Simon Horobin

J.R.R. Tolkien as a Philologist: A Reconsideration of the Northernisms in Chaucer’s Reeve’s Tale

In his analysis of the portrayal of Northern dialect in the Reeve’s Tale Tolkien assumed that Chaucer was aiming at complete consistency in his representation of Northern dialect features. Tolkien’s article presented Chaucer as a philologist and argued that his ‘linguistic joke’ could therefore only be truly appreciated by philologists. In the critical text appended to the article Tolkien attempted to reconstruct a Chaucerian original which was ‘very purely and correctly Northern’ (16); a text free from the ‘mongrel blends’ and ‘corruptions’ introduced by scribal copyists with no formal philological training. However since Tolkien’s article was published a great deal of work has been done on the text of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which serves to cast doubt on many of Tolkien’s assumptions and conclusions. The vast editorial enterprise carried out by J.M. Manly and E. Rickert based upon a complete collation of all the extant manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, concluded that the Hengwrt manuscript [Hg] preserved a very accurate text, close to the author’s original. Furthermore Manly and Rickert claimed that the Ellesmere manuscript [El], which formed the basis of F.N. Robinson’s edition of 1933 and Tolkien’s critical text of 1934, had been subjected to a degree of editorial sophistication. Following Manly and Rickert’s work a number of their assumptions and their methodology have been called into question, although their belief in the importance of the Hg manuscript has been accepted by many textual scholars. The strongest supporter of the Hg manuscript is N.F. Blake whose argument that Hg represents the text closest to that of Chaucer’s lost holograph led him to use Hg as the basis of his 1980 edition of the Canterbury Tales. Recent stemmatic analysis of the manuscripts of the Wife of Bath’s Prologue using sophisticated

A 'Piers Plowman' Manuscript by the Hengwrt/Ellesmere Scribe and its Implications for London Standard English

It has long been accepted that two of the earliest and most authoritative copies of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales were written by the same scribe.1 These are the Hengwrt manuscript, National Library of Wales, Peniarth 392D, and the Ellesmere manuscript, Henry E. Huntington Library, Ellesmere 26.C.9. Both have been dated to the first two decades of the fifteenth century, and recent scholarship has raised

Adam Pinkhurst and the Copying of British Library, MS Additional 35287 of the B Version of Piers Plowman

British Library, MS Additional 35287 [M] is an early fifteenth-century copy of the B text of Piers Plowman which has been heavily corrected by a contemporary scribe. In this essay I argue that the hand responsible for these corrections is that also responsible for copying the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales, recently identified by Linne Mooney as the professional London scrivener Adam Pinkhurst. The remainder of the essay then considers the implications of this identification for our understanding of Pinkhurst’s role in the London book trade and the production of early copies of the B version of Piers Plowman.

Chaucer's Norfolk Reeve

This article reconsiders Chaucers representation of the Norfolk dialect in his depiction of the Reeve in the Canterbury Tales. It argues that while Chaucers treatment of the Northern dialect in the Reeves Tale is more consistent, the Reeves speech is coloured with distinctive features characteristic of the Norfolk dialect of Middle English.

The Scribe of Bodleian Library, MS Digby 102 and the Circulation of the C Text of Piers Plowman

This essay identifies the scribe of an important manuscript of the C version of Piers Plowman as a clerk working for the London Brewers’ Guild during the early fifteenth century. Following a presentation of the palaeographical evidence upon which this identification rests, the essay considers its implications for our understanding of the production and reception of this copy of Piers Plowman, its relationship with other texts within the manuscript, and the light it sheds upon the transmission and circulation of this recension of Langland’s poem among London scribes and readers during the first quarter of the fifteenth century.

A New Fragment of the Romaunt of the Rose

Among the nineteenth-century papers of the Reverend Joass, part of the Sutherland collection housed in the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh, an envelope was recently discovered that contains a single vellum leaf folded in half.1 The leaf measures 185mm x 170mm and contains twenty-four lines of text in single columns on both recto and verso, written in a professional secretary hand of the midfifteenth century. The envelope reads ‘‘?Lydgate c.1460’’ in a nineteenth-century hand, though the text preserved in this fragment is in fact lines 2403–50 of the Middle English translation of the Roman de la Rose, known as the Romaunt of the Rose. This text survives in a single manuscript, now Glasgow University Library Hunter 409 (V.3.7), and the discovery of a single leaf testifying to the earlier existence of a further copy of this work is therefore of considerable interest. The text of the Romaunt is traditionally divided into three separate fragments, and the current scholarly consensus is that Chaucer was responsible for only fragment A.2 The section of text in the NLS fragment derives from fragment B. It is impossible to determine for certain whether this single folio was originally part of a complete copy of the Romaunt, though there seems no reason to doubt this. The Hunter manuscript now contains 151 folios, although a further eleven leaves are missing, and the text is left incomplete. The leaves of the Hunter

John Cok and his Copy of Piers Plowman

This essay examines the career of John Cok, a Piers scribe and the copyist of Cambridge, Gonville and Caius College, MS 669*/646. It argues that a C-text extract (16.182-201a), copied by Cok into this manuscript, was deliberately excerpted from a complete copy of the poem. The essay also examines a second extract (C.16.116), which was added by Cok into the same manuscript. The essay asks what these extracts can reveal about Cok’s access to and response to Langland’s poem.

Studying the history of early English

Studying the History of English Evidence Standardization Spellings and Sounds The Lexicon Morphology Corpus Studies Bibliography

Pennies, Pence and Pans: Some Chaucerian Misreadings

This occurrence is cited in the Middle English Dictionary under the headword ‘panne’ n.(1), meaning 1. (a) ‘A metal or earthenware vessel, usually used for heating; a caldron, pot, or pan’. A similar interpretation is offered by Davis et al. in A Chaucer Glossary which glosses this word as ‘dish’. The interpretation of these lines is therefore that as a dowry Symkyn received a number of brass pans from his father-in-law the parson. This may seem a rather unusual dowry even for a poor parson to give on behalf of an illegitimate daughter. The suggestion offered here is that this word is not ‘panne’, but rather a phonological variant of ‘peni’: a reading which would accord much better with the sense in the quotation given above. Certainly two Medieval scribes understood the word as such and replaced it with the more widely attested form ‘peny’, while one scribe was evidently confused by the reading and replaced it with ‘pownd’. The form ‘panne’ is a common variant form of the word ‘penny’ in Middle English, attested particularly in the Essex and London dialects as the result of a sound change peculiar to that area. This sound change concerns the imutated reflex of West Germanic [a] before nasals. In most ME dialects this vowel was raised and written <e> while in the Essex and London dialects it was retracted and written as <a>. Examples of this are: ‘sanden’ to send, ‘ande’ end, ‘strangth’ strength, ‘man’ men. Such forms are common in the

The Scribe of the Helmingham and Northumberland Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales

This article argues that two manuscripts of Chaucers Canterbury Tales were copied by a single scribe. Both manuscripts are subjected to palaeographical and linguistic analyses, and linguistic differences between the two manuscripts are explained according to the process of standardisation. The article concludes by drawing attention to the significance of the identification of scribes active in more than one Middle English manuscript for the study of linguistic standardisation and book production in fifteenth-century England.