A Dialectal Study of the First Quire in National Library of Wales, Brogyntyn MS ii.1

Abstract

Brogyntyn MS ii.1 (olim Porkington 10) is a mid-fifteenth-century collection of prose and
verse copied by multiple scribes. As the signatures suggest, quire 1 did not belong to the
originally intended book but was initially unrelated to the other twenty-five extant quires
and a singleton. These two distinct parts of the codex became physically and textually
connected when Scribe I used the end of this booklet (fols. 8v-10v) to start copying a text
that continued at the beginning of quire 2 (fol. 11r). The volume’s Middle English texts and
place(s) of production were tentatively associated with the West-Midland counties of Cheshire
or Shropshire (Ackerman 1947; Kurvinen 1951, 1969; Huws 1996). While a dialectal study
of the core of the manuscript is currently underway by Carrillo-Linares and Garrido-Anes
(forthcoming), the present paper aims to offer a detailed analysis of the English texts in the
first quire–except for Scribe I’s later addition–and to delimit their linguistic provenance.
The methodology followed is that devised in A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English
(LALME) (McIntosh, Samuels and Benskin 1986).