Funny Manuscript Annotations

Another brilliant one from Dennis King, this time from the Book of Ballymote, specifically the part of the book known as the Monastery of Tallaght.

Dennis has pictures here:
http://nimill.blogspot.ie/2012/08/ce-mhead-bhi-ar-rent-boy-in-eirinn.html

I'll translate Dennis' post:

How much did a rent boy cost in medieval Ireland?

Easy to know. We have the answer in this passage from a text which is called the Monastery of Tallaght usually. It is to be found in the Book of Ballymote, written around the year 1390.

Bardic Irish text:
Screpul doberar
do gilli no óclig ar comaitecht do
neuch o pecad étraid no do mnáoi

English translation of Bardic Irish text*:
A scruple, it's given to the youths or servants
for accompanying one who is under the sin
of lust, or to a woman (who does the same).

The next paragraph of Dennis' post deals with the naturalness of his Modern Irish translation.

Then the post ends with:
As for "screpul" or "screaball", it was a unit of currency. The name comes from the Latin "scripulus". There was 24 scruples in the ounce in that system. Different sources say different things about the worth of a scruple, but it is clear that it wasn't a lot of money. Occasionally scruple only means fee.


*I thought this would be better than translating Dennis' modern Irish translation. Two layers of translation is a bit much.

Basically in the earliest period Irish looks very like Latin and Gaulish, so called Primitive Irish. Which is what we see on Ogham stones, although Ogham stones have "posh" Primitive Irish. Around the 5th and 6th centuries the Irish accent mutated this Latin like language into what has been called the strangest Indo-European language, I'll call this Early Irish.

The new monastic orders, literate in Latin, decide to make a literary model for their own language. They decided to ditch Primitive Irish as it is too archaic and get rid of ogham for two reasons:
1. Writing in the Roman alphabet brought Irish into line with the other European languages.
2. Ogham was based too strongly around the way sounds worked in Primitive Irish, most of these sound rules no longer functioned.

The monks appeared to looked quite closely at Early Irish, all its dialects and devised Old Irish, the standard form of Early Irish that nobody actually spoke. (Although it was probably close to the way a well-read person spoke Early Irish) Old Irish is not posh or elitist really, it appears to be just a fairly neutral standard language. It strictly forbid all dialect forms however. It is impossible to tell where somebody is from in Old Irish literature.

The poetic classes, we know, did not take up Old Irish and instead probably continued to recite the Táin and other stories in Primitive Irish. Only the monks used Old Irish, but thankfully some monks from poetic families wrote down the myths and stories. Unfortunate that we never get a true poet doing it, but it's still a lot better than other countries got.

The poetic classes were originally broken into Fili and Bard. Both did the same initial training for seven years, when a Bard would then stop and a Fili would continue for up to a decade after. A Bard could only write praise poetry for nobles and did not know the vast stores of knowledge, lore and law of the Fili. A Fili could of course write praise poetry (but he cost much more than a Bard), however also acted as a Judge, as well as an encyclopedia of genealogical knowledge and ancient stories.

Eventually the law grew in complexity until a Fili could not be expected to know it in addition to the other Lore. For that reason the system was reformed and a Fili, after his first seven years, was given a choice. Either they took an additional five years in pure law and no lore and became a Brehan (basically a judge), or they just learned lore and no law, this choice kept the name Fili. Fili and Brehan were segregated and went to separate schools. Redwood Castle in Tipperary is an example of a Brehan school.

By this time the language was beginning to evolve rapidly, the insanely complex grammatical rules of Early Irish breaking down, giving way to an unstable language: Middle Irish. Unstable languages like Middle Irish often appear in linguistic evolution. A halfway house the language rests in as it begins to reorder its grammar.

The Fili and Brehan now began to learn Old Irish, but both they and the monks started making several mistakes as they no longer spoke Early Irish. This is the Middle Irish period, when most of the early manuscripts containing the laws, genealogies and literature were written. Of course some Fili did write Old Irish without mistakes.

Around the time the Normans arrive, the language completes the transition and Modern Irish comes into existence. However the important thing is that the transition was completed in 1300 and the Normans arrived in large numbers around 1200. When the Normans arrived, society was restructured quite a bit. The old monasteries were removed and Christianity began to take its modern form. The Normans however loved Irish praise poetry, but didn't care much for all the literature and lore. For this reason there wasn't really any economic incentive to be a Fili, since you could already write praise poetry after the first seven years when you qualified as a Bard. (There was still a reason to be a Brehan, as the Normans began following Brehan law).

For this reason the additional seven years as a Fili stopped existing in a formal way. Basically, outside of Brehans, everybody just became a Bard. However the additional seven years of Fili training were still offered in some places and some would take it to build up their prestige, but from now on it just made you a super-Bard, not anything truly different.

So with the monasteries and the Fili gone, there was no real connection to Old Irish any more and people recognised it was too archaic. So for this reason the Bards made the Bardic standard around 1200. It consisted of the following:

1. Posh speech. The poets had always been an elite. So their standard contained no elements of common speech the way Old Irish did.

2. Unlike Old Irish, which forbid all traces of dialect, Bardic Irish allowed them. So Ulster, Leinster, e.t.c. words are all present. As long as they were the words used by the elite in those areas. The reason for this is that the focus of the Bards was now mainly poetry. More words and choice of verb forms meant more possibilities for rhymes.

3. The ability to create compound words under strict rules. In the common people's language they didn't really make compound words. An analogue in English is that you would always say "fridge", never "frozo-electra-box", people aren't understood if they make compound words like this. In the Bardic standard, you were, you could use the normal word or any compound possible under the proscribed rules. Of course the rules basically ensured that nothing as stupid sounding as what I wrote would be produced. Still though, these compound words are part of the reason why the common folk would mock Bardic Irish. The reason they were included is that the compound words allowed the Bards to achieve extremely complex rhymes.

So in 1200 the Bardic standard was completed. It would have sounded like noble speech with a poetic edge. A Noble with no training would easily have understood it. Remember however the language only stopped rapidly changing in 1300. So within one hundred years, nobody, not even the nobles spoke like this. The training of Bards had to be extended by three years to drill them in how to pronounce the Bardic Standard.

So that was the Bardic Standard. Luckily the Normans loved the poems and so did the Gaelic Lords, so the Bards had a good living.