The Wycliffite Bible and ‘Central Midland Standard’: Assessing the Manuscript Evidence*

M. L. Samuels' article "Some applications of Middle English dialectology" (1963/1989) belongs to those rare pieces of scholarship which continue to be discussed and debated forty years after their original publication. Basing his arguments largely on orthographic evidence, Samuels outlined four types of incipient written standard in late ME (Types I-IV). Of these, Type IV ('The Chancery Standard') is the one most widely discussed by subsequent scholars with regard to its role in the evolution of Standard English (see e.g. Fisher 1996; cf. Benskin 1992, 2002). The interest shown in Type I ('The Central Midland Standard' or CMS) has been of a different, less diachronic kind, because its usage seems to have waned towards the end of the 15 th century. Why did CMS decline in spite of its apparent initial success and wide dissemination at the turn of the 15th century? The fate of its usage has sometimes been linked with that of the Lollards; since Wycliffite texts have traditionally been viewed as the core of the