The Language and Copying Practices of Three Early Medieval Cartulary Scribes at Worcester

The Language and Copying Practices of Three Early Medieval Cartulary Scribes At Worcester Katherine Wiles Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds Institute for Medieval Studies September 2013 i The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his/her own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2013 The University of Leeds and Katherine Wiles The right of Katherine Wiles to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. ii Acknowledgements I would first like to thank my supervisors, Dr Orietta Da Rold, Dr Philip A. Shaw, Dr Bill Flynn and Dr Mary Swan, for their support, advice and guidance, and for making the process of doing a PhD a very enjoyable one. This PhD would not have been possible without the support of the AHRC, for which I am very grateful, and The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060-1220 project who have provided invaluable resources and created many opportunities I would not otherwise have had. For allowing me the use of the images contained in this thesis my thanks go to the British Library Board, and to Jonathan Herold, whose website has proved a vital resource, and whose early encouragement was very helpful. I would also like to thank the staff and students at the Institute for Medieval Studies for creating an environment in which I have been very proud and happy to work. During the course of my research, many people have offered help or advice for which I am very grateful. As such I would like to thank Dr Emilia Jamroziak, Dr Peter Sawyer, Justin Pollard, Dr Alexander Rumble, Dr Francesca Tinti, Dr Antonette DiPaolo Healey, Christine Wallis, Dr Julia Crick and Frances Mary Pitt. I would also like to thank my friends for their patience as I in turns neglected them and then bored them talking about my work. I would specifically like to thank Dr Thom Gobbitt, Eleanor Warren, Hannah Leach, and Dr Nollaig McEvilly for their input, feedback and help. For their friendship and company, and for their invaluable help I would like to thank Naomi Wells and Ella S. Mills (and Rosa). Final thanks go to my family, without whose support and patience this PhD would not haven been completed. Thank you. iii Abstract This thesis investigates the factors that influence the ways in which scribes copied Old English in charter texts. These factors include: the training scribes received in learning to write Old English and to copy texts; the role of the Anglo-Saxon scriptorium and the environment in which scribes worked; and the role of training and scriptorial influence in the development of a scribe’s written system. This investigation has highlighted, in particular, the lack of information about how scribes were trained in Old English compared to what is known of their training in Latin and in script acquisition. To investigate these factors, this thesis uses a comparative study of the work of the scribe of the eleventh-century Worcester Nero Middleton cartulary, copying the texts S 1280 and S 1556 from the early eleventh-century cartulary Liber Wigorniensis. The data is taken directly from the manuscripts and from original transcriptions of each charter copy, which provides evidence not available in editions. This study demonstrates the worth of studying later copies of texts, in particular of charters. It also shows the wealth of information to be found in the work of copying scribes. The study of the Nero Middleton scribe’s work has shown that scribal copying is not simply the application of one system (the copying scribe’s) onto another (the exemplar’s). In the two texts studied, this scribe exhibits different behaviours, varying in ways which are not the result of influence from their exemplar, but which suggest that their copying style and written system is changeable. From this it can be concluded that the scribes underwent some training in writing Old English which formalized aspects of their written conventions, but that much of the scribes’ conventions appear to have been influenced by the collaborative environment of the scriptorium in which they worked. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgements ii Abstract iii Table of Contents iv List of Figures v List of Tables vi Abbreviations and Conventions vii SECTION ONE CHAPTER 1: Introduction 2 CHAPTER 2: The Development of Scribal Writing Systems 5 CHAPTER 3: Manuscript Copies and Copying 40 CHAPTER 4: The Contexts of Production 56 CHAPTER 5: Scribal Profiles 71 SECTION TWO CHAPTER 6: Case Study, Worcester 80 CHAPTER 7: Palaeography 98 CHAPTER 8: Syntax and Structure 112 CHAPTER 9: Lexis 124 CHAPTER 10: Punctuation 127 CHAPTER 11: Abbreviation 148 CHAPTER 12: Orthography 176 CHAPTER 13: Conclusion 256 APPENDIX 1: S 1280, Liber Wigorniensis Transcription 266 APPENDIX 2: S 1280, Nero Middleton Transcription 268 APPENDIX 3: S 1556, Liber Wigorniensis Transcription 270 APPENDIX 4: S 1556, Nero Middleton Transcription 272 BIBLIOGRAPHY 275 Manuscripts Referenced 294 Charters Referenced 296 Cameron Numbers Referenced 299 v List of Figures Figure 1: The two forms of the <t>-graph in S 1280. 