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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
In a recent article Professor J. R. Hulbert has disputed the traditional assignment of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and of the alliterative romances generally, to the West Midland dialect of Middle English. He contends that the lack of sufficient criteria for distinguishing West Midland from East Midland, and the lack of documents from the Northwest Midland area, make it impossible to determine whether Gawain was composed in the East or in the West; we are justified, he says, only in saying that it is a North Midland text. It is the purpose of the present article to refute Professor Hulbert's argument in so far as it concerns Gawain, this and the other poems of the same manuscript being the only alliterative works he discusses in detail, and to show that there is quite sufficient evidence to permit us to assign it to the Northwest rather than to the Northeast Midland dialect.
1 “The ‘West Midland’ of the Romances,” Modern Philology, 19, 1-16.
2 I quote an important part of Morsbach's note which Hulbert omits (Mittelengl. Gram., p. 15, Anm.): ‘Das westl. mittelland zeigt gegenüber dem östl. zum teile häufiges o für a vor nasalen in mon, con etc., ferner vielfach -ande im partic. praes. gegenüber östlichem -ende (seltener -ande), die Schreibung u in unbetonten endsilben (-us, -ud, -ut) gegenüber östlichem -es, ed (selterer -is, -id, -it, das vorwiegend nördlich ist), auch u, ue für langes geschlossenes ē. Doch sind diese und andere unterschiede nicht für das ganze westliche mittelland und alle denkmäler desselben gleich bedeutsam und finden sich zum teil wenigstens auch im östlichen mittellande und sonst.‘
3 Historische Grammatik, 2d ed., 1. 27. It should be noted that Kaluza's statement is simply an exaggeration of Morsbach's quoted above.
4 P. 2.
5 Short History of English (1915), pp. 122-3.
6 Only Lieferungen 1-5, and 6 (first half), (1914-1921), have appeared, but this includes the development of vowels from the eleventh to the fifteenth century.
7 The following sections of Luick's grammar mention Gawain as having West Midland peculiarities, or in connection with Western documents: §33; §357, Anm. 1; §397, Anm. 1; §399, Anm. 1; §408, Anm. 3; §460, Anm. 1. Most of the peculiarities noted are discussed below.
8 EETS., Vol. 1. The preface contains ‘Remarks upon the Dialect and Grammar,‘ pp. xviii-xxxvi.
9 I shall generally treat the two together, as does Hulbert, who ‘finds no sure indication of difference in the dialect of the authors’ (p. 8, note 3). For the purpose of the present article, therefore, it makes no difference whether these poems were written by several men or by one, though no evidence has ever been presented to refute the many proofs of common authorship (see my edition of Purity, pp. xi-xix).
10 Englische Studien 47. 1-58; 145-66.
11 Zur Geographie der Altenglischen Dialekte, Abhandlungen der Königl. Preuss. Akad. der Wissenschaften, Jahrgang 1915, Phil.-Hist. Klasse, Nr. 4, pp. 42-75.
12 Hulbert, p. 8.
13 Hist. Gram., §287, Anm. 3, p. 262.
14 Wyld, table facing p. 32; Brandi, p. 71.
15 John Myrc, author of a Festial, and Instructions for Parish Priests, was a canon of Lulshull, Shropshire, who wrote about 1400 (Wells, Manual, p. 301). John Audelay, some of whose poems were edited by Halliwell (Percy Society, Vol. 14), and others more recently by Chambers and Sidgwick (Modern Language Review 5 (1910). 473-91; 6 (1911). 68-82), wrote about 1425, and was connected with Haghmond Abbey, Shropshire (Halliwell's Preface, p. vi; Wülfing, Anglia 18. 175 ff.; Modern Language Review 5.473-4).
16 §287, pp. 261-2.
17 Die Sprache Roberd Mannyngs of Brunne, pp. 70-1; 77-9; 147.
18 Schultz, Die Sprache der “English Gilds,” p. 11. Morsbach sees Southern influence in the language of the Norfolk Guilds (Mittelengl. Gram., p. 168); and this might easily explain furst, which is found in the London documents of the period (Morsbach, p. 174).
19 EETS., Extra Series, Vol. 71.
20 The rhymes, of course, show only i (F. Schmidt, Zur Heimalbestimmung des Havelok, pp. 27, 31, 51, 57). Of earlier texts of this region that are considered free from dialect mixture, Orm has no u-forms (Lambertz, Die Sprache des Orrmulums, pp. 38 ff.; 47 ff.; 79; 84 ff.), nor has the Bestiary (Hall, Selections from Early Middle English, 2.581-2).
