corruption soon spread Southward. In a letter of 1464, the old Northern Plural of the Present Tense in s is seen; and Robert of Brunne's holy (integrè) is changed into wholie, a wretched corruption which we are still doomed to write.[1] In the same letter, we see far (procul) replacing the old ferre, as it did in the Northern Psalter. I give the Knaresborough wedding formula of 1450: ‘Here I take the . . . to my wedded wife to hold and to have, att bed and att bord, for farer or lather, for better for warse, in sicknesse and in hele, to dede us depart, and thereto I plight the my trouth.’[2]
Salop, like Yorkshire, has had some influence upon Standard English. In 1426, an old blind monk, known as ‘Syr Ion Audlay,’ was compiling his poems, striking at Lollards and worthless priests alike.[3] He lived on the border land between the Northern and the Southern varieties of English speech, as we could tell from a few lines in page 65:
And vii aves to our lady,
Fore sche is the wel of al peté,
That heo wyl fore me pray.
The Salopian shows us that the old lewd (indoctus) was getting its bad modern meaning, when at page 3 he brands the wicked lives of the clergy of his time. He
- ↑ I have ventured on writing rime instead of rhyme; but I must leave to bolder men to write hole instead of whole, coud instead of could.
- ↑ Plumpton Letters (Camden Society), LIV., LXXVII. 1, 11, 233.
- ↑ Percy Society, No. 47. The Sir, applied to a priest, lasted two hundred years, down to Sir Hugh Evans.
