Standards from the Past: The Conservative Syllable Structure of the Alliterative Revival.

P3A, and other ME alliterative poems, reveals that although final -e was apparently disappearing or had disappeared from the spoken language, it was preserved in poetic texts. Presents rules governing the phonology of final -e from OE, ON, OF and, based on the words which do and do not appear at the end of the a- and b-verse, determines that there can be one, two, or no unstressed syllables at the end of the first half-line, but that there must be exactly one unstressed syllable at the end of the second half-line.