MIDDLE ENGLISH OCCUPATIONAL BYNAMES AS LEXICAL EVIDENCE: A STUDY OF NAMES IN THE NOTTINGHAM BOROUGH COURT ROLLS 1303–1455 PART 1, METHODOLOGY By PETER MCCLURE University of Hull ABSTRACT The potential value of Middle English bynames for the history of English vocabulary has long been recognised, and occupational names have been given a good deal of scholarly attention. Nevertheless there are many borough and city records whose bynames have yet to be systematically researched. The present paper on methodology and its sequel, Part 2, ‘Etymologies’, are concerned with occupational bynames in the borough court rolls of late medieval Nottingham. ‘Etymologies’ will discuss 51 bynames that either are not recorded as occupational agent nouns in the Middle English Dictionary (hereafter abbreviated as MED), antedate the earliest quotation in MED, or, through their forms and contexts, shed new light on the etymology or sense of the source word. Part 1, ‘Methodology’, places this investigation of Nottingham bynames against the background of previous lexicographical applications of Middle English bynames, describes the contents of the Nottingham borough court rolls, and sets out the methodological principles and practicalities that influence the etymological judgements made in the second paper. Lacking the linguistic contextualisation that is normal for items of vocabulary, bynames present special problems of interpretation for the lexicographer, which need to be identified and, where possible, mitigated. 1. MIDDLE ENGLISH BYNAMES AND LEXICOGRAPHY In 1930 Sir Allen Mawer published ‘Some unworked sources for English lexicography’. These unworked sources were Middle English ‘second names’, as he called them, in other words ‘surnames’ or better still ‘bynames’, a term which has the advantage of avoiding any implication of hereditary naming. He remarked that ‘the vocabulary which goes to the making of these second names … involves the use of words at a far earlier date than they are recorded in the Oxford Dictionary’ (Mawer 1930: 12). He acknowledged, however, that ‘the rich reward which awaits the investigator’ is complicated by the difficulty of interpreting much of the material. ‘These second names have seldom any context, so to speak, which can be quoted in the admirable way with which the Oxford Dictionary has made us so familiar’ (p. 12). In fact this problem is particularly acute for documents like the Lay Subsidy Rolls, which are little more than lists of names, whereas some kinds of record, such as court rolls, deeds, wills and so on, offer better, if somewhat sporadic, opportunities for contextualising a byname. Mawer’s paper met with an almost instant response, not in England but in Sweden, where first Eilert Ekwall and then Olof Arngart encouraged their students at Lund University to write doctoral dissertations on the lexical and phonological aspects of Middle English Transactions of the Philological Society Volume 108:2 (2010) 164–177 Ó The author 2010. Journal compilation Ó The Philological Society 2010. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.