Yorkshire speech as it was in his day.[1] The Northern English had become the Court language at Edinburgh. The Southern dialect, the most unlucky of all our varieties, gave way before her Mercian sister: Dane conquered Saxon. After Trevisa wrote in 1387, no purely Southern English work, of any length, was produced for almost five hundred years.[2] Shakespere, in his Lear, tries his hand upon the Somersetshire tongue; and it also figures in one of the best of the Reformation ballads to be found in Bishop Percy's collection. But Mr. Barnes in our own day was the first to teach England how much pith and sweetness still lingered in the long-neglected homely tongue of Dorset; it seems more akin to Middle English than to New English.[3]
A few improvements, not as yet brought from the North, were still wanting; but now at last our land had a Standard tongue of her own, welcome alike in the Palace and in the cottage. King Edward the Third, not long after Cressy, lent his countenance to the mother-tongue of his trusty billmen and bowmen. He in 1849 had his shield and surcoat embroidered with his own motto, on this wise:
‘Hay, hay, the wythe swan,
By Godes soule, I am thy man.’
- ↑ The Southerner, on entering Leeds, still reads the old Northern names of Kirkgate and Briggate on two great thoroughfares. May the Leeds magistrates have more wit than those of Edinburgh, whom Scott upbraids for affectation in substituting the modern Square for the ancient Close!
- ↑ Audlay, the blind Salopian of 1420, has a mixture of Southern and Midland forms.
- ↑ We there see the true old Wessex sound of ea.
