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Middle English Poetry (PCMEP)

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The Proverbs of Alfred

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About the text:
Text name: The Proverbs of Alfred
Alternative names: At Salford [Sifford] sat theigns many
Content: The Proverbs of Alfred is the principal Middle English proverb collection. The text begins with a narration of King Alfred teaching his company of thanes, bishops and other learned men how to live properly. The individual proverbs then open with "Thus said Alfred..." They are about religious conduct, popular wisdom, advice on family, friends and women, education and traditional superstition.
Genre/subjects: proverbs, precepts, admonition, popular wisdom
Dialect of original composition: Unknown, probably Southern
The most comprehensive commentary on the dialect of the original comes from South (1931). She first summarizes the consensus view at the time that the "Proverbs of Alfred has generally been considered a Southern poem. Skeat (p. xxxviii), Bergström (p. xviii), and Hall (II, 292), agree in recognizing it as such. […] Wyld and Jordan both include the Proverbs in their list of Southern monuments" (ibid.: 64). She then specifies the likely place of origin, "locat[ing] the home of the archetype as somewhere near the border of the East Midland and the South" (ibid. 98). "The precise spot at which the archetype was written cannot be determined, of course, but it would appear to belong within the limits of Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Bucks, and lower Northamptonshire. This location would agree with the dialect characteristics, with the external evidence connecting the Maidstone MS. [one of the manuscript witnesses of the text, see ibid.: 5-6] with Northampton, and also with the naming of Siford in the poem as the site of Alfred’s gathering [As far as the evidence goes, Sifford mentioned in line 1 probably refers to modern day Shefford in Berkshire (ibid.: 31-42)]" (ibid.: 84). While Berkshire could easily count as Southern, Northamptonshire would not fall into the Southern dialect region anymore. Hence, the archetype is probably best classified as Southern, but could also count as East Midlands (ibid.: 98).
Date of original composition: 1150-1200
Skeat (1907: xxxix) dated "these 'Proverbs' between A.D. 1205 and 1210" on account of similiarities with Layamon's Brut. However, subsequent scholars have refined this view. The Proverbs are now generally believed to be a twelfth century composition. For example, the homilist of Lambeth Homily no. V may have alluded to Alfred's Proverb B9, both prescribing humility for the wealthy, which, "in turn, establishes a 12th-century date for the Proverbs, if the dating of Morris, Morsbach, and Hall for the Lambeth Homilies may be accepted" (South 1931: 55, for more justification of a twelfth century date of composition, see ibid.: 42, 63, 98).
The text is "a twelfth century cultural artifact" (Rouse 2005: 13).
"Philological criteria date the composition of the archetype to the second part of the twelfth century, between c. 1150 and c. 1180" (Minkova 1997: 427).
The original is thought to be from the twelfth century, possibly as early as 1150 (Arngart 1955: 55-7).
"The composition of that original should, I think, be placed somewhere about 1180 A.D." (Hall 1920: 295).
The online version of the Middle English Dictionary lists the date of composition as ?c1150.
The poem may originally have ended in l. 572 with the formulaic expression wurþe þat iwurþe, iwurþe Godes wille! The following lines may thus have been added somewhat later (Skeat 1907: 67). However, it also "looks as if the greater portion of Part III [=from line 573 to the end] is nearly as old as all that precedes it" (ibid. xli).
Suggested date: 1180
PCMEP period: 1a (1150-1200)
Versification: mostly alliteration; some lines are alliterative with rhyme; some lines are couplets without alliteration
Index of ME Verse: 433 (IMEV), 433 (NIMEV)
Digital Index of ME Verse: 714
Wells: 7.5
MEC HyperBibliography: Prov.Alf.


