portion was to be woefully altered. The only thing that could have kept up a purely Teutonic speech in England would have been some version of the Bible, a standard of the best English of the year 1200. But this was not to be; Pope Innocent III. and his Prelates had no mind to furnish laymen with weapons that might be so easily turned against the Church. We have missed much; had Orrmin given us a good version of the Scriptures, our tongue would have had all the flexibility of the New English, and would have kept the power of compounding words out of its own stores, the power that belonged to the Old English.
The Ancren Riwle, written about 1220, is the forerunner of a wondrous change in our speech. The proportion of Old English words, now obsolete, is therein much the same as it is in the writings of Orrmin and Layamon. But the new work swarms with French words, brought in most needlessly. What could we want with such terms as cuntinuelement, Deuleset (God knows), belami, misericorde, and cogitaciun? The author is even barbarous enough to give us the French sulement, where we should now write only. I set down a short sample, underlining the foreign words. ‘Heo weren itented, and þuruh þe tentaciuns ipreoved to treowe champiuns, and so mid rihte ofserveden kempene crune.’[1] Many a word, embodied in the English Bible and Prayer Book three hundred years later, is now found for the first time in our tongue. These words were accented in the
- ↑ Page 236 of the Camden Society's edition. I have not underlined proved, as that foreign word was in use before the Norman Conquest.
