpi stands as a little, local echo of the great gold image that begins the page. Much like the young King Alfred, this aldorman is captivated by the beauty of the letter, and the richness of its decoration – its gilded initial and its capitals, set on blue vellum – demands a richness of ransom. Aldorman Ælfred tells the story of how he and his wife bought the book back from the heathens with their own, hard currency: their “clæne feo” and their “clæne golde.” Their gold was unalloyed, but the choice of adjective here is as much a matter of ethics as it is of assay. Their purity of funds matches their purity of heart, for they bought the book back for the love of God and the benefit of their souls: to bring these books (notice the plural here, most likely referring to the manuscript as the collection of Gospels) out of “hæðenesse” and “inn to Cristes circan,” for God’s glory and worship and in gratitude for his suffering. Notice this phrasing in the Old English: “to wuldre and to weorðunga, ond his ðrowunga to ðoncunga.” The alliterative pairings here resonate with the prosody of the religious verse and pulpit homily. God’s words should be read out, monthly, for the salvation of Ælfred and his family: his wife Werburg and his daughter Alhthryth. He wants this book to stay where it is, as long as Christianity lasts here. His word for Christianity is the word for baptism, “fulwiht” – a word he had used in his own will precisely in this way, and which must function here as something of a metonymy for faith expressed through a sacrament. And if “fulwiht” seems to us a verbal feint, so too must “gefera” (companion) – the word Ælfred uses to describe Werburg and which, as Sweet has commented, “seems the only instance of the use of the word as ‘wife.’”²⁰

Ælfred’s inscription offers an eloquent, intensely self-aware example of medieval English. Though in the Kentish of the late ninth century, it may exemplify Thomas Hahn’s vision of the writer putting pen to parchment, requiring “a reinvention of vernacular literacy.” The force of that vernacular reinvention comes from its place on the Chi-Rho page: not only in its echoing of the Christogram, but in its own narrative of family genealogy running parallel to that of Jesus: “Christi autem generatio sic erat: cum esset desponsata mater ejus Maria Joseph, antequam convenirent inventa est in utero habens …” On a page about the birth of Jesus, next to a sentence speaking of the Holy Family, this all-too-earthly English family records their names and gift. Reading down from the top of the right margin, Ælfred’s name comes first, and then, just alongside the word “mater,” is Werburg; finally, on the last line, finding what was in the mother’s womb, there is the name of Alhthryth, their daughter. The cleanness of this family’s wealth remains untainted by heathen sin, and the return of the book – now read in the full context of this page – comes off not simply as the ransoming of an object, but as a saint-like romance of exile and return. God is to be praised here, but he is praised in the alliterations of the vernacular. And while the inscription bids others to read from the book aloud, it is Ælfred’s own “ic” that echoes as a vox clamantis in our ears. His statement, much as Jocelyn’s account of Samson, is a story about speaking and writing, about local dialect and universal faith, about the ornaments of eloquence and the decorum ecclesie. This is not just a text but a performance, as much a piece of what O’Keeffe had called “visible song” as Cædmon’s Hymn may be in its multiple literacies.

I have sought to move the Codex Aureus inscription out of the marginality of Sweet’s “non-West-Saxon.” At the same time, I have sought to restore it to its own margins and to see its physical condition as a bearer of its broader social and linguistic meaning. But, in addition, I have tried to show that even the most straightforward, historically bound of texts may offer figurative expression. Ælfred aspires to imagination: in his uses of alliterative homiletics, in his metonymic terms for faith and marriage, and in his visual arrangement of the names on the margin.

The emergence of Middle English verse

One could write a history of medieval English along these beautifully blurry lines between the vernacular and the Latin, the literal and the figurative, the side and the center. Some of the earliest post-Conquest texts survive on the margins of the masters, and their first-person voices read as powerful assertions of vernacularity. What Carleton Brown once called “the earliest example of the secular lyric” in Middle English survives scrawled out as prose along the top of a late twelfth-century theological manuscript.²¹ Re-edited and lineated by Peter Dronke, it reads:

In the eighty years since Brown published this poem, we have come to realize that terms such as “earliest,” “secular,” and “lyric” are all contingent categories. On the one hand, the string of first-person directives, its complex rhyme scheme, and its blend of desire and description all locate this text as a Middle English lyric. On the other hand, however, its imagery of confinement and control, its direction towards death and the grave, and its almost completely Anglo-Saxon vocabulary point back towards the elegies of late Old English: to the First Worcester Fragment, The Soul and the Body, The Grave, and The Latemast Day. And in its one identifiable, non-Anglo-Saxon loanword – the castel in which the beloved is locked away – the poem deploys the same strategy of verbal and material displacement as the poem on the death of William the Conqueror had done in the 1187 entry in the Peterborough Chronicle. “Castelas he let wyrcean,” that poem began, as if the one thing that William had left behind was a new built environment of dressed stone, of a monumental legacy distilled into a loanword.

