Present Indicative in Late Medieval Warwickshire: A Case Study of National Library of Wales, Brogyntyn ii.1 in Comparison with other Sources

Abstract National Library of Wales Brogyntyn ii.1 is a fifteenth-century miscellany including texts in Middle English, which is localisable in the Warwickshire area. The manuscript was copied by around ten scribes who produced a wide range of endings for the third person singular and plural forms of the present indicative. This paper seeks to systematise and analyse these forms with the aim of identifying the reasons for the different usages of verbal endings of the English written in Warwickshire at the end of the Middle English period. Apart from the two main types (‘‑th’ type and ‘‑s’ type) which have been widely investigated for different periods of the history of English, the data include two more types, one of which contains minority forms that have frequently been ignored in most works on the verb endings. Each scribe’s production is tackled from different angles, including the phonological and the syntactic and prosodic environments of the occurrences. In addition to the information extracted from the Brogyntyn manuscript, data from different sources in text corpora ( LALME , LAEME , MEG‑C and MELD ) have been collected for comparison with the results obtained in the main analysis. The main findings of this research indicate that the variety of forms used in Warwickshire literary manuscripts in the fifteenth century are not linked to any sort of linguistic constraints but to the linguistic past of that area and are most likely connected to textual transmission. The non-literary sources contemporary with the Brogyntyn manuscript share only some of these less common endings, implying a smoothing out of variation in the possible inflections during the fifteenth century.