99 Figure 2: Further examples of the <t>-form. 99 Figure 3: S 1280, Nero Middleton. Comparison of majuscule <a>-forms. 104 Figure 4: S 1280, Nero Middleton, ll. 48-51. 105 Figure 5: S 1280, Nero Middleton, ll. 40-42. 106 Figure 6: Onset initial of S 1432, Nero Middleton, fol. 182v. 107 Figure 7: Onset initial of S 1556, Nero Middleton, fol. 181r. 107 Figure 8: A comparison of the forms of <N> in Nero Middleton. 109 Figure 9: S 1280 rubric. Nero Middleton, ll. 1-5. 109 Figure 10: Rubric for S 1556, Nero Middleton, ll. 1-3. 111 Figure 11: Tree 1. 116 Figure 12: Tree 2. 118 Figure 13: Majuscule abbreviation of word-final <-m>. 194 Figure 14: Comparison of supralinear strokes in Nero Middleton. 169 vi List of Tables Table 1: Syntactical differences between the copies of S 1280. 113 Table 2: Distribution of prepositional phrase structure type 1. 116 Table 3: Distribution of prepositional phrase structure type 2. 118 Table 4: Structural differences between the copies of S 1556. 121 Table 5: Lexical differences between the copies of S 1280. 124 Table 6: Lexical differences between the copies of S 1556. 125 Table 7: The punctuation of numerals in S 1280. 141 Table 8: The distribution of vowel graphs in Beorhtsige. 213 vii Abbreviations Bosworth-Toller An Anglo-Saxon Dictionary Online, ed. by Thomas Northcote Toller and others. Comp. by Sean Christ and Ondřej Tichý (Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague, 21 July 2010) <http://bosworth.ff.cuni.cz/016906> CCCC Cambridge, Corpus Christi College DOE The Dictionary of Old English DOEC The Dictionary of Old English Corpus EM 1060to1220 The Production and Use of English Manuscripts 1060-1220 Hemming’s Cartulary London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A. xiii (II), fols 119-200 LAEME The Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English LALME The Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English LangScape LangScape: The Language of Landscape: Reading the Anglo- Saxon Countryside (London, 2008), version 0.9 <http://www.langscape.org.uk/index.html> Liber Wigorniensis London, British Library, MS Cotton Tiberius A. xiii (I), fols 1-118 MANCASS Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies Nero Middleton London, British Library, MS Cotton Nero E. i, pt 2, fols 181-84 and London, British Library, MS Additional 46204 PASE The Prosopography of Anglo-Saxon England S/Sawyer The Catalogue of texts found in The Electronic Sawyer: Online Catalogue of Anglo-Saxon Charters (London, 2010) <http://www.esawyer.org.uk/> Conventions < > Denote graphs or short strings of graphs quoting the transcriptions in Appendices 1-4 ‘ ’ Denote phrases or quotes from the transcriptions in Appendices 1-4 italics Denote headword forms of words 1 SECTION ONE 2 Chapter 1 1 CHAPTER 1: Introduction This thesis investigates the various influences that inform the way in which scribes copy Old English in charters. These influences include the linguistic and paralinguistic features from the exemplar that a scribe might change or preserve in producing a copy, as well as external factors such as a scribe’s spoken language, training, and working environment. In particular, this thesis will use the evidence of scribal copies to explore the extent to which scribes’ written conventions – including their spelling systems, features such as punctuation and abbreviation use, and their copying habits – are formalized by the training they receive. The corpus used to guide this investigation consists of the copies of two charters, S 1280 and S 1556, found in the eleventh-century Worcester cartularies Liber Wigorniensis and Nero Middleton. 1 Each of these texts was copied into the Liber Wigorniensis manuscript by a different scribe in the early eleventh century,2 and these copies were later used as the exemplars for the Nero Middleton scribe in the later-eleventh century.3 Having the Nero Middleton scribe’s exemplars allows for comparison between the copies to determine those features that are replicated from the exemplar, and those which are produced by the copying scribe. These unique features, considered alongside the relationship the copies have with the exemplars, build a picture of the Nero Middleton scribe’s copying practices. This will allow an exploration into the influences which help to form those copying practices. This thesis is written in two sections. Section One sets out the contexts in which scribes worked in Anglo-Saxon England and the factors which may have influenced their written systems.

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