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This article investigates the nature of hiatus and elision in fourteenth-century alliterative verse by using a series of case studies from within and beyond the alliterative tradition. In particular the article considers whether elision between the -ly suffix and a following word beginning with a vowel (or h + vowel) was a possibility in alliterative poetry. The author concludes that the degree to which poets and their scribes exploited the -ly and -liche suffixes as doublets for metrical purposes to avoid hiatus was variable from poem to poem and proposes several possible explanations for the observable differences in usage.
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