We have seen that the earliest dialect to assume literary supremacy was the Northern, and that at a very early date, namely, in the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries; but its early documents have nearly all perished. If, with the exception of one short fragment, any of Cædmon’s poems have survived, they only exist in Southern versions of a much later date.
The chief fosterer of our rather extensive Wessex (or Southern) literature, commonly called Anglo-Saxon, was the great Alfred, born at Wantage in Berkshire, to the south of the Thames. We may roughly define the limits of the Old Southern dialect by saying that it formerly included all the counties to the south of the Thames and to the west and south-west of Berkshire, including Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, Somersetshire, and Devonshire, but excluding Cornwall, in which the Cornish dialect of Celtic prevailed. It was at Athelney in Somersetshire, near the junction of the rivers Tone and Parrett, that Alfred, in the memorable year 878, when his dominions were reduced to a precarious sway over two or three counties, established his famous stronghold; from which he issued to inflict upon the foes of the future British empire a crushing and decisive defeat. And it was near Athelney, in the year 1693, that the ornament of gold and enamel was found, with its famous legend—ÆLFRED MEC HEHT GEWYRCAN—“Ælfred commanded (men) to make me.”
From his date to the Norman Conquest, the MSS. in the Anglo-Saxon or Southern dialect are fairly numerous, and it is mainly to them that we owe our knowledge of the grammar, the metre, and the pronunciation of the older forms of English. Sweet’s Anglo-Saxon Primer will enable any one to begin the study of this dialect, and to learn something valuable about it in the course of a month or two.
The famous Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, beginning with a note concerning the year 1, when Augustus was emperor of Rome, not only continues our history down to the Conquest, but for nearly a century beyond it, to the year 1154. The language of the latter part, as extant in the (Midland) Laud MS., belongs to the twelfth century, and shows considerable changes in the spelling and grammar as compared with the Parker MS., which (not counting in a few later entries) ends with the year 1001.
After the Conquest, the Southern dialect continued to be the literary language, and we have several examples of it. Extracts from some of the chief works are given in Part i of Morris’s Specimens of Early English. They are selected from the following: (1) Old English Homilies, 1150-1200, as printed for the Early English Text Society, and edited by Dr Morris, 1867-8. (2) Old English Homilies, Second Series, before 1200, ed. Morris (E.E.T.S.), 1873. (3) The Brut, being a versified chronicle of the legendary history of Britain, compiled by Layamon, a Worcestershire priest, and extending to 32,240 (short) lines; in two versions, the date of the earlier being about 1205. (4) A Life of St Juliana, in two versions, about 1210; ed. Cockayne and Brock (E.E.T.S.), 1872. (5) The Ancren Riwle, or Rule of anchorite nuns (Camden Society), ed. Morton, 1853; the date of composition is about 1210. (6) The Proverbs of Alfred, about 1250; printed in Dr Morris’s Old English Miscellany (E.E.T.S.), 1872. A later edition, by myself, was printed at Oxford in 1907. (7) A poem by Nicholas de Guildford, entitled The Owl and the Nightingale, about 1250; ed. Rev. J. Stevenson, 1838; ed. T. Wright, 1843; ed. F.H. Stratmann, of Krefeld, 1868. (8) A curious poem of nearly 400 long lines, usually known as A Moral Ode, which seems to have been originally written at Christchurch, Hampshire, and frequently printed; one version is in Morris’s Old English Homilies, and another in the Second Series of the same. (9) The Romance of King Horn; before 1300, here printed in full.