This little poem hovers on the margins of its manuscript and well as its linguistic history. But it is far from unique. A more powerfully canonical example might be The Owl and the Nightingale, whose assertive first-person beginning, its lithe dialectic, and its attentive descriptions of the natural landscape have long elevated it to an ideal of post-Conquest vernacularity.²²

The Owl and the Nightingale is many things, but it may well be the first, sustained English poem written out in lineated couplets: the form of continental verse. Such European, intellectual associations of the poem are affirmed, too, in the heading it receives in the Jesus College Manuscript: “Incipit altercacio inter filomenum et bubonem.”²³ But when we read its words aloud, we hear not the polysyllables of Latin but the short words of Old English. Is this an English poem, written in the manner of a European altercacio? Or is it a continental poem that happens to be written in English? Such questions may be complicated by the version of the poem in the Cotton Caligula Manuscript, where it appears unaccouterred by a Latin title or by a concluding “Explicit” and segues, immediately, into verses of unquestionably Insular didactic force.

The Owl and the Nightingale ends, in this manuscript, with the poem we now call “Death’s Wither-Clench.” That poem had, in fact, appeared in the Jesus Manuscript, but folios away. Here, in Cotton, it stands as a kind of closing moral, reasserting the poem’s nativeness, grounding the reader in the earth after avian flights of eloquence. As the coda to a debate poem full of misdoings and misunderstandings, where final human judgment playfully suspends itself, “Death’s Wither-Clench” offers an unmistakable deme. After a story celebrating two birds singing in green meadows, “Death’s Wither-Clench” reminds the reader: “Al schal falewi þi grene” (Everything that is green will fade). After The Owl and the Nightingale’s initial characterization of the bird’s debate, “þat plait was stif 7 starc 7 strong,” “Death’s Wither-Clench” asserts, “Nis non so strong ne sterch ne kene / þat mai ago deaþes wiþer-blench [sic]” (There is no one so strong nor powerful nor keen that will not undergo death’s savage trick). And after a story in which one bird has accused the other of subsisting on a diet of spiders, flies, and worms, “Death’s Wither-Clench” reiterates the inescapable fact that in the end, all of us “wormes fode … shald beo” (shall be food for worms).

These are the landscapes of medieval English, where the line between the Old and Middle – whether drawn by language or by literature – shifts verbally and visually. Such texts subvert our textbook needs for demarcations between periods. They undermine our affirmations of linguistic or literary innovation. They ask us to consider the place of voice (whether it be historically human or imagined avian) in the world of the document. And they ask us, too, whether those writings can be trusted. If there is one thing in which we still wish to believe it is that, for the bulk of medieval English writing, orthography follows pronunciation. This is, of course, not to say that every single piece of writing represents the lived speech of the writer or the reader. But it is to say that, by convention, forms of spelling largely represented sounds, and in the study of Middle English dialects in particular, those spellings are the primary sources of evidence for such sounds.

Reading, writing, and the ends of medieval English

Much of this relationship changed towards the close of the medieval period, as writing standards evolved keyed to institutional practice and official regularization. The rise of the so-called “Chancery Standard” exemplifies the ways in which a spelling system emerged, unmoored from the speech of scribes. Chancery preserved what might be called historical spellings even in the face of changed pronunciation (for example, high, ought, slaughter, right, though, and nought). By contrast, at least some of Chancery’s scribes came from the North of England, and these transplanted men brought their own regional preferences to spelling and morphology: for example, the Northern form-ly rather than the Midlands form-lich; the ending-s, instead of-eth, for the third-person singular; and certain forms of the verb “to be.” Such regionalisms became part of a standard. When William Caxton came to print the literary canon of the previous century (Chaucer, Gower, and Lydgate), he adopted Chancery-style spellings and word forms. His remarkable innovation was to adapt a form of writing developed for official, non-literary texts to imaginative works of literature. In so doing, he contributed to what we (retrospectively) may see as the “modernization” of English.²⁴

In so doing, too, he contributed to what (as much as sound change or grammatical development) may distinguish medieval English from its later forms. John Hurt Fisher has argued for the great importance of Chancery in the establishment of a modern, standard English, and he has argued that “the most important development of the [fifteenth] century was the emergence of writing as a system coordinate with, but largely independent from, speech.” During the fifteenth century, a written, official standard seems to have emerged, leading Fisher to conclude that by the century’s end, “speech is not writing.” This split between the voice and hand (or the typesetter) had become so great, that by 1569 John Hart lamented in his Orthographie:

Medieval English may mark its end with an attitude towards speech and writing: a recognition that the English of the page is no longer the English of the voice.

Of course, the rigorous distinction between voice and script did not crystallize at once. In spite of Chancery ministrations, or the work of early printers, English men and women often wrote as they spoke well into the seventeenth century – long after anything approaching “medieval English” could be said to have survived. But it is true, however, that in the rise of both aristocratic and bourgeois household and school education, writing masters of the late fifteenth and sixteenth century did help to regularize literate vernaculars, and it came to be understood, throughout the Tudor period, that the mark of an educated man or woman was the skill at letter-formation and (at least some) consistency of spelling.

