Lexical Cruces in Orrmulum: The importance of context

Abstract

Between 1659 (when he purchased the Orrmulum manuscript) and 1666 (when he died), Jan van Vliet, Dutch local administrator and antiquarian, worked on a glossary for Orrmulum. A draft of this glossary, together with transcripts of parts of the text of Orrmulum, is preserved in his notebook, now London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 783. In his 1961 study, Robert Burchfield presented an analysis of those words in van Vliet’s material that derived from folios since lost from the Orrmulum manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 1). A problem with Burchfield’s analysis is that he discusses problematic words out of context, which in some cases leads to infelicitous interpretations. Since the folios where the words occurred have been lost, this may seem to be the only approach possible. But some context which may support (or disprove) an interpretation is provided by van Vliet’s transcripts of text passages; his notebook as a whole also provides a context which may aid interpretation. It is also possible to construct a more general context for a word by considering the content of the text before and after the lacunae in order to determine what Orrm in all likelihood wrote on the missing folios.

This article will present a re-interpretation of a few problematic words in this material, based on the context in which they appear.

Notes

¹ Van Vliet was apparently given access to the manuscript before he purchased it, since his transcript of Orrm’s Preface is dated in January 1659, whereas the actual purchase was made in early February.

² All modern English translations in this article (apart, of course, from the New International Version of the Bible) are my own. Square brackets are used to mark items under discussion which are left untranslated.

³ I read van Vliet’s “P.M.” as ‘Parliamenti Membrum’, i.e. Member of Parliament. There is no information in Alsbury 2008, however, that Aylesbury was ever a Member of Parliament. Unless “P.M.” was intended to convey some other meaning, van Vliet must have been mistaken.

⁴ In these notes written in MS Junius 1 van Vliet used the abbreviations “s” (for L super/supra ‘on top’?) and “m” (for L medio ‘in the middle’) after the column numbers to achieve a greater precision in his reference.

⁵ We know of at least one such occasion: “In his letter to Vossius, Van Vliet suggested that he wished to show Junius his Ormulum manuscript, which he had compared with Otfrid’s Old High German Evangelienbuch. He must have shown it to Junius on his first visit, during one of his frequent trips to The Hague.” (Dekker 1999: 96).

⁶ The loose folios may easily have been overlooked and lost during the cataloguing of van Vliet’s belongings after his death: “The final account drawn up by Town Clerk Van Moock mentions piles of papers that were found in the house, some of which were returned to the widow because they were deemed worthless, but of which the greater part was put up for auction, even if Van Moock himself did not attribute great value to Van Vliet’s private speculations. In May 1667, the Englishman William Griffith, secretary to Henry Coventry at the Peace of Breda, acquired a large bundle of Van Vliet’s notes (now London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 783), which contains the bulk of his shorter studies in manuscript. One can only conjecture how many more of Van Vliet’s studies were lost during these turbulent events.” (Dekker 1999: 107).

⁷ Dekker’s wording in the quotation in footnote 5 above (“a large bundle of notes”) seems to suggest that notes on loose sheets of paper were bound to form a notebook (MS 783) only after van Vliet’s death. Regardless when the pages were bound together, van Vliet’s draft for an Orrmulum glossary is written on pages with the occasional cancelled heading of the type “‹DICTATORUM, /Quæ ex ore legentis Jacobi Mæstertij /in collegio Pandectario excer- /pebam, /Pars Altera. /A LIB. XVIII VSQUE›” (folio 43^r) ‘Second part of dictated lessons, which I excerpted from the mouth of Jacobus Maestertius reading in the College of Pandects. From Book 18 up to’. At the bottom of the page is written (not cancelled) “Postridie Kalendas Januarias /ANNI JULIANI M DC XLI.” ‘On the day following the Kalends of January [2 January] in the Julian year 1641’. Jacobus Maestertius was Professor of Law at Leiden University from 1639 until his death in 1658 (van Kuyk 1914: 810). Van Vliet studied law at Leiden 1639–1641 (Dekker 1999: 62–63). The Pandects of Justinian are a central document in the study of Roman Law; book 18 deals with the legal principles underlying purchase and sale (Scott 1932).

⁸ ‘Running text’ as opposed to single words or phrases, not in the sense of a verbatim representation of Orrm’s running text. As Ker points out, “Vliet’s interest was lexicographical and his excerpts on ff. 51–72^v are not continuous blocks of text, but illustrations of the use and meaning of particular words and phrases, which he has underlined in his copy. Excerpts often begin in the middle of a line or include an essential word from further up the column, or omit words or lines which were not strictly necessary to the sense.” (1940: 2–3).