Just at the very end of the century we meet with two Southern poems of vast length. The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, comprising the History of Britain from the Siege of Troy to the year 1272, the date of the accession of Edward I, and written in the dialect of Gloucester, was completed in 1298. It must seem strange to many to find that our history is thus connected with the Siege of Troy; but it must be remembered that our old histories, including Layamon’s poem of The Brut mentioned above, usually included the fabulous history of very early Britain as narrated by Geoffrey of Monmouth; and it is useful to remember that we owe to this circumstance such important works as Shakespeare’s King Lear and Cymbeline, as well as the old play of Locrine, once attributed to Shakespeare. According to Robert’s version of Geoffrey’s story, Britain was originally called Brutain, after Brut or Brutus, the son of Æneas. Locrin was the eldest son of Brutus and his wife Innogen, and defeated Humber, king of Hungary, in a great battle; after which Humber was drowned in the river which still bears his name. Locrin’s daughter Averne (or Sabre in Geoffrey) was drowned likewise, in the river which was consequently called Severn. The British king Bathulf (or, in Geoffrey, Bladud) was the builder of Bath; and the son of Bladud was Leir, who had three daughters, named Gornorille, Began, and Cordeille. Kymbel (in Geoffrey, Kymbelinus), who had been brought up by Augustus Cæsar, was king of Britain at the time of the birth of Christ; his sons were Guider and Arvirag (Guiderius and Arviragus). Another king of Britain was King Cole, who gave name (says Geoffrey falsely) to Colchester. We come into touch with authentic history with the reign of Vortigern, when Hengist and Horsa sailed over to Britain. An extract from Robert of Gloucester is given in Specimens of Early English, Part ii.
The other great work of the same date is the vast collection edited for the Early English Text Society by Dr Horstmann in 1887, entitled, The Early South-English Legendary, or Lives of Saints. It is extant in several MSS., of which the oldest (MS. Laud 108) originally contained 67 Lives; with an Appendix, in a later hand, containing two more. The eleventh Life is that of St Dunstan, which is printed in Specimens of Early English, Part ii, from another MS.
Soon after the year 1300 the use of the Southern dialect becomes much less frequent, with the exception of such pieces as belong particularly to the county of Kent and will be considered by themselves. There are two immense manuscript collections of various poems, originally in various dialects, which are worth notice. One of these is the Harleian MS. No. 2253, in the British Museum, the scribe of which has reduced everything into the South-Western dialect, though it is plain that, in many cases, it is not the dialect in which the pieces were originally composed; this famous manuscript belongs to the beginning of the fourteenth century. Many poems were printed from it, with the title of Altenglische Dichtungen, by Dr K. Böddeker, in 1878. Another similar collection is contained in the Vernon MS. at Oxford, and belongs to the very end of the same century; the poems in it are all in a Southern dialect, which is that of the scribe. It contains, e.g., a copy of the earliest version of Piers the Plowman, which would have been far more valuable if the scribe had retained the spelling of his copy. This may help us to realise one of the great difficulties which beset the study of dialects, namely, that we usually find copies of old poems reduced to the scribe’s own dialect; and it may easily happen that such a copy varies considerably from the correct form.
It has already been shown that the rapid rise and spread of the Midland dialect during the fourteenth century practically put an end to the literary use of Northern not long after 1400, except in Scotland. It affected Southern in the same way, but at a somewhat earlier date; so that (even in Kent) it is very difficult to find a Southern work after 1350. There is, however, one remarkable exception in the case of a work which may be dated in 1387, written by John Trevisa. Trevisa (as the prefix Tre- suggests) was a native of Cornwall, but he resided chiefly in Gloucestershire, where he was vicar of Berkeley, and chaplain to Thomas Lord Berkeley. The work to which I here refer is known as his translation of Higden. Ralph Higden, a Benedictine monk in the Abbey of St Werburg at Chester, wrote in Latin a long history of the world in general, and of Britain in particular, with the title of the Polychronicon, which achieved considerable popularity. The first book of this history contains 60 chapters, the first of which begins with P, the second with R, and so on. If all these initials are copied out in their actual order, we obtain a complete sentence, as follows:—“Presentem cronicam compilavit Frater Ranulphus Cestrensis monachus”; i.e. Brother Ralph, monk of Chester, compiled the present chronicle. I mention this curious device on the part of Higden because another similar acrostic occurs elsewhere. It so happens that Higden’s Polychronicon was continued, after his death, by John Malverne, who brought down the history to a later date, and included in it an account of a certain Thomas Usk, with whom he seems to have been acquainted. Now, in a lengthy prose work of about 1387, called The Testament of Love, I one day discovered that its author had adopted a similar device—no doubt imitating Higden—and had so arranged that the initial letters of his chapters should form a sentence, as follows:—“Margarete of virtw, have merci on Thsknvi.” There is no difficulty about the expression “Margarete of virtw,” because the treatise itself explains that it means Holy Church, but I could make nothing of Thsknvi, as the letters evidently require rearrangement. But Mr Henry Bradley, one of the editors of the New English Dictionary, discovered that the chapters near the end of the treatise are out of order; and when he had restored sense by putting them as they should be, the new reading of the last seven letters came out as “thin vsk,” i.e. “thine Usk”; and the attribution of this treatise to Thomas Usk clears up every difficulty and fits in with all that John Malverne says. This, in fact, is the happy solution of the authorship of The Testament of Love, which was once attributed to Chaucer, though it is obviously not his at all.
