English Studies ISSN: 0013-838X (Print) 1744-4217 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/nest20 The surrey dialect in the XIIIth century Henry Cecil Wyld To cite this article: Henry Cecil Wyld (1921) The surrey dialect in the XIIIth century, English Studies, 3:1-6, 42-45, DOI: 10.1080/00138382108596414 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00138382108596414 Published online: 13 Aug 2008. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 1 View related articles Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=nest20 Download by: [University of California Santa Barbara] Date: 09 June 2016, At: 18:34 42 experiment. You will never get through in privacy'. He said : They are entirely absorhed in loyalty.' But I was the better prophet : he was recog- nised from the one extremity of the street to the other, and never did I see such an instance of national devotion expressed.'" When the city, amid universal approval, erected in Princes Street the delicate Gothic pinnacle of white marble canopying the statue of Scott in his plaid and with his staghound at his feet, it was the recognition of what Scott meant for her in his daily walk and conversation as well as of what he was to the wider world through his books. J. A. FALCONER. The Surrey Dialect in the XIIIth Century. In Kemble's Codex Diplomaticus there is a small collection of charters which Kemble, in Vol. VI, p. XVII, describes as 'A register on vellum of the Charters of Chertsey Monastery, Surrey'. The title of the MS. is Cott. Vitellius A. XIII. I enquired of the authorities in the MS. Department of the British Museum their opinion as to the age of the MS., and Mr. J. P. Oilson informs that me on p. 77 of the volume is a document dated 15 May 1259, which is in the same hand as the Charters with which I am now concerned. In Mr. Gilson's opinion, the character of the handwriting points to a date very little later than that just mentioned — say 1259—1280. The following are the Nos. of the Charters in Kemble: — 151,222 (in Vol. Ill); 812, 844, 848, 849, 850, 856 (in Vol. IV); 986, 987, 988 (in Vol. V). Nos. 844, 848, 849, 850, are in English ; No. 987 is in Latin, but has the boundaries in English, and this Charter is the most important of all, since we have here two and a half pages of English which, while being slightly archaic in spelling, as is natural, seeing that it is apparently based upon an older model, nevertheless makes the impression of exhibiting the language of the latter half of the 13th century pretty faithfully. The Latin Charters in the collection contain several Surrey PI. Names which offer important criteria of dialect. In an article recently published, in Vol. VI of Essays and Studies (Oxford 1921) I discussed (pp. 139—142) the dialect of the ME. poem The Owl and the Nightingale, and arrived at the view, purely on linguistic grounds, that we have here a fairly pure specimen of the West Surrey dialect of the period. This result is reached partly by a process of elimination whereby the easterly areas on the one hand, and the more extreme westerly areas on the other, Downloaded by [University of California Santa Barbara] at 18:34 09 June 2016 are excluded by the application of linguistic tests which, so far as our knowledge now goes, seem to be reliable; partly also from a comparison of the main dialectal features of O. & N. with what information concerning the Surrey dialect was available. The Surrey sources which I used for the purposes of comparison were the O. E. Surrey Charter of 871—889 printed in Sweet's Oldest English Texts pp. 451 etc., and in Kemble II, p. 120 etc., and M. E. forms of Surrey Place Names. So far as the chief phonological tests are concerned, the O. E. Surrey Charter and 0. & N. agree very largely, and the differences which exist — e. g. [T] for O. E. aï2 {déle, etc.) in O. & N. as against [ë] in the Charter, may be explained from the fact that the former, for reasons presently to be 43 mentioned, was attributed to West Surrey, while the Charter belongs to East Surrey, and not unnaturally has some features in common with Kentish which disappear as we go further west. The credit of calling attention to the important additional information concerning the Surrey dialect of approximately the same date as the Owl and Nightingale, which is found in the Chertsey Chartulary, belongs entirely