Linguistic repertoires and intra-writer variation in Old English: Hemming of Worcester

This chapter explores intra-writer variation in the works of Hemming of Worcester, an eleventh-century monk whose hand has been identified in seven surviving manuscripts. A corpus compares selections from Hemming’s written output alongside parallel selections from other textual witnesses. The resulting scribal profile builds on data in Wallis (2013a) to analyse his variation in four features which deviate from ‘standard’ or ‘focused’ Late-West-Saxon: <wæ> spellings, o+nasal, retraction of -ward, and unstable <h> (hdeletion and h-insertion). Hemming’s variation is shown to be due to two main factors, constrained selection (influenced by exemplar forms) in ‘local’ texts, and his own preferred usage, based on ongoing sound changes in late-Old English.