But it is time to return to John Trevisa, Higden’s translator. This long translation is all in the Southern dialect, originally that of Gloucestershire, though there are several MSS. that do not always agree. A fair copy of it, from a MS. in the library of St John’s College, Cambridge, is given side by side with the original Latin in the edition already noticed. It is worth adding that Caxton printed Trevisa’s version, altering the spelling to suit that of his own time, and giving several variations of reading.
Trevisa was also the author of some other works, of which the most important is his translation into English, from the original Latin, of Bartholomæus de Proprietatibus Rerum.
I am not aware of any important work in the Southern dialect later than these translations by Trevisa. But in quite modern times, an excellent example of it has appeared, viz. in the Poems of Rural Life, in the Dorset Dialect, by William Barnes.
Though the Kentish dialect properly belongs to Southern English, from its position to the south of the Thames, yet it shows certain peculiarities which make it desirable to consider it apart from the rest.
In Beda’s Ecclesiastical History, Bk i, ch. 15, he says of the Teutonic invaders: “Those who came over were of the three most powerful nations of Germany—Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. From the Jutes are descended the people of Kent, and of the Isle of Wight, and those also in the province of the West-Saxons who are to this day called Jutes, seated opposite to the Isle of Wight”; a remark which obviously implies the southern part of Hampshire. This suggests that the speech of Kent, from the very first, had peculiarities of its own. Dr Sweet, in his Second Anglo-Saxon Reader, Archaic and Dialectal, gives five very brief Kentish charters of the seventh and eighth centuries, but the texts are in Latin, and only the names of persons and places appear in Kentish forms. In the ninth century, however, there are seven Kentish charters, of a fuller description, from the year 805 to 837. In one of these, dated 835, a few lines occur that may be quoted:
Ic bidde and bebeode swælc monn se thæt min lond hebbe thæt he ælce gere agefe them higum æt Folcanstane l. ambra maltes, and vi. ambra gruta, and iii. wega spices and ceses, and cccc. hlafa, and an hrithr, and vi. scep.... Thæm higum et Cristes cirican of thæm londe et Cealflocan: thæt is thonne thritig ombra alath, and threo hund hlafa, theara bith fiftig hwitehlafa, an weg spices and ceses, an ald hrithr, feower wedras, an suin oththe sex wedras, sex gosfuglas, ten hennfuglas, thritig teapera, gif hit wintres deg sie, sester fulne huniges, sester fulne butran, sester fulne saltes.
That is to say:
I ask and command, whosoever may have my land, that he every year give to the domestics at Folkestone fifty measures of malt, and six measures of meal, and three weys [heavy weights] of bacon and cheese, and four hundred loaves, and one rother [ox], and six sheep.... To the domestics at Christ’s church, from the land at Challock: that is, then, thirty vessels of ale, and three hundred loaves, of which fifty shall be white loaves, one wey of bacon and cheese, one old rother, four wethers, one swine or six wethers, six goose-fowls, ten hen-fowls, thirty tapers, if it be a day in winter, a jar full of honey, a jar full of butter, and a jar full of salt.
At pp. 152-175 of the same volume, Dr Sweet gives 1204 Kentish glosses of a very early date. No. 268 is: “Cardines, hearran”; and in several modern dialects, including Hampshire, the upright part of a gate to which the hinges are fastened is called a harr.
