Orm and the Ormulum

by Professor Nils-Lennart Johannesson

Department of English at Stockholm University

The Ormulum: the work of the 12th-century Bourne preacher Orm

A 12th-century manuscript preserved in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and containing a work known as the Ormulum was in all likelihood produced at Bourne Abbey. The following is a summary of current scholarly opinion about the text and its author. For illustrative passages from the text and more information about the manuscript, visit the website www.english.su.se/nlj/ormulum/ormulum.htm

The author

What we know about the author of the Ormulum is what he himself states in his text: at one place he gives his name as Orrm (Þiss boc iss nemmnedd. orrmulum; / Forr þi þatt orrm itt wrohhte.), at another he states that at the place where he was baptised, he was given the name Orrmin. Orm (< ON ormr ‘worm’, ‘serpent’, ‘dragon’) was a common enough name in the parts of England which had been settled by Scandinavians; Orrmin is generally held to be a modification of the name on the model of Awwstin (‘Augustine’).

At the beginning of the ‘Dedication’ Orm addresses his brother Walter, who is said to have commissioned the work (Icc hafe don swa summ þu badd; / & forþedd te þi wille.). Both brothers were Augustinian canons (witt hafenn takenn ba. / An re3^hell boc to foll3^henn. / Unnderr kanunnkess had. & lif. / Swa summ sannt awwstin sette.). That is the end of the information that Orm himself gives us; for the rest, we have to rely on what deductions can be made from the text.

As far as the localisation of the text is concerned, the dialect has long been recognised as East Midland. In an ingenious discussion of the table of contents in the manuscript, Parkes (1983) points out that a group of homilies towards the end of the collection stand out from the vast majority (which deal with the life of Christ), in that they deal with the lives and works of Peter and Paul. This would make sense only if Orm belonged to a monastery dedicated to these saints. The only Augustinian house in the East Midland area with that dedication was the abbey of Bourne, in southern Lincolnshire, founded in 1138. It does not follow, of course, that Orm himself came from Bourne; his comments about his baptism seem to indicate that he was baptised, at any rate, at some other place.

In the same article, Parkes analysed the writing of the collaborator of Orm’s (traditionally referred to as Hand C) who put in the Latin cues (the beginning of the Gospel text for each homily) in the manuscript and concluded that those entries could not have been written later than c. 1180. But the Latin cues were the last entries to be made in the manuscript, and were made only after a long process of composition of the homilies, copying the text from earlier drafts, revision of the content of the text, and finally a long sequence of passes through the text during which Orm corrected various little formal details. Orm may well have started work on his homilies in the 1150’s. (In other words, Orm must have been active during the time of abbot David.)

Brother Walter must clearly have been an authority figure, since he could commission a work on this scale, which in all likelihood kept his brother occupied for a couple of decades. (See below about the length of the text.) Orm was in all likelihood active during the time of abbot David; Walter may well have been the prior. The reason why a fair copy of the manuscript was apparently never produced may have been that Walter died and official support for Orm’s project was withdrawn. That may well have been the point at which Orm went from making large-scale revisions of the content of his text to concentrating on minor details of spelling and morphology. Eventually, old age seems to have taken its toll: what are apparently late changes are clumsily executed, no doubt due to weak eyes and stiff fingers.

The manuscript

The manuscript as we know it today is merely a fragment of the total work. The table of contents runs to 242 homilies, but that list in itself is incomplete: it is quite possible that the total number was 250. In the margin beside entry 50 a hand of the 12th or 13th century has written Huc usque .i. uol. (i.e. ‘Here ends the first volume’), hence 5 volumes of 50 homilies each seem plausible. Since the 17th century, however, the manuscript comes to an end at the beginning of homily 32; a 17th-century owner (the Dutch scholar Jan van Vliet, who signed the flyleaf at Breda on 6 February 1659) has written in the margin beside entry 32 Huq usque fragmentum (i.e. ‘Here ends the fragment’). Some pages have also disappeared from the manuscript since van Vliet numbered the columns of text. Even so, the text, as it has come down to us, comprises just over 20,000 verses in the 1878 edition.

Van Vliet acquired the manuscript from the library of Sir Thomas Aylesbury, a royalist who died in exile at Breda in 1657. Aylesbury was a collector of manuscripts and rare books and managed to smuggle out his library when he left England after the execution of Charles I in 1649 which explains how the MSS came to be on the Continent in the 17th century.

The manuscript is made up of large and somewhat irregularly shaped sheets of parchment (a page is roughly 23 inches high and 9 inches across), gathered in 8 numbered quires which contain the homilies, preceded by two unnumbered quires, the second of which contains Orm’s introduction and table of contents. The manuscript is clearly Orm’s own working draft; there are numerous changes and corrections to the text, and in addition to the main pages there are numerous smaller pieces of parchment with added text sewn into the manuscript. The introduction contains instructions for a future copyist, but it is not known whether the text was ever copied; all that has survived is Orm’s own draft.

Ownership

If Parkes’s attribution of the text to Bourne Abbey is correct, it seems reasonable to assume that the manuscript remained in the Abbey library until the dissolution of the monasteries. Nothing is known about its fate, however, until it came into the possession of van Vliet in the mid-17th century (see above). Van Vliet apparently took a great interest in the text and started preparing a glossary for it (his notebook is now in Lambeth Palace Library, known as MS 783). After van Vliet’s death, the manuscript came into the possession of the librarian Francis Junius. After Junius’s death in 1677 the manuscript became the property of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, where, to this day, it is known as MS Junius 1.

