9 - Latin and Old English Month-names in Old English Written Tradition and in the Verse Menologium

Summary

The verse Menologium presents one of the few instances of heavy use of Old English month-names, and Imelmann summarises a brief history of English month-names in his edition of the poem. Together with Chapter 15 of Bede's De temporum ratione, where the origins of the vernacular month-names are explained, the poem is also sometimes mentioned in studies related to Old English month-names. However, the background of the dual use of Latin and Old English month-names in the poem has not been examined, which is why I shall discuss the issue here in an appendix. The issue has much to do with how the two sets of month-names were conceived and used in Old English writings in late Anglo-Saxon England, and therefore, I shall first survey the use of Latin and Old English month-names in the Old English written tradition.

The issue is also interesting since it is related to the problem of the replacement of the vernacular month-names by the Latin ones in Old English. It seems worth examining since our knowledge about the issue is limited. It is not known when Latin month-names replaced vernacular ones; some suggest that the replacement had already been completed by the time of Bede, but as I shall argue below, written evidence suggests otherwise, and the native terms were still current at the end of the tenth century, when the Menologium was composed, and even in the eleventh century. As we shall see, Latin month-names, as learned terms, first began to be used among literate people, while vernacular ones seem to have lingered especially in colloquial contexts among the less learned at least until the first half of the eleventh century, since they are used as glosses for their Latin equivalents in the eleventh-century calendar in Cambridge, Corpus Christi College, MS 422. The dual use of month-names in the verse Menologium may also have something to do with the difference in vocabulary between the learned and the less learned. Yet before drawing any conclusion, it is necessary to know how these two sets of month-names coexisted or were segregated from each other in the latter half of the tenth century.