WORD-PLAY AS EVIDENCE FOR THE DATE OF "DURHAM"

Abstract

De situ Dunelmi, also known simply as Durham, is an Old English poem of twenty-one lines describing the city of Durham, particularly its abundant wildlife and its equally plentiful holy relics.1 It has been called a simple 'class-room assignment' in poetic composition,2 but more recent scholarship has revealed its great precision of language and complex use of word-play.3 In addition to this literary interest, its historical context lends the poem great significance. It is generally thought to have been written to commemorate the translation of St Cuthbert's remains to the new cathedral at Durham in 1104, and has thus been referred to as 'our latest specimen of classical OE verse'.4 In fact, its editor has dated it to some time between 1104 and 1109,5 making it a rare example of Old English poetry written after the Norman Conquest. Unfortunately, the situation is not quite as straightforward as that, and both limits of that date range have since been called into question, leaving us with the rather unsatisfyingly broad range of perhaps most of the eleventh century.6 Thankfully, however, new evidence based on word-play suggests that the 1104 x 1109 dating may not actually be far off, and can be accepted with only minor adjustment.The linguistic evidence is inconclusive, and provides only a broad indication of the poem's date of composition. It is generally thought to represent one of the latest stages in the development of the Northumbrian dialect before the language could no longer truly be called Old English.7 It has several late Anglian features such as the loss of initial hbefore a consonant, the confusion of e and a in end syllables, the loss of inflectional -n in words such as 'deope' (line 8), 'clene' (line 11), and 'eadige' (line 18), among others.8 Furthermore, it exhibits the final stage in the development of the spelling of OE a before a nasal in the Anglian dialects; although the original West Germanic a before a nasal was preserved in Late West Saxon, it had a tendency to become 0 in Mercian and Northumbrian. This change was already beginning in the age of Bede, who used a and 0 in equal proportions. In the tenth-century glosses to the Lindisfarne Gospels, 0 is used with few exceptions, and it is used exclusively in Durham? The poem's language therefore seems to indicate that it was written some time in the late eleventh or early twelfth century,10 but we cannot be more precise than that without further study.It thus falls to the historical evidence to provide greater precision. The Anglo- Norman historian Symeon of Durham makes clear and indisputable reference to the poem in his history of the church of Durham, the Libellus de exordio atque procursu istius, hoc est Dunhelmensis, ecclesie, which thus provides a terminus ante quern for Durham. David Rollason has shown that Symeon's work must have been produced sometime between 1104 and 1115, a slight revision of earlier scholarly opinion which had dated it to between 1104 and 1109.11 It is therefore possible that the poem was written as late as 1115.The terminus post quern is more problematic, and it is this issue upon which new evidence can provide useful insight. Much of the poem is devoted to a list of relics held by the community at Durham, among them those of Cuthbert, Oswald, and Bede. This matches the remains described in accounts of the translation of St Cuthbert in 1104,12 and most scholars have assumed that the poem was thus written after, or indeed on, that occasion.13 However, H. S. Offler righdy pointed out that this is not necessarily the case, as all of the relics mentioned had been in the community's possession since the removal of Bede's remains to the site from Jarrow by an act of furta sacra in the first half of the eleventh century.14 Indeed, the acquisition of Bede's relics at that time is as likely to have provided inspiration for the poem's composition as Cuthbert's translation more than half a century later. Offler's was the last scholarly word on the date of the poem, and while more recent work has sometimes ignored or dismissed his reservations,15 no one has direcdy addressed them. …