The Charles Translation Project Transcribed!

It's been a while since I've made an update. Work has kept me busy for the last few months, but I've had some time in between jobs to work on transcribing the text of BL Harley MS 682, the English poetry of Charles d'Orleans. It's been my goal for several years now to produce a modern English edition, and making my own transcription wasn't possible until the British Library got the manuscript digitized and up on their site. I've been working on the transcription in Transkribus (I talked a little about using Transkribus in this post last year) and thanks to some encouragement on Twitter, I've finally had the confidence to post it on my Charles website, Strangeness On the Ground. The site is a mess and some of the links pages are in need of a massive overhaul, but it's a start. I was paralyzed by it not being presentable and I didn't want to even start thinking about posting the transcription til it was complete and I had a nice site to put it on, but hey, the manuscript itself is messy and not ready for presentation 580 years later, so what am I worried about?

You can see the transcription in progress here: https://sites.google.com/site/charlesdukeoforleans/harley-682

How Easy is it to Read Chaucer?

Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is often used as an example of how much the English language has changed in 600 years. If anyone knows any Middle English, it's probably the opening of the Tales, the first 18 lines of the General Prologue: "Whan that aprill with hise shoures soote...". English has changed a great deal since Chaucer's medieval tour bus pulled out of Southwark on its way to Canterbury, but how much has it changed? How difficult (or easy) is it to read Chaucer? 

The answer is subjective. However easy or difficult it is to read a text depends on the reader's knowledge of the language used. Despite this, I became interested in how Chaucer's English, dating from the last quarter of the 14th century, compared to 21st century English. I hypothesized that, turns of phrase, cultural references, and pronunciation differences aside, the closer a word was to modern spelling and meaning, the "easier" it would be for someone with no experience in Middle English to read. To test this, I took a simple section of the Canterbury Tales-- The first 18 lines of the General Prologue-- and compared it to modern English. While it is not representative of the Tales as a whole, it is the most well-known part and most commonly used as an example of what I wanted to investigate-- how different it is from English spoken today. I split words into three categories: 1) words that have the same meaning and spelling in Middle English as they do in modern English, 2) words that have Middle English spellings but are recognizable from modern English, and 3) words that are not recognizable with just a knowledge of modern English. This is the result of my study.

Part 1 - The Middle English

To get the Middle English, I decided to use my own transcription rather than one published by someone else. This is because published editions often have spelling changed to some degree, even if still in Middle English. I wanted to be sure that the Middle English I was comparing was as Middle English as possible. To do this, I used the "Ellesmere Chaucer" manuscript, Huntington MssEL 26 C 9 as my source. I transcribed the lines using a program called Transkribus.

Transcribing San Marino, Huntington MssEL 26 C f.1r on Transkribus

My completed transcription, with a few abbreviations filled out:

Whan that aprill with hise shoures soote

The droghte of march hath perced to the roote

And bathed euery veyne in swich licour

Of which vertu engendred is the flour

Whan zephirus eek with his sweete breeth

Inspired hath in euery holt and heeth

The tendre croppes and the younge sonne

hath in the Ram his half cours yronne

And smale foweles maken melodye

That slepen al the nyght with open eye

So priketh hem nature in hir corages

Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages

And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes

To ferne halwes kouthe in soundry londes

And specially from euery shires ende

Of engelond to caunterbury they wende

The hooly blissful martyr for to seke

That hem hath holpen whan þat they were seeke

Part 2 - Asking someone who knows nothing about Middle English

To get an idea of what could be understood by someone with no experience in Middle English, I showed the transcription to my mother, who is not familiar with Chaucer or his language. She marked what she could more or less understand and what she didn't understand at all.

Yellow highlights indicate what someone with no experience in Middle English understood, blue for what wasn't understood.

The only things marked were things understood and things not understood. Surprisingly, most of the language was understood to some degree. I didn't count things like whatever "hath in the Ram his half cours yronne" (GP.l.8) actually means in context (halfway through the sign of Ares), just that the reader could understand the words in general. The things that weren't understood were extreme variations in spelling (like "shoures," "seken," and "holpen") and words that have no modern English equivalent (e.g., "yronne," "ferne," and "kouthe").

