Angevin King, of his son, grandson, and great-grand

son.

The plan I follow is this. I shall first give specimens of prose and poetry written within the Mercian Danelagh and East Anglia, where our classic New English was born.

To each specimen I shall add a contrast, being some poem or treatise, written outside the aforesaid district, either in the South, the West, or the North. The samples from within the Danelagh, and from its Essex and Yorkshire border, will be seen boldly to foreshadow what is to come; the samples from shires lying to the South and West of the Danelagh will show tokens of a fond lingering love for what is byegone. In the Midland district I have named, there was the same mingling of Angles and Danes that we find in the shires where the Northumbrian Gospels were translated.

THE EAST MIDLAND DIALECT.

(About 1120.)

Of all cities, none has better earned the homage of the English patriot, the English scholar, and the English architect, than Peterborough. Her Abbot was brought home, sick unto death, from the field of Hastings; her monks were among the first Englishmen who came under the Conqueror's frown. Her Minster suffered more from Hereward and his Norse friends than from her new French Abbot, Turold. At Peterborough our history was compiled, not in Latin but in English; the English that had grown up from

the union of many generations of Danes and Angles, dwelling not far from Rutland. Without the Peterborough Chronicle, we should be groping in the dark for many years, in striving to understand the history of our tongue.

This Chronicle bears the mark of many hands. It is likely that various passages in it were copied from older chronicles, or were set down by old men many years after the events recorded had taken place. A fire, whereby the old Abbey and town of Peterborough were burnt to the ground in 1116, marks a date both in English Architecture and in English Philology. After that year arose the noble choir, which has happily escaped the doom of Glastonbury and Walsingham. After that year, monks were sent out to copy the English chronicles of other Abbeys, and thus to replace the old Peterborough annals, which must have been burnt in the fire.' The copyists thus handed down to us a mass of good English prose, a great contrast to the forged charters, drawn up in the Midland speech of 1120, which were newly inserted in the Chronicle. It is with these last that my business lies, as also with the local annals of Peterborough, taken down from the mouths of old men who could remember the doughty deeds of Hereward and his gang fifty years earlier, when men of Danish blood in the East and North were still hoping to shake off William's yoke.

I here follow Mr. Earle in his account of the Saxon Chronicles. The cock and bull tales in the forged Charters of the Abbey are most amusing to any one who knows the true history of England in the Seventh Century.

I now show how the Old English had changed in the Danelagh before the year 1131, at which date the first Peterborough compilers seem to have laid aside their

pens.

This reign of King Henry I. is the most interesting of all reigns to a student of English.

As to letter changes, the old h sometimes becomes ch, as burch for burh; this prevailed over the Eastern side of England, from London to York; though gh came to be more used than ch. We see that the diphthong, which our fathers loved, was to drop; for efre (semper) sometimes replaces æfre. These two changes appeared long before in the Lindisfarne Gospels. The Old English Article, se, seo, pat, becomes hopelessly confused in its cases and genders; we are not far from the adoption of the, to do duty for them all. Our old 8 was often laid aside for th, the latter being better known to the Normans. There is a tendency to get rid of the letter 9 in word; thus we find

every part of a

1G sometimes changed to y, and then centuries later, in Standard English, changed back to g again; as we see in this word gate, still called by the Scotch yett.

2 Here the Northern k begins to replace the Old Southern c.

F in the middle of a word was often replaced by v ; thus we geafon becomes we gaven, and lufe becomes luve; this change was still more marked in the South. The Old English heord and him (in Latin, eorum and eis) now change into here and hem. This last we still use in phrases like, give it 'em well; and this Dative Plural drove out the old Accusative hê. In the same way the Dative Singular him at this time drove out the Accusative hine; the latter is now only found in the mouths of peasants, as 'hit un hard.' Squire Western, who was above a peasant (at least in rank), loved this old phrase. The Article seo replaces the Old English heô (in Latin, ea); and the accusative of heô, which of old was hi, is now seen as hire in the account of the year 1127. Eower becomes iure (your). The relative Neuter pronoun pat is now no longer confined to the Neuter Singular antecedent, but follows Plurals, just as we use it; thus, in the forged Charter of the year 656, we find, ealle pa ping p. ic wat. It soon came to follow Masculines and Feminines, much as we employ it now. The nominative Who did not come in as a Relative til the next Century. Many short English words now approached their modern form; what we found long ago in the Northumbrian Gospels is now repeated at Peterborough.

In Nouns the Dative Plural in um has long vanished; there is a general break-up of case-endings; and the Nominative Plural in as (now es) is swallowing up all the other Declensions. The Definite and Indefinite forms of Adjectives were jumbled together, and the agreement of their cases with those of Substantives was no longer heeded.

The h before another consonant now begins to drop, in the

approved Anglian fashion.