the glosses of the 10th century, but Cursor Mundi and Hampole have little of it in comparison with certain modern provincial dialects of the north of England, such as those of Cleveland, Whitby, Lonsdale, Furness, and parts of Cumberland. In the county of Northumberland, and in Scotland, the Danish influence is apparently at a minimum, agreeing with the fact noted by Mr. Worsaae, that "the whole east coast of Scotland, from the Cheviot Hills to Moray Firth, is entirely destitute of characteristic and undoubted Scandinavian monuments."[1] As a consequence the Lowland Scotch of the present day represents Hampole and Cursor Mundi, and the Northern dialect of the 13th and 14th centuries generally, much more closely than those North English dialects, in which the Danish element, or what currently passes for Danish is more apparent. The use of at as the relative, of til for to, thir for these, and waar for worse, are common to the modern Scotch with the old northern writers. The use of t' or 't as the article, instead of the (t' master o' t' houses), of at instead of to in the infinitive (a sup o' summat at drink), of the form I is for I am, I war for I was, are unknown in Scotland. In general
- ↑ The Danes and Norwegians in England, Scotland, and Ireland, by J. J. A. Worsaae, Lond. 1852, p. 217. Elsewhere the author says : "Extremely few places with Scandinavian names are to be found in the Scottish Lowlands, and even these are confined almost without exception to the counties nearest the English border. Dumfriesshire, lying directly north of Cumberland and the Solway, forms the central point of such places. Northumberland and Durham, the two north-easternmost counties of England, contain but a scanty number of them, and consequently must have possessed, in early times at least, no very numerous Scandinavian population. Cumberland, on the contrary, was early remarkable for such a population; whence it will appear natural enough that the first Scandinavian colonists in the Scottish border-lands preferred to settle in the neighbourhood of that county. On the S.E. coast of Scotland they would not only have been separated from their kinsmen in the East of England by two intervening counties, but also divided by a broad sea from their kinsmen in Denmark and Norway. Such a situation would have been much more exposed and dangerous for them than the opposite coast, where they had in their neighbourhood the counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland, inhabited by the Northmen, as well as their colonies in Ireland and the Isle of Man. . . . . The Scandinavian population in Dumfriesshire evidently appears to have emigrated from Cumberland over the Liddle and Esk, into the plains which spread westward of these rivers; at least the names of places there have the very same character as in Cumberland," p. 202-3. Mr. Worsaae then instances the names of fell (fjeld) and rigg (ryg) applied to hills, and the local names Thornythwaite, Treethwaites, Robiethwaite, Murraythwaite, Helbeck, Greenbeck, Bodsbeck, Torbeck, Stonybeck, Waterbeck, Hartsgarth, Tundergarth, Applegarth, Lockerby, Alby, Middleby, Dunnabie.Wyseby, Percebie, Denbie, Newby, Milby, Sorbie, Canoby, and the words pock-net (Isl. pokanet) and leister (Isl. ljóster, Danish lyster), fishing implements also well known in the Tweed and Teviot, and adds: "In the Lowlands the number of Scandinavian names of places is quite insignificant when compared with the original Celtic or even with the Anglo-Saxon names." I may add that the dialect spoken in the S.E. corner of Dumfriesshire and the adjacent corner of Roxburghshire, or Canobie and Liddesdale, is still quite distinct from that of the rest of these counties, and is rather that of Cumberland than of Lowland Scotland.
