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Guy of Warwick in Warwick?:Reconsidering the Dialect EvidenceAlison WigginsPublished online: 09 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Alison Wiggins (2003) Guy of Warwick in Warwick?: Reconsidering the DialectEvidence, English Studies, 84:3, 219-230

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GUY OF WARWICK IN WARWICK?: RECONSIDERING THE DIALECT EVIDENCE

‘Guy of Warwick’ and WarwickshireIt has traditionally been claimed that the A-redaction of the Middle English ro-mance Guy of Warwick had its genesis in Warwickshire.1 The first attempt to lo-calize the language of the A-redaction was by Brandl in 1893 as part of hiswider survey of ‘Mittelenglische Literatur’.2 Brandl proposes that the Auchin-leck Guy of Warwick was originally composed in the South West Midlands, per-haps South Warwickshire. He offers no further discussion or examples from thetext to support this suggestion. Nevertheless, the notion of a Warwickshire ori-ginal was subsequently taken up by commentators and standard works of ref-erence with some enthusiasm. Hibbard Loomis cites Brandl in her survey ofmedieval romance. Wells and then Severs refer to the probable Warwickshireorigin of this text and Severs reports that ‘An early translation ... may havebeen made ca. 1300 in Warwickshire’.3

The claim for a Warwickshire provenance is important as it has implicationsfor how we understand the production circumstances and the reception of thisredaction of Guy of Warwick. Above all, it implies some kind of connectionwith the activities of the Earls of Warwick. It is very well documented that thelate-medieval Earls of Warwick had an interest in the story and its legendaryprotagonist. There are family artifacts illustrating the story. A drinking bowlsurvives from the early-fourteenth century, carved with the image of a knightslaying a dragon bearing the contemporary coat of arms of the Beauchampsand with the inscription ‘Guy of Warwick is his name, who here slays thedragon’ linking the legendary ancestor with the family of the day. There is a ref-erence from 1397 to possession of an arras, dorsers and costers decorated withscenes from the story of Guy of Warwick. Another late-fourteenth-century ref-erence records the alleged ‘discovery’ of Guy’s sword and suit of armour, laterput on display at Warwick castle. There are also various names with symbolic

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1 An outline of the different redactions of Guy of Warwick is provided by J. Zupitza in the pref-ace to the first volume of his edition, ‘The Romance of Guy of Warwick’, EETS 42, 49, 59(London, 1883, 1887, 1891). An updated outline is provided by A. Wiggins, ‘Guy of Warwick:Study and Transcription’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Sheffield, 2000. There arefive independent redactions. The ‘A-redaction’, discussed here, is referred to as ‘Version I’ byZupitza.

2 A. Brandl, ‘Mittelenglische Literatur (1100-1500): Von Lewis bis Crecy. Mitte des XIII bisMitte der XIV Jahrhs’ in Grundriss der Germanischen Philologie, ed. H. Paul II vols. (Stras-bourg, 1893).

3 L. Hibbard Loomis, Mediæval Romance in England: A Study of the Sources and Analogues ofthe Non-Cyclic Metrical Romances (New York, 1924), p.128. Manual of the Writings in MiddleEnglish 1050-1500, ed. J.B. Severs, V vols. (New Haven, 1967), pp.27-8.

English Studies, 2003, 3, pp. 219-2300013-838X/03/02-105/$16.00© 2003, Swets & Zeitlinger

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value which serve to reinforce the connection between the family and the leg-endary Guy. In the 1270s William Beauchamp named his son Guy although itwas not a traditional family name. Then, in the 1340s three Beauchamp sonswere named Guy, Thomas and Reynborne: the use of both Guy and Reynborne(the name of Guy’s son in the romance) confirms that the names had the ro-mance as their source. In the fourteenth century ‘Guy’s Tower’ was built atWarwick Castle. In the fifteenth century ‘Guy’s Cliff’ became the establishedname for a local landmark and, with direct reference to the events of the ro-mance, in the 1420s Richard Beauchamp purchased ‘Guy’s Cliff’ and built therea chantry chapel and statue to honour his legendary ancestor Guy. These ac-tivities culminated in Guy of Warwick actually being written into theBeauchamp’s family genealogy in the fifteenth century.4 The family adopted thelegendary hero Guy as one of their own historical ancestors. Throughout thelate-medieval period each successive generation of the family left evidence ofsome kind that they were concerned to promote and encourage a connectionwith a story which implied a noble and chivalrous family lineage.

