Macedoyne, supposed by the poet to be a city, is thus described in page 135: The kyng sygh, of that cité, That they no myghte duyré: The tayl they kyt of hundrodis fyve, Theo othre into the wallis stygh, And the kynges men with gonnes sleygh.1 As to French words, bonny is seen for the first time in page 161, where bonie londis are promised. The word defyghe, riming with spie (page 288), shows that the guttural was not sounded in Southern Mercia in 1300; dereworth is now making way for precious, when jewels are mentioned. In the line at page 316, 'theo wayte gan a pipe blawe;' the French substantive shows how the watchman was to become a musician. The above specimens will give some idea of the sources whence mainly comes our Standard English. A line drawn between Chelmsford and York will traverse the shires, where the new form of England's speech was for the most part compounded by the old Angles and the later Norse comers. Almost halfway between these two towns lived the man, whose writings are of such first-rate importance that they are worthy of having a Chapter to themselves. After his 1 Contrast these obsolete-looking lines with those given at page 163 of my work; the latter are the product of the Danelagh. 2 The Mercian Danelagh has claims upon architects as well as upon philologers. A great treat awaits the traveller who shall go time there came in but few new Teutonic changes in spelling and idiom, such as those that had been constantly sliding into our written speech between 1120 and 1300. from Northampton to Peterborough and Stamford, and so to Hull, turning now and then to the right and left. Most of the noble churches he will see, in his journey of 120 miles, date from the time between 1250 and 1350. CHAPTER III. THE RISE OF THE NEW ENGLISH. (A.D. 1303.) WE have seen the corruption of speech in the Mercian Danelagh and East Anglia; a corruption more strikingly marked there than in other parts of England, with the exception of Yorkshire and Essex, where the same intermixture of Norse blood was bringing about like results. We shall now weigh the work of a Lincolnshire man who saw the light at Bourne within a few miles of Rutland, the writer of a poem begun in the year that Edward I. was bringing under his yoke the whole of Scotland, outside of Stirling Castle. It was in 1303 that Robert of Brunne (known also as Robert Manning) began to compile the Handlyng Synne, the work which, more clearly than any former one, foreshadowed the road that English literature was to tread from that time forward. Like many other lays of King Edward I.'s time, the new piece was a translation from a French poem; the Manuel des Pechés had been written about thirty years earlier by William of Waddington. The English poem 1 This work, with its French original, has been edited for the Roxburgh Club by Mr. Furnivall. 2 The date of Waddington's poem is pretty well fixed by a passage differs from all the others that had gone before it in its diction; for it contains a most scanty proportion of those Teutonic words that were soon to drop out of speech, and a most copious proportion of French words. Indeed there are so many foreign words, that we should set the writer fifty years later than his true date, had he not himself written it down. In this book we catch our first glimpse of many a word and idiom, that were afterwards to live for ever in the English Bible ana Prayer Book, works still in the womb of Time. Indeed, the new Teutonic idioms that took root in our speech after this age were few in number, a mere drop in the bucket, if we compare them with the idioms imported between 1120 and 1300. This shows what we owe to Robert Manning; even as the highest praise of our Revolution of 1688 is, that it was our last. The Handlyng Synne is indeed a landmark worthy of the carefullest study. I shall give long extracts from it, and I shall further add specimens of the English spoken in many other shires between 1300 and 1340. We are lucky in having so many English manuscripts, drawn up at this particular time: the contrasts are strongly marked. Thus it will be easy to see that the Lincolnshire bard may be called the patriarch of the New English, much as Cadmon was of the Old English six hundred years earlier. We shall also gain some idea of the influence that the Rutland neighbourhood has had upon our classic tongue. This was remarked by Fuller in his time; and in our day Latham in page 248 (Roxburgh Club edition of the Handlyng Synne). He writes a tale in French, and his translator says that the sad affair referred to happened 'in the time of good Edward, Sir Henry's son.' tells us that the labouring men of Huntingdon and Northampton speak what is usually called better English, because their vernacular dialect is most akin to that of the standard writers.' He pitches upon the country between St. Neots and Stamford as the true centre of literary English.' Dr. Guest has put in a word for Leicestershire. Our classic speech did not arise in London or Oxford; even as it was not in the Papal Court at Rome, or in the King's Palace at Naples, or in the learned University of Bologna, that the classic Italian sprang up with sudden and marvellous growth. The Handlyng Synne shows how the different tides of speech, flowing from Southern, Western, and Northern shires alike, met in the neighbourhood of Rutland, and all helped to shape the New English. Robert of Brunne had his own mother-tongue to start with, the Dano-Anglian dialect corrupted by five generations since our first glimpse of it in 1120. He has their peculiar use of niman for the Latin ire, and other marks of the East Midland. We have seen a specimen of the North Lincolnshire speech of 1240; this, as Robert was to do later, had substituted no for ne (the Latin nec). From the South this speech had borrowed the change of a into o and c into ch (hence Robert's moche,3 eche, whyche, swych), of sc into sh, g into w, and o into ou. From the West I visited Stamford in 1872, and found that the letter h was sadly misused in her streets. 2 This change is also seen in Layamon and in the Herefordshire manuscript of 1313; whence Mr. Wright has taken much for his Political Songs (Camden Society). 3 His moche was used by good writers down to Elizabeth's time. |