It must be clear to all, that since Orrmin no Englishman has shown the change in our tongue so strikingly as Robert of Brunne. Many of our writers had fastened an English ending to a foreign root, such as martirdom; but no Englishman before 1303 had fastened a French ending to an English root, as bondage; and none had employed a French Active participle instead of an English preposition, as ‘passing all things.’ Robert commonly writes y instead of i, a fashion which lasted for two hundred years, and then happily dropped. He seems to be conscious that he was an innovator, for in page 267 he asks forgiveness
‘For foule Englysshe and feble ryme,
Seyde oute of resun many tyme.’
In his seventy lines on Confirmation, at page 304, he employs French words for at least one-third of his nouns, verbs, and adverbs; the same proportion that was afterwards to be used in the Collects of the English Prayer Book, as also by Addison, and by most good writers of our own day.[1] No more nonsense, it is to be hoped, will now be talked about Chaucer, who not long ago was looked upon as the first Englishman who employed French words to a great extent.
In my specimens taken from Robert's work, I have chosen parts that are wholly his own and no translation from the French. I give first a tale of the great Bishop of Lincoln, who died but a few years before our poet's birth; I then give St. Paul's description of
- ↑ Matthew Paris would have called Robert of Brunne ‘immutator mirabilis.’