Nonetheless, documents survive that attest to earlier linguistic forms in everyday use and that show how medieval English lasted well into the period we would like to believe was modern. Mine has been, here, a history of language written on the blurry lines between vernacular and Latin, material and metaphorical, the margin and the center. In offering one final case of medieval vernacular eloquence, I turn to the sixteenth-century annotations I discovered in a book of hours now held in the San Diego Public Library.²⁶ This little volume, produced in the Low Countries in the late fifteenth century for English export, holds marks of prayer and possession from an identifiable Norfolk family. On historical, linguistic, and paleographical grounds, these annotations can be dated from the 1490s through the 1550s, and in what may be its chronologically last, extended piece of personal writing, one of the owners has inscribed a prayer in the dead center of the volume: just after the Obsecro Te and on a set of blank leaves that may have been originally designed for illumination. I have elsewhere discussed this book in detail, and the text with which I conclude may be dated to the first decades after the Henrician reformation. Nonetheless, it offers evidence for the profound linguistic impress of “medieval English” on the writer’s heart and hand. Much like Ælfred’s inscription in the Codex Aureus, it records a vernacular, first-person voice responding to a Latin text of devotion and holy descent.

This prayer hovers between the commonplace and the creative. For a reader with an eye towards medieval English idioms and ideologies, the appeal for the defense against enemies visible and invisible will recall the prayers of St. Bridget, popular throughout late medieval England, especially in their vernacular form known as the “Fifteen Oes.” St. Bridget’s Latin plea, “liberes me ab omnibus inimicis visibilibus et invisibilibus” (free me from all enemies visible and invisible), is virtually translated here. In addition, the repeated appeals for mercy resonate with the miserecordia prayers of the late medieval church, themselves echoic of the Psalms. Much of this prayer’s vocabulary would have been commonplace to Middle English orisons: God’s immutable power and mercy; the plea to be delivered from affliction; to loosen the writer from the trouble; the desire to take hatred clean away. Among the Middle Englishisms that stand out, there is the idiom “to me warde,” a way of expressing “towards me,” that shows up in such texts as Pearl, Troilus and Criseyde, and Lydgate’s Pilgrimage of the Life of Man. It may well have been an archaism by the time of Tyndale, who used it in his versions of 2 Corinthians 7:7: “For he tolde vs youre desyre youre mornynge youre fervent mynde to me warde: so that I now reioyce the more.”

For a text written in the 1550s, there is much here that is “medieval.” Its long sentences, unsure in their subordinate clauses and relative pronouns, evoke the prose of an earlier century, where (to appropriate the words of Richard Beadle) only a modern editor’s “liberal use of parentheses and dashes … might do something to meet the writer’s desire to combine subordination” with devotional assertion.²⁷

But the most strikingly medieval moment in the text is the use of the word queme. Descending from the Old English gecweme, the word meant satisfaction or pleasure, often in actions pleasing to God. The noun appears (in various spellings) throughout a range of Northern Middle English texts, as well as in such regional poems as Gawain and Pearl. The OED and the Middle English Dictionary give the following quotation from the Townley Cycle Play of Jacob as the last recorded use of the noun: “Thou shall well yhwe thi holy day, and serue to wheme God with all thi hart.” After this time (at least according to the OED), the word was seen as regional or archaic, and it survives not in literary uses but in lexicographies of Northern dialects and provincialisms.

An Elizabethan reader would have found queme as a relic in the architecture of this passage’s vocabulary. Compared to the Latin-sounding mitigate (according to the OED, a late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century word) and extinguish (according to the OED, a word that first appears in the 1540s and 50s), queme would have seemed as medieval as these other words sound modern. Indeed, this prayer straddles the old and new in such arresting ways, that we cannot but see in it a human supplicant, putting pen to parchment (in Thomas Hahn’s words) in “a reconsideration of the resources and possibilities of literacy.” That this writer understood his place on the cusp of language change is clear, finally, in his phrasing of the creation of man, as if he were translating the old into something new: “Lorde god of Israell, who madest Adam of a parte of earth or clompe of ye grounde …” Anyone from Aldorman Ælfred onwards could have understood “a parte of earth,” but only someone of the late sixteenth century could have made sense of “clompe of ye grounde.” In fact, the OED records the first use of the word clump as meaning “a group of trees” in 1586, and has no entry for the word meaning a “compact mass or piece” (clearly the book of hours’ annotator’s meaning) until 1699. This prayer may offer up the earliest recorded, written use of clump, and in that little bit of lexicographic one-upsmanship, we may find a writer acutely conscious of watching one version of his language end and another begin.

This passage is far from unique in its blend of old and new and its subversion of the fault lines between “medieval” and “modern” language and sensibility. But what it offers in my narrative of medieval English is the evidence of voice coming to terms with text; the challenges that we, as modern scholars, have with using written documents as evidence of language change; and the material condition of the English language taking form amidst the interleavings of the Latin. Much like Abbot Samson of three centuries before, this writer offers a prayer “secundum linguam Norfolchie” – with all the idiosyncratic blends of form and lexicon that may have been that dialect’s own norm. And if the old and new stand side-by-side, it may be because someone is writing at the close of a lifetime that had seen linguistic change in the place “ubi natus et nutritus est.”

