In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Variants of the Middle English warning in William of Canterbury's Life of Becket* William's anecdote William of Canterbury's Latin life of St Thomas Becket (written 1173) relates a widely repeated anecdote in which the mother of Hugh de MorviUe (= Hugh n, one of Becket's murderers) cries out to her husband, also named Hugh de Morville (= Hugh I), a warning in English.1 The source of most printed accounts of the warning, James Craigie Robertson's normalized transcription of Winchester College M S 4, gives the Middle English (ME) as follows: 'Huge de Morevile, ware, ware, ware, Lithulf heth his swerd adrage!'2 The passage has attracted attention chiefly as evidence for the use of English among the Anglo-Norman barony in the twelfth century,3 but the English warning is also of interest as evidence for early M E forms and spellings. Indeed, the Winchester occurrence of the compound adrage is at least as early as and perhaps earlier by several decades than the occurrence in L^amon's Brut, tbe earliest occurrence reported in the Middle English Dictionary (MED).* Not I am grateful to Carl T. Berkhout and T. F. Hoad for their comments on earlier dra of the present essay and to Roberta Frank for transcriptions of the M E in the Vatican and Vallicelliana manuscripts. I wish to acknowledge the following for access to the manuscripts or microfilms and photocopies consulted in preparing the essay: the British Library; the Bodleian Library; Cambridge University Library; Corpus Christi College, Cambridge (in particular Mrs G. Cannell); Corpus Christi College, Oxford (in particular Christine Butler); the Dean and Chapter of Durham Cathedral; Durham University Library (in particular Elizabeth Rainey); the Joseph Regenstein Library of the University of Chicago (in particular Daniel Meyer and Bill Pugh); Trinity College, Cambridge; the Biblioteca Vallicelliana, the Vatican Library, and Winchester College (in particular Roger Custance). 1 Hugh II was almost certainly the son of Beatrice de Beauchamp, probably of Bedfordshire, and Hugh I, Constable of Scotland: see Geoffrey W . S. Barrow, 'Some Problems in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Scottish History: A Genealogical Approach', The Scottish Genealogist, 25 (1978), 97-112, and The Anglo-Norman Era in Scottish History (The 1977 Ford Lectures), Oxford, 1980, pp. 70-75. 2 Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, ed. James Craigie Robertson and J. B. Sheppard, 7 vols., Rolls Series (RS) 67, London, 1875-85, 1, p. 128. 3 William's anecdote is known to students of English language and literature especially from summaries in Albert C. Baugh, A History of the English Language, New York, 1935, pp. 148-49; 2nd edn, N e w York, 1957, p. 144; Albert C. Baugh and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language, 3rd edn, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1978, pp. 120-21; 4th edn, 1993, p. 118; and in R. M . Wilson, 'English and French in England, 1100-1300', History 28 (1943), 37-60 (p. 53). The anecdote is frequently cited by others, however: e.g. Austin L. Poole, From Doomsday Book to Magna Carta: 1087-1216, Oxford, 1955, repr. 1970, pp. 252-53. 4 Middle English Dictionary, ed. Hans Kurath, Sherman Kuhn, and Robert E. Lewis, Ann Arbor, MI, 1952-, J.V. adrauen. MED dates the earlier of the extant Brut P A R E R G O N ns 11.1, June 1993 22 R. Dahood widely noted are the many variant readings of the M E , only a few of which have appeared in print in some cases inaccurately transcribed.5 In view of the limited surviving corpus of transitional English and early M E , accurate transcriptions of variants, especially from twelfth- and thirteenth-century manuscripts, seem desirable for expanding the record of documented forms and contributing to a more precise appraisal than has previously been attempted of the anecdote's value as evidence for the distribution of M E in the twelfth century. A preliminary sketch of the relationship between William's Life ofBecket and derivative works will provide a useful context for the discussion of variants. The Life of Becket, Quadrilogus I, Quadrilogus II, and Roger of Crowland's Quadrilogus Winchester College M S 4 preserves the only complete copy of...

pdf

Share