These Warwickshire-based activities are significant if we are going to acceptthat the romance of Guy of Warwick was written in Warwickshire and that itscomposition was initiated there. What is implied is a particular model for theway that this text was produced and received: it is the idea of a Warwickshirestory, produced in Warwickshire for a Warwickshire audience. It implies thatthis text had a very specific regional appeal and function, and was read as alocal story linked to a local family.

The objective of this study has been to re-assess the dialect evidence in orderto test the hypothesis that the A-redaction of this romance originated in War-wickshire. The A-redaction is written in couplets and there are three survivingtexts: the earliest is in the Auchinleck Manuscript (National Library of ScotlandAdvocates’ MS 19.2.1) of c.1330-40, where it is the first part (ff.108ra-146vb) ofthis manuscript’s tripartite Guy of Warwick. The only other copy of this text inanywhere near complete form is in MS Caius College, Cambridge, 107/176 ofc.1400 where the A-redaction forms the first part of the romance (pp.1-149). InCaius, as in Auchinleck, the latter part of the romance is completed by anotherredaction (from pp.150-271 in Caius and ff.146vb-175vb in Auchinleck). Thereis also a fragment of the A-redaction in MS BL Sloane 1044. This is a singlefolio from the second half of the fourteenth century which preserves just 216lines of text. After considering some of the special problems presented by thelanguage of Middle English romances, this analysis considers the language anddialect of these three texts in order to trace, firstly, the dialect of the archetype,and, then, the evidence for the dialect of any subsequent, intermediate copyings.

Problems for Dialect Analysis of a Middle English Popular Romance

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4 V.B. Richmond’s study, The Legend of Guy of Warwick (New York, 1996), assembles and assimi-lates the various references from throughout the period. References to the sword and armour arerecorded in Severs’s Manual, p.31. A description of the building of the fifteenth-century chapel isprovided by J. Frankis, ‘Taste and Patronage in Late Medieval England as Reflected in Versionsof Guy of Warwick’, Medium Ævum, 66, no. 1, 1997, pp.80-93.

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Middle English romance manuscripts pose special difficulties for dialect ana-lysis. Whatever the dialect of the original was, it has been to a large extent oblit-erated by the dialects of later copyists. Medieval scribes frequently ‘translated’a text into their own dialect as they copied.5 So, in the case of the A-redactionof Guy of Warwick, each text primarily represents the language of the scribewho copied it into the surviving manuscript: the Auchinleck scribe has trans-lated the text into, largely, a Middlesex dialect of 1330, and the Caius scribe hastranslated the text into approximately an early-fifteenth-century London dia-lect. As a result of this, reconstructing the dialect of the archetype relies uponthe evidence of the rhyme words, which are much more stable than the languageused in line and where the language of the archetype is to a larger extent pre-served or can be reconstructed from the intended rhyme.

In addition to this there are a number of complicating features peculiar to theromance genre. The way that popular romances were composed problematisesany attempt to localise the language of the archetype. The number of rhymewords that are useful for localisation is limited by the high proportion of selfrhymes, repetitive rhymes and traditional tags and phrases. Such formulaic tagsand phrases and fixed rhymes were the ‘stock in trade’ of romance writers andare, therefore, of very limited use for localisation. Their currency, as tradition-al generic or poetic words, allowed them to travel between dialects and to occuracross diverse geographical regions.6

The case of Thomas Chester illustrates this feature of romance composition.The majority of meaningful rhymes in his works (the ‘Southern’ Octavian, SirLaunfal and Lybeaus Desconus) attest to the localisation of his dialect within theS.E. Midlands. However, Lybeaus Desconus is marked by a series of typicallyNorthern and N. Midland rhymes as well as some typically Western or W. Mid-land rhymes. Many of these Northern and Western rhymes also appear in theSouthern Octavian and Sir Launfal. These apparently ‘discrepant’ rhymes arethe result of Chester having borrowed rhymes from other romances: as M. Millscomments, they ‘tell us less about his own dialect than about the dialects ofsome other writers of romances, from whose work he borrowed extensively’. Itis a method of composition that is reliant upon a kind of linguistic intertextu-ality, whereby Chester not only borrowed motifs and phrases but also wholerhymes, even, as Mills describes ‘when these last depended upon linguistic de-velopments that had not taken place in his own dialect’.7 It is a practice partic-

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5 The concept of scribes as translators and the expressions ‘show-through’ and ‘relict’ are re-ferred to in this discussion. Throughout, the use of these terms and concepts is with referenceto M. Benskin and M. Laing’s seminal article ‘Translations and Mischsprachen in Middle Eng-lish Manuscripts’ in So Meny People Longages and Tonges: Philological Essays in Scots andMediaeval English Presented to Angus McIntosh, eds M. Benskin and M. Laing (Edinburgh,1981), where full definitions are provided along with discussion of the implications of theseideas. As Benskin and Laing state, they are ideas which are essential to the discussion of ‘thelinguistic interplay of copyists and their exemplars’, p.58.

