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Leland's transcript of Ælfric's Glossary

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 September 2008

Ronald E. Buckalew
Ronald E. Buckalew
Affiliation:
The Pennsylvania State University
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Extract

When Henry VIII‘s Antiquary, John Leland, died in 1552, he left several volumes of notes and transcripts which have come to be called his Collectanea Volume iii of this collection, now in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, contains a long series of extracts from a Latin–Old English glossary entitled ‘Ex antiquissimo Dictionario Latinosaxonico‘. It has not yet been noticed in print that these extracts are a transcript of items from Ælfric‘s Glossary, and it has not been realized that they were copied from a manuscript not otherwise attested. Although (excluding a Latin–Old Cornish version) the Glossary is extant in seven medieval manuscripts (four virtually complete) and in two sets of medieval excerpts – two more manuscripts being known from sixteenth-and seventeenth-century transcripts – this record of a twelfth text is significant for several reasons. It provides valuable textual evidence; it is an additional sign of the medieval popularity of the Glossary; it is an important witness to the beginnings of Anglo-Saxon studies in the years immediately following the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII; its publication in Hearne‘s edition of the Collectanea in 1715 was in fact the first printing of any version of Ælfric's Glossary (although not recognized as such); and it demonstrates the need for more attention to Leland's Collectanea by both medieval and Renaissance scholars.

Type
Research Article
Information
Anglo-Saxon England , Volume 7 , December 1978 , pp. 149 - 164
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1978

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References

page 149 note 1 Leland's transcript as printed by Hearne (see below, p. 155) was cited, without reference to its relationship to Ælfric's Glossary, by Kennedy, Arthur A., A. Bibliography of Writings on the English Language from the Beginning ofPrinting to the End of 1922 (Cambridge, Mass., 1927)Google Scholar no. 3284, and by Alston, R. C., A. Bibliography of the English Language from the Invention of Printing to the Year 1800 III. I: Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English Miscellaneous Works [and] Vocabulary (Menston, Leeds, 1970)Google Scholar, nos. 12–14, reproduced in pis. x–xi. In an unpublished doctoral dissertation, ‘The History of Old English and Old Norse Studies in England from the Time of Francis Junius till the End of the Eighteenth Century’ (Oxford, 1938)Google Scholar, J. A. W. Bennett also noted (P. 349, n. 2)that Leland derived this material from Ælfric' Glossary. While this article was awaiting publication and copies of its abstract and typescript had been for some time in circulation, a note appeared which contains many of its conclusions without the evidence on which they are based: Swanton, M. J., ‘Eine wenig bekannte Fassung von Ælfrics Glossar’, ASNSL 213 (1976), 104–7Google Scholar.

I should like to thank several people who were particularly helpful while I was preparing this study: Professor J. A. W. Bennett, Dr Derek S. Brewer, Dr David N. Dumville, Dr Michael Lapidge, Dr Raymond I. Page, Professor James L. Rosier and especially Professor Peter Clemoes; also the staffs of the Pennsylvania State University Library, especially Mr Charles W. Mann; the University Library and the Parker Library of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; the Bodleian Library and St John's College Library, Oxford; and the British Library and Lambeth Palace Library, London. Much of the work was carried out during research leave provided by the Pennsylvania Stats University. An abbreviated version of this paper was read before the Old English Literature Section of the Tenth Conference on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in May 1975.

page 150 note 1 In arriving at these figures, I have counted a singular noun followed by its plural as one entry. These Latin plural forms may be taken as grammatical information rather than lexical, as the OE ma is always used to gloss the Latin plural, the Old English plural noun form then being left for the reader to supply. Feminine derivatives are counted separately from the masculine ones, however, as here the Old English nouns are explicitly specified. Where two or three terms in the same language are joined by a conjunction (pel, abbreviated l, or oððe), all of them and their gloss or lemma are treated together as one entry. When no conjunction is used, but the same gloss or lemma is used more than once, each instance is counted separately. This is also done on the rare occasions when both lemma and gloss are repeated in different contexts.

page 153 note 1 See, e.g., Rosier, James L., ‘The Sources of John Joscelyn's Old English-Latin Dictionary’ Anglia 78 (1960), 31.Google Scholar

page 156 note 1 See Anglo-Saxon, and Old English Vocabularies, ed. Thomas, Wright and Wulcker, R. P., 2nd ed. (London, 1884) i, 6/37Google Scholar (Corpus Glossary, Ker, Catalogue, no. 36), 131/14 (Antwerp-London Glossary, Ker, Catalogue, no. 2), 287/3 (Brussels Glossary, Ker, Catalogue, no. 9), 551/25 and 356/30 (Cleopatra alphabetical glossary, Ker, Catalogue, no. 143).

