We thus learn that Adam’s flesh was made of a pound of loam; his red and hot blood, of fire; his salt tears, of salt; his sweat, of dew; the colour of his eyes, of flowers; the instability of his thoughts, of cloud; his cold breath, of wind; and his intelligence, of grace.

The Northumbrian glosses on the four Gospels are contained in two MSS., both of remarkable interest and value. The former of these, sometimes known as the Lindisfarne MS., and sometimes as the Durham Book, is now MS. Cotton, Nero D. 4 in the British Museum, and is one of the chief treasures in our national collection. It contains a beautifully executed Latin text of the four Gospels, written in the isle of Lindisfarne, by Eadfrith (bishop of Lindisfarne in 698-721), probably before 700. The interlinear Northumbrian gloss is two and a half centuries later, and was made by Aldred, a priest, about 950, at a time when the MS. was kept at Chester-le-Street, near Durham, whither it had been removed for greater safety. Somewhat later it was again removed to Durham, where it remained for several centuries.

The second MS. is called the Rushworth MS., as it was presented to the Bodleian Library (Oxford) by John Rushworth, who was deputy-clerk to the House of Commons during the Long Parliament. The Latin text was written, probably in the eighth century, by a scribe named Macregol. The gloss, written in the latter half of the tenth century, is in two hands, those of Farman and Owun, whose names are given. Farman was a priest of Harewood, on the river Wharfe, in the West Riding of Yorkshire. He glossed the whole of St Matthew’s Gospel, and a very small portion of St Mark. It is worthy of especial notice, that his gloss, throughout St Matthew, is not in the Northumbrian dialect, but in a form of Mercian. But it is clear that when he had completed this first Gospel, he borrowed the Lindisfarne MS. as a guide to help him, and kept it before him when he began to gloss St Mark. He at once began to copy the glosses in the older MS., with slight occasional variations in the grammar; but he soon tired of his task, and turned it over to Owun, who continued it to the end. The result is that the Northumbrian glosses in this MS., throughout the three last Gospels, are of no great value, as they tell us little more than can be better learnt from the Durham book; on the other hand, Farman’s Mercian gloss to St Matthew is of high value, but need not be considered at present. Hence it is best in this case to rely, for our knowledge of Old Northumbrian, on the Durham book alone.

It must be remembered that a gloss is not quite the same thing as a free translation that observes the rules of grammar. A gloss translates the Latin text word by word, in the order of that text; so that the glossator can neither observe the natural English order nor in all cases preserve the English grammar; a fact which somewhat lessens its value, and must always be allowed for. It is therefore necessary, in all cases, to ascertain the Latin text. I subjoin a specimen, from Matt, v 11-15.

The history of the Northern dialect during the next three centuries, from the year 1000 to nearly 1300, with a few insignificant exceptions, is a total blank.

CHAPTER IV

THE DIALECTS OF NORTHUMBRIA; A.D. 1300-1400

A little before 1300, we come to a Metrical English Psalter, published by the Surtees Society in 1843-7. The language is supposed to represent the speech of Yorkshire. It is translated (rather closely) from the Latin Vulgate version. I give a specimen from Psalm xviii, 14-20.

The literal sense is:—“He sent His arrows and scattered them; multiplied (His) lightning and so afflicted them. And the wells of waters were shown, and the foundations of the earthly world are uncovered because of Thy snubbing (rebuke), O my Lord! because of the blast (Lat. inspiratio) of the breath of Thy wrath. He sent from on high, and took me up; from many waters He took me. He took me out there-among from my foes that were so strong, and from those that alway hated me; for they were strengthened together over me. They came before me in the day of affliction, and the Lord is made my protection. And He led me (so as) to be in a broad place; He made me safe, because He desired (lit. would) me; and the Lord shall requite me according to all my righteousness, and according to the cleanness of my hands shall He repay me in the end.”