My chapter has attended to some moments in the history of medieval English when we can see changes and contingencies at work – when we may find in the self-conscious writings of an individual or in the ventriloquisms of a genre an awareness of vernaculars in contact and in contest with varieties of forms. To speak and write, conscious of diachronic change and synchronic variation, attentive to the multilingualism of the British Isles, and sensitive to the material environments in which vernacularity took shape – to do all these things is to live in medieval English. As I have suggested here, that English can be understood anew by placing texts back in their documentary contexts: not excerpted in textbooks or anthologies, but restored to the voice and verso of their origins. In the process, we may understand how situational medieval English was – a language of times and places, but one of pens and parchments, too. If linguistic history, to return to Machan’s formulation, needs to be rewritten in a manner other than retrospectively, it needs first to be reread on its own pages.

Philology at the beginning of the twenty-first century

The distinguished paleographer, the late Malcolm Parkes, was accustomed to opine in conversation that “the greatest mistake a paleographer makes is to forget the nature of the text being copied.” The axiom is a powerful one, with relevance not simply for the subdiscipline of paleography but also for the wider philological enterprise of which paleography is part. In this chapter, part of a much larger ongoing research program on the afterlives of medieval texts, a set of texts from the period under review that survive in more than one version will be examined. It will be demonstrated how certain characteristics of these texts – spelling, punctuation, certain paleographical/bibliographical characteristics and their layout, all broadly speaking philological – can be related intimately to their textual function. The wider theoretical framework for the chapter, therefore, may be characterized in broad terms as philological and pragmatic.

The term philology has of course a wide range of meanings, and indeed these meanings have changed through time. The birth of the “new philology,” arguably the nearest thing to a real (as opposed to a claimed) paradigm shift that has ever happened in linguistic enquiry, is traditionally dated to a single event: Sir William Jones’s Third Anniversary Discourse to the Asiatic Society of Bengal, delivered in 1786. Sir William’s speech on that occasion included the following famous passage:

Although its novelty has been questioned,² Jones’s statement remains – once we look past its eighteenth-century terminology (e.g., copious, i.e., “elaborated”) – a concise outline of the comparative method, whereby languages are compared in order to reconstruct the nature of their common ancestor. This approach was “the new philology.”

The new philology expressed itself more comprehensively through the tree diagrams of Jacob Grimm (1785‐1863), enunciator of the eponymous Law, which were used to reconstruct the archetypal language of common ancestor-languages through the analysis of extant cognates. But it also expressed itself in the study of textual relationships, something hinted at by Jones’s reference to antiquities, through the textual criticism of Grimm’s contemporary Karl Lachmann (1793‐1851). Lachmann’s stemma codicum – or family tree – of manuscript witnesses, used to reconstruct the archetypal text and thence the author’s original conception of the work, is clearly related to the tree models of languages developed by Grimm and his successors.

Grimm and Lachmann underpin pretty well all the philological enterprises of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, from the great Neogrammarians to what became the Oxford English Dictionary, and philological “rigor” made subjects new to nineteenth-century universities – such as the discipline that later became “English studies” – respectable. The philological tradition continued – indeed it underpinned the disciplinary formation of numerous Anglicists until quite recently – and it never lost the range of concerns that Jones enunciated: a combination of pattern-seeking beside an intense empirical focus on texts (Jones’s “antiquities”). But, by the final decades of the twentieth century, philology seemed to have run its course and was ripe for rethinking. Its prominence in linguistic inquiry had been overtaken in many circles by the rise of linguistics as a discipline distinct from textual study; generative linguistics, the dominant model in the United States particularly, was in its focus on formalism much more akin to philosophy or mathematics. And as an approach to text, philology seemed under-theorized in comparison with, say post-modernism.³

However, the influential “new philologists” (really, it may be argued, the “‘new’ new philologists”) who contributed to Stephen Nichols’s special number of Speculum in 1990 drew on a kind of critical approach that found its expression, for medievalists at least, in the writings of Derek Pearsall and others from the late 1970s onwards.⁴ Inspired by current theoretical trends in the humanities, the “new” new philologists wanted a more theoretically sensitive approach to textual study which took on board post-modern, destabilizing thinking; and they undertook this task by reversing the telescope, as it were, setting aside the focus on archetypes and concentrating on variance – Bernard Cerquiglini famously wrote “in praise of the variant” – and what Paul Zumthor had some years before called mouvance.⁵

The “new” new philology differed from the older variety in not emphasizing the linguistic aspect of the enterprise, but in recent years it has, in some circles at least, mutated into something else, which brings it back into engagement with its linguistic side: historical pragmatics. Pragmatics for linguists is the study of how language works in situations, and is increasingly interesting for linguists working with cognitive models of language: “a shift seems to be taking place in linguistics towards pragmatic approaches … with context playing a more prominent role than before.”⁶ Historical pragmatics, as its name suggests, applies this insight to the past, and is necessarily focused on written texts. And although much research in the field has hitherto been devoted to the discussion of more obviously “linguistic” phenomena such as the grammatical/lexical expression of (im)politeness,⁷ other developments of the discipline have taken on board quite delicate “textual trace” features such as punctuation.⁸

The rest of this chapter will focus on a number of texts that, originating in the Old and Middle English periods, demonstrate processes of mouvance in quite delicate ways. I will conclude by returning to some of the implications of the approach offered here.