Several years ago, M. Paul Mayer found five short sermons in a Kentish dialect in MS. Laud 471, in the Bodleian Library, along with their French originals. They are printed in Morris’s Old English Miscellany, and two of them will be found in Specimens of Early English, Part i, p. 141. The former of these is for the Epiphany, the text being taken from Matt. ii 1. The date is just before 1250. I give an extract.
The kinges hem wenten and hi seghen the sterre thet yede bifore hem, alwat hi kam over tho huse war ure loverd was; and alswo hi hedden i-fonden ure loverd, swo hin an-urede, and him offrede hire offrendes, gold, and stor, and mirre. Tho nicht efter thet aperede an ongel of hevene in here slepe ine metinge, and hem seide and het, thet hi ne solde ayen wende be herodes, ac be an other weye wende into hire londes.
That is:
The kings went (them), and they saw the star that went before them until it came over the house where our Lord was; and as-soon-as they had found our Lord, so (they) honoured him, and offered him their offerings, gold, and frankincense, and myrrh. The night after that (there) appeared an angel from heaven in their sleep, in a dream, and said to-them and commanded, that they should not wend again near Herod, but by another way wend to their lands.
In the days of Edward II (1307-27) flourished William of Shoreham, named from Shoreham (Kent), near Otford and Sevenoaks, who was appointed vicar of Chart-Sutton in 1320. He translated the Psalter into English prose, and wrote some religious poems, chiefly relating to church-services, which were edited by T. Wright for the Percy Society in 1849. His poem “On Baptism” is printed in Specimens of Early English, Part ii. I give an extract:
In the year 1340, Dan Michel of Northgate (Kent) translated into English a French treatise on Vices and Virtues, under the title The Ayenbite of Inwyt, literally, “The Again-biting of In-wit,” i.e. Remorse of Conscience. This is the best specimen of the Kentish dialect of the fourteenth century, and is remarkable for being much more difficult to make out than other pieces of the same period. The whole work was edited by Dr Morris for the Early English Text Society in 1866. A sermon of the same date and in the same dialect, and probably by the same author, is given in Specimens of Early English, Part ii. The sermon is followed by the Lord’s Prayer, the Ave Maria, and the “Credo” or Apostles’ Creed, all in the same dialect; and I here give the last of these, as being not difficult to follow:
Ich leve ine God, Vader almighti, makere of hevene and of erthe. And ine Iesu Crist, His zone onlepi [only son], oure lhord, thet y-kend [conceived] is of the Holy Gost, y-bore of Marie mayde, y-pyned [was crucified, lit. made to suffer] onder Pouns Pilate, y-nayled a rode [on a cross], dyad, and be-bered; yede [went] doun to helle; thane thridde day aros vram the dyade; steay [rose, ascended] to hevenes; zit [sitteth] athe [on the] right half of God the Vader almighti; thannes to comene He is, to deme the quike and the dyade. Ich y-leve ine the Holy Gost; holy cherche generalliche; Mennesse of halyen [communion of holy-ones]; Lesnesse of zennes [remission of sins]; of vlesse [flesh, body] arizinge; and lyf evrelestinde. Zuo by hyt [so be it].
A few remarks may well be made here on some of the peculiarities of Southern English that appear here. The use of v for f (as in vader, vram, vlesshe), and of z for s (as in zone, zit, zennes) are common to this day, especially in Somersetshire. The spelling lhord reminds us that many Anglo-Saxon words began with hl, one of them being hlāfweard, later hlāford, a lord; and this hl is a symbol denoting the so-called “whispered l,” sounded much as if an aspirate were prefixed to the l, and still common in Welsh, where it is denoted by ll, as in llyn, a lake. In every case, modern English substitutes for it the ordinary l, though lh (= hl) was in use in 1340 in Southern. The prefix y-, representing the extremely common A.S. (Anglo-Saxon) prefix ge-, was kept up in Southern much longer than in the other dialects, but has now disappeared; the form y-clept being archaic. The plural suffix -en, as in haly-en, holy ones, saints, is due to the fact that Southern admitted the use of that suffix very freely, as in cherch-en, churches, sterr-en, stars, etc.; whilst Northern only admitted five such plurals, viz. egh-en, ey-en, eyes (Shakespeare’s eyne), hos-en, stockings, ox-en, shoo-n, shoes, and fā-n, foes; ox-en being the sole survivor, since shoon (as in Hamlet, iv iv 26) is archaic. The modern child-r-en, breth-r-en, are really double plurals; Northern employed the more original forms childer and brether, both of which, and especially the former, are still in dialectal use. Evrelest-inde exhibits the Southern -inde for present participles.