About the edition and manuscript base:
Edition: Skeat, Walter W. 1907. The Proverbs of Alfred. Oxford: Clarendon. 1-52.
Manuscript used for edition: Oxford, Trinity College B. 14.39 (323), ff. 85r-87v (Skeat's [B])
London, British Library Cotton Galba A.XIX (Skeat's [C])
Oxford, Jesus College 29, Part II, ff. 189r-192r (Skeat's [A])

Skeat prints the poem from three sources. Firstly, there is a longer version (Skeat's [B], 709 lines). Secondly, there are three short transcripts of a manuscript that was destroyed in the Cottonian Fire in 1731 (Skeat's [C], 98 lines). Skeat prints a version based on all three transcripts with the variant readings in a critical text apparatus. The Cottonian manuscript, as represented by these three transcripts, agrees very closely with [B]. Finally, there exists a shorter version of the text (Skeat's [A], 458 lines).
Online manuscript description: Manuscript [B], Oxford, Trinity College B. 14.39:
LAEME
Manuscripts of the West Midlands (item 46)
Trinity College Cambridge: The James Catalogue Of Western Manuscripts
Manuscript [C], London, British Library Cotton Galba A.XIX:
The manuscript was destroyed during the Ashburnham House Fire in 1731. Thus there is no description of this manuscript available.
Parts of the poem were transcribed prior to its destruction: (i) There is a transcript made by Humfrey Wanley (30 lines, before 1705). It can be found in his 1705 book Catalogue of Ancient Manuscripts, see
Linguarum veterum septentrionalium thesaurus grammatico-criticus et archaeologicus (page 231).
(ii) Another transcript was made by John Spelman (95 lines, before 1643). The Spelman manuscript is now MS. Oxford, Bodleian Library Rawlinson D. 324, see
Catalogi codicum manuscriptorum Bibliothecae Bodleianae (item 324).
(iii) Finally, a transcript was produced by Richard James (119 lines, before 1638). The transcript is now MS. Oxford, Bodleian Library James 6 (3843). For general information on the collection, see
Bodley Library: James Manuscripts
In addition, three folios of the burnt manuscript survive. They were edited and published by Ker (1936). For a description of facsimilies of those surviving folios, see
British Library: Archives and Manuscripts Descriptions
Manuscript [A], Oxford, Jesus College 29, Part II:
LAEME
Manuscripts of the West Midlands (item 23)
Manuscript dialect: Manuscript [B], Oxford, Trinity College B. 14.39:
West-Midlands
The writing system of the scribe of the Proverbs of Alfred in the Trinity manuscript is "wildly profligate, variable and rich" (Laing 1999: 254). For example he represents the phoneme /v/ variably as u (by far the most common variant), ƿ, uu, w, ȝ, v or f (see ibid.: 259, Table 3, for variation between various letters ("littera") and the sounds they represent ("potestas"), and ibid.: 260, Table 4, for spelling variations of individual lexemes and morphemes. Laing designates the scribe as 'scribe D'). As a consequence it was hypothesized that "the scribe must have been a Norman" (Skeat 1907: xiv, see ibid.: xiv-xv for details). In this case, it would not be useful to ascertain a scribal dialect. However, it is now generally assumed that the scribe was in fact a native speaker of English since ethnically pure Anglo-Normans should have been quite rare by the thirteenth century and since an Anglo-Norman monoglot could not have made systematic alterations to English spellings on the basis of English phonology. Instead, the extraordinary spelling variation in the manuscript is explained as a consequence of the scribe’s experimentation with various scripting strategies – traditional Anglo-Saxon characters, graphemes known from recording French and Latin, and entirely novel scripting devices – to meet the requirements imposed by thirteenth century English. Further, spelling variation may result from pre-existing variation in the vorlage manuscript, individual preferences determined by the scribe’s phonology, training and creativity, as well as the possibility of genuine scribal errors. Laing (1999) mentions an impressive number of scholars who concur with this view, including Cecily Clark, Michael Benskin, Oliver Prior, William Rothwell, and Ian Shot. She suggests that the language of the scribe must "belong in the SW Midlands" (ibid.: 254) and localizes it specifically to Herefordshire (ibid. 259).
