ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the way that the ‘early Middle’ of Middle English is rarely taken to be the defining condition of a particular text or texts. It suggests accounts that might describe a text's language as early Middle English tend to treat all the attributes of that text as separate entities, each of which can then be assigned to a different period. The chapter describes how such a dissociation is often achieved by elevating the text to the status of literature, making it possible to place it in one moment of literary history and a different moment in the history of English. One of the texts most vulnerable to such treatment is Durham, a poem that sits so conveniently on the customary chronological divide between Old and Middle English that that line can be drawn right down the middle of the poem.
