by Ken Webster
The evidence would suggest, then, a man of the South-West, probably well into middle age, still retaining the nationally outmoded forms of common words with which he grew up. After all it is not difficult to imagine this; I myself very clearly remember the older men who worked on my grandfather’s farm when I was a small boy, with whose regular forms of ‘I be’, ‘youm are’, ‘theym be’ and such we were very familiar and even used easily. I doubt whether those forms can still be so commonly found among the newer and fewer farmworkers of South Northamptonshire and North Oxfordshire as they were among their forebears of fifty years ago, but this is because there have been very rapid and far-reaching effects of general levelling in local forms since the spread of television and popular radio. Many of us lament the passing of such riches in speech and all of us must be well aware of such a process of levelling at work.
Those old forms I remember from my youth had been preserved for hundreds of years, some of them going back well into the Middle English period, and much contemporary common speech goes back directly to Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons themselves. How did ‘slog’ survive in boy’s cricket from the Old English past tense of ‘slegan’, meaning ‘to hit, to kill’?
One has surely to realize too that writing, at the period we are trying to bring into focus, was a very uncommon practice, and our man would most probably write as he spoke with hardly a second thought, though he would be aware, as indeed he said he was, that his ‘tongue was old’ and that we spoke ‘the tongue of Chester’ as he called it. In other words, he had come to realize that his normal manner of speech was old-fashioned compared with the standard of a more cosmopolitan centre, though undoubtedly the streets of such a centre of trade at the borders of England and Wales (without a border at that time) and close to Ireland, with strong influxes from the north as well as his own south and from London, would have echoed to a veritable babel of mixed accents and dialects. Still, the local families of long-standing, among whom he seems to have had several and probably many friends, would have had a distinct regularity in speech fundamentally different from the common speech of his childhood home, sufficiently so for him to be aware of the outdated characteristics of his own speech.
In view of all these factors it seems to make good sense that he used very many forms which the OED does not record later than the 15th century. Just as my childhood was immediately before and during the Second World War, which in the 1980s seems a different world, so his would have been just after Bosworth Field and during the quieter, more settled times of the opening of the Tudor era in the reign of Henry VII. I did wonder if his father had been involved on either side in the Wars of the Roses but it did not emerge, and I do not think that we asked about this. The brief picture of his father at work in the shipyards of Bristol, as presented in later messages, seems to confirm our expectations, though we still cannot explain what is meant by the King’s rose (or Rose) with which he says his father was connected. There was more detail of that famous sailor out of Bristol, John Cabot, as will be seen.
The vast bulk of the forms, words and senses contained in the messages which are recorded as in use in the 16th century would seem to be the most significant, but I have tried to show first why I paid special attention to those recorded later or earlier. Of the total words roughly sixty-five per cent are recorded in the 16th century itself. It is sometimes possible to be more precise than a span of a whole century, and here the OED’s ample system of illustration by quotation is most useful, for the quotations are dated exactly in most cases, and the difference between 1520 and 1530, or 1560 and 1580 might be quite crucial.
To take all this evidence of dating quite objectively and to guess from it just when our texts might have been written was an interesting experiment. In fact I had a shot at this quite early, before we had been given a reliable date at all, and my guess was 1545. When the date was eventually given as 1546 we were somewhat gratified. Here, perhaps, was another example of wishful thinking, in which new material confirmed our previous guesses – like the placings in the South-West and the shot at Bristol. Sceptics will say – but not before we said it ourselves – that such serendipity is suspicious, and that perhaps the whole experience has been fabricated by our own subconscious – but collectively, by two, usually three, often four and sometimes many more of us? How could this be? Again, however any of it may be, the texts exist. They lie in files and boxes by my side as I write, the pages well-thumbed and fraying at the punched edge in many cases. Some of the handwritten originals are framed as precious mementoes of a frantic and heady excitement of more than a year’s duration. This was no dream, singular or collective; no work of the subconscious.