6 A discussion of this aspect of romance composition is provided by F. McSparran in her in-troduction to Octovian, EETS 289 (London, 1986), p.33.

7 For a thorough discussion of this aspect of romance composition see M. Mills’s introductionto Lybeaus Desconus, EETS 261 (London, 1969), pp.33-6.

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ularly well suited to a genre constructed from the repetition of formulaic phras-es, easily borrowed from one romance to another.

Dialect analysis, then, must take into account that the rhyme words are like-ly to represent the composer’s generically determined ‘romance repertoire’,which will be somewhat distinct from his everyday written repertoire. With re-gard to this, the information provided by LALME should be applied to ro-mances with caution: it is information gleaned from a wide range of differentkinds of documents and does not attempt to account for how genre may haveinfluenced the distribution of any particular form.8

Dialect Analysis 1: The Language of the A-Redaction ArchetypeAn understanding of these factors has been crucial to interpreting the linguisticforms from the archetype of the A-redaction of Guy of Warwick. Contrary toBrandl’s hypothesis, this analysis of the rhyme-word evidence concludes thatthe archetype of the A-redaction was written in a South Eastern dialect ofc.1300 and exhibits a series of marked similarities to the so-called ‘Kyng Alisaunder group’ of London romances.

The Kyng Alisaunder group is constituted of the texts Kyng Alisaunder, Arthour and Merlin, The Seuen Sages and Richard Coer de Lyon. They are re-garded as a ‘group’ as they have been shown to display such close linguistic sim-ilarity as to warrant the suggestion, by G.V. Smithers, that they were all theoutput of a single (London) author.9 Whether or not they represent the work ofa single author, what is of great significance here is their distinctive use of lan-guage. Smithers describes their language as ‘in the first instance ... a literaryform of English’. They are written in their own particular ‘literary standard’which is linguistically distinctive but based upon a ‘nucleus of features’ derivedfrom the local spoken dialect. They are an example of production, in London,in the late-thirteenth century, of a series of popular metrical romances all writ-ten in a romance language, or koine, dialectically mixed but nonetheless dis-tinctive and based upon a core of London features. There are certainirregularities peculiar to Guy of Warwick. Nevertheless, the linguistic affiliationthat is exhibited between the A-redaction of Guy and the Kyng Alisaunder grouptexts is highly significant to forming an understanding of the circumstanceswithin which the archetype of this Guy of Warwick was composed. It would in-dicate that the composer of the A-archetype of Guy of Warwick was highly fa-miliar with the distinctive romance koine represented by the language of the

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8 A. McIntosh, M.L. Samuels and M. Benskin, The Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English,IV vols. (Aberdeen, 1986).

9 Kyng Alisaunder, Volume II: Introduction, Commentary and Glossary, ed. G.V. Smithers,EETS OS 237 (London, 1957; rept. 1969), pp.40-55. Smithers commits himself to a Londonorigin for these texts and provides strong evidence to support this localization. Though hestates that he believes the Kyng Alisaunder group texts all to be by the same author, he doesnot go on to list the evidence for this as he says he will. However, the detailed catalogue oflinguistic features from Kyng Alisaunder in this edition adequately serves to supply the infor-mation which characterizes the group, as is confirmed by computer-enabled searches of theAuchinleck versions of these texts.

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Kyng Alisaunder group of texts and would therefore point to London as themost likely region of composition. The data relevant to these conclusions is setout below.

Firstly, the dominant majority of the rhyme-word evidence attests that the ar-chetype of the A-redaction was composed in an early-fourteenth-century dialectof the South East. The rhymes of most significance to this conclusion are as fol-lows:10