In this specimen we can already discern some of the chief characteristics which are so conspicuous in Lowland Scotch MSS. of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The most striking is the almost total loss of the final -e which is so frequently required to form an extra syllable when we try to scan the poetry of Chaucer. Even where a final -e is written in the above extract, it is wholly silent. The words ware (were), are (are), myne, thine, toke, made, brede, hende, ende, are all monosyllabic; and in fact the large number of monosyllabic words is very striking. The words onesprute, forcome, foryhelde are, in like manner, dissyllabic. The only suffixes that count in the scansion are -en, -ed, and -es; as in sam-en, skat’r-èd, drev-èd, hat-èd, etc., and arw-ès, well-ès, watr-ès, etc. The curious form sal, for “shall,” is a Northern characteristic. So also is the form hende as the plural of “hand”; the Southern plural was often hond-en, and the Midland form was hond-ès or hand-ès. Note also the characteristic long a; as in swa for swo, so; gast, ghost; fra, fro; faas, foes. It was pronounced like the a in father.

A much longer specimen of the Metrical English Psalter will be found in Specimens of Early English, ed. Morris and Skeat, Part ii, pp. 23-34, and is easily accessible. In the same volume, the Specimens numbered vii, viii, x, xi, and xvi are also in Northumbrian, and can easily be examined. It will therefore suffice to give a very brief account of each.

VII. Cursor Mundi, or Cursor o Werld, i.e. Over-runner of the World; so called because it rehearses a great part of the world’s history, from the creation onwards. It is a poem of portentous length, extending to 29,655 lines, and recounts many of the events found in the Old and New Testaments, with the addition of legends from many other sources, one of them, for example, being the Historia Scholastica of Peter Comestor. Dr Murray thinks it may have been written in the neighbourhood of Durham. The specimen given (pp. 69-82) corresponds to lines 11373-11796.

VIII. Sunday Homilies in Verse; about 1330. The extracts are taken from English Metrical Homilies, edited by J. Small (Edinburgh, 1862) from a MS. in Edinburgh. The Northern dialect is well marked, but I do not know to what locality to assign it.

X. Richard Rolle, of Hampole, near Doncaster, wrote a poem called The Prick of Conscience, about 1340. It extends to 9624 lines, and was edited by Dr Morris for the Philological Society in 1863. The Preface to this edition is of especial value, as it carefully describes the characteristics of Northumbrian, and practically laid the foundation of our knowledge of the old dialects as exhibited in MSS. Lists are given of orthographical differences between the Northern dialect and others, and an analysis is added giving the grammatical details which determine its Northern character. Much of this information is repeated in the Introduction to the Specimens of English, Part ii, pp. xviii-xxxviii.

XI. The Poems of Laurence Minot belong to the middle of the fourteenth century. He composed eleven poems in celebration of events that occurred between the years 1333 and 1352. They were first printed by Ritson in 1795; and subsequently by T. Wright, in his Political Poems and Songs (London, 1859); and are now very accessible in the excellent and cheap (second) edition by Joseph Hall (Oxford University Press). There is also a German edition by Dr Wilhelm Scholle. The poet seems to have been connected with Yorkshire, and the dialect is not purely Northern, as it shows a slight admixture of Midland forms.

XVI. The Bruce; by John Barbour; partly written in 1375. It has been frequently printed, viz. in 1616, 1620, 1670, 1672, 1715, 1737, and 1758; and was edited by Pinkerton in 1790, by Jamieson in 1820, and by Cosmo Innes in 1866; also by myself (for the Early English Text Society) in 1870-89; and again (for the Scottish Text Society) in 1893-5. Unfortunately, the two extant MSS. were both written out about a century after the date of composition. Nevertheless, we have the text of more than 260 lines as it existed in 1440, as this portion was quoted by Andro of Wyntown, in his Cronykil of Scotland, written at that date. I quote some lines from this portion, taken from The Bruce, Book i, 37-56, 91-110; with a few explanations in the footnotes.

