Ealde æ, niwæ laȝe: Two words for ‘Law’ in the Twelfth Century

This article investigates the competition between the two main words for ‘law’, oe and lagu, at the ‘transition’ between Old English and Middle English. Its focus is on five important manuscripts copied from the mid-twelfth century to the turn of the thirteenth: London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian D xiv, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MSS Bodley 343 and Junius 1 (The Orrmulum), London, British Library, MS Cotton Vespasian A xxii, and London, Lambeth Palace Library, MS 487. The study explores the contexts of all the occurrences of oe and lagu in these manuscripts, and asks whether their attestation can be accounted for in terms of processes of textual transmission and/or preferences for particular collocations or stylistic effects, sense, metre, etc.