Introduction

The aim of this Appendix is to set out, in accessible and convenient form, the available evidence for the date and provenance of each of the thirty-six known tail-rhyme romances. In most cases this is provided by a combination of the dates of the extant manuscripts and the linguistic features of the text, the latter mainly drawn from an analysis of the rhymes. Assessing the authorial dialect of a poem from its rhymes is not without its problems, although it is the most traditional method. Crook, in his preface to Jordan's Handbook, states categorically: ‘In determining the dialectal provenance of any given poem only the rhyming words should be studied in view of their Old English origins.’ This statement was published in 1974, before the publication of LALME with its vast amounts of data on scribal linguistic usage, including details such as local spelling variants which are not dealt with by studies of historical phonology. This tremendous resource allows for the much better detection of ‘relict’ forms and spellings in individual manuscript copies, but it does not in itself reveal whether these relicts are authorial or from some interim copying layer. To gauge whether or not a relict form may be authorial, one needs to have some sense of what that authorial dialect is likely to have been and this brings us back to rhyme-evidence. Although rhyme-evidence rarely allows for the precise localisation of a tail-rhyme romance (for reasons which will be outlined below), in cases where linguistic evidence for provenance is the only kind available, it remains the basis on which the significance of all other linguistic features must be judged.