But the word zennes, sins, exhibits a peculiarity that is almost solely Kentish, and seldom found elsewhere, viz. the use of e for i. The explanation of this rests on an elementary lesson in Old English phonology, which it will do the reader no harm to acquire. The modern symbol i (when denoting the short sound, as in pit) really does double duty. It sometimes represents the A.S. short i, as in it (A.S. hit), sit (A.S. sittan), bitten (A.S. bĭten), etc.; and sometimes the A.S. short y, as in pyt, a pit. The sound of the A.S. short i was much the same as in modern English; but that of the short y was different, as it denoted the “mutated” form of short u for which German has a special symbol, viz. ü, the sound intended being that of the German ü in schützen, to protect. In the latter case, Kentish usually has the vowel e, as in the modern Kentish pet, a pit, and in the surname Petman (at Margate), which means pitman; and as the A.S. for “sin” was synn (dat. synne), the Kentish form was zenne, since Middle English substantives often represent the A.S. dative case. The Kentish plural had the double form, zennes and zennen, both of which occur in the Ayenbite, as might have been expected.
The poet Gower, who completed what may be called the first edition of his poem named the Confessio Amantis (or Confession of a Lover) in 1390, was a Kentish man, and well acquainted with the Kentish dialect. He took advantage of this to introduce, occasionally, Kentish forms into his verse; apparently for the sake of securing a rime more easily. See this discussed at p. ci of vol. ii of Macaulay’s edition of Gower. I may illustrate this by noting that in Conf. Amant. i 1908, we find pitt riming with witt, whereas in the same, v 4945, pet rimes with let.
We know that, in 1386, the poet Chaucer was elected a knight of the shire for Kent, and in 1392-3 he was residing at Greenwich. He evidently knew something of the Kentish dialect; and he took advantage of the circumstance, precisely as Gower did, for varying his rimes. The earliest example of this is in his Book of the Duchess, l. 438, where he uses the Kentish ken instead of kin (A.S. cynn) in order to secure a rime for ten. In the Canterbury Tales, E 1057, he has kesse, to kiss (A.S. cyssan), to rime with stedfastnesse. In the same, A 1318, he has fulfille, to fulfil (cf. A.S. fyllan, to fill), to rime with wille; but in Troilus, iii 510, he changes it to fulfelle, to rime with telle; with several other instances of a like kind.
It is further remarkable that some Kentish forms seem to have established themselves in standard English, as when we use dent with the sense of dint (A.S. dynt). When we speak of the left hand, the form left is really Kentish, and occurs in the Ayenbite of Inwyt; the Midland form is properly lift, which is common enough in Middle English; see the New English Dictionary, s.v. Left, adj. Hemlock is certainly a Kentish form; cf. A.S. hymlice, and see the New English Dictionary. So also is kernel (A.S. cyrnel); knell (A.S. cnyllan, verb); merry (A.S. myrge, myrige); and perhaps stern, adj. (A.S. styrne).
There are some excellent remarks upon the vocalism of the Kentish dialect in Middle English by W. Heuser, in the German periodical entitled Anglia, vol xvii pp. 73-90.
The Mercian district lies between the Northern and Southern, occupying an irregular area which it is very difficult to define. On the east coast it reached from the mouth of the Humber to that of the Thames. On the western side it seems to have included a part of Lancashire, and extended from the mouth of the Lune to the Bristol Channel, exclusive of a great part of Wales.
