The Dialectal Localisation of Hands B and C in Manchester, Chetham’s Library, MS Mun.A.3.127

Abstract

This paper studies the dialectal features of Hands B and C in Manchester, Chetham’s Library, MS Mun.A.3.127 since these two hands conflate in the same folios (ff. 57r-58v). The manuscript under analysis is a late Middle English codex that contains different recipes to cure illnesses. The main aim of this paper is to localise geographically the area of provenance of these two hands by means of the model offered in the electronic version of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (eLALME) (Benskin et al. 2013). The analysis carried out signals two close areas of origin for both scribes: Hand B has been localised in the border between the southern part of East and West Ridings of Yorkshire and the northern part of Lincolnshire, whereas Hand C has been found in the border between southern Yorkshire, the northern part of Lincolnshire and the northern part of Nottinghamshire. This conclusion might be indicative of the presence of a scriptorium in the eastern part of the country at the time.