to Miss Serjeantson of the University of Liverpool. Miss Serjeantson had already discovered an important point connected with the treatment of O.E. eo in Surrey which enabled me with some confidence to locate the dialect of O. & N. in West Surrey. This point, as we shall see, is now further confirmed by the fresh evidence which she has discovered. The two special points which I asked Miss Serjeantson to investigate further were the treatment of O.E. y in Surrey, and the treatment of O.E. eo. As regards the first point it appeared from my investigation on the subject published in E. St'.' Vol. 47 (1913), that Surrey was mainly what I called an 'u-area' (i. e. one which O. E. y was written u in M. E.) with a small sprinkling of /-spellings, but no e-forms. Now O. & N. always writes ti in cunne, sunne, cunde, etc., but in spite of the dozens of «-spellings there are two or three instances where words thus spelt are made to rhyme with words that can only have had e in O. & M. E. Thus cunde-sehende 273, worse - m(er)she 303, mankunne-penne 1725, wrste, 'worst' 121 rh. — berste. These rhymes make it certain that the poet was at least acquainted with the e-forms. In spite of my place-name results I was not disposed, on the strength of these few rhymes, to rule Surrey out. Still less was I disposed to admit that the poem was composed in an-c-area, and written out by a scribe from an «-area who had altered all the spellings from e to u, though lie was unable to alter the rhymes. Bihcdde 102 rh. bredde may possibly stand for O.E. behydde 'hid'; in which case we should have another example of e in O. & N. Miss Serjeantson's new material proved conclusively that Surrey was overwhelmingly an //-area, but contributed the fresh information that the e-forms were not unknown, since a faint sprinkling of them actually occurs in the Chertsey Chartulary. Thus this point is set at rest, and as regards these particular forms, the dialect of O. & N. agrees with that of the other Surrey documents of the same date. The second point is to some extent bound up with the first. In O. & N. line 849 we find (in Cotton MS.) mankunne rhyming with honne, while the Jesus MS. writes cunne-heonne in the same passage. In 863 Cott. writes sunne, 'sin', and rhymes it with honne. Again, in the same place MS. Jesus writes sunne-heonne. The same rhyme is found in both MSS. in 65. In 1. 311, the MSS. write rordc and reorde, 'voice', respectively. How are we to inter- pret these o, eo spellings? If we believe that the dialect of the poet had [y], Downloaded by [University of California Santa Barbara] at 18:34 09 June 2016 written u, for O. E. y, we shall assume [hynne, ryrd] ; if we believe that he spoke an e-dialect, then clearly we must pronounce [henne] to rhyme with [kenne, senne], and [rërd]. Here again Miss Serjeantson came to the rescue at the time my former article was being written. She found a M. E. Surrey PI. N. Hurtmere, in which the first element was clearly O. E. Heorot. This place is near Guildford, and the form with u (in Feudal Aids V. p. 127) established at least a probability that this characteristic treatment of O. E. eo extended at least as far west as this part of Surrey. I accepted this evidence at the time as confirming that of the rhymes in O. & N. Miss Serjeantson has now further confirmed the existence of the u (for eo) forms in Surrey by pointing out three more, in independent words in the Chertsey Chartulary 44 — nuder for O. E. neoöor and binude (twice) for O. E. be-neodan. Further, she has found four examples of Hurtmere, one of Hortespole, all in Surrey documents of the 13th century quoted in the Calender of Ancient Deeds, and one Hurteswode (Surrey) in Calender of Inquisitions of K. Edw. II, p. 248. To these may be added, representing eö, frondliche and infangenduef Chertsey Ch. No. 848. It comes to this then : if O. & N. were written by a Surrey poet cunne, brugge, etc. would be the normal forms and spellings; further he would also be acquainted with the pronunciation [y] for O.E. eo, might write u or o in words containing this vowel, and might also rhyme such words with others containing O. E. y. The poet of O. & N. does both of these things. On the other hand it by no means follows that in Surrey [y] was the only current pronunciation for O. E. eo. It is merely claimed that this form was in occasional use there.