A good English writer of the Eleventh Century would have been shocked at the corrupt replacing of the old Genitive by such a phrase as this, in the account of the great Peterborough fire in 1116: ‘bœrnde eall þa mœste dœl of þa tuna;’ ‘ic am witnesse of þas Gewrite.’ Henceforward, of was used most freely, at least in the Danelagh. Prepositions were disjoined from the verbs; in the forged Charter of 963 we find he draf út instead of the old he utdráf. These changes we saw earlier in St. Edmund's Legend. We find al used instead of the old Genitive ealra; the latter form still lingers in Shakspere, as alderliefest. The helpful word man shrinks into me; as in the phrase of the year 1124, him me hit berœfode, ‘one bereaved him of it,’ or as we say now, ‘he was bereaved of it.’ This idiom lasted for 160 years more in the Danelagh, and much longer in the South.
We see for to employed in a new sense in the year 1127, like the kindred French pour; se kyng hit dide for to hauene sibbe, the king did it to have peace. Hence the well-known question, ‘what went ye out for to see?’ We suppress the for in modern speech.
The old œlc now becomes ilca, and still lingers in Scotland; in the South we say, each. The phrase, ne belœf þœr noht an (there remained not one), in the account of the year 1131, shows how noht was by degrees replacing the ancient ne. The old swithre now gives way to right (dextera), just as the still older teso (in Gothic, taihswo) long before made room for swithre.
In the year 1124, heftning appears; and some old monk, who aimed at correctness, has put the u, the proper letter to be used, above the i in the manuscript.