1. OE a– is <o>. For example: fro : (do) 3896-7, 4114-5; go : (do) 527-8, 705-6, 3470-1.2. OE a before a nasal is <a>. For example: man : (o�an) 2240-1.3. OE æ appears as <a>. For example: blake : (take) 4084-5; was : (cas) 73-4, 4021-2, 5674-5.4. For the reflex of OE æ + g + d or n, <a> is attested as an original form by the rhymes seyde: (made) 3036-7; sade : (made) 4364-5, 6562-3; 2800-1 seyd : (glad).5. Reflex of OE y is attested as <e> by the rhymes hille : (snelle) 4990-1; miri : (sweri) 1107-8;mende : (sende) 3330-1; pride : (ferred) 4224-5; dent : (schent) 6850-1.6. For OE i-mutation of a + nasal, a is implied by wimen : (can) 475-6.7. OE ea before l-combinations is commonly <e>. For example: beld : (weld) 3892-3; beld :(scheld) 2770-1; eld : (weld) 1429-30; held : (�eld(e)) 1173-4, 1873-4; held : (feld) 1665-6.8. Rhymes between /v/ and /w/ indicate a change in pronunciation whereby /v/ has been changedto /w/, as in the rhymes sorwe : for corue 4912-3; haue : plawe 2822-3; graue : y slawe 1409-10;drawe : haue 189-90, 3294-5, 3824-5.9. Present singular verbs take -p: dop :(sop) 373-4; hap : (�af) 5260-1.10. Present plural verbs take -p: bep : (dep) 2322-3, 2560-1, 2950-1; gop : (op) 2394-5; dop : (minop) 3180-1; gop : (wrop) 3976-7, 6188-9.11. The third person plural nominative pronoun (‘they’) is confirmed in rhyme 10x as he, for ex-ample at 1775-6, 2152-3, 3504-5.12. The third person plural accusative pronoun (‘them’) occurs once in line as es (3487) but ap-pears nowhere else in Auchinleck Scribe I’s lengthy stint of copying on Auchinleck and maytherefore be considered a relict form.

The phonology and morphology are decisive for the South East. The North isexcluded by 1, 9 and 10. The West is excluded by 2 and 3. Kent is excluded by3 and 4. The South is implied by 7 and 10. The remaining forms are South East-ern or East Midland: 8 would indicate the S.E. Midlands and 4, 5 and 6 indi-cate the South East and are especially characteristic of London and Essex.11

This conclusion is supported by the evidence of the vocabulary. The form he,given in 11, is East Midland (LALME dot map 33 records its occurrence pri-marily within East Anglia and Essex). The form es, given in 12, is described bySmithers as being of ‘striking’ geographical distribution. He comments that it

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10 All examples are taken from the Auchinleck Manuscript couplet Guy unless otherwise stated.Throughout, line numbers refer to the unpublished edition of the texts provided by Wiggins,‘Guy of Warwick’ (forthcoming at http://www.nls.uk). This text has been used as there are po-tentially-confusing errors in the lineation of Zupitza’s EETS edition.

11 These results should be compared to the work of M.T. Ikegami, ‘The Tripartite Authorshipof the Auchinleck Guy of Warwick’, Kyoyo-Ronso, 78, 1988, pp.17-33. Ikegami’s primary aimis to demonstrate that ‘the Auchinleck Guy is not the work of one author but each of the tri-partite versions is composed by different poets’, p.17. However, in the course of demonstrat-ing this point she succeeds in showing that all three parts are characterised by rhymes whichattest in each case to an archetype in a broadly Southern and Eastern dialect. As such, herfindings coincide with the results presented here.

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tends only to appear in S. Eastern and E. Midland texts and records its ap-pearance in the S.E. texts Vices and Virtues, Kyng Alisaunder, Arthour and Mer-lin and Ayenbite of Inwyt, and in the E. Midland texts The Bestiary, Genesis andExodus and Havelok.12 The vocabulary occurring in line is also marked by itsSouthern and Eastern character. The form doune for ‘hill’ occurs regularly inline and, as it is rare elsewhere in the work of Auchinleck Scribe I, seems likelyto have been part of the phraseology of the original. The MED indicates thatthis form appears mainly in S. Eastern and E. Midland texts: occurring in theTrinity Homilies, Vices and Virtues, Genesis and Exodus and John Trevisa’stranslation of Bartholomew de Glanville’s De Proprietatibus Rerum. The form(al) what for ‘until’ occurs 11x in line and is of highly restricted geographicaldistribution: LALME only records examples in Kent (LALME dot map 1085).The form (al(le)) fort also appears for ‘until’, occurring 7x in line and LALMEdot map 1078 shows that this fort type was widespread across the South. Thecombined evidence of phonology, morphology and vocabulary is decisive forthe South East.

