and Robert of Lincoln had rimed, good home-born patriots though they might be. In our island there was no acknowledged Standard of national speech; ever since 1120, each shire had spoken that which was right in its own eyes. We have seen how widely the Northern, the Midland, and the Southern dialects differed from each other; and this was remarked by Giraldus Cambrensis almost seven hundred years ago.[1] But not long after that keen-eyed Welshman's death, it might be seen that some great change was at hand. Of course, any dialect that was to hold the position once enjoyed by the Winchester speech, would have to win its way into London, Oxford, and Cambridge — towns that, after the year 1000, had become the heart and the eyes of England. Of these three, Cambridge lay within the bounds of the East Midland speech; her clerks, drawn to her from all quarters of the land, may have helped to spread abroad her dialect, such as we (it may be) see it in the Bestiary of 1230. To Cambridge came young Robert Manning, as he says himself.[2] That University, thronged as it must have been with lads from the North, West, and South, may have had her influence on his great work of 1303.
Had the most renowned of all Lincoln's Bishops been a writer of English, I should have given him a great share of credit for the Southern conquest achieved a hundred years after his death by the speech of his flock. But we must go much further back than his time, when
