OLD ENGLISH DIALECTS AND THE STAGES OF THE TRANSITION TO MIDDLE ENGLISH

Folia Linguistica Histonca XI/1-2 pp. 27-87© Societas Linguistica Europaea

OLD ENGLISH DIALECTSAND THE STAGES OF THE TRANSITION TO MIDDLE ENGLISH

PETER KITSON

I ArgumentTb try to define the point of succession between successive periods

of a language, such äs Old and Middle English, is rather like trying todistinguish where night succeeds day. No-one will deny that for practicalpurposes they are different; but there is no natural demarcation, theyshade into one another, and it is left to arbitraiy choice by the publicauthorities to set the time of civil twilight at which lamps are lit. Auth-orities on the histoiy of the English language point to two things ofprime importance in the transition from Old to Middle English: phoneticlevelling of the vowels of final unstressed syllables to a single vowel,accompanied by loss of final nasals in at least some circumstances, andanalogical levelling of the wide variety of nominal and verbal inflectionsin Old English to the considerably smaller variety in Middle English.According to most current authorities1 they happened in that order. Theaccount given by Baugh and Cable (1978:159) is typical. First, accordingto Baugh, came a "change of final -m to -n wherever it occurred", thenloss of final -n. Then "the vowels , o, u, e in inflectional endings wereobscured to a sound, the so-called "indeterminate vowel", which cameto be written e (less often /, y, u, depending on place and date). As aresult, a number of originally distinct endings...were reduced generallyto a uniform -e, and such grammatical distinctions äs they formerly ex-pressed were no longer conveyed." An unspoken assumption implicit inthis formulation is that in all dialects the order of phonetic weakeningfollowed by analogical reshaping was the same. That assumption seemsto be shared even by writers like Barbara Strang (1970:265, 294, etc.)who show more sensitivity to the differences in detail of phonetic de-

1 And to writere since at least Sweet (1874:160; cf. 7,38-39, etc.). These are "organic"and "inorganic" changes in his terminology.

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velopments between dialects. And even that minority, notably Bennettand Smithers (1968:xxix-xxxi), who dissent about the causes of reduction,finding those in the redundance of case-endings given a largely prepo-sitional syntax, seem to accept the Standard account of the order ofphonetic events.

I shall argue that the two propositions, that phonetic levelling ledanalogical and that all dialects were the same in this, are in importantrespects both false. The latter is false simply, the former wrong for thedialects of most literary importance in both late Old English and earlyMiddle English. A substantial measure of the levelling of declensionsto Middle English patterns can be shown to have happened in at leastone dialect where front and back unaccented vowels were still distin-guished. There is some spread of -e at the expense of back vowels; how-ever the distribution is not such äs would result from random confiision,but is significantly greater in some grammatical and phonetic categoriesthan in others. Close analysis of the frequencies of the various deviationsfrom Old English inflectional norms enables us to set them in a coherentchronological order, and to show that in this dialect the transition hap-pened not by wholesale reordering following a general phonetic confu-sion but by a series of mutually interacting small stages in which changesto Systems, both of paradigms and of phonetic economy, are more im-portant than phonetic changes äs such. Comparison with the plentifullocally provenanced language of the boundary surveys of land Chartersshows that this dialecfs process of transition rather than the traditionalmodel is typical for at least southern and western English generally.

The crucial manuscript witness is Bodley 343, written in the secondhalf of the twelfth Century. Its main contents are JElfric homilies, forwhich its readings have gone largely unreported by editors.2 Most of thepieces peculiar to it were edited by Belfour (1909); others are the Historyof the Hofy Rood-lt-ee edited by Napier (1894) and items in collectionsby Assmann (1889) and Fehr (1914). Bodley 343's language has receivedless attention than it deserves, partly because Napier (1894:lvii) declaredit <4with a few modifications due to the later date...pure West Saxon".3Napier was not in the habit of being wrong about Old English languagematters, but he was plumb wrong about this. It is true that the OldEnglish texts in Bodley 343 derive pretty clearly from exemplars in Stand-ard late West Saxon. There is however a continual sprinkling of changes

2 Godden (1979:xcv) states the reasons. Some of the JElfnc pieces, with some of theothers, are now being separately edited by Miss Susan Irvine of Lincoln College, Oxford.

3 Hence Pope (1967:18) "written in the south" and Godden (1979:xl) "Its languageis thoroughly southern". Dissenting, Vleeskruyer (1953:102 n. 1) "several Anglian — poss-ibly SW. Midland — features".


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in spelling, inflection,4 morphology,5 word-order,6 phrasing,7 and some-times vocabulary,8 amounting to what Angus Mclntosh and his co-wor-kers at Edinburgh not without reason call scribal "translation".9 Thedialectal colouring of this is the same throughout; its intensity is sub-stantially greater in the last of the seven sections of which the manuscriptis composed than it is in the other six.10 I have accordingly taken äs my

4 E.g. loss of feminine ending and levelling of stem vocalism in Belfour 92s quic forSkeat 1171 cucu\ loss of feminine inflectional -r- after n (8823 one for 124 anre, 92u agenefor 178 agenre); transfer to strong declension of OE ttchama (see text); reshaping of pro-nominal declensions (see text); retreat of weak declension of adjectives (94wpe eadiglobfor 236 se cediga iob).

5 Notably Substitution of prefixes, e.g. 8634 igefcen for 100 forgifen, 880 iwend for 106awend, 941 bilimpe for 204 getympe; very frequent loss of ge- (including internally 92g un-segenlic for 176 ungescewenlic).

6 Generally to make words follow immediately their immediate grammatical antece-dents where Êlfric for rhetorical reasons has not done so, e.g. 8630 an dod an hire iswilnigendlic for 97 an dod is on hire gewylnigendlic, 923 pe lufiedpone Scyppend for 169 depon[n]e Scyppend lufad, 8819 bitweonan heom for 120 him betwynan, 9422 be pam de isiwritcen for 227 bepampepus awriten is; even in some Latin scriptural quotations to makethem agree with English order, 9222 Psallam spiritu et psallam mente for 191 ...psallam etmente, 94g tunc fulgebunt iusti for 211 Tunc iusti fulgebunt (keeping jElfric's following trans-lations Ic singe mid gaste and ic singe mid mode and ponne scinad pa rihtwisan verballyintact).

7 E.g. 92i2 monigfealdlice inemnod for 180 manegum naman gecyged, 92i, g deletionof Êlfric's defmite article 167, 174 "(the) devü", 904 cetforan "before" for 138 on "in"(the sight of), 94i9 alle lichamlice heow for 224 ealle lichamlicra pinga hiw. 8626-2? gehwcerIcerdon on pam haiige circean for 85 gepwaerlehton on pam anum looks to have beenprompted by a misreading.

8 E.g. 8812 sxdon for 113 cwaedon "said (pl.)" (both texts use both verbs in otherplaces); consistent Substitution of beod for iElfric's synd(on) "are"; 8820 pencean "thinkof" for 121 gemunan "bear in mind, remember"; 90i2 pine for 146 wytum "torment(s)M;90i6 wurdgode "enriched" for 150 getfaengde "adorned"; 90i9, 20 sunne "sin(s)w for 154leahtres (gen. sg.), 155 leahtras "vice(s)" (Îfric spoke 144 of synnum in a phrase lost fromBelfour äs extant, but it looks äs if the "translator" is levelling the distinction), 9410 sunfullefor 213 arleasan "impious, wicked"; 92s cegder for 112 ge "both..."; 92i2faren for 178 gewytan"depart"; 92i6ßeleed, 94i6/celed for 184,220 gefret "feels", 94is rine for 220 hreppe "touch"(pres. sj.), 9228 fondung for 198 swtec "taste"; 9221 todadde for 190 totwaemde "distin-guished". One wonders whether 94i unpeawlices for 204 unpceslice "unseemly" (with over-tones of *unpeowlic "insubordinate", appropriately in context?), 9421 wille "desire" for 226wfyte "beauty", and the forms 8627, 8827, 28 of sceawian "scrutinize" for Îfric's 86, 128,130 gescyppan "create", are the result so much of "translation" äs of misreading; 922 deosode Codes lufce j monnce for 168 seo sode lufii godes 7 manna looks like a half-slip cor-rected.

9 On this see especially Benskin and Laing (1981).10 For Illustration of the increase in intensity see n. 38 below. On the seven sections

and their self-containedness see Clemoes (1964:xxiii), and with detail of Contents Godden(1979:xxxvii-xxxviii). The distribution between them of accessibty edited Old English textsis |0| |0|Belfour MV, Rood-tree|Assmann X, Belfour V-VI | Belfour VII-V1II | Assmann


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main sample texts the first in that section, Belfour IX, a re-working byJElfnc of a Christmas homily of his (no. I in Skeat's edition of his saints'lives).11

II Placing the dialectTb obtain a clear perspective of the kind of Middle English that de-

velopments in Belfour IX would be leading to, the first step is to definethe dialect, at least approximately. Old English dialectology has operatedlargely on different premisses from that of more recent periods. Theview has been widespread that Old English texts cannot be closely lo-cated on the basis of dialectal peculiarities;12 most scholarship of thelast thirty years has taken it äs axiomatic.13 However, by finding variablescommon to literaiy texts and Charter boundaries, some dialects of literaryprose can be located with high probability to within a few miles (Kitson1992). The method is essentially that of the "fit" technique devised byMclntosh and his colleagues from modern dialect-mapping, and shownby them triumphantly to work for Middle English. For Old English itwill not be possible äs in the Middle English survey to use essentiallya single set of variables to place all texts, but it is entirely likely that byusing texts placeable by variables they have in common with Charterboundaries äs anchor-points to map distributions of variables found onlyin literary texts, worthwhile results can be obtained for Old English auth-ors and/or texts and/or manuscripts generally, especially late Old English.A further question which because of the supposed unmappability of OldEnglish dialects has hardly been broached is how Old and Middle Englishliterary dialect-geography relate to one another. So it is of intrinsic im-portance, apart from its relevance to the main argument, that whetherwe compare Belfour IX with other Old English, or with Standard ac-counts of Middle English dialectology, or with what seems relevant ofmodern dialectal and of place-name material, the location indicated forthe dialect is much the same.

From an Old English point of view, the dialect of Belfour IX is pro-

VII, Fehr II-III | Belfour IX-XIV, Assmann IV |.11 The starting-point of my investigation was actually the desire to distinguish äs ac-

curately äs possible Êlfric's re-working from the Bodley 343 "translator(s)'s", a subjectto which I hope to return elsewhere. A recent discussion of relations betwen these andother texts centred on the burnt manuscript mentioned in n. 23 below is Leinbaugh 1986,

12 E.g. Campbell §19 for Mercian, Bately (1980:xxxix n. 2) for West Saxon.13 That of Professors Schabram and Gneuss and Iheir followers. The logic has usually

been ladt or at best (Gneuss 1972:71) fuzzy. Its outcome when clarified is seen in Seebold1990, whose direction of argument from conventions of monastic writers to localization indialect at large leads to extravagantly false conclusions (cf. Kitson 1992).


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nouncedly Anglian. Êlfric's eall "all" in its variations is replaced well-nigh consistently by all without West Saxon breaking. (I have noticedthirty-seven instances, with a solitary exception.)14 AZlmihtig "almighty"is consistently (14 x) replaced by the retracted>4/w/Mg.15 "Killed" (pre-terite plural) is unbroken 7822 acwaldon. Elfric's ä before nasals is oftenreplaced by o, e.g. consistently mon (13 x), monie (thrice including com-pounds), onde "malice", hond (single instances),16 inconsistently nomce"name" (thrice out of four occurrences), preterite ongon (twice out ofthree), Infinitive understonden (one out of two);17 but consistently (4 x)understont levelling out the /-mutation of Êlfric's present third personSingular understent.™ The past participle segen contained in unsegenlic"invisible" (thrice) is Anglian (West Saxon (ge)sewen, ungesewenlic);19

heow without /-mutation is probably confined to Anglian texts;20 the to-pographic word dcel "dale" was not in use further south than Glouces-tershire;21 walde 'Svould" and eam "am" are broad Anglianisms.22 Con-

14 All 78ll, 14, 15 (x 2), 16, 27, 28, 31, 8<b (x 2), 9,14, 823, 21, 30, 84l (x 2), 13, 864, 6, 8,16, 25, 8824,903, 6 (x2), 7,26,28,29, 9220,29, 94a, 12,19,25', 84s ealle. It is not true äs stated by some writersthat the lack of breaking in spelling need not be dialectal but might be explained simplyby the late date: contrast its well-n ig h universal retention in the mid-twelfth-centurymanuscripts British Library Cotton Vitellius A JEV and Vespasian D jdv (cf. text to n. 61below).

15 7827, 3l, 802 (x 2), 6, 10, 25, 82l, 21, 27, 86l6, 903, 16, 942.16 Mon 787, 29, 80n, 82i6,17, 846,12,3l, 869, 90i6, 922, 9430,32; 7829 monie, 8230 moni-

fealdes, 92i2 monigfealdlice; 7823 onde, 9230 dat. pl. hondien.17 92i3,14 nomce, 20 nomen, 8826 name; 80s, 82i ongon, 824 ongan; 8432 understonden,

80i? understanden.18 92l7, 24, 25, 94l5.19 8232, 864, 929; cf. Campbell §743 and refs.20 Cf. Campbell §§201, 294, 300. This carries the corollary that Vespasian *D. xiv,

where heow is the normal spelling, (13 x, plus related words: for refs. see n. 61 below), isnot äs often asserted Kentish. The dialect form to be expected from Kent is hlow (cf.Crowley 1980:378, Campbell §§201.3, 297, Gradon 1979:29-34). A manuscript where aspelling neither Standard -/- nor Kentish -iow- is clearly dominant is not likely to be Kentish.As I read the Toronto Microfiche Concordance, excluding Vespasian D. xiv äs disputed,neither for hlw nor for the elsewhere commoner mwe is an -eo- spelling from Kent attested.

21 Belfour 90n on pam swartan ekele "in the black chasm" (substituted for dal ofSkeat 1144 on pam scelran dcele "in the better pari"). Charter boundaries show that dcel"dale" was in complementary distribution (mapped Kitson 1990:188) with the closely re-lated words dell "dell" and crundel of similar meaning. The southernmost occurrences ofcUel are in Gloucs, Worcs, Nhants, and Hunts. As the Charter corpus is much richer forsouthern counties the absence of dcel there is certainly significant.

22 Walde 789 (discussed by Vleeskruyer (1953:1(K)-1), amply supported by the Micro-fiche Concordance', cf. Campbell §156); eam 7824 (beside 8422 eom) is specifically Mercian(also Kentish), since by the tenth Century in Northumbrian am is general (Campbell pp.349-350).


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sistent removal of syncope from present 3sg. verbal forms23 (with thephonetieally conditioned exception of dental stems24 and sporadic ex-ceptions in habban "to have")25 is decisive for a provenance outside theWest Saxon area; sporadic removal of '-mutation in such forms accordswith this.26

As within Anglian, the integrity of Old English verbal inflectionsguarantees that like most surviving Anglian texts this is Mercian notNorthumbrian. Infinitival -n is never lost; present endings in -es are neverfound.27 Belfour IX has too the sound-change we- > wce- of the mainlate Mercian dialect monument, the scribe Farmon's half of the Rush-worth Gospels.28 As within Mercian these things and the high proportionof o before nasals point by this date to the west midlands. There is spo-

23 8030 artered, 885 wurcced, 880 cymed, 889 wczx&d, 8824 geondfaraed, 8825 iheraed, 8829hered, 90i2 ifymped, 92i4 bilimpced, belimpced, 92is imynced, 9223 singced, 94i3 gemed, 94i?penchcep for Êlfric's arcerp, wyrcd, cymd, wexd, geondfierd, gehyrd (x 2), gelimpd, gefympd,belimpd, gemand, singd, gymd, pcencd; 94w wurced for Êlfric's gefadap', 78is birisced, 80i6laered, 8032 fcellaed, 84 13 creopeed, 864 bercep, 8616 gesceped, 8625 $yfled where direct com-parison with a good Êlfric text is not possible. (Occasional elce misspellings in the earlyeleventh-century extant manuscript of Skeat I do not affect the issue (Cotton Julius E. vii,Ker no. 162 (l Suffolk — cf. Pope 1967:85 n. 1)). From Belfour 8028 to 82 29 comparisonis with a surviving fragment of the Îfrician text of Belfour IX on the burnt manuscriptOtho C. i, for a transcript of which I thank Professor Peter Clemoes.) Cf. generally Hedberg1945 and Löfvenberg 1949.

24 8223 ondred, 8431/ki/f, 865 äfftest, 881 miswent, 88g miswend, 8825 ise;tt, 909,10 swelt,90io forlety 90i3 let, 92 19 todceat, 92i?, 24, 25, 94is understont. This is the category whereHedberg (1945:296-7; cf. 111 etc.) found syncope to be most widespread, also the onlyone where it is prevalent in the "Katherine group" (d'Ardenne 1961 §108). The furtherexception 8830 stild is also phonetieally conditioned, though more obscurely (Löfvenberg1949:271-3). For stems in h and g (8029, 84i2, 8830 smead, 8811 underfehd, 8&24ffyhd, 90 20underlid, 942, 3 oferstihd) dialectal distinctions were effectively obsolete.

25 82g hasfed, 829 ncefd, 8222 nafed, nafced, 846 hcefd, 8613 hafed, 8633 hcefted, 8812hafed, 8813 htefft, 8815 hasflt, 8822 hafoed, 90s hafd. This pattern seems a random result ofthe behaviour of scribes who do not normally think about the exact spelling of their exem-plar except where repeated occurrence forces it on their attention.

26 Most of the forms in n. 23 are from verbs where i-mutation would not show orare rendered ambiguous by the instability of y-spellings: but in cymed and (probably) imy-nced /-mutation is present and in wcexced, geondfarced, fiellced and (probably) beraid it isnot. Cf. the even mix in n. 25. The doubt about OE gemyned is whether the -y- had beengeneralized through the System (Campbell p. 345); it is another specifically Anglian form(Skeat 1186 gemand).

27 There are more than fifty infinitives (to nn. 122-4 below add contracted and in-flected infinitives 8427, 92s underfon, 8430 gän, 7820, 884, 944 beon, 8024 to beon, 80is toasmeagene, 8634 to wilnigenne); relevant present forms are in nn. 23-25 above and, morefully, nn. 112-5 below. On their diagnostic value for Northumbrian see Campbell §735(i)and (b, c); on the latter for Middle English Mosse; 1949 §§93-94, with maps to which cf.MED I 8 map 2.

