Yorkshire speech as it was in his day. The Northern English had become the Court language at Edinburgh. The Southern dialect, the most unlucky of all our varieties, gave way before her Mercian sister: Dane conquered Saxon. After Trevisa wrote in 1387, no purely Southern English work, of any length, was produced for almost five hundred years.2 Shakespere, in his Lear, tries his hand upon the Somersetshire tongue; and it also figures in one of the best of the Reformation ballads to be found in Bishop Percy's collection. But Mr. Barnes in our own day was the first to teach England how much pith and sweetness still lingered in the longneglected homely tongue of Dorset; it seems more akin to Middle English than to New English.3 A few improvements, not as yet brought from the North, were still wanting; but now at last our land had a Standard tongue of her own, welcome alike in the Palace and in the cottage. King Edward the Third, not long after Cressy, lent his countenance to the mother-tongue of his trusty billmen and bowmen. He in 1349 had his shield and surcoat embroidered with his own motto, on this wise: 'Hay, hay, the wythe swan, By Godes soule, I am thy man.' The Southerner, on entering Leeds, still reads the old Northern names of Kirkgate and Briggate on two great thoroughfares. May the Leeds magistrates have more wit than those of Edinburgh, whom Scott upbraids for affectation in substituting the modern Square for the ancient Close! 2 Audlay, the blind Salopian of 1420, has a mixture of Southern and Midland forms. We there see the true old Wessex sound of ea. His doublet bore another English device: 'it is as it is."1 Trevisa says that before the great Plague of 1349 high and low alike were bent on learning French; it was a common custom: 'but sith it is somedele chaunged.' In 1362 English was made the language of the Lawcourts; and this English was neither that of Hampole to the North of the Humber, nor that of Herebert to the South of the Thames. Our old freedom and our old speech had been alike laid in the dust by the great blow of 1066: the former had arisen once more in 1215 and had been thriving amain ever since; the latter was now at last enjoying her own again. After this glance at Kingly patronage, something almost unknown hitherto, we must now throw a glance backward, and mark the changes since the Handlyng Synne had been given to the world. Many writers, both in prose and in rime, had been at work in the first half of the Fourteenth Century: of their pieces I have already given some specimens. Forme-fader, ganed, hyrwe, ilic, iseowed, ileaned, lawerce, ofpurst, seli, ismépet, spinnere, tæppet, pridde were now turned into forefader, yaned (yawned), harew,2 aliche, isewed (the participle of the Latin suere), ilend,3 larke, athurst,sili, ismôped (smoothed), spipre (spider), tippet, pirde. There are new words and forms such as awkward, bacward, tall, until, ded as a dorenail, a biwey (bye-way). The most startling are turn up swa doune (upside down) in Hampole, and she-beast much 1 Warton gives the Wardrobe Account, in Latin, with Edward's directions for his devices.-History of English Poetry, II. 32. (Edition of 1840.) 2 It must have been confounded with the Norse harfr. 3 Chaucer turned this into ilent, our lent. about the same time. Layamon's no (nec) becomes nor, in the Salopian poem quoted at page 205; this is shortened from nother. Reule, having long been a substantive, now becomes a verb, and we see ine mêne time. The form graciouser, in the Ayenbite, is one of the last attempts to force the English sign of comparison on a French adjective ending in ous. The old dysig (stultus) gets our modern sense of dizzy; and Langland's kill (occidere) replaces the old cwell, which now has only the meaning of opprimere. A curious poem, the Debate of the Carpenter's Tools (Hazlitt's Collection, I. 88), is the compilation that best represents Manning's style; it seems to have been written about 1340, and must belong to the Rutland neighbourhood: it certainly has a dash of the Northern speech. I give a few lines as a link between Manning and Mandeville. Bot lythe to me a lytelle space, I schall gow telle all the case, I wylle not lye, be the rode. When thei have wroght an oure ore two, Anone to the ale thei wylle go, And drinke ther, whyle thei may dre: Thou to me, and I to the. And seys the ax schall pay fore this, It is found under the form of ho-besteg, in the Lancashire poem quoted at page 204. 2 In this last line, we have the first use of our foreign very (valdė), We now hail the first writer of New English prose. I give in my Appendix a specimen of Sir John Mandeville: it is strange to think that he is separated by only a score of years or so from the compiler of the Ayenbite of Inwit. The travelled knight was born at St. Albans, and went abroad in 1322. We may look upon his English as the speech spoken at Court in the latter days of King Edward III.; high and low alike now prided themselves upon being Englishmen, and held in scorn all men of outlandish birth. The earlier and brighter days of King Harold seemed to have come back again; Hastings had been avenged at Cressy, and our islanders found none to match them in fight, whether the field might lie in France, in Spain, or in Italy. King Edward was happy in his knights, and happy also in the men whom he could employ in civil business, men like Wickliffe and Chaucer. Mandeville's language is far more influenced by the Midland forms than that of Davie had been fifty years earlier; in the new writer we find sche, I, thei, theirs, have, are, and ben, forms strange to the Thames, at least in 1300; the Southern ending of the Third Person Plural of the Present tense is almost wholly dropped, being replaced by the Midland ending in en; even this is sometimes clipped, as also is the en of the Infinitive, and the Prefix of the Past Participle. A hundred years would have to pass before these hoary old which appears next in Yorkshire letters of 1450; it was a long time making its way to London, though Chaucer uses it as an adjective. In the above poem we meet the expression 'reule the roste.' I have given a specimen of this at page 208. relics could be wholly swept away from Standard English. The corruption first seen in 1220, whereby most dreadful replaced the old Superlative, is sown broadcast over Mandeville's works. He has the new form, houshold. The Northern same (idem), so sparingly employed of yore even in the North, is now found instead of ilk; ask instead of axe, ren (currere) instead of urn, chough instead of choz, mordrere instead of murperere. Ayens now takes a t at the end, in the true English style, and becomes ayenst (contra). The old forms dwerghes, o ferrom, thilke, overthwart, are still kept. There are barely more than fifty obsolete English words in the whole of Mandeville's book, though it extends over 316 printed pages. It was wonderfully popular in England, as is witnessed by the number of copies that remain, transcribed within a few years of the worthy knight's death.1 Few laymen had written in English, so far as can be known, since King Alfred's time. We now find a University lending its sanction to the speech of the common folk. In 1384, William of Nassington laid a translation into English rimes before the learned men of Cambridge. The Chancellor and the whole of the University spent four days over the work; on the fifth day they pronounced it to be free from heresy and to be grounded on the best authority. Had any errors been found in it, the book would have been burnt at once.2 For the last thirty years there had been a great stirring up of the English mind; 1 See Halliwell's edition of it, published in 1866. |