Mediaeval scribes and poetry: the production of copies in the late ME period

Helena Alfaya Lamas

The particular aim of this paper is the placing of an alliterative poem written in fourteenth century England and supposedly transcribed by Robert Thornton from East Newton in Yorkshire. This poem -The Parlement of the Thre Ages- forms part of the British Museum manuscript 31042.

There are two main objectives. Firstly, we intend to fix a provenance area for the British Museum version of the poem -and at the same time, find out where the copyist of the poem learnt to write. Secondly, we will also try to shed some light on the geographic origins of the first and currently lost manuscript from which this version we are dealing with originates.

Nowadays, there is a wide range of opinion concerning the attitude of mediaeval English scribes when transcribing poetry. The results of this study on the geographic provenance of this poem will give us a reliable insight into the attitude of our scribe.

The final aim of our research is to find out whether English scribes from 1350 to 1450 copied rhymes and alliteration and translated the rest of the poem into their own dialects or may be they translated the whole poem or what...but the possibilities are many.

Finding a general pattern for scribal behaviour in mediaeval poetry means repeating the same experiment on more poems and scribes in order to achieve more reliable data.

This time, we will limit our study to a single poem as it is in any case the beginning of either the confirmation or refutation of our hypothesis: Mediaeval English scribes copied rhymes and alliteration and translated the rest of the poem into their own dialects when copying poetry.

From previous research, there remains many unanswered questions and insufficient data. We will follow a new methodology. We will base our analysis on the orthography of our corpus and we will make use of the so-called "fit"-technique devised by the authors of A Linguistic Atlas of late Mediaeval English.