28 E.g. 8227, 8431 wcel, 926 wcelwillendce, 82is swoehe, 78$ waeres; cf. Campbell §328.


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radic replacement of cäc "each" byy/c, the normal form in the mid-ninth-century west midland dialect of the Vespasian Psalter gloss (possibly fromLichfield),29 but not otherwise recorded in Old English. Bodley 343shares with most west midland Middle English writing the habit of rep-resenting OE y by u not only in many words where it is derived by i-mutation from Germanic u (so-called OE "stable y") but also in somewhere it is of other derivation ("unstable /'). All the words in BelfourIX with u for OE "unstable/' have it also in what has been called sinceTblkien (1929:108) the "AB language" of the early Middle English "Ka-therine group",30 placed by Dobson (1976) at Wigmore in north-westHerefordshire. There are other links with the "AB language", äs willbecome apparent. But, äs argued in section XI below, Belfour IX's dialectlacks the sound-change of "second fronting" of OE ce to e and ä to ce(Campbell §§164-9) which Vespasian Psalter and "AB" both have.

All this suggests for Bodley 343 an origin in east Herefordshire orsouth-west Worcestershire (where Lasamon's dialect does not seem tohave had much second fronting either). The same obtains if one appliesto Belfour IX and Rood-tree the late Middle English dialect criteria fromSamuels' celebrated article (1963). Of the ten criteria mapped there allare consistent with, and some point strongly toward, a position in thosetwo counties, more particularly on or just north of a line joining Here-ford and Worcester. The most strongly indicative are the combinationof ylc "every", =Samuels' uche, widespread in the west midlands (andcan = other midland and northern forms) with 8827 geylce, =his eucheconfined to a small area south of Hereford and Worcester (cf. Belfour130s ceghylc). Of other normal forms the 3pl. pronoun nom. heo is inSamuels' period confined to the west midlands; the u in mucel fits largeparts of the west midlands but not the south country; consistent stemvowel -e- in p.p. "given" fits west midlands and south. Of occasionalexceptions to West Saxon Standard forms 92so pc&i "though" if not ran-dom late OE monophthongization best fits Samuels' Herefs pah and/orWorcs peih\ 7824 seolf (which is non-WS) best fits the north and

29 See Kuhn's glossary (1965:272, cf. 243). I hope to discuss the incidence of theseand related forms in more detail elsewhere. Kuhn's placing of the Vespasian psalter-glossdialect at Lichfield is circumstantial and has been controversial, but is likely to be eithertrue or a close approximation to the truth. Kristensson (1981:373) implies that the evidenceof the Middle English Lay Subsidy Rolls is at least consistent with it and perhaps supportsit. I think that of Old English Charter boundaries somewhat more consonant with a locationfurther west and south in Staffordshire (Kitson 1990:219).

30 The words are mucel "great" (x 4, and once each mucele "much" and mucelnesse,beside thrice mycel), wule thrice, wulle twice (beside wyle 4, nyle 2) forms of the verb"will", sulle "give", and Scuppend "Creator" (thrice, beside 6 Scyppend). On their autoch-thonous Status in "AB" see d'Ardenne (1961:164, 187; cf. 115, 141).


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north/west midland selfarea (less well the south-eastern one where siolfwould be likelier); 7826 ceni "any" most of the south-west midlands andsouth. Preterite "saw" does not occur in this text, "such" and "stead"(in the compound stedeleas) only in Standard West Saxon forms. Rood-tree however has 2g, 22s stude which is specific to the west midlands,31

and normal iseah, which according to Mclntosh et al 1986 vol. I maps515-6 by its /- and - in combination would in the fourteenth Centurypoint strongly to Herefs and Worcs. Other maps in that volume whichincrease the precision of evidence already cited are 519 (seolf) äs a sur-viving spelling in the Severn valley broadly defined), 168 walde (mainlyin north and Lines, secondaiy concentration in Herefs and Worcs), 104u in mucel (west and south), 165 wul- (west midland centre of gravitybut more sporadic); 35, 37 "they", 88, 89 "each", 198-9, 205 "though",98 "any", 526-7 "stead".

Of course some distributions must have grown or shrunk appreciablybetween 1150 and 1350 (one that has shrunk is heo whose domain inthe twelfth Century reached äs far south-east äs Vespasian D. xiv). Theagreement of so many is still probably significant, a fortiori so in thelight of demonstrable general continuity between dialect distribution-patterns of the Old English settlement-period and those of modern Eng-lish (Kitson, forthcoming (a)). For reasons which will emerge, my im-pression is tKat connections with the "AB language" are more importantthan with the other texts mentioned. My working hypothesis thereforeis that Bodley 343 is from Hereford, and I hope palaeographers will seefit to compare it with roughly contemporary manuscripts known to comefrom there. Whether or not this particular choice is right, the phenomenadescribed below are to be seen in the context of what we know or supposeof language and culture within a radius of at most twenty miles east ofHereford.

III Belfour IX's spelling-conventionsThe prime fact about Belfour IX's spelling-conventions is that they

operate not at the level of sound-laws äs described in modern grammarsof a traditional cast, but, äs commonly found in modern dialect studies,more minutely with respect to particular words. The Vespasian Psalterhas o for a before nasals with near-uniformity,32 Belfour IX in someword actively avoids it: thus angin "beginning" (thirteen times that I haveremarked), Rchame "body" (21 x), (un)ttchamlic "(in)corporeal" (8 x)—in the last pair agreeing with another well-known Mercian text, its extant

31 The only other OE text in which stude occurs is Plan B 15.8.649 (see text to n. 105below)

32 Discussed by Vleeskruyer (1953:104), with usage of other Mercian texts (ibid. 103-5).


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manuscript probably from Worcester, the Life of St. Chad.33 In moni-fealdes and monigfealdtice the vowel in the first syllable is Anglianizedbut West Saxon breaking in the second is allowed to stand (äs it is notin gemonigfaldad in the Life ofSt. Chad). So it is in 903 andwealdnesse;and despite the Anglianizing of "all" and "Almighty", both West Saxondiphthongs are kept in the one instance (8223) of Ealwealdend "Omni-potent". Such patterned discrepancies within broad overall patterasmight reflect either of two things, not mutually exclusive:

(i) A dialect which mixed West Saxon with Anglian forms, äsEkwall (1917, esp. 29-39) showed from place-names, and OldEnglish local documents also show, that counties right across thesouth midlands in fact did. Old English local material forHerefordshire is äs already mentioned exiguous, but Charterboundaries from the extreme west of north Gloucestershire andsouth Worcestershire tend to show mixtures of West Saxon -eal-forms with Mercian -on- forms similar to this.34 So do surveys ofmodern dialect pronunciations, where the division between formwith and without breaking (Kolb 1979 maps 250 calfy 252 half)runs across Herefordshire at least half-way up, but the dark westmidland reflex of a before nasals extends in some words (Kolb

33 Vleeskruyer 1953:103 (five instances). In view of this agreement Vleeskruyer isprobably wrong to postulate (ibid. 104) that St. Chad goes back to an original with o forä before nasals äs consistently äs the Vespasian Psalter. The Belfour IX text referencesare angin 78ie, 25, 27, 80?, 8 (x 2), 9,12, 24, 82g, 11,15,22 (including variants angein, angen, angin(x 2), dat. anginne, so that an- is actually the most stable element); ttchame äs in nn. 58,67, 69 below lichamlic 8234, 8811, 94a, 4, 6, 12, unlichamüc 82ai, 929 . Neither VPs nor StChad has the word angin longin, but cf. ongin in another partly Anglian-coloured collection,the Bückling Homilies.

34 I refer to Charter boundaries by the Charter number in Sawyer 1968 (subdividedwhere there is more than one boundary survey to a Charter, thus S786(ix) is the ninthsurvey in S786). Charters not in Sawyer are referred to by their numbers in Regesta Anglo-Normannonun, Finberg's "Tavistock Charters", or the Toronto Plan. For more detail onthe placing and, especially, dating, of Charter boundaries, and their linguistic äs well ästopographic content generally, see Kitson, forthcoming (c); on their sociolinguistics cf.briefly Sandred 1988:148-9. Charter usage in this WSaxon/Anglian border zone is very vari-able, probably reflecting actual mixture in spoken usage (cf. Clark 1958jdvi-xlix (1970:xlix-li)on similar mixture in the east midlands), though it does not offer close guidance äs to theproportions of the mixed ingredients: e.g. 963 S1306 (Gloucs/Worcs border within 2 milesof Herefs) has ondlong (4 x), longan (2 x), cron, ealdan, sealter<a>, salter <a>, <h>afoc;990s S786(ix) (salient of Worcs into Herefs) mixes sand (2 x) with sond (2 x), wallan, wellanwith wyllan, willan, sealtera, healh, heale with saltera, fald,falde and second-fronted heafoc(2 x); 958 S677 (NW Herefs) has ondlong (9 x) beside once rfang, c.1016 S1561 (Hereforddocument describing east diocesan boundary) has andlang (l x), on(d)lang (3 x), Carc- (2x) but Eardig- (2 x).


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map 202 man) äs far south äs the south of Gloucestershire.35

Belfour IX's distribution of a before nasals makes rough phoneticsense äs going with strongly front environments. In that hypothesisthe dialect must both be rather sensitive to such minutiae, andrather stable in them to induce near-consistency in spelling.(ii) That we have to do not with dialect simply but with somethingmore sophisticated, fairly comprehensive "house rules" forscribally debatable items, founded on a local vernacular but notnecessarily slavishly following it. A tendency for relict forms whichbreach the rules to occur in contexts where repetition or rhetoricaleffects would make the scribe conscious of the detaii of hisexemplar more than usual,36 showing that to this scribe in thiswork "translation" was the norm and faithful copying theexception, favours this hypothesis.

Either hypothesis would explain the greater intensity of dialect col-ouring in the seventh section of the manuscript than in the precedingsix.37 The same scribe wrote four of the six, but there is some changeof style with the seventh section such äs might betoken an appreciablelapse of time.38 In the first hypothesis, the pieces in this section would

35 Place-names of Gloucestershire and Herefordshire also show a mixture, with someevidence for the spread of west midland forms at the expense of the minority southernforms during the Middle English period (e.g. Smith 1965:63-65, Coplestone-Crow 1989:95,104, 137, 148, 190, 195). This is not confmed to names written according to Old Englishspelling-norms, and Smith (1965:63) is therefore not justified in taking for granted thatelements which are so written "have no significant for local dialect". Ekwall had next tono evidence for Herefordshire and tried (1917:36-38) to account for the WSaxon/Anglianmix in other counties by a historicai theory which would exclude Herefordshire; but it isunsound (cf. e.g. on Huntingdonshire Mawer and Stenton 1926:xvii) and also unnecessary,since this kind of mix is quite normal in dialect geography.

36 E.g. the two places where OE nominative söwul is kept (cf. Table III) are BelfourB&uAn sawul is, j an lif, j an edwist "It is one soul, and one life, and one substance" and92i3 Hyre nomce is anima. paet is, sawul "Her name is anima, that is soul"; of the 21 mod-ernized nominatives 18 are preceded by peo, 2 by possessive pronouns, and one (92zo) isin a rewritten phrase. Cf. 92$ eure for Skeat 1172 cyre, but 92? cyres allowed to stand; cf.n. 24 above. 8223 Ealweaidend could be explained along these lines, but if so it wouldcontradict what was cultivated äs exalted diction elsewhere (Lutz 1984:62-63). Incidentallythis seems a counter-example to Benskin's and Laing's (1981) supposition that "translation"was commoner later in Middle English (§§7.1.1 ff.) and/or to their conjecture (§§7.1.6-8)äs to the causes of such increase.

37 E.g. in Rood-tree and Belfour I-VIII walde occurs just once (VII 6825 ), ylc not atall. Walde occurs in Belfour IX (x 1), X (x 5 plus once waelde), XI (x 3), Assmann IV (x6, one duplicated); ylc in Belfour IX (x 3), X (x 2), XI (x 4), XII (x 2), XIII (x 3), AssmannIV (x 2), displaying all cases of the Singular and once nominative plural, fairly randomiyinterchanging with sslc (also 984 ealc, 130s ce^tylc).

38 Ker (1957:374) remarks change in the size of the written space äs well äs in minor


37

simply have been copied oftener by people who wrote in this dialect.39

In the second, house rules would have been in process of elaborationduring the compilation of Bodley 343, and when he wrote the last sectionthe scribe would have acquired a more instinctive obedience to them.(That the rules would be the result of elaboration in stages, the earliestperhaps äs rudimentary äs those deduced by Derolez (1989) for mid-eleventh-century Abingdon glossators, is intrinsically likely anyway.)These possibilities, again, are not mutually exclusive. The time involvedis presumably the middle and third quarter of the twelfth Century. Dob-son (1976:125-6) dates the orthography of the "AB language" to the lastquarter of that Century. This begins to look like the nearest thing yetfound in late Old English to a combination of dialect fairly similar tothe "AB language" with the habits of mind that lie behind it.

IV Reduction of inflectional vowelsTb turn to inflectional vowels. Tb the seven short vowel phonemes

ce, e, i,y, a, o, u of Standard Old English in stressed syllables correspondsin unstressed syllables a System of about three and a half, e (correspond-ing to the first four), , and o/u (u being kept separate from o in somecontexts but only in a minority).40 It is generally held that the back vo-wels a and o/u feil together in West Saxon in the eleventh Century, inother dialects earlier.41 Current orthodoxy puts coalescence of the re-maining pair to the single unstressed vowel of Middle English in theeleventh centuiy äs well.42 Ttoo papers by Samuel Moore (1927, 1928)are usually cited äs establishing this. Malone (1930) purported to showthat the coalescence happened äs early äs the tenth Century; Marckwardt(1949) added a companion-piece on late Old English verbal inflections.Moore's papers contain a wealth of material and are carefully argued,but from some premisses so dubious äs to make them of small probativevalue. He averages too readily grammatical categories whose divergencein detail is significant;43 and his detailed comparisons of non-final vowels

details of the handwriting but holds that the scribe is "probably" the same äs before; Cle-moes (1964:xxiii), Pope (1967:17), and Godden (1979:xxxvii) all affirm his unity.

39 Or more carefully, but random Variation e.g. celcfylc seems to mle that out.40 Campbell §§377-9; -i survives in some suffixes (ibid. §376).41 In Kentish by the ninth centuiy (Campbell §377), in Northumbrian and the Mercian

of Rushworth l (Campbell §379, Sievers-Brunner §44 Anm. 8) by the tenth; with reductionto schwa in absolute tinality and before nasals in Northumbrian in the tenth Century, in"Southumbrian" in the eleventh, according to Jordan §134.

42 Before about 1075 according to Moore (1927:248).43 E.g. (1927:217) strong adjectival dative Singular and dative plural: cf. text to n. 63

below.


38

are largely of vowels before -n, well known äs a neutralizing environmentin many linguistic contexts in which there is no question of general le-velling. Malone and Marckwardt follow him in this to the extent thattheir conclusions are almost worthless.44 All three authors share too thequestion-begging assumption, made explicii by Moore (1928:239), thatscribai "slips", however occasional, which match the norms of the laterlanguage, "reveal the Speech habits of the scribes which the 'correct'forms conceal". They can do so; if they do the speech habits they revealneed not be identical with the later norms: They can also be randomerrors. For it to be legitimate to use them äs evidence it is necessary tobe able to dislinguish between the three cases. Here is a crux of methodwhich Moore and his successors have not faced.45

At ihis distance in time the only available method of distinction isquantitative. Only if divergence from a scribai norm in respect of somelinguistic feature occurs significantly oftener than random errors do (andthan would be accounted for by any special palaeographic explanationthat might be relevant, or by copying from exemplars with a contradictoryscribai norm) can we be justified in inferring that spoken linguistic normshave developed in contradiction to scribai norms in respect of that fea-ture. And only if divergence in the direction of later norms is significantlycommoner than divergences incompatible with those norms can they beevidence that the spoken language was developing directly toward thosenorms rather than to some lost intermediate stage.

It would be reasonable to anticipate that at a period of less thanmonolithic uniformity in spelling-standards most moderately long textswould offer material for this kind of frequency-analysis. It is importantanyway to base our theories upon ihose that do. Belfour IX does; andin what follows comparisons with frequencies I suppose to be insignifi-cant will be used where appropriate by way of control of those I supposeto be significant in the same work.

Belfour IX's orthography uses in unaccented positions two vowelSymbols, ce and e\ others are so rare äs to be obvious relict spellings.With the loss of ce äs a separate phoneme in most dialects by the earlytwelfth Century ("AB" is the one conspicuous exception), in a wide area

44 Malone's material, if it fairly represents the manuscripts, shows appreciable con-fusion of vowels before -n in the Vercelli Book, but does not show anything eise of levelling;Marckwardt argues entirely from endings in -n and does not even consider using endingsin -p äs a control on them.

45 The seductiveness of the assumption that evidence for change must be evidencefor change in the direction of the eventual Standard language is curiously paralleled inscholarship between the 1930s and 1980s on the history of twelfth- and thirteenth-centuryFrench (see Dees 1985:94 andpassim).


39

of the south-east e and ce have become äquivalent graphs, and inter-change randomly in unaccented äs well äs tonic syllables.46 Napier(1894:l-li) seems to have assumed that that is what is going on in Bodley343. But it maintains entire the threefold distinction elcele in tonic syl-lables (cf. ibid. xlvii-xlviii), so there is no cause for it to use ce for e byaccident elsewhere, where in traditional spelling ce was not used at all.And in absolute fmality their distribution is patently not random. Thesubjunctive Singular in Old English verbs ends in -e\ Belfour IX hastwenty-three all speit -e.41 Of adverbs in OE -e or -ßce sixty are speitwith -e\ there are just two exceptions, both preceded by r.48 This showsthat there is a distinction; nominal endings show what it is: e representsOE e, (e the combination back vowel reflex of a/o/u attributed toeleventh-century Old English. The distinction between the two has begunto weaken after liquids but not significantly in other environments. Whatphonetic value the Symbol ce here has is a question that will be deferredto section IX below, after detailed examination of the contexts in which-ce and -e occur.

V Belfour IX's nominal inflectionsNouns, adjectives, and plurisyllabic demonstratives in Belfour IX end

in -ce 86 times by my count (against 547 in -e: see Tkble I). 44 derivefrom OE -a, 14 from -an, 7 from -uy 4 from -um, that is 69 from backvowels altogether.49 5 are analogical vocalic endings supplied to words

46 The two most conspicuous texts for this are the Canterbury Psalter (ed. Harsley1889) and the Winchester cartulary BL Additional 15350. Cf. Campbell §§288, 291-2, theSisams 1959 §§45, 27-28.

47 78i4 blissie, habbe, SOzi dweolie, 8024 h&fde, ongunne, 8025 nere, 8028 vw^re, hcefde,mihte, SQ&fandie, 80ai cume, 8611 cumc, 8628 wacre, 909/orlete, 9232foresceawie, 94i bilimpe,94i4 lokie, 94is ihyre, rine, 9425 lufie, wurdie, 9426 leomie, 9432 wiMge. Subjunctive Singularsmight reasonably be anticipated where four forms in -en occur, but since -n äs a pluralmarker in subjunctives remained stable in Middle English none is probably so intended:9426 forlceten is probably meant äs an infinitive governed by sceal two lines earlier, 8820munen an infinitive by scribal accident induced by the two earlier in the line (and reasonablyemended by Belfour), 80i4 scopen and 80is wrohten are probably plurals engendered byenthusiasm for the Persons of the IHnity. Even if any were meant äs Singulars the pointabout the vowel still holds.

