Chapter I: Front Matter

[Transcriber’s Note:

This e-text is based on the 1869 (second) edition of the _Poems_. A few apparent misprints were checked against the 1864 edition, but the texts as a whole were not closely compared.

The text includes characters that will only display in UTF-8 (Unicode) text readers, primarily Ȝ ȝ (yogh). There are also a few Greek words in the Index, and a handful of letters with overline or macron, such as ī. If these characters do not display properly, or if the quotation marks in this paragraph appear as garbage, make sure your text reader’s “character set” or “file encoding” is set to Unicode (UTF-8). You may also need to change the default font. As a last resort, use the Latin-1 version of the file instead.

The book has been separated into six independent units, set off by triple rows of asterisks:

[1] Introductory Material
[2] The Pearl
[3] Cleanness
[4] Patience
[5] Glossarial Index (excluding Postscript)
[6] Collected Sidenotes (section added by transcriber: editor’s
sidenotes can be read as a condensed version of full text)

Each segment has its own footnotes and errata lists. Readers may choose to divide them into separate files. The Notes were originally printed as a short (12 pages) section before the Index. For this e-text they have been distributed among their respective texts.

_Italics and other Text Markings:_

Bracketed letters are in the original.

Italicized letters within words, representing expanded abbreviations, are shown in the e-text with braces (“curly brackets”): co{n}nyng{e}. Readers who find this added information distracting may globally delete all braces _in the body text_; they are not used for any other purpose. Italic markings were omitted from forms such as “Fol. 51a.” where the a or b was consistently italicized. Whole-word italics (in modern editorial material only) are shown with _lines_.

In the Glossarial Index, groups of words in {braces} were printed on consecutive lines, bracketed together. Text printed in small capitals is shown in +marks+.

_Page Layout:_

The HTML version of this e-text offers a closer approximation of the original page layout.

_Footnotes_ were numbered separately for each page. In this e-text, footnotes are numbered sequentially within each text and grouped at the end of each stanza (_The Pearl_) or section (_Cleanness_ and _Patience_), or each subsection of the Preface. Numbered notes printed in the side margin were treated as footnotes.

_Headnotes_ from the top of each page have been moved to the most appropriate sentence break. They are also grouped at the beginning of each selection to act as a detailed table of contents.

_Sidenotes_ were added by the editor to give translations or summaries. In this e-text, they are collected into full sentences, and generally appear immediately _before_ their original location. In _The Pearl_, sidenotes are grouped at the beginning of each twelve-line stanza. Sidenotes in the form [Fol. 10b] are shown in the same way as general sidenotes. They always come directly above the relevant line or its sidenotes, if any.

_Orphaned Quotation Marks_ are listed separately in each Errata section. In some cases it may be possible to guess where the missing quotation mark belongs, but it seemed safer to leave the text as printed. No quotation marks disappeared between the 1864 and 1869 editions.]

Early English

Alliterative Poems

in the

West-Midland Dialect

of the

Fourteenth Century

Edited From
The Unique Manuscript
British Museum MS. Cotton
Nero A. x

by

Richard Morris

_Published for_
THE EARLY ENGLISH TEXT SOCIETY
_by the_
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
London New York Toronto

First Published 1864
Second Edition 1869
Reprinted (1869 Version) 1965

Original Series, No. 1

Originally Printed by Stephen Austin, Hertford
and now Reprinted Lithographically in Great Britain
at the University Press, Oxford
by Vivian Ridler, Printer to the University

CONTENTS

[List added by transcriber. Items in brackets do not have headers in the body text, but were treated as subsections for grouping footnotes.]

Preface
[Introduction to _The Pearl_]
[Introduction to _Cleanness_]
[Introduction to _Patience_]
[General Introduction]
Remarks Upon the Dialect and Grammar
Grammatical Details
I. Nouns
II. Adjectives
III. Pronouns
IV. Verbs
V. Adverbs
VI. Prepositions
VII. Conjunctions
Description of the Manuscript
Contractions Used in the Glossary

The Pearl
Cleanness
Patience

Notes [distributed among the three poems]
Glossarial Index