There were two chief varieties of it which differed in many particulars, viz. the East Midland and the West Midland. The East Midland included, roughly speaking, the counties of Lincoln, Rutland, Northampton, and Buckingham, and all the counties (between the Thames and Humber) to the east of these, viz. Cambridge, Huntingdon, Bedford, Hertford, Middlesex, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex. We must also certainly include, if not Oxfordshire, at any rate the city of Oxford. This is by far the most important group of counties, as it was the East Midland that finally prevailed over the rest, and was at last accepted as a standard, thus rising from the position of a dialect to be the language of the Empire. The Midland prevailed over the Northern and Southern dialects because it was intermediate between them, and so helped to interpret between North and South; and the East Midland prevailed over the Western because it contained within its area all three of the chief literary centres, namely, Oxford, Cambridge, and London. It follows from this that the Old Mercian dialect is of greater interest than either the Northumbrian or Anglo-Saxon.
Unfortunately, the amount of extant Old Mercian, before the Conquest, is not very large, and it is only of late years that the MSS. containing it have been rightly understood. Practically, the study of it dates only from 1885, when Dr Sweet published his Oldest English Texts.
But there is more Mercian to be found than was at first suspected; and it is desirable to consider this question.
An important discovery was that the language of the oldest Glossaries seems to be Mercian. We have extant no less than four Glossaries in MSS. of as early a date as the eighth century, named respectively, the Epinal, Erfurt, Corpus, and Leyden Glossaries. The first is now at Epinal, in France (in the department Vosges); the second, at Erfurt, near Weimar, in Germany; the third, in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; and the fourth, at Leyden, in Holland. The Corpus MS. may be taken as typical of the rest. It contains an enumeration of a large number of difficult words, arranged, but imperfectly, in alphabetical order; and after each of these is written its gloss or interpretation. Thus the fifth folio begins as follows:
|
Abminiculum . adiutorium. Abelena . haeselhnutu. Abiecit . proiecit. |
Absida . sacrarium. Abies . etspe. Ab ineunte ætate . infantia. |
The chief interest of these Glossaries lies in the fact that a small proportion of the hard words is explained, not in Latin, but in Mercian English, of which there are two examples in the six glosses here quoted. Thus Abelena, which is another spelling of Abellana or Avellana, “a filbert,” is explained as “haeselhnutu”; which is a perfectly familiar word when reduced to its modern form of “hazel-nut.” And again, Abies, which usually means “a fir-tree,” is here glossed by “etspe.” But this is certainly a false spelling, as we see by comparing it with the following glosses in Epinal and Erfurt (Nos. 37,1006):—“Abies. saeppae—sæpae”; and “Tremulus. aespae—espæ.” This shows that the scribe ought to have explained Abies by “saeppae,” meaning the tree full of sap, called in French sapin; but he confused it with another tree, the “trembling” tree, of which the Old Mercian name was “espe” or “espæ,” or “aespae,” and he miswrote espe as etspe, inserting a needless t. This last tree is the one which Chaucer called the asp in l. 180 of his Parliament of Fowls, but in modern times the adjectival suffix -en (as in gold-en, wood-en) has been tacked on to it, and it is now the aspen.
The interpretation of these ancient glosses requires very great care, but they afford a considerable number of interesting results, and are therefore valuable, especially as they give us spellings of the eighth century, which are very scarce.
One of the oldest specimens of Old Mercian that affords intelligible sentences is known as the “Lorica Prayer,” because it occurs in the same MS. (Ll. 1. 10 in the Cambridge University Library) as the “Lorica Glosses,” or the glosses which accompany a long Latin prayer, really a charm, called “lorica” or “breast-plate,” because it was recited thrice a day to protect the person who used it from all possible injury and accident. I give this Prayer as illustrating the state of our language about A.D. 850.
