Conquest upon England's speech. I give in my Appendix a specimen of the East Anglian dialect, much akin to the Northumbrian, written not long after the battle of Hastings.[1] In the Legend of St. Edmund, the holy man of Suffolk, we see the forms þe, ðe, and the, all replacing the old se; the cases of the substantive and the endings of the verb are clipped; the prefix ge is seldom found, and iset stands for the old Participle geset. As to the Infinitive, the old dœlfan becomes dœlfe; the Dative heom replaces the old Accusative hî, as heom wat gehwa, each knows them. The adjective does not agree in case with the substantive; as mid œþele ðeawum. An heora is turned into án mon of him; a corruption that soon spread over the South. The preposition is uncoupled from the verb in our bad modern fashion; as slogon of þœt hœfod, smote off the head.[2] Rather later, this preposition of, when used as an adverb, was to have a form of its own. The first letter is pared away from hlaford; the Anglian alle replaces the Southern ealle. Eode is making way for wende (ivit); and we find such forms as child, nefre, healed, fologede, instead of cild, nœfre, hœlod, fyligde. Hál (sanus) gets the new meaning of integer at p. 88: from it comes both our hale and our whole.
But other parts of England besides Suffolk were corrupting the old speech. In the years set down in the different Chronicles, after the Norman Conquest, we see new