48 Ignoring minor variants, the adverbs are cefre 22, rüefre 12, södtice 5, witertice4, witodllce, ittche, wisßce, untuyftce, eälesienttce, rihtttce, monigfealdlice, geomftce, rade

2, swlde 2, mucele, wyrsse, fange, Hörne, toga*dere; 7830 nefrce, 90w riöefrae.49 From -a following liquids 7827, 9029 alrae, 804, 824 be-(i)gra>, 806,22, 824, 84is, 94io

heorae, 80?, 8818, 21, 92i9 willce, 8224 mihtigrae, M&panz, 8632 pisseras; M-stem dative 9229neosce\ fern. NA pl. 8225 gyfa, 8228 täasungce, 885 suwwe, 90zi mihtce; weak masc. adj. Nsg.822 äncennedUe, 824 Hälgce, 90i6 Almihtigce, 926 wcelwillendce, 962 leofie; wk. m. noun Nsg.7820,30 ffmae, 7827, 80e ordfhunae, 8023 Wurhtos, 92i3,14 nomae\ G pl. 78i6 läfordae, 7827


40

Table I.Nominal inflections in -V(N) in Belfour IX and their descent from Old English (brackets showing

-e 547 (246)/

-es

3(1)

-e

386(164)

-a

32W

-an

53(14)

-u

11(4)

-um

33(17)

\+

47(37)

-e

12(8)

-a

44(18)

-ae86y

-an

14(5)

(39)v

-u

7(3)

-um

4(1)

\+

5(4)

ending in Old English in liquid consonants, 4 represent OE -fe, 4 -re-,these 13 are to be left out of account in quantifying derivations.50 Thereare only 4 real exceptions representing endings in OE -e not precededby -r.51 TWo ofthose are adjective plurals and may be explained plausiblyby supposing some levelling between strong and weak adjectives (cf.Täble II). Similar levelling is probably also visible elsewhere,52 and thereis evidence, which I shall come to, that at one stage in the decay of theweak declension -ce came to serve äs a plural marker. Depending onwhether this is thought to smack too much of special pleading the pro-portion of -ce derived from back vowels to derived from -e is about 17:1or 34:1. Either way the exceptions are few enough to be accepted äsrandom scribal error, and Belfour IX's final -ce is established äs the regu-lär descendant of the Old English unaccented back vowels. Its frequentoccurrence for back vowels followed in Old English by a nasal äs welläs ones which were final in Old English proves Moore's conclusion(1928:246 etc.) that general levelling of unstressed vowels was earlierthan loss of final -n false for nouns in this dialect. But the presenceamong relict spellings (RH of Tkble I) of groups not only from an earlierstage of presumably the same spelling-system in -cen 4, but also fromwhat was certainly an incompatible System in -en ,53 confirms what

isceaftce, 88isping&, 92^ monna; neuter NA pl. 7827, 28, 82i4 isceaftce, 803, 8229 &esceaftce,94a ( 2) sceaftce« From -an 84i3 eordce; 84i4 yfelce, 8621 witegce; 809 ordfrumce\ 783, 8428,8813, 963 hälgce, 84i4 neddrce, 84is QrwwraK^ 86s endenextce^ 92s, 7,31 willce. From -u neuterNP 7S2gebrödrfe1 92i mcegence; w-stem Nsg. 822 Sunae\ fern. Nsg. 824, 92z lüfte, 882 wrieppce;fern. Asg. 8614 jjyfie (cf. text to n. 64 below). From -um 8030 stcefce, 8032 stafce, 8634 pingce,92n linue. For the significance of the sub-categories see the comparison with -e of theseorigins.

50 8612, 889,10, 9031 säwlce, 8631 üdrce\ 8617,27, 882,22 sSwlce; 80i3 unSsegenlicrae, 80sohlceddrce, 84i9 Urce, 9021 parce.

51 88s ftesceada, 92io hefte; 8629 wfro», 9426 tädee.52 E.g. masc. Asg. 8027 hine sylfen (recte 8026 hine sylfhe).53 For -an 8814 wittcen; for -um 9230 limam, hondoen, 9420 sylften. For -um 7&n pissen,


41

how many are in the pari corresponding closely to Skeat I).

-a -an -u (-0) -um -on -en -aen

7 9 2 (+1) (1+) 1 4 l 1 0 4(2) (3) (1+1) (9) (1) (4) (4)

we know from other evidence,54 that in some dialects the levelling ofvowels (at least before nasals) and loss of -n did not happen in the sameorder äs in this dialect but in Moore's order. The geographical distribu-tion of dialects with the two Orders will be discussed in section VII below.

The descent of Belfour IX's -ae then is phonetic. I shall argue thatthat of its -e is about three-quarters phonetic and one quarter analogical.Before doing so I should like to point to some analogical reshaping un-deniably in progress. Let us consider the wonderful indeclinability ofthe soul. The word is a long-stemmed feminine with in principle eightcase-endings, though the single inflection -e does in West Saxon for three,in most Mercian for five of them (Campbell §§585-7: see Täble III). Nor-mal Middle English would have sg. N. sowie G sawles D sawle, pl. de-pending on dialect sawlen or sawles (in "AB" sawlen with sawles andsawle äs syntactic variants). Between the two there has been analogicalextension of -e to the nominative Singular within the paradigm and anal-ogical Substitution for -e in the plural and genitive Singular of endingsfrom other paradigms. Belfour IX has the former but not the latter,indeed it has the ending -e in all eight Old English cases (plus a sprin-kling of ce by confusion after a liquid, plus two rhetorically prominentrelict spellings). Note that since äs we have already seen the phoneticdescendant of OE -um is -o?, -e in the dative plural äs in the nominativeSingular must be analogical. So of course in the genitive plural, aboutwhich there is the slight doubt that the single instance of it would makesense Singular äs well äs plural.55 This stage at which with that one

78i2,16 halgen, 7829 monen; for -ne 8027 sylfen; for -an 84i2 witendliccn, 8629 udwitcn, 8811frummen, 9220, 21 nomen.

54 E.g. the Vercelli Book (n. 44 above); whence the modification of Moore in thisparticular by writers like Baugh äs quoted in section I above.

55 963 sowie lif "the life of (the) soul(s)w, translated Singular by Belfour, but SkeatI 241 sawla lif from which it derives is certainly plural, and the balance of probability isthat it was so understood by those who transmitted it. The incidence of sawle is N 82i9,8027, 8812, 16, 29, 90g, 9, 26, 923, 4, 20, 25, 31, 943, 6, 11. 12J A 863, 23, 90lO, 16i G 8030, 90g, 19, 21,


42

Table II.OB declensions of nouns and adjectives discussed in this paper, and their reOexes in nouns insouth-west midland ("AB") and other Middle English. (Adjectives in "AB" have -e generally inplurals and weak Singulars, with remnants oi-e(s) from strong Singular cases in particular syntacticfunctions: see d'Ardenne 1961, esp. §§78-81. Adjectives elsewhere have either -0 Singular -c pluralor ~e throughout.)

OB

sg. NAGDI

pl. NAGD

OB

sg. NAGD

pl. NAGD

Adj. masc.(neut.)

st. wk

-0

-ne-es-um-e

(-eH(-e) -an

-an-an

-e (-U/-0) -an-e (-U/-I-ra-um

Adj.st.

-U/-0

-e-re-re

-a/-e-a/-e-ra-um

0) -an-ena-um

fern.wk

-e

-an-an-an-an-an-ena-um

Noun masc.(neut.)

wk.

-a (-e)-an(-e)-an-an

-an (-u/-0)-an (-U/-0)-ena-um

Noun fernwk

-e

-an-an-an-an-an-ena-um

st.a-stem

-0-0-es-e

-äs-äs-a-um

st.tf-stem-U/-0

-e-e-e

-a/-e-a/-e-a-um

u-stem-U/-0

-U/-0-a-a

-a-a-a-um

i/ -stem-U/-0

-U/-0-a-a-a-a-a-um

eME ("AB")

noun I (reflexof st. masc.)

)J-0/-e-es-e

)J-es-e(ne),-es[-es]

eME ("AB")noun II (reflex

and all wk.)))-e-es(/-e)-e

)j-en-e(ne), -es-es

other ME

-0

-es-0

-es-es-es

other MEsouthem/northernof st. fern.

-e-e-e

-en/-es-en/-es-en/-es

possible exception the case-endings of a deciension lost all distinction,in a language which went on having case distinctions, was presumabiyexceedingly transient. In respect of feminine nouns Bodley 343's is pre»ciseiy "transitional Old English".

There is one more spectacular, Ihough isolated,56 piece of analogyin tlie masculine deciension, 78is Forpon de he ane is God, j allre kyngeskyng, 7 alre lafordce laford "Becanse he alone is God, and king of all

942i; D 78?, 84?, 887; NP 82i6; AP 82i2, 861 GP 96s; DP 84ao; of sawlcs N 8612, 889,10,90315 A 8627, G 8822; D 8617, 882; of sawul N 8814, 92is.

56 8628 agenes for Skeat I 86-87 Codes agenum results obviousiy from scriba! error.


43

Table III.The word "soul" and its spellings in Belfour IX.

sawle sawul sawlx

OEsg. NAGD

pl. NAGD

sawulsäwiesäwlesäwlesawlaAngL sawle)(WSax. stwla) säwlesäwiasäkvlum

NAGDNPAPGPDP

17 245?(+l?)312!?(-!?)1

4112

:23:5:6:5

kings, and lord of all lords", where the OE genitive Singular form kyngesis used for a genitive plural. This looks remarkably like what d'Ardenne(1961:205) says of what she calls the "adjectival case" of nouns in the"AB language":"It is derived from the OE genitive, but the sense of num-ber had nearly disappeared".57 Ttansfer between declensions is exempli-fied too, in the strong genitive -es four times58 for Êlfric's -an of ßcha-ma\ the corresponding change in "AB" is explained by d'Ardenne(1961:207) äs by analogy with the synonym bodi. Analogical reshapingoccurs in pronouns, in the case-division of the third plural personal pro-noun where late OE NA hi/tiy D him has become N heo AD heom (cf.Napier 1894:lv), and in the morphology of the definite article third sin-gular, initial p for OE s- in the nominative masculine pe, feminine peo.This last innovation is known to have begun in the north and spreadsouth; Charter boundaries show it established in Staffordshire by the lateeleventh centuiy.59 It is present in maybe 10% of Moore's large sampleof eleventh-century manuscripts.60 Here again Bodley 343 corresponds

57 Conversely this suggests that what she calls the "adverbial" case of the plural,obsolescent except in "fixed...expressions" of roughly this kind, and identical in form inthis declension with the nominative plural and genitive Singular, derives from the latter äsmuch äs from the formen (From the former, though, presumably, in Belfour DCs onlyother extension of -es, 7829 to engles.)

58 90g, 9226 (X 2), 94i6.59 The surveys in question are S1380(i-viii). The Charter S1380 is a forgery 1 §

to be of the 990s (dating-indications inconsistent between 994 and 996, see Keynes1980:252,135 n. 172). The decay of Old English phonetic forms shows that the boundariescannot have been among the material from the 990s used by the forger, but comparisonwith other late Worcs and Staffs surveys suggests a date probably in the 1070s (see Kitson,forthcoming (c), §10.17.1).

60 Moore 1928:240 n. 2. But Moore's list includes some, e.g. bis no. 67 Solüoquiesof Augustine, where these forms if present are very rare and untypical.


44

Table IVOE nominal inflections in -V(N) and their descent in Belfour IX.

-a 84 -an 87 -u 20

r-e32

-ae44

•a7

\-es1

/-es4

-e53

-ae -an14 9

-aen -en1 5

\-um

1

l~-e11

-ae7

\-U -0

1 1

to usage in a way which seems to contrast significantly with mid-twelfth-centuiy southern usage (äs represented in BL Cotton VitelliusA. xv, the Soliloquies of Augustine manuscript) or that of eastern countiesimmediately north of the Thames (which I take to be represented inCotton Vespasian D. xiv).61

Nouns, adjectives, and plurisyllabic demonstratives end in -e by mycount 547 times in the whole of Belfour IX (246 in the latter part thatagrees closely in wording with Skeat I and is amenable therefore tochecking by readers not fluent in Old English). 368 (164) continue OE-e\ 47 (37) are in words which either were endingless in Old English orwere definitely added to the text during transmission; 33 (17) correspondto -z/m, 53 (14) to -an, 32 (9) to -a, 11 (4) to -n, 3 (1) to -es (these lastall adjectival genitive Singulars). A blindly phonetic Interpretation ofthese figures would yield a correspondence <e:<back vowels of about3:1, which is obviously significant, but from which in Isolation a devil'sadvocate might wish to infer that the distinction was not a living one

61 Both of which have normal OE se, seo. Vitellius A xv, whose provenance fromSouthwick, Hants, is uncontroversial, has NA hj/hi D him, with heo äs an occasional variantof H$. Vespasian D. xiv has NAA?o D heom. It has been ascribed to Kent (e.g. Ker 1957:276-7) on the basis of vague palaeographic affinities and the inclusion of an OE translationof a sermon by an early twelfth-century bishop of Rochester and archbishop of Canterbury.But the fact that for the words hlw, nlwe the specifically Anglian forms (cf. n. 19 above)heOw, nZowe are normal seems to show that the scribal dialect belongs north of the Thames(heOw Warner 26, 729 (x 2), 13, HOie, 117i, 14110, 20, 1449, 145? (x 2), 9, 14724, plus 14724geheowed-, neowe 72n, 78i, variant nywe 7210 plus 72i2 geednywode). These are too wide-spread to be credibly supposed relict spellings, and co-occur with "Kentish" forms e.g.141n styde (cf. 67i2 wongstyde mixing "(WMidl.) Anglian" and "Kentish" elements) andwith specifically "WSaxon" ones (147i4, 27 wucan)\ so the Sisams' (1959.28) designation"south-eastern" seems wisest. (Styde also fits Essex etc.; Samuels 1963:92 stide, Mclntoshet al 1986 map 526.) The majority of words are normal enough late West Saxon, eall,mann, etc., with a high proportion of smoothing of ea before h (Campbell §312): peh"though", seh "saw", etc. Peculiarities include past part. "seen" generally seowen (102i2forseowen, 81 geseowenlicre 7 ungeseowenlicre, 95is geseowenlicra gea ungeseowenlicra; once(1173l) Anglian gesegen, cf. pret. pl. 1449 gesegeri); 14114,15 (x 2) fii(g)döm "freedom"; oc-casional pres. part. -inde (147is fageninde, 11627 wellinde) beside usual OE -ende.


45

-um 60 -e 383

/-e33

-ae4

-aen

3-en

4-on

1-um -es

12 2

\-0

1

/-e368

-ae12

-u1

-um1

\-en1

but recently dead. Putting the figures for -e and -ce together makes itat once obvious that that is not the right way to Interpret them. Evenwithout allowing for special factors like confusion after liquids, the 2

test yields a probability of 95% that the double correlation of Bei. IX-e with OE -e and of Bei. IX -ce with OE back vowels is not random.It is incumbent upon us to seek rational causes for deviations from it.This is particularly obvious if we look at it from the Old English end(see Täble IV).

OE -u is three and a half times äs likely to be represented by -ce äsOE -um is, and OE -a is three times äs likely to be represented by -ceäs OE -an is. After the loss of final nasals the members of either pairwould be identical. It makes no sense phonetically to suppose a followingnasal would have induced fronting. Analysis by grammatical categoriesdoes make sense of the distribution, in the process enabling us to workout (see section XII below) the stages by which the transition to MiddleEnglish declensions in Belfour IX's dialect was accomplished.

Of the 33 endings -e for -um, 26 are for adjectival datives, from 15to 18 Singular depending on how you judge rewritings during trans-mission.62 It is reasonable to infer that in these 26 of the 33 there isnot phonetic descent but analogical levelling, first of adjectival dat. sg.to nominal dat. sg., then of adjectival dat. pl. to adjectival nom. pl. (andthat it is these two processes, in this order, which led to the "syntacticdative" without distinction of number described by d'Ardenne (1961§79(4)) in the "AB language"). Of the seven nouns three may have beenrewritten äs Singular and one is sawle, leaving only three definite irregu-larities. By contrast all four instances of -ce for -um are from nouns:there the descent was obviously phonetic. The distribution of relict spell-ings with nasals is uneven in a way which implies that the two processes

62 Adjectives: Singular 783 sode, 78is mucele, 82 , 3l, 8830, 94i2 ane, 84i, 13 alle,33 pisse, 8818 summe, 90i2 ece, 9031 anrede, 92^ 7 agene; orig. sg. 90i odre; orig. pl. 7829monie; 94wyfele; plural 78i6, 803, 8625, 92io, 29, 9425 alle, 7822 arlease, 9427 haiige. Nouns:clearly plural 8430 sowie, 90i4 weldede, 90is wurdscipe, 92n boce; possibly rewritten 7829wise, 8424 morme, 94io weorce.


46

Table V-ce and -e in Belfour IX äs reflexes of OE -a.

After liquids

w-stem dativesfern. NA pl.wk. m. adj. Nsg." " noun "

gen. pl.n. NA pl.

-ce16

145747

-e13

11813

(e.g. alrce (x 2), Äeorre (x 4); al(l)re (x3), /ieore; *5iv/e(x4))(neosce; Sune)(jjyfte, leasungce, sunnce, mMce\ samesse)(e.g. äncennedte, H5lgae\ äne (x 5), -Üce (x 3))(e.g. ßm<£ (x 2), ordfrumoe (x 2), Wwrht(K\ ordfrume)(e.g. lafordte, isceaftee, pingce\ gpde, mcegene)(gesceaftae (x 2), isceafta: (x 3), ,sceö/fo? (x 2))

of levelüng of adjectival datives happened while final nasals were stillpronounced: half the dative plurals of nouns arc still speit with -m or-n, but only just over 20% of adjectival dative plurals and none at allof adjectival dative Singulars.63 (This distinction shows incidentally thatMoore's presentation of strong adjectival dative Singular and plural äsa single categoiy was unsound.)

