Jesu Crist, sod God, sod man, Bring me ut and makye fre. God wot ich ne lyghe noct, Almicti, that wel licth, Of bale is hale and bote, For wos gelt we bed ipelt Ne hope non to his live, Ded him felled to grunde. Ne lasted buten on stunde. Maiden, that bare the heven king, Bisech thin sone, that swete thing, That he habbe of hus rewsing, And bring us of this woning For his muchele misse; He bring hus ut of this wo, And hus tache werchen swo, In those live go wu sit go, That we moten ey and o Habben the eche blisce. The above poem is taken from the Liber de Antiquis Legibus (Reliquiæ Antiquæ,' I. 274), in the possession of the Corporation of London; the manuscript has musical notes attached to it. The proportion of obsolete English is much the same as in the Genesis and Exodus. The poem of page 134 seems therefore to represent the London speech of the year 1230, or so. What was g in Suffolk becomes c here, as in the Twelfth Century Homilies; it is broct, not brogt; gelt replaces gilt. The h is sometimes misused, even as Londoners of our day misuse it. The gh sometimes replaces the old h, as we saw in the Essex Homilies: this change was now overspreading the greater part of the Eastern side of England between London and York. THE EAST MIDLAND DIALECT. (About A.D. 1240.) The piece that comes next, a version of the Athanasian Creed, was most likely written in the Northernmost part of Lincolnshire, perhaps not far from Hull; it has corruptions of English that are not often found before Manning wrote in that county sixty years later, such as ne pre no two' (nec tres nec duo). We see the Northern forms in great abundance; thus whilk is used for the Relative, as in Dorset; als, til, sal, pair, &c., come often the third Person tense ends in es, not in eth. making great inroads on the Singular of the Present But the Southern o was Northern a, as we saw in No for nec is found in Layamon. East Anglia; in this piece we find so, non, no mo, whos, pow (tamen), who so; in short, the whole poem foreshadows Manning's riming Chronicle. The writer who Englished this Creed has little love for outlandish words; sauf, sengellic, and persones are the only three specimens of French here found: he commonly calls persones by the obsolete name hodes. The deep theological terms of the Creed could still be expressed in sound English; though the writer's mikel does not wholly convey the sense of our incomprehensible. We see our bifore-said for the first time. Bot (sed) and with (cum) are preferred to their other English synonyms, as in Orrmin's writings. Unlike that poet, our present author will seldom use ne for the Latin non; he prefers noht, as in the East Anglian pieces: but he once has nil (nolunt). We see the Participle lastend, which Orrmin would have used. This Creed, short though it be, shows us two great changes that were taking root in our spelling; h was being turned, as in Essex, into gh, and u into ou.1 One or two instances of these changes may be seen in the East Midland poems of 1230; but the alteration is now well marked. We see right, noght, and thurght instead of the old riht, noht, and thurh. These words must have been pronounced with a strong guttural sound, which may still be heard in the Scotch Lowlands; there right is sounded much like the German recht. Thoh is in this Creed written pof, and this shows us how cough and rough came to be pronounced In the piece referred to at p. 85, we saw the first instance of o being changed into ou. as they are now.' The letters k and ƒ are akin to each other; the Sanscrit katvar is the Gothic fidvor (four), and the Lithuanian dwy-lika is our twá-lifa (twelve). With us, Livorno becomes Leghorn; and in Aberdeenshire kwa (the Latin quis) is pronounced fa. No change seems to have been made in the sound, when dun and ur were written as doun and our in the Creed before us. The English word for domus is to this day pronounced in Northumberland as hoose. This, in parts of Yorkshire, is corrupted into ha-oose; if this last be pronounced rapidly, it gives house, as it is sounded by good speakers of English in our day. It is hard to know why us should be spelt now as it was a thousand years ago, and yet why ur should be turned into our. 2 a saved b Trinity ⚫ salvation dincarnation e therefore The pronunciation of a word like Loughborough is the despair of foreigners. Why should cough be sounded differently from plough? I have a cow in my box,' said a Frenchman, meaning a cough in his chest. Bunyan, who came from the East Midland, pronounced daughter as dafter; so we see by his rimes, quoted by Mr. Earle (Philology of the English Tongue), p. 127. 2 It is pronounced in South Lancashire in a way quod literis dicere non est, but something like heawse (Garnett's Essays, p. 77). Coude (our could), wound, and bound have three different sounds in modern English. f belief Den ever is trauth f right Dat we leve with alle oure miht Dat oure louerd Jhu Crist in blis Godes sone and man he his, Gode of kinde of fadir kinned werld biforn, Fulli God, fulli man livand h Of schilful saule and mannes flesshe beand, Lesse pen Fader purght manhede, Dat pof he be God and man, Noght two prwæper is, bot Crist an, 8 begotten h reasonable i still k On, noht þurght wendinge of Godhed in flesshe, changing Bot þurght takynge of manhede in godnesshe, Bot purht onhede of hode m pat is, Dat poled" for oure hele, doun went til helle, Upstegh • til heven, sittes on right hand And yhit for to come is he Saufe ne mai he never be.1 1 substance m person n suffered 。 went up p own a holy r unless 1 Hickes has mangled some of the words in this piece, which I leave as he printed it. It is in his Thesaurus, i. 233. |