Page:The Journal of English and Germanic Philology Volume 18.djvu/145

 S Mutter 139 serious extent. In the second place, a goodly number of charters published in the first three volumes lack what is for the student of Old English the most important part, the vernacular description of boundaries. In the appendix to the third and sixth volumes Kemble has tried to make up for the omission by printing as many of these parts as he could gather, but the number is still incomplete and every user of the Codex Diplomaticus should bear this in mind, if he wants to avoid confusion. 1 In the third place, only in certain instances Kemble abstains to meddle with the accents of the MS. As a rule, he has introduced accents wherever he thought they were necessary to indicate vowel length, and on the other hand he has, here and there, omitled those MS. accents he thought were wrong. As a consequence, his edition is fairly worthless for a study of MS. accents in the charters. Birch, in his strictures on Kemble's edition, lays no stress on this point, in fact, does not mention it. I consider it a very misleading feature of that edition in the same way as I consider the introduction of accents into the quotations of the Supplement a practice against which I cannot raise my voice loud enough. Due stress is laid by Birch on the fact that Kemble's texts, when examined by the light of the originals, show wide differences in the employment of $ and/), contrary to the archetypal MS. As a consequence, most, if not all of the Supplement's quotations from Kemble are vitiated by this inaccuracy. So, for example, what the Supplement exhibits sub flit-gara from C.D. V 217, 15, 22 should read, according to Birch's Cartularium II 409, 6th line f.b. and ibid. II 410 3 . . . on pone flit garan. of pam flit garan . . . on ponce, flit garan. For what the Supplement prints sub east-steep from C.D. V.216, 35 should read, according to B.C. I. 409 24 6f afenan east stadce. Observe the MS.'s accent over o of the first word and the parts of the compound kept separate. But not only with regard to the accents and the use of 5 and p is Kemble's edi- tion and the Supplement following it inaccurate; there are other inaccuracies just as well. So the cwalm- of cwalmstdwe contained in the quotation from C.D. Ill 404, 27 is nothing but a blunder of Kemble for cwealm- which the Supplement gives as various reading, evidently, from Earle's Handbook, p. 290 29, while in fact it is just the MS.'s reading, according to B.C. II 284. The quotation in the Supplement for cel-fisc from C.D. Ill 61, 5 should be replaced by the following from B.C. Ill 561, 23 ff., which is from the original MS., 7 ic pa ge eacnode. 2 to pare^ arran sylene tyn pusende elfioca cdce geare pam munecum. Sub fl&sc and forgenge the same passage of a certain charter is quoted in the Sup- plement from two different editions, with the result that under ^the latter word the quotation taken from Thorpe's Diplomatarium comes nearest to the MS. text, while what is printed subflasc from . 1 Birch, as rule, points out the omissions, but occasionally fails to do so. s Evidently by a misprint Birch has acnode; the MS. has plainly eacnode.