21 Englische Studien 47. 39-41.
22 Ibid., 47.39; cf. Knigge, Die Sprache des Dichters von Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, etc., pp. 29, 47.
23 Of Wyld's list of 19, 8 occur in Gawain also, and at least 6 words with u-spellings occur in Gawain which do not occur in the Alliterative Poems: munt, v., 2262, and n., 2350 (OE. myntan); mulne, 2203 (OE. mylen); muryly, 2295, 2336, 2345 (cf. OE. myrige); gurd, 588, 597 (OE. gyrdan); sturez, 331 (OE. styrian); þurled, 1356 (OE. þyrlian). For u-spellings in The Pearl, see Osgood's edition, p. (xiii).
24 P. 8. I am not, of course, defending Wyld's assignment of the poems to Derby; I agree with Hulbert that such small differences in the proportions of u and i-spellings make it impossible to assign them to any particular county.
25 The fact that Myrc and Audelay, though later, have more u-spellings than Gawain is probably due to their closer proximity to the South, where the ü sound was more consistently retained. In Gawain it appears especially in conjunction with r, l, m, n.
26 Or with reference to the evidence of place-names, which is valuable only in connection with that of literary texts, the question might be phrased: if in the East, by the evidence of place-names, we have a predominantly i-district, and in the West a predominantly u-district, when a document the locality of which is unknown has a very large number of u-forms compared to any other North Midland document of known origin, is it more logical to assign it to the East or to the West?
27 Some of the authorities mentioned here, for example, Luick, include in this Western phonological change a before lengthening groups, as in lond, hond (
here developing, as Luick thinks, from earlier o); but as the same sound developed in the South generally from lengthened a, and appears frequently in the North Midland district, I have disregarded it in considering o before nasals as a test. For a similar reason I have not, of course, considered certain forms which had become general or fixed in OE., such as on, nor mony, which is regular in the North and in Scotland (Luick, §367, Anm. 2, p. 358).
28 See above, note 2, and cf. Mittelengl. Gram., p. 124.
29 Anglia 19.459: ‘Doch giebt es kaum ein anderes kriterium das dem westen so ausschliesslich angehört und zugleich so in die augen fällt, wie gerade dieser laut.‘ Heuser criticizes Morsbach for not mentioning this dialectal characteristic, but he apparently overlooked Morsbach's note just quoted.
30 Pp. 76-7. Boerner's note should be consulted for a justification of this criterion, and references to rare o-forms in Eastern texts.
31 Short History, p. 122.
32 Hist. Gram. §367, Anm. 1: ‘Auch später zeigen alle westmittell. Texte bis auf Aud. herab solche o, nur daneben auch a, die entweder durch Schreiber aus anderen Gebieten oder durch Einfluss der beginnenden Gemeinsprache hineingekommen sind. Somit ist dies ⊖ ein kennzeichnendes Merkmal für diese Landschaften.‘
33 Boerner, p. 77.
34 Schultz, p. 5: ‘Das in L 69/22 einmal vorkommende mon … wird Schreibfehler sein.‘
35 No instance in glossary.
36 Schmidt, p. 23. Even in the fifteenth century many documents of the Northeast Midland contain only a forms; for instance, only man and can (not mon, con) appear in the Lincoln Diocese Documents, EETS., Vol. 149 (my own examination); for rare o-forms in East Midland see Dibelius, Anglia 23.178. For late mon and nome in the meagre Northwest Midland documents, see below, p. 523.
37 As I have not had an opportunity to consult Rasmussen's Die Sprache John Audelay's (Bonn, 1914), I have had to depend on my own examination of the text.
38 Wright, English Dialect Grammar, p. 7.
39 Morsbach is thus wrong when he says ‘die vielfachen (aber nicht durch den reim gesicherten) o in der hs. der sog. Alliterative Poems‘ (Mittelengl. Gram. p. 124).
40 See above, note 2.
41 Germanisch-Romanisch Monatschrift 2. 130.
42 Short Hist., p. 109.
43 Hist. Gram., §357, p. 333.
44 Wyld, Englische Studien 47.49.
44a Wyld, ibid., and the glossary of Myrc's Festial (EETS., Extra Series, Vol. 96).
45 Wyld, History of Modern Colloquial English, p. 35, remarks that ‘the development of OE. ēo into ē on one hand, or into ū on the other, is one of the great dialectal tests between East and West (not between South and Midlands), and it would be rash to assign any text which has only e in words which had this diphthong in OE., to an area farther west than the borders of Hampshire.‘ In his South-eastern and South-east Midland Dialects in Middle English, Oxford Essays and Studies VI, p. 117, he finds no trace of the u-type in Southeastern dialects (except in the Owl and Nightingale, which he assigns to Surrey). There is an unpublished dissertation by Miss Serjeantson (ibid., p. 117) on the distribution of the u-type in ME.
