L.2.121KD.2.119 ¶ For Mede is moylere · of amendes engendrethL.2.121: LCYR alone have the form engendreth; all other B manuscripts have the past participle. The form spelled engendrit in some A manuscripts perhaps accounts for the error.
Cr1.2.121KD.2.119 For Mede is mulier of amendes engendred
C.2.121KD.2.119 ¶ For Mede is Moilere of amendes engendreth
O.2.120KD.2.119For Mede is MulirieO.2.120: O alone has the form Mulirie; most B manuscripts have muliere. of amendis engendrid
R.2.80KD.2.119
¶ For mede is moylere of amendes engendreth .R.2.80: R shares an apparently
nonsensical verb inflection (engendreth for engendred)
with beta witnesses LCY. Nevertheless, any RL shared form, however odd, is intrinsically
likely to be archetypal, albeit perhaps non-authorial—because of their extraordinary
accuracy as well as their definitive stemmatic positions. If this lection is not merely a
blatant archetypal error (one "corrected" by most later copyists to the expected form), it
may be that the R and L scribes (or the Bx scribe) understood the -eth
suffix in this word as allomorphic with the past participle suffix -ed /
-et attested in other B copies. The final phone of engendreth would then probably have been construed by L and R as /t/ (not the
/θ/ which the spelling would suggest to us). Cf. the 1408 London will of John Plot.
Twice in this brief document, Plot uses a phonologically identical verbal suffix <-yth>
to denote the past participle form usually spelled as <-ed>. In the first instance,
Plot requests that "thyr be Spendyth among my Nyebourus in Mete & in drynke" a certain
amount of money; in the second, he requests that some of his assets be used for road repairs,
or, as he phrases it, "be yspendyth betwene London and ware, of fowle weys, . . . there most
nede ys" (The Fifty Earliest English Wills, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall
(London: Trübner, 1882), 14-15. A few pieces of evidence scattered throughout manuscripts L
and R may support such a conclusion. One wonders, for example, whether the strong preference
in manuscripts L and R for the ON-derived spelling of the cardinal number 100 (= hundreth) over the OE-derived form (= hundred) indicates
that these scribes, or their models, would have pronounced that word with /θ/ as the
final phone, rather than /t/. Such a conclusion seems doubtful. Rather, this spelling
preference for the number 100 probably attests the same trivial orthographic anomaly
hypothesized above concerning engendreth. For fuller discussion see
Introduction III.2.2.10.