South Eastern forms dominate the language. But amid this sea of South East-ernisms are a scattering of non-South-Eastern forms which can also be con-firmed in rhyme as archetypal. These are forms which might usually be expectedto belong to dialects from further north and west and so present the questionof how these apparently contradictory sets of forms can be reconciled. That is,how the scattering of more northerly forms can be reconciled with the domin-ant South Eastern character of the rhyme-words elsewhere. It is here that com-puter-searchable texts have come into their own. Computer-enabled searches,performed across a wide range of Middle English texts, have revealed that thenon-South-Eastern forms in Guy are the same as a number of the non-SouthEastern forms occurring in the Kyng Alisaunder group texts and that this com-bination of forms is highly distinctive to these texts. These forms are:

13. OE a– is occasionally <a>, as in the rhymes to blowe : (y slawe) 6490-1; aros : (was) 3420-1;pas : (plas) 3834-5.14. There is one example in which OE a is <o>: conne : (sonne) 791-2.15. There are two rhymes which confirm the use of the Northern -s inflection in the original forthe third person singular of the present indicative: gos : (aros) 2310-11; gos : (ros) 2448-9.16. The present participle form -inde is used as an alternative beside -inge. For example: doinde: finde 965-6, 2512-13; prikeinde : kinde 2596-7, 2624-5. 17. There are several rhymes which should be compared with the comments of Smithers on theoccurrence of OE <œ–1> in Kyng Alisaunder. Smithers records that in Kyng Alisaunder ‘Anundiphthongized type for OE <long æ1> (i.e. preceded by a front consonant) is combined withthe Essex-London a– in the remarkable �are 6950 (: care), which is characteristic of the K[yng]A[lisaunder] group (SS 554, AM 6771, RCL 2772) but otherwise exceedingly rare’.13 This rhymeoccurs 5x in the Auchinleck couplet Guy as �are : (fare) 1025-6, 1719-20, 4552-3, 7136-7, 7322-3 and 1x in the Caius Guy as yare : (fare) 1721-2.18. ME /u/ had been lowered to /o/ in the rhymes forp : worp 3818-9, 4750-1; hors : wors 5754-5. This kind of rhyme is also found in Kyng Alisaunder.

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12 Havelok, ed. G.V. Smithers (Oxford, 1987) p.11213 Smithers, Kyng Alisaunder, p.48.

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The forms given in 16, 17 and 18 are unusual in Middle English but all occurin both the A-redaction Guy of Warwick and the Kyng Alisaunder group texts.The forms given in 13, 14 and 15 all represent dialect features which originatedin the North or the Midlands but which also show a striking similarity to thelanguage of the London Kyng Alisaunder group texts occurring, as they do,within the context of a dominant number of South Eastern forms. These fewNorthern and Midland forms, then, do not imply localisation further North,but should be recognised as part of the ‘literary language’ of a South Easterntext. Furthermore, it is not surprising that London romances would have de-veloped a literary language that included Northern and Midland forms. Signif-icant numbers of Northern and Midland forms came and went in the dialect offourteenth-century London as a result of migration to the capital from theNorth and Midlands. These forms, to a significant extent, characterise the lan-guage of the capital and set it apart from other Southern dialects.14

Dialect Analysis 2: The Language of the Scribes and Relict FormsThe rhyme-word data is extremely persuasive in favour of a London archetype.The overwhelming majority of the data is compatible with this conclusion.There is, however, one other outstanding feature of the language of the A-redaction texts which must be mentioned here and accounted for. There are afew forms occurring in the texts which cannot be confirmed as archetypal (asthey occur either in the line or within inconclusive rhymes) and which are in noway consistent with what is known of the language of the archetype or the lan-guage of the Caius or Auchinleck scribes.

The largest number of these discrepant forms occur in the Auchinleck textand they are extremely rare elsewhere in the work of Auchinleck Scribe I. Thelanguage of Auchinleck Scribe I has been subjected to considerable scholarlyscrutiny. Most recently, the publication of LALME has provided a detailed lin-guistic profile for this scribe, outlining his written repertoire and localising hislanguage to the west of London, in Middlesex, by comparison with attesting an-chor texts for the area (LALME records Auchinleck Scribe I as LP 6510). TheLALME profile for Auchinleck Scribe I is based on samples of his copying fromSt. Mergrete, St. Katerine, Guy of Warwick and Sir Orfeo. By sampling from arange of texts in this way LALME provides a general profile which establishesthis scribe’s most commonly used forms. Access to machine-searchable versionsof all of the texts in the Auchinleck Manuscript has enabled comparison of thisgeneral profile with Scribe I’s repertoire across the entire manuscript, as well asspecifically within the couplet Guy. These computer-enabled searches havemade possible production of a very precise and revealing set of data whichshows that a series of exotic forms occur in the couplet Guy.

These exotic forms, representing deviations from Scribe I’s regular repertoire,

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14 For a discussion of migration into London during the fourteenth century see E. Ekwall, Stud-ies on the Population of Medieval London (Stockholm, 1956). For a consideration and someexamples of Northern and Midland forms entering the dialect of late medieval London seeM.L. Samuels, ‘Some Applications of Middle English Dialectology’, ENGLISH STUDIES, 44(1963), pp.81-94.

