WORD GEOGRAPHY IN THE LEXICOGRAPHY OF MEDIEVAL ENGLISH

WORD GEOGRAPHY IN THE LEXICOGRAPHY OF MEDIEVAL ENGLISH

Angus McIntosh

Department of English Language David Hume Tower, George Square

University of Edinburgh Edinburgh 8, Scotland

With the brief time at my disposal for this consideration of the word geography of medieval English, I must take many things for granted. In particular I must assume some familiarity with the procedures outlined in a paper I published in English Studies in 1964.’ Since that date, the program of work which Professor Michael Samuels and I set ourselves nearly twenty years ago has proceeded to a point when it is not very far from completion. I feel able, on the basis of what has already been accomplished, to say something about the possibilities that our approach offers for very substantially increasing our present knowledge about the geographical distribution of English words in the later medieval period.

Before I do so it is necessary to say something about the scope and aims of our projected Atlas of the Dialects of Later Middle English, and in particular to explain why it cannot, of itself, be much more than a prelude to word- geographical studies in the full sense. Any dialect atlas has to strike some sort of balance between the number of dialect items it covers and the number of different points on the map for which it offers evidence about these items. In the case of an atlas dealing with medieval English, the nature of the surviving material has an obvious influence on the balance actually struck. If, as is certainly the case, we have good written evidence for well over a thousand dialectally differentiated varieties of later Middle English, then there are good arguments for not brushing any of them lightly aside: to cut down this number substantially would be to pass up the opportunity to attain for this rather distant period a density of geographical coverage which has hitherto been considered possible only with the dialects of living languages. I regard the opportunity to do just this as being one of the main interests of the whole project. One must not, of course, be carried away by density for its own sake. But I believe that the cut-off point should come only when the differentiation- yield resulting from any further increase of density beings to fall off in a marked way. This certainly does not seem to happen with the Middle English material even by the time the density of coverage is such that one has separate linguistic evidence for, on an average, each fifty square miles of country.2

A corpus of source material as large as this imposes in itself quite serious practical limitations on the number of items investigated. There is the further consideration that a dependence on written texts (as distinct from informants in the ordinary sense), some of them quite short, dictates-for the purposes of a dialect atlas-that only those items which are likely to occur most fre- quently should be incorporated. The items chosen must also satisfy the requirement of displaying marked regional variation. In this sort of way the item “she” gets in on both counts whereas the item “he,” though even more frequent, is unacceptable on the second count, being extremely weak in formal

55

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it o

f ki

rk -

Lim

it of

kir

c -I -

Wch

erch

e

.chi

rche

:h

erch

e w

cher

che

3 8 b 01 e B

Y

McIntosh : Word Geography of Medieval English 57

differentiation from one area to another. It will also be evident that only a minority of the items selected on these principles will be lexical at all; a great number of the most powerfully discriminatory items will be below the dimen- sions of the unit “word“ altogether and will instead exemplify orthographic and morphological phenomena.

For such reasons, and particularly because of their relatively low frequency of occurrence, a great number of interesting words can have no place in the questionnaire which forms the basis of the Atlas: this is why I describe it as not much more than a prelude to serious and comprehensive word-geographical studies. I hold, at the same time that it is a necessary prelude and I shall now try to justify this assertion.

I would above all stress the fact that one of the main aims of the Atlas is to provide a means of localizing a large number of later Middle English texts:’ The objective is thus not simply to present cartographically, item by item, an often highly complex array of dialectal patterning, as is the case with atlases of modern dialects. In the latter, the provenance of all the information plotted is of course known precisely, place by place, from the very start, and it is only the patterning which the investigators can be said to discover. In the Middle English case, the provenance of only a minority of the texts which are used as informants is known to begin with: the investigators aim not only to lay bare the patterning but also to discover the provenance of those many texts whose origin is not known at the outset. It is thereafter possible, in a quite straightforward way, to localize further dialectal texts not examined or perhaps even known about during the investigation.

The implications of all this for word geography are as follows. The information provided by the Atlas will make it possible for anyone to search a large number of now for the first time localized or localizable texts for their individual dialectal peculiarities. What, for example, are the facts about the medieval equivalents of the modern English word “church”? Is it the case that the four forms kirk, chirch, church, and cherch (without going into further shades of formal distinction) each have reasonably well-defined areas of use, or are they scattered haphazardly about the map? A tentative answer can now be given to these questions (see map Or we may want to know whether stern “star” (ON starn) is adequately characterized by being de- scribed as the “northern” equivalent of southern sterre (OE steorru). Do these two words in fact have distinct areas of use, and if so how precisely can we demarcate the areas? The answer is that they do, and that it is possible already to give a pretty accurate picture of their distribution (see map 2) . Similar problems arise with the pair hundreth (ON hundrab) and the native word hundred, and with the Norse forms of the ordinal numbers (see maps 3 and 4) . A further and much broader question, which cannot be answered adequately without information about many such Scandinavian-English pairs- and therefore not yet-is: what can medieval word geography teach us about Scandinavian settlements in England?