And the georne gebide gece and miltse fore alra his haligra gewyrhtum and ge-earningum and boenum be [hiwe]num, tha the domino deo gelicedon from fruman middan-geardes; thonne gehereth he thec thorh hiora thingunge. Do thonne fiorthan sithe thin hleor thriga to iorthan, fore alle Godes cirican, and sing thas fers: domini est salus, saluum fac populum tuum, domine, praetende misericordiam tuam. Sing thonne pater noster. Gebide thonne fore alle geleaffulle menn in mundo. Thonne bistu thone deg dael-niomende thorh Dryhtnes gefe alra theara goda the ænig monn for his noman gedoeth, and thec alle soth-festæ fore thingiath in caelo et in terra. Amen.*
That is:—
And earnestly pray for-thyself for help and mercy by-reason-of the deeds and merits and prayers of all his saints on-behalf-of the [households] that have pleased the Lord God from the beginning of the world; then will He hear thee because-of their intercession. Bow-down then, at the fourth time, thy face thrice to the earth before all God’s church, and sing these verses: The Lord is my salvation, save Thy people, O Lord: show forth Thy mercy. Sing then a pater-noster. Pray then for all believing men in the world. Then shalt thou be, on that day, a partaker, by God’s grace, of all the good things that any man doth for His name, and all true-men will intercede for thee in heaven and in earth. Amen.
Another discovery was the assignment of a correct description to the glosses found in a document known as the Vespasian Psalter; so called because it is an early Latin Psalter, or book of Psalms, contained in a Cotton MS. in the British Museum, marked with the class-mark “Vespasian, A. 1.” This Psalter is accompanied throughout with glosses which were at first mistakenly thought to be in a Northumbrian dialect, and were published as such by the Surtees Society in 1843. They were next, in 1875, wrongly supposed to be Kentish; but since they were printed by Sweet in 1885 it has been shown that they are really Mercian. This set of glosses is very important for the study of Old Mercian, because they are rather extensive; they occupy 213 pages of the Oldest English Texts, and are followed by 20 more pages of similar glosses to certain Latin canticles and hymns that occur in the same MS.
There are also a few Charters extant in the Mercian dialect, but the earliest contain little else than old forms of the names of persons and places. There are, however, some later Charters, from 836 to 1058 in the Mercian dialect, which contain some boundaries of lands and afford other information. Most of these relate to Worcestershire.
But the most interesting Mercian glosses are those to be found in the Rushworth MS., which has already been mentioned as containing Northumbrian glosses of the Latin Gospels of St Mark, St Luke, and St John. For the Gospel of St Matthew was glossed by the scribe Farman, who was a priest of Harewood, situate on the river Wharfe, in the West Riding of Yorkshire; whose language, accordingly, was Mercian. In my Principles of English Etymology, First Series (second edition, 1892), p. 44, I gave a list of words selected from these glosses, in order to show how much nearer they stand, as a rule, to modern English than do the corresponding Anglo-Saxon forms. I here repeat this list, as it is very instructive. The references, such as “5. 15,” are to the chapters and verses of St Matthew’s Gospel, as printed in my edition of The Holy Gospels, in Anglo-Saxon, Northumbrian, and Old Mercian Versions, synoptically arranged (Cambridge, 1871-87). The first column below gives the Modern English form, the second the Old Mercian form (with references), and the third the Anglo-Saxon or Wessex form:
In l.5, the scribe Farman miswrote caldas as galdas, in Matt. x 42; but it is a mere mistake. In l. 20, the accent over the a in áld is marked in the MS., though the vowel was not originally long.
Even a glance at this comparative table reveals a peculiarity of the Wessex dialect which properly belongs neither to Mercian nor to Modern English, viz. the use of the diphthong ea (in which each vowel was pronounced separately) instead of simple a, before the sounds denoted by l, r, h, especially when another consonant follows. We find accordingly such Wessex forms as eall, ceald, fealleth, -feald, gealla, healf, healt, nearu, eald, seald, weall, gearo, where the Old Mercian has simply all, cald, falleth, -fald, galla, half, halt, naru, ald, sald, wall, iara. Similarly, Wessex has the diphthongs ēa, ēo, in which the former element is long, where the Old Mercian has simply ē or ī. We find accordingly the Wessex cēace, ēac, ēage, scēap, as against the Mercian cēke, ēk, ēge, scēp; and the Wessex lēogan, lēoht, as against the Mercian līgan, līht.