The language remains to confirm it all; the fat volume of the glossary I have composed proves it genuine, with most of the words clearly substantiated as in use in the 16th century, very many of the words unknown to me before I met them here, and several words which still remain apparently unrecorded elsewhere and still unexplained. I hope the full glossary will be published later, together with our findings in historical and topographical research about the provenance of the messages and the identity of their author, but the list of unexplained words is so interesting and important that I include it as a tailpiece to this brief account of the language of the messages. These words were used by our correspondent and checked in the OED as I came to them in the process of annotation. Many words equally unfamiliar to me proved to be in the dictionary, but these words were not there, nor have I been able to find in any other source a satisfactory solution to such words as ‘broatniss’, ‘stemeain’ and the rest of the list. Tomas, our correspondent, and I talked much about words, as the messages will show, so that I was able to ask him about several of them. Except that his explanations generally confirmed my guesses, since the meaning was usually fairly obvious from the content, little was really gained in this way. However, because of their intrinsic interest, these explanations are given below. We hope that professional scholars and other experts may pick up this list and perhaps care to comment in some way. These words must form a part of our continuing work on the evidence of our experience. Perhaps we shall never be more firmly convinced by any historical or linguistic evidence of the genuineness of our experience than we felt at the time it was actually in progress. Tomas was entirely real to us, speaking intimately as a close friend, though over a space of four centuries. That conviction remains as strong – and as perversely commonplace in its essential feeling – as it was then. Now the evidence is published we hope for some public reaction. If the experience can be proved the consequences must be momentous.
Where is Tomas’s own account, his book that was finished at Oxford and left somewhere in manuscript? We never forget that ‘2109’ said it would be found, and we can only hope that this will happen in our lifetime.
There are some other interesting points to make about the language, in particular the number of words which the OED records as first used – sometimes uniquely used – by Shakespeare. Of course, Shakespeare himself was a man from the Midlands countryside as well as a great inventor of words and a treasury of recondite terms. The fact that ‘charge house’, meaning a school, has not been found anywhere except in Love’s Labours Lost does not mean that the word was not used. It may indeed have been in normal colloquial, if restricted, use but never written in any text that has survived. The same is probably true of several other words in the list of forty-seven which I compiled as first occurring in recorded use in Shakespeare. They all pose fascinating problems. And what of such words as ‘deradynate’, for example, obviously an alternative form of ‘deracinate’ since that meaning would fit the context precisely? It was more intriguing still to find that the first occurrence of ‘deracinate’ (perhaps a Shakespearian coinage) is in Henry V, a play with strong French interest which includes several such words apparently coined from a French root, whereas ‘deradynate’ in Tomas’s use seems to have been taken directly from the Latin. One could go on with such spec
ulations.
Two other areas of interest and possible significance in the words and forms used by Tomas are the legal terms and the evident Scots or northern connection. This latter element was evident quite early, particularly in such forms as ‘-ioun’ for the suffix ‘-ion’ (as in ‘condicioun’ or ‘salvacioun’). By the 16th century this form seems to have been characteristically northern, (the ‘northern’ dialect also included southern Scotland). This point was well explained by Tomas’s casual revelation that Lukas Wainman, his teacher and mentor, had come from Aberdeen.
A significant number of words have specific legal connections, such as ‘champartye’, ‘lachess’, ‘validity’, ‘precedenten’, ‘exempcioune’ and others. It seems from a passing reference that Lukas may have had a legal background; Tomas mentions that he himself was in London for a time and he was quite possibly at one of the law colleges before he went to Oxford.
The occasional term from alchemy such as ‘quintessence’ may be important in the light of the strange nature of the whole experience and the totally unexpected quality of its beginning. Was Tomas a secret alchemist? Again, there are more things in heaven and earth …
In the following list of statistics I have analysed the evidence of my glossary into categories that might be significant in various ways, but the analysis was done quite objectively as an assessment of the verbal evidence as a method of dating the likely composition of the documents. Using the evidence of the dating system of the OED I divided the words by period, concentrating on the span from the 15th to the 17th centuries. It was obvious that a significant number of forms were earlier than the 16th century so my first category is those forms dated as last recorded earlier than the 15th century, and so on. After the 16th century, during which some sixty-five per cent of the total forms were recorded as in use, I listed those first recorded later in two categories: those belonging to the 17th century (on the grounds that a period which in practice is actually less than than a hundred years is allowable variation at a time in which many words are likely to have been in use but not to have survived in records): and finally those words which are first recorded at any time certainly later than the 17th century. No less an authority than Professor A. C. Partridge states that, ‘It is doubtful whether any three centuries could equal the period 1450 to 1750 in the achievement of welding home growths and alien borrowings into a serviceable and resourceful instrument of the national mind … it should surprise no reader that from 1590 to 1625 events moved more rapidly than in any other comparable time in the evolution of the language.’ (Tudor to Augustan English, André Deutsch, 1969 p. 13). Now although 1590 is too late for our messages, for the dictionary the difference between the outer dates of this critical period is that of a century. The OED dates a form of, for example, 1595 as 16th century, and one of 1605 as 17th century. It is significant to realize that even by the mid-16th century events were moving extremely rapidly in the language as well as in the politics and religion of England.