This only answered part of my question. I had identified three kinds of words and this part only gave me two of them-- things understood and things not understood. What about the in-between of words that were similar to modern English but spelled differently? That led me to:

Part 3 - Breaking things down further

I took the transcription and looked back at my original three criteria-- words that were the same in Middle and modern English, words that had spelling variations but same or similar meanings, and words that were not recognizable from modern English at all. Applying these three criteria, I marked the section according to my own understanding of modern English.

Lines 1-18 with three categories of words

Words marked in yellow are spelled the same as their modern English counterparts, green indicates a Middle English word similar to a modern English word but spelled differently, and blue for words that are either spelled so differently from modern English (like "hem" for "them," "þat" for "that," and "seeke" for "sick") that they are unrecognizable or have no modern English equivalent (like "halwes" and "eek").

There are 128 words in total in the first 18 lines of the General Prologue, and 90 unique words (counting spelling variations, like "his" and "hise"). Of these 90 unique words, 33 were the same as modern English, 42 were similar but with variations in spelling, and 15 were unrecognizable.

A chart representing the distribution of unique words in lines 1-18 of the General Prologue

I was surprised to find that the majority of unique words were similar to modern English, just with spelling variations (like "Caunterbury" for "Canterbury" and "droghte" for "drought"). I was also surprised to find that only a small portion of this text was completely unrecognizable. 

What's changed the most is minor spelling and pronunciation. The vocabulary in the first 18 lines of the Tales is largely still understandable in the modern day, with only 15 unique words-- 16 in total-- not having a clear modern equivalent-- and that's out of a total of 128 words. 

The Persnickety Historian Vs. The History Channel

Ah yes, our old friend. The "History Channel."

At one point, I seem to remember them doing stuff on history. I also remember TLC doing educational programming. Television is a vast wasteland of entertainment and education-- call it edutainment-- and . The most infamous example of this, at least in the States, is History Channel. At one point it seemed so saturated with WWII it was jokingly called "The Hitler Channel" and today it's the home of the 100% most incredibly accurate and trustworthy show on television, Ancient Aliens. So it's unsurprising that there is a serious lack of credibility and accountability in anything they say at this point. I just didn't expect to find it in an article about one of my favorite historical figures.
A recent interest (more accurately, obsession) of mine is the 15th century French poet Charles d'Orleans, who briefly appears in Henry V and was far more interesting than Shakespeare let on. He was the nephew of Charles VI, King of France, and became duke at 13 when his father was brutally murdered. He was 21 at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415 and was captured and taken to England, where he was held for 25 years. In his copious amounts of free time, Charles learned English and wrote poetry in it as well as French. His life was fraught with heartache, including the deaths of his father in 1407 and mother in 1408, the death in childbirth of his first wife, being part of a civil war, separation from his daughter, everything possible went wrong for him, but I'll talk more about his life as a whole in the rest of this article.

For background, Charles is attributed with writing the first Valentine poem, usually attributed to his years in captivity with his second wife, Bonne d'Armagnac as the recipient. It's pretty miserable as Valentines Day poetry goes.

I am already sick of love,
My very gentle Valentine,
Since for me you were born too late,
And I for you was born too soon.
God forgives him who has estranged
Me from you for the whole year.
I am already sick of love,
My very gentle Valentine. 

Well might I have suspected
That such a destiny,
Thus would have happened this day,
How much that Love would have commanded.
I am already sick of love,
My very gentle Valentine. (1)

Now that I've talked a little about Charles in general, what's this got to do with the History Channel? An article that somehow managed to get almost everything wrong. History.com, the website of History Channel ran an article this Valentine's Day about Charles and this poem. I honestly have no idea how you can pack so many mistakes into one article, it's simultaneously disappointing and impressive. Here we go.

