Horae Subsecivae, ‘that remarkable glossary of West Country words’ (Bodl. MS Eng. lang. d. 66)

Abstract

This paper examines Horae Subsecivae (Bodl. MS Eng. lang. d. 66), an unprinted glossary of the late eighteenth century that was conceived as an addition to Franciscus Junius’s Etymologicum Anglicanum (1743). Although the manuscript drew the attention of some dialect lexicographers and antiquarians of the nineteenth century, it has remained largely ignored in recent times despite its important contribution to the dialect record of the West Country. In fact, it appears that no other compilation of the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries was chiefly concerned with West Country words, most of which went unnoticed by the renowned contemporary glossaries of Francis Grose (1787) and William Humphrey Marshall (1789, 1796). My aim is to uncover Horae Subsecivae, describing its peculiarities and lexicographical method, whilst showing its significant impact on the history of West Country dialects and our knowledge of eighteenth-century lexical dialect variation more generally