---
title: "Metrical Revisions in the Ormulum Manuscript — Cooper 2026"
description: "Instead he builds a typology that sorts revisions by how large a unit they touch: (1) marks below the morpheme, (2) affixes, (3)… 24 references."
authors: ["Andrew Cooper"]
year: 2026
venue: "SELIM 31"
source: "https://pruebas-reunido.uniovi.es/index.php/SELIM/article/view/23961"
doi: "10.17811/selim.31.2026.63-79"
licence: "CC BY-NC-ND (journal licence per DOAJ; SELIM)"
licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/cooper-2026-metrical-revisions-ormulum-manuscript/"
---
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# Metrical Revisions in the Ormulum Manuscript

**Authors:** Andrew Cooper · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** [SELIM 31](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/selim-journal-of-the-spanish-society-for-medieval-english-language-and/) ([SELIM Journal of the Spanish Society for Medieval English Language and Literature 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/selim-journal-of-the-spanish-society-for-medieval-english-language-and/2026/)) · **Publisher:** [University of Oviedo](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/university-of-oviedo/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-NC-ND (journal licence per DOAJ; SELIM)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.31.2026.63-79) · [PDF](https://pruebas-reunido.uniovi.es/SELIM/article/download/23961/18018) · [DOI 10.17811/selim.31.2026.63-79](https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.31.2026.63-79) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7169047298)

**Citations:** 0 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14)

## Summary
The study looks at the Ormulum, an early Middle English verse-homily collection. It survives only in Orrm's own working draft, MS Junius 1, which holds thousands of uncatalogued corrections made over a long period. Cooper does not try to list every change. Instead he builds a typology that sorts revisions by how large a unit they touch: (1) marks below the morpheme, (2) affixes, (3) whole orthographic words, and (4) stretches longer than a word. He then tests each class against the poem's very rigid syllabic septenarius.

The findings by type:
- **Type 1:** sub-morpheme edits seldom alter the meter.
- **Type 2:** affix edits matter most. They usually follow language change, and Orrm patches the resulting syllable gaps by rewriting, often by adding or dropping small function words.
- **Type 3:** synonym swaps are typically metrically neutral, because like-for-like words were easy to find.
- **Type 4:** verse-level replacements serve content, including cutting down repeated formulae.

The typology gives later scholars a scaffold for a full catalogue of revisions. It also shows a strict verse form absorbing ongoing linguistic change.

## Key points
- The manuscript is Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Junius 1: 119 folios, over 20,000 English verse lines, and 243 Latin prose entries. The first volume apparently held about 50 homilies, which implies four more lost volumes.
- Each long line has 15 syllables. The on-verse has four iambic feet (8 syllables) and opens with a bold capital. The off-verse has 7 syllables, ending unstressed, and opens with a plain capital. Resolution never crosses the caesura or a line break.
- Following Johannesson and Cooper (2023), Hands A, B and P are treated as Orrm at different stages, and Hand C as a separate person. A flat-footed \<n> is one marker of Hand B.
- Adding a pronoun object repairs short lines. For example, line 387 had a 7-syllable on-verse and gained *hemm*.
- In at least 32 places, Orrm substitutes *Þatt witt tu wel to soþe* for the formula *Swa summ þe ḡoddspell kiþeþþ*. This is evidence that Orrm deliberately reduced repetition.

## Interesting ideas
- Revisions are classified purely by the size of the unit changed (sub-morpheme, affix, word, multi-word span), with no prior assumption that each edit is an improvement. This keeps the typology neutral and reusable.
- A hard formal constraint (exact syllable count) works as a detector. Where an edit breaks the count, the repair that follows exposes an underlying linguistic change.
- When dropping an affix shortens a line, the loss is offset elsewhere by inserting a light word such as a pronoun or particle. The local change is balanced against a global budget.
- Recording which formulae replace each other in the same metrical slot reveals the author's own sets of interchangeable expressions.
- Counting how often formulae recur, then swapping some instances for rarer alternatives, is a simple way to control repetitiveness.

## For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

- **I1** (learn): Self-induced repair rules and disagreements between witness parsers could be bucketed by edit scope (token, morpheme, subtree, clause), which shows which levels of the pipeline generate most repairs.
- **I2** (learn): Strict invariants, such as one head per token or argument counts matching VerbNet frames, could flag silver-data errors automatically and act as negative controls.
- **I3** (back): The generator or text→graph→text compressor could meet length or rhythm targets by adding or removing low-content function words rather than meaning-bearing ones.
- **I4** (world): Slot-preserving substitutions observed in parallel or revised texts could be mined into paraphrase-equivalence classes for the compiled knowledge layer.
- **I5** (back): Generation could track phrase frequency across a produced text and rotate among equivalent realizations so that answers and retellings sound less mechanical.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Stockholm University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/stockholm-university/) — University, Stockholm, Sweden · 21 works · 1,832 citations

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## Cite

Cite as: Andrew Cooper. 2026. Metrical Revisions in the Ormulum Manuscript. SELIM 31.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@inproceedings{cooper2026metrical,
  title = {{Metrical Revisions in the Ormulum Manuscript}},
  author = {Andrew Cooper},
  booktitle = {SELIM 31},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.17811/selim.31.2026.63-79},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.17811/selim.31.2026.63-79}
}
```

- [← previous Metric Grammars: A usage-based grammatical formalism that supports generation, parsing and morphological innovation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/tabor-2026-metric-grammars-usage-based-grammatical/)
- [next → METRO: Towards Strategy Induction from Expert Dialogue Transcripts for Non-collaborative Dialogues](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/yang-2026-metro-strategy-induction-expert-dialogue/)
- [↑ back to papers of 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2026/page/41/)

## References

24 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 1 November 2026*