University of Virginia Library

—Here endes Morte Arthure writen by Robert of Thornton[1]

The problem of editing Middle English texts is basically one of evidence: if a poem survives in a number of manuscripts, one must choose among alternative readings, basing the decisions made on judgments about which alternative is more likely to be original, which more probably in error. If there is only one manuscript of a text available, the editor may be forced to rely on his own common sense and knowledge of medieval language and style in order to identify errors. In either case the process requires some familiarity with the mechanics of medieval book production and some understanding of the habits of reading and writing characteristic of the age—for example, the fact that a scribe's verbal sense was more likely to be auditory than visual.[2] In short, the editor's task is primarily one of evaluation, by whatever means available or appropriate, of the body or bodies of evidence before him.

In recent decades there has been an increasing emphasis on the analysis of scribal tendencies as a means of evaluating such evidence—on the face of it a sensible approach, since an understanding of the kinds of errors to which scribes were commonly subject, or the kinds of changes they were likely to make, at least establishes a range of probabilities against which a questionable reading may be measured. It appears that generalizations are possible, not only about commonly recognized errors such as c/t confusion and

homoeoteleuton, but also about such things as the tendency of fifteenth-century scribes to regularize or increase alliteration in such a poem as Piers Plowman.[3] But generalizations about scribal tendencies, of course, may or may not be applicable to the tradition of any one text. An example is the alliterative Morte Arthure, which appears in the unique Thornton MS text (Lincoln Cathedral Library MS. 91, fols. 53-98v) to have a number of alliterative irregularities. Whatever one's conclusions about whether those irregularities are authorial or scribal, it appears that the poem's succession of scribes did not participate to any marked extent in the general tendency of their contemporaries to regularize or increase alliteration.[4] For descriptions of scribal tendencies are based on statistical inference from the scribal habits of individuals and are not necessarily applicable to every individual. On the other hand, intensive analysis of the characteristics of individual scribes is in most cases of limited usefulness, because of their normal anonymity; Scribe A's habits in transcribing Text X are relevant only to that text, if no other transcriptions can be identified as his.

But there are cases in which the habits of an individual scribe are significant, cases in which a known individual has copied a variety of texts, and in which therefore the conclusions derived from his transcription of one text may be useful in evaluating his transcriptions of others. Such a scribe is Robert Thornton, lord of East Newton in Ryedale, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, in the earlier fifteenth century.[5] Although apparently an amateur, he made copies of many important texts. The two extant volumes known to have come from his pen, the "Thornton MS" itself and BL Addit. MS 31042, contain many romances as well as other texts both devotional and secular; the scribe is a factor to be reckoned with by students of such texts as The Awntyrs off Arthure, Sir Degrevant, Sir Eglamour of Artois, Thomas of Ercildoune, The Parlement of the Thre Ages, Winner and Waster, The Siege of Jerusalem, Richard Rolle's treatises and poems, and a miscellany of other works.[6]

The importance of this scribe, and the recent publication of the Scolar Press facsimile of the Lincoln MS (see note 5 above), have led to increased interest in him in the last few years. The exhaustive researches of George R. Keiser, for example, establish Thornton as "a man of some moderate prestige and influence," who "had a fairly ordinary life as an active, though by no means a leading citizen of Ryedale and the North Riding"; more important, he was "an avid reader and a man of industry, enthusiasm, and ambition" whose access to texts available in his region must have been at least partly the result of active search and inveterate book-borrowing.[7] Other scholars, however, have been led by the careful organization of Thornton's two anthologies, the general "expertness" of his scribal operations, the surprising skill of some of his decorations, and the mere bulk of his material to question his amateur status.[8] Nevertheless, the birth-record of the scribe's grandson Robert "in Ridayll anno domini m cccc liij" on fol. 49v of the Lincoln MS makes the identity of the scribe Robert Thornton with the landholder and active country gentleman Robert Thornton more than merely plausible (Keiser, p. 159), and the scribe's amateur status must be accepted. It appears, in fact, that Thornton was an amateur in the best sense of the word, loving his avocation enough to train himself in the requisite skills and to employ them conscientiously, if not always consistently.

