adj.
Erk bone; WA boune, bowne
‘ready; bound, setting out; arranged, fixed’ (Modern English bound)
PGmc Ancestor
*bō(w)an or *bū(w)an-
Proposed ON Etymon (OIcel representative)
búinn ‘ready, prepared, finished, willing, favourably disposed (towards sth.), obedient, submissive’
(ONP búa (2) (vb.); -búinn (adj.))
Other Scandinavian Reflexes
Icel búinn, Norw buen
OE Cognate
būan (v.) ‘to dwell, inhabit’
Phonological and morphological markers
Summary category
C3c
Very common in ME (from Orrm onwards): especially frequent in N/EM texts and in alliterative poetry (inc. e.g. WPal.), but there are indications of more widespread usage by the later 14c. (inc. rarely by Chaucer and Gower)(see further McGee 508–9). On the variants ibon, iboned (mainly LB) see MED s.v. ibōn (adj. and ppl.) and further Dance 2003: 342, 344, 414, SPS 430–1.
Occurrences in the Gersum Corpus
Gaw 548, 852, 1311 etc.; Pe 534, 992, 1103; Erk 181; WA 323, 534, 870 etc.
Usually parsed as an adj. in Gaw 1693 ‘were boun busked’ (since Madden and Morris), but Vant glosses it as an adv. On the usage at Gaw 548 see PSn. The MS of Erk has <bode> with <d> crossed out and <n> written above it; McGee (436) reasons that 'the misspelling was probably due to its use in the phrase bone to his bode' (see also Peterson 181n citing Savage 181n, who notes a similar phrase occurs in WA as well as Gaw).