Langland’s Dialect and Final -e

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Langland's Dialect and Final -e Hoyt N. Duggan University of Virginia M.L. SAMUELS in ment studies of Langland's dialect ,nd grammar has argued persuasively on the basis of alliterative practice and relict forms in the manuscripts of the B and C versions of Piers Plowman (PP/) that the dialect ofsouthwest Worcestershire "was in fact the one that he used in his holographs."1 Samuels reconstructs in a number of details the phonological and morphological features of Langland's dialect. He conjectures that the language of the three C manuscripts, X, I, and Y, written in that southwest Worcestershire dialect, is very close to Langland's and argues that the "reconstruction ofLangland's dialect could probably be best achieved by adopting X as the basis and modifying it in a conservative direction."2 I wish here to add to Samuels's characterization of Langland's language one additional bit of information on the status of final inflec­ tional and etymological -e. Samuels himself addressed this issue, though inconclusively. I quote in its entirety his statement on final -e: 1 M. L. Samuels, "Langland's Dialect," MAi 54 (1985):242. See also his "Dialect and Grammar," inJohn A. Alford, ed., A Companion to Piers Plowman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 201-21. All quotations from Piers Plowman, unless otherwise noted in the text, come from the following editions: George Kane, ed., PiersPlowman: The A Version (London: Athlone Press, 1960); George Kane and E. lalbot Donaldson, eds., Piers Plowman: The B Version (London: Athlone Press, 1975); Derek Pearsall, ed., Piers Plowman by WilliamLangland: AnEdition ofthe C-Text (London: Edward Arnold, 1978). I also quote fromWW Skeat, ed., The Vision o/Wtiliam Concerning Piers thePlowman in ThreeParallel Texts, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1886). Chaucer quotations are from Larry D. Benson, gen. ed., The Riverside Chaucer, 3d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987). I ignore editorial punctuation, provide extra space to indicate the caesura when citinga full line, and sometimes supply in braces an -e or -n not in the editedtext. The corpus analyzed for this study involved one-founh of the B text: Prol.-passus 3, 10.1-200, 15.1-400, and 18.200-399 and the correspondinglines inversionsA and C. Themanuscriptsigils cited here are the standardones and are fullyidentified and themanuscriptsdescribed in the editions cited. To avoidconfusion of manuscript sigils with the three versions of Piers Plowman, the versions are cited in boldface. 2 Samuels, "Langland's Dialect," p. 244. 157 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER A more difficult problem is posed by final -e, for here the evidence of texts from the same area is no certain guide. As I have suggested elsewhere, in the late xiv century in southern England the use of -e depended on varying conditions of stress and register, and the individual usage of an author cannot be established simply on the evidence of when and where he lived. If there is no holograph, the only other possible evidence is the author's practice in writing syllabic metre. The conclusions that can be drawn from stressed metre are much less certain. One possible indica­ tion is from half-lines that would, without -e, be too short to fall into any of the recognized stress patterns. For example, at B.ix.19, MS L (Skeat's text) reads "bi his first wyf," which lacks the weak adjective -e after first and the dative -e afterwyf The Kane-Donaldson reading "bi his firste wyue" is that oftheir base-text, W, and that is borne out by the reading ofX, "by his furste wyue." This and other similar cases show that Langland must have made at least some use ofgrammatical final -e. In MS X, the -e is to some extent over-represented, and Kane and Donaldson's MSW may well give a fairer representation of it, even though the language of that MS is London, notWorcestershire. In any case, it is perfectly reasonable to read the B-text in the form in which it would have been best understood by the London audience for which it was intended.3 When Samuels wrote that paragraph, scholars imagined that syllables were not counted in Middle...