The OED dating is of ‘forms’, i.e. spellings of words. For each main word in my glossary I recorded the OED’s dating of the form in which it occurred in the message, if that form was given. A few words were listed more than once because they occurred in more than one form, but Tomas’s spelling was very largely consistent, so this factor does not distort the statistics. Another few words, some twenty-five, could not be counted in the statistics because of some imprecision of dating in the OED or very occasionally the absence of dating altogether. I also included a very few characteristic prepositional phrases as well as words but have not at this stage compiled a list of idiomatic phrases as such.
Dating of Words and Forms
Number of words last recorded earlier than 15th century1 102
Number of words last recorded in 15th century2 319
Number of words last recorded in 16th century3 667
Number of words recorded before, in, and after 16th century4 980
Number of words recorded in 16th century only5 72
Number of words first recorded in 16th century 241
Number of words first recorded in 17th century6 64
Number of words first recorded later than 17th century7 1
Number of words not recorded in OED8 685
Total number of words recorded before 16th century 421
Total number of words recorded in 16th century 1706
Total number of words recorded after 16th century 65
Total words in Glossary 2877
Most of these are recorded as 13th–14th century, but some are as early as the 11th or 12th.
This includes many words recorded only in the 15th century.
This should include eleven numerals written in small roman, e.g. xiii or vii instead of ‘thirteen’ or ‘seven’. Arabic notation was coming into general use during the 16th century.
Many of these are dated only up to the early 17th century and very many others are still current.
This low total reflects the very restricted period represented by a mere one hundred years in the history of a language.
Some of these are restricted to the 17th century, and many to the early years of that century.
Really an incredibly low total (the one word is ‘Cestrian’ – for an inhabitant of Chester, first recorded in 1703).
The vast majority of these forms are very similar to other forms which are in fact recorded. Perhaps one letter is different (frequently ‘y’ for ‘i’ which is really of no significance whatever) but I tried to be extremely strict in all these statistics. This total also includes the 121 words which remain unexplained.
The following is the full list of words which are not in the OED nor have I found them in Wright’s Dialect Dictionary or other regional or specialized glossaries which I have consulted. Several of them are easy to explain but others are very strange and even exotic specimens. (T=Tomas’s explanation)
a as
aboone v. ‘to make good’ T
aformoste best
afoundid destroyed
aft after
aldeyen often
alerwyse wisest
aplexify startle, confound
appertiteth v. delights
awreathyng tormenting
aymo evermore?
beeleful happy, pleasant
belean v. abandon?
bemeters v. borders?
boken books
bride bridge
broatniss ‘a weakly person’ T
deyntie v. treat with care?
deradynate deracinate – ‘rift up’ T
dew to due to – rare before 19th century
elyful ‘dark’ T
empayr to improve
exchaundances unwanted elements
excusacyone v. to excuse, apologize
excusyoune apology
farrygible ‘farradiddle’?
fasinorouse caused by witchcraft?
festement n. feasting?
fey ti fi exclamation
flat-skyn n. parchment?
fo for (used several times)
folly v. behave foolishly
foralden very old
forermed grieved? adj.
forgreven much grieved?
forlacks adj. lacking
formergd submerged?
forweels very much?
forweet know well
forwyttd intelligent?
fulharlotin despicable?
gauberynge idiotic
gekalles ‘fools’ T
giggester jester?
gledie bright, shining (Scots)
gleeb jest
glooze gaze?
glorien glorious
go ago
gust n. taste
happs perhaps
hask ‘dry corn’ T
heeraft here after
intresstes v. interests
intrynscioun intention?
joyif joyous
kyn calle family name
lecturie n. preserve?
l
est conj. unless
lore to lose
luxyoune adj. lively?
mallechoes* n. ‘intention of malice’ T
nant (ne want) v. do not want
parlie purlieu?
penen pens
popolotie adj. darling, dear
prifyk prefix
project particle
ragement argument
replayce v. transfer, transcribe
scantens barely, hardly
sessa† ‘to be still’ T
scoleye to study, attend school
seylesermone n. silly talk?
sleyghte slander
slompryng clumsy
spoken of language, as opposed to ‘written’ – first recorded 1837
stemeain ‘shining’ T
stincioun adj. ‘immovable’ T
theeche v. to prosper
torablise terrible, troublesome
umberyde open, clear
unavoydaunte unavoidable
urn v. use
Footnotes
Chapter 8