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are of particular interest because of their rarity in the work of a scribe who gen-erally adheres consistently to his own preferred linguistic standard.15 The exot-ic forms are either unique to the couplet Guy or are extremely rare anywhereelse in Scribe I’s lengthy contribution to the Auchinleck MS (a total of 29 texts,constituting over 70% of the surviving manuscript). Furthermore, and of greatsignificance to their interpretation, they form a group which can be localisedwithin a specific geographical region. These exotic forms are as follows:

19. Reflex of OE y is <u>:

brugge ‘bridge’: Auchinleck Scribe I’s usual form is brigge, which appears inline 22x in his stint of copying on the Auchinleck MS. There are two exceptionsto this in line: the form bregge occurs 1x in Sir Tristrem and the form bruggeoccurs 1x in line in the A-redaction Guy at line 4251.

fure ‘fire’: The LALME profile of Auchinleck Scribe I records his form as‘fire (fer)’. There is one exception to this in line: in the A-redaction Guy, fureoccurs at line 3538.

hulle(s) ‘hill’: LALME records Auchinleck Scribe I’s form to be ‘hille’. How-ever, a computer-enabled search shows that Scribe I also uses hulle(s) 7x in lineduring his stint of copying on Auchinleck. Significantly, the distribution ofthese occurrences is highly restricted: hulle(s) occurs 1x in line in the stanzaicGuy at line 8900 and 6x in line in the A-redaction Guy at lines 3106, 3118, 3261,4284, 4317 and 6265.

furst ‘first’: The LALME profile for Auchinleck Scribe I records his form as‘first (furst)’. However, a search of the whole manuscript reveals that furst isvery rare in his stint of copying. It occurs 4x: 1x in line in the Short MetricalChronicle at line 844, 1x in line in the stanzaic Guy at line 9949, and 2x in linein the A-redaction Guy at lines 3123 and 6594.

By tabulating this data regarding the reflex of OE y the exceptional nature ofthe appearance and distribution of these forms in the A-redaction Guy is givensharper definition:

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15 Samuels, ‘Some Applications’, describes Scribe I’s language as an early stage of Standard Eng-lish and it has since come to be recognised as what Macrae-Gibson has called ‘a clear linguis-tic entity’, Of Arthour and of Merlin, EETS OS 279 (London, 1979), p.62, a distinctive stagein the development of the London dialect.

All texts from Scribe I’s stint of copying ‘bridge’ ‘first’ ‘fire’ ‘hill’ TOTALS(total of 29 texts) which include examples brugge furst fure hulleof reflex of OE y as <u>.

Couplet (A-redaction) Guy of Warwick 1x 2x 1x 6x = 10x

Stanzaic Guy of Warwick - 1x - 1x = 2x

Short Metrical Chronicle - 1x - - = 1x

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As this table illustrates, u-forms for the reflex of OE y are extremely rare out-side of the A-redaction Guy in Auchinleck Scribe I’s stint of copying. Their rel-ative frequency in the couplet Guy (combined with forms 20-22, given below),would indicate that these are relict forms carried over from the exemplar fromwhich Scribe I was copying this text. The reflex of OE y appeared as <u> in theWest Midlands and the South West where it was retained into the fourteenthcentury, when rounding reached the West.16

It should, incidentally, also be observed that this data is highly significantwith regard to localising the language of Auchinleck Scribe I. The repeated oc-currence of reflex of OE y as <u> in the couplet Guy is precisely what influencesLALME (sampling from the couplet Guy) to place Scribe I as far west as Middlesex. Consequently, the identification of y > u as part of Scribe I’s pas-sive rather than active repertoire, here, loosens LALME’s Middlesex placing. Itis data which removes the western emphasis from Scribe I’s profile and there-fore implies that Scribe I should be re-located further east, within London itself.

