Revising Layamon: The Otho scribe and his French additions

Abstract

An important aspect of the Early Middle English Layamon’s Brut is the scribal variation between the two extant versions of the verse chronicle, MS Cotton Caligula and MS Cotton Otho. Notably, these two contemporaneous versions, while identical in many respects, occasionally deviate from one another in both diction and style. As a consequence, vocabulary sometimes varies from one version to the other in certain passages / lines. In this article, I look at the lexical additions of the Otho Brut – in particular, the French lexis which the Otho scribe employs multiple times throughout the chronicle to replace some of Layamon’s comparatively more archaic vocabulary and prosody. This study is divided into two main sections: the first examines the types of words which the Otho scribe selected for replacement with his own French lexis with the aim of determining how much the scribe was motivated by a need to ‘update’ some of his exemplar’s characteristically archaic language. In the second section, I specifically analyze the Otho scribe’s lexical updates to see if they still manage to adhere to Layamon’s original prosody. Ultimately, this section sets out to determine if the Otho scribe was a part of and / or knowledgeable about the alliterative tradition which Layamon was composing in, while also ascertaining if his French additions have any metrical utility. Overall, this article sets out to understand the role of the scribe as revisor and his adaptive decisions behind his lexical changes (e.g., abbey, conseil, gisarme, lettre).

Keywords

• French loanwords
• archaic English
• scribal variation
• alliteration