Muð twegra oððe Muð tuoe oððe drea Mouth of two or

The Norsemen, breathing fire and slaughter, have for ever branded, as we see, their mark upon England's tongue. Northern English had become very corrupt since the year 800; as I before said, the intermingling of two kindred tribes, like the Angles and Norsemen, must tend to shear away the endings of substantives and verbs. The third Persons, both Singular and Plural, of the Present tense now often end in s instead of th, as he onsæces; we follow the North in daily life, but we listen to the Southern form when we go to Church. The 8 of the Imperative also becomes s, as wyrcas instead of wyrcað ;

See note on p. 49.

New

the Scotch still say, gies me, instead of give me. idioms crop up, which would have astonished Alfred or Elfric: we find full of fiscum for plenus piscium.

The Old English Plural of nouns in an is now changed, and hearta replaces heartan; sad havock is made in all the other cases. The Genitive Singular and Nominative Plural in es swallow up the other forms. Thus we came back to the old Aryan pattern, in all but a few plurals like oxen.1 Such new-fangled Genitives Singular as sterres, brydgumes, heartes, tunges, fadores, and such Nominative Plurals as stearras, burgas, and culfras, are now found. There is a tendency to confound Definite with Indefinite Adjectives. The Dative Plural in um is sometimes dropped.

In short, we see the foreshadowing of the New English forms. The South, where the Norsemen could never gain a foothold, held fast to the old speech; and many forms of King Alfred's time, now rather corrupted, linger on to this day in Dorset and Somerset ; though these shires are not so rich in old words as Lothian is. The North, overrun by the Danes, was losing its inflections not long after King Alfred's death. Even in the South, Norse words were taking root; some are found in Canute's day; and William I., addressing his Londoners in their own tongue, says that he will not allow 'pæt ænig man eow ænig urang beode.' This wrang (malum) comes from the Scandinavian rangr (obliquus); it drove out the Old English woh.

I shall consider elsewhere the effect of the Norman

There is a wrong notion abroad that the German Plural in ens is more venerable than the English Plural in es.

1

Conquest upon England's speech. I give in my Appendix a specimen of the East Anglian dialect, much akin to the Northumbrian, written not long after the battle of Hastings. In the Legend of St. Edmund, the holy man of Suffolk, we see the forms pe, de, and the, all replacing the old se; the cases of the substantive and the endings of the verb are clipped; the prefix ge is seldom found, and iset stands for the old Participle geset. As to the Infinitive, the old dælfan becomes dælfe; the Dative heom replaces the old Accusative hî, as heom wat gehwa, each knows them. The adjective does not agree in case with the substantive; as mid æpele deawum. An heora is turned into án mon of him; a corruption that soon spread over the South. The preposition is uncoupled from the verb in our bad modern fashion; as slogon of pæt hæfod, smote off the head. Rather later, this preposition of, when used as an adverb, was to have a form of its own. The first letter is pared away from hlaford; the Anglian alle replaces the Southern ealle. Eode is making way for wende (ivit); and we find such forms as child, nefre, healed, fologede, instead of cild, næfre, hælod, fyligde. Hál (sanus) gets the new meaning of integer at p. 88: from it comes both our hale and our whole.

But other parts of England besides Suffolk were corrupting the old speech. In the years set down in the different Chronicles, after the Norman Conquest, we see new

1 Mr. Thorpe, in his Analecta Anglo-Saxonica, looks upon the Legend, which he prints, as an East Anglian work.

2 This uncoupling sometimes adds to our stores of expression; to throw over is different from to overthrow.

forms; as in the account of Stamford Bridge fight, in 1066, pa com an oper (here the an has no business), 'then came another;' afre pe oder man, 'every other man' (year 1087). Moreover, we begin to light on expressions such as sume of pam cnihtan (year 1083); toscyfton to his mannon (year 1085); yrfenuma of eallon (year 1091). Wifman (mulier) is cut down to wimman in 1087; the process of casting out a consonant (coming in the middle of a word) went on for two hundred years and more. The Latin amavisse had become amásse centuries earlier. We see that wiðutan, which of old meant no more than extra, has gained the new sense of sine in 1087, as we now mostly use it. The great William, we hear, would have won Ireland wiðutan alcon wœpnon.1 Still, the monks did their best to write classic English, down to about the year 1120.

England has been happy, beyond her Teutonic sisters, in the many and various stores of her oldest litera ture that have floated down the stream of Time. Poems scriptural and profane, epics, war-songs, riddles, translations of the Bible, homilies, prayers, treatises on science and grammar, codes of law, wills, charters, chronicles set down year by year, tales, and dialogues-all these (would that we took more interest in them!) are our rich inheritance.

In spite of the havock wrought

1 This of old would have been bûtan. Our but still expresses nisi, præter, quin, sed, verùm ; in Scotland, I believe, it may still stand for extra and sine. Our fathers must have thought that too great a load was thrown upon one word.

at the Reformation, no land in Europe can show such monuments of national speech for the 400 years after A.D. 680 as England boasts. And nowhere else can we so clearly mark the national speech slowly swinging round from the Old to the New.

Take the opposite case of Italy. In 1190 we find Falcandus holding in scorn the everyday speech of his countrymen, and compiling a work in the Old Italian (that is, Latin), such as would have been easily read by Cæsar or Cicero. Falcandus trod in the path that had been followed by all good Italian writers for 1200 years; but two or three years after his book had been written, we find his countryman, Ciullo d'Alcamo, all of a sudden putting forth the first known poem in the New Italian, a poem that would now be readily understood by an unlettered soldier like Garibaldi.

In Italy, there is a sudden spring from the Old to the New, at least in written literature; but in England the change is most slow. I have already traced the corruption shown in the Northumbrian writings. In the Peterborough Chronicle of 1120, we see an evident effort to keep as near as may be to the old Winchester standard of English. Some of the inflections indeed are gone, but the writer puts eall for the all that came into his everyday speech, and looks back for his pattern to King Alfred's writings. In 1303, we find a poem, written by a man born within fifteen miles of Peterborough: the diction of this Midland bard differs hardly at all from what we speak under Queen Victoria. Nothing in philology can be more interesting than these 180 years, answering roughly to the lives of our first