20. mon (‘man’). LALME records Scribe I’s form to be ‘man’. A computerised search of Auchin-leck reveals one exception to this in line: in the couplet Guy, monschip (‘manship’) occurs oncein line at line 3736. In cases of OE a before a nasal, /ɔ/ was retained only in the West Midlands:therefore mon.17

21. onswere (‘answer’). Scribe I’s usual form is answere and there are only three exceptions to thisin line: the form onswer- occurs 3x in line in the couplet Guy, onswere at line 3570 and onswerdat lines 3738 and 3882. Again this is a form which was restricted to the W. Midlands (reflex ofOE a + nasal is <o>). LALME’s County Dictionary gives a more detailed breakdown of thisform and provides information to show that onswer(e) was of particularly restricted geograph-ical distribution: onswer(e) was common in West – Central Warwickshire and Shropshire, witha few examples extending east into N. Staffordshire and N. Derbyshire. It is extremely rare out-side of these regions: LALME records 13 cases in Warwickshire, 21 cases in Shropshire,Staffordshire and Derbyshire, and only 1 case outside of these regions (in Rutland).22. uerd (‘earth’). The form uerd occurs once in rhyme with swerd (‘sword’) at lines 4168-9. Thiscannot be confirmed as an original form (as a form without initial u- would be possible in rhymehere), yet neither can it be attributed to Auchinleck Scribe I as it is unique in his work. It is ofhighly restricted geographical distribution. Forms with initial u-/v- occur only in the West Mid-lands: LALME records 16 examples occurring from N. Derbyshire, throughout Staffordshire toWarwickshire and S.Shropshire.

In the work of Auchinleck Scribe I, then, the forms mon, onswer-, fure, bruggeand uerd are unique to the A-redaction Guy and hulle and furst are extremelyrare outside this text. There is a pronounced pattern of distribution: these formsare clustered within the A-redaction Guy. They can be classed together as agroup as each is characteristic of the W. Midlands and they could only have co-occurred, in combination with one another, within this geographical region.Even more specifically than this, when plotted together on a map, according to

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16 This is clearly illustrated by the isoglosses established by S. Moore, S.B. Meech and H.Whitehall, Middle English Dialect Characteristics and Dialect Boundaries (Ann Arbor, 1935),in which the S.W. and W. Midlands are defined as west of the line representing the easternlimit of OE y retained as front round vowels /y(:)/ (spelled <u> or <ui> or <uy>).

17 R. Jordan, Handbuch der Mittelenglischen Grammatik, translated and revised by E.J. Crook(The Hague, 1925, 1934; 1974), p.50. LALME dot map 352.

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the information provided by LALME, these forms are found only to co-occurwithin Warwickshire and the Shropshire / Derbyshire region.18

The restricted distribution of these forms within the manuscript combinedwith their restricted geographical distribution indicates that they represent alayer of relict forms ‘showing through’ from the exemplar from which Scribe Iwas copying this text. That is, indicating that Scribe I copied the couplet Guyinto the Auchinleck Manuscript from an exemplar that contained a large num-ber of forms specific to Warwickshire or Shropshire/Derbyshire. It would bedifficult to account for a series of such specifically distributed and precisely lo-calizable exotic forms in any other way.

The appearance of these apparently relict forms in Auchinleck Scribe I’scopying of the couplet Guy is even more remarkable when compared to similarrelics occurring in the Caius MS Guy. The language of the Caius scribe is con-sistent with what would be expected of an early-fifteenth-century S. Eastern orLondon dialect. Although this scribe is generally a careful and consistent copy-ist there are two apparently relict forms occurring in his stint:

23. Reflex of OE y appears as -uy- at 1217-18 huyde : ride (hide : ride) and 2061-2 (smyte) : luyte(smite : little).

The -uy- forms are not archetypal (the original rhyme seems certainly to havebeen an E. Midland type where /y/ > /i/) nor consistent with what is known ofthe language of the Caius scribe, as -uy- forms for the reflex of OE y were re-stricted, very specifically, to the S.W. Midlands. Of great significance here isthat these relict forms in Caius are, according to the information provided byLALME, forms which co-occur within precisely the same geographical regionas the relict forms found in the Auchinleck couplet Guy. To take the forms withthe most restricted distribution: if all -ui-/-uy- forms of ‘little’ (from Caius) areplotted with the relicts onswer- ‘answer’ and uerd ‘earth’ (from Auchinleck) theonly regions within which all three forms are found to co-occur are S. Shrop-shire and the North West quarter of Warwickshire.19

There is one further feature which endorses the idea of a link between the A-redaction and the West Midlands. The Sloane fragment has been dated palaeo-graphically to the second half of the fourteenth century. It is written in whatseems to be a broadly South Midland dialect which includes a number of West-ern features, the most striking of which is heo ‘she’ (appearing 11x at lines 11,12, 23, 42, 75, 85, 150 and 204). By the mid – late fourteenth century heo wasvery much restricted to the South West and the West Midlands (as illustrated,

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18 The information in LALME has been collected from texts which can be dated between ap-proximately 1340 and 1450. They are therefore from a later date than these relicts which datefrom between 1300 and 1340. It may, perhaps, be expected that the Western forms were, inthe earlier period, slightly more widespread than is indicated for the period covered byLALME. Nevertheless, until the publication of the Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English,LALME provides the best indication of regional spelling patterns for this period. Further, theinformation it provides has been shown to be of interest and relevance here because of thestriking pattern that it implies with regard to this series of exotic forms.

