of Brunne, who first led the way to French endings fastened to English roots. They also write ing for the Active Participle, where Hereford writes the old ende; they do not follow him in employing the Southern Imperative Plural. In the Apology for the Lollards (Camden Society) there is a strong dash of the Northern dialect. If Wickliffe were the writer, he must have here gone back to the speech of his childhood far more than in his Scriptural translations. In this Apology there are 94 obsolete English words.
The last half of the Fourteenth Century employed many of the phrases that live for ever in the English Bible and Prayer Book. We find such expressions as albeit, surely, passing rich, during, on this condition that, considering this, as to this, with one accord, to that ende that, touching these things, enter in, under colour of, that is interpreted, if so be that, oft time, according as, in regard of, upon a time, ensaumple, rebuke, she-wolf, outrely (utterly), go a begging, whereas, because. The Lord's Prayer took its shape much as we have it now, Wickliffe employing in its latter part the French words dettours, temptacioun, delyvere. I pass on to the Belief, that other stronghold of wholesome English; and I give a few other forms of this age, now embodied in our Prayer Book. I take the following from a Primer of the year 1400.[1] We see that the speech of Religion was being moulded into the shape which has come down to us in the Anglican Prayer Book; little remained to
- ↑ Blunt's Key to the Prayer Book, Edition of 1868, page 4. The first piece seems to be East Anglian.
