In 1489, John Ramsay, a ‘notary public’ in Fife, copied a manuscript for the use of Symon Lochmalony, vicar of Auchtermoonzie in the same county. This book, now Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates’ 19.2.2, contains the two principal epic-romances of Older Scots literature: John Barbour’s Bruce, a poem originally presented to Robert II, King of Scots, in 1375, and ‘Blind’ Hary’s Wallace, which dates from a century later.Ramsay had already completed a copy of The Bruce two years before, although this earlier manuscript, now Cambridge, St John’s College, MS G.23, seems to be drawn from a different exemplar; the Cambridge manuscript is moreover much damaged, the first three books of the poem being missing.

Historical pragmatics is a mode of analysis that is not only descriptive but also explanatory. Hitherto, most – very valuable – work in historical pragmatics has focused on corpus-analysis, especially of grammatical or lexical features; a ‘typical’ piece of research from this orientation deploys quantitative analysis to map (e.g.) the linguistic expression of ‘polite’ discourse (see e.g. the essays in Bax and Kádár 2011). More recently, however, as flagged earlier by Andreas Jucker and Irma Taavitsainen, and developed further by such scholars as Claudia Claridge, Merja Kytö, Matti Peikola, Carla Suhr and Jukka Tyrkkö, the domain has become more capacious and qualitative in orientation, including as additional objects of enquiry features that have traditionally been seen as non-linguistic.

William Langland’s Piers Plowman, one of the greatest English poems of the late fourteenth century, was first printed in 1550. This edition was produced by Robert Crowley (c. 1517–88), who combined his short-lived commercial activities – supported, albeit without acknowledgement, by the king’s printer, Richard Grafton – with a longer career as a polemical author and reformed clergyman, active in the evangelical interest and inter alia a major source for the protestant martyrologist John Foxe. He has, perhaps a little over-enthusiastically, been described as ‘the most significant poet between Surrey and Gascoigne’ (King 1982: 320). Piers Plowman was Crowley’s most ambitious verse publication in terms of size, and was clearly a success for him. No fewer than three impressions (1550a–1550c) appeared in the same year, in a substantial quarto format; with the exception of an edition of the Psalter, all Crowley’s other publications were more modest octavos.

In 1867, John Hales (1836–1914) and Frederick J. Furnivall (1825–1910), two distinguished Victorian men of letters and enthusiasts for earlier literature (Gregory 2006), produced a new edition of a very famous poetic miscellany: the seventeenth-century Percy Folio manuscript. This volume, now London, British Library, MS Additional 27879, is a collection of ballads and romances, many originating (it seems) in the late Middle Ages, albeit heavily revised by a seventeenth-century learned (and, probably, royalist) antiquarian (Donatelli 1993). The new edition superseded that of the manuscript’s eponymous first editor, Bishop Thomas Percy (1729–1811), who a century earlier had included much of its contents in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765).

Towards the end of the fourteenth century, someone, somewhere (probably) in the English West Midlands, decided to make a substantial investment: the production of a vast manuscript miscellany of religious texts in the vernacular. This book, Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Eng. poet. A.1, is better known nowadays as the Vernon manuscript, after Edward Vernon, its seventeenth-century owner who gifted it to the Bodleian in 1677. Such miscellanies seem to have been fashionable at the time of its making; for instance, John Northwood’s collection in London, British Library, MS Additional 37787, associated with Bordesley Abbey in North Worcestershire, where Northwood entered as a novice in 1386, contains some twenty English works of vernacular devotion, several in common with Vernon.

This book began with the case of Thomas Percy, and it seems therefore appropriate to conclude it with a figure who has a claim to be Percy’s principal successor as an imaginative recuperator of the medieval past, and whose presence will have been noted in several places earlier. In 1804, Walter Scott published his first edition of Sir Tristrem; a Metrical Romance of The Thirteenth Century; by Thomas of Erceldoune, called The Rhymer. Scott was not yet Sir Walter; nor was he yet the laird of the great estate of Abbotsford, which was still a farm nicknamed Clarty (i.e. ‘muddy’) Hole.

In the previous chapter, it was claimed that a text’s formal features reflect contemporary ideologies, and that as a work is copied and recopied these formal features change to reflect shifting socio-cultural imperatives; texts are not only invented in the ancient rhetorical sense (i.e. inventio ‘finding’), but in the modern sense as well. This claim is well demonstrated by the transmission history of a work now canonical in Anglo-Saxon studies: the Old English epic poem Beowulf, surviving in London, British Library, MS Cotton Vitellius A.xv (part II). In addition to Beowulf the codex also contains a poem on the Biblical story of Judith, and three prose works: The Life of St Christopher, The Marvels of the East and The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle. The manuscript was copied by two scribes.

In the chapter, I argue for a broad conception of context in metaphorical conceptualization – one that covers our cognitive interaction with various elements and properties of the situation of discourse, the discourse itself, the conceptual-cognitive background, and the body of the speaker and hearer. These dimensions of our interaction with the world are labeled the situational context, discourse context, conceptual-cognitive context, and the bodily context. All of these context types and the specific contextual factors that make them up can influence the creation of metaphors in discourse.