Caxton's press was of great use in fixing our speech. The English spoken at London, brought thither from the Mercian Danelagh, was now established as the Standard; Puttenham, in a well-known passage written a hundred years later, will have nothing to say to any speech but that of London and the neighbouring shires. Strange it is that Caxton, a Kentishman, should have been the writer who sealed the triumph of Midland English as our Standard for the future. One of his best works is Renard the Fox (Percy Society), which he translated from the Dutch; traces of the sister tongue we see in words like moed, saacke, lupaerd, ungheluck, which must be due to Dutch handicraftsmen. Caxton says, ‘I have folowed as nyghe as I can my copie, which was in dutche, and translated into this rude and symple Englyssh;’ the date of the work is 1481. There are here many old Teutonic words, now obsolete, which we could ill afford to lose, and which Tyndale unhappily did not employ in his great work, though they must have been household words in his childhood. Such are eme, overal, lief, bleeve, wyte, elenge, sybbe, to dere, to bote, and others.[1] Caxton's great claim upon us is, that in many words he gave us back the old g, which for the foregoing three hundred years had been softened into y in words like gate, get, again; he even writes galp instead of yelp. It was now settled that we were to employ peyne and not pine. We find brydge and hedche, the spelling showing how they
- ↑ It is wonderful that the Norse thrive and the French flourish between them drove out the Old English theon; for the expletive ‘so mote I the!’ lasted down to 1500, and is found in many a ballad.
