North. — We standes singande.
Midland. — We standen singende.
South. — We standeth singinde.
This Midland form of the Present Plural is still alive in Lancashire. The Southern form is kept in the famous Winchester motto, ‘Manners maketh Man.’
Much shocked would an English scholar, sixty years earlier, have been at such a sentence as this, the last but one of the Chronicle for the year 1127: ne cunne we iett noht seggon, we can say nought yet. It is curious to mark the slow corruption of the old tongue: on þyssum geare, on þis gœr, þis gear.
Many words, common to us and to our brethren on the mainland, live on in the mouths of the common folk for hundreds of years ere they can win their way into books. Thus Mr. Tennyson puts into the mouth of his Lincolnshire farmer the word buzzard-clock for a certain insect. No such word as clock can be found in the Anglo-Saxon dictionaries, though it is tacked on by our peasantry to many other substantives, to stand for various insects. But, on turning to an Old German gloss of wondrous age, we find ‘chuleich, scarabæus.’[1] We shall meet many other English words, akin to the Dutch and High German, which were not set down in writing until the Twelfth, Thirteenth, and Fourteenth Centuries, when these words replaced others that are found in the Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Some of the strangers are also used by Norse writers; it is thus often hard to tell whether a Teutonic word came to England with Hengist in the Fifth Century or with
- ↑ See Garnett's Essays, p. 68.