46 P. 16, note 1.
47 Wyld, Englische Studien 47.49.
48 The form urpe occurs in the late St. Editha (Wiltshire).
49 Luick, §357, Anm. 1, p. 335.
50 Boerner, pp. 66 ff., 77 ff., 86 ff., 106 ff.; Schultz, pp. 18-20; Schmidt, pp. 26, 42.
51 Short Hist., p. 123; cf. p. 169: ‘The new form [she] was established, on the whole, pretty firmly in the East Midlands, at any rate from the middle of the thirteenth century.‘
52 Anglia 45.20, and esp. pp. 48-50.
53 Ho occurs in lines, 196, 1243, 1766, 1767. In Audelay the regular form is heo beside rare sche.
54 I have left heo forms out of consideration, because, though they probably equal ho in Myrc (Lindkvist, p. 49), in early documents they are ambiguous.
55 Boerner, pp. 216-7; Skeat's glossary of Havelok gives only scho and sche (once); no instance of the nom. fem. sg. appears in the Norfolk guilds, Schultz, p. 33.
56 Wright, Engl. Dial Gram., p. 74; Lindkvist, pp. 48-50.
57 Only ho occurs in Purity and Patience; scho occurs once in Pearl, and 5 times in Gawain, beside 39 instances of ho.
58 P. 9, and note 1.
59 Lindkvist, pp. 48-9.
60 Considered characteristic of West Midland by Morsbach (see above, note 2), by Wyld, Short Hist., p. 123, and Coll. Engl., p. 261, and particularly of the Northwest Midland by Luick, §460, p. 518.
61 Boerner, pp. 212 ff.; 221 ff.; Schultz, p. 31 (the -us of borus, beside borowes, is not, of course, a substitute for -es); pp. 38-9; Schmidt, 74 ff.
62 Schüddekopf, Sprache und Dialekt … William of Palerne, p. 109. They occur commonly also in the Ireland MS., in the Boke of Curtasye, and the Liber Cure Cocorum, which have, partly on this account, been assigned to the Northwest Midland, and in the Wiltshire St. Editha (Wyld, Coll. Engl., p. 261).
63 See below, p. 522.
64 Lease of Bradshaw Hall in Journal of the Derbyshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 24.42-3.
65 EETS. 149.303. Cf. Patch, The Ludus Coventriae and the Digby Massacre, Publ. Mod. Lang. Assoc. 35.338, note.
66 Lekebusch, Die Londoner Urkundensprache von 1430-1500, p. 120.
67 Hist. Gram. §366, p. 356.
68 Contributions to the History of OE. Dialects, pp. 62-3. If Ekwall is right, my emendation of walle-hede (Pur. 364) to welle-hede (accepted by Emerson, Journal of English and Germanic Philology 20.231) is unnecessary; compare further the Chester Antichrist, ca. 1475, (115, ed. Manly): ‘ffor I am wall of welle and wytt.‘
69 Cf. the form faurte, ‘forty,‘ in an early Lancashire will, below, p. 523.
70 Luick, §408.2, and Anm. 3. This is one of the peculiarities cited by Ekwall in justifying the assignment of Gawain and the Alliterative Poems to Lancashire because of the agreement of their phonology with that of the place-names in this region (Ortsnamenforschung ein Hilfsmittel für das Studium der englischen Sprachgeschichte, Germ.-Rom. Monatsschrift 5.563-4; 607).
71 Germ.-Rom. Monatsschrift 2.130.
72 P. 6.
73 See above, p. 511, for u from 
Wyld, Englische Studien 47.33-6, for u from 
, and Schüddekopf, p. 21, for o before nasals.
74 Early English Alliterative Poems, p. viii.
75 Fick, for instance, (Zum Mittelenglischen Gedicht von der Perle, p. 9) assumed that u for OE. 
, the retention of -i- in OE. weak verbs of the second class, and the few participles in -ing, were marks of a southern scribe, an assumption which is entirely unnecessary (see my criticism, Purity, p. lix, note 4). Similar arguments of Knigge and Morsbach are criticized by Hulbert, p. 12, note 4.
76 EDD. says ‘NCy., Lanc.,‘ but its only authority for North Country is John Ray's North Country Words (1674), which makes no attempt to distinguish the usage in particular counties.