Other questions suggest themselves which have to do, not with the distribution of a certain form as such, but with the geographical limits of its use in some particular meaning. For example, the noun fare, in the sense “gear,”

MAP 1. “Church.” This displays the area where northern and northerly kirk gives way to the three main ch-forms church, chirclr, and cherch. Orthographic variants of the four main forms are shown.

YO

RK

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MAP 2.

“St

ar.”

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(rou

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W l

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iffer

ent forms s

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ern.

$ LAN

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z MAP 3.

“H

undr

ed.”

Thi

s sh

ows

the

E to

W li

ne n

orth

of

whi

ch h

undr

ed i

s ha

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tha

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of Suffolk

and

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60 Annals New York Academy of Sciences

M U 4. “Eighth” The forms of the ordinals from “seventh” to “eleventh” have major variants in -)3 -t and -d (e.g. seuen(p (e), seuent(e), seuend(e)). The variants of each of the five ordinals have roughly the same distribution as shown for “eighth.”

“accoutrements,” seems to be pretty strictly confined to the North and to parts of the north Midlands though it is used much more widely in other meanings. In a similar way, the examples cited by the Middle English Dic- tionary for the preposition for-bi in the sense “past (or by) something in spuce” would seem to indicate that it was not used in this sense in the west of England or south of the Thames.l0 But even such imprecise statements as these cannot at present be made with much certainty unless a particular word happens to have been studied in great detail.”

I believe, however, that there are no theoretical difficulties in the way of being able to make rather precise statements about many hundreds of Middle English words; l2 all that is needed is a great deal of hard work. But here I must anticipate an objection. Even if the claim be charitably accepted that we can associate each of a large number of scribes with a large number of places all over the country, it may well be asked what relevance this has to the problems in question. For are we not still faced with the undeniable fact that the actual surviving work of these scribes is in the great majority of cases nothing more than material copied from some other text written elsewhere? Of what use, it may well be asked, can such stuff be to word geographers? For example, even if I can prove to you, on external non- linguistic evidence, that British Museum MS Harley 1205 is the work of a Lichfield scribe, what conceivable “local” value can it have, since it is only a copy of the northern poem, the Prick of Conscience? What grounds are there


for believing that it has transformed the vocabulary of its exemplar in a consistent way into something truly characteristic of Lichfield? And so simi- larly with hundreds of other manuscripts?

I must preface any attempt to answer this question with a complaint. It is simply this: that though enough evidence to make it possible to answer it has been freely available in printed form for the best part of a century, till recently no really serious attempt has been made to examine that evidence in detail. It is not possible in this brief paper to do more than outline what emerges, but I must attempt a sketch in order to clarify what is obviously a quite crucial problem.

The situation may be summed up as follows: 1. A medieval scribe copying an English manuscript which is in a dialect

A. He may leave it more or less unchanged, like a modem scholar transcribing such a manuscript. This appears to happen only somewhat rarely.l3 B. He may convert it into his own kind of language, making innumerable modifications to the orthography, the morphology, and the vo~abulary.*~ This happens commonly. C. He may do something somewhere between A and B. This also happens commonly.

2. Type A texts and type B texts are both of value as primary source material for dialectal (including word-geographical) studies, while Type C texts are not. For our purposes, the main difference between a Type A text and a Type B text is that an A text will tell us nothing about the provenance of the scribe who wrote it, but only about the provenance of the scribe originally responsible for the kind of language it is written in.

3. Type C texts can usually be recognized. After an analysis of two or three hundred separate details, the internal consistency manifested by an A or a B text usually contrasts sharply with the internal inconsistency of a C text.15 A C text may therefore be identified and thereafter discounted (for the purposes under discussion) on the basis of such an analysis.

We must always take into account an important if somewhat obvious fact. When a scribe creates a B text which is in verse, he often hesitates to make a change which would destroy rhyme, alliteration, or rhythmical pattern. Words or forms retained in this intentional way stand out in such a text by violating the standards of internal consistency which the rest of the text manifests; they must naturally be ignored if we are scouring that text for words characteristic of the scribe’s own language.16 One must expect also, in all but the purest B texts, to find occasional lapses, i.e. unintentional failure to convert alien forms into those normal in his own linguistic milieu. It is remarkable, however, how many texts there are where unintended lapses of this kind are virtually negligible.

