Lawman's Language: A Test Case in Digital Humanities

Abstract

Lawman’s Brut (c. 1185–1216) stands out as an important text in early Middle English. Its immediate source, the French Roman de Brut of Wace, translates the Latin History of the Kings of Britain by Geoffrey of Monmouth, which introduced the legend of King Arthur to the Western world. Lawman recasts his source in the form of a verse chronicle evoking the alliterative tradition of Old English. Brut’s language seems deliberately old-fashioned, an impression supported by revisions in a thirteenth-century manuscript. This study takes a new approach to Lawman’s language, using electronic searches to sift through the Oxford English Dictionary and Middle English Dictionary to find how many of the dictionary entries turn to the Brut for the final illustrative quotation before a word or sense becomes obsolete. These final quotations become an index of the Brut’s archaisms, and their prevalence opens up interpretive questions concerning Lawman’s vision of history.