It is hopeless, after seven hundred years of wrong spelling, to talk now of King Ælfred. Ortgeard is softened into orchard. Rá-deor (capreolus) is changed into roa-deor, and shows us the steps by which the old a became the new o; we still write broad and goad, a compromise between the North and the South. The sound o in English can be expressed by about ten different combinations of letters; the student of our tongue must here long for the simplicity of the Italian.
About this time, the reign of Henry II., the Old Southern English Gospels of King Ethelred's time were fitted for more modern use. These, known in their new form as the Hatton Gospels, are now accessible to all; St. Matthew's Gospel was published in 1858.[1] The main corruption, wrought by two hundred years or less, is the change of c into ch, as mycel into mychel and œlc into elch. The endings are clipped as usual; thus sunu becomes sune. These Gospels were the last version of Scripture, so far as is known, put forth in England until Wickliffe's day; free paraphrases and riming translations of the Psalms might indeed be compiled; but the next Century, with its Albigensian wars and its Lateran Councils, frowned upon literal versions of the Bible in any vulgar tongue. Even the stout Teutons of England had in this to give way to Roman behests. We are still two hundred years from the Lollard outbreak.
We must now for the third time cast an eye upon the Homilies, which throw such a flood of light upon Twelfth Century English.[2] Those to which I now refer
