Documenting the Demise of Old English: The Legacy of a Royal Writ from Cnut to Henry II

The status of Old English in the post-Conquest period has been reexamined lately by a number of scholars, chief among them Elaine Treharne and Mary Swan, and a theme has emerged that very late Old English was the product of livelier, more frequent, and more creative endeavors than has been commonly thought.¹ Treharne gives a fair review of the standard opinion that Old English texts written post-Conquest are in the main "antiquarian," and goes on to say:

If the English texts of the twelfth century are the result of antiquarianism, there is little point discussing them: they are backward-looking copies of respected older Old English material—antiquities that can reveal little of importance in and of themselves. If, however, as I firmly believe, the opposite is true—that many of the manuscripts were copied for pragmatic purposes utilizing a living, contemporary formal written language—then a very different value can be placed on these texts. Moreover, the issue of their linguistic classification becomes crucial. Are these texts copied and sometimes updated, often adapted and re-created, still Old English . . . or are these texts "transitional," linguistically anomalous and so uncategorizeable? My proposal is that . . . they ought more properly to be seen as belonging to the same Old English literary corpus as the texts in the Exeter Book or as Wulfstan's Sermo Lupi ad Anglos.²

This, it seems to me, presents a dichotomy that is too extreme: either a text must be a useless antique or a living pragmatic composition, even a masterpiece. This essay attempts to show, via one small but extensive case study, that late texts in English wearing the garb of Old English language, that is of the traditional grapholect, can be both "backward looking" and "useful," while "antiquarianism" can have powerful cultural and political uses. It proceeds by detailing the lineage of a document that began in the 1020s and continued in a more or less unbroken thread throughout the twelfth century. It gives, I believe, a microscopic but symptomatic conspectus of the course of written English over the same period: a course of declining but still persisting relevance to contemporary concerns.

First, about the "liveliness" and "originality" of twelfth-century English writing: of course English always remained the natural spoken language of the vast majority of the inhabitants of England after the Conquest, but it is evident from a review of the literary and documentary evidence that its functional and original use as a specific grapholect gradually tailed off as the eleventh century wound down and dropped off sharply to almost nothing in the twelfth as far as original communication goes, though various degrees of passive reception obviously continued. A close look at the twenty-nine extant manuscripts containing substantial amounts of Old English texts copied in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries shows that they overwhelmingly stem from a few houses in the southeast and Worcester, which maintained the copying of English texts as part of their individual traditions. Evidence of writings actually composed in English in the twelfth century is meager.³ Latin works by Ralph d'Escures and Honorius Augustodunensis written before and after the turn of the century, some maybe as late as 1120, are represented in Old English translations of brief selections that are preserved in the mid-twelfth-century homiliary Cotton Vespasian D. xiv;⁴ other late homiliaries contain pre-twelfth-century works that have been recombined, abridged, or modified in the late twelfth century. Three homiliaries written toward the end of the twelfth century—Cambridge, Trinity College B. 14. 52, Cambridge University Library Ii.1.33, and Lambeth Palace 487—contain original writings in a language that is symptomatic of "early Middle English" and may betoken a revival in the practice of writing English. What is obvious, but is not often stated, is that writing in English played virtually no part—either as original work or as translation—in the massive twelfth-century resurgence in England and Normandy of works (in Latin) of history, politics, poetry, theology, and...