The text

The text of the Ormulum was first edited and published in 1852 by R M White (Oxford University Press); a revised edition was brought out by R Holt in 1878 (also OUP). If all goes well, my own edition should appear in a couple of years’ time.

The text of the Ormulum is made up of homilies, ie explications of gospel texts. Homily collections which are intended to be used for preaching are normally arranged in the order of the Sundays and saints’ days in the Church year, and take as their point of departure the gospel lection for each day. The Ormulum differs from this pattern in that Orm selected gospel lections from the Missal but rearranged them so as to form a chronological sequence presenting the life of Christ, starting at Luke 1.5, the story of how the archangel Gabriel appeared to Zacharias in the Temple, announcing the coming birth of Zacharias’s son (John the Baptist). The gospel-based homilies come to an end with number 230; the remaining twelve entries in the list of contents deal with matters from the Acts of the Apostles, in particular with the activities of St. Peter and St. Paul (from which Parkes concluded that they were the patron saints of Orm’s house).

It is hard to imagine how Orm intended his text to be used. If it had been intended for use in church, then the chronological arrangement of the episodes in the life of Christ would hardly have been chosen. There are also indications that Orm intended his homilies to be read in the order they are presented; now and then there appear passages in the text that provide links to earlier homilies (‘as I said a little earlier’, ‘now I will take up the story of John the Baptist just where I left it’). But if the work had been intended for private devotions, one would have expected it to have been commissioned by a wealthy layman rather than his brother and fellow canon Walter. The audience that Orm addresses also seems to shift, even within a single homily: sometimes he addresses a single person (addressed with the singular pronoun þu ‘thou’), who sometimes appears to be a priest, sometimes a married man of substance, sometimes a serf. On other occasions he addresses an audience of several readers/listeners (using the plural pronoun 3e ‘ye’ and the phrase laferrdinngess ‘gentlemen’). In the Dedication to his brother Walter he explicitly states that he has written his homilies in order to save the souls of such English-speaking people as did not know any Latin, by explaining to them what each gospel text means.

Each homily consists of a translation of the gospel text in question, followed by an explication of the text. These explications were based on existing Latin homily collections and Bible commentaries. Very few of Orm’s sources have been known in the past; during my stay in Oxford this spring I have managed to identify nearly two dozen books that Orm must have had access to, by authors ranging from St Augustine in the 4th century over the venerable Bede in the 7th century to near-contemporaries such as Anselm of Laon and Honorius Augustodunensis. It turns out that Orm did not follow his sources as slavishly as has hitherto been assumed; he could easily combine elements from five or six different authors in a single homily.

His language

Although the Ormulum has never been popular among literary critics (more of this below), it has been a favourite among linguists and language historians ever since the 17th century. Orm’s language affords us a glimpse of the English vernacular when it had finally shaken off the bonds of the Old English West Saxon written standard language (even the last couple of scribes working on the Peterborough Chronicle between 1121 and 1154 did not entirely manage to free themselves from its influence), but before it had been inundated by French loanwords. There is a strong presence of loans from Old Norse, but very few from French and Latin. Compared to earlier texts, the language of the Ormulum looks quite modern: Orm is the first known writer to have used the indeclinable article þe (the) consistently with any kind of noun, and he is also the first known writer to have used the third person plural personal pronoun þe33 (they, borrowed from Old Norse) consistently. But the lack of French and Latin borrowings make his language still look rather different from modern English (e.g. gluterrnesse ‘avarice’, mildheortnesse ‘mercy’, frofrenn ‘to comfort’, forrwunndredd ‘amazed’, swiþe ‘very’).

It may also be noted that Orm is the first known spelling reformer. He devised a spelling system whose most noteworthy feature is the doubling of a consonant after a short vowel in the same syllable, thus providing valuable information about the pronunciation of his variety of English.

Comparison with Robert Mannyng

Orm has always had a bad press from modern literary critics, who tend to find his text boring. This is to some extent due to the White-Holt editions, which neglect the paragraph marking in the manuscript, which makes the text seem less structured than it really is. But by and large, the text is not very entertaining, and Orm never intended it to be. His text stands at the end of a long tradition of Latin exegetical writing, and any flaws one may find in his writing (such as a preoccupation with details and side issues so that main issues may temporarily be obscured, or a predilection for number mysticism) are all to be found in Latin texts produced within that tradition. His style is at best dignified; his main theme — an explanation of God’s purpose with mankind — is too serious to admit of entertaining or light-hearted writing. When he writes about sins, he refrains from illustrative anecdotes, which makes his presentation somewhat abstract. Mannyng, by contrast, uses the illustrative anecdote as his chief presentational device, which makes his text more immediately attractive to a modern reader.

References

Holt, Robert (ed.). 1878. The Ormulum, with the Notes and Glossary of Dr. R.M. White. 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon.

Parkes, M.B. 1983. ‘The Presumed Date and Possible Origin of the Manuscript of the “Ormulum”: Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS. Junius 1.’ In Five Hundred Years of Words and Sounds: A Festschrift for Eric Dobson, ed. by E.G. Stanley and D. Gray, 115-127. Cambridge: Brewer.

White, Robert Meadows (ed.). 1852. The Ormulum. 2 vols. Oxford: At the University press.

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