In this extract, as in that from the Metrical Psalter above, there is a striking preponderance of monosyllables, and, as in that case also, the final -e is invariably silent in such words as oure, stere, lede, yhere, thare, were, etc., just as in modern English. The grammar is, for the most part, extremely simple, as at the present day. The chief difficulty lies in the vocabulary, which contains some words that are either obsolete or provincial. Many of the obsolete words are found in other dialects; thus stere, to control, perfay, fonden (for fanden), chesen, to choose, feloun, adj. meaning “angry,” take kepe, soiourne, to tarry, travaile, to labour, parage, rank, all occur in Chaucer; barnage, reauté, in William of Palerne (in the Midland dialect, possibly Shropshire); oughte, owned, possessed, tyne, to lose, in Piers the Plowman; umbethinken, in the Ormulum; enkerly (for inkkyrly), in the alliterative Morte Arthure; march, to border upon, in Mandeville; seignorie, in Robert of Gloucester. Barbour is rather fond of introducing French words; rybalddale occurs in no other author. Threllage or thryllage may have been coined from threll (English thrall), by adding a French suffix. As to the difficult word nyt, see Nite in the N.E.D.

In addition to the poems, etc., already mentioned, further material may be found in the prose works of Richard Rolle of Hampole, especially his translation and exposition of the Psalter, edited by the Rev. H.R. Bramley (Oxford, 1884), and the Prose Treatises edited by the Rev. G.G. Perry for the Early English Text Society. Dr Murray further calls attention to the Early Scottish Laws, of which the vernacular translations partly belong to the fourteenth century.

I have now mentioned the chief authorities for the study of the Northern dialect from early times down to 1400. Examination of them leads directly to a result but little known, and one that is in direct contradiction to general uninstructed opinion; namely that, down to this date, the varieties of Northumbrian are much fewer and slighter than they afterwards became, and that the written documents are practically all in one and the same dialect, or very nearly so, from the Humber as far north as Aberdeen. The irrefragable results noted by Dr Murray will probably come as a surprise to many, though they have now been before the public for more than forty years. The Durham dialect of the Cursor Mundi and the Aberdeen Scotch of Barbour are hardly distinguishable by grammatical or orthographical tests; and both bear a remarkable resemblance to the Yorkshire dialect as found in Hampole. What is now called Lowland Scotch is so nearly descended from the Old Northumbrian that the latter was invariably called “Ingliss” by the writers who employed it; and they reserved the name of “Scottish” to designate Gaelic or Erse, the tongue of the original “Scots,” who gave their name to the country. Barbour (Bruce, iv 253) calls his own language “Ynglis.” Andro of Wyntown does the same, near the beginning of the Prologue to his Cronykil. The most striking case is that of Harry the Minstrel, who was so opposed to all Englanders, from a political point of view, that his whole poem breathes fury and hatred against them; and yet, in describing Wallace’s French friend, Longueville, who knew no tongue but his own, he says of him (Wallace, ix 295-7):

Later still, Dunbar, near the conclusion of his Golden Targe, apostrophises Chaucer as being “in oure Tong ane flouir imperiall,” and says that he was “of oure Inglisch all the lycht.” It was not till 1513 that Gawain Douglas, in the Prologue to the first book of his translation of Virgil, claimed to have “writtin in the langage of Scottis natioun”; though Sir David Lyndesay, writing twenty-two years later, still gives the name of the “Inglisch toung” to the vulgar tongue of Scotland, in his Satyre of the three Estaitis.

We should particularly notice Dr Murray’s statement, in his essay on The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland, at p. 29, that “Barbour at Aberdeen, and Richard Rolle de Hampole near Doncaster, wrote for their several countrymen in the same identical dialect.” The division between the English of the Scottish Lowlands and the English of Yorkshire was purely political, having no reference to race or speech, but solely to locality; and yet, as Dr Murray remarks, the struggle for supremacy “made every one either an Englishman or a Scotchman, and made English and Scotch names of division and bitter enmity.” So strong, indeed, was the division thus created that it has continued to the present day; and it would be very difficult even now to convince a native of the Scottish Lowlands—unless he is a philologist—that he is likely to be of Anglian descent, and to have a better title to be called an “Englishman” than a native of Hampshire or Devon, who, after all, may be only a Saxon. And of course it is easy enough to show how widely the old “Northern” dialect varies from the difficult Southern English found in the Kentish Ayenbite of Inwyt, or even from the Midland of Chaucer’s poems.