South (1931: 64-84) investigates twelve phonological and morphological features (attributed to Henry Cecil Wyld) in the Trinity manuscript to test whether the manuscript is roughly more Southern or more Midlands. She finds that the manuscript dialect clearly belongs more generally to a Midlands dialect, and not to the South. (However, she – probably incorrectly – assigns the scribal language to the East-Midlands rather than the West-Midlands based on two of her features (test 3, ibid. 69-72 and test 4, ibid.: 72-76). Incidentally, this attribution is contradicted by one of her own features (test 11, ibid.: 81-83), which points towards "some Southwestern influence" (ibid. 82).)
McIntosh et al. (1986: 65) reappraise the dialect of the scribe of the Proverbs of Alfred in the Trinity manuscript. Based on a comprehensive list of linguistic features, they assign its dialect to the West-Midlands.
Manuscript [C], London, British Library Cotton Galba A.XIX:
Unknown
South (1931: 64-84) investigates twelve phonological and morphological features (attributed to Henry Cecil Wyld) in the Cotton transcripts of manuscript [C], Cotton Galba A.XIX to test whether the manuscript dialect was roughly more Southern or more Midlands. She finds that it clearly belongs more generally to a Midlands dialect than to the South. Since the Cotton transcripts are very closely related to the West-Midlands manuscript [B], Trinity College B. 14.39, it is possible that its scribal language is comparable and might have been written by a West-Midlands scribe as well. On the other hand, South finds that the manuscript belongs to the "Southern part of East Midland" (1931: 84). Hence, the precise scribal dialect of MS. Cotton Galba A.XIX is currently uncertain.
Manuscript [A], Oxford, Jesus College 29, Part II::
Southern
South (1931: 64-84) investigates twelve phonological and morphological features (attributed to Henry Cecil Wyld) in the Jesus College manuscript to test whether the manuscript dialect is roughly more Southern or more Midlands. She finds that it clearly belongs more generally to a Southern than a Midlands dialect. The following examples illustrate: The Jesus manuscript exhibits the usual Southern present plural ending -eþ (e.g. wurcheþ line 398, not the ending -en typical of the Trinity manuscript) (test 8, ibid.: 80). The Jesus manuscript shows the Southern reflex e of Old English fracture ea before r (e.g. bern line 430, erewe line 236, not the a normally found in the Trinity manuscript, as in barin line 548, areȝe line 204) (test 5, ibid.: 70).
However, McIntosh et al. (1986: 199) localize the scribe to the West-Midlands. It is possible that their dialect attribution is in fact more adequate.
Manuscript date: Manuscript [B], Oxford, Trinity College B. 14.39:
s. xiii-ex
The manuscript is a "late-13th-century verse miscellany" (Laing 1999: 252).
Manuscript [C], London, British Library Cotton Galba A.XIX:
s. xiii-in
"The hand, which Wanley considered to be contemporary with that of the Trinity Homilies (he dates both MSS. 'circa temp. Henrici II aut Ricardi I'), seems to me to belong to the early thirteenth century" (Ker 1936: 115).
Manuscript [A], Oxford, Jesus College 29, Part II::
s. xiii-ex
The manuscript was dated 1270-1300 by Hill (1977: 98)


