<i>Bilive</i> and <i>Blive:</i> Distribution and Metrical Function

Abstract

Bilive and Blive:Distribution and Metrical Function Myra Stokes The adverb derived from the phrase bi live appears in Middle English either with or without elision of the vowel of bi: that is, as bilive or blive. References to the two forms in what follows should be taken to include the variants recorded for each (such as belive, bileve, belef, for the former, and blif, bleve, bleive for the latter). Consideration of the form in which the word appears in any given text(s) is, it will emerge, of significant diagnostic value with regard to dialect and meter and can have surprisingly far-reaching textual and editorial implications. The way in which bilive/ blive figures in alliterative verse will be the special focus of this paper, but there are several general points that should first be made about the adverb (which in Middle English is used in a sense-'quickly,' 'promptly,' 'at once'-which is not in fact recorded in Old English for be life). It is by and large a poetic word, very common in verse, but uncommon in prose. The few prose texts that do use it do not use it frequently. Its absence from any one substantial prose work is not in itself significant, since there are also long poems, from earlier and later in the period, such as The Owl and the Nightingale and Piers Plowman, which contain not a single instance of the word-though that in itself suggests that it is not so stylistically neutral a term as its synonyms anon or swithe (both of which occur not infrequently as manuscript variants for b(i)live). But it must be significant that the word occurs twenty-six times in Chaucer's verse, but not at all in his prose; that Mirk uses it three times, as a rhyme word, in the 2046 lines of his verse Instructions for Parish Priests (394, 1418, 1444), but not at all in the 74 prose sermons of his Festial;1 and that the only instance of the word in Malory ("Yet sir Launcelot and Sir Lovel rescowed hym [i.e. Bedivere] blyve"2) occurs in that section which is based on the alliterative Morte Arthure, the wording of which Malory follows very closely [End Page 190] and in which the word (which occurs several times in the poem) must certainly have figured at that point in the version Malory was following.3 Even in verse, its function is more metrical than semantic: it is hardly ever found without stress in alliterative verse, where it provides either one of the alliterative beats or (especially in the case of bilive, as will be observed) the usually non-alliterating line-ending stress; and outside alliterative verse it is most frequently used to supply a rhyme. All 26 instances of the word in Chaucer, for instance, occur in rhyme,4 as do all those in the Confessio Amantis.5 Variation as between blive and bilive forms is not random, but has a clear regional basis. Though the word is not used as a dialect indicator in the Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English,6 it probably ought to be, since there is an unambiguous distinction between northern and southern usage. Southern texts show only blive, which is thus the form invariably used by Chaucer, Gower, Hoccleve and Lydgate, in the east; and, in the west, by, for instance, the fourteenth-century Friar Thomas de Hales (=Hailes, in Gloucestershire) in his "Love-Ron" and by the Gloucester monks responsible for The Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, in which texts it figures respectively once (line 21: "Toward his ende he hyep blyue") and nineteen times (always as a rhyme word).7 It is bilive, on the other hand, that appears in northern texts, and bilive is therefore the form always found in, for instance, Cursor Mundi and all Scottish texts. Thus The [End Page 191] South English Legendary has only blive forms, whereas the form found in The Northern Passion is bilive, which occurs seven times in the version in Harley 4196-described in LALME as N(orthern) M(iddle) E(nglish)-where it is confirmed (as against blive) by meter. The other manuscripts...