[Link to article]

1. “As the nephew of King Charles VI of France, also known as Charles the Mad (who was believed to be schizophrenic), he was caught in the crossfire between his father, Louis I, who presided over the House of Orléans, and his uncle’s family, which oversaw the House of Burgundy, in their fight for control of France.” (2)

— Charles VI and Louis I were the nephews of Philip I of Burgundy (brother of their father Charles V). Philip’s son John the Fearless was Louis’s first cousin and therefore Charles d'Orleans’s first cousin once removed. The duchy of Burgundy was more like an independent state at that time, its ruling family being part of the Valois family (the dynasty then ruling France, so Charles VI was Charles of Valois) but not of the royal primogenitor line, rather a cousin branch, the House of Valois-Burgundy. For these reasons Charles VI had no control over Burgundy. However, the Duke of Burgundy John the Fearless (the king’s first cousin) was regent for the king during periods of his illness, during which time he and Louis jockeyed for power through control over the king.
Note also the use of "was believed to be schizophrenic," which is grammatically anachronistic. That indicates people thought that in his own time.

2. “Charles and his brothers vowed revenge on their first cousin John the Fearless, the Duke of Burgundy, whom they accused of murdering their father in a power grab, intensifying the family civil war.”

— The civil war began after Louis’s assassination in 1407 (the article does not state the year) and as stated above, John the Fearless was Charles’s first cousin once removed. They also didn't even have to make the accusation, as Burgundy confessed to ordering Louis's death soon after. Despite the confession and the brutal nature of the murder and the fact it was the King's brother who'd been killed, Charles and his family had to forgive Burgundy, who defended his actions as killing a tyrant.

3. “It also put the young duke in his father-in-law’s Armagnac camp in the years-long French civil war between the Armagnacs and the Burgundians.”

— The Orleanist party had no leader after Louis’s death, until Bernard VII took control after Charles and Bonne were married. The party was renamed after Armagnac, so in reality Armagnac technically joined Charles’s side.

 4. “As battle after battle dragged on between the rival factions, Charles was captured and imprisoned by the Burgundians in 1415. While held prisoner in the Tower of London, he penned a poem to his wife the same year that he was captured at the Battle of Agincourt.”

— Charles was not taken prisoner by the Burgundians, he was captured by the English at the Battle of Agincourt as stated, which is why he was imprisoned in the Tower of London. He was imprisoned and kept imprisoned for years by King Henry V, most likely since he would be seen as a major threat to Henry's already shaky claim to the French throne.

5. “Beyond the Valentine he sent to Isabella, Charles wrote hundreds of other poems while in prison—many about love and nobility.” 

 — The recipient was Bonne d'Armagnac, his second wife. In all, Charles would be married three times: first to Isabelle d'Valois, daughter of the King (therefore Charles's cousin) and widow of King Richard II of England; second to Bonne d'Armagnac, daughter of the new head of the party Bernard VII Armagnac; and finally to Marie de Cleves in part of the end of the Burgundian-Armagnac Civil War (interestingly, she was the grandaughter of Burgundy. Yes, that Burgundy.). He and Marie would have three children, including the future King Louis XII of France.

There are also multiple omissions of things that'd be good to note, like who Isabelle was first married to, Richard II; the years of some of these events, and most disappointingly that Charles's mother was named Valentine! The most annoying omission is any form of bibliography. There are no citations, no further reading. This undermines any credibility and leaves the reader stranded. All of this information can be found in the encyclopedia.

If you're interested in Charles and his times and want a well-researched historical novel to get lost in, check out Hella S. Haasse's In a Dark Wood Wandering. I highly recommend it.

(If anything is wrong here, please contact me so I can correct it).

1“A Farewell to Love,” Wikisource, last modified November 2, 2016, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Translation:A_Farewell_to_Love.

2“Thad Morgan, History’s Oldest-Known Valentine Was Written in Prison,” History Channel, last modified February 14, 2018, https://www.history.com/news/historys-oldest-known-valentine-was-written-in-prison.