The above poem is taken from the Liber de Antiquis Legibus (‘Reliquiæ Antiquæ,’ I. 274), in the possession of the Corporation of London; the manuscript has musical notes attached to it. The proportion of obsolete English is much the same as in the Genesis and Exodus. The poem of page 134 seems therefore to represent the London speech of the year 1230, or so. What was g in Suffolk becomes c here, as in the Twelfth Century Homilies; it is broct, not brogt; gelt replaces gilt. The h is sometimes misused, even as Londoners of our day misuse it. The gh sometimes replaces the old h, as we saw in the Essex Homilies: this change was now overspreading the greater part of the Eastern side of England between London and York.
THE EAST MIDLAND DIALECT.
(About A.D. 1240.)
The piece that comes next, a version of the Athanasian Creed, was most likely written in the Northernmost part of Lincolnshire, perhaps not far from Hull; it has corruptions of English that are not often found before Manning wrote in that county sixty years later, such as ‘ne þre no two’ (nec tres nec duo).[1] We see the Northern forms in great abundance; thus whilk is used for the Relative, as in Dorset; als, til, sal, þair, &c., come often: the third Person Singular of the Present tense ends in es, not in eth. But the Southern o was making great inroads on the Northern a, as we saw in
- ↑ No for nec is found in Layamon.
