Symposium 2007: workshop

The geography of eME scribes

Bella Millett, University of Southampton.

I’d like to raise a problem which I keep encountering in my research: the tension between the localization of what the dialectologists call ‘scribal dialects’ and the localization of the manuscripts in which they appear. In theory, this shouldn’t be a problem; the Linguistic Atlas of Late Middle English makes a very clear methodological distinction between the two, and, as M. L. Samuels says, ‘It is a commonplace of Middle English dialectology that scribes brought up in local country parishes that were not cultural centres would tend to migrate to the nearest source of work or patronage’.[1] But in practice there’s a tendency for scholars, even occasionally the dialectologists themselves, to conflate the localization of the ‘scribal dialect’ with the localization of the MS; and this tendency can prevent us from thinking about other possibilities. I’ll take three case-studies from the area I’m currently working in to illustrate the point.

1. the late C12/early C13 sermon collection, Lambeth 487

PPT SLIDE HEREFS/WORC. MAP

Samuels placed the scribal dialect of the main hand of this MS on the borders of Hereford and Shropshire, but Meg Laing has recently relocated it to NW Worcs. I contacted her about this, and she emphasised that because of the shortage of ‘anchor-texts’ in eME, the precise localization was notional: essentially, she said, the main hand of Lambeth 487 was occupying ‘a kind of abstract linguistic space’ intermediate between the ‘tremulous hand’ of Worcester (which was localizable) and the ‘AB language’, which wasn’t (though she links it tentatively with Ludlow). And she added, click ‘In terms of “real geography” Lambeth might be placed anywhere in the north Herefordshire, north Worcestershire, south Shropshire intersection’.

click

But if we were to place not just the scribal dialect but the production of Lambeth 487 in this wider area, we’d still have problems of localization. Let’s look at the ‘real geography’ of the area.

i) physical geography: hilly country, broken up by the valleys of rivers coming down from the Welsh mountains: Severn, Teme, Wye.

ii) superimposed on this, a social geography, mostly mapped on to the physical features: county boundaries tending to follow natural barriers, hills to the west, rivers further east; major towns in the valleys, most often at river crossings (Shrewsbury, Worcester on Severn; Ludlow on Teme; Hereford on Wye).

You’ll notice (if you look inside the circle) that not a lot is going on socially in the Teme valley (Stourport is much later, it’s a creation of the Industrial Revolution); all we have is a scatter of small settlements. And since we’re concerned with religious works, let’s look also at a third type of geography,

PPT SLIDE: ‘Monastic Britain’

iii) ecclesiastical geography: sometimes defined in opposition to social geography (as in the case of Cistercian houses, which were deliberately sited out in the wilds); more often mapped on to the social geography, but not necessarily evenly. Again, nothing much going on in Teme Valley; at one end you have Ludlow (which in this period is simply a market town with one parish church), at the other Worcester, a cathedral town with a long tradition of vernacular preaching. Strong indications (which I’ll talk about later in the conference) that the sermons in Lambeth 487 were designed for diocesan rather than parish preaching; whatever the origin of the main scribe, by far the most likely place of production of the text itself is Worcester (and indeed Meg did raise the possibility that we’re just dealing here with ‘varieties of Worcester language’).

2. The ‘AB language’

PPT SLIDE: ‘golden triangle’

Second case-study: a scribal dialect, the ‘AB language’. This is found in 2 important early MSS of AW Group, Bodley 34 and Corpus 402; and something like it seems to underlie the other early MSS of Group. Has been consistently localized by the dialectologists to borderland of N. Herefs. / S Shropshire. Localized more closely on non-linguistic grounds to Wigmore Abbey by Eric Dobson and (tentatively) to Ludlow by Laing. But again, the localization of the production of this group of texts to the Ludlow area causes problems. By this time, in the second quarter of the C13, Ludlow’s a market town with a parish church and a hospital. Wigmore’s an abbey of Victorine canons with no record of pastoral activity; and neither of them seems to me the most likely place of origin culturally or institutionally for the works of the Ancrene Wisse Group. However, this area isn’t far from 2 cathedral towns, Hereford and Worcester. We need to bear in mind that we’re actually looking at v. small distances here:

click click click

Ludlow, Hereford and Worcester (if you look at the indication of scale) only about 25 miles from each other as crow flies: one day’s journey on horseback, two on foot or by cart. Again, I don’t think we can use scribal dialect to localize this group of works too narrowly (frankly, the more I work on them, the less certain I am about where they were produced).