To quote from Dr Murray once more (p. 41):

“the facts are still far from being generally known, and I have repeatedly been amused, on reading passages from Cursor Mundi and Hampole to men of education, both English and Scotch, to hear them all pronounce the dialect ‘Old Scotch.’ Great has been the surprise of the latter especially on being told that Richard the Hermit [i.e. of Hampole] wrote in the extreme south of Yorkshire, within a few miles of a locality so thoroughly English as Sherwood Forest, with its memories of Robin Hood. Such is the difficulty which people have in separating the natural and ethnological relations in which national names originate from the accidental values which they acquire through political complications and the fortunes of crowns and dynasties, that oftener than once the protest has been made—‘Then he must have been a Scotchman settled there!’”

The retort is obvious enough, that Barbour and Henry the Minstrel and Dunbar and Lyndesay have all recorded that their native language was “Inglis” or “Inglisch”; and it is interesting to note that, having regard to the pronunciation, they seem to have known, better than we do, how that name ought to be spelt.

CHAPTER V

NORTHUMBRIAN IN THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY

The subject of the last chapter was one of great importance. When it is once understood that, down to 1400 or a little later, the men of the Scottish Lowlands and the men of the northern part of England spoke not only the same language, but the same dialect of that language, it becomes easy to explain what happened afterwards.

There was, nevertheless, one profound difference between the circumstances of the language spoken to the north of the Tweed and that spoken to the south of it. In Scotland, the Northumbrian dialect was spoken by all but the Celts, without much variety; the minor differences need not be here considered. And this dialect, called Inglis (as we have seen) by the Lowlanders themselves, had no rival, as the difference between it and the Erse or Gaelic was obvious and immutable.

To the South of the Tweed, the case was different. England already possessed three dialects at least, viz. Northumbrian, Mercian, and Saxon, i.e. Northern, Midland, and Southern; besides which, Midland had at the least two main varieties, viz. Eastern and Western. Between all these there was a long contention for supremacy. In very early days, the Northern took the lead, but its literature was practically destroyed by the Danes, and it never afterwards attained to anything higher than a second place. From the time of Alfred, the standard language of literature was the Southern, and it kept the lead till long after the Conquest, well down to 1200 and even later, as will be explained hereafter. But the Midland dialect, which is not without witness to its value in the ninth century, began in the thirteenth to assume an important position, which in the fourteenth became dominant and supreme, exalted as it was by the genius of Chaucer. Its use was really founded on practical convenience. It was intermediate between the other two, and could be more or less comprehended both by the Northerner and the Southerner, though these could hardly understand each other. The result was, naturally, that whilst the Northumbrian to the north of the Tweed was practically supreme, the Northumbrian to the south of it soon lost its position as a literary medium. It thus becomes clear that we must, during the fifteenth century, treat the Northumbrian of England and that of Scotland separately. Let us first investigate its position in England.

But before this can be appreciated, it is necessary to draw attention to the fact that the literature of the fifteenth century, in nearly all the text-books that treat of the subject, has been most unjustly underrated. The critics, nearly all with one accord, repeat the remark that it is a “barren” period, with nothing admirable about it, at any rate in England; that it shows us the works of Hoccleve and Lydgate near the beginning, The Flower and the Leaf near the middle (about 1460), and the ballad of The Nut-brown Maid at the end of it, and nothing else that is remarkable. In other words, they neglect its most important characteristic, that it was the chief period of the lengthy popular romances and of the popular plays out of which the great dramas of the succeeding century took their rise. To which it deserves to be added that it contains many short poems of a fugitive character, whilst a vast number of very popular ballads were in constant vogue, sometimes handed down without much change by a faithful tradition, but more frequently varied by the fancy of the more competent among the numerous wandering minstrels. To omit from the fifteenth century nearly all account of its romances and plays and ballads is like omitting the part of Hamlet the Dane from Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy.

