The wars of Alexander: an alliterative romance translated chiefly ...

XIV DESCRIPTION OF THE ASHMOLE MS.
he was unable to read correctly the copy which he had before him,
while others would appear to shew that he wrote from dictation."
I have not observed any passages of the latter kind ; and I think
that the above description, though fairly indicating the general
condition of the MS., errs somewhat on the side of severity. I
should say that the scribe aimed at being both neat and regular,
though his success in attaining to these is not of the highest order.
Still it is a tolerably good MS., and I have seen many that are worse.
No doubt it abounds with singular errors, but the number of these
has been needlessly augmented in the former edition, as if it were
the editor who, in just a few instances, *' was unable to read
correctly the copy which he had before him ; " ^
though the general
carefulness and correctness of that edition may be admitted. The
MS. contains at present 97 leaves, wholly occupied with the
Romance, and is imperfect at the end. Each leaf contains about 60
lines, sometimes more, and sometimes less; and we thus see that
two leaves are missing after leaf 12, since the missing portion
amounts to 122 lines ; but the following leaf is numbered 13, as the
gap in the MS. seems" never to have been noticed. The MS. gives
us no further information of any kind, so that we are entirely
thrown back upon internal evidence. We may perhaps date it
about 1450, as already suggested, and I think we may also say that
it was probably written in the north of England.
With reference to
this question of locality, Mr. Stevenson ventures to " hazard the
conjecture that this romance was written in one of the north-eastern
counties of the midland division of England, some district in which
the Anglian dialect had originally prevailed, untinctured, however, by
those peculiarities of vocabulary and construction which characterize
the language of ancient Northumbria." I would venture to say, on
the contrary, that the Northumbrian character of the dialect is very
strongly marked. If we apply, for instance, such dialectal tests as
are given in the Introduction to Morris and Skeat's Specimens of
1 Examples :
" forwart " for " forwitA," 15 ;
" sodeyn " for " sweuyw," 417 ;
"Anec" for "anes," 478; "Anec analey" (sic) for " Anecanabw*," scribal
error for " Anectanab