forms; as in the account of Stamford Bridge fight, in 1066, þa com an oþer (here the an has no business), ‘then came another;’ œfre þe oðer man, ‘every other man’ (year 1087). Moreover, we begin to light on expressions such as sume of þam cnihtan (year 1083); toscyfton to his mannon (year 1085); yrfenuma of eallon (year 1091). Wifman (mulier) is cut down to wimman in 1087; the process of casting out a consonant (coming in the middle of a word) went on for two hundred years and more. The Latin amavisse had become amâsse centuries earlier. We see that wiðutan, which of old meant no more than extra, has gained the new sense of sine in 1087, as we now mostly use it. The great William, we hear, would have won Ireland wiðutan œlcon wœpnon.[1] Still, the monks did their best to write classic English, down to about the year 1120.
England has been happy, beyond her Teutonic sisters, in the many and various stores of her oldest literature that have floated down the stream of Time. Poems scriptural and profane, epics, war-songs, riddles, translations of the Bible, homilies, prayers, treatises on science and grammar, codes of law, wills, charters, chronicles set down year by year, tales, and dialogues — all these (would that we took more interest in them!) are our rich inheritance. In spite of the havock wrought
- ↑ This of old would have been bûtan. Our but still expresses nisi, prœter, quin, sed, verum; in Scotland, I believe, it may still stand for extra and sine. Our fathers must have thought that too great a load was thrown upon one word.