page 157 note 1 The other two occurrences of this word in Old English may derive from Ælfric's Glossary. One, hreohche as gloss to jannus, occurs in the fragments of the badly burned Cotton Otho E. i (Ker, Catalogue, no. 184), s. x/xi, as one of the entries added to the main glossary which itself was copied apparently from Cotton Cleopatra A. iii (Ker, Catalogue, no. 145). See Meritt, Herbert Dean, ‘Old English Glosses, mostly Dry Point’, JEGP 60 (1961), 446.Google Scholar Another of these additional entries is enula glossed pærl, which is otherwise peculiar to Ælfric's Glossary (Z 304/7) and the Antwerp-London Glossary. This is an enigmatic gloss-lemma relationship for which Meritt provides an explanation in Some of the Hardest Glosses in Old English (Stanford, 1968), pp. 29–30Google Scholar. Furthermore, it is also the Antwerp-London Glossary (s. xi in.) which contains the other instance of our word in the form reohhe as gloss to fannus (WW 181 /6). Max Forster has noted the dependence of the Antwerp-London Glossary on Ælfric's (Anglia 41 (1917), 94; see also Ladd, C. A., ‘The “Rubens” Manuscript and Archbishop Ælfric' Vocabulary’, RES n.s. 11 (1960), 353–64, at 363Google Scholar). Thus all three glossaries (Ælfric's, Antwerp-London and the additional entries in Otho E. i) are linked in some way, and the nature and dates of the entries suggest that Ælfric's came first. Although hreo(c)he is the form found in the two oldest extant manuscripts of the Glossary (O and C), as well as in L and F, the word is entered in the standard dictionaries under reohhe (Bosworth-Toller, Clark Hall-Meritt, and Holthausen; see also OED, s.v. reigh). Perhaps the initial h was present in the original text of the Glossary as a result of a folk-etymological association with breoh, ‘ rough‘, if it was not part of the correct Old English form of the word.

page 159 note 1 The catalogue was printed by Hearne, Thomas, Johannis Glastoniemis Chronica (Oxford, 1726) 11 423–44Google Scholar. The entry cited is on p. 441.

page 160 note 1 Manifested by such errors as his omission of the key verb sæde from the first of the three entries and his construing of þreo ceastra (‘three cities’) as a place-name. Throughout this transcription Leland followed Robert Talbot‘s annotations and underlinings in the manuscript, but in some instances Leland‘s treatment of them shows that, although Talbot understood the Old English text, he himself often did not.

page 161 note 1 Sisam, Kenneth, Studies in the History of Old English Literature (Oxford, 1955), p. 233Google Scholar, says of Lambarde‘s publication of Nowell's Archaionomia (1568) that ‘throughout his book final -e is added or omitted almost at random’; and Page, Raymond, ‘Anglo-Saxon Texts in Early Modern Transcripts’, Trans. of the Cambridge Bibliographical Soc. 6 (1972–1976), 80Google Scholar, points out that ‘ the Parkerian scribe who copied the text for CCCC 178… often added an inorganic -e to the ends of words, sometimes doubling the preceding consonant’, in addition to making several serious errors in a short text and failing to differentiate between þ and wynn.

page 161 note 2 Grant, Raymond J. S., ‘Laurence Nowell's Transcript of BM Cotton Otho B. xi’, ASE 3 (1974), 111–24Google Scholar. But see also Torkar, Roland, ‘Zu den ae. Medizinaltexten in Otho B. xi und Royal 12 D. xvii’, Anglia 94 (1976), 319–38.Google Scholar

page 162 note 1 The usual form of this word is ælþeodig. It seems strange that Leland should have omitted the / if it had stood in his exemplar, considering the attention he paid to the initial vowel. Even if he had omitted it at first, he could be expected to have noticed it when he corrected the vowel.

page 162 note 2 A puzzling deletion is the underpointed re in fyrres as gloss to ramnus (176, 227/8; Z 312/11). The problem is whether this deletion is Leland's correction of his own mistake or his accurate transcription of a manuscript correction, as all other manuscripts have fyrs (O, C, J, F, Q and V) or furs (W). In either case, however, it strengthens our confidence in his accuracy.

page 163 note 1 L shares its initial h with O, C, F and Otho E. i (initial b lacking in J, Q, V and W); its eo with all but V, which has /, and W, which has 0; its cb with O and Q (C and F h; J, V and Otho bcb).

page 164 note 1 Page, ‘Anglo-Saxon Texts’, pp. 75–9.

page 164 note 2 Somner printed the Grammar from Junius's transcript of R, which lacks the Glossary. Prior to Zupitza's 1880 edition the only other printings of the Glossary were Sir Thomas Phillipps's 1838 publication of W and Thomas Wright's edition of J and W in A Volume of Vocabularies (London, 1857)Google Scholar. Wright, however, followed Somner in attaching Ælfric's name to the Antwerp-London Glossary. Wülcker maintained the confusion of the glossaries in his widely used revision of Wright (see above, p. 156, n. 1), with the result that it has permeated much subsequent scholarship, from the Bosworth-Toller, Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Oxford, 1898)Google Scholar to Latham's, R. E. new Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, fasc. 1, A–B (London, 1975)Google Scholar. See Ladd, ‘The “Rubens” Manuscript and Archbishop Ælfric's Vocabulary’.