When Richard I. came home from his German prison (II. page 490), ‘he pleyede nywe king at ome.’ This new idiom seems French; we now put a the after the verb. The poet is fond of using body for person, as ‘mani god bodi, that ne com’ (II. page 546). We are told, in the famous ballad on Lewes fight, that the King's brother ‘saisede the mulne for a castel.’ Thirty-five years later, the Gloucestershire bard tells us that the aforesaid Prince ‘was in a windmulle inome.’ The old n at the end of the word, clipped in England, is still kept by the Scotch Lowlanders.
Robert wrote, besides his Chronicle, a great number of Lives of Saints. Of these, that of Becket has been published by the Percy Society, Vol. XIX. At page 92, we see a new adverb compounded from an adjective, ‘to do the sentence al abrod,’ We still keep this counterpart to the Latin latè in ‘to noise abroad;’ but the Norse abroad (foris) is of much later introduction. There are such new phrases as forasmoche as (page 28); þu miʓt as wel beo stille (page 49); the kinges men were at him (page 63); hi dude here best (did their best), page 3. The old berewe now becomes barewe, our barrow.
A new adjective is found; Becket's mother, wandering about London unable to speak English, is called ‘a mopisch best’ (page 5). This is akin to the Dutch moppen, to sulk. Buttock reminds us of the Dutch bout; and stout, which is pure Dutch, now first appears in England.
We have seen in Sir Tristrem that bond came to mean servus; we find, at page 27 of the Becket, the word bonde man, with the same meaning. In other shires, such as near Rutland, bonde man still bore the old sense