77 This must be either Henry Ainsworth (1571-1622) or, less probably, Robert Ainsworth (1660-1743), both Lancashire men (see DNB.)
78 I have verified the statements of the NED. and EDD. by examining all the glossaries of the Northeast Midland counties (Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire) available in the Yale Library, including the publications of the English Dialect Society. Neither word occurs in any of them. Another word wysty (Gaw. 2189), which I have not found elsewhere in Middle English, occurs only in modern Lancashire and Cheshire according to EDD., s.v. wisty, adj.; cf. E. M. Wright, Engl. Stud. 36.226.
79 P. 12.
80 P. 3; cf. Schwahn, Die Conjugation in Sir Gawayn and the Green Knight, pp. 6-7.
81 Wyld, Short Hist., p. 181.
Wyld is probably correct, moreover, in considering the participial ending -ande West Midland as well as Northern, pp. 123, 196. The phonology of the Earliest English Prose Psalter, which contains no specifically Northern features (Hirst, The Phonology, etc., p. 78), has regularly -and, rarely -end (ibid., p. 79).
82 Schwahn, pp. 6-7.
83 Morsbach, pp. 15, 17.
84 Knigge, pp. 31, 62.
85 In so far as ‘such similarities’ refer to Midland phonology, they are to be found between Myrc and Audelay and the Alliterative Poems. In giving the present inflection of the verb in Myrc as -e, -est, -eth, -e(n) (p. 9), Hulbert fails to note that the Northern endings of the third person were not unknown to him as endings with s are attested by rhyme: telles, 3 sg., 583 (elles); berus (Western -us for -es), 3 plur., 1666 (okererus). Moreover, Hulbert's statement that ‘Audelay has the same forms, and in addition (my italics) some second and third singulars in -es’ misrepresents the facts, since according to Wyld (Short Hist., p. 193, Note), Rasmussen's study of Audelay shows that he has ‘-is, ys, -s, most frequently, but also fair number of examples of -eth, -yth, -uth.’ The first thirty pages of Audelay's poems (Percy Society text) contain regularly sayth and doth, and sometimes hath, but in other verbs only one -th ending (lastyth, p. 9, line 30), beside 21 endings in -ys, 7 in -us, and 4 in -is. Hulbert thus greatly magnifies the inflectional differences between Gawain and the Shropshire poets.
86 I could find no documents from Derby before 1450. A lease of 1478 is cited above, p. 515.
87 Earwaker, Local Gleanings, p. 146 (October, 1879).
88 Only the more relevant points are noted.
89 P. 9; cf. above, note 85.
90 The prompter's copy of the Chester Antichrist (Hengwrt MS.), ca. 1475, regularly has -es, -is, -ys, (-us) in 2 and 3 sing., only very rarely ith- in 3 sing.; the 3 plur. and imperative plur. have regularly -es, -is, -ys, but ME. -en is represented in the 2 plur. forms: cryn (357), lyne, ‘lie’ (358), etc. It may be noted that only mon occurs, and that there is a participle in and—flaterand (376).
91 The final -d of the weak past participle, though retained in the fourteenth century Norfolk guilds, is unvoiced regularly in Capgrave (Dibelius, Anglia 23.450), and very frequently in Myrc.
92 Lines 130, 244, 1014, 1127, 1139, 1155, 1252, 1265, 1406, 1516, 1519, 1559, 1665, 1693, 1918, 1923, 1959, 2413 (twice).
93 Boerner, p. 217; Schultz, p. 34. Further hor does not occur in the texts studied by Dibelius (Anglia 24.222), in the early or late London documents (Morsbach, Ueber den Ursprung der neuengl. Schriftsprache, pp. 126-7; Dölle, Zur Sprache Londons vor Chaucer, p. 68; Lekebusch, pp. 109-11). Robert of Gloucester earlier has hor (Wyld, Short Hist., p. 177).
94 Needless to say, I think Hulbert carries scepticism altogether too far when he assumes that it is folly to attempt more definite localization than Northern, Midland or Southern. He is satisfied with nothing less than statements from authors themselves. But this is too great a disparagement of indirect evidence, without which philology, in the broadest sense of the word, could accomplish little.
95 I cannot discuss here the other texts generally assigned to the Northwest or West Midland. My own opinion is that the traditional assignment of the Wars of Alexander to the Northwest is correct; that the Ireland MS. is almost certainly from this region, though Luick (§33, p. 47) is not quite correct in thinking that the late fourteenth-century entries prove the poems to have been copied in Hale Hall, Lancashire; and that the Boke of Curtasye is certainly, and the Liber Cure Cocorum probably, western.