Indeed, it may be because Thornton was not a professional scribe that he stands out as an individual, and it is appropriate that at least one of his compilations has come to be known by his name. The history of the "Thornton MS" is closely connected with that of his family, for it remained at East Newton until the late seventeenth century.[9] The selection of works included shows that Thornton was copying texts for his and his family's private use: it is just such a compendium of entertainment, instruction, religious edification, and practical advice as one might expect to find in the domestic library of a moderately bookish fifteenth-century gentleman's household. And, from the marginal scribblings and evidences of early mending, it was clearly well used as long as Thornton's descendents were capable of reading his language.

One might expect, then, that the scribe, not intending public circulation, would exercise considerable freedom in adapting the texts he copied for personal use. Yet several editors of Thornton texts have attested that, dialect aside, the scribe exhibited a remarkable fidelity to his texts.[10] And even in

terms of dialect, he only "half-transform[ed] his original," adding "a Yorkshire veneer" to texts he copied from other dialectal regions.[11] Certainly, in preserving archaisms and rare words, including technical terms presumably outside his experience, Thornton seems to have been unusual among scribes. One might take as example the lively scene of preparation for the sea-battle at Southampton near the end of Morte Arthure (lines 3599-3711); here the poet's own familarity with and fondness for the details of shipping and ship-battles come through unimpaired. But this passage is interesting not only for its portrayal of topcastle and stem, sail and hatch, but even more for the terms inaccurately reproduced by the scribe—e.g., bilynge for "bilge" (3663), vpcynes for "upties" (3675).[12] Unlike many other scribes, Thornton seems not to have felt the need to rationalize or emend corruptions in his copytext; there are a number of places where he appears to have contented himself with reproducing words that looked as though they might mean something.[13]

In short, Robert Thornton's status as a country gentleman, devoutly religious, head of a substantial family, may have had some influence on his choice of texts to copy; certainly his education and experience must have influenced his treatment of the texts; but whatever his activities or background,

he appears to have exercised an extraordinary care in reproducing them, a care informed not only by his sense of their interest or usefulness but also apparently by a respect for them in themselves. Thornton's carefulness may have been due at least partly to his amateur status; lacking professional training as a scribe, he was free from the prescribed routines, techniques, and conventions of the scriptorium. What this means for the scribe's practice is that he was forced to rely on his models, his copy, as the only available guides to the representation of text. He was more liable than a professional scribe would have been to be influenced by the letter-forms, the spellings, the abbreviations, the punctuation, the line-divisions he saw before him, less prone to translate such incidentals of transcription into his own (or his shop's) systems and conventions.

This tendency has led one or two of his editors to see more than one scribe at work in the transcription of the two MSS. L. F. Casson, for example, the editor of Sir Degrevant, found a "considerable variation" in the handwriting of the Lincoln MS as a whole and cited the opinion of Eric G. Millar that the London MS was also probably in different hands. Millar, recognizing that "apparent variations in size or general appearance may be due only to a change of pen or a different quality in the ink," based his judgment primarily on the increased use of thorn and a "rather different" et-symbol after fol. 66v (Casson, p. ix). But with an amateur scribe like Thornton one must also take into account the fact that fol. 66v in the London MS marks the beginning of a new work, The Sege of Melayne; it is probably the scribe of Thornton's copy-text for this work who was responsible for its graphemic differences from the preceding material.[14] A similar circumstance may be found in the Lincoln MS; in the texts of the Prose Life of Alexander (fols. 1-49) and Sir Percyuell of Gales (fols. 161-176) the older form of thorn is used (that is, it has a straight descender without a flourish), whereas elsewhere in the MS thorn is normally indistinguishable from y; the difference once again is presumably due to the usage in Thornton's copy-texts for these works.

Thus, although the scribe's lack of professionalism might be seen as a reason for distrust of his texts, his very inconsistency of practice, and the dependence on his models that it implies, may offer the editor fuller access to previous stages of transmission than a professional scribe's systematic habits and conventions normally afford. This is not to say, of course, that Thornton was a scribe without habits and systems of his own; all his texts show evidence of a spelling system strongly influenced by his own dialect, for example. Nor can it be supposed that his texts are error-free; his lack of professional training did not prevent him from sharing in trained scribes' mistakes and misjudgments, not only reproducing those of his copy-texts but also contributing a number of his own.

It may be objected that it is a task of formidable difficulty to distinguish the errors of one scribe from those of his predecessors in the transmission of

a text. One aspect of Robert Thornton's care as a scribe has not been remarked by his editors, however: that is, his alertness in correcting his own errors.[15] In my own transcription of Morte Arthure, for example, I have found several hundred self-corrections. Many of these are quite minor, yet this tendency affords an unusual opportunity: to define a scribe's characteristic errors in terms of what he himself saw as error in his transcription. Although such an approach must leave out of account unrecognized errors, it does at least distinguish Thornton's errors from those of his predecessors.

