Whenne he þat of hire nam blod and fless,
Also his suete wille was,
Heng inayled on þe treo.
‘Alas, my sone,’ seide heo,
‘Hu may ihc live, hu may þis beo?’
The above is taken from the Assumption of the Virgin, printed by the Early English Text Society, along with the King Horn and another poem, all written about 1280 or rather later. In them we find that the Active Participle in inge, first used by Layamon, has almost driven out the older inde. The King Horn was written in some part of England (Oxfordshire?), upon which the East Midland dialect had begun to act, grafting its Plural form of the Present tense upon the older form in eth. Here hwanon (unde) is replaced by whannes, our whence. In page 8 there is a curious instance of the Old English idiom, which piles up negatives upon each other: this survives in the mouths of the common folk.
‘Heo ne miʓte . . . speke . . . noʓt in þe halle,
ne nowhar in non oþere stede.
We now light on scrip (pera), which comes from the Norse skreppa, and pore (spectare), akin to the Swedish pala.[1] There are also three words akin to the Dutch or German, clink, flutter, and guess. Chivalrous ideas were now being widely spread under the sway of the great Edward, and we find that a verb has been formed from the substantive knight.
‘For to kniʓti child horn.’ — Line 480.
- ↑ Pala i en bok is to pore on a book. — Wedgwood.