Of the 11 endiögs -e for -u six are neuter plurals? all preceded byfront vowel plus single consonant.64 The remaining five are n-stem orstrong feminine nominatives which I account for on the supposition thattheir -u had ceased to function äs a distinct inflection at a time whenit was still phonetically distinct from -a. Belfour V provides proof thatthis happened (see end of n. 126 below); there is good reason in termsof phonetic economy why it should have done. If you garb the wholehomily in classical Old.English vowel inflections, keeping Belfour IX'swording, noun endings in vowel or vowel followed by nasal comprise -e57%, -an 13%, -a 12%, -um 9%, -u only 3%.65 A distinct form which

63 Noun Dpls. with nasal 78i2 englum, 842 fotum, 889 cildmm^ 8810 megenum, 90ipingum äs rewritten, 9232 limum, 94n limpum, 94zs weorcum, 9427 böcum; 92so limcen, 92sohoncUen; 78ie halgen, 7829 monen: total 13 (-um is always written -Ü with Suspension, hon-dam is written hond&) Noun Dpls. without nasal -se x 4 (n. 49 above), -e x 4 (or up to7) (n. 62), 78ii alt 7829 engles: total from 10 to 13. Adj. Dpls. with nasal 9232 gehwylcum,8632 nvtwurdon, 78i2 halben, total 3; without nasal -e from 8 to 11 (n. 62). (8628 agenesshould probably be discounted äs scribal error (n. 56).) For dative Singulars there is adistinction between pronominal adjectives, for which there are 5 nasal relict spellings (7832,8421 sylfiun, 86iîsswm, 9^20 sylfcen, 78n pissen) and 3 in -e (n. 62) and adjectives properfor which there are just from 12 to 15 in -e (n. 62).

^ 82i3, 84is, 90is njtene, 9226, 27, 30 an$te\ u-stem nominatives 802, 8 Sune; st. fern.N 78z5 andsware, 804,6 -

65 Other endings genitive -es 5%, plural -äs 1%; these low scores hardly sigoify, sincein some other kinds of discourse they would obviously be very much higher.


47

so rarely expressed a distinction might well be found not worth retain-ing.66 There are only two instances of final -u in the whole homily (eventhe adverb OE huru becomes 80i9 hure). Both look like relict spellings;both are Singulars. One is where final -u would be expected to havelingered longest, in a u-stem with root vowel u 80s Sunu. The other isa reverse spelling 929 gifii for Skeat I 175 strong feminine accusativegife. The implication of the latter is that in these Singulars levelling wentboth ways, with -e and -u for a period in use interchangeably. That ex-plains why in them alone of inflectional categories, other than afterliquids, there is an approximately even mix of -e and -ce in identicalwords.

The 32 endings -e for -a include 5 in Kchame; the remainder arebestconsidered in comparison with the 44 endings -ce for -a (see TäbleV).67 All but two of the -e endings other than after liquids are precededby single consonants, all the -ce endings in neuter plurals and genitiveplurals by two consonants; non-homorganic consonant clusters whosefinal member is not a liquid are followed by -ce without exception.68

This suggests that the spread of -e at the expense of -ce was conditionedpartly by the openness or otherwise of the penultimate syllable. Thecorrelation is with openness and not with vowel length under either theOld or the Middle English quantity System. Such phonetic conditioningis however only a secondary aspect of the change, because in weak mas-culines it is only beginning to operate: six of the seven noun endings-ce and three of the five adjectival ones follow single consonants. Fiveof the adjectival -e endings are for äne "alone"; there are no spellings*ance. This suggests that there was a house rule for spelling that word,perhaps for uniformity with the feminine which would anyway be ane.The remaining three are all adjectives in -lice, which though a very smallsample offers a plausible hint that -e first replaced -ce in front environ-ments.

In Belfour IX's remaining group of -e for back vowel, the 53 occur-

66 This point has been made before, in connection with a similar statistical breakdownof endings in a passage of Old English, by at least one writer in an article I had read andforgotten the provenance of long before 1986, when the bulk of this one (minus sectionsVI and VII) was written. It was presented äs a paper to the Philological Society in June1987; I thank Prof. R.M. Hogg for some subsequent criticisms tending to increase clarityof expression, and Dr John Insley for some tending to induce thought about second fronting.

67 Foliowing liquids 78is (x 2), 86g al(l)re, 806 begre, 82i2,16, 86ie, 963 sowie, 8420 engle,8632 dcele, 8&4pcere, 885 pare, 94g heore; u -stem dat. 806 Sune\ fern. AP 94i6 sämesse\ wk.masc. adj. Nsg. 78is, 3l, 8221, 846, 8610 äne, 8026 HeofmUce, 84i9,22 ttflice\ wk. m. noun Nsg.8223 ordfrumar, Gpl. 8429 gpde, 885 sunne, 9029 moegsne\ 82i?, 8424, 28, 8619, 90io KchameNsg.

68 Compare notes 50 and 66 and the selective comparison in Table V.


48

Tkble VI.-ce and-e in Belfour IX äs reflexes of OE -an.

-

type -lice (>-?-?)type (-)wlsetype häligeearlier lügtype Angl. -e-type -&-ylce "same"type -eorC- 1open stem -e- 2open stem (back V) 1ciosed stem 10

1144

135223432

(e.g. heofenlice (x 5), gästlice (x 2), wunderlice)(wlse (x 2), rihtwlse, ungesceadwlse)(haiige (x 3 ine. 1 spelling Äö/ge), steligre)(ttchame (x 12), liflgende)(?ce (x 2), «ce, c&ewe, c/ene) (WSax. e"ce, c&ewe)(geleafe, itäafe)

(eordce-, eorde, heorte, sceorte)(yfelce (pl.), witegce; mycele (x 2), Scennede, ägene)(prdfrumce-, lufe, natne, imäne)(e.g. Ä5/^p (x 4), Srwurdce, willce (x 3), riBeddra\ onde)

rences for OE - « (see Täble VI), which after loss of final nasals wouldbe phonetically identical with the previous group,69 45 out of 48 open-stemmed words likewise end in -e\ those whose stem syllable containsan i or a long front vowel, or with a long l anywhere in the word, endin -e without exception. Stem consonant groups of liquid plus other con-sonant are followed by -e 5 times, -ce once; other ciosed stems have -ce10 times,70 There is small scope for grammatical Variation in these words,since they are merely the oblique Singular cases and nominative and ac-cusative plurals of the weak declension whose nomlnatives in -a werediscussed previously. Yet it may be worth mentioning that two of thethree endings -ce following open stems are in plurals, and only in -liceand after long front vowels are there -e endings for such plurals. Wemay recall the two irregulär -ce for strong plural -e mentioned earlier.

69 Adjectival Singulars 782,10,12,19 heofonlice (-en-), 8614,16 gästlice, 8822 wunderlice,9422 eordlicc·, 80i, 82a wlse; 78s, 8426 hfflige, 84so hälfc; 862 liflgende; 78?, 8420 clene (-*?-),881, 90n, 96s föce (#-); 865 ylce; 8433 sceorte\ 78n, 80i9 myce/e, 806 ffcennede, 789 ffgene;plurals 849 heofenlice, 84io eordlice, 84n äteoriendlice; 90is ungesce~adwlse, 949 rihtwlse; 90isscelifre; 8625 leajulle. Noun Singulars 78?, 8232, 84i, 11,13,26, 864,17, 909, 92io, 12, 946 ttchame',78s, 8421 ileafe (ge-); 86nylce; 84i eorde; 786 imSne, 8826 name, 92i lufe; 7823 onde; plural78i heorte.

70 The similar behaviour after open syllables and groups of liquid plus consonantlooks likeiy to be a transient effect of the same habits of articulation that more permanentlyproduced the Middle English quantity system, since these are the two categories in whichshort stressed vowels of disyllables are lengthened. But again -e correlates with opennessin penultimate syllables whose vowels would remain short äs well.


49

It is tempting to suppose that in a particular category displacement of-ce by -e was slower in plurals, and that a part was played in this bydesire to maintain a distinction between Singular and plural, which wasto lead to wholesale restoration of plural -n in nouns by the beginningof Middle English. But these samples are too small for statistical cer-tainty. For other questions the data are not sufficiently uneven: theywould accord comfortably with, but fall well short of establishing, thehypothesis that -e spread in the Singular from the dative and/or in theplural from adjectives to nouns. We can speculate rather more confiden-tly that the replacement of final -ce by -e, like the disappearance of final•u earlier, was impelled by considerations of general phonetic economy,-e already being more than twice äs common äs -ce and -ce not any longermarking any particular distinction of case or number; and that this re-placement in words like lichame was a prerequisite for their adoptioninto the strong declension. Depending on how you view the various strag-glers the proportion of phonetically irregulär to phonetically and anal-ogically regulär -e comes out at somewhere between 1:22 and 1:49. Mybest guess is about 1:32, of the same order of magnitude äs irregulär-o?.71

The tidiness with which the conditions for -e and -ce äs reflexes ofOE -a(n) can be formulated confirms pretty clearly that the replacementof -ce by -e was a sound-change still in progress. It is not likely thatscribes could maintain the integrity of such a non-traditional pattern iftheir own speech were appreciably distant from it. So here we have inmid- to late twelfth Century a levelling of final vowels such äs orthodoxwriters ascribe to the eleventh. Only it is not the kind they postulate.The general correspondence of -ce to OE back vowels and the fasterspread of -e äs reflex of -a(n) (and perhaps of -u) in front environmentsshow that what is going on is not levelling toward an obscure vowel butremoval of a more retracted (whether or not obscure) vowel that is theless common in the System in favour of a more common clearly pro-nounced front vowel. The same process is visible in the one category ofnominal endings not considered so far, those in -s. In noun plurals themajority spelling is -ces, with -es slightly outnumbering relict -äs in theremainder;72 by contrast genitive -es is so speit 36 times without excep-tion. The explanation why there are no reverse spellings for verbal sub-

71 This happens to fit most neatly the other figures in the second paragraph of sectionXI below, but no value in the possible ränge between two and six per cent would disruptthe argument there.

72 78is kynges, 82i 32 engees, 8220, 84ie entfes, 82 3/» ? , KZufiigelas, 844/KOS, 8625f(jederces, 8629 lareow&s: -ces 5, -es 3, -äs 2 (or excluding those preceded by liquids-CKS 2, -äs l, -es 1).


50

junctives is similar: their -e was clearly pronounced, and -ce representeda sound that was distinct from it. What that sound was will be consideredin section IX below.

VI Nominal inflections in Charter boundaries

Because the broad contrast between the distribution of -ce and -e innominal inflections in Belfour IX is so obviously significant, the anal-ogical changes outlined above, which make sense of the detail of them,would have to be posited even if the dialect stood alone in this. Butparallels have been noticed in other transitional texts, e.g. Lehnert(1953:24) found irregulär -e in long-stemmed nominatives in the Orr-mulum much commoner in feminines where the accusative has -e thanin masculines and neuters where it is uninflected. And they can be be-lieved in with more confidence in that similar analogies can be seenoperating centuries earlier in the texts with the best Claim to record OldEnglish vulgär speech, Charter boundaries. About an eighth of the con-tent of Charter boundaries is preserved in "original" documents, aboutfive-eighths in cartularies of before about 1250, about a quarter in car-tularies later than that.73 Spelling-patterns in the earlier cartularies differvery little from those of "Originals" (their versions of OE texts are farmore reliable than those of pre-Conquest poetic manuscripts, forexample). In the later cartularies there is significant sporadic corruption(usually adding an -e to words that were originally endingless or con-verting another vowel in an inflectional ending to e), but though it dis-torts absolute sizes of distributions it does not usually alter their overallpattern. (Where it seems important in the following samples I have com-mented äs appropriate.) Where phonetic change was actually going onin late Old English Charter boundaries show it; thus in dative plurals ofnouns, where the traditional spelling -um is fairly consistently maintainedin literary texts, of the 678 examples I have found in the Substantiveelements of Charter boundaries, spellings with final -m constitute only19%, spellings with final -n 72% of which -an 49%, -on 12%, -un 3%,-en 7%, other variants less than 1%. (The remaining spellings are -e3%, -a 1%, -o 1%, analogical -äs and -es 3%, others 1%.) The spellings-en and half the spellings -e74 are artefacts of post-Conquest cartularies.It is clear that actually more than half the OE Originals of these DPswere speit -an. In counties with large samples we can even teil the dateof the change: -um is prevalent until 940 in Hants, 955-960 in Wilts and

73 For more detail see Kitson, forthcoming (c).74 The other half have rational OE origins, mainly in numeral phrases feit äs Singular,

e.g. "N boundaries" meaning "the common boundary-point of N estates".


51

Berks; an intermediate stage of -un or ~on is significant in Hants until961, in Wilts till c.990; in all three counties -an is prevalent from 960or a little before, and only in Wilts of the three are there significantnumbers of back-vowel forms thereafter.75

Inflectional vowels not followed by a nasal suffer no comparableweakening; any confusion occurs only where analogy gives room for it.Thus of genitive plurals of strong nouns, which should for all gendersend in -a, 19 out of 22 masculine examples do, and the remainder, -äs2, -es l, are obviously analogical; neuters, which if short-stemmed shouldhave NAP -M, have GP -a 17 out of 29, -M 3, -e l (both these only inshort-stemmed words); and feminines, whose NAP should end in -e or-a and NS if short-stemmed in -M, have GP -a 15 out of 25, -e 4, -u 1.(The remaining feminines are -ena proper to the weak declension 3, itsweakened variant -an 2; the remaining neuters -an 7, -0 1.) Of 4224masculine and neuter -stem dative Singulars, which should end in -e,93% do.76 The only other statistically significant category, at somewhatover 6%, is a zero ending by analogy with the (nominative and) accu-sative Singular; endings in a vowel other than -e (nearly all - ), totalmerely 0.3%, well down in the realm of random scribal error. In 342datives of masculine and neuter /-stems,77 whose NAs äs well shouldend in -e, the proportion in -e rises to 97%, -i falls to 2%; again theseare the only significant categories. 1223 feminine dative Singulars, whoseaccusatives should end in -e but nominatives in -0, have -e 96%,78 -03%, others (mainly -a) again less than 1%. Conversely, of 4816 masculineand neuter -stem nominative and accusative Singulars, which shouldhave zero ending, only about 87% do; nearly 13% have -e by analogywith the dative. (The difference between irregulär -0 in datives and ir-regulär -e in nominatives and accusatives indicates that cartularial cor-ruption reducing the one and increasing the other has probably affectedabout 3% of the total sample in each of these categories.) Feminine o-stem accusatives should end in -e\ of those with short stem syllables,whose nominatives end in -w, 96% of 348 datives end in -ey l*/2% in -uand 2% in other vowels; of those with long stem syllables, whose nomi-natives are endingless, only 89% of 842 datives end in -e, nearly 10%are endingless, none at all end in -u and less than 1% in - , the only

75 For more detail see Kitson, forthcoming (b).76 Including somewhat under 2% in its transitional south-eastern cartularial variant

-ce.77 I.e. excluding from the sample the word gem&re "boundary" whose declension be-

haves very irregularly (for reasons originating in confusion between Singular and plural)which has D -e 83%, -0 9%, -o 5%, -u lV2%, -0 l/2%.

78 Including -<z 2.5%.


52

other vowels represented. In 521 feminine genitives the only significantcategories are regulär -e 95%, -es by analogy with masculine genitives3% (the majority either in pre-Conquest manuscripts or guaranteed bythe syntax to be of Old English origin), -0 1%; all the genitives in -0are in words with long stem syllables;79 there is only one example ofwhat might be supposed phonetic confusion, a genitive ending in a vowelother than -e. In 1428 masculine and neuter -stem genitives the onlysignificant category is regulär -es 96%; other spellings -e 2%, -0 1%,nearly all obviously result from post-Conquest corruption,80 äs do thetiny residue of variahts in -s. The spread of masculine genitive to fe-minine nouns but not vice versa incipient here anticipates of course whatbecame general in Middle English.

The Middle English tendencies to replace weak Singular endings withfeminine ones and make weak inflections a plural marker are also fore-shadowed. In 285 masculine nominative and accusative plurals 3% endin -an (and 1% cartularial -en), with 3% in -a or -e either analogicalwith other genders or a worn-down variant of that, beside regulär -äs72% and -es 19%. The latter group include 13% clearly of late cartularialorigin, the largest such corruption in any inflectional category: theresidue, all in twelfth-century cartularies, probably do betoken some lateOld English phonetic confusion, but only sporadic, affected by context,81

and influenced by the existence of -es already within the paradigm.82 Allthe analogical plurals in -an and cartularial -en are accusatives; nearlyall are from surveys which also contain dative plurals, all of which are-an or cartularial -en. It looks äs if the motive for them was accusative-dative syncretism. (This suggests the possibility that such syncretism inthe weak declension was the motive for the reduction of DP -um to -anin the first place. The sample of weak DPs is much too small to test for

79 Not all certainly free of corruption; but likewise only with long-stemmed femininesdoes one get effects äs extreme äs these (excluded from the above sample): strm -0 54, -e163,-es l (0 25%); Foss 0 9, -e 2; die when feminine -0 251, -e 36, -es 45, -an l (-0 75%).Nothing comparable happens with short-stemmed feminines

80 The exceptions are mostly due to differential reduction of compound qualifyingelements, of the form S811 (of) cirscumbe hracan (äs against regulär S630(i) (anlang) cum-bes hracan}.

81 Including accentual context, e.g. reduction in mid-phrase. Cf. Hants 940 (XII: Win-chester) S465 paar pa weges togeare licgad; Berks 1042 (XII: Abingdon) S993(i) dcer da weges twis-ligad and in the earlier Version (S1542(i)) of the related text c.937 S411(i), the agreementbetween the two probably indicating that the spelling is that of the c.937 surveyor notcartularial.

82 Compare in contemporary English the pronunciation of accept äs except widespreadin the last twenty years, or that of words in -ible, -ity äs if they ended in -able, *-aty wide-spread in the last five years, but not usually accompanied by reduction of all unstressedvowels to a single vowel.


53

this, but would be consistent with it: of the 11 that there are 8 end in-Vny 3 in -F, and none in -Vm.) In 351 masculine and 223 feminine weakdatives the significant categories are regulär -an masculine 80%, fe-minine 69%; variants with back vowel plus nasal, masculine 2%; post-Conquest cartularial -en masculine 7%, feminine 2%; -e masculine 10%,feminine 26%; -a feminine 3%; total with nasal masculine 90%, feminine71%, total without nasal masculine 10%, feminine 29%. The proportionof -e spellings is exaggerated, to an extent I have not measured exactly,by late cartularies to whose scribes OE -a(n) was alien, but some appearin "Originals",83 and those for some words are geographically coherent,84

so that they are certain to be of Old English origin, äs those in -a ob-viously must be. The disproportion between -Vn forms and -e forms inmasculine and feminine datives is anyway too great to be an artefact ofcartularies, and must be explained by analogy with the strong declension,where all feminine Singular cases end in a vowel with no following con-sonant and where -a äs well äs -e is a possible form of it, but only thedative of masculine cases does and its only form is -e. (The numbers of-a endings are too small to be statistically significant, but the contrastbetween masculine dative 1/351, accusative 1/469, and feminine dative6/223, accusative 4/286, is certainly suggestive.) Weak genitives show aneven strenger contrast: of 196 masculine -an 84%, variants 2%, -en 9%,-e 3%, -es 2%; of 52 feminine -an 71%, -en 2%, -e 23%, -es 4%. (Thefeminine genitives are too few to be veiy reliable statistically but 169genitives of weak river-names, which should be feminine, tend to supportthem: -Vn 69%, -e or -a 27%, -0 2%, -es 2%). In weak accusatives how-ever both genders show proportions similar to masculine datives (stillwith feminine rather less conservative): of 469 masculine -an 83%, vari-ants 1%, -en 4%, -Vn totalling 88%, -e 12%; of 286 feminine -an 82%,variants 1%, -en 2%, -e 14%, -a 1%, totalling -Vn 85%, -V 15%. Pres-umably the greater spread of -e in datives than accusatives is conditionedby -e being the dative marker in all the main strong declensions, accu-sative in only some of them. (The much greater conservatism of genitiveforms is to be expected from the greater markedness of that case.) Thetotal proportion of weak endings in -a plus nasal to those in -o or -uplus nasal is incidentally 185:1 in weak nouns (55:1 in river-names, 125:1overall), a much smaller proportion of reverse spellings than would beexpected if the three had been reduced by c. 1070 to a uniform -[an].

