The Dialects of the Two Scribes

However, the differences between the Dutch texts written by the two scribes are much more pronounced and much more revealing. The table below contains features and words that occur in the language of both scribes, but in different forms:

For a broad-brush localisation of the language of the two scribes we can begin by using the Middle Dutch dialect atlas by Pieter van Reenen and others, where some of these items have been mapped.1 Pieter van Reenen, Matthijs Brouwer, and Evert Wattel, ‘Middelnederlands: Vormen en Constructies’ <https://www.middelnederlands.nl/>. For methodological discussion, see Evert Wattel and Pieter van Reenen, ‘Probabilistic Maps’, in Language and Space: An International Handbook of Linguistic Variation, ed. by Alfred Lameli, Roland Kehrein, and Stefan Rabanus (Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011), 2 vols, II, pp. 495–508. The local records that form the basis of the Middle Dutch dialect atlas are earlier (pre-1400) than the Ordinances, so where relevant we also refer to the more recent Low German dialect atlas by Robert Peters: this dialect atlas builds on data from the Middle Dutch dialect atlas but has further data on Dutch dialects from the northeast of the present-day Netherlands and northwest Germany, and has a broader chronological range, including the fifteenth century.2 Robert Peters, Christian Fischer, and Norbert Nagel, Atlas spätmittelalterlicher Schreibsprachen des niederdeutschen Altlandes und angrenzender Gebiete, 3 vols (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017). As we shall see, the dialect evidence shows that these Low Countries scribes could hardly be further apart: scribe 1 was from the north-eastern region of what is now the Netherlands while scribe 2 was from the south-western Low Countries, probably the County of Flanders or the Duchy of Brabant.

For the spelling of initial /k/, the Middle Dutch dialect map for spellings of kunnen provides useful comparative data (see fig. 11). The dark area is the one where we would expect initial k, the light one is where we would expect c. The variants of brengen (to bring) fit this pattern: the i/y forms of scribe 2 are south-western while the e forms are generally eastern and northern (see fig. 12).

The distribution of ‘desse’ (‘dese’) (scribe 1) and ‘dese’ (scribe 2) show a comparable distribution. The dialectically marked form is ‘desse’ is characteristic of the north-eastern parts, bordering on Germany (see fig. 13).3 See also the map in Peters et al., Atlas, II, 113.

The pattern that emerges is that the linguistic habits of scribe 1 fit the north-east of the Netherlands whereas those of scribe 2 fit the south-west of present-day Belgium. The forms ‘hillig’ (holy) and ‘broder’ (scribe 1), contrasting with ‘heyligh’ and ‘broeder’ (scribe 2), confirm this pattern and help us to pin down the origins of scribe 1 to north-eastern border areas with Germany. The dark areas in the following map indicating forms with <i> in heilig, which by and large correspond with the areas where ‘broder’ was used, show the restricted currency of the forms found in scribe 1 (see fig. 14).4 Compare Peters, Atlas, II, map 77 (broder) and II, map 139 (hillig).

The north-eastern provenance of scribe 1 also explains features of his language that one might otherwise have been tempted to attribute to interference from English. It is striking, for instance, that, unlike scribe 2, who uses ‘te’ as the infinitive marker, scribe 1 uses ‘to’, and so writes ‘to betalen’ in Dutch and in English ‘to be paid’ (art. 8). And just as in his English he writes ‘of olde tyme’, so in Dutch he writes not van ouden tijden, but ‘van olden tijden’ (art. 2). Other English-looking spellings are ‘holden’ for modern Dutch houden (art. 10), and ‘geholden’ for gehouden (passim). However, although these forms may at first look like anglicisms, they are in fact entirely consistent with the scribe’s north-easterly provenance. ‘To’ or ‘toe’ are found in eastern Middle Dutch dialects, and spellings of oud and houden with <l> belong to roughly the same area as broder and hillig.

A number of other characteristics make it clear that scribe 1 was from the north-east. In the peculiar form of Modern Dutch volbracht, ‘vullenbracht’ (art. 13), the <u> spelling in combination with -len points east.5 See MNW, s.v. volbringen, ‘vooral in het oost-mnl. vollenbrengen’, and on <u> spellings, ‘in Gelderland en Overijssel’, see Chris de Wulf, Klankatlas van het veertiende-eeuwse Middelnederlands (Ghent: Koninklijke Academie voor Nederlandse Taal en Letteren, 2019), p. 318, and Peters, Atlas, II, map 52. ‘Gued’ for goed is also predominantly eastern,6 See the dialect maps at <https://www.middelnederlands.nl/item/69/480/?text=goed+> and in Peters, Atlas, II, map 35. as is the unusual pronoun ‘he’ for hij, which is exclusively found in the language of scribe 1.7 Scribe 1 uses this alongside the more usual ‘hie’; scribe 2 writes ‘hy’. The form ‘he’ is exclusively eastern: see map 90 in de Wulf, Klankatlas <https://bouwstoffen.kantl.be/kamnl14/deel2+3.htm>, and in Peters, Atlas, II, map 112. Scribe 1’s normal form vntfangen (art. 1, 3, etc.) – only once ontfangen (art. 2) is also clearly north-eastern, as figure 15 shows.8 We thank Pieter van Reenen for generating this map for us.

