A Twelfth-Century Canon Regular and His Curious Accent Marks

In my last blog post, I promised you’d get to know a notorious twelfth-century canon regular, so here you go. Meet Orm – Augustinian canon, spelling reformer, and author of the Ormulum (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 1). We don’t know much else about Orm, except that his dialect places him in South Lincolnshire, perhaps at Bourne Abbey, and that he had a brother, Walter, who was also an Augustinian.

Everything we do know about Orm comes from his Ormulum, a collection of sermons written with the aim of saving the souls of the English people. But one gets the impression that the author and his work were not too popular, because we have no evidence that the Ormulum has ever been copied, and modern scholars do not seem to like it much either – not for its looks or content at least, judging by the abundance of unflattering remarks in the literature: Bennett, Smithers & Davis call the manuscript “singularly ugly and untidy” (1968), M. B. Parkes (1930-2013), the Oxford paleographer, is said to have commented that "it looks as though it was written with a stick" (both according to Worley, p. 19), Dickinson (1950, p. 228) believes Orm’s compositions were singularly suited to inducing “widespread somnolence” in congregations, and Dickins & Wilson (1956) consider the Ormulum “an intolerably diffuse and tedious work” (p. 82) with a boring, repetitive rhythm that “calls for subject-matter of high interest if the work is to be at all endurable, and that it is far from having” (p. 81).

However, there is one group that has always been interested in Orm’s work: linguists (or their nearly extinct predecessors: philologists). And this is because the Ormulum is written in a sort of phonetic spelling system, offering a unique insight into the pronunciation of its author’s early Middle English.

The basic rule of Orm’s system (described best in Anderson & Britton 1999) is the following: A vowel is long whenever the letter representing it is followed in word-final position by a single consonant graph, but it is short when the final consonant graph is doubled. So long-vowel brid means ‘bride’ while short-vowel bridd means ‘young bird’. In between two vowels, however, a double consonant graph indicates that it – the consonant itself – must be pronounced long (compare sune ‘son’ and sunne ‘sun’), and Orm cannot also indicate preceding vowel length in such contexts. For this reason, he occasionally adds single acutes or breves where disambiguation seems helpful, as in the pair wrítenn (‘to write’) and wrĭtenn (‘written’).

So far so good. But Orm did not stop there. He used another kind of diacritic, double acute accents, on (almost) every sequence of a vowel followed by a single final t. We know from the single – rather than double – final consonant in főt ‘foot’ or űt ‘out’ that the preceding vowel is long, so what in God’s name does he want to tell us? That’s what I tried to find out in my master’s thesis.

First of all, I needed data. Luckily, some people in Sweden https://www.english.su.se/ormulum/about-the-project were preparing a new edition of the Ormulum which unlike the previous edition, published in 1878, would faithfully reproduce all of Orm’s accents. They kindly sent me a preprint, and I set upon programming in hopes of letting the computer do much of the work for me. Then I went to Oxford, where I spent my time reading a great deal on the Ormulum’s orthography and looking at pictures of the manuscript, and where after some initial difficulties – the first reply I received after requesting to see the manuscript was along the lines of “You know it is a treasure, right?” – I got to examine the Ormulum under a magnifying glass.

Having obtained sufficient data, I analysed the pattern of Orm’s double accenting, looked at exceptions, compared Orm’s double accenting with his own single accenting and with the double accenting in other English and Anglo-Norman manuscripts, and I read a lot about twelfth-century orthography and phonology. But the crucial piece of evidence came from the Ormulum itself. A second scribe, referred to as Hand C, rewrote one of Orm’s verses which had been crossed out. In doing this, they turned Orm’s főt ‘foot’ into fótt. Now, if this was a sensible spelling in Hand C’s mind – as we should expect it was given that they endowed it with an accent – we can infer that a double final t and a single acute did not seem contradictory to them. And this potential spelling habit might have been the thorn in Orm’s side, violating so clearly the basic rule of his reformed spelling, which as you may recall states that a double final consonant indicates a short preceding vowel.

Unexpected doublings of final consonants after a long vowel seem to be a phenomenon much more frequent after the Norman Conquest (AD 1066) than before it, occurring more often for t than for any other consonant, and there is some evidence to suppose that such a spelling habit could have entered English from French as the languages and spelling traditions cross-fertilized. Orm could have suspected that copyists or readers might fall back into this unfortunate habit, thereby thwarting his plan of providing preachers with a book that not only contained sermons to save the souls of the English people but also transparent correspondences between spelling and pronunciation that would help render the preachers’ delivery more effective.

The above is what I ended up arguing in my master’s thesis after initially mistaking (as I think now) correlation for causation: Double accents occur (almost) exclusively above long vowels, so I thought they must redundantly indicate that the vowel is long, while in fact the association with long vowels might only be a side effect. Like most people writing a master’s thesis I had my moments of despair in the process, but at least I can now say that no one has ever looked as closely as I have at this particular feature of the Ormulum’s orthography – I’m also pretty sure no person of sound mind would have ever wanted to, but that’s another story.

References:

Text:

Anderson, John & Derek Britton. 1999. The orthography and phonology of the Ormulum. English Language & Linguistics 3(2). 299-334.

Bennett, A. W., G. V. Smithers & N. Davis. 1968. Early Middle English verse and prose. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Dickins, B. & R. M Wilson. 1956. Early Middle English Texts (Revised Edition). Cambridge: Bowes & Bowes.

Dickinson, J. C. 1950. The origins of the Austin Canons and their introduction into England. London: S.P.C.K.

Worley, M. 2003. Using the Ormulum to Redefine Vernacularity. In F. Somerset & N. Watson (eds.), The Vulgar Tongue: Medieval and Postmedieval Vernacularity, 19-30. University Park, PA: Penn State Press.

Images:

Picture 1: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 1 (The Ormulum), folio 3r: The beginning of Orm’s preface with a double-accented Ȝe̋t in line 5

Picture 2: The Ormulum with the present author at the Weston Library.