Laʒamon’s Brut

The language of London, British Library, MS Cotton Caligula A.ix (Part I), dated to the second quarter of the thirteenth century, has been localized to the south-west Midlands, more specifically north-west Worcestershire.⁹ The manuscript contains one of two surviving texts of the early Middle English epic/romance poem Laʒamon’s Brut, and the Caligula text is generally considered to be closer to the authorial original. Passage 1 below is based on Brook and Leslie’s edition of the opening lines of the poem, but has been corrected against the manuscript. The first initial <A> is historiated, containing the famous drawing of Laʒamon bent over his book (the only such elaborate initial in the whole of the Caligula text).¹⁰ While in verse, the passage is written out (as was the case with Anglo-Saxon poetry), in the same manner as prose, although (unlike Anglo-Saxon verse) in double columns on each page. I have marked the end of manuscript lines with |, while flagging the verse structure in lineation.¹¹

The verse form of the text is based around the half-line unit characteristic of Anglo-Saxon poetry, although the syntax of the passage is “looser,” with considerable use of prepositions, required given the obscuration of the comparatively complex Old English inflectional system. It has been argued that the deployment of short units in sequence, e.g., line 19, is more characteristic of the so-called “popular” style of late Old English verse than that of poetry traditionally seen as more archaic, e.g., Beowulf.¹⁴ Litterae notabiliores (i.e., capital letters) are deployed in general to mark steps in the argument, although they are also sporadically used for personal names. However, in general the punctuation of the passage is closely tied to its verse structure, with symbols known as the positurae, in origins used for “pointing” liturgical texts, deployed to assist declamation. Thus the mid-line caesura is generally flagged by the symbol known as the punctus elevatus, viz. ؛, used to indicate a major medial pause, and the end of lines by the simple point or punctus; it will be observed that, in this passage at least, the occurrence of the caesura corresponds to a break between periodic units. In sum, the punctuation is designed to assist oral delivery, while the “loose” syntactic structure, as was commonplace well into the early modern period and indeed beyond, reflects “speech-like” usage.

As flagged above, Laʒamon’s Brut survives in two versions. The second version, London, British Library, MS Cotton Otho C.xiii, dated from the second quarter of the thirteenth century with language localized by LAEME to north-west Wiltshire, has generally received less attention than the Caligula text. Not only was the manuscript severely damaged in a disastrous fire at Ashburnham House in 1731, but also the Otho text was clearly always an abbreviated form of the poem. For that reason, the Otho manuscript has never received the same kind of attention as the Caligula text.

The opening of the Otho Brut was lost in the Ashburnham fire, but not before it had been transcribed by the distinguished paleographer and librarian Humfrey Wanley (1672–1726). Wanley’s transcription has been the main source for all modern editions of these lines, such as Brook and Leslie. Brook and Leslie present the Otho opening as follows:

This edited version (passage 2) allows us to compare the vocabulary of the two versions of the text, and it is at once clear that the Otho text represents a “modernized” version of the Brut, replacing (e.g.) the Old English forms seemingly characteristic of Laʒamon’s “antiquarian sentiments.”¹⁶ Thus archaic (or archaistic) forms such as Caligula’s drihten (line 10) or leoden (line 1) appear as God (cf. the confused form Driste, line 2) and londe in Otho. (It also demonstrates, inter alia, what were probably Wanley’s interventions; the only mark of punctuation deployed is the punctus, whereas we know from elsewhere in the Otho manuscript that the punctus elevatus must also have been used.) Such regular departures from what must have been “difficult readings” have added to the general view that the Caligula manuscript is to be preferred for study as being closer to the author’s original conception of the work.

However, more recently scholars have been more willing to celebrate Otho’s virtues. Jane Roberts, commenting on the Otho scribe’s calligraphic qualities, suggests that “this must once have been rather a pretty book,”¹⁷ while Elizabeth Bryan, most notably in an important monograph from 1999, has drawn attention to several features of the Otho manuscript that are worthy of special attention.¹⁸ One such feature, discussed by Bryan in detail and very relevant to the themes of this chapter, is the deployment of a comparatively sophisticated set of punctuation marks, litterae notabiliores and paratextual features.

