While the old accusation that there were no fixed spelling conventions in Middle English betrays a lack of understanding of extreme dialectal variation, conventions were largely scribal productions and could be highly localised, and often demonstrate some startling scribal takes on the relationship between certain configurations of letterforms and the spoken words they represent. (The north east, for example, is during the fourteenth to fifteenth century a major source of devotional handbooks and spiritual writing, due in part to, and in part a cause of, the significance and influence of Richard Rolle.) Far from being suddenly liberated to write down the language of the common people (an idea which itself proves irresistible as a comic device to a lot of medieval writers, including Chaucer), scribes continued to be instructed by other scribes, and some scribal archaisms persist for a long time. Rather, this diversity suggests the gradual end of Wessex's role as a focal point and trend-setter for scribal activity, and the emergence of more distinct local scribal styles and written dialects, and a general pattern of transition of activity over the centuries which follow, as the north east, East Anglia and London emerge successively as major centres of literary production, with their own generic interests. al., A Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English (4 vols, Aberdeen, 1986) for a comprehensive survey of the post-1400 period.) It should be noted, though, that the diversity of forms in written Middle English signifies neither greater variety of spoken forms of English than could be found in pre-Conquest England, nor a faithful representation of contemporary spoken English (though perhaps greater fidelity to this than may be found in Old English texts). Unlike Old English, which tended largely to adopt Late West Saxon scribal conventions in the immediate pre-Conquest period, Middle English as a written language displays a wide variety of scribal (and presumably dialectal) forms.
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