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 drank 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.[2]
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
