wipp heore wapenn alle bun,o swa summ itt birrp, wipp like. and ec þær gedenn wipp pe lic S full wel fif hunndredd pewwess," to strawwenn gode gresess þær, patt stunnkenn swipe swete, biforenn þatt stinnkennde lic þær menn itt berenn sholldenn. and tuss pezz alle brohhtenn himm wipp mikell modignesse till þær þær he pezzm haffde sezzd P ready q it befits r servants s herbs t where u such THE CONTRAST TO THE EAST MIDLAND. (About A.D. 1205.) (KING LEAR'S ANGER AT CORDELIA'S SPEECH.) Pe king Leir iwerde swa blac, pa hit alles up brac, hit wes vuel þat he spac: ich pe telle wille mine wille; of mine dohtren pu were me durest, nu þu eært me alre lædes: ne scalt þu næver halden ah mine dohtren ich wille delen mine riche. for navere ich ne wende þat þu me woldes pus scanden, pine sustren sculen habben mi kinelond, pe duc of Cornwaile scal habbe Gornoille, and ic hem geve all pa winne and al pe alde king dude swa he hafvede idemed.1 The above lines are taken from Layamon's Brut, compiled, as it would seem, in Worcestershire about the year 1205. The proportion of Teutonic words, now obsolete, to the whole is the same as in the Ormulum. The poet has both hat and hot for calidus; but the words lond, hond, are written instead of land, hand, just as we find in the oldest Worcester charters printed by Kemble, Codex Dip. I. page 100. And this is also done by our kinsmen in Friesland. We sometimes find in Layamon peo for the Old English hi; a token that he did not live to the South of 'Sir F. Madden's Layamon, i. 130. Layamon has added much of his own to the original in this story of King Lear; and the additions have been copied by later writers, Shakespere among them. the Thames. He prefers the old sc to the new sound sh, writing scawian, not shawian. The ch was not fully established in his Western shire, so far from London. We see swilc, such, and other varieties for talis. He, like Orrmin, sometimes gives us the old and the new sound of c (that is, k) in the same word; thus, the old cycene now becomes kuchene, our kitchen. He was the last Englishman who held fast to the old national diphthong œ, which was after his time, and indeed earlier, replaced by many combinations of vowels that still puzzle foreigners. 1. What Orrmin would have called o lande, Layamon calls a londe. I. He has for denique a new phrase, at pan laste, page 160. We have already seen in the Homilies our contraction from the old latost. We keep both the forms, latest and last. The old endlufon (undecim) is turned into ællevene. Layamon turns ne (the Latin nec) into no; we must wait 140 years for nor. He has the two phrases pene dai longe and alle longe niht; whence come our all day long, &c. He first used the Indefinite Article after many, as mony enne thing (many a thing). The word Hors (equi) is now changed to horses.-II. page 556. In Verbs, Layamon turns some Strong ones into Weak. He says (I. 57), his scipen runden, where we more correctly say, his ships ran. But the great corruption which England owes to him is the changed 1 The old cicen is turned into chicken in the Worcester manuscript, quoted at page 85. state of the Present Participle Active. It of old terminated in ende: this in the South became inde about the year 1100; and now, in 1204, it turns into inge; being doubtless confounded with the verbal nouns that of old ended in ung. We find berninge, fraininge, singinge, and waldinge, Participles all used by Layamon. A hundred years later still, this corruption was unhappily adopted by the man who shaped our modern speech. The English word for volaverunt used to be flugon, but Layamon changes this into fluwen, our flew. This likeness to flowan (fluere) is rather confusing, to say nothing of fleon (fugere). The Perfect of pýden (premere) was once pidde, but it now became pudde; hence our thud. The old gyrdan (cingere) now gets a new sense (cædere), 'he gurde Suard on þat hæfd' (I. page 68); we still talk of girding at a man. Pliht had hitherto meant periculum; it now takes the meaning of conditio, which we keep. Swogan had meant sonare; it now got the sense of swoon.-I. page 130. At I. page 275 we see for the first time the word agaste (terruit), whence comes our aghast. For the origin of this word we must go so far back as the Gothic usgeisjan. Our ghostly and ghastly come from sources that have been long separate. Instead of the Old English word for insula, Layamon employs cite (ait), a word well known to all Etonians. It is the Danish ey with the Definite Article tacked on to the end in the usual way, ey-it, eyt, as Mr. Dasent tells us. Layamon has marcoden in the sense of videre; of old, it had been used for ostendere: this is just the converse of what has happened in the case of the old sceáwian. The word peau had hitherto been applied to the mind only; it is now used of the body; though this new sense did not become common in England until three hundred years later. We still talk of thews and sinews; Spencer used the word in its old sense. Layamon forms an adjective from the Old English hende, in Latin prope. He says, in Vol. I. page 206: 'An oder stret he makede swide hendi.' But he usually employs this adjective in the sense of courteous, and in this sense it was used for hundreds of years. I give a list of many Norse words used by Layamon, which must have made their way to the Severn from the North and East; we shall find many more in Dorsetshire a few years later. Club, from the Icelandic klubba Draht (haustus), from the Icelandic drattr 1 Hap (fortune), from the Icelandic happ, good luck 1 Hustinge (house court), from the Norse hus and thing Semen (beseem), from the Norse sama, to fit Layamon has the word nook (angulus) which may 1 Hence happen, happy, came into England and supplanted older words. 2 Hence the Rake's Progress. |