19 A map illustrating this distribution is provided by Wiggins, ‘Guy of Warwick’, p.355.

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for example, by LALME dot map 17) and was highly characteristic of this re-gion. The appearance of heo would therefore, on face value, seem to imply thatthe Sloane scribe originated from the West. This conclusion is tenable but it isalso worth considering the use of heo by Essex scribe LP 6090 in his copying ofthe Brut. The editors of LALME remark that ‘The scribe [LP 6090] acceptedheo “she” as the main form, probably to represent the flavour of the Brut ori-ginal’. Was the Sloane scribe, like Essex scribe LP 6090, deliberately retainingcertain Western features from his exemplar in order to represent the ‘Westernflavour’ of its language, in a way deemed to be appropriate to a West Midland(‘Warwickshire’) story? The limited evidence of the Sloane fragment means it isnot possible to determine whether the Sloane scribe originated in the West Mid-lands himself, or was deliberately retaining certain West Midland features in hiscopying. The question also persists of whether the Sloane and Auchinleck textswere copied from the same Western (or Western-influenced) exemplar, but withno overlapping portion of text between Auchinleck and Sloane this is also im-possible to substantiate. To establish the precise relationship of these texts toone another or to a predecessor is problematic, but what is reinforced and re-mains compelling is the idea that early in its history the A-redaction was copiedby a scribe from the West Midlands, possibly Warwickshire.

The Reception of the A-Redaction of ‘Guy of Warwick’This analysis has shown that the A-redaction archetype of Guy of Warwick wascomposed early in the fourteenth century in a South Eastern dialect and that itsassociation with the language of the Kyng Alisaunder group romances makes itmost likely to have been written by a London redactor. The Western relicts oc-curring in the texts point to a Warwickshire or S. Shropshire ‘stage’ early in thehistory of the A-redaction; they signal a putative Warwickshire or Shropshirecopying early in the textual tradition of the A-redaction. Of course it is possiblethat this text may have been copied in London, using a scribe from Warwickwho added a few Westernisms. One of the problems is that we have no idea howfar the Auchinleck text is from its original.

Certain questions remain open (and this would be an anomalous piece of dia-lect analysis if they did not). But the evidence is decisive in relegating to therealms of myth the notion of a Warwickshire genesis for this romance. It seemsthat Brandl noticed the scattering of Northern and Western forms and was ledby them to propose a Warwickshire original, without analysing the language indetail. His analysis fails because it assumes that the occasional Westernisms arearchetypal and, also, because it does not acknowledge a number of key formsto be traditional, literary words. It is a mechanical method of analysis wherebyNorthern and Western forms are simply used to shift localisation relatively fur-ther North and West without recognition of their use by composers from fur-ther South and East. The text represents several different linguistic systemsoverlapping (those of the original composer, the literary koine, and then latercopyists). Any attempt to analyse the language of this type of text must ac-knowledge this complex of components. From a methodological perspective,analysis must resist the temptation to seize upon individual forms out of con-

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text, or to be seduced by external, circumstantial evidence.These findings significantly enhance understanding of the production/recep-

tion of this romance, as well as of fourteenth-century romances more widely(such as those of the Auchinleck MS). It has been shown that any Warwick-shire-based interest in the A-redaction of Guy of Warwick can only have beeninitiated after the archetype had been composed, and via London connections.If the Earls of Warwick are to be implicated in the reception and transmissionof this Guy of Warwick then it is within a London context. The Earls of War-wick owned land and property in London and, as one of the most powerfulfamilies of the day, involved and implicated in contemporary politics, theywould certainly have benefited from conveying to a London audience the storyof their family’s prestigious lineage and noble and chivalrous history. This isperhaps to suggest that this romance was intended and functioned as a kind ofpropaganda, encouraging the spread of a regional legend to urban audiencesand thereby promoting the family with which it was associated. The issue of re-gionalism and romance is, it seems, more complex than has previously been as-sumed. The case of Guy of Warwick perhaps also suggests a call for thereassessment of the traditionally-held beliefs about the localisation of other ro-mances such as Havelok at Grimsby and Bevis of Hampton in Southampton.

AHRB Centre for Editing Lives and Letters ALISON WIGGINS

Queen MaryUniversity of LondonEngland

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