About the file:
File name: M1a.ProvAlf
ID: ProvAlf,w,x,y,z: w=token, x=page, y=line z= version and proverb number {C1-C5, A6, B6-B37}
Word count: 3,095
Token count: 250
Line count: 717 (709 +9 -1)
The line count indicates 709 lines in Skeat's edition. However, the line counts 305, 306, 311, 330, 331, 400, 405 are doubled in Skeat's edition to make the lines in manuscript [B] fit the respective lines in manuscript [A]. In addition, lines 526 and 670 are printed as two separate lines but counted as one in Skeat's edition. This gives and additional 9 lines. Finally, line 208 is missing in the edition and cannot easily be reconstructed. It should therefore be subtracted from the overall number of lines.


Other:
General notes: Four lines occur separately elsewhere (DIMEV 3405).
Remarks on parses: The line breaks in the electronic text file follow Skeat's edition (1907: 1-52).
The PCMEP file divides the sources printed in Skeat in the following way: The file includes the [C] text up to line 98 (C1-C5), the [A] text for lines 99-117 missing in [B] (A6), and the [B] text for the rest of the file (B6-B37). Exceptions: ll. 47-8 are missing in [C] and substituted from [B]. ll. 80-81 are missing in [C] and substituted from [A]. The pronoun hi in l. 123 has been copied from [A] into [B]. The obscure l. 143 in [B], so wel him þet mot shapen (for various interpretations, cf. Gropp 1829: 55-6), has been replaced by the more transparent equivalent from [A], wel is him þat hit ischapen is. In l. 233, the pronoun þe is doubled in [B]; the second occurence has been omitted so that the word order pattern now conforms to the corresponding line in [A]. ll. 264-7 are missing in [B] and have been substituted from [A]. ll. 290-1 are missing in [B] and have been substituted from [A]. l. 314, missing in [B], has been added from [A]. l. 320 is missing in [B] but the replacement of the single line fom [A] would be non-sensical, and so all of ll. 318-20 have been taken from [A]. ll. 333-4 are taken from [A]. The word scumes in the obscure l. 334 as scumes, forteoþ, a quote from a lost song, is interpreted, following Skeat (1907: 62), as 'twighlight-shadows' (Icelandic skumi 'dusk, twighlight') rather than as an error for quene (e.g. as in the MED entry for seien). ll. 337-8 are missing in [B] and taken from [A]. ll. 369-70 are missing in [B] and taken from [A]. ll. 373-4, and frendschipe o werlde fairest to wurchen, without a finite verb, has been replaced with the corresponding lines from [A], Freond þu þe iwurche. In l. 417, the adverb neuere has been deleted so that the word order is now as in the corresponding line of [A]. ll. 438-439, missing in [B], have been added from [A]. The six last lines of [A], ll. 452-456, which are missing in B, have been added, including the interjection Amen and the Latin explicit. All of these changes are indicated as CODE and / or, where appropriate, in the token IDs of the parsed file.
The parses are largely unproblematic.


References

Arngart, Olaf S. 1955. The Proverbs of Alfred. 2 Volumes. Lund: Gleerup.
Gropp, Ernest. 1829. On the language of the Proverbs of Alfred. Halle: Typis Ploetzianis.
Hall, Joseph. 1920. Selections from Early Middle English, 1130-1250. Oxford: Clarendon. (Part I: Texts - available online), (Part II: Notes - available online)
Hill, Betty. 1977. 'The Twelfth-Century Conduct of Life, Formerly the Poema Morale or A Moral Ode.' Leeds Studies in English n.s. 9. 97-144 (available online)
Ker, Neil R. 1936. 'MS. Cotton Galba A. XIX "Proverbs of Alfred".' Medium Aevum 5. 115-120.
Laing, Margaret. 1999. 'Confusion "wrs" Confounded: Litteral Substitution Sets in Early Middle English Writing Systems.' Neuphilologische Mitteilungen 100.3. 251-270.
Minkova, Donka. 1997. 'The Credibility of Pseudo-Alfred: Prosodic Insights in Post-Conquest Mongrel Meter'. Modern Philology 94.4. 427-454.
Rouse, Robert, A. 2005. The idea of Anglo-Saxon England in Middle English romance. Studies in medieval romance. Woolbridge: Brewer.
Skeat, Walter W. 1907. The Proverbs of Alfred. Oxford: Clarendon. (available online)
South, Helen P. 1931. The Proverbs of Alfred. New York: Haskell House Publishers.