83 E.g. Nhants 1021x3 (XI *) S977 has one wyrtwale declined with A and D -e betweentwo others with correct A -an one of which also has correct D -an. The late date of thisCharter is what one would have expected.

84 E.g. of buma in eleventh-century Essex.


54

This implies in turn that the motive for the reduction of dative pluralswas not primarily phonetic but systematic.

In Charters just äs posited for Belfour IX -u is the most unstableending. The samples for individual categories are too small to be reliedon for exact percentages, but they agree well enough for their overalltestimony to be reliable for Orders of magnitude. 23 short-steinmed fe-minine nominative Singulars end in -u 43%, -o 17%, -a 13%, -e 22%,-0 4%. The last two I take to be analogical with feminine oblique casesand long-stemmed nominatives respectively. One of the -e endings hap-pens to be in an extant "original".85 The mix of analogical -e with phone-tically descended back vowels is exactly the kind of thing posited abovefor Belfour IX. 59 short-stemmed neuter nominative and accusative plu-rals have -M 18%, -o 15%, -a 48%, -an 11%, -e 9%. 55 long neuter jfl-stemplurals have -u 18%, -o 31%, -a 20%, -an 9%, -e 21%. (The disproportionbetween -a and -o in the last two samples is conditioned by the differentbehaviour of the individual words (and)heafod and gemöere which makeup most of them; the preference for -a in (-)heafda matches what tendsto happen to ordinaiy long-stemmed neuters, etymologically endingless,in late Old English.)

In Charters just äs posited for Belfour IX the u -declension is by farthe most unstable declension. 80 short-stemmed nominatives and accu-satives have regulär -u 40%, ~o 1%, -a 40%, -ce 1%, -e 15%, -0 2%. Theenormous preponderance of -a over ~o shows that -n is being replacednot by phonetic confusion but by analogy with the oblique cases. Thedistribution of forms is also geographically coherent in a way whichshows competing analogies in progress. East of the easternmost isoglossin Map l analogical -a from the dative is also consistently used for nomi-native and accusative of wudu "wood", where it has ousted regulär -ubefore the beginning of the tenth Century. It spreads to the second iso-gloss before the end of the Anglo-Saxon period, remaining a minorityform in W. Hants-Wiltshire, becoming the majority form in east Ham-pshire after about 960 and in Staffordshire by the eleventh Century. Butwithin the westernmost isogloss analogy goes the other way, and a clutciiof late texts have dative -u, apparently äs the majority form in Worces-tershire.86 641 w-stem datives altogether have regulär - 71%, -e 18%,

85 Oxon 1069 RAN 28(ii).86 The NA forms east of the easternmost isogloss are in IoW 982 S842(iii), Sussex

s.ix S108(i), 963 S708, sjc2 S108(iv), Kent 889 S1276 (2 features), 996 S877 (i), Surrey sjc2

S382, Berks 963 S722, Middx 957 S645(i) (+1 inwuda not mapped), Hunts 948 S547, Nhants948 S533, Nhb 737 HNE 151 (l feature speit twice -0, once with zero ending). The onlyother NA is Kent 838 S286-e, which may be genuine for that county but looks more likelyto be an artefact of a ihirteenth-century cartulary. Between the two easternmost isoglosses


55

"7" NA -a in a Charterearlier than 960

φ ΝΑ -a beside -0 inan early Charter

• NA -a in a Charterlater than 960

9f& same feature in twoCharters

Δ D -u

same feature in twoCharters

D -u beside -a forthe same feature

NA -0 in an earlyCharter

β Isogloss east of which NA has consistently -a

• Isogloss east of which NA has sporadically -a

• Isogloss west of which D has in late texts -u

Map 1: Directions of analogy in the declension of wudu


56

-u 5%, -0 4%, -an 1%. 14 genitives have regulär -a 57%, -ey 43%.87

More than 99% of the n-stem forms are of masculine nouns; the -e da-tives are by analogy with the main masculine declension, äs the -es geni-tives and -0 accusatives obviously are, and äs are the small sample of 4accusative plurals, which are all -äs not regulär -a. (Likewise the exiguoussample of feminine w-stems are all analogical -an o r -e.) The moremarked masculine endings -es and -äs tend to coexist with endings properto the w-declension, but thoroughgoing assimilation of a w-declensionword to the «-declension is found in at least one text of äs early äs theninth Century.88

In Charters analogy in nominal declensions becomes evident first ofall in weak adjectives. Where these are used without definite articles,the -an of the oblique cases is levelled back into the nominative. Of 31

NA forms in -u occur in Staffs loos S920(ii), Wilts 955 S582(iii) (2 features), 997 S891(i),sjd S275(i), s.xi S540(i), sjd S393(i), s. xi S229(i) (these five a textualiy related group onthe Hampshire border), Hants 924 S283, 932 S417, 940 S465 (2 features), 948 S532(ii), 961S693(i), 961x4 S385, in -a Staffs 996 S878, loos S920(ii), Wilts 901 S364, Hants 939 S446, 961S699, 1033 S970, s.xi S276, 1045 S1012, sjd S360(vi). Hants 961 S699 has also an -ce, whichnormally one would Interpret äs a Winchester Cartulary error for -e, but looks äs if itwould be for -0 in this instance. And there is the form mentioned in n. 88 below. Withinthe westeramost isogloss datives in -a are found in Worcs 962 S1300 (2 features), sjd1 S219,sjd1 S1591 (2 features), sjd med. S1593, Gloucs 990s S786(vi), 990s S786(xi), sx2/^1 S414(ii),sjd1 S179(ii), Ne Som. 956 S593; in -u Worcs 974 S1329, sjd1 S216, sjd med. S1185, sjd med.S1596(i), sjci2 S1597(i) (these last two textualiy related), Gloucs sjd1 S179(ii), Som. sjdmed. S508(ii) (mixed forms for one feature). It is not practicable on a map of this scale toshow all contrasting case-forms by separate Symbols, but this map may be compared withthat of the total distribution of wudu, Kitson 1991 map 1. The distribution of relevantforms between the two westernmost isoglosses, where neither analogy operates, is Worcs964 S726 A, Oxon995 S1379 N, Berks 951 S558 D, Wilts 939 S449(i) D, 994 S881 D, Somersets.x/xi sub-682 S237(i) N, 953x5 S571 A, Devon 847 S298(ii) D. These lists ignore texts in manu-scripts of later than the mid-thirteenth Century, where there is corruption of the kind in-stanced in Kitson 1991 §§5(i), 7, though lack of any better evidence for Dorset is whathas made me draw the isogloss there äs far west äs I have. The courses of isoglosses frommid-Staffordshire north-wesl are highly conjectural. A grammatical anomaly in mid-northSomerset 955 S563 cet stocwudu nordeweardne, where m.acc. -ne guarantees accusative for-u even after cet which normally governs dative, arises because cet here denotes not, äsusual, position at a place but limiting point after a line, normally denoted by öd whichgoverns accusative. (On the relation between öd and cet cf. Campbell §73 n. 2.) If regardedäs a dative this would extend the westernmost isogloss äs far south äs the Brue.

Slight discrepancies in the dating of forged Charters between Kitson 1991 and thisarticle are due to refinement of technique since 1986 when that one was finished. A con-spectus of the dating factors Charter by Charter is included in Kitson, forthcoming (c).

87 The qualifying element in Warks S64(i) wudan bergas is presumably also a genitive(since the only other syntactic possibility is nominative).

88 Wilts 892 S348 A wlod D wlodde. The genuineness of S348's forms is confinnedby the occurrence of exactly corresponding ones in exactly the same pari of Wiltshire inmodern dialects; for discussion see Kitson 1991.


57

weäk masculine nominatives without article, spellings with -an predomi-nate at 45% (48% if a single -am be included); only 13% have regulär-a\ -e 23% and -0 13% (both somewhat inflated by late manuscripts)are the other significant categories. Of 35 weak neuter nominatives andaccusatives without article, 31% have regulär -e, 54% -an, and another9% -en in late manuscripts probably reflecting OE -an. Of 15 weak fe-minine nominatives without article, 33% have regulär -e, 40% -an, and27% -0. Used with articles the proportion of regulär forms is muchhigher: of 7 masculine 71%, of 85 neuter 82%, of 8 feminine 50% (ifone -ce be included äs variant of -e). But even there analogical -an is äscommon äs phonetically confüsed -e for masculines or -a for feminines,and substantially commoner for neuters (there -an 4%, -en 2%, -a 2%;phonetically reduced -0 at 8% is the commonest variant). By contrastin 47 strong feminine accusative adjectives, nearly all without article,regulär -e and phonetically reduced -0 are the only endings recorded,and 18 out of 19 instances in early manuscripts are regulär. Levelling-outof articleless weak nominatives is normal at least äs early äs the eighthCentury, witness Som '766' S262 Diornanwiel, Worcs 770 (Viii2) huitan stanyreadan solo, 778 S113 ruanberg, Kent 824 S1266(ii) Loncgan duun, 845 (IXmed.) S296(iii) longan med\ perhaps äs early äs the Start of Charter evi-dence in the late seventh Century, if Somerset 682 (XVI) S237(ii) Blacan-broc is meant äs an Old English nominative (rather than äs a cross-lin-guistic accusative governed by Latin habet). The degree t)f relevance ofthis to ordinary speech is debatable, because adjectives in Charter boun-daries belong to names of natural features some of which were traditionaland hardening into "place-names" in the modern sense, which perhapsthe articleless nominatives already were. But articleless weak adjectivesseem to have been used also in Charters (äs in the conservative dictionof poetry) in appellatives which were not traditional. 89 The comparisonseems worth making for this reason and because even in the syntax ofordinary prose endings of weak adjectives preceded by articles never con-veyed Information that was not conveyed more accurately by some othermember of the phrase. There were redundanties, in effect, in a syntheticaccidence given a syntax that was already largely analytic. This I take tobe why Moore found loss of -n greater in all texts in weak Singulars,both noun and adjective, than in weak plurals and dative plurals. Butconversely these levellings invalidate Moore's essentially a priori assump-tion (1927:255) that the loss of final n in weak adjectives "was neitherretarded nor accelerated by analogical processes", which was the sole

89 Use of articles with weak adjectives in new descriptions seems to have been foundmost necessary in the south-east midlands and least necessary in the south-west. The earlychaners of Devon furnish a particularly striking series of the latter.


58

basis for bis conclusion "that loss of n in this grammatical category wasthe result of sound change alone".

VII Tbmsitional Old English dialect geography in Charter boundaries

If such levelling had ever been a feature of the dialect of Belfour IXthe loss of final -n would have obscured it from us. Weak adjectives inCharters are of much clearer relevance to Belfour IX in providing a dia-lectal context for that loss. When adjectives are preceded by the definitearticle the distinction between neuter NA and fern. N -e or m, N -a andoblique -an is usually maintained, but where it is not analogical variantsoutnumber ones due to phonetic confusion;90 however, phonetic reduc-tion, medially in name-compounds, especially in already-existing namesused äs qualifiers,91 is a significant factor with weak adjectives äs it wasnot with weak nouns. I have not sorted the adjectival spellings fullyenough to state exact proportions äs for nouns,92 but it is clear thatwhen cartularial spellings are omitted the geographical distribution ofirregulär reflexes of -an is significant, äs sketched in Map 2.1 emphasizethat this is only a sketch-map; the possibilities of error in the placingof isoglosses are quite large, and the whole Situation was doubtless muchmore complicated than this makes it look. But the basic pattern shownis a real one, with -a mainly south-western (including west Worcester-shire), -en and similar variants mainly eastern (but very rare in pre-Con-quest texts), and -e mainly in counties north of the Thames. Thus intexts which must belong to about the time of the Conquest Devon S1547has weak adjectives in - 5 (none preceded by the definite article), -an

6 (three preceded by the definite article),93 Warks S79 has -an 6, -e

90 A sample of 13 masculine nominatives yields regulär -a 5, analogical -an 4, phone-tically reduced -0 2, phonetically confused -e l, and -o reflecting the final stem-consonantof the word "hollow" 1. 63 neuter nominatives and accusatives yield regulär -e 64%, anal-ogical -an 16%, phonetically reduced -0 13%, phonetically confused -a 5%. Levelling ofneuter nom./acc. endings into the dative is also found, e.g. Derbys 968 S768 in pcet aldewie (acc.), ofalde wie (dat.), beside correct masculine acc. in done stanegan ford. An extremepiece of adjectival levelling appears to be instanced in Kent 996 S877(iv) to Käsern strcete...an-dlang Kaseru strcete which looks like "to/along Imperial Street", strong nominative (äs themost distinctly feminine Singular ending) used to form an adjective from a masculine noun.

91 E.g. Warks 956 S588 on langdune ende; oflangandun.92 For what they are worth a sample of 1972 weak adjectives reflecting OE -an (about

half the total) yields -an 77%, variants with back vowel plus nasal 1%, -a 2Vz%, -0 3%,-en 3L/2%t -e 12%, more than three-quarters of the last two looking cartularial.

93 Langa 2, ruwa, hwita 2; blindan, ruwan, gre(a)tan 2, fulan 2 (hean (x 2)being contracted is not strictty comparable). Weak nouns in this survey reguiarly have -an,and a dative plural and a strong adjectival dative have -um unreduced.


59

Limit of occurence of forms in -enUnqualified labels indicate strong preponderance of one form

Map 2: Possible Interpretation of Charter evidence fordirections of decay of weak adjectival -an


60

3, all preceded by articles;94 and Suffolk 1000x2 S1486(i) has -an 1? -nel (both preceded by article) beside confusion before nasals in otherwords.95 This provides the context for the disagreement between the de-velopments -an > -a > "-ce" deduced above for Belfour IX's dialect and-Vn > -[an] "-en" implicit in the majority of transitional manuscriptsused by Moore: the spelling-system which eventually became dominantin Middle English reflects developments in eastern counties, for whichthe Charter evidence is regrettably exiguous,96 but Belfour IX goes, äsit should from the geographical position we have deduced for it, withthe more conservative south-west. (A corollaiy should be that Old Eng-lish manuscripts such äs the Vercelli Book with appreciable confusionof vowels before -n were written in eastern parts,97 but that such con-fusion in south-western manuscripts should be äs it is in the Exeter Bookwell down in the realm of random scribal error.)

Mercian -e for weak adjectival -an is nothing to do with later MiddleEnglish spellings of -e for a reduced vowel but is a fully pronouncedOld English -e of analogical origin. This is shown by the unevenness ofits grammatical distribution. Täking äs a sample Warwickshire and Shrop-shire, where weak -an is not corrupted by cartularies, -e for weak adjec-

94 In sequence brodan, restihtan, fytle, ealde, ealdan, grenan, blacan, ealdan, fytle (weaknoims have -an 6, -and 2, West Saxon strong -e l in wylle), It looks äs if in thissurveyor's dialect fytel was being reshaped in the same way äs sawol in Belfour IX.

95 Ealdan, grenne. Perspicuous weak nouns have -an 2; qualifying elements of de-batable etymology have acan beside acyn, rigen beside rigin« The significance of the Variationacan/acyn is greater if both fonns represent -an genitive of a personal name (Ekwall 1960:2)than if an alternative composition-form was current or if the first word is really oecenläcen"oaken" äs Ekwall (1960:395) agrees the other to be rygm "ryen".

% But the documents in pre-1200 MSS in Whitelock (1930) tend to support the viewthat reduction of vowels generally had gone further in East Anglia than elsewhere in mid-land and southern England.

97 Other spellings in the Vercelli Book, e.g. Uchoma(n) consistently with -o- and spo-radically frequent - · for WSax. -eo-, would seem to fit the hypothesis of an origin in theextreme south-east midlands or East Anglia. Scragg (1973:195-202) considers the distribu-tion of various fonns in the Vercelli Book, including in most detail -20-, showing that muchof it (though he perhaps overstates how much) reflects the practice of exemplars The"conclusion that the VB is a Kentish compilation" (p. 207) is however false äs it Stands:his evidence and argument point to the south-eastern dialect region but away from Kenispecifically. (The preposition in in a sentence Scragg thinks (ibicL) was composed by theVercelli Book scribe is non-Kentish äs well äs non-West Saxon; granted the south-easterncontext, according to the evidence of Charter boundaries the Chiltern area would be themost likely. The initial sei- inscleon, which Scragg calls Kentish, is not specifically so (Camp-bell §479), and later in Middle English (Mclntosh et 1976 I map 1072) would fit theChilterns or south Essex better than Kent. If we are to pluck particular places out of theair, somewhere in south Bedfordshire such äs Dunstable would seem äs good a guess äsany.


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tival -an is more than twice äs common in datives äs in accusatives (ac-cusative -an 52, -e 5 (9%), dative -an 28, -e 8 (22%)) and ten times äscommon qualifying feminine nouns äs qualifying masculine (masculines-an 58, -e 2 (3%), feminines -an 24, -e 11 (31%)). The 2 lest with Yates'scorrection for small samples yields a probability of the order of 86%that the former contrast is not random and well over 99% that the latteris not. In combination they leave little doubt that what is going on isanalogical spread of strong feminine endings to the weak declension,led by the dative (mutatis mutandis äs suggested in the penultimate para-graph of section V above for Belfour IX). The logical end-product ofthis rapprochement would be the Standard adjectival declension of the"AB language", and I suggest that this is probably how that originated,just äs amalgamation of the same two declensions led to "AB's" secondnoun declension (and with further simplification to that of Middle Eng-lish generally).

