A Dialectal Study of the First Quire in National Library of Wales, Brogyntyn MS ii.1

Abstract

Brogyntyn MS ii.1 (olim Porkington 10) is a mid-fifteenth-century collection of prose and verse copied by multiple scribes. As the signatures suggest, quire 1 did not belong to the originally intended book but was initially unrelated to the other twenty-five extant quires and a singleton. These two distinct parts of the codex became physically and textually connected when Scribe I used the end of this booklet (fols. 8v -10v ) to start copying a text that continued at the beginning of quire 2 (fol. 11r ). The volume’s Middle English texts and place(s) of production were tentatively associated with the West-Midland counties of Cheshire or Shropshire (Ackerman 1947; Kurvinen 1951, 1969; Huws 1996). While a dialectal study of the core of the manuscript is currently underway by Carrillo-Linares and Garrido-Anes (forthcoming), the present paper aims to offer a detailed analysis of the English texts in the first quire–except for Scribe I’s later addition–and to delimit their linguistic provenance. The methodology followed is that devised in A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (LALME) (McIntosh, Samuels and Benskin 1986).