LINGUISTIC GEOGRAPHY, DEMOGRAPHY, and MONASTIC COMMUNITY: SCRIBAL LANGUAGE at BURY ST EDMUNDS Kathryn A. Lowe University of Glas
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LINGUISTIC GEOGRAPHY, DEMOGRAPHY, AND MONASTIC COMMUNITY: SCRIBAL LANGUAGE AT BURY ST EDMUNDS Kathryn A. Lowe University of Glasgow Introduction In their preface to an edited collection of articles on East Anglian English, Jacek Fisiak and Peter Trudgill note that “the English of this area has a very special place indeed in the history of the language.”1 As they observe, not only did East Anglia constitute one of the fi rst areas of settlement by the West Germanic tribes bound for Britain in the fi ft h century, but the language of its substantial population in the later medieval period also signifi cantly shaped the development of Standard English. Despite the importance of this variety, however, key questions about its development and nature remain unanswered as a result of the nature of the evidence and the decidedly uneven spread of its textual remains: we know a good deal about the language of East Anglia in the later period but very little indeed about its pre-Conquest characteristics. Within Suff olk, however, one place off ers continuity of evidence for its dialect from the late Old English through the late medieval period: the English written and copied at the Benedictine 1 East Anglian English, ed. Jacek Fisiak and Peter Trudgill (Cambridge: Brewer, 2001), x. What the term “East Anglia” in this context actually constitutes is, as Fisiak and Trudgill observe, not an easy issue to resolve. For valid objections to the phrase itself and to what he calls a “traditional preoccupation” with dialect boundaries, see Michael Benskin’s article “Descriptions of dialect and areal distributions,” in Speaking in Our Tongues: Proceedings of a Colloquium of Medieval Dialectology and Related Disciplines, ed. Margaret Laing and Keith Williamson (Cambridge: Brewer, 1994), 169–187, at 169–73. Here I use the term narrowly as shorthand for Norfolk and Suff olk. For an historical justifi cation of this approach and the close-knit nature of the two shires, see David C. Douglas, Th e Social Structure of Medieval East Anglia, Oxford Studies in Social and Legal History 9 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1927), 2–3. A fresh, and very interesting, view on the region is given by Tom Williamson, England’s Landscape: East Anglia (London: Collins, 2006), 28–29, who stresses the cultural and geographi- cal similarities between north-east Suff olk and Norfolk on the one hand, and south- west Suff olk and Essex on the other. In such an account, Bury is seen very much as liminal. 148 kathryn a. lowe abbey of Bury St Edmunds. In this article, I describe and assess the material surviving from the Abbey during the Old English period in respect of one particular sound change. I move on to outline what are generally considered to be the diagnostic dialectal diff erences between Norfolk and Suff olk in the later period. Th e evidence supplied by the post-Conquest material from Bury appears to show a blurring of these distinctions: I consider a range of potential explanations for this, and conclude that they are to be found in the demographic make-up of the Abbey’s community. Old East Anglian Th ose who work in the fi eld of Old English dialectology will be pain- fully aware of the methodological problems associated with its study. Not only are texts of any sort outside the West Saxon area thin on the ground, but the opportunity for directly comparative work is virtually eliminated given the chronologically patchy nature of survival. Th e situation was succinctly summed up by Crowley in 1986: there is no evidence for Northumbrian of the ninth century and the early tenth; for Mercian before c.750, or of the later two thirds of the eleventh century; for Kentish before c.800 and aft er c.1000; and for West Saxon before c.850. Relatively few witnesses date before 950. Th ose that do are quite important, because texts aft er 950 are usually aff ected by the stan- dard Late West Saxon literary language.2 Th e situation is even worse for East Anglian. Th ree of the seven king- doms that made up the heptarchy are absent from the conventional dialect groupings of Anglo-Saxon England. While the fortunes of Essex, Sussex and East Anglia all fl uctuated during the period of the heptarchy (conveniently, 500–800), the East Anglian dynasty seems alone of the three to have retained a consistent degree of indepen- dence. Th ere is therefore no sound historical reason for its exclusion, but rather a pragmatic one: what is considered to be an almost com- plete lack of evidence for the status of the dialect during the Anglo- Saxon period. 2 Joseph P. Crowley, “Th e Study of Old English Dialects,” English Studies 67 (1986): 97–112, at 103..