employ doubled consonants to show that the preceding vowel is short and single consonants when the vowel is long. For syllables that ended in vowels, he used accent marks to indicate length. In addition to this, he used three distinct letter forms for g, using the insular ᵹ for , a closed form of it for , and the Carolingian g for , although in printed editions the last two letters may be left undistinguished. His devotion to precise spelling was meticulous; for example, having originally used eo and e inconsistently for words such as beon and , which had been spelled with eo in Old English, at line 13,000 he changed his mind and went back to change all eo spellings, replacing them solely with e alone (ben and knew), to reflect the pronunciation. The combination of this system with the rigid metre, and the stress patterns this implies, provides enough information to reconstruct his pronunciation with some precision; making the reasonable assumption that Orm's pronunciation was in no way unusual, this permits scholars of the history of English to develop an exceptionally precise snapshot of exactly how Middle English was pronounced in the Midlands in the second half of the twelfth century. Significance Orm's book has a number of innovations that make it valuable. As Bennett points out, Orm's adaptation of a classical metre with fixed stress patterns anticipates future English poets, who would do much the same when encountering foreign language prosodies. The Ormulum is also the only specimen of the homiletic tradition in England between Ælfric and the fourteenth century, as well as the last example of the Old English verse homily. It also demonstrates what would become Received Standard English two centuries before Geoffrey Chaucer. Further, Orm was concerned with the laity. He sought to make the Gospel comprehensible to the congregation, and he did this perhaps forty years before the Fourth Council of the Lateran of 1215 "spurred the clergy as a whole into action". At the same time, Orm's idiosyncrasies and attempted orthographic reform make his work vital for understanding Middle English. The Ormulum is, with the and the , one of the three crucial texts that have enabled philologists to document the transition from Old English to Middle English. See also Allegory in the Middle Ages Biblical criticism Biblical studies List of biblical commentaries Endnotes A. Quotations are from Holt (1878). The