The Form Wento in Middle English Texts

When Mayumi Taguchi and I edited the Middle English text Pepysian Meditations on the Passion of Christ from MS Pepys 2125, Magdalene College, Cambridge,¹ we came across the anomalous form wento in the manuscript. I intended at first to emend it as wente in the edited text, but it ended up staying as wento in the published version, as several people with expertise in medieval palaeography stated that they had come across the form in various Middle English manuscripts. Eventually, the edited lines in our printed text are as follows:

And whenne the sonne was go down and hit was leful to wurche, Marie Maudeleyne and other Maryes wento for to bye spicerye, with the whuche they wolde make an oynement for to anoynte the body of owre Lord Ihesu. (25/985–7)

On second thought, however, I feel that wento in these lines could have been altered to wente, unless the approach to the text is strictly diplomatic.² On the other hand, I am interested in the fact that not a few medievalists have come across the form wento. It seems to be attested repeatedly, though not frequently, both with singular and plural subjects. In this short contribution, I will propose some possible explanations for its occurrence by drawing on material from databases.

In the above-mentioned edition, I wrote in the commentary section that ‘e and o were, on occasion, confused in manuscripts’.³ I also referred to James Morey, who commented on the occasional mingling of e and o that he came across while editing the Prick of Conscience (e.g. tho for the).⁴ This is certainly relevant, but I am now convinced that more is involved in the occurrence of wento in Middle English texts.

It is certain that the erroneous interchange between e and o took place in medieval texts. In addition to the above, I would also like to refer to Takako Kato, who classifies the interchange between e and o in manuscripts as errors due to ‘visual memory’.⁵ She explores MS Gg.4.27 at the Cambridge University Library,⁶ pointing out some cases where the scribe erroneously wrote o for e or e for o and then he himself corrected the error (e.g. ho for he). Apparently, it was a fairly common pen slip, which may or may not have been corrected in a number of extant texts. As Kato notes, the reason for the mingling can be visual, since e and o have visual similarity.

The second possible factor behind the occurrence of wento is the existence of the preterite plural form wenton in Middle English, which is acknowledged in the existing literature to a larger extent, at least in comparison to wento. It is, unlike wento, recorded in the Middle English Dictionary (MED) (s.v. wenden).⁷ Indeed, its occurrence is not particularly isolated: the simple search string ‘wenton*’ in the MED Corpus gives 36 relevant examples, though three quarters of them are found in S. Editha, including the following⁸:

Erlys and barrons in the halle / Wenton to the emperour alle, / And sayed, … (The seven sages in English verse [MED Corpus])

Anon as þus was do, þe King and alle his meyne made hem redy, and wenton to schyppe, & sayled forth … (The Brut, or The chronicles of England [MED Corpus]).

In view of the fact that wenton can easily be emended as wenten in editions, one can surmise that it appears more widely in manuscripts than represented by the MED Corpus, which is based on editions, though I do not mean to say that wenton was frequent.⁹ The plural ending –on, whether or not its phonological value was reduced by the time of Middle English, is a justifiable form inherited from Old English, though wenton rather than wendon is attested mainly from the Middle English period according to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) (s.v. wend, v.).¹⁰ The loss of –n from wenton would simply yield wento, which is most appropriate for the plural, again however reduced the pronunciation of –o may have been. This process may have led to the occurrence of the same form in the singular.

The third possibility is that wento arose as a result of a kind of haplology. A simple search of the form ‘wento’ in the MED Corpus provides the following two examples:

Þaire sauls went (t)o heuyn ful sone. [H wento, T went to.] (Altenglische legenden [MED Corpus])

It happenyd, that the kyng wento to the wode an huntyng, and a knyght lafte at home, … (Early English versions of the Gesta Romanorum [MED Corpus])

Both these examples illustrate the clear relationship between wento and the preposition to, though of course it is natural in any case for verbs of ‘going’ to be accompanied by to. In the first of the above examples, the manuscript form wento (H) has been altered to went (t)o in the edition, perhaps with reference to the reading in the T manuscript went to, which is a full form without haplology. This particular case suggests that the form wento in the H manuscript resulted from the eliding of one of the duplicated t sounds. In the second of the above examples, wento is followed by to, suggesting that wento alone perhaps existed at some stage in the textual transmission, which itself would be a result of haplology, though this particular manuscript is a version with the insertion of additional to.¹¹ A similar case is found in the ICAMET (Innsbruck Computer Archive of Machine-Readable English Texts), whose single example of wento runs as follows¹²:

he toke leve, and wento to Blase (The Early History of King Arthur: A Prose Romance [ICAMET])

This example again suggests the possible existence at some stage of a version with wento, though this particular version includes the preposition to in addition to wento, which alone probably meant ‘went to’.

