5. Standardisation, exemplars, and the Auchinleck manuscript

Abstract

Samuels’ 1963-article “Some applications of Middle English dialectology” situated the first steps in the formation of present-day Standard English in fourteenthand fifteenth-century London, the home of three of his four incipient standards. The orthographic forms respectively selected by Scribes 1 and 3 of the Auchinleck manuscript, National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, MS Advocates’ 19.2.1, dated c. 1330–40, exemplify the earliest of the London-based types, Type II. This type dies out suddenly c. 1380 and is replaced by Type III, which in turn is equally suddenly replaced by Type IV half a century or so later. Samuels’ four types have been influential; for example, Kane and Donaldson (1975) explicitly selected Cambridge University Library, MS B.15.17 as the base text for their edition of the B version of Piers Plowman on the grounds that it is written in Type III. The types have come under fire in recent years but they continue to prove resilient despite the complete absence of contributions countering the criticisms. For example, the types are unconditionally accepted in a textbook on manuscript studies focusing on the late Middle English period (Kerby-Fulton et al 2012: 67), go entirely unquestioned in a widely used undergraduate linguistics textbook (Horobin and Smith 2002), and are reproduced in as many as three of the fifteen chapters in a recent handbook on Middle English (Brinton and Bergs 2017), including in the chapter specifically devoted to standardisation. It is time to lay the types to rest. To fulfill this goal, this paper adds to the criticisms by questioning the basis for Type II. What follows details my methodology for orthographic analysis, which is able to discriminate the six scribes of the Auchinleck manuscript and the hands who produced the immediate exemplars. Relating how the exemplar hands are distributed to the manuscript’s codicology strongly suggests the exemplars were obtained from local sources which also produced them. A later section discusses orthographic standardisation because there is evidence that the orthographic forms selected by Scribes 1 and 3 are no more similar than the forms selected by the manuscript’s other scribes, contrary to what would be expected of a standard even at a very early stage in its formation. The final section summarises.