Just how conservative unaccented vowels in the south-west could beis shown by the rare survival of a late twelfth-centuiy boundary fromDevon, c.H74 FTC 29,98 in which -n has been lost from weak wordswithout exception," but the distinction between -a of genitive pluralsand weak inflections100 and -e of strong datives and feminine genitivesis preserved with only one exception.101 Belfour IX's dialect obviouslywas not quite äs conservative quite äs late äs that. Its closest Charterparallel is a north-west Worcestershire survey S1195 composed probablyin the early twelfth centuiy.102 There OE -an in weak adjectives preceded

98 Ed. Finberg 1947b:363; newly composed to delimit a particular Stretch of boundarythat was disputed (Finberg 1947a).

99 Twlfealda, hola x 2, dima x 2; also the directional adverb westa x 2 and the pers.n.gen. Egga.

100 GP wulla (for wulfä) x 2 plus the forms in the previous note.101 Tbtalling -e 13, -ö 1.102 S1595 is inserted in a twelfth-century band in a space left blank in the eleventh-

century Worcester cartulary (Sawyer 1968:53). Its Old English is significantly more decayedthan that of SSO and S142(i) which themselves must be dated post-Conquest. An absoluteterminus post quem of 1086 appears to be provided by the content. S1595 describes underthe name Pensax (not otherwise attested until 1231 according to PNWorcs 67) modernKnighton, Lindridge and Pensax in Worcestershire (=DB's Knighton and Eardiston) andMilson in Shropshire (including apparently the portion of Neen Sollars west of Mill Brook).Most of the estate was included in the mid-eleventh-century survey S1185 in the samecartulary; the bounds of Milson, which was not, are described in much greater detail thanthe rest. All this presumably reflects a claim by the church of Worcester, which alreadyowned Knighton and Eardiston, to Milson, which it did not have in DB. Eyton IV 291conjectures that Domesday tax Privileges of Neen Sollars were due to ancient ownershipby the church of Worcester, and in DB Milson was an outlier of Neen Sollars, so thismight mean resurrection of an unrecorded ancient claim; but S1595 presupposes Separation


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by articles appears äs -an x 4, -a x 2, -ce l, -e 5, -ey 1; withoutarticles, -e l, -/ 7, -ey 4.103 The presence of the vowel a proper toweak endings in half those preceded by articles but consistent front vo-wels in the larger sample not so preceded indicates that in the dialectof Knighton at least weak adjectives had their weak endings replaced bystrong ones sooner in the latter sub-category than in the former. Stronggenitive endings, not only in (into/of) ealdes wcelle sice where a weakgenitive would be expected but also in (into/of) holdes broc where a weakdative would be, indicate that in the Knighton area c.1100 random in-terchange of all possible adjectival endings, intrinsically likely äs a laststage before the uniform -e of Middle English, had been reached inname-compounds though not in ordinary sentence-contexts. Overall, themix of phonetically descended -a(n) with analogical -e is exactly the kindof thing found in Belfour IX; the frequent -i, which has no precedentin regulär Old English spelling, and can only be a local phonetic variantof -e,104 shows even more emphatically than the distribution of -ce and-e in Belfour IX that -e was still pronounced distinctly äs a front vowel.

of Milson from most of Neen Sollars so must postdate their loss by the Domesday ownerOsbern Fitz Richard or bis heirs.

One detail suggests it also postdates the acquisition of the main pari of Neen Soilarsby the Norman family de Solanis whence comes the manorial affix in the current name(Ekwall 1960: 337). For a solnhcema broc "So/h-inhabitants' brook", where the compositionwith -hffine requires that Soln be either a place-name or the first element of a place-name,probably is actually on the boundary of Neen Sollars, modern Marlbrook debouching SO651702 (not at all äs mapped Hooke 1985:70); there is no other visible candidate for theplace denoted, nor does soln have a visible Old English or Welsh etymology. This is achronological cmx, in that according to Eyton IV 291 the de Solanis owner recorded in1195 did not acquire it until after 1185, probably after 1190. That is much too late forS1195, whose English looks a good generation earlier than that of Plan B 15.8.649 (seenote 105 below). But perhaps the genealogical complications of parallel De Solanis familiesoutlined by Eyton on the next page had begun to operate early enough for some connectionto have been established earlier.

103 With art. woche (x 2), ealda (x 2), blacan (x 2), lange (x 2), fulan (x 2), woge,wogce, fytles; without art. dunni (x 4, one printed -e by Birch), deope, deopi, hludi (x 2),ealdes (x 2), holdes (x 2), = strenges (x 2); also one regulär n. N fytle. The fytles and bothealdes forms are genitives; the remaining adjectives are datives, except that the case of oneealda is unclear. Whether strenges is an adjective is debatable, but koldes surely is: "coldstream" is so common a name-type it would be perverse to posit a "stream of cold" justto diminish the grammatical irregularity of this instance.

104 As such it is paralleled in Warks 1089 Plan B 15.8.64« bogi lawe x 2 (beside doddaford(-) x 3 and hrucge slo) and Worcs S179(iii) (clearly post-Conquest but in an eleventh-century manuscript) gearri ford(-) x 2 and bradi bunte (beside brade and a wide mix forother elements). Of these qualifiers only bradi is certainly an adjective; those in Plan B15.&648 certainly are not. Perhaps to be compared is the modern vernacular N. Worcs pro·nunciation "Kiddy(minster)" for Kidderminster.


63

Another relevant NW Worcs Charter is Plan B 15.8.649, datable his-torically within rather broad limits 1130x89105 that allow it to be eitherslightly earlier or slightly later than Bodley 343. Its language could alsobe argued either way. Weak endings are all -e\ however, the sample ofthem is small. 106 In noun endings -a (x 2) is unlike Bodley 343's cemerely a non-functional variant of regulär -e (x 22). On the other handdatives tro, treo, and stig with Old English vowel-contraction show thatlevelling analogous to that of sowie in section V above has not yet oc-curred. In definite articles Plan B 15.8.648 has gone morphologically near-ly äs far äs "AB" in that uninflected reduced de is the normal form (x9, beside 5 regulär dam, for masculine/neuter datives, x 3 for femininedatives beside one da properly fern. acc. but no regulär dcere, x l formasculine genitive with no regulär dces)\ phonetically, however, in itsunlevelled forms it is more conservative than S1595, where m./n. dativesare always dan, but where the only disruption to the Old English case-system is analogical spread of da from feminine accusative to be in themajority (beside regulär dcere) for feminine dative, and aprjarently tofeminine nominative,107 and from NA plurals (none of which occurs)to be the only form for dative plurals (x 2). (FTC29 preserves feminineäs well äs masculine case-distinctions perfectly, but has thrice/ân besideonce p am, and the one fern. acc. is pe.) In Plan B 15.8.648 onlong andvariants "along" governs masculine genitive -es regularly thirteen times,-e once. We may reasonably regard the latter äs scribal error, and inferOld English case-syntax is preserved almost intact; however, the onlyclear accusatives are of words whose accusatives and datives are regularlyidentical, and there are of course no nominatives, so this could be an"AB"-type case-syntax just preserving Old English genitives for specialpurposes.

A complication attending comparison between Charters and Bodley343 is the strong presumption that their authorial English was not de-

105 Plan B 15.&649 describes an assart near or in Horseley Hills in Wolverley, (a fewmiles NE of S1195, close to the borders of Shrops and Staffs) granted by a prior Radulfusof Worcester. Unfortunately there were two, whose periods of office according to Knowleset al. (1972:83-84) were 1142-43 and 1146-89 (not to mention the possibüity of scribalerror for Randulfus 1203-14, mied out probably by manuscript date, surely by comparisonof the language with "AB" and La^mon). The grantee Fulk (Latin dative Fulcquio x 2)does not seem identifiable äs an individual.

106 Three clear adjectives (hole x 2, olde)\ one probable genitive of a weak propername (wibbe)\ possibly also one debatable element (caue).

107 The natural explanation for the sequence into doere ealda strceL Da ealda strcet,to dan blacan mere would be that a preposition of has dropped out before Da, making itreally accusative after all. But the genuineness of the construction äs written seems vindi-cated by to dces fytles sices hcefde. Daet fytle sie. into temeda later in the survey. It may besignificant that both landscape-features involved are linear.


64

liberately modernized by copyists, against the certainty that Bodley 343'swas. This affects some aspects of language more than others. We canmeaningfully conclude for nominal inflections that Bodley 343's Systemis closest phonetically to S1595 and belongs chronologically betweenS1595 and Plan B 15.8.648 but closer to the latter. It would be morehazardous to conclude from appearances (text to n. 61 above) thatspoken usage for the definite article in Bodley 343's scribal milieu wasmost like FTC29's. Preservation of the older forms shows that they werestill current in Speech, but leaves open the possibility that de was alsocurrent in a proportion approaching Plan B 15.8.648 or "AB". As withother linguistic comparisons, common innovation is stronger evidencethan common retention. What is certain is that these three Charter boun-daries between them are the closest available approximation to directevidence for the kind of spoken dialect current among Bodley 343'sscribes.

VIII Belfour IX's verbal inflectionsTb return to Belfour IX, this time to verbs, where unstressed vowels

are not in absolute finality, except for Singular subjunctives whose com-plete regularity has already been mentioned.108 Vocalism is likewise per-fectly preserved (allowing for occasional Anglian peculiarities) in weakpast participles109 and weak preterite Suffixes, in both of which the fol-lowing consonant is -d.no The regulär OE spelling of the (unsyncopated)present indicative third person Singular of strong verbs and Class I weakverbs was -ep, plural -ap; Class II weak verbs Singular -ap, plural -iap.111

108 Text to n. 47 above. Belfour IX has no weak Singular imperatives to provide in-formation on the levelling of Old English Class I -e and Class II a to -e in Middle English.

109 Class I, 784, 7, 19, 32, 804, 6, 822, 3, 8420 acerrned (-£·), 78i? ifulled, 92s iwemmed;Class II, 84i? igearcodne, 8615 iwuraod, 94? iwlitegod. 90i ibysgad for Skeat 1135 gebysgodis an Anglianism (Campbell §757); 9420 iheowed for Skeat I 225 gehiwode is an exceptionon which not much weight should be placed, because dictionaries have parallel instancesfor the word (cf. Vleeskruyer 1953:150, Campbell §757, on further sporadic exceptionsespecially in Anglian texts).

110 Class I 8429 neahkecede, Class II 7822 axodon, 94? osrnode\ 7821 andswerede, 7824andswarede are well paralleled in Anglian texts (Vleeskruyer 1953:150). If äs is likely sec-ondary stress survived in these forms pari passu with infinitives it would have preservedthe vocalism anyway.

111 Class III weak plurals and the only Singular to occur in Belfour IX (that of habban,n. 23 above) belong with Class I, and I have so counted them. The graphsjb and dt in lateOE usage equivalent, I have subsumed in the totals according to modern phonetic con-vention in -p. The slightly higher proportion oipin nn. 113-4 than n. 112 may indicatesome drift from the late OE convention of -<f äs a passive norm toward the usual ME -pasan active one; the clear majority Status of -d throughout shows pretty cleariy that therewas no house rule on this point.


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In Belfour IX strong and Class I weak Singulars are speit -ep and -cep,with -ce- preponderant in a proportion of six to five.112 Strong and ClassI weak plurals exhibit twenty-one -cep spellings, with two -ep and one•φ.113 Class II weak Singulars have twenty-one -αφ, once each -ep, -icep,and -fl/>.114 Class II weak plurals have twice -icep, once -igcep.115 Thespelling ce for the reflex of OE unstressed a is s we have already en-countered for back vowels in noun inflections. That the majority spellingsof strong and Class I weak Singular and plural are identical shows thatthere is levelling of some sort. The lack of parallelism between devel-opments before dental consonants d and/? suggests, s does the disparityin proportion of -ep and -cep between Singular and plural, that it wasparadigmatic rather than due to phonetic confusion. Presumably p wasspreading from Class I weak Singular to be the ending for all Singulars.Partly comparable levelling is found in at least one Mercian dialect text,the Rushworth l gospel-gloss, already in the tenth Century (Campbell§757 p. 334). The particular context where Rushworth l applies it, be-tween weak Class II Singulars and plurals throughout the present tense,and involving the invention of new forms with and without -i-, is s dif-ferent s possible from Belfour IX's, where the forms being levelled arefairly close phonetically. Yet the paradigmatic levelling s such may per-haps legitimately be seen s a sort of Anglianism. The relatively earlyorigin that would suggest finds some confirmation in the fact that unlikemost of the inflectional novelties in Belfour IX this one is practicallyconstant throughout the manuscript: -(i)cep is normal for OE -(i)apthroughout the texts I have sampled, and OE -ep has fallen generallytogether with -cep, possibly significant exceptions occurring only in Bel-four I and II.116 The use of -αφ s norm is not found anywhere eise inOld English.117

112 78i3 birisaed, 80i6 Icered, 8025 wcened, 8030 arcered, 8032 faetteed, 82g hcefed, 8222nafed, nafced, 84i3 creopced, 864 berap, 8613, 8812 hafed, 8616 gesceped, 8625 iyf d, 8633hazfoed, 881 acenned, 886 cymed, 885 wurcced, 889 waxted, 8822 hafad, 8824 geondfarced, 882$iherasd, 8829 hered, 90i2 itymped, 92i4 bilimpced (x 2), 92i6fcelced, 94iefizled, 92ie imynced,9223 singaed, 94i3 gemed, 94n penchce p, 94y> wurced: -αφ χ 18, -ej> χ 15.

113 82ιο, 8632, 8819, 992 habbced, 82ii, 32, 8611 nabbad, 8228 wurceeed, 8229 specced,8234t 84is brucczd, 84i creopa p, 843 swimmced, 844 nabbas p, 84s lybbce p, 8231, 33, 8416libbced (-cep), 84i6 gemep, 8425 ceted, 8433 wurdoep, 8630 secgced, 94g scinoed, 94n blawczd.(Note also plural imperative 782 arcered.)

114 80i5, 8614 wunted, 8023 purhwunued, 80\\ goffced, 80n sottced, 8227 worued, 8226bihofced, 8228 hatced, 84g bitacnced, 8612 lufced, 8623 sceawcep, 8823 bisceawiced, 90iz, 18 endcep,929 hyrwmaed, 9223 cleopad, 9226,30 wisscep (-<zd), 9231 gedafenad, 94i6 bisoregced, 94i? glce-dep, 96i cerrued, 963 leofced, 96* rixaed.

115 8634 fremiaed, 9028 derigced, 9426 liciced. (Note also plural imperative 783 luficed.)116 Present 3sg. endings of strong and Class I weak verbs in Belfour I comprise -ep

6, -nep 2; in Belfour II -ep 2, -cep 1; in Belfour III -αφ 4; in Rood-tree -αφ 2, -ep 2 in


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In strong past participles, ending in -/i, there is considerable confu-sion: the traditional spelling in -en outnumbers its competitors by a bitless than two to one.118 The obvious inference is that vowel timbretended to be obscured by the following -w.119 In preterite plurals, alsoending in -Λ, there is one slightly dubious -en against ten traditional -onspellings; of four preterite-presents three are in -e«.120 This suggests that(at least among correct Speakers) confusion in strong preterites was onlybeginning but that the connection with them of preterite-presents wasno longer strongly feit. In subjunctive plurals, also in -n, the score isthree "(en against one each -on and traditional -en.121 This is likeliestto mean that the e of subjunctive plurals was more open than that ofSingulars (thus also etymologically more conservative: Campbell§§731(b), 355.2, 369) and that house rules on other unaccented vowelsmade scribes more sensitive to the difference between the two. The sam-ples of plural categories are too small for statistical certainty, but thecontrasts between them are strong enough very probably to call for ra-tional explanation.

Belfour V -αφ 5, -ep 3, -ap 1; in Belfour VI -σφ 4, -φ 1. These figures could be taken smeaning that in Belfour I and II, alone of the texts sampled, OE -ep had not fully fallentogether with -ap] in which case that falling together would not be the origin of the aehouse rules, but we should be no nearer knowing what the origin really was. But that isprobably not what the figures do mean, because fully half the -ep endings in Belfour I andII and the one in Rood-tree are in variants of the single verb cymed. Probably there wass mething peculiar about the pronunciation of that verb (there is even an imperative pluralRood-tree 4n cumed) and the remaining -ep spellings are due to scribal inertia.

117 The Microfiche Concordance reverse-spelling frequency-list puts beyond doubtthat outside Bodley 343 it occurs often enough to be worth mentioning only in one text,the mid-twelfth-century Canterbury Psalter, on whose linguistic "confusion" see the Sisams(1959:56-58). Confusion is the word for its mixture of -ep, -<ep, and -ap for both Singularand plural (including -ap for strong and Class I weak Singulars, e.g. CXLV 7 gehealdap, 8onliehtad). In some groups of psalms or canticles -cep is the commonest, in others it doesnot occur; in no real sense is any of the variants a norm. (Secaep pl. χ 16 (beside 3 secapbut no seceap) and blissicep χ 12 (9 or 10 pl., beside no blissiap) look s if they might bephonetically conditioned, but we may perhaps swallow even these s random: there are noother comparably striking frequencies.)

118 Singular 7828 unbigunnen, 80i, 84?, 867 isceapen, 80n awriton, 8023 unongunnen,&62&inum(en, 8634 igeften, 883 geigefan, 887 igefan, 90ii forloren, 9028 iwriten, 92io bifangen,9227 ihaten, 94s imeten, 9427 icwcedon: -en χ 10, -αεη χ 2, -on χ 2. Not surprisingly plurals,ending in -e, consistently keep the preceding -e-: 78io, 82io, 15 isc(e)apene, 8817 icwcedene.

119 Probably grossly over-ingenious is the alternative hypothesis of hyper-correctionof an earlier stage of transmission whose ending for weak nouns was -en.

120 Preterite plurals 78i7, 82i3, 906 weron(-tz-), 7820, 8626 scedon, 7822 acwaldon, 7822axodon, 7823 cwoeden ("the e altered from another letter" Belfour), 94s cwaedon, 8429 cydon,8626 lcerdon\ preterite-presents 8022 magen, 8432 sceolen, 8427 sceoldon, 8430 sceolden (thelast two should not by proper OE usage be present but in context plainly are).

121 80n, 862 ilefien, 862 icnawaen, 863 smeagen, cynnon.


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In infinitives some confusion before -n is again apparent; but it isoutweighed in importance by Belfour IX's making a distinction StandardOld English spelling did not make. In strong and non-/-stemmed weakverbs three-quarters of infinitives are speit -en, and all but one of therest are relict spellings in -an.122 This shows pretty conclusively thatvowel timbre had been lost and the pronunciation was a reduced close[-an], Of weak Class III infinitives 3 out of 5 are relict spellings.123 Thismay mean that these very common verbs resisted reduction in speech,or only in writing; the sample is small enough that it may also be ac-cidental. By contrast in /-stemmed verbs (weak Class II and short-root-syllabled Class I) two-thirds of non-relict infinitives are speit -icen.124

(The proportion of relict spellings is äs in the first group about 20%).Here äs in final position it is possible to Interpret äs either in terms ofvowel quality or of openness. If the former, the following vowel waspartly assimilated to the -i-, if the latter the -/- caused it to resist re-duction. Tb make phonetic sense of the former possibility at all, or ofthe latter after short root syllables, it is necessary to suppose that thesecondary stress on the i which metrical patterns show that there wasat least after long root syllables in early Old English, reflecting originin a long formative suffix (cf. Campbell §§89,756), survived in this dialectafter long and short root syllables both. It seems to have been tacitlyassumed by scholars that in late Old English this stress existed only äsa poetic convention;125 the implications of its possible survival in ordi-nary speech have been rather neglected. Yet if it did survive at a timewhen inflectional vowels were weakened it would be a powerful condi-tioning factor favouring coalescence after long root syllables to a long

122 8031 stigan, 867 arisan, 8820 pencean, 9023 tosceadan, 94ig witan; 78n ifyften; 78ziihyren, 80is ifyfen, 80n widerstanden, SOzz asmegen, 8028 wyrcen, 849, 90i smeagen, 8432 witen,8432, 9023 understonden, 8820 undergyten, 8820 munen (see n. 47 above), SSzibihealden, 90i8forleosen, 90si forbceren, 92i abugen, 92i2 faren, 9426 forlceten: -an 5, -am l, -en 18.

