Gower

Middle English Reading 1

Chapter 8 · Gower

📜 Gower

This chapter replaces the planned Piers Plowman. Wikipedia's article on that poem quotes only one line of Middle English and gives no gloss for it. The Middle English article's Sample texts section prints four lines from Chaucer's contemporary John Gower with a word-for-word rendering and two modern translations, so we read those instead. Four lines are short, but they are lines whose meaning we can check at every word.

The text

Two modern translations are printed beside the original. By Richard Brodie: "Of those who wrote before our lives / Their precious legacy survives; / From what was written then, we learn, / And so it's well that we in turn,". By J. Dow, which the page tool gave only in part: "Of those who wrote before we were born, books survive, / So we are taught what was written by them when they were alive." The two translations differ from each other and from the word-for-word rendering, which is why I use the rendering for the grammar.

Source: Wikipedia, Middle English, Sample texts, Gower, Confessio Amantis: the Middle English, the near word-for-word rendering (no translator credited), and the translations credited to Richard Brodie and J. Dow, as the page tool gave them. My notes are mine and unverified.

Walking through it

1. Pronouns. hem ("them") is an h- form of the kind Middle English Grammar 1, Chapter 5 listed for the third-person plural object (heo[m]), not the Norse þem. ous ("us") is listed in Chapter 5 as us / ous. we is the subject form.
2. written. The rendering reads it as a past tense, "wrote", plural, agreeing with hem. The ending -en is the plural of the strong past that Chapter 6 gave. It is the same form we use for a participle today, so the context decides.
3. duelle. The rendering reads it as "dwell", a present plural. It ends in -e. Chapter 6 gave the dialect plurals as -eþ, -en and -es, and -e is not one of them. The source I read does not say which dialect this is, so I cannot place the ending; I note it as a plural in -e and nothing more.
4. The letter u. duelle is written with u where we write w. The rendering shows it means "dwell". I do not know if this is the poet's habit or the edition's; the sources do not say.
5. Plural noun. bokes carries the strong plural -es (Chapter 2).
6. Ben. The rendering reads Ben tawht as "Been taught", with Ben a present plural of be. Chapter 7 gave the present plural as aren and the infinitive as been; Ben is not in the table, so this is a form I can read but not check.
7. tawht and write. tawht is a participle with no ending and no prefix. write in was write is rendered "written", so it is a participle that lacks the -en of its plural-past cousin written in line 1. The sources gave no rule about when a participle took -en, so I only point out the difference.
8. Word order. Line 4 puts the predicate before the verb: good is that we also. The word-for-word rendering turns it into "it is good". Chapter 8 of Middle English Grammar 1 had no source for this kind of order, so I describe it and do not explain it.
9. Forthi. The rendering gives only "For", so I cannot say what the -thi adds.

What I could not read of Piers Plowman

Wikipedia's Piers Plowman article gives the author as William Langland, with the date as c. 1370 to 86 and the form as unrhymed alliterative verse in dream visions, and it states no dialect. It quotes one Middle English line, from the B-text, B.XV.152: "I have lyved in londe... my name is longe wille." It gives no translation or gloss. With no gloss and only a fragment, a reading chapter would be guesswork, so I left it out.

New words

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