The 10 most-cited articles in Notes and Queries, 2020

Research into English alliterative verse has seen progress on a number of fronts in recent years, summed up by a trio of Cambridge University Press monographs on the subject by the present author (2016), Ian Cornelius (2017), and Geoffrey Russom (2017).1 Naturally enough, these books focus on the long Old English and Middle English poems that have always been at the center of scholarly inquiry. In my book, I included two appendices listing little-studied short Old English and Early Middle English alliterative poems, but I did not perform the same bibliographical work for fourteenth-, fifteenth-, and sixteenth-century alliterative poetry.2 The present article remedies this lacuna. Although Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Winner and Waster, and William Langland’s Piers Plowman are widely read and taught, and other long poems, such as Mum and the Sothsegger and Scottish Field, are well known to specialists, there exist...

On 11 November 1755, Christopher Smart and Richard Rolt signed a contract with the stationer, Thomas Gardner, and the printer, Edmund Allen, to provide material—whether their own or that of collaborators—for a new periodical, to be entitled The Universal Visiter or Monthly Memorialist. The first number of this periodical (henceforth UV) appeared on 1 February 1756, and it ran for twelve monthly numbers, terminating in December 1756.1 The progress of UV was troubled from an early stage. Smart’s health was poor, and assistance in production of material for the periodical—from David Garrick, Charles Burney, Thomas Percy, possibly Arthur Murphy, and most famously Samuel Johnson—was called upon almost immediately. Contributions were not signed but were sometimes identified by initials or other marks. Smart’s own contributions were most prominent in the early numbers, between January and April 1756. A number of Smart’s contributions to UV, in both prose...

Two lines of Old English poetry are inscribed on the Anglo-Saxon reliquary cross preserved in the Cathedral of Saints Michel and Gudule in Brussels: Rōd is mīn nama. Geō ic rīcne cyning bær byfigende, blōde bestēmed. [Crucifix is my name. Long ago I bore a powerful king, trembling, covered with blood.]1 Critical discussion of this poem, which appears to have been inscribed during the eleventh century, has been largely concerned with its relationship to The Dream of the Rood and the crucifixion poem inscribed on the Ruthwell Cross.2 Assessing the connections between the poems, Bruce Dickins and Alan S. C. Ross conclude: ‘It is impossible to decide the relation of the inscription on the Brussels Cross to the other two versions; it seems to contain no more than a reminiscence of the poem.’3 John Hines, on the other hand, perceives a more definite relationship, as he judges the verses inscribed on the Brussels Cross to be ‘paraphrasing a series of phrases’ in The Dream of the Rood.4 Mary Clayton takes a rather different position: in her view, the Brussels Cross inscription is ‘not a…

During Middle English (ME), at a point in the development of the language when accusative pronouns were giving way to dative forms so that a single object case remained, the seemingly innovative use of full and enclitic forms of his as a 3pl. acc. and 3sg. fem. acc. form is witnessed across the East, Central, and West Midlands and in Kent alongside ME reflexes of the Old English (OE) 3pl. acc. and 3sg. fem. acc. pronouns in hī, hīe, hēo, etc.1 Illustrative examples include (1)–(2) for the 3pl. acc. and (3)–(4) for the 3sg. fem. acc.2

There are two distinct theories concerning the death in 1821 of Dr John William Polidori, author of ‘The Vampyre’ (1819): death by natural causes or death by suicide. His family agreed that he had taken his own life. Though they never met, William Michael Rossetti, Polidori’s nephew, edited his late uncle’s journal for publication and straightforwardly declared that he committed suicide with poison—having, through losses in gambling, incurred a debt of honour which he had no present means of clearing off. That he did take poison, prussic acid, was a fact perfectly well known in his family.1 Rossetti then quoted Thomas Medwin, who reported Lord Byron as saying that I was...

Pervez Rizvi’s electronic corpus of 527 plays dated between 1552 and 1657, titled Collocations and N-grams, is of invaluable aid for researchers aiming to ascertain the authorship of early modern texts.1 Rizvi’s results are fully automated and enable scholars to check for every phrase shared between plays. A phrase four words in length will contain different types of n-grams: one tetragram (four-word phrase); two trigrams (three-word phrases); three bigrams (two-word phrases); and four single words. These are what Rizvi would call ‘formal n-grams’. Conversely, the four-word phrase itself would also constitute what Rizvi calls a ‘maximal’ n-gram and would only be counted once. The phrasal matches between plays are ‘weighted’,...

In the autumn of 1570, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, in a letter to Thomas Heneage only recently transcribed, leveraged his friendship with Elizabeth I to obtain money from Heneage, his old rival for the Queen’s favor. The contents of the letter not only afford a broader understanding of the Leicester/Heneage rivalry but may also support suspicions that Leicester had a hand in the death of his own wife, Amy Robsart. Appointed earlier that year as Treasurer of the Queen Majesty’s Chamber, Thomas Heneage held the purse strings regarding wardships, and Leicester had sought funding for a particular wardship from Heneage for some time. In this letter, dated 2 September 1570,...

Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Broxbourne 90.28 is a fragment containing Old English. It was once part of the collection of Albert Ehrman (1890–1969) and his wife, the Broxbourne Collection being named after their home in Hertfordshire.1 Neil Ker examined the fragment when compiling his Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon, and it was then in situ in a copy of Haymo’s commentary on Pauline Epistles printed in 1528 in Cologne.2 He later announced that the fragment was missing after being detached from the binding.3 Mary Blockley reported in 1994 that it remained in the Bodleian Library, and it is still available for consultation, with the copy of Haymo separately catalogued as Broxbourne 9.12.4 This note aims to consider the significance of the Old English text of the fragment. MS Broxbourne 90.28 is a strip of parchment, measuring c. ‘155 × 50 mm’, as...

The use of the French definite article (mostly the forms le, les, lez, and la) in multilingual records produced in Medieval Latin across England has been extensively researched.1 The functions of the French definite article closely align with those expected in monolingual French texts [in expressions like ‘construccionem de le ale’ (Durham Account Rolls (henceforth, DAR) Rott. Terrar. 1419–20)]2 at least until the mid-fifteenth century, when it seemed to have started to function as a textual marker to indicate a switch into the vernacular in syntactically unpredictable contexts: for instance, it was combined with the partitive despite the indefinite nature of the referent (e.g. ‘purgacione del...