Or does it? One question that must be considered in such an investigation is the extent to which such changes represent actual corrections—that is, reassertions of the copy-text's forms and spellings—and the extent to which they represent deliberate alterations influenced by the scribe's own dialect or by his own judgment about correctness, explicitness, intelligibility, emphasis, or elegance.[16] Definitive answers on questions of dialectal change must await the publication of McIntosh and Samuels' Survey of Middle English Dialects, although Professor McIntosh has provided a few clues in his 1962 article (see note 11 above). Until then one must depend on hints and guesses gleaned from more traditional and less precise surveys.[17] Other Thornton texts also provide some guidelines, particularly the "Thornton Medical Book," which appears to represent the scribe's own dialect more consistently than any other of his texts.[18] In spite of such uncertainties, it may be significant that, although some of these corrections do show apparent dialectal influence, none of them shows a deliberate change from the Midland <o> spelling of OE ā to the Northern <a>. The question of editorial (as opposed to dialectal) change may be more accessible to analysis.

The purpose of this study, then, is by the detailed analysis of Thornton's self-corrected errors in Morte Arthure to derive conclusions about his characteristic errors, tendencies to err, and possible editorial tendencies, as well as about his habits and systems of transcription. Conclusions about the scribe's practices are supported by a statistical analysis of frequency of error at various points of the alliterative long line, which also identifies patterns of weakness within the line. The conclusions reached, one hopes, will be of use not only to students of other Thornton texts but also to critics of Alliterative Revival texts more generally; for Thornton's patterns of error are probably not unique to him.

An understanding of Thornton's tendencies to err depends in part on familiarity with his characteristic handwriting, which, like other hands of the period, was likely to give rise to certain kinds of error. In Derek Brewer's words (p. vii) Thornton's is "a fairly typical mid-fifteenth-century cursive hand" which "varies considerably." The New Paleographical Society notes that it "varies a great deal, but is at best a carelessly formed cursive type of script."[19] Confusion of minims in m, n, i, and u was inevitable in any hand of the period and in Thornton's case may also include w-errors; although it was quite different in form, he tended to use w interchangeably with u, especially in the ou digraph. The grapheme <y> is also ambiguous, standing for both y and þ, but it is nevertheless seldom confusing since it is ordinarily clearly distinguishable by context and position. With the meaning þ it occurs with few exceptions only initially or (when medial) before a suspension (e.g., þow 'thou,' oþer 'other');[20] with the meaning y (i.e., /i/) it is normally used only medially or finally (again with a few unambiguous exceptions, e.g., ynowe 'enough'). The scribe of Thornton's copy appears to have been less careful in distinguishing y and þ by position, however, and a few cases of medial þ without a following suspension do crop up. Thornton never uses <y> for /j/, preferring <3> for that sound in all positions (thus <yow> is always "thou," while "you" is spelled <30w>). That this sound was spelled earlier in the tradition of this text with a thorn-like y, however, is shown by the uncorrected form 30fe for þofe in lines 1938 and 2854.[21]

Other closely related letter-forms are f/long s, c/t, and o/e. So alike in form are c and t, in fact, that it is often difficult to decipher which letter the scribe himself intended.[22] Beyond these easily confused forms, there are other pairs that are similar enough to cause occasional confusion, especially if carelessly made: y/r, h/b, initial v/d, final e/sigma s, and gg/w or dd/w. One final peculiarity of letter-form may be noted: like other northern scribes, Thornton often used 3 to indicate a final sibilant (here transcribed as z); otherwise, he normally chose the sigma-form of s finally, long s initially or medially.

The scribe used standard suspension-symbols for -er, -es, -ur, -us, and nasals; the nasal suspension occurs (at times superfluously) in a variety of forms, straight, curved, or looped, sometimes dotted and sometimes not. One must note also Thornton's often-remarked habit of adding apparently superfluous flourishes to final nasals and of crossing doubled ll and (less frequently) th. Although early editors interpreted these marks as suspensions

for a following -e, the more recent consensus is that they are usually meaningless.[23] Final -e after d or g was, however, indicated by a superscript dagger.