123 78ii habbcen, 80n habben, 92e habban, 9025, 96i libban.124 882? sceawian, 9023 lufian, 9025 wurdian\ 82i9 endiaen, 883 wradpiaen, 8828 scea-

wiam, 90i3 rbaam, 90i4 wissiaen, 9027 metegiam, 924 fremiam, 9420 hiwam (for Skeat I 225gehiwiari)\ 8610 lufien, 8629 summen, 883 ursien, 9424 körnigen: -ian 3, -(i)cen 8, -i(g)enx4.

125 Some would deny even that, equating rather too readily all the word-types coveredin Campbell §90 n. l and/or all types of late poetry. In poems of a formal register thestress was operative at least into the mid-eleventh Century: to citations by Bliss (1958:101,103) from Brunanburh (937 or later) and Maldon (991 or later) may be added half-lineslike pcet hi blission from the Chronicle poem on the death of prince Alfred (1036), whichin other metrical respects is very debased, and weolan britnode from the verse obituary ofEdward the Confessor (1065). But Eardioepost dem eadige, the only test-case in Durham(c.1109), a poem which in respect of alliteration is stricter than Maldon, does show reduc-tion.


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(leornm for OE leornian, etc.) emphasized by Tblkien (1929:118) äs adistinguishing mark of the "AB language". I think we have here a cardinalfeature common to "AB" and Belfour IX's dialect and to no other knowndialect of late Old or early Middle English. It was also a fast evolvingone. Tfexts written by the same scribe earlier in the manuscript revealseveral stages of the reduction of strong and non-i-stemmed weak in-finitives. Between -an and reduced -en there is an innovative stratum ofspellings -cen, implying perceptible change (of pronunciation or spell-ing-rules) short of total reduction. In Assmann X -cen outnumbers -enbut -an is much commoner than either; in Belfour V-VI -cen is slightlycommoner than -an while -en is practically confined to passages of recentrewriting; in Rood-tree -en is the commonest but -cen and -an comprisea quarter each and between them still match -en.l2e (These figures maywell imply incidentally that section 4 of the manuscript was written be-fore section 3; they very probably imply that its exemplars were the older,and that within section 3 Rood-tree's exemplar was older than those ofBelfour I-III.)

Elsewhere in late Old English, infinitives speit -igen are of moderatelywide sporadic occurrence; isolated -in spellings in other transitional textsare so rare äs to be probably scribal errors. The only even approximateparallel to the System that I have been able to find is in a single one ofthe Lambeth Homilies (one of the stratum with most west midland con-nections). There the distinction is between strong and Class I weak -en,Class II weak -ian.121 This might be from an earlier stage of Belfour

126 Strong and non-/-stemmed Class I weak infinitives comprise by my count in As-smann X -an 17, -cm 7, -en 5, -on 2, total 31; in Belfour V-VI -cen 9, -an 7, -en 8 (ofwhich 7 are in the rewritten passages 5223-5424 and 566-25), total 24; in Rood-tree -en 48(including one abbreviation expanded -an by Napier), -cen 25, -an 23, -on 8, total 104; inBelfour I-III -en 25, -cen 10, -an 9, -on 2, total 46. For comparison the figures for weakClass III are Assmann X-cenl; Bei. V-VI -an 1; Rood-tree -cen l, -an l, -en 1; Bei. I-III-an 4, -cen 3, -an 3. Class II and -stemmed Class I weak infinitives comprise in AssmannX -wen 2, -ian l, -igen 1; in Belfour V-VI -wen 12, -igcen 3, -ian 2, -igan 2, -igen 2 (bothin one of the rewritten passages), total 21; in Rood-tree -ian 22, -wen 16, -an l, -cen l,-igan l, -igen 4, -ien 4, total 49; in Belfour I-III -wen 17, -igen l, -ien 2. The rewrittenpassages in Belfour VI are identifiable äs such because Belfour V and VI are versions ofthe same homily, Belfour V being verbally close to Vercelli III and therefore the earlierof the two. (5223-5424 is an expansion of 444-6,566-25 a replacement of 44is-46i (by a hell-firecleric capable of confusing John the Baptist 42i9 with the Evangelist 52i).) The earlinessof these texts relative to Belfour IX is shown also by substantial numbers of -cen spellingsfor oblique cases of the weak declension, and in Belfour V-VI by survival of -u äs a currentending, in neuter plurals (4021 bedu, 463, 5628 mcegnu, 466 iscotu, 46i4 $erynu> 4632, 50i9gebedu, 56s bodu, 583 gemceru', cf. once fern. AP 4621 ru;no) but not in w-stem Singulars(40?, 1l, 17,4232 nom. lufe, 4822 acc. durce), exactly the distinction postulated in the discussionof -e for -u above.

127 In Lambeth Homily II the figures are: strong and non-/-stemmed Class I weak


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IX's dialect or it might betoken a related one where the -/- delayed thefollowing vowel's weakening but did not affect its quality when it didweaken. Belfour IX's -icen if we Interpret it phonetically would be anearly stage of the same development äs in the "AB language", if in termsof openness might be that or might be only a parallel change caused bythe same accentual System. Either way the fact that Belfour IX is closerto "AB" than, äs Tblkien (1929:119) noted, Lasamon is, is an extra reasonfor placing Bodley 343 in east Herefordshire and not further east.

IX Possible origins and phonetic value of Bodley 343's inflectional ceWe have now examined all the main contexts of Belfour IX's un-

stressed cey and are in a position to assess its likely phonetic value, orvalues. The evidence of System is so great that the presumption must Ithink be that the value was a single one in the terms of reference ofBodley 343's scribes (whether or not modern phoneticians would makedistinctions within it) and that the choice of symbol has a rational originabout which we can make rational conjectures. The relative frequenciesof different distributions128 show that it was applied first to third personverbal endings and only later to infinitives and nouns. There seem threemain possibilities.

One is that ce in unstressed position was an arbitrary symbol for thereduced vowel schwa. This choice will appeal to anyone wanting topreserve äs much äs possible of the traditional model of the transition,but from the point of view of Old English spelling it is most illogical.If a constant symbol was wanted for schwa the back vowels a, u and owould have been the obvious candidates, with a (at least in absolutefinality, and in the south and west) much the most likely. For a separatesymbol to have been feit necessary there would have to have been astage at which both some categories of final/unstressed vowels had beensystematically reduced to schwa and none of the three back vowels hadbeen systematically so reduced, a combination hard to envisage. Thevalue schwa could be made to work for nominal endings and for finiteverbal inflections (though I think it unlikely there), but not for infinitiveswhere the evidence is that -en is the spelling for [an], and -cen representssomething different. So this hypothesis must be roundly rejected.

The second possibility is that unstressed ce represents simply a vowelof the same timbre äs stressed ce. This may seem rather outlandish; it

-en 37, -an 4, -in 1; Class III weak -en 3; i-stemmed -ian 20, -ien 10, -an 2, -en 1. On thewest midland connections see Tblkien 1929:119, on the dialectal variability of the LambethHomilies Sisam 1951, esp. 108-9,112.

128 Contrast especially the text to note 116 with the back-vowel spellings in Table Iabove.


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would imply that Bodley 343's dialect Speakers had an Intonation similarto some varieties of modern upper-class English and/or of Welsh Engiish,not something we are accustomed to assuming. But Herefordshire is asuitable place for dialects sounding vaguely like Welsh, and those modernvariants by their existence show that the implied sound-change äs suchis a possible one. Chronologically to generate the observed distributionsthis hypothesis would require the sequence first -ap > cip in verbs thencompletion of back-vowel levelling -u > -a in nouns then either -a >-ce directly or -a > -3 > -ce, of which the last seems the best motivated,which is a weakness. Motivation also seems weak for fronting what re-mained phonemically a back opposed to a front unstressed vowel Onthe other hand the one position in which Welsh never has an obscurevowel is the final syllable of a phrase. All in all this hypothesis probablyworks if and only if arising either from serious Substrate influence orfrom some deviant version of second fronting such äs outlined very tend-entiously in the third sentence of section X below. I think we shouldreject it äs significantly less economical than the next

The third and most fruitful-seeming possibility is that the use of un-stressed ce is a development of specifically Mercian spelling-conventions.In Mercian spellings of stressed syllables the symbol ce denoted not onlyphonetic [ae] but in some circumstances open [e] (Ekwall 1917:64; Camp-bell §§327, 328 mid, 227 n. 2; Kristensson 1986:451-2). In some othercircumstances ce (symbol and sound) interchanged fairly randomly withe (Campbell §193(c)). Bodley 343's use of ce might be extension of thiskind of pattern to unstressed syllables, äs denoting an open vowel in aposition that made it only alternative to e. This hypothesis has the ad-vantage that the development would be most strongly motivated wherethe distributions show it first occurred, in third person verbal endings.It is possible, indeed quite likely, that when [- ] feil together with [-ap]the pronunciations most favoured were the intermediate [- |>] and [- ],and that scribes trained to the sensitivity to phonetic detail which BelfourIX's spellings everywhere evince deliberately selected from the ränge ofpossible pronunciation-spellings the one aesthetically most pleasing todenote an ending derived from traditional -ep and -ap conjointly. Thatthe preponderance of -cep over relict -ap spellings is so much greaterthan over relict -ep spellings may reflect not only a Situation of unifor-mity of traditional plural pronunciation in the plural but free Variationbetween traditional Singular and plural pronunciations in the Singular,but also drilled awareness in scribes (at that stage before unstressed cehad come to be used in nouns) that whereas a and ce were not equivalentgraphs and -ap must therefore be changed to avoid committing definiteerror, e and ce being to a certain extent equivalent, failure of vigilancewith -ep would leave blemishes and no more. Use of ce to represent an


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unstressed open vowel close to a, and/or reduced ß, would then havespread from third person plural verbs infinitives and thence to nouns(probably first to weak nouns): an order of events much äs in the pre-vious hypothesis but well motivated in this one. The value of ce in ab-solute finality, before -s and -n in noun endings and in -cen infinitives,is then probably a fairly open reduced , of the kind represented byitalic a in the phonetic transcriptions of the original Oxford English Dic-tionary, distinct from reduced o and u and from schwa.129 The correlationnoted in the text to n. 70 above tends to eorroborate that unstressed cein nouns was a reduced vowel of some sort, and choice of the samesymbol äs in verbal endings shows that it was not reduced äs far äs in-determinacy.

X Second fronting

An additional specifically Mercian factor which might have con-tributed toward the origin of Belfour IX's unstressed ce is second front-ing. Ttaffic in books across the border of the second-fronting area wouldmake scribes on both sides of it conscious of spelling-contrasts elce andcela between one part of Mercia and another. Extension of this patternfrom stressed to unstressed syllables would provide a direct precedentfor - äs reflex of Standard OE -ap etc. It is conceivable that in somepart of the second-fronting area the change a > ce spread to unstressedsyllables, at any rate in the favourable phonetic environment before den-tal consonants, which would provide a new twist, much improved in itschronological implications, to the second hypothesis in section IX above.This last may be thought intrinsically unlikely, in that sound-changes offronting are normally stress-dependent.130 I am inclined to play downsecond fronting even äs a possible intellectual Stimulus, both because äsargued in section XI below I think the scribal dialect did not have itand because if it were important we might expect ce for unstressed backvowel not to be unique to Bodley 343. Either way, in order to evaluatethese variables properly we need to know what geographical area wasaffected by second fronting, äs to which there has never been generalagreement among scholars.

The Old English literary evidence is too sparse to establish any closedelimitation. Reflexes of second fronting in Middle English texts havebeen interpreted by some äs products of a general West Mercian sound-

129 As still normally irr the pronunciation of educated English-speakers (consider suchpairs äs abet, obituary). The reduction of all three unaccented back vowels to an identicalschwa in the recent second edition of the OED is not a truthful description of the language.

130 For the physiology involved see Samuels 1972:21-25 and references.


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change recessive before Standard English forms,131 by some äs pertainingto most of the west midlands,132 by some äs indicating that second front-ing was limited all along "to a small part of the vast West Midlandarea".133 But two other types of evidence can be brought to bear on thequestion to produce answers a good deal more detailed and definite.Given that the domain of second fronting is at any rate not likely tohave increased since Old English times, the handlest rough yardstick ofits minimum extent then should be the maximum spread of its reflexesin modern dialect English. The items in ihe Atlas of English sounds withmost widespread evidence for ä > is are the peculiarly west midlandforms [es] for cesc and the front-vowel reflexes of ce in wceter and fieder(Kolb maps 191, 200, 205). The relevant data are summarized in Map3. Front-vowel reflexes of fieder may be derived from ON plural fedr,but that seems likely to be relevant only to the Danelaw area not sharedby the other words.134 The three west midland distributions however allseem certain to derive from second fronting.135 Their measure of corre-spondence with each other and with the generally accepted limits of thewest midland dialect area seem sufficient to establish that ce > was a

131 So effectively Jordan §32. On second fronting generally see Campbell §§164-8,259.

132 So Kristensson 1986:452-3,1987.41-42: "the dioceses of Lichfield and Hereford",i.e. excluding only the diocese of Worcester and Oxfordshire.

133 Campbell §168. Dietz (1989:307-8) would have it concentrated in S. Shrops —NW Worcs — (N)E Herfs — N. Gloucs. For other recent views see Insley, forthcoming.

134 The front reflexes of cesc other than [es] derive from a "Kentish" sound-change(Campbell §§288-291) and are likewise not relevant to the argument.

135 Kristensson (1987:40) denies the validity of reflexes of cesc in his late MiddleEnglish onomastic material äs evidence for second fronting, in the course of a discussionin which he denies the validity of all west midland e-spellings äs evidence for second front-ing, which is perverse (the more so since the isogloss for [es] in modern dialects almostexactly matches his (1986:449,1987:243) for the domain of second fronting). His preferredexplanation for -e- reflexes of cesc, a conditioned sound-change of raising before [j], isdubious because by his own account cescen and *plcesc (on tiny samples however) nevershare it, and fails for [es] chronologically, in that [-J] > [-s] in other words where it occursis a late OE - early ME sound-change (Jordan §183, Luick §692), whereas raising before[-J] where found äs a special change seems late Middle English (Jordan §102, Luick §404,cf. Smith 1956:4-5). The large number of different explanations Kristensson is forced toresort to for various e-spellings to avoid second fronting is anyway unconvincing. The ob-servation which is the starting-point of his argument, "It is conspicuous that <e> is lessfrequent in the present material than in that from northern England", is real, though. Itstrikingly contradicts the distribution of fronted variants in the modern dialects and is tobe explained rather by the degree of contrast with non-fronted variants, äs shown in Kolbet al collective map 182. The normal value of a in all the north is [a], which would notbe thought an acceptable spelling for [e]-pronunciations, but in a substantial part of the(soulh-)west midlands the normal value is [ce], which well might.


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general west Mercian change (at least in some phonetic contexts: it isnoteworthy that in all these words the front-votoel reflex of ce is followedby a dental consonant);136 also that the routes by which competing formspenetrated included most importantly Watling Street. If the occasional[i:] äs reflex of ce in fieder, wceter is an extreme local result of secondfronting (which seems prima fade more reasonable than that it shouldbe an extreme local result of the Great Vowel Shift), it strengthens theevidence for south Cheshire and north-west Herefordshire being withinthe heartland of the sound-change. The evidence of Old English Charterboundaries broadly agrees with these inferences. It is too complicatedlinguistically and textually for detailed presentation here (for that seeKitson forthcoming (c)). But it seems to show that second fronting ofce to e was common in south Staffordshire, the northern fringe of Wor-cestershire and the extreme north-west of \torwickshire, and that in thetenth and eleventh centuries it was not common any further south thanthere (though outlying patches in SE Warwickshire and probably alsoon the Gloucs-Worcs border support the Impression that it had beenmore widespread originally). If äs could reasonably be inferred from theagreement of St. Chad and the Royal 2. A. xx glosses Worcester was inthe area of general ce > originally,137 the evidence of the Charters isthat it had ceased to be so before the middle of the tenth Century. TheMiddle English distribution of -e- in "had", Mclntosh et al 1986 vol. Imap 1012, likewise shows most of Worcestershire, including Worcester,a blank area, but with some outliers further south.138 There is no Charterevidence for Cheshire (or Leicestershire), and very little for Shropshire

136 Kristensson (1967:46-48) ascribes the -e-forms in bis material corresponding tothe Northumberland isoglosses on Map 3 to a conditioned change whereby "ce was spo-radically raised to e before dentals in the northern counties". The correlation between-e-forms and following dentals is better in his northern than in bis west midland materialbut is far from complete, and again Kolb et ai's maps make clear that the phenomenonthough widest spread in dental environments is not confined to them. It seems better toregard dentals in north country äs well äs west midlands äs a factor conditioning survivalof an originally more widespread variant, not conditioning the origin of the variant. Weprobably should accept the implication that the Variation which became systematized inwest Mercian äs second fronting was present early äs a sporadic tendency in west andnorth Northumbrian äs well. Such a dialect distribution would be quite unexceptionablewhether for Old or modern English.

137 Cf. Jordan §32, Vleeskruyer 1953:82-86.138 The other items chosen for mapping include none with a certain bearing on second

fronting, but note map 139 west midland main concentration of wes for wces (Campbell§380 thinks due to accentual Variation, I think to second fronting), map 180 tertiary con-centration of efter for OE cefter (quite possibly Scandinavian-derived, äs the primary con-centration certainly is), maps 1092-3 Kent and (rare) west midland hwet for OE hwcet.Map 357 SWMidl. and NW Wessex es(c)h "asksw is not relevant (OE Hscian with late


74

Isogloss within which [es] is recorded in mod-ern English dialects s reflex of OE cesc

Isogloss within which it is the only reflex re-corded

Isoglosses within which front-vowel reflexes ofthe ce in wceter are recorded ([ε, e, ε:, e:,i:, ei, ει, εο, e:1, e:3, e:a, ε:3])

Isogloss within which [ε/, ε:/, e:J] are recorded

·········· Isoglosses within which front-vowel reflexes ofthe ce in fceder other than []ε, ja, εο] are re-corded at at least three datum-points andare in the majority

Isoglosses enclosing additional areas withinwhich front-vowel reflexes other than [es]of the ce in fceder are recorded at at leasttwo datum-points

o o o o o o o o o Isogloss enclosing area(s) within which at atleast four datum-points only these reflexesare recorded ([ε, e, i:, e:, ε:, e:1, e:i, e:9, ε:θ,ε:3, ei, ει, es])

x x x x x x x x Isoglosses within which [εο] s reflex of the cein fceder is recorded at at least three datum-points

•fc Points at which [i:] is recorded among the re-flexes of the ce in either wceter or fceder

Point at which [h] is recorded among the re-flexes of the ce in both wceter and fceder

The shaded area is that which ties within allflve main west midland isoglosses.

