Seventeen Words of Middle Dutch Origin in the Miller's Tale?

Abstract

IN support of his argument that Heile van Beersele is ‘the closest we have to Chaucer's source for the Miller's Tale’, Peter G. Beidler calls attention to ‘the Middle Dutch origins of a number of unusual words’ in the Middle English tale, which ‘suggest that Chaucer might well have known enough Middle Dutch to draw some of his words from that register’.1 His argument, then, is not that these words occur in Heile – in fact they do not and the verbal parallels he later cites (259–61) could apparently have travelled in either direction – but rather that Chaucer, using a Dutch source, then drew on other vocabulary from this language. But are the words that he identifies Dutch in origin? Following the list, he reveals the source of his confusion when he explains why his evidence remains ‘uncertain’: ‘For some of these words we can also find cognates in other medieval languages besides Middle Dutch – Anglo-Norman, Old French, German, and Anglo-Saxon’.2 Middle English words and the Anglo-Saxon ones from which they descend are not cognates (‘words in different languages derived from the same root’),3 nor indeed are those borrowed from Old French and Anglo-Norman and their romance sources. Nine of Beidler's ‘Dutch’ words are clearly from Old English; one is from Old English or Old Norse; and another is derived from Old English elements. One has been borrowed from Anglo French and another is most likely French in origin. At most four, crul, kiked, shot, and tub, may then derive from Dutch.