are very few Old French influences on Orm's language. Another—likely previous—East Midlands work, the Peterborough Chronicle, shows a great deal of French influence. The linguistic contrast between it and the work of Orm demonstrates both the sluggishness of the Norman influence in the formerly Danish areas of England and the assimilation of Old Norse features into early Middle English. According to the work's dedication, Orm wrote it at the behest of Brother Walter, who was his brother both (biologically, "after the flesh's kind") and as a fellow canon of an Augustinian order. With this information, and the evidence of the dialect of the text, it is possible to propose a place of origin with reasonable certainty. While some scholars, among them Henry Bradley, have regarded the likely origin as Elsham Priory in north Lincolnshire, as of the mid-1990s it became widely accepted that Orm wrote in the Bourne Abbey in Bourne, Lincolnshire. Two additional pieces of evidence support this conjecture: firstly, Arrouaisian canons established the abbey in 1138, and secondly, the work includes dedicatory prayers to Peter and Paul, the patrons of Bourne Abbey. The Arrouaisian rule was largely that of Augustine, so that its houses often are loosely referred to as Augustinian. Scholars cannot pinpoint the exact date of composition. Orm wrote his book over a period of decades and the manuscript shows signs of multiple corrections through time. Since it is an autograph, with two of the three hands in the text generally believed by scholars to be Orm's own, the date of the manuscript and the date of composition would have been the same. On the evidence of the third hand (that of a collaborator who entered the pericopes at the head of each homily) it is thought that the manuscript was finished , but Orm may have begun the work as early as 1150. The text has few topical references to specific events that could be used to identify the period of composition more precisely. Manuscript Only one copy of the Ormulum exists, as Bodleian Library MS Junius 1. In its current state, the manuscript is incomplete: the book's table of contents claims that there were 242 homilies, but only 32 remain. It seems likely that the work was never finished on the scale planned when the table of contents was written, but much of the discrepancy was probably caused by the loss of gatherings from