There are some grounds for believing that the consistent conversion process which produces B texts is most in evidence with works both in prose and verse’s which are of a popular nature, like the Northern HomiZy Collection or the Prick of Conscience or Myrc’s Festial. This may well be because copies were often made for reading aloud to a strictly local audience. It is also possible that this process was more common in later Middle English than it

other than his own may do one of three things:


was somewhat earlier,lg perhaps because the tradition of local written vernaculars with their own well-established conventions developed considerably over the period and there came to be more and more scribes who were accustomed to setting down the forms characteristic of their own districts as a matter of course.

At all events, we have inherited from the great welter of medieval scribal activity a very large number of B texts. I have tried to show that it is now possible to localize the language of many of these with reasonable precision, and that it is also possible to make a list of several hundreds of these chosen in such a way that: ( i ) between them they cover the whole country fairly evenly and fairly

densely, so that no sizeable part of England is unrepresented.20 (ii) most texts are of considerable length and therefore offer us a reasonable

expectation of finding examples of a large number of common words in them.

It is not my business to assess how illuminating a study of this material might be, whether for lexicographers of later English or for medievalists. But I believe that such a study would clarify many problems relating to the vocabulary both of the modern standard language and of the dialects of English within and outside Britain. And how might this be carried out? Setting aside for the moment all practical and financial difficulties, it would clearly be desirable to make concordances of (say) five hundred of the texts I have mentioned, using a suitable computer procedure. It might be necessary to restrict the material by concordancing only a sample of each of the longer texts. How small this sample could afford to be would depend largely on the frequency-characteristics of the words about which distributional information was being sought. But for various reasons I would not consider that it should be less than 10,000 words; allowing for the fact that some critically important texts would be less than that length in their entirety, this would involve a total corpus of, say, 4,500,000 words.22

And here we encounter a considerable obstacle. Since only a small pro- portion of these texts has been printed, at least 4,000,000 words would have to be transcribed from the originals, or reproductions thereof, before any of the analytical work could proceed at I estimate, very roughly, that this would take one expert at least 5,000 hours. Divide the task, however, between ten people and it becomes a practical possibility. Farm it out among a hundred and a month’s not too solid work by each of them would see this all-important transcription stage finished, Nothing thereafter would be comparably costly or time-consuming and the entire operation would be tiny compared with the production of a large modern dictionary.

I shall be surprised, nevertheless, I confess, if any organization will be sufficiently enlightened to come forward with the funds and with the drive to carry out the kind of program I have outlined. What I do emphasize, however, is that it is now entirely possible, and that such work would supplement in the best possible way the findings of the Middle English Dictionary and the projected Atlas. Surely a period so richly endowed with surviving written remains, and one which is so critical for an understanding of the genesis of much of the vocabulary of modern English, deserves thorough exploration in this kind of direction.


NOTES AND REFERENCES

1. MCINTOSH, A. 1964. “A New Approach to Middle English Dialectology.” English Studies 44 ( 1 ) : 1. This is followed up by SAMUELS, M. L. “Some Ap- plications of Middle English Dialectology,” ibid, no. 2, 1964, p. 1. See also KRISTENSSEN, G. “Another Approach to Middle English Dialectology,” op. cit. 46 (2), 1965, p. 1. The most comprehensive approach to the word-geographical aspects of Middle English dialectology is still KAISER, R. Zur Geographie des mittelenglischen Wortschatzes (Palaestra 205) Leipzig 1937; for some com- ments on this work see notes 8 and 12. For a most stimulating study of Chaucer’s handling of northern dialect in the Reeve’s Tale, see TOLKIEN, J . R. R. “Chaucer as a Philologist,” Transactions of the Philological Society of Great Britain, 1934, p. 1. It is perhaps unnecessary here to underline the importance for all such matters of the Ann Arbor Middle English Dictionary.

2. It may be noted that this density is considerably in excess of what many atlases of modem dialects aim at, for instance over three times that of the Leeds Survey. If one reckons according to total number of speakers rather than to area, then the medieval coverage becomes even more strikingly dense, viz. (even allowing for the fact that the material spans more than one generation) not less than one “informant” for every 6,000 inhabitants. For modem atlases the coverage is not usually much better than 1:50,000 and is often considerably thinner; see CATFORD, J. C. “The Linguistic Survey of Scotland.” Orbis vi, 1957, p. 14. For some further remarks on the case for density, see note 22.

3. And of course phonological, but only at one remove, via the graphic substance. See MCINTOSH, A. “The Analysis of Written Middle English,” Transactions of the Philological Society of Great Britain, 1956, p. 26, reprinted in Lass, R. (Ed.) Approaches to English Historical Linguistics, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969, p. 35.