To demonstrate the deployment of such features, we might examine the following transcribed passage from later in the Otho version of the poem. The modern lineation is that of Brook and Leslie, but again I have shown the layout of the manuscript using | to indicate line endings. Lacunae/damaged letters in the manuscript are indicated by an asterisk (*), each occurrence flagging a presumed missing letter. Bold or engrossed letters are used to indicate decorated litterae notabiliores.¹⁹

Here by contrast is a diplomatic transcription of the Caligula text of the same passage, exactly as it appears in the manuscript (e.g., including the intrusive <g> in line 1958):

It will be observed immediately that the Otho text has a more sophisticated pattern of punctuation than Caligula, in the sense that the decorated initials stand out on the page. As Bryan points out, although there is a fairly close link between the textual organization of Caligula and Otho in the deployment of punctuation marks (including, sporadically, litterae notabiliores), in the Caligula manuscript “the paragraph instructions do not stand out to the eye, especially by comparison to the rubricated names in the margin of that manuscript. In [Otho], however, the eye is drawn to the large colored initials first.” She goes on to argue as follows:

These two versions of the text, although dating from roughly the same time, are therefore very different in approach, and this difference manifests itself pragmatically, in terms of the ways in which the texts have been presented for the reader’s use. The Caligula text is clearly designed for readers who can find their way round the text with comparatively minimal direction and can be expected to collaborate with the scribe in the interpretation of the text, assisted by their own established habits of vernacular reading. Such readers would have no difficulty with Laʒamon’s use of terms such as drihten or leoden. By contrast, the Otho text is more directive, drawing the reader’s attention to a particular imagining of history. It could be argued that contemporary readers received the Otho text, rather than collaborated in its interpretation.

Two versions of Ancrene Riwle

Ancrene Wisse (“A Guide for Anchorites”) or Ancrene Riwle (the work has two titles) was composed at approximately the same time as Laʒamon’s Brut, and seems to be part of the same cultural milieu. Traditionally Ancrene Wisse has been seen as the “end of the line” for a particular kind of vernacular prose composed in the English south-west Midlands: a last gasp of the prose tradition that had included Wulfstan and Ælfric. Ælfric’s homilies were, however, still being copied, modified, and read at around the time the Ancrene Wisse author was composing his work.²³

Ancrene Wisse/Riwle had a considerable cultural impact in its area, with nine English manuscripts or distinct manuscript fragments, two translations into French, and one translation into Latin. Most date from the century after its composition, c. 1200‐20, but one in particular dates from much later: the Vernon manuscript miscellany in Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. Poet. a.1, dating from 1390‐1400.

The Vernon manuscript has received a lot of attention recently, most notably from Wendy Scase and her associates working on the West Midlands Manuscript Project, and I myself, in a volume edited by Scase, have written on some of the linguistic features of the texts in the manuscript and how they can offer us insights into various cultural developments.²⁴ The manuscript – a vast object, weighing some 22 kilos – seems to have been a kind of “millennium ark,” a repository of 370 poetry and prose texts on devotional or moral themes.

The Vernon text of Ancrene Riwle is an attempt to reproduce a text that originated some two centuries before the creation of the Vernon Manuscript. It is therefore unsurprising that the Vernon scribe found it very challenging to turn this archaic text into something more readable for his contemporaries, and an analysis of the changes which appear in the Vernon text when compared with the other early Middle English versions of the work is very illuminating for the purposes of this discussion.

The Vernon text of Ancrene Riwle is most closely related in stemmatic terms to the Nero text of the work, i.e., London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero A.xiv, which dates from the middle of the thirteenth century. The Vernon and Nero texts seem to derive from a common lost ancestor in the stemma codicum suggested by Eric Dobson.²⁵ There is also some evidence that the text as it survives in the Vernon Manuscript has been influenced in some way by the most authoritative version of the work, Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 402, i.e., there has been contamination of the Vernon/Nero tradition by the Corpus tradition, not only in substantive terms (as pointed out by Dobson) but even in terms of layout.

As with the versions of the Brut, linguistic comparison is also very illuminating. I have commented elsewhere on the various features that have been changed, e.g., in terms of spelling (reflecting sound changes), and also in terms of vocabulary and grammar.²⁶ So, for instance, the word ferde (army; cf. Old English fyrd) is at one point replaced by the less metaphorical, but also less archaic, form strengþe, and at another point by host. Archaic dole (host) is replaced by Book; archaic onont (with respect to) has been replaced by more commonplace on; ʒet (sends forth) is replaced by ʒeldeþ (yields); ereste (most original) has been replaced by Furste; i efned (likened) has been replaced by I.likne, licamliche (bodily) by bodiliche. The native form foes is at one point replaced by enemyes – though fo is later retained – and bitechen (bestow) is replaced by bi taken (given). There has therefore been some linguistic updating between Nero and Vernon.

But one area that has not been traditionally considered as part of “linguistic” discourse – though it is an argument of this chapter that it should be – is punctuation. Here are parallel versions of the opening of Book V, from the Nero and Vernon texts respectively, derived from the diplomatic editions published by the Early English Text Society:

It will be clear from the transcriptions that these two texts of Ancrene Riwle are very different in appearance. As Roger Dahood has observed, the early (i.e., thirteenth-century) manuscripts of Ancrene Wisse deploy capital letters of varying sizes to indicate different levels of subdivision within the text; Dahood believes that this system was put in place in the exemplar of London, British Library, MS Cotton Cleopatra C.vi, a manuscript which, according to Dobson, was annotated by the author himself. As Dahood puts it, “Whoever first imposed the system of graduated initials was concerned that readers grasp the relationships between divisions and not just focus on discrete passages.”²⁹ The Nero text has a similarly sophisticated deployment of litterae notabiliores.

