250
The Sources of Standard English.
cides exactly with the time of England's greatest loss in a philologer's eyes.[1]
Robert of Brunne began his Handlyng Synne, as he tells us, in 1303; he must have taken some years to complete it. We possess it, not as he wrote it, but in a Southern transcript of 1360 or thereabouts; even in this short interval many old terms had been dropped, and some of the bard's Norse words could never have been understood on the Thames. The transcriber writes more modern equivalents above those terms of Robert's, which seemed strange in 1360. I give a few specimens, to show the change that went on all through the Fourteenth Century:
| Robert of Brunne, in 1303. | His Transcriber, about 1360. | Robert of Brunne, in 1303. | His Transcriber, about 1360. |
| Gros | Dred | yerne | desyre |
| wlatys | loþeþ | rous | boste |
| wede (insanus) | made | qued | shrewe |
| wryʓtes | carponters | aywhore | ever more |
| were | kepe | wurþ þe | most |
| mote (curia) | plete | weyve | forsake |
| ferly | wndyr | gate | wey |
| cele | godly | loþe | harme |
| byrde (decet) | moste | he nam | he ʓede |
| estre | toune | he nam | he toke |
| yrk | slow | stounde | tyme |
| mayn | strenkþ | rape | haste |
| harnes | brayn | kenne | teche |
| grete | wepte | tarne | wenche |
| whyle | tyme | bale | sorow |
- ↑ Happy had it been for Spain if her begging friars, about the year 1470, had been as sluggish and tolerant as their English brethren.
