Ormulum

…which he gave the title Ormulum, “because Orm made it.” The work (dated on linguistic evidence c. 1200) is of little literary interest but of great value to linguists, for Orm—who clearly wished to spread sound teaching, derived mainly from works of Gregory the Great, Bede, and Aelfric—invented an individual…

…idiosyncratic of these is the Ormulum by Orm, an Augustinian canon in the north of England. Written in some 20,000 lines arranged in unrhymed but metrically rigid couplets, the work is interesting mainly in that the manuscript that preserves it is Orm’s autograph and shows his somewhat fussy efforts to…