But the Vernon text is supplied with much more thoroughgoing punctuation than is used in any of the earlier texts of Ancrene Riwle. The pilcrow or paragraph mark, viz. ¶, is used frequently throughout, varying with punctus, punctus elevatus, and punctus interrogativus. Litterae notabiliores are much more commonly employed in Vernon than in Nero, and the beginning of the fifth book is marked by an inset title (neither Corpus nor Nero mark this title); as Dahood has pointed out, the Vernon scribe “seems to have been especially concerned to make Part Five accessible for reference.”³⁰ The comprehensive scheme of punctuation provided by Vernon, much more extensive than in Nero, is clearly designed to help the reader make sense of the text more easily.

It is fairly clear that the increased use of punctuation correlates with readers having access to a greater range of books, reading the same text less frequently, rather than reading a few books very frequently, i.e., a shift from a more intensive to a more extensive reading culture. The differences between the Ancrene Riwle in the Nero and Vernon manuscripts, therefore, correlate with some very significant cultural changes in the role of the vernacular during the course of the Middle English period. The Vernon manuscript may have been a repository, a millennium ark, but it is also something else: a precursor of the enhancement of devotional reading, particularly private, which Eamon Duffy, Helen Spencer, and others have detected in the late medieval period.³¹

The earliest editions of Beowulf

For the third example I will turn to the text with the longest afterlife of all those under review: the Old English epic poem Beowulf. The dating of this poem is, of course, a thorny issue – Old English poems tend to have been a long time in the making – but the sole manuscript, London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv, is generally dated to around the year 1000 CE. But the poem then fell into neglect, although noticed by the antiquarian Humfrey Wanley in his survey of the Cottonian manuscripts in the second volume of Hickes’s Thesaurus;³² we have already noted Wanley’s work on the Otho manuscript of Laʒamon’s Brut. Wanley described the poem as Tractatus nobilissimus Poeticè scriptus (a most noble treatise written in poetry), and provided a transcription of the opening and of a passage from a little later in the poem. These transcriptions have special value since they were undertaken before the Ashburnham House fire of 1731.

Wanley’s transcriptions are presented in Hickes’s Thesaurus in the special Anglo-Saxon font favored by many antiquarian editors until well into the nineteenth century. Although Wanley clearly recognized that the work was a poem (Poeticè), he followed the Anglo-Saxon practice of having the text presented as prose.

Here is a transcription of the same passage from the manuscript:

Comparison of the two versions indicates the odd slip – <ð> for <þ>, <þ> for <ƿ>, and <c> for <e> – and of course Wanley has imposed his own practice of capitalization. But in general Wanley’s transcription is – as one might expect from the leading Anglo-Saxonist of his age – accurate, and the odd slips are understandable, given the astonishing scale of the cataloguing that Wanley had set himself.

The poem then fell into neglect as Wanley, a busy man, turned to the task that was to dominate the rest of his life: the development of the Harleian collection. The recuperation of Beowulf had to wait until the labors of the Icelandic–Danish scholar Grimur Jonsson Thorkelin (1752‐1829), who visited Britain and Ireland in search of Danish antiquities in 1786‐1787.

The basis of what was to become Thorkelin’s editio princeps³⁴ was the preparation of two transcriptions of the poem, now known as Thorkelin A and Thorkelin B. Thorkelin A was transcribed in an imitation Anglo-Saxon script by a professional copyist, probably James Matthews, in 1787. The transcript is rather impressively done, although there are some regular confusions, e.g., a crossed thorn was sometimes deployed in error rather than a plain one (thus curiosities such as þætah, þætara, þætone), and until quite late in the copying process Matthews regularly confused thorn and wynn (thus þeox under þolenum for weox under wolcnum). The second transcription (B), a hybrid edition/transcription, was Thorkelin’s own, written in his eighteenth-century “round hand.”³⁵

After various vicissitudes, not least the alleged destruction of his notes – but not the transcripts – by Lord Nelson’s ships during the bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807, Thorkelin’s De Danorum Rebus Gestis Secul. III & IV. Poema Danicum Dialecto Anglosaxonica appeared in 1815, presented in a handsome roman font with a parallel Latin translation, a title page embellished with an emblem composed of laurel leaves, a lyre and a sword, and a rather grand dedication to Johann von Bülow, Thorkelin’s patron. Magnus Fjalldall has suggested that Thorkelin’s delay in producing his edition was in reality caused by his lack of confidence in his own editorial abilities.³⁷ Reviews of the work can best be described as “mixed”; Sharon Turner, for instance, kindly suggested that, “As a first translation of a very difficult composition, I ascribe great merit to Dr. Thorkelin,” but he then goes on to state almost immediately that, “on collating the Doctor’s printed text with the MS., I have commonly found an inaccuracy of copying in every page.”³⁸ Another reviewer, N. F. S. Grundtvig, was so dismissive of Thorkelin’s scholarship that one of Thorkelin’s friends, Frederik Schaldemose, as late as 1847, criticized Grundtvig as follows: “a young student who has since distinguished himself right into his old age by vulgar coarseness in his many literary quarrels, with his usual energetic mode of expression threw mud like a street urchin and loaded the old man with filth, without taking account of the many sacrifices he had performed in order to bring the old book to light.”³⁹ But Schaldemose was fighting a losing battle, and the crushing verdict of John Kemble in his edition of 1833 now holds sway: “not five lines of Thorkelin’s edition can be found in succession, in which some gross fault either in the transcript or the translation, does not betray the editor’s utter ignorance of the Anglo-Saxon language.”⁴⁰ Perhaps the most comprehensive condemnation of the edition was an unpublished initiative: the detailed and devastating collation of the Thorkelin text with the original manuscript, undertaken by John Josias Conybeare (Rawlinson Professor of Anglo-Saxon, 1808‐12) and Frederic Madden, later Keeper of Manuscripts at the British Museum.⁴¹

