A Book of Middle English. J. A. Burrow
relation to realities. To describe a regional dialect is to specify certain features which are held to be characteristic of its vocabulary, idiom, spelling, grammatical forms, sounds, etc. But if you take such features and map them individually according to their occurrence in localizable texts, as has been done for many in the Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (see Bibliography, 9.2, and map p. 16 here), two awkward facts emerge. First, an individual dialect feature – say, a locally characteristic word – will not normally be separated off from its neighbouring alternatives by a clear boundary. Second, such boundaries as can be drawn, albeit roughly, for individual features – the so‐called ‘isoglosses’ – will not commonly coincide or bundle together with one another in such a way as to define a single firm and satisfactory dialect boundary. Rather, what one finds is a ‘complex of overlapping distributions’ (Linguistic Atlas I 4).
Something of the range of dialect variation in Middle English may be gathered from text 18a, the Reeve’s Tale. Here Chaucer, himself a Londoner, imitates the speech of two students from ‘fer in the north’ – probably Northumberland, and therefore well north of the northernmost of our texts (no. 15). He notices three main types of feature:
Phonological: especially the Northern preservation of Old English (and Scandinavian) /a:/ in words where London English had an ‘open o’, /ɔ:/ (see 2.2.1 below). Thus: bathe, twa, wha, when Chaucer normally has bothe, two, who.
Inflexional: especially the ‐(e)s ending for the third person present indicative of verbs (see 4.5.2 below). Thus: he fyndes, he brynges. This Northern and North Midland form later spread south and superseded Southern ‐eth, which was Chaucer’s usual form. Hence it is the students’ form, not Chaucer’s, which will in this case appear ‘normal’ to the modern reader.
Lexical: words and meanings alien to London English. Thus: the words heythen, ‘hence’, and ille, ‘bad’; and hope in the sense ‘expect’. Many of these are of Scandinavian origin (see 3.2 below).The dialect areas of Middle English cannot be at all precisely mapped, as one can map a county. It remains possible, of course, to describe this or that feature as broadly characteristic of this or that area; and later sections of this introduction will touch on some regional variations in inflexions and vocabulary. But the introduction will mostly be concerned with outlining the general features of Middle English, leaving peculiarities of individual texts to be briefly treated in their respective headnotes.
The dialects of Middle English. The mappings of the texts are approximate. They represent the dialects of the texts as printed here from scribal copies, which may differ from the author’s own regional form of English. For further details see the individual headnotes, and for comments on ‘dialect boundaries’ see 1.2.1.
1 The Peterborough Chronicle
2 The Owl and the Nightingale
3 Laʒamon’s Brut
4 Ancrene Wisse
5 Sir Orfeo
6 The Cloud of Unknowing
7 Langland: Piers Plowman
8 Patience
9 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
10 Pearl
11 St Erkenwald
12 Trevisa: Dialogue between a Lord and a Clerk
13 Gower: Confessio Amantis
14 Lyrics
15 The York Play of the Crucifixion
16 Chaucer: The Parliament of Fowls
17 Chaucer: Troilus and Criseyde
18 Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
19 Julian of Norwich: Revelations of Divine Love
1.2.2 Early and Late Middle English
It would be wrong to leave the impression that the ‘gret diversité’ of written Middle English is solely a matter of regional variation. There is variation over time as well as over space. The texts represented in this book span a period of about 250 years, and even in the Middle Ages 250 years was a long time. Our selection opens with a group of Early Middle English writings by twelfth‐ and early thirteenth‐century poets and prose writers whose language would have appeared distinctly archaic to their fourteenth‐century successors. Laʒamon and Langland both belonged to the same South‐West Midland dialect area; but Langland would have found much that was strange in the vocabulary and inflexions of Laʒamon’s Brut, had he known it.
1.2.3 Spelling
One further source of diversity remains to be mentioned. The absence of a national written standard means that, even where differences of spoken form are not in question, the same word may be spelled in a variety of different ways. The writing of Middle English was by no means an uncontrolled or anarchic activity; and in some cases the usage of a scribe can be shown to be quite strictly determined by a local school of practice, such as that in which the writer of Ancrene Wisse (text no. 4 here) was evidently trained. But the usage of such ‘schools’ prevailed only in specific areas and for limited periods of time; and in general one has to be prepared for a good deal of inconsistency in scribal spellings. The evidence for this may be found in our Glossary, where we have frequently had to cross‐refer from one form of a word to another.
2 Pronouncing Middle English
2.1 Introduction
Although the scribes who copied our texts wrote Middle English in a variety of differing forms, their spelling generally keeps closer to the sounds of words than does that of Modern English. Modern English spelling, largely fixed by the usage of early printers, has in many words preserved letters which no longer correspond to anything in the changed spoken language – as in ‘knight’, for instance. Middle English spelling, being more fluid, was better able to adapt to changes in pronunciation as they occurred. None of the spelling systems represented in this book can be called ‘phonetic’, in the sense of having one and only one written symbol for each sound; but there are relatively few words in which a letter (like k in modern ‘knight’) has no corresponding sound in the spoken form.
It is always desirable to have some idea of how poetry should sound; but in the case of Middle English writings – prose as well as verse – there are particular reasons for trying to hear as well as see them. In an age when written copies were still relatively scarce, texts were often transmitted by reading them aloud to a listener or group: in his Troilus, Chaucer describes Criseyde sitting with two other ladies in her parlour listening to a maiden reading aloud from a book (17/81–4). Even solitary readers commonly murmured as they read. The kind of speed‐reading which leaps straight from the printed form of a word to its meaning was rarely possible in an age of manuscript, where handwritings and spellings varied from copy to copy. Hence medieval texts make bold use of effects designed to strike the ear – rhymes, alliterations, rhythmical parallels, and the like.
What follows is no more than a rough guide, to enable readers to produce or imagine approximately the right sounds. These are indicated between slashes (/ /). Where modern equivalents are given, these are drawn from standard British English (RP, ‘Received Pronunciation’). For fuller accounts of Middle English phonology, see Blake (1992) and Jordan in Bibliography 9.2 below.
2.2 Vowels
2.2.1 The