--------------------------------

Edurne Garrido Anes
Department of English Philology, University of Huelva
Email: edurne dot garrido at dfing dot uhu dot es

The case of souchen, a Middle English word that didn’t last

The verb souchen is a Middle English word of French descent that seems to have had an extremely short life in the history of English. The OED, which labels the term as ‘obsolete’, dates its first written record to 1325 and its last one to about 1400. Even if some occurrences of this verb have been attested in slightly later manuscripts, it appears to be the case not only that the word did not manage to outlive the Middle English period, but also, that it could hardly reach the end of it, given that the latest records seem to be from around 1450 (MED). This implies, then, that souchen formed part of the English lexicon for little longer than one century, at least as it stands in written documents alone, since we cannot estimate its oral usage, which must have naturally preceded the one in writing.

When scribes of the period were confronted with this word in their source texts, some chose to copy it on into their exemplars, whereas many others clearly refused to use it and came up with alternative lexical choices. This paper seeks to show that multiple extant copies of individual Middle English works, and more specifically, of the Prick of Conscience, can provide us with interesting samples of contemporary medieval attitudes towards this word, and they might, too, shed some light upon the reasons why, unlike others, this one failed to survive beyond the Middle English period.

References