tells us that ‘the labouring men of Huntingdon and Northampton speak what is usually called better English, because their vernacular dialect is most akin to that of the standard writers.’ He pitches upon the country between St. Neots and Stamford as the true centre of literary English.[1] Dr. Guest has put in a word for Leicestershire. Our classic speech did not arise in London or Oxford; even as it was not in the Papal Court at Rome, or in the King's Palace at Naples, or in the learned University of Bologna, that the classic Italian sprang up with sudden and marvellous growth.
The Handlyng Synne shows how the different tides of speech, flowing from Southern, Western, and Northern shires alike, met in the neighbourhood of Rutland, and all helped to shape the New English. Robert of Brunne had his own mother-tongue to start with, the Dano-Anglian dialect corrupted by five generations since our first glimpse of it in 1120. He has their peculiar use of niman for the Latin ire, and other marks of the East Midland. We have seen a specimen of the North Lincolnshire speech of 1240; this, as Robert was to do later, had substituted no for ne (the Latin nec).[2] From the South this speech had borrowed the change of a into o and c into ch (hence Robert's moche,[3] eche, whyche, swych), of sc into sh, g into w, and o into ou. From the West
- ↑ I visited Stamford in 1872, and found that the letter h was sadly misused in her streets.
- ↑ This change is also seen in Layamon and in the Herefordshire manuscript of 1313; whence Mr. Wright has taken much for his Political Songs (Camden Society).
- ↑ His moche was used by good writers down to Elizabeth's time.
