The history of poetry is also in part a history of the language in which it was created. This book uses evidence from alliterative verse to explore the development of some important phonological features of Old and Middle English. The assumption behind this approach is that both conformity to a metrical template and linguistically circumscribed preferences govern the distribution of forms in verse. The patterns found in early English alliterative compositions provide a valuable resource for the reconstruction of the contemporary language. In a field as heavily raked over as English historical linguistics is, it is surprising and exciting to find a cache of often unrecorded and definitely unanalyzed primary data. For Old English, the only full-length study of alliterative patterns is Classen (1913), and he restricts himself to vowel alliteration. Schumacher (1914), on whose pioneering survey Oakden (1930, 1935) relies, is the only systematic account of the patterns of alliteration for a large sample of Middle English alliterative verse. This work augments the early philological findings with new material, incorporating the information gleaned from verse into new accounts of the histories of particular segments and structures. In addition to yielding fresh insights into the specific attributes of early English, the reconstruction and interpretation offered here is useful as a test for the applicability and viability of current linguistic models.

The volume represents one part of a much larger project intended to cover the interplay between language and verse throughout the history of English.