3. BL Cotton Titus D. xviii

PPT SLIDE: Titus D. xviii

The subject of my third case-study BL Cotton Titus D. xviii: stands out among the early MSS of the AW Group, markedly more N. in dial. than any of the others.Written by single hand, but in varying types of lang.; Meg Laing and Angus McIntosh, in a 1995 article, did a really impressive piece of linguistic archaeology on underlying dialect strata.

click

Titus scribe’s exemplar of AW copied by 2 scribes in turn (T1, T2, prob. from an area around the S. Cheshire border). Lang. of Wohunge similar to T1. Other works (SK, HM, SW) click in a dialect closer to AB language (T3). Laing and McI think it likely that T scribe himself from same area as T1, T2.

click

further linguistic strata below this:

Original stratum of AB-type language in all texts but Wohunge. They also find some traces of AB in Wohunge, click but set apart from others by a much more noticeable substratum of features from NE Cheshire area.

So far, I’ve simply been talking about scribal dialects. But Laing and McIntosh then go on to use these findings to localize the more northerly texts underlying Titus, as well as Titus itself:

PPT SLIDE: Laing/McIntosh map

T and the more northerly of its exemplars, T1 and T2, are localized to S. Cheshire border area click (‘T has its place firmly on the map’), and the Urtext of Wohunge is localized to NE Cheshire— see caption; not just abbrev., because Laing and McIntosh argue that Wohunge must have been composed further north and east than the other works of the AW Group, and only joined them at a later stage. Now it’s possible that T and its exemplars could have been copied where this map places them; it’s not a heavily populated area, but x marks the spot not just of T1’s dialect but of the Cistercian abbey of Combermere, founded in 1133. But localizing the Urtext of Wohunge to NE Cheshire causes real problems.

—First, geographically: In terms of physical geography, it’s in the middle of nowhere, right up in the Peak District; in terms of social and ecclesiastical geography, there’s no significant centre in that area where it could have been produced.

—the localization’s also problematic textually: although Wohunge survives only in Titus, it’s very much of a piece stylistically and thematically with the rest of the AW Group.

—it’s even problematic linguistically: it’s not entirely clear on this interpretation of the evidence exactly how the traces of AB language got into the Titus text of Wohunge.

I’m inclined to suggest a totally unprovable but (I think) more plausible alternative scenario: what if these works travelled up to Chester together (quite possibly to the Dominican priory there), where they were copied repeatedly by a group of scribes from different parts of Cheshire? click click Chester’s to the north-west of Cheshire, so its natural catchment area is to the south and east; and again, it’s only about 25 miles from the S. Cheshire border to Chester.

Conclusion

What I’m arguing is that when we’re localizing texts in this period, late C12 to early C13, we need to bear in mind not just the localization of their ‘scribal dialects’, but the gravitational pull of major centres of population, particularly when these were also ecclesiastical centres. Wendy Childs, in a recent piece called ‘Moving Around’ (2006),[2] traces a scale of attraction, from small towns like Stratford-upon-Avon, which attracted immigrants within a radius of 20 miles, to London, which attracted immigrants from all over the country. In this period, the production of vernacular religious texts is beginning to move out of the monasteries and into the towns; and it’s being carried out by increasingly mobile clerici, whether these are commercial scribes, diocesan clergy, or, from the 1220s onwards, friars (for whom mobility, at national or even international level, was part of the job description). There’s no doubt that ‘scribal dialects’ are a very helpful starting-point for the localization of ME texts; but I think the ‘real geography’ of MS production in this period may be more dynamic than scholars tend to assume.

[1] M. L. Samuels, ‘The Dialect of the Scribe of the Harley Lyrics’ [1984] in Laing 1989, p. 262).

[2] Childs, Wendy R, ‘Moving Around’, in A Social History of England 1200–1500, ed. Rosemary Horrox and W. Mark Ormrod (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), pp. 260–75