⁹ Burchfield uses the following abbreviations: J: Bodleian Library, MS Junius 1; L: Lambeth Palace Library, MS 783; V: van Vliet.

¹⁰ Words from van Vliet’s notebook are given in double angle quotation marks («…») when quoted within my own text (as opposed to being embedded in quotations from Ker 1940 or Burchfield 1961.

¹¹ The images in Figures 1–5 are © Lambeth Palace Library; I am grateful to the Library for permission to reproduce the images here.

¹² All passages from Orrmulum are newly edited from MS Junius 1. Changes and corrections in the manuscript are irrelevant for the purposes of this article and have not been specifically noted; abbreviations have been silently expanded. Punctuation and capitalization follow the manuscript. The character e̤ represents Orrm’s original <eo> digraph where the <o> was later erased. The letter H before a line number indicates the Homily part of the text (as opposed to the Preface). A double dagger (‡) before a word indicates my own reconstruction of a lost Orrmulum word. I am grateful to Dr Bruce Barker-Benfield for granting me access to MS Junius 1 in the spring of 1997 and again in the spring of 2002, and to the Master and Fellows of St Peter’s College, Oxford University, for inviting me as a Visiting Fellow during the Hilary and Trinity terms of 2002, thus greatly supporting my work with transcribing the manuscript.

¹³ I thought for many years that this must be Orrm’s own addition to gospel text xviii, but it turns out that Clement of Llanthony’s gospel harmony Concordia Evangelistarum, which may well have served as Orrm’s model when he decided on the textual structure of Orrmulum, makes the same combination of gospels in his Book 1, Chapter 3.

¹⁴ In this quotation, grafenn is Burchfield’s reconstructed Orrmulum form, L306 refers to the line number of van Vliet’s copied text in Ker’s diplomatic edition (1940), “grafen” is the actual form given by van Vliet, and 26 is the number of the column of text (as numbered by van Vliet before several folios were lost from the Orrmulum manuscript) in which the text extract containing this word was found.

¹⁵ The phrase “cum rima” means ‘with a slit’, and must be van Vliet’s comment on a physical property of the folio: some imperfection in the skin had been cut out with a sharp knife in the production process, leaving a narrow slit through the folio which Orrm’s text would have straddled. Such a slit can be seen in MS Junius 1, folio 93^r, col. 321, ll. 5–9.

¹⁶ Homily xi/xii is a double homily, with two gospel texts (xi and xii) presented in succession before the exposition.

¹⁷ Columns 176–180 plus four columns of text (one folio) which were lost between columns 176 and 177 before van Vliet numbered the columns.

¹⁸ In his notebook, van Vliet uses the abbreviations “p.” (occasionally “pr.”) for occurrences in the upper part of a column, “m.” for occurrences in the middle part of a column, and “f.” for occurrences in the bottom part of a column. Occasionally references can be more precise, such as “l. 5” ‘line 5’, “l. ult.” ‘last line’, or “l. pen.”/“l. penult.” ‘last line but one’, but only in cases where the position of a line could be determined at a glance. As regards van Vliet’s standard abbreviations, “p.”/“pr.” may represent (in) principio ‘at the beginning’, “m.” (in) medio ‘in the middle’, and “f.” (in) fine ‘at the end’. I owe these suggestions to professor Hans Helander; Uppsala University (p.c.).

¹⁹ “Vliet’s underlining is here retained and his superposed letters indicated by means of round brackets.” (Ker 1940: 3)

²⁰ “Details of some minor errors in Ker’s transcript may conveniently be given here…. 369: witthe little: small arabic 2 above witthe and arabic 1 above little indicate that they should be reversed.” (Burchfield 1961: 94, fn. 1)

²¹ I use the degree sign (°) to mark an unrecorded infinitive in MS Junius 1.

²² In the section headed “Additional evidence for words, forms, etc., which are rare in MS. Junius 1”, however, Burchfield includes the entry “toþþ 27 (L 314)” (1961: 110) with a footnote giving the OED’s identification of its sense and line references to the three occurrences in Holt 1878.

²³ Pace MED, which s.v. hōlen (v. [4]) suggests the sense ‘?To obtain; ~ o, rob (sb.)’. If this were correct, it would leave calumniam faciatis without a counterpart in Orrm’s rendering of Luke 3.14.