The passion for long romances or romantic poems had already arisen in the fourteenth century, and, to some extent, in the thirteenth. Even just before 1300, we meet with the lays of Havelok and Horn. In the fourteenth century, it is sufficient to mention the romances of Sir Guy of Warwick (the earlier version), Sir Bevis of Hamtoun, and Libeaus Desconus, all mentioned by Chaucer; Sir Launfal, The Seven Sages (earlier version, as edited by Weber); Lai le Freine, Richard Coer de Lion, Amis and Amiloun, The King of Tars, William of Palerne, Joseph of Arimathea (a fragment), Sir Gawain and the Grene Knight, Alisaunder of Macedoine and Alexander and Dindimus (two fragments of one very long poem), Sir Ferumbras, and Sir Isumbras. The spirited romance generally known as the alliterative Morte Arthure must also belong here, though the MS. itself is of later date.

The series was actively continued during the fifteenth century, when we find, besides others, the romances of Iwain and Gawain, Sir Percival, and Sir Cleges; The Sowdon (Sultan) of Babylon; The Aunturs (Adventures) of Arthur, Sir Amadas, The Avowing of Arthur, and The Life of Ipomidoun; The Wars of Alexander, The Seven Sages (later version, edited by Wright); Torrent of Portugal, Sir Gowther, Sir Degrevant, Sir Eglamour, Le Bone Florence of Rome, and Partonope of Blois; the prose version of Merlin, the later version of Sir Guy of Warwick, and the verse Romance, of immense length, of The Holy Grail; Emare, The Erl of Tolous, and The Squire of Low Degree. Towards the end of the century, when the printing-press was already at work, we find Caxton greatly busying himself to continue the list. Not only did he give us the whole of Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, “enprynted and fynysshed in thabbey Westmestre the last day of Iuyl, the yere of our lord MCCCCLXXXV”; but he actually translated several romances into very good English prose on his own account, viz. Godefroy of Boloyne (1481), Charles the Grete (1485), The Knight Paris and the fair Vyene (1485), Blanchardyn and Eglantine (about 1489), and The Four Sons of Aymon (about 1490). We must further put to the credit of the fifteenth century the remarkable English version of the Gesta Romanorum, and many more versions by Caxton, such as The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, The Life of Jason, Eneydos (which is Virgil’s Æneid in the form of a prose romance), The Golden Legend or Lives of Saints, and Reynard the Fox. When all these works are considered, the fifteenth century emerges with considerable credit.

It remains to look at some of the above-named romances a little more closely, in order to see if any of them are in the dialect of Northern England. Some of them are written by scribes belonging to other parts, but there seems to be little doubt that the following were in that dialect originally, viz. (1) Iwain and Gawain, printed in Ritson’s Ancient Metrical Romances, and belonging to the very beginning of the century, extant in the same MS. as that which contains Minot’s Poems: (2) The Wars of Alexander (Early English Text Society, 1886), edited by myself; see the Preface, pp. xv, xix, for proofs that it was originally written in a pure Northumbrian dialect, which the better of the two MSS. very fairly preserves. Others exhibit strong traces of a Northern dialect, such as The Aunturs of Arthur, Sir Amadas, and The Avowing of Arthur, but they may be in a West Midland dialect, not far removed from the North. In the preface to The Sege of Melayne (Milan) and Roland and Otuel, edited for the Early English Text Society by S. J. Herrtage, it is suggested that both these poems were by the author of Sir Percival, and that all three were originally in the dialect of the North of England.

