and sleeping. At page 151, wlache, the old wlæc, is the adjective applied to snow melted by the sun; this is seen in our luke-warm. The old tilian (colere) remains to this day as till; but it had another sense laborare: this last is expressed in page 155 by changing tilian into tulien. England was losing many of her old words; but she made the most of those that were left to her by giving double meanings to certain terms.

We find new forms like 'to croke' or 'make crooked,' page 61; and swoldren, our swelter, page 7; snevi and snuve (sniff and snuff, pages 37 and 191). Trustliche (trustfully) appears, akin to the Frisian trást.

There are many Norse words, which we have followed, rather than the kindred old English forms.

There are here also a few words common to England and Holland, such as twist, wimple, and shiver (findere). To scorn is here seen for the first time; some have derived it from the French escornir, to deprive of horns. But it is used a few years later by Orrmin, the last of all men

This is nearer to the Norse than to the Old English scir. 2 Hence comes our tout, well known to sporting men.

to use a French word: scorn (stercus) is the more likely parent of the word. The old war (cautus) now becomes warre (page 193), our wary.

We have a collection of King Alfred's saws, dating from about the year 1200. It seems, like the Homilies just discussed, to have been compiled somewhere in the North of Essex; for we find the thorough East Anglian forms, such as gung, sal, wu, arren (young, shall, how, are), and also Norse words, such as plough. On the other hand, we find the Active Participle ending in both the Midland end and the Southern ind, and the prefix ior y in constant use in all parts of the Verb; the Southern o moreover has driven out the older a, as no ping for na ping, swo for swa. But there is a further change in the sound and spelling of vowels. Bóc is turned into booc, and gód into goed. The old sound of o was being replaced by u in many parts of England; about this time Orrmin far away was writing bule (taurus) and funnt instead of boli and font. Moreover, in the poem before us, u is replaced by oo; wood is written for the old wude (silva). The combination ai was in full force; before it the Old English diphthong o was to vanish. We here find again, fair, maist (potes). This last word is a corruption of þu meaht. Ne leve pu is now turned into leve pu nout (ne crede). Wela becomes weld; hwilis pat stands for the Latin dum. For sope (forsooth) is seen for the first time. A new adjective is formed from lang; the poet mentions at the end of his piece pe lonke mon, the lanky man. It is said of

1 Anglo-Saxon Dialogues, by J. Kemble (Ælfric Society), Part. III. p. 226. A revised edition has been published by Dr. Morris in his Old English Miscellany.

a saucy fellow, that 'he wole grennen, cocken, and chiden; ' here we have the first hint as to our adjective cocky. The whole poem is most Teutonic; but at the end of the two last stanzas, the bard, perhaps wishing to show off, brings in a few French words most needlessly :

Ac nim pe to pe a stable mon
þat word and dede bisette con,
and multeplien heure god,
a sug fere pe his help in mod.

Hic ne sige nout bi pan,
þat moni ne ben gentile man;
puru pis lore and genteleri

he amendit huge companie.1

This is the first instance of our word gentleman. We find for the first time the Frisian haste, and also dote (dolt), akin to a Dutch term; besides a few Scandinavian words. Huge, from the Norse ugga, to frighten. Scold, from the Swedish skalla. We have also added to our well-known word ban the Norse sense maledicere, as seen in this poem. About the year 1200, the Old English Charters of Bury St. Edmunds were turned into the current speech of the shire, and these fill many pages of Kemble's Codex Diplomaticus.

THE EAST MIDLAND DIALECT.
(About 1200.)

I now come to that writer who, more clearly than any other, sets before us the growth of the New English, the great work of the Twelfth Century. The monk

The h is sadly misused in this piece, as we see.

Orrmin wrote a metrical paraphrase of the Gospels, with comments of his own, somewhere about the year 1200; at least, he and Layamon employ the same proportion of Teutonic words that are now obsolete, and Layamon is known to have written after 1204. Orrmin, if he were the good fellow that I take him to have been (I judge from his writings), was a man well worthy to have lived in the days that gave us the Great Charter. He is the last of our English Makers who can be said to have drunk from the undefiled Teutonic well; no later writers ever use so many Prepositional compounds, and on this account we ought perhaps to fix upon an earlier year than 1200 for his date. In the course of his lengthy poem, he uses only four or five French words; his few Latin words are Church phrases known in our land long before the Norman Conquest.1 On the other hand, he has scores of Scandinavian words, the result of the Norse settlement in our Eastern shires 300 years before his day. His book is the most thoroughly Danish poem ever written in England, that has come down to us; many of the words now in our mouths are found for the first time in his pages. Had some of our late Lexicographers pored over him more, they would have stumbled into fewer pitfalls."

It is most important to fix the shire in which Orrmin wrote, since no man did more to simplify our English grammar, and to sweep away all nicety as to genders

1 When we find so thorough a Teuton using words like ginn and scorn, we should pause before we derive these from France.

2 Mr. White has given us a capital edition of Orrmin's poem, the Ormulum. Dr. Stratmann has made good use of it.

and cases.

From his use of the ch instead of c, he cannot well be éstablished to the North of the Humber. From his employment of their, them (though indeed he sometimes uses her, hem, as well), he cannot fairly be brought further South than Lincoln. Had he lived in Lincolnshire, he would have used sal and suld instead of shall and should, and perhaps too, the participle in and, instead of ende. A line drawn between Doncaster and Derby seems to be the Western boundary of the old Danish settlement in Mercia, for few hamlets ending in by are found to the West of this line, and a writer so Scandinavian as Orrmin must have lived to the East of it. On the whole, the North of the county of Notts seems as likely a spot as any for his abode.' There are many links between him and the Peterborough Chronicler who wrote forty years earlier. The word gehaten or zehatenn is almost the only Past Participle which they leave unclipped of its prefix. They both use the two great Midland shibboleths, the Present Plural in en and the Active Participle in ende. They have the same objection to any ending but es for the Genitive Singular and the Nominative Plural, following in this the old Northumbrian Gospels. They do not inflect the Article, and are thus far ahead of the Kentish writer in 1340. Orrmin uses that as a Demonstrative and not as a Neuter Article; he knows nothing of the old thilk, used in Somersetshire to this day. He has no trace of the Genitive Plural in ene, which lingered on in the

1 Mr. Garnett wishes to settle him within fifty miles of Northampton, and therefore would not object to Nottingham. I should like to place him thirty miles still further North.