Can we be more precise? The maps for hillig and broder place scribe 1 either in the north-eastern tip, in what are now the provinces of Groningen and Drenthe (see fig. 1 for a map showing the provinces), or a little further south, in the eastern parts of the provinces of Overijssel and Gelderland. There are some reasons for thinking the latter was scribe’s 1 homeland, for it is to this area (and not the far north-east) that we can assign the following features of his Dutch:

The provenance of scribe 2 is not quite so easy to determine. We have less Middle Dutch text to go on, and in his writing we do not generally encounter forms restricted to a small area. For instance, while ‘desse’ (scribe 1) can help us to localise that scribe to a small area, ‘dese’, the form of scribe 2 (also the minority form of scribe 1) is supragregional, as the dialect map for this item shows (see above, fig. 13).

The raising of e to i before n (e.g. ‘brynghet’, art. 24) is mentioned as a characteristic of Flanders by Van der Wal,13 Marijke J. van der Wal, Geschiedenis van het Nederlands (Utrecht: Spectrum, 1992), p. 114. but the dialect map for this item (see above, fig. 12) shows that it had a wider currency in south-western areas, including also Brabant. There are just a few marked forms that might tentatively lead us to Flanders and to the coastal area of that county in particular. ‘Darde’ (third) in article 23 is unusual. The scribe uses it alongside the normal ‘derde’; its use was characteristic of west Flanders and south-west Holland.14 van Loey, Klankleer, p. 3; and the dialect map at <https://www.middelnederlands.nl/item/146/1073/?text=darde+>. Also unusual is ‘sterlynes’ for sterlynges: as noted by Van Loey, spellings of <ing> as <in> (e.g. ghinen for ghingen, conininnen for coninginnen) are typical of West Flanders.15 van Loey, Klankleer, p. 96.

We have argued so far that the dialects of these two scribes point to opposite ends of the Low Countries, to the north-east, perhaps Gelderland (scribe 1), and to the south-west, perhaps Flanders (scribe 2). Yet against the backdrop of this strongly contrastive pattern some interesting anomalies spring into view. For when scribe 2 begins to write, he initially presents some of the same dialect features of scribe 1, features that later make way for south-western forms. For instance, in the Dutch prepositions boven and over, forms with a are typical of north-eastern Dutch and so it is no surprise that we find them in scribe 1 (see above). We would expect scribe 2, from the southwest, to write them with o, and so he does (‘ouer’, art. 24), and yet when he first takes over from scribe 1 he writes ‘bauen gescreuen’ (art. 22), adopting both scribe 1’s north-eastern vowel and his spelling of the prefix ge- (normally ghe- in scribe 2). For ‘sunte’ (‘saint’), which again is predominantly north-eastern and thus predictably scribe 1’s form (passim),16 See the dialect map at <https://www.middelnederlands.nl/item/78/549/?text=sunt+> and Peters, Atlas, II, map 101. scribe 2 writes ‘sinte’ (art. 23) and ‘sent’ (art. 24), but he starts off with ‘sunte’ (art. 22). For north-eastern ‘broder’, scribe 1’s form, scribe 2 has ‘broeder’, except in the first article he copies, where he writes ‘broderen’ and ‘broderscop’ (art. 22). The suffix ‘scop’ in ‘broderscop’ is also north-eastern and characteristic of scribe 1. Scribe 2 writes it only at the start and then goes on to write ‘broederscyp’ (art. 23) and ‘broederscap’ (art. 24). Of these later forms, ‘broederscyp’ is dialectically the most revealing one: it belongs to Flanders.17 See the dialect map for this item at <https://middelnederlands.nl/item/162/1183/?text= schap>.

The curious pattern we find here is consistent with what is known as ‘progressive scribal translation’: when scribes copy a text written in another dialect they usually begin by adopting the linguistic features of their exemplar but as they warm to the task of writing they progressively resort to forms of their own active repertoire rather than retaining those of the text they are copying.18 See M. Benskin et al., ‘General Introduction’, in An Electronic Version of A Linguistic Atlas of Late Mediaeval English (Edinburgh: Angus McIntosh Centre for Historical Linguistics, 2013) <http://www.lel.ed.ac.uk/ihd/elalme/intros/atlas_gen_intro.html>, section 3.3.3, and for discussion of a specific case of progressive scribal translation, see Ad Putter, ‘An East Anglian Poem in a London Manuscript? The Date and Dialect of the Court of Love in Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.19’, in Historical Dialectology in the Digital Age, ed. Rhona Alcorn et al. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019), pp. 212–43. Our analysis of the language thus suggests not only that scribe 1 was from the north-east and scribe 2 from the south-west, but also that scribe 2 was copying a text that had been written in the language of scribe 1 (and presumably by scribe 1) and so began by adopting some of the same north-eastern forms that are the hallmark of scribe 1 before imposing his own linguistic habits.

To conclude, we have seen that the manuscript that contains the Ordinances was put together in different stages: the bilingual Ordinances were copied in 1501, but the last two articles later. The agreement with the Haberdashers was added in 1511, and sometime after the manuscript had come into the possession of the Haberdashers a later hand added the oath of the wardens of the Haberdashers.

The bilingual nature of the Ordinances of the fraternity makes this a unique document: it is the earliest document to have been drawn up bilingually, in Dutch and English. Both scribes were comfortable writing in Dutch and in English, and they were almost certainly Dutch speakers. However, one of them (scribe 1) was from the north-east of the Netherlands, on the border with Germany, while the other (scribe 2) was from the southwest, perhaps Flanders. The first, perhaps to be identified with the clerk of the Hatmakers, wrote in a continental style; the second wrote in a script marked by English features and was probably copying an exemplar written by scribe 1.