dislikes the old fashion of setting a at the beginning of a verb: he will not write arise or awake. The Northern men, who settled our speech, clipped everything that they could.
In his Pronouns, he shows that he is a near neighbour to Northumbria. He uses I and icc; þeʓʓ, þeʓʓre, þeʓʓm; but sometimes replaces the two last by heore, hemm. It was two hundred and sixty years before their and them came into Standard English; they are true Scandinavian forms. Unlike the Peterborough Chronicler, Orrmin sticks to the Old English heo (in Latin, ea), which he writes ʓho. This is another reason for settling him as far to the West in the Danelagh as we can; his ʓho still survives in Lancashire as hoo, as we know from Mrs. Gaskell's works.
It would be endless to point out all Orrmin's Scandinavian leanings. In our word for the Latin stella, he prefers the Danish stierne to the Old English steorra, writing it sterrne. He even uses og, the Danish word for ‘et’ in a phrase like aʓʓ occ aʓʓ. He employs the Norse ending leʓʓc as well as the English ness in his substantives, as modiʓleʓʓc, modiʓnesse. In tende, his word for decimus, he follows the Danish tiende rather than the Old English teoða; our tenth seems to be a compound of the two. The English Church talks of tithes, the Scotch Kirk of teinds. He uses a crowd of Norse words which I do not notice, since they have dropped out of use. Like the Peterborough Chronicler, Orrmin has fra, wicke, wrang, wiless, ploh, kirrkegœrd. While weighing the mighty changes that were clearly at work in his day, we get some idea of the influence that the Norse settlement
