174 Note on the Pulpitin Worth Church. 
The upper lines of these couplets should be read in succession, 
then the lower lines, and the whole be compared with Luther's 
translation of John xiv. 28. The following is a literal translation 
of the couplets :— 
who me loves the same will my 
and we will to him come 
and a dwelling with him make. John 14. 
word hold | and my father 
will him love 
A.D. 1577. 
As the Anglo-Saxon church at Worth is generally considered 
to be of the first half of the eleventh century, and as the date 
carved on the pulpit is a.p. 1577, I have made inquiries as 
to the date when the pulpit was placed in the church, how it 
was acquired, and have tried to make out in what dialect of the 
German language its inscriptions are written. The Worth Rec- 
tory has a record that ‘‘ the pulpit was bought by the Rey. G. C. 
Bethune from Street & Son, antique furniture warehouse, Brewer 
Street, Golden Square, London, and erected in Worth Church 
the 29th September, 1841. It originally came from a cathedral 
in Bavaria, Saxony, Germany.” No clue as to its place of 
origin can be obtained from this, for Bavaria and Saxony are 
and were separate states. 
Those acquainted with Germany will agree with me that the 
pulpit at Worth is similar to the pulpits of the Protestant 
churches in the North of Germany. The language of the 
inscriptions very much resembles a Low German which I spoke 
when a boy, and which is still spoken in the villages of Hast- 
friesland, Hanover. I therefore requested a friend in Leer, 
Province Hanover, Prussia, to find out where in Eastfriesland 
or along the North Sea coast the Low German coming nearest to 
that inscribed on the Worth pulpit is spoken at the present day. 
The reply is that the Low German spoken at the present time 
at Schwansen is about the same as that carved on the Worth 
pulpit in 1577. Schwansen is a peninsula on the south-east 
coast of Schleswig, lying between Eckernfoerde and the mouth 
of the river Schlei, and was inhabited by the Angles during the 
first centuries after Christ. 
At the time when Luther began to translate the Bible there 
was no common German language. LHvery state and district 
had its own dialect, and over the whole of North Germany Low 
German was spoken. Among the Low German Bibles in the 
British Museum, there is one by J. Bugenhagen, a Pomeranian 
