A good English writer of the Eleventh Century would have been shocked at the corrupt replacing of the old Genitive by such a phrase as this, in the account of the great Peterborough fire in 1116: barnde eall pa mæste del of pa tuna;' 'ic am witnesse of pas Gewrite.' Henceforward, of was used most freely, at least in the Danelagh. Prepositions were disjoined from the verbs; in the forged Charter of 963 we find he draf út instead of the old he utdráf. These changes we saw earlier in St. Edmund's Legend. We find al used instead of the old Genitive ealra; the latter form still lingers in Shakspere, as alderliefest. The helpful word man shrinks into me; as in the phrase of the year 1124, him me hit beræfode, one bereaved him of it,' or as we say now, 'he was bereaved of it.' This idiom lasted for 160 years more in the Danelagh, and much longer in the South.

We see for to employed in a new sense in the year 1127, like the kindred French pour; se kyng hit dide for to hauene sibbe, the king did it to have peace. Hence the well-known question, 'what went ye out for to see ?' We suppress the for in modern speech.

The old olc now becomes ilca, and still lingers in Scotland; in the South we say, each. The phrase, ne belaf þær noht an (there remained not one), in the account of the year 1131, shows how noht was by degrees replacing the ancient ne. The old swithre now gives way to right (dextera), just as the still older teso (in Gothic, taihswo) long before made room for swithre.

In the year 1124, heftning appears; and some old monk, who aimed at correctness, has put the u, the proper letter to be used, above the i in the manuscript.

The Verb, as written at Peterborough in Henry the First's day, is wonderfully changed from what it was. in the Confessor's time.

The Infinitive now drops the n, as in the Northumbrian Gospels. In Pope Agatho's forged charter of 675, we find 'ic ville segge,' I will say: this should have been seggan. The ge, prefixed to the Past Participle, now drops altogether in the Danelagh; the Norsemen, having nothing of the kind, forced their maimed Participle upon us. The ge, slightly altered, is found to this day in shires where the Norsemen never settled. Thus, in Dorset and Somerset they say, 'I have a-heard,' the old gehyrde. One Past Participle, gehaten, still lingered on in the Midland for fourscore years after the paring down of all its brethren. No Teutonic country was fonder of this ge in old times than Southern England.

The ge in nouns is also dropped. Scir-gerefa turns into scirreve, which is not far from sherriff.

But we now come to the great change of all in Verbs, the Shibboleth which is the sure mark of a Midland dialect, and which we should be using at this moment, had the printing-press only come to England thirty years earlier than it did. The Old English Present Plural of verbs ended in að, as wê hýrað, gê hýrað, hí hýrað. It has been thought that, after the common English fashion, an n has been here cast out, which used to follow the a. But the peasants in some of our shires may have kept the older form hýrand; as we find the peasants on the Rhine using three different. forms of the Present Plural; to wit, liebent, liebet, and lieben. Bearing this parallel case in mind, we can understand how the Present Plural of the Mercian Danelagh came to end in en and not in að. The Peterborough Chronicle, in Henry the First's reign, uses liggen, haven, for the Plural of the Present of Verbs; we even find lin for liggen. This is the Midland form. The Southern form would be liggeth, habbeth; a slight alteration of the Old English. The Northern form, spoken beyond the Humber, would be ligges, haves, as we saw in the Northumbrian Gospels. Another Shibboleth of English dialects is the Active Participle. ended in ande, the Norse form. became ende, the Old English form,

Danish ande.

In the North this

In the Midland it though in Lincoln

shire and East Anglia this was often supplanted by the In the South, it ended in inde, as we To take an example, we stand singing.

shall soon see.

1 Garnett's Essays, p. 142.

North. We standes singande.
Midland.-We standen singende.
South. We standeth singinde.

This Midland form of the Present Plural is still alive in Lancashire. The Southern form is kept in the famous Winchester motto, 'Manners maketh Man.'

Much shocked would an English scholar, sixty years earlier, have been at such a sentence as this, the last but one of the Chronicle for the year 1127: ne cunne we iett noht seggon, we can say nought yet. It is curious to mark the slow corruption of the old tongue: on pyssum geare, on pis gær, pis gear.

Many words, common to us and to our brethren on the mainland, live on in the mouths of the common folk for hundreds of years ere they can win their way into books. Thus Mr. Tennyson puts into the mouth of his Lincolnshire farmer the word buzzard-clock for a certain insect. No such word as clock can be found in the Anglo-Saxon dictionaries, though it is tacked on by our peasantry to many other substantives, to stand for various insects. But, on turning to an Old German gloss of wondrous age, we find 'chuleich, scarabæus.'1. We shall meet many other English words, akin to the Dutch and High German, which were not set down in writing until the Twelfth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Centuries, when these words replaced others that are found in the Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Some of the strangers are also used by Norse writers; it is thus often hard to tell whether a Teutonic word came to England with Hengist in the Fifth Century or with

1 See Garnett's Essays, p. 68.

war;

Hubba in the Ninth Century. Perhaps the safest distinction is to draw a line through Ipswich, Northampton, and Shrewsbury: in the case of strange Teutonic words that crop up to the North of this line, we should lean to Scandinavia; in the opposite case, to Friesland. Thus, in the account of the year 1118, we find wyrre, our this reminds us of the Old Dutch werren; in Latin, militare. In 1124, the new form bærlic, our barley, replaces the old bere, which still lingers in Scotland. Cnawlece (acknowledge) is seen for the first time in a forgery inserted in the account of the year 963. As might be expected, Scandinavian words, long used by the Dano-Anglian peasantry, were creeping into written English prose. The Norse bathe (ambo) drove out the Old English ba and butu. In the forged charter inserted in the annals of 656, we read of the hamlet Grætecros; the last syllable of this comes from the Norse kross, and it was this word, not the French croix, that supplanted our Old English ród (rood). In 1128, we find the phrase, 'purh his micele wiles;' this new word, which is still in our mouths, comes from the Scandinavian vaela (decipere). In 1131, we see 'pa was tenn ploges;' the substantive is from the Scandinavian plôgr; English is the only Teutonic tongue that of old lacked this synonym for aratrum. The Scandinavian fra replaces the Old English fram; and we still say, 'to and fro.' Where an older writer would have written on de norð half,' the Peterborough Chronicler for 1131 changes on into 0 ; from this new form, which soon spread into the South, we get our aloft, aright, and such like. We may still write either ashore or on shore.