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The Sources of Standard English.
Forby derives it from ped, which in Norfolk is a covered pannier.[1] There are many words in the Ancren Riwle, which, as Wedgwood thinks, are formed from the sound; such as gewgaw, chatter, flash; scratch arose in Salop; the window of that shire was called þurl in the South.[2] The adjective in Shakespere's ‘little cwifer fellow’ is found in the Ancren Riwle; it seems to come from the old cóf, impiger.
Dr. Morris has added to his Twelfth Century Homilies (First Series) some other works, which seem to date from about 1220. The word carp (loqui) is seen for the first time. Another new word is dingle, applied to a recess of the sea; it is akin to a German word, as also is schimmeð or schimereð (fulget), at page 257.
- ↑ This proves that we ought not to write pedler, but pedlar; the word is sometimes given as a puzzle in spelling.
- ↑ In Salop, forms which were used in Lothian and Yorkshire seem to have clashed with forms employed in Gloucestershire and Dorset; something resembling the Ormulum was the upshot. In each succeeding century Salop comes to the front. ‘The Wohunge of ure Lauerd’ seems to have been written here about 1210 (Morris' Old English Homilies, First Series, p. 269). In 1340, or so, the Romance of William of Palerne was compiled here. In 1420, John Audlay wrote his poems in the same dialect (Percy Society, No. 47). In 1580, Churchyard had not dropped all his old Salopian forms. Baxter, who came from Salop, appeared about 1650 as one of the first heralds of the change that was then passing over Standard English prose, and that was substituting Dryden's style for that of Milton. Soon after 1700, Farquhar, in his Recruiting Officer, gives us much of the Salopian brogue. This intermingling of Northern and Southern forms in Salop produced something not unlike Standard English.
