The Rev. William Hutton's A Bran New Wark: the Westmorland Dialect in the Late Early-Modern Period (original) (raw)

2004, Sederi Yearbook of the Spanish and Portuguese Society For English Renaissance Studies

Earlier work on the dialects of Early-Modern English has shown the dialects of English of the sixteenth-to-eighteenth centuries to be perhaps the most neglected and poorly researched of all in the history of the language. Under such circumstances, it is important to identify and then analyse both manuscripts and printed documents that contain examples of dialectal forms and constructions from that period. Although republished by the English Dialect Society, the Rev. William Hutton's A Bran New Wark has remained an essentially-neglected source, not least-one imagines-because of its rarity, spelling conventions, and stylistically-mixed character, all of which render it difficult to interpret. In the present study, I discuss and illustrate these difficulties, and offer an analysis of part of the text at all linguistic levels, from the discourse-analytical and stylistic through the orthographicalphonological to the grammatical and lexical. It is shown that, despite certain difficulties, Hutton's text gives us a considerable amount of linguistic information at all levels, and that it is especially valuable by virtue of its being one of a group of early studies devoted to the dialects of SouthEast Cumbria/pre-1974 South Westmorland and the extreme North of Lancashire. Further, given that Hutton had had close contact with this dialect for many years before he published the piece in 1785, that society was still relatively static at the time, and that his stylistic, religious-pedagogic, and antiquarian agendas were conservative, it is not unreasonable to imagine that this text offers us some insights into the Westmorland and North-Lancashire dialects of the early-eighteenth and even late-seventeenth centuries.