Abstract In the standard account (Canale 1978, van Kemenade 1987, Lightfoot 1991), there is a sharp divide in word order between Old and Middle English. Old English is INFL-final and OV while Middle English is INFL-medial and VO. Indeed, Lightfoot gives an account of the transition from Old to Middle English based on a catastrophic reanalysis in the twelfth century (Lightfoot 1991, 1999) and, viewed from a certain distance, this story has considerable plausibility. Thus, up until the entry for II22 CE, the syntax of the Peterborough version of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, the manuscript which extends furthest into the twelfth century, is that of standard literary Old English. The brief continuations, which end in II54, are hard to interpret but are not revolutionary in their syntax. These are the last documents of Old English. Then in the first quarter of the next century, several prose texts of West Midlands provenance appear, the Ancrene Riwle and the Katherine Group of saints’ lives, whose word order is considerably more modem. INFL-final word order seems absent and surface OV word order be comes a minority pattern. Nevertheless, there is reason to doubt the standard account.
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