Further evidence in favour of this inference is found in some early printed books, where word divisions are clearer than in manuscripts and where it is not too difficult to find examples of wen to. See the following example from Early English Books Online (EEBO):

so as he abandoned the place, and wen to bokara in despigh: … (1615, The estates, empires, & principallities of the world [EEBO])¹³

This is a clear case of the deletion of one of the duplicated t sounds.

It is, therefore, likely that the essential mechanism for the rise of wento or wen to is similar to that for use to (rather than used to). Relevant examples of this are found quite easily, as the following quotations from the MED Corpus illustrate:

and all suche service as Chrysten men use to synge. (St Brandan [MED Corpus])

assuming the Sarum use to be that of the southern, and the York use to be that of the northern (Select English works of John Wyclif [MED Corpus])

This phenomenon is more widely discussed than wento in previous studies, where use to and used to are usually treated within the framework of the present and preterite tenses. Considering the fact that the examples cited from Chaucer by J. Kerkhof illustrate the plural form usen to, it may well be a matter of the tense.¹⁴ Still, the possibility cannot be eliminated that it is, to some extent at least, a matter of the rather ‘accidental’ deletion of d by the process of haplology.

Finally, I would also like to stress that wento, when incorporated into the inventory of variant orthographic forms of ‘went’, could be used for wente(n) outside the original environment. The addition of to after wento as discussed above is a case in point. If wento means ‘went to’, it is not necessary, at least in theory, to add another to, but this sequence is attested in a number of cases. Furthermore, the example quoted at the very beginning of this note from Pepysian Meditations on the Passion of Christ shows the sequence of wento for to. Due to the intervention of for, the preposition to in this example no longer neighbours on wento. This is clearly a further step from the initial rise of wento. All these considered, it is not surprising that a number of medieval scholars have come across this anomalous form. It is likely that the form wento was, to some extent, established as an anomaly.

As hitherto discussed, there are some possible factors behind the occurrence of the form wento in Middle English. Among the three suggested above, the third factor seems to be essential, at least in my view, though certainly the first and second ones are also involved.

Footnotes

1

Mayumi Taguchi and Yoko Iyeiri (eds), Pepysian Meditations on the Passion of Christ: Edited from Cambridge, Magdalene College, MS Pepys 2125 (Heidelberg, 2019).

2

Our edition is fairly diplomatic, but we have corrected obvious errors.

3

Taguchi and Iyeiri, 58. I was in charge of this line, though the edition is a collaborative work. For details of our division of work, see Taguchi and Iyeiri, vi.

4

James H. Morey (ed.), Prik of Conscience (Kalamazoo, MI, 2012), 8.

5

Takako Kato, ‘Corrected Mistakes in Cambridge University Library MS Gg.4.27’, in Margaret Connolly and Linne R. Mooney (eds), Design and Distribution of Late Medieval Manuscripts in England (York, 2008), 78–83.

6

This manuscript goes back to the early fifteenth century. For further details of the manuscript, see Kato.

7

https://quod.lib.umich.edu/m/middle-english-dictionary/dictionary (accessed 8 Jan. 2021)

8

A number of the examples from S. Editha are repeatedly counted in this result, since the MED Corpus (https://quod.lib.umich.edu/c/cme/ [8 January 2021]) includes two copies of it. This, however, does not affect my point that the form is simply more acknowledged than wento.

9

I have investigated the LAEME Corpus (http://www.amc.lel.ed.ac.uk/?page_id=492 [accessed 8 Jan. 2021]), which is manuscript-based, and found no examples of wenton.

10

The second edition of the OED, which is available on CD-ROM (vers. 4), states that –t forms of the preterite tense is attested from the Middle English period onwards, while the current online version (https://www.oed.com/ [accessed 8 Jan. 2021]) gives a single example of the -t form (instead of –d forms) from late Old English.

11

When the addition of to took place is a different question. The scribe of this manuscript may have introduced to, or perhaps the exemplar that he used already had the preposition to. This is an interesting issue, but not relevant to the present discussion.

12

For details of the ICAMET, see the description in CoRD (http://www.helsinki.fi/varieng/CoRD/corpora/ICoMEP/ [accessed 8 Jan. 2021]).

13

The easiest way to find examples of the sequence wen to is to use the EEBO Online Corpus provided by Mark Davies (https://www.english-corpora.org/eebo/ [accessed 8 Jan. 2021]) or Lancaster University (CQP Web at Lancaster, https://cqpweb.lancs.ac.uk/ [accessed 8 Jan. 2021]). I have found, however, that it is essential to look at the original image in EEBO, since some of the examples of wen to in the EEBO Online Corpus are representations of wen[…] to. The example cited here is an authentic one, where wen is followed by to with a space in between.

14

J. Kerkhof, Studies in the Language of Geoffrey Chaucer, 2nd, revised, and enlarged edition (Leiden, 1982), 161–2.