Iwain and Gawain and The Wars of Alexander belong to quite the beginning of the fifteenth century, and they appear to be among the latest examples of the literary use of dialect in the North of England considered as a vehicle for romances; but we must not forget the “miracle plays,” and in particular The Towneley Mysteries or plays acted at or near Wakefield in Yorkshire, and The York Plays, lately edited by Miss Toulmin Smith. Examples of Southern English likewise come to an end about the same time; it is most remarkable how very soon, after the death of Chaucer, the Midland dialect not only assumed a leading position, but enjoyed that proud position almost alone. The rapid loss of numerous inflexions, soon after 1400, made that dialect, which was already in possession of such important centres as London, Oxford, and Cambridge, much easier to learn, and brought its grammar much nearer to that in use in the North. It even compromised, as it were, with that dialect by accepting from it the general use of such important words as they, their, them, the plural verb are, and the preposition till. There can be little doubt that one of the causes of the cessation of varying forms of words in literary use was the civil strife known as the Wars of the Roses, which must for a brief period have been hostile to all literary activity; and very shortly afterwards the printing-presses of London all combined to recognise, in general, one dialect only.

Hence it came about, by a natural but somewhat rapid process, that the only dialect which remained unaffected by the triumph of the Midland variety was that portion of the Northern dialect which still held its own in Scotland, where it was spoken by subjects of another king. As far as literature was concerned, only two dialects were available, the Northumbrian of Scotland and the East Midland in England. It is obvious that the readiest way of distinguishing between the two is to call the one “Scottish” and the other “English,” ignoring accuracy for the sake of practical convenience. This is precisely what happened in course of time, and the new nomenclature would have done no harm if the study of Middle English had been at all general. But such was not the case, and the history of our literature was so much neglected that even those who should have been well informed knew no better than others. The chief modern example is the well-known case of that most important and valuable book entitled An Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language, by John Jamieson, D.D., first published in Edinburgh in 1808. There is no great harm in the title, if for “Language” we read “Dialect”; but this great and monumental work was unluckily preceded by a “Dissertation on the Origin of the Scottish Language,” in which wholly mistaken and wrongheaded views are supported with great ingenuity and much show of learning. In the admirable new edition of “Jamieson” by Longmuir and Donaldson, published at Paisley in 1879, this matter is set right. They quite rightly reprint this “Dissertation,” which affords valuable testimony as to the study of English in 1808, but accompany it with most judicious remarks, which are well worthy of full repetition.

“That once famous Dissertation can now be considered only a notable feat of literary card-building; more remarkable for the skill and ingenuity of its construction than for its architectural correctness, strength and durability, or practical usefulness. That the language of the Scottish Lowlands is in all important particulars the same as that of the northern counties of England, will be evident to any unbiassed reader who takes the trouble to compare the Scottish Dictionary with the Glossaries of Brockett, Atkinson, and Peacock. And the similarity is attested in another way by the simple but important fact, that regarding some of our Northern Metrical Romances it is still disputed whether they were composed to the north or the south of the Tweed.... And to this conclusion all competent scholars have given their consent.”

For those who really understand the situation there is no harm in accepting the distinction between “Scottish” and “English,” as explained above. Hence it is that the name of “Middle Scots” has been suggested for “the literary language of Scotland written between the latter half of the fifteenth century and the early decades of the seventeenth.” Most of this literature is highly interesting, at any rate much more so than the “English” literature of the same period, as has been repeatedly remarked. Indeed, this is so well known that special examples are needless; I content myself with referring to the Specimens of Middle Scots, by G. Gregory Smith, Edinburgh and London, 1902. These specimens include extracts from such famous authors as Henryson, Dunbar, Gawain (or Gavin) Douglas, Sir David Lyndesay, John Knox, and George Buchanan. Perhaps it is well to add that “Scottis” or “Scots” is the Northern form of “Scottish” or “Scotch”; just as “Inglis” is the Northern form of “English.”

“Middle Scots” implies both “Old Scots” and “Modern Scots.” “Old Scots” is, of course, the same thing as Northumbrian or Northern English of the Middle English Period, which may be roughly dated as extant from 1300 to 1400 or 1450. “Modern Scots” is the dialect (when they employ dialect) illustrated by Allan Ramsay, Alexander Ross, Robert Tannahill, John Galt, James Hogg (the Ettrick Shepherd), Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, and very many others.

I conclude this chapter with a characteristic example of Middle Scots. The following well-known passage is from the conclusion to Dunbar’s Golden Targe.