precise time when English prose was handled with wonderful skill. Theology, chivalry, law, and homely life found the best of representatives in Pecock, Mallory, Fortescue, and Caxton. This was the time when our inflections were almost all driven out; there is a great difference between the Bishop's writings and those of the Printer thirty years later. At this latter date, few inflections remained. Pity it was that the printing press did not come to England a few years earlier; we might then have kept the old Plural ending of the Verb in en.[1] Ben Jonson long afterwards bemoaned this heavy loss.
About the time that the Red Rose was withering, the Northern words their and them drove out the Southern her and hem. King Henry VI. uses the former in a proclamation, put forth at York a fortnight before Towton field. There are other words, common in our mouths, which we owe to Yorkshire. Robert of Brunne had written syn, instead of the old siððan; but in a Knaresborough petition of 1441, we find a formation from this syn, the new synnes or since; this we have kept. We also see ‘my verray good maister’ in a letter of 1462: this very (valdè) was not well established in Standard English until sixty years later, when it unhappily almost wholly drove out right.[2] The ending of verbs are clipped in these Yorkshire letters, and
- ↑ If we must subdivide New English prose, the decisive periods seem to be 1470, when many inflections were dropped by Caxton; 1650, when Cowley and Baxter began to write; 1740, when Johnson was becoming known; 1800, when Cobbett was making his mark.
- ↑ Chaucer talks of ‘a verray parfit gentil knight,’ but here the verray is an adjective.
