This Southern English, as anyone may see, is far more archaic than the English of Peterborough. After the year 1000, Ælfric wrote many homilies in the English of his day, and these were popular in our land long after his death. A clean sweep, it is true, was made of a Latin sentence of his, wherein he upholds the old Teutonic idea of the Eucharist, and overturns the new-fangled Transubstantiation, a doctrine of which Lanfranc, seventy years later, was the great champion in England.[1] But otherwise Ælfric's teaching was thought sound, and his homilies were more than once turned into the corrupt English of succeeding centuries. We have one of these versions, drawn up about the time of the forged Peterborough charters; this is headed by the extract given above. The East Midland, with its stern contractions, is like the Attic of Thucydides; the Southern English, with its love of vowels and dislike of the clipping process, resembles the Ionic of Herodotus. The work we have now in hand, being written far to the South of the Mercian Danelagh, holds fairly well by the Old English forms; thus, instead of the Peterborough ðe, we find the older se, si, þat; and we sometimes meet with the old Dative Plural in um, though the old Genitive is often replaced by the form with of, and the endings of Verbs are often clipped. A guess may be given as to the place where these Homilies were adapted to the common speech. Forms like fer (ignis) and gelt (scelus) point to some shire near Kent. The combination ie, used by King Alfred, is here found,
- ↑ See Faber's Difficulties of Romanism (Third Edition, p. 260) as to erasures made in Ælfric's text by theologians of a later age.
