With an O (Yorks.) or an I (Salop.)? The Middle English Lyrics of British Library Additional 45896

Poems in the mid-fourteenth-century British Library MS. Additional 45896, two of which employ alliterative verse in stanzaic forms and are written in a scribal Southwest Midland dialect, betray probable Northern origins and provenance. As such, they undercut the theory of a native southwestern alliterative culture as the sole generator of the Alliterative Revival at mid-century, and testify instead to “some collision of separate local literary cultures” – perhaps via some such link as the road that traversed the midlands from Worcester and joined the North Road at Doncaster.