4. More strictly, a means of drawing conclusions about the provenance of the scribe who wrote any such text: the actual writing down could of course have taken place almost anywhere. Even the phrase “the provenance of the scribe” is insufficiently explicit, for obvious reasons.

5. In an approach of this kind it is convenient to reserve the word “text” for something which is the work of one scribe: he “informs” us via this text and if another scribe contributes text even to the same manuscript his contrihution must be analyzed quite separately. Thus the BM Cotton Vespasian A iii manuscript of the Cursor Mundi provides us (apart from oddments) with three “texts” in this sense, and these provide us with information about three dialectal varieties of Northern Middle English, two rather similar and one sharply different from these.

6. It is perhaps worth pointing out that the information contained in an atlas of modern dialects could, in the same sort of way, be used to determine the provenance of some further speaker who refused (like most ME scribes) to divulge explicitly his place of origin. We have in fact done just this-as a sort of parlour game-as a by-product of more serious work on Scots dialects in the Linguistic Survey of Scotland.

7. For a detailed map of the whole country giving the later Middle English forms for this item, based on results up to 1970, see JONES, C. A n Introduction to Middle English. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1972, p. 196.

8. A very thorough examination of no less than 101 such pairs is made by RYNELL, A. The Rivalry of Scandinavian and Native Synonyms in Middle English, Lund Studies in English XIII, 1948. This pioneer investigation and the earlier very wide-ranging study of ROLF KAISER (see note 1) both suffer from a perhaps unavoidable neglect of unprinted texts, from the insufficiency of information then available about the dialectal provenance of their material, and from a failure (very general at the time) to attach enough importance to texts which are the product of dialectal conversion.


9. MED fare n. (l), sense 9. Cf. DOST fare, fair n, sense 7 . 10. MED forbi prep, sense 1. 11. For a note on one such use of a Middle English word in what seems to be a re-

stricted area, see DAREN, M. G. and MCINTOSR, A. “A dialect word in some West Midland manuscripts of the Prick of Conscience,” Edinburgh Studies in English and Scots, Eds. A. J. Aitken et al, Longman, 1971, p. 20.

12. At this point it would be natural to ask the question: is there, however, enough lexical variation within Middle English for there to be many hundreds of words that would even repay investigation? The work of Rolf Kaiser (see notes 1 and 8) is enough in itself to supply an affirmative answer and the material provided by the MED amply corroborates this. In my own somewhat casual investigations into the lexical peculiarities of northern (and northerly) Middle English I have noted at least 1,500 words not current in the southern part of the country and a fairly precise demarcation of a large number of these could well be attained. And this matter of north versus south is only one of several problems of word distribution.

13. It is of course difficult to prove that this is a rather rare procedure, but it is suggested by the following fact. Quite often a scribe copies several pieces which are likely to have separate origins and textual histories and therefore (usually) distinct dialectal characteristics. In this situation those cases where the several pieces have had one set of linguistic characteristics imposed on them all in the process of copying appear far to outnumber those in which they retain all or most of their own different sets of characteristics. For an example of the latter process (BM Harley 2409) see English Studies 44 no. 1, p. 9.

14. Changes in syptax may also be in evidence but they are usually much harder to pinpoint and classify.

15. Limitations of space preclude adequate discussion of the notion of internal consistency. But the criteria for rejection correspond roughly to those employed (however intuitively) by a field-worker studying a modern dialect when he re- jects some informant on the grounds of his having, for whatever reason, ex- traneous linguistic components mixed in with his local speech habits. The hardest C texts to recognize are those:

(i) where the scribe produces something not far from an A text. By introducing very few of his own scribal habits he may, in some circumstances, cause us not to recognize these for what they are.

(ii) where he produces something not far from a B text. By introducing very many of his own scribal habits he may lead one to conclude that even those things which he lets through unchanged are his own contribution.

(iii) where the underlying text from which he made his copy was dialectally in a language very similar to his own; in this case we may wrongly assume that both ingredients in the manuscript he produces tare the end-product of a consistent B-type procedure.

It should be noted that the term “internal consistency” does not imply the condition that a scribe should consistently write a unique form for each item. There should be an expectation of a certain degree of variation in the work of even the most careful scribes. This is proved by an examination of the nu- merous extant examples of passages of text written twice (usually inadvert- ently) by one and the same scribe. (For a discussion of one such example, from BM Cotton Caligula A ix, see BROOK, G. L. “A piece of evidence for the study of Middle English spelling,’’ Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 1-2 LXXIII, 1972, p. 25). In many cases the variants that a scribe feels free to use in a quite normal and natural way rest on his happening to belong to a border-area, dialectally speaking, with respect to the two or more forms he uses (e.g. both -es and -eth for the 3rd sg. pres. ind. within a strip running from E to W across the north Midlands). Because of this such variants, far from being suspect and confusing, are often highly informative.

