coming from Norfolk manor-houses; here we find the East Anglian arn (sunt) and the qu replacing hw, as quhat for hwat, qwan for hwen, much as in the Genesis and Exodus of the same shires, compiled two hundred years before. Manning's way of writing ho for who is repeated. A paper of the date 1419 shows that almost all inflections had been pared away.[1] Soon afterwards we find the French z employed for the old English s at the end of words. In a letter of 1440 we see Mandeville's corruption of ayenst repeated.[2] We also find the new phrases that meene tyme and be the meene of, in 1424; the last phrase was one generation later to become be menys of.[3] Many a corruption, now used by us, had its rise in shires far to the North of London; in the great city, writers who aimed at dignity of style preserved the old inflections that were on the wane elsewhere. Shillingford, Mayor of Exeter, shows us the lingering remnant of Southern speech in a letter of his ‘y-written yn Alle Sawelyn day.’ He reports from London, whither he had gone on a lawsuit, the ‘Alagge! alagge!’ (alack) uttered by Archbishop Kemp the Chancellor in 1447, one of the first instances of that exclamation, which may come from the old eala of our fathers. We are rather amazed to find that the Northern tham (illos) had already taken root in Devonshire by the side of the old ham and buth (sunt).[4]
Capgrave and Lydgate, both East Anglians, were reckoned two of the great lights of the first half of this
