Page:The Review of English Studies Vol 1.djvu/16



is now more than seventy years since the first (and so far the only) edition of the Ancren Riwle was made by James Morton. Morton was no philological specialist, and he owns to having been sometimes puzzled (as most later students have been) by obscurities of language. Yet his edition is a solid piece of work. For sixty years, scholarship had little to add to Morton’s statements concerning the origin and authorship of the Rule, and his view that the book was written by Richard Poore (who was Bishop successively of Chichester, Salisbury and Durham, and who died in 1237) is repeated, with more or less hesitation, in the standard works of reference.

But ten years ago a new stage in the study of the book was inaugurated by G. C. Macaulay, with his patient collation of the manuscripts; and the present-day student is overwhelmed by a mass of conflicting arguments. Three new claimants to the honour of the authorship have been brought forward, while it has been maintained that the book was not written first in English, but was translated from the Anglo-Norman.

The question of language is one of importance. For the Rule is the greatest book of its class in either Anglo-Norman or English. A good deal of it is the ordinary mediæval pious instruction; but from time to time we find the writer showing powers of an astonishing kind. For example, this account of the backbiter is like nothing that we know, up to this date, in either English or Norman prose: it might come from a character-sketch many centuries later: He casts down his head, and begins to sigh before he says a word; then he talks around the subject for a long time with a sorrowful countenance, to be the better believed. But when it all comes out, it is yellow poison: “Alas, wellaway, woe is me, that he (or she) has fallen into such