.


16. It is interesting that the preoccupations of an editor with such a text will usually be quite different in this respect. He will show marked enthusiasm for whatever the scribe seems to have left untouched, because such things, he hopes, will help him to get closer to the original version; the scribe’s modifications, however dialectally informative, will be to him mere aberrations.

17. Nevertheless it should not be forgotten that a transcribed text will almost in- variably, in certain circumstances, emerge less richly dialectal than an original. This is usually the case, for instance, in later Middle English, if the text copied was in some variety of South Eastern standard. For by this time many forms in it, even if not those normally used elsewhere, would often be familiar enough to be retained. Two manuscripts may be mentioned which exemplify this, and which would repay close study. The first is Wadham College Oxford 13, a Confessio Amantis written for John Dedwood of Chester probably around 1470. (See MACAULAY, G. C. The Complete Works of John Gower, Oxford 1901, vol. ii, p. clxiii). It is written by two scribes and both parts are heavily overlaid with West Midland forms. But it is not surprising, especially at this late date, to find that the conversion from London English is not complete. The second is Oxford Bodley Selden supra 56, a Troilus and Criseyd written by a single scribe in 1441. Here again the conversion is incomplete, but the dialectal overlay is so strong that it can be associated with Lincolnshire with virtual certainty and with the south west of that county with reasonable probability.

18. This does not altogether hold, especially at the lexical level, of alliterative verse. We have seen already that the exigencies of preserving the alliterative pattern may result in a scribe’s retaining unfamiliar words. But beyond that, it may be the case that the whole texture and flavor of alliterative verse, and especially its often special diction, was regarded as sui generis and therefore not too lightly to be tampered with. The many surviving copies of Piers Plowman offer, between them, some evidence that this was so.

19. At all events there are some extremely interesting mixed (i.e. C type) texts in Middle English before 1350. A well known example is the text of Havelok in Bodley Laud Misc. 108. The Auchinleck MS contains others, among them Sir Tristrem and The Four Foes of Mankind, about which I propose to write elsewhere; they are noteworthy for containing many words which are other- wise recorded only in northern texts and which were certainly not current in the scribe’s own dialect. For mixed texts in BM Harley 2253 see BROOK, G. L. “The Original Dialects of the Harley Lyrics,” Leeds Studies in English, 11, 1933, p. 38. This is perhaps the point to note that C texts, though to be avoided as primary source material, may well be valuable to dialectologists in a sup- plementary way; this is particularly true of C texts with no more than two dialectal components. Thus Havelok provides important information, some of it unavailable from any other source, about the vocabulary of medieval Lin- colnshire.

20. The only large area which at the time of writing could not be covered adequately in this way, district by district, is the north (Cumberland, Westmorland, Northumberland, Durham, and Yorkshire). There is no lack of material from this area, but the problem of differentiating the various subtypes of northern Middle English is a complex one; the analysis of some 200 texts from this area is in progress at the moment. Lancashire also presents a problem because literary material from there seems to be unusually scanty. This deficiency is offset, however, by the fact that the county is unusually well represented by richly dialectal local documents of various kinds.

21. One reason is that there would be other important uses for sizeable samples of these texts in readily accessible form, e.g. for detailed research work on the morphology and syntax of the various dialects they represent.

22. For a recent discussion, relating to syntax rather than lexis, see NIXON, G. “Mea- suring corpus adequacy,” Archivurn Linguisticum iii (new series), 1972, p. 101.


It might also be thought that a considerable reduction of the suggested number of texts could be made. There are very good reasons for not cutting it down very much. For example, there are many interesting words where the expectation of occurrence may be of the order of once every 30,000 words of text. Even if such a word therefore crops up in only one text in three from the region where it is current, the distributional information obtained by searching a generously large number will still be fairly precise.

23. If it be asked how an even larger body of material has been handled without re- course to preliminary transcription in the assembling of data for the Atlas, the answer is as follows: for the Atlas project the investigators carry in their heads an inventory of all the items about which they are seeking information; they then record all the relevant forms as they read through the originals or photographic reproductions. But with an inventory of lexical items running into many hundreds, a systematic process of searching and recording would take longer than to make a transcription.

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WORD GEOGRAPHY IN THE LEXICOGRAPHY OF MEDIEVAL ENGLISH