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

Abstract

This chapter investigates the text The Court of Love (Cambridge, Trinity College, MS R.3.19, folios 217r-234r). It was long time held to be a poem by Chaucer, a notion debunked by Skeat as a neo-medieval fabrication dating from the fourth decade of the sixteenth century at the earliest. This chapter presents a new appraisal of the date, which is tentatively pinpointed as the middle of the 15th century, and the localization of the poet, who is localized in East Anglia based on the evidence of rhymes and some spellings. Frequent failures of rhyme point to the linguistic differences between the poet and the scribe, as reconstructed from rhyme, metre and possible “relicts”. The hypothesis that the poet was from East Anglia and the scribe from London is confirmed by evidence from eLALME dot maps, and shows that instances in the poem that were identified by Skeat as “false grammar” are in fact examples of syntax that is true to the poet’s own dialect.