Map 3: Tb illustrate reflexes of OE second fronting


x *.

sο «^ Χ Χ Χ

75

*ι


76

or Herefordshire. That little may point toward second fronting in Shrop-shire and north-west Herefordshire and away from it in Hereford and/orthe extreme east of the county.

The related change a > ce is not easy to trace in modern dialectssince except where & was fronted to S the two feil together early inMiddle English (Jordan §32). Literary texts suggest that its distributiononly partially overlapped that of&>e (cf. Campbell §259). The Charterevidence probably shows it in north-west Herefordshire, definitely showsit significantly in the north-west quarter of Worcestershire (includingthe immediate environs of Worcester), and could be interpreted äs im-plying that it spread further south than ce > £, perhaps with a Hwicceanrather than a Mercian centre of gravity. The large island of [ae] centredin Hereforshire surrounded by northern [a] in the collective map of re-flexes of , Kolb et al map 182, might be interpreted äs supporting thatview.

XI Bodley 343 and "AB language"These innovations with ce constitute creative use of an already exist-

ing Mercian spelling-habit. They also look first cousin to the use of thedigraph ea for o? in the "AB language".139 Or rather, to precise the ge-nealogical metaphor, uncle to it. For despite the links I have drawn be-tween "AB" and Bodley 343, and others which might be drawn, for in-stance in vocabulaiy — Belfour IX and X alone in Old English havethe Norse-English hybrid witerlice äs a sporadic substitute for Êlfric'switodttce "certainly"; Belfour I and Rood-tree alone in Old English havethe Norse loan-word the verb to "die"140 (beside more frequent OE swel-tari) — I repeat that Belfour IX's dialect cannot be direct ancestor tothe "AB language". The reasons are differences in the distribution ofvowel phonemes, for example "AB's" more consistent o for a before na-sals, and especially what was asserted above, that Belfour IX lacks theeffects of west Mercian second fronting.

Now, it may be objected, how does one prove that? Belfour IX'sspelling-system was not devised ex nihilo but by way of modifications of

shortening). Map 428 -e- in "gave", which Dietz (1989.307) would add, is more south-west-ern than west midland. Dietz however seems right to add the -e-preterites "spake, brake",which though in a minority in Herefs and Worcs look centred there (but since äs in maps1092-3 those are the northernmost west midland counties for which data are given thismay be an Illusion).

139 Discussed most incisively by Dobson (1976:123-6); cf. d'Ardenne (1961:181-6,191-2), Dobson (1972:boiii ff., cxxri ff.)

140 On both of these words see d'Ardenne's Etymological Appendix, on the latteralso de Caluw6-Dor 1979:685.


77

Standard late West Saxon. These things were not present in that Standard:how do we know that they were not in fact present in the scribe's spokenlanguage, that their absence in Belfour IX is not due to Orthographieinertia? It is not enough to show that the System does not recognizethem — that's easy enough141 — : we have to show that any putativetraces of them which may occur do so significantly less often than theywould if they were developments in speech of which those who set thehouse rules had not chosen to take cognizance. Fortunately it is possibleto test for this. An index of the frequency of such spellings to be expectedif second fronting had occurred in the scribe's dialect but was not ad-mitted in his written Standard and he was trying not to introduce it isgiven by forms betraying monophthongization of the diphthong eay whichtook place according to the books in the eleventh Century (Campbell§329.2), and of which there is trace in Herefordshire in the second decadeof that Century.142 Beside ninety-odd correct ea spellings, Belfour IXhas twelve plainly monophthongized and one reverse spelling, with apenumbra of phonetically special cases.143 This suggests a rate of abouttwelve per cent failure to comply with written norms contradictory tospoken ones, which tallies nicely on the one side with the about threeper cent failure for final -e and -ce to comply with norms broadly in

141 E.g. by the regularity of 783, 86g D dtege, 784, 84i9, 26 todceg, 78i9,3l, 80i, 2, 6, 7,82z, 4, 9410, 963 Feeder against Vespasian Psalter (to) dege, Feder (G Feaduf), and the para-digm of "may" sg. 8830, 92s, 11, 944, 20, 32 m<z& pl. 7821, 8022 mage(n), 844 magon againstVPs sg. meg, pl. ma(e)gon (~un). On second fronting äs antecedent to "AB" see Campbell(1967:89-90); cf. d'Ardenne (1961:181-2), Dobson (1976:125).

142 c.1016 S1561 in Mcertleages ecge (OE meard "märten").143 With long &a there are 63 correct spellings and the 7 exceptions 8020 üef, 8022

asmegen, 82i? düeh, 862 Heften, 90i2 döep, 90i? e~dignesse, 92wpteh, also the reverse spelling804 eafre. All the monophthongized elements occur oftener in the homily in normal diph-thongal guise except deap of which this is the sole occurrence. With short ea, excludingthose followed by liquid plus other consonant (and excluding SSzopencean where the seconde is diacritic) there are 27 correct spellings and the 5 exceptions 7830 iscefia, 8032 fcellced,82i3, is iscapene, 889 wcexced, also the reverse spelling 8423 dfa. The words gesceaft andisceapen provide the majority of the diphthongal spellings äs well. Errors comprise exactly10% for the long diphthong, about 16% for the smaller sample of the short diphthong,just under 12% overall. Exclusion of the type -(e)alC-, where ea is replaced overwhelminglywith normal Anglian a, is obviously correct. Exclusion of the type -eorC-, of which thereare 8 correct spellings and the 6 exceptions 8420 wterd, 90? towarde, 90n swartan, 9031arfodnesse, 94? cernode, 96i cemced, is more debatable; but the amount of monophthongi-zation is so much greater in this than any other phonetic context that it seems best regardedäs a special combinative change on the lines of Campbell §144 n. l (cf. Jordan §59). Ifincluded it would raise the proportion of error overall to 16% (of the same order of mag-nitude äs Variation in sowie) and that with short diphthongs to 24%, more than twice thatwith long diphthongs, which on a sample of this size without special explanation is improb-able (to a level of 93% by the 2 test).


78

accord with unstable spoken ones and on the other side with the twentyper cent failure of consistency in the entirely arbitraiy choice äs to thefinal vowel of sowie. If second fronting were present but hidden, then,we should expect in tonic syllables of the order of ten per cent of spell-ings of e and ce for ce and ä respectively, with a sprinkling of reversespellings, these perhaps for long vowels äs well äs short. That is notwhat we find. When allowance is made for words in which for variousreasons Anglian has e for West Saxon ce, for elce Variation of accentualorigin in normally unstressed words, and for a small number of phone-tically definable special cases,144 there is just one form which looks sec-ond-fronted,145 and no reverse spelling of a for ce or ce for e. There arein syllables which could bear stress over 200 ce spellings, over 500 aspellings, and e spellings too many to be rewarding to estimate. Onecould ignore half or even three-quarters out of excess of scruple aboutstress or length, and still second fronting candidates would be dozensfewer than ought to be expected. Crude äs these statistics are, the pro-portions are so overwhelming äs to preclude the possibility that secondfronting was prevalent even in speech in Belfour IX's scribal milieu.

The degree of similarity that emerges, embracing important morpho-logical features but falling short of identity, between Belfour IX's dialectand the "AB language" is roughly what we should expect if "AB" is rightlyplaced in Wigmore and I am right in assigning Bodley 343 to HerefordaReaders may perhaps agree with me that the acuity of awareness of cur-rent phonology which seems to emerge in Belfour IX and the similarityof intellectual style between its innovative use of ce and "AB's" innovativeuse of ea to replace ce are circumstantial evidence reinforcing that lo-cation. On the basis of what has ever been observed, at least, in othertransitional manuscripts, it is difficult to believe in two such good schoolsof philology a generation apart in the same part of the country withoutsome direct link between them; and what local cultural centre are canonsof Wigmore more likely to have looked to for influence than Hereford?That placing would solve incidentally one of the minor conundra of Bod-ley 343, why none of its Contents, even Rood-tree which has some stylisticaffmities with ninth-century Mercian translations,146 shows any sign of

144 Anglian of types 78? clene (Campbell §292), 8830 D slepe (Campbell §128), 94i3$&ned (Campbell §200.5) explains apparent irregularities in long vowels so completely ästo make them useless äs potential indicators of second fronting. Low stress accounts for8027 nes (Jordan §32 Anm. 3: cf. Campbell §380). Special phonetic types are we > Wie (n.26 above), 8410 gres (Sievers-Brunner §84 Anm. 3), and 86g cedlean, 8816 cedwist (beside86nedwist etc.), 8811 basiere (cf. Campbell §§327 etc. äs cit. in text above), and was > wain 82i8, 84s D watere beside 844 watere (Jordan §32; cf. Napier 1894:xlvii).

145 82io megenum (beside 9024, 25,29,30, 92i meegen(-)\


79

going back to an original in Old Mercian or any other cast of languagethan late West Saxon. Hereford cathedral library was destroyed byplunder and burning along with the rest of the minster by Gruffydd apLlywelyn in 1055. All Bodley 343's exemplars will have been acquiredfrom elsewhere, perhaps piecemeal and in a hurry, perhaps copied toorder, since that date.147

It is symbolically apt that a text which marks to a nicety the transitionfrom Old to Middle English should have its origin in the borderlandbetween the geographical realm of the late West Saxon literary Standardand that of the earliest significant Middle English one. Considerationof Bodley 343 strengthens Tblkien's (1929:105) "impression, if my argu-ment is sound, of the existence in the west of a centre where Englishwas at once more alive, and more traditional and organized äs a writtenform, than anywhere eise." By the time of Belfour IX monophthongiza-tion was the one big problem of organization the tradition had not yetgrappled with. The increase in dialectal intensity between the earlier sec-tions and the last section of Bodley 343 implies a time of pioneeringwork toward the establishing of a new Standard. It is not surprising thatsuch work should be less consistently carried through than the polishedfinished product of Ancrem Wisse. As Tblkien (1929:106) says of the"AB language", "It has traditions and some acquaintance with books andthe pen, but it is also in touch with a good living speech— a soil some-where in England". That is still truer of "AB's" close congener in BelfourIX, in close touch with a speech which at about 1150 still preserved OldEnglish phonology almost entire, and whose spellings followed the smallchanges in that speech with remarkable fidelity. It was moving towarduniformity of final inflectional vowels, yet not by loss of phonetic dis-tinction but through a series of analogical changes, and not by way ofreduction of vowel timbre but by the opposite, gradual replacement ofthe less common back vowels by the more common clearly pronouncedfront vowel close e. The only loss of variety in them was of u, even thatat first not phonetic but by paradigmatic levelling. Loss of distinction

146 E.g. Napier (1894:39) notes that the noun gfyto "greatness" is found only in Rood-tree (22iz gräte, 22? grcete) and the Letter of Alexander to Aristotle\ and perusal of the Micro-flehe Concordance's too many columns of naman and noman seems to show that "to callsomeone by name" is usually expressed with the verfo hätan or clegan and that the onlytexts which repeatedly use for it the formula hine/hire bi his/hire noman nemde are the OEBede, Gregory's Dialoges, and Rood-tree (64,14z, 2624, 34io; also 34i hine bi nome ciriacumnemde meaning approximately "assigned äs bis proper name", more in accord with usageelsewhere).

147 The extreme complexity of the textual relationships of its different parts, on whichGodden (1979:xxxvii-xl) has commented, will then reflect a not altogether deliberate varietyin their acquisition.


80

between verbal endings in -/? was accomplished, but here again indica-tions are that grammatical levelling led phonology. There was some con-fusion of vowels in the special case before -n, but only in non-/-stemmedinfinitives was it thoroughgoing. The three categories in - , infmitive,subjunctive plural, and preterite plural, were still largely distinguished,though the phonetic distances between them were smaller than in classi-cal Old English, counterweighed in turn by the fact that /-stemmed in-finitives had evolved into a distinctive class. There was no loss of -nwhatever in these categories, and there was no sound-change of loss of-n. In nouns and adjectives -n was lost from weak Singulars and the nasalconsonant from datives, but the losses were analogically conditioned äsparts of wholesale reshaping of nominal declensions.

XII Stages of the transition

Belfour IX's dialect is characterized, äs by d'Ardenne (1961:204) "AB"is, "by conservatism in the verbal System contrasted with advanced sim-plification in the declension of nouns, and still more of adjectives/' Butunlike "AB's" highly uniform grammar and orthography the incomplete-ness of Belfour IX's modernizing of spellings, and more importantly ofits declensional simplifications themselves, enables us to reconstruct thestages by which a transition to something very like "AB's" variety of earlyMiddle English was accomplished. Extracting the chronological indica-tions from the evidence for individual sounds and grammatical categoriesdiscussed above yields the order of events of Täble VII. It agrees withMoore in the relative order of stages (vi) and (vii), with Baugh's modi-fication of Moore in that of (i) and (vi). The overlapping of successivestages is in accord with Moore's fmdings and with intrinsic probability*The more detailed nature of the present study lets us see more clearlythan Moore's the extent to which particular changes conditioned andinteracted with one another. One thing that unfortunately cannot beclosely placed in the sequence is the application to nouns of BelfourIX's house rule of spelling ce for OE unaccented a. The much greaterfrequency of -um than -an relict spellings shows that it was in the copyingof this text largely implemented before stage (v); but granted its originin third person verbal endings (n. 128 above), and granted the likelihoodthat the third of the hypotheses offered in section IX above to explainit is the right one, it may have been devised at any time since the latetenth Century. We can but hazard a guess that it belongs to the twelfthCentury, fairly close in time äs well äs space and style to the use of eain the "AB language".


81

Table VII.Identifiable stages of levelling in nominal declensions.

(0) General in OE: fern. NApl. (to etym. N -a WSax. in nouns, to etym. A -e Angl. innouns, all OE in adjs.).

Sporadic in OE: strong Gpl. in wk. adjs.; interchange between st. and wk. adj. Dsg.;nouns, within w-stems and from a- and S-stems to u-stems.

Widespread in the OE of Charter boundaries: levelling of wk. adj. sg. (early -an, latesouthern -0, midland sometimes -e).

Diagnostic evidenceNearly universal in Moore's (1928.241) sampleof eleventh-century MSS: -Vn ·* -Vm is exem-plified (ibid. 243 n. 11) in 10% of them.Bei. IX endings -e for -um mostly adj., majoritysg.; OS for -um all noun Dpls.Bei. IX relict nasal spellings for datives (nounpl. 50%, adj. pl. 20%, adj. sg. 0)«how (vi)begun later than (ii) and (iii) but betöre com-pletion of (iii).Accomplished in Bei. IX, with loss of OE dis-tinctions in st. fern. decl.An immediate consequence of (iv), since nowthe u only distinctively survived before nasals

(0

(ö)

(iii)

(iv)

W

(vi)(vii)

(viii)

levelling of unstressed -Vm and-Vw, generally to - Vn.

st. adj. Dsg. (-um) -» st. nounDsg. (t).(st.) adj. Dpi. -» adj. NApl.

least common -V (-M) -* mostcommon (-e).u in final syllables falls togetherphonetically with OE a (speit aein Bei. IX).wk. norm -VN -» st. norm -V-0 -» -e in ö-stems to completevocalic pattern.

Nearly accomplished in Bei. IX; agrees withMoore's finding (vii) begun after (vi) but while(vi) was still in progress.Traces of ·< for ttchama in Rood-tree but only-e in Bei. IX.

Transfer to st. decl. of some wk.nouns should postdate (vi) andprobably beginning of (ix),

(ix) Levelling of -a reflex to com-moner -e.

(x) Final disappearance of «-decl.should postdate (v) and be con-sequent on completion in it of(ix),

(xi) Reduction of strong adjectivalgenitive -es to -e.

(xii) Reintroduction to fern. decl. ofplural distinction, in "AB" andpresumabty Bei. IX's dialect byuse of the obsolescent wk. pl., inother (especially northern) dia-lects by the spread of the masc.pl.

In this table -» means "becomes (by analogy not regulär phonetic change) identical witb".

Bei. IX phonetic conditioning of - -e for -anshows still in progress.TVaces of -OK and relict -u äs well äs -e for sunustill in Bei. IX.

Only in a minority of instances in Bei. IX.

Not yet begun in Bei. I


82

XIII The transition to Middle English generallyTb conclude by returning to the questions raised at the beginning,

how far are the processes evidenced and the stages of their accomplish-ment in Belfour IX likely to typify the transition to Middle English inthe country generally? Tb extrapolate blindly to Northumbria, wherephonetic attrition was much wider much earlier, or to eastern Danelawcounties where the Peterborough Chronicle suggests rather different pro-cesses (Clark 1958:xxx-lxvi etc.), would obviously be unwise; and it ispossible that there was more influence from Norman-French in someparts than in the west midlands there is likely to have been.148 Yet äsfar äs the south and the south-west midlands are concerned, Charterboundaries indicate that very similar levellings to those of Belfour IXhad been present for centuries äs sporadic tendencies in other dialectsäs well, liiere are good syntactic reasons why this should be so. Thelikelihood therefore is that in the transition to Middle English in thishalf of the country generally morphology led phonology throughout. Vo-wels of final syllables were speit e because, except when followed by n,in early Middle English they had come to be pronounced e\ reductionto the schwa of Chaucerian southern English was a later development.This last is probably true for east and north äs well: widespread occur-rence there of -i- äs unaccented vowel from äs early äs Middle Englishtexts survive (Jordan §135) is much more likely to be a raising of frontvowels already in the System (äs in participial -inde from -ende) than tobe a new development from unstressed vowels reduced uniformly toschwa. The north-west midland area whose frequent -u- is positive evi-dence for reduction (Jordan ibid.) was probably äs untypical in pronun-ciation äs in spelling. That minority of older scholars who held the engineof phonetic change to be the initial preponderance in random discourseof -e endings over other endings were in all probability always in theright of it. And the prime mover of the whole process was the saecularchange from a synthetic language to an analytic one.

NOTE: In words cited in the text (except in long quotations) vowel-length is marked according to the Old English quantity System. In thenotes this is only done where it seems material to the particular discus-sion in hand (in notes 19, 20, 48, 49, 61, 64, 67, 69, 137, 142). In quo-tations from twelfth-century manuscripts I have with some misgivingspreserved the distinction between front g (MS 3) and back g where edi-tors (Belfour, Napier) report it, evert though other editors are incon-

148 But Clark (1991) assembles a formidable case that such influence is another thingthat has been overstated in scholarship of the last seventy years generally»


83

sistent (Warner) or do not, and in pre-Conquest manuscripts the dis-tinction is of course not made.

PETERR.KITSONSchool ofEnglish

The University of BirminghamEdgbaston

BIRMINGHAM BIS 2TTUNITED KINGDOM

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OLD ENGLISH DIALECTS AND THE STAGES OF THE TRANSITION TO MIDDLE ENGLISH