The authority of Thorkelin’s edition is therefore, at best, dubious, and it is to say the least unfortunate that he clearly did not understand the opening line of the poem, glossing Hwæt wegar by Latin Quomodo. In part, this was probably due to his habit – understandable in the conditions of the time – of using Matthews’s transcription rather than the manuscript itself as the basis of checking the editorial process,⁴² yielding for instance the reading Goban in half-line 21 below; Thorkelin’s own transcript reads (correctly) gomban. A lack of confidence also accounts for Thorkelin’s omission in his edition of the final letters in half-line 30; Matthews’s ase is accurate, whereas Thorkelin’s tise, in his transcript but omitted in his edition, makes no sense. Modern editors generally reconstruct the half-line as aldorlease.

For the purposes of the current discussion, however, these various ways of presenting the text are all of considerable interest, clearly relating to shifting cultural imperatives. The Old English original (Passage 8) is presented simply, designed for practiced readers who are able to use the text as a starting point for interpretation. The Anglo-Saxon scribe sees no necessity to deploy litterae notabiliores to flag names – something that was to cause problems for Thorkelin, who was to mistake inter alia the first element of the form gifstol (gift-throne) for a personal name Gif.⁴⁴ Punctuation is minimal, limited to the simple punctus and to word division, the latter sometimes suggesting that our modern conceptions of Old English morphosyntax could require some revision, e.g., huða, for geaf.

The special Anglo-Saxon font used by Wanley (passage 7) was possibly one of those fonts imported from the Netherlands by John Fell, vice-chancellor of Oxford (1666‐9) and a key figure in the history of the Oxford University Press. However, it is more like the Pica Saxon developed for the seventeenth-century Germanic philologist Franciscus Junius the younger (1589‐1677), who bequeathed his books and other materials to the university.⁴⁵ The font became associated with the construction of “Anglo-Saxonism” as a distinctive feature of the new, distinctively British and Protestant order that emerged after the Glorious Revolution of 1688, underpinning many aspects of contemporary antiquarianism.⁴⁶ It is no coincidence that radical thinkers such as Horne Tooke and Leigh Hunt venerated the Anglo-Saxon king Alfred the Great as a legendary champion of ancient liberties. And the careful tracing of the manuscript offered by Matthews (passage 9) no doubt in addition relates to the eighteenth-century craze for facsimiles, encouraged by technical developments in lithography and aquatint.

Thorkelin’s own project, as expressed though his transcription (passage 10) and his published edition (passage 11), is similarly located in a particular historical moment. His ideological stance is clear from his preface; as Haarder and Shippey suggest,

And Thorkelin’s stance is clear from the title page, where the poem is announced as not only “DE DANORUM,” but also “POËMA DANICUM DIALECTO ANGLOSAXONICA.” The poem is conceived of as an assertion of pan-Danish identity, and it is clear from other parts of his biography that these ambitions were grandiose; that the great lexicographer of Scots, John Jamieson, aligned Scots with Norse has been connected with his encounter with Thorkelin during the Scottish part of the latter’s research expedition,⁴⁸ with resonances for imaginative twenty-first-century attempts to identify a distinctive and historically situated “Nordic” Scottish identity. A Latin translation was itself a bold bid for a pan-European hearing – perhaps unwisely.

But Thorkelin’s edition does not express its ideology solely through the “paratexts” of his title page and preface and the Latin parallel text. His choice of roman font as opposed to “antiquarian” Pica Saxon may of course be constrained by what was available to his printer, Rangel of Copenhagen, but choosing to impose the half-line unit as the basic measure is a clear statement of a particular view of the structure of Old English verse. In doing so he was undertaking something that later editors, however critical they were of his efforts, were also to imitate with enthusiasm – thereby, of course, changing again the pragmatics of the text, guiding the ways in which that text was to be received.

Implications

Elsewhere, I have argued that

These points are, I would suggest, relevant to the various case studies discussed here. What this chapter has attempted to demonstrate is that textual detail can be linked rather precisely to contextual setting; understanding the linguistic form of a text – in the broadest sense, bringing paleography/bibliography and linguistic research back into close articulation – relates closely to the sociocultural contexts in which that text exists.