194 The New Forest : its History and its Scenery. 



" • 



smaller " mores," applied also to the fibres of ferns and furze, 

 whilst the sailor on the coast calls the former " mootes," when 

 he dredges them up in the Channel.* 



With this I must stop. I will only add that the study of the 

 "West Saxon dialect in the counties of Hants, Wilts, and Dorset, 

 is all-important. As we go westward we shall find it less pure, 

 and more mixed with Keltic. As is well known, the Britons 

 lived with the Old-English in perfect harmony in Exeter. Their 

 traces remain there to this day. In these three counties, there- 

 fore, are the most perfect specimens of the West-Saxon dialect 

 to be found. Mr. Thorpe has noticed in the Old-English text 

 of Orosius, which is now generally ascribed to Alfred, the 

 change of a into o and o into a, and also the same peculiarity in 

 Alfred's BoetJilus.'t This we have already, in the last chapter, 

 seen to be purely West-Saxon. I have no doubt whatever that 

 at even the present day it is not too late to find other points of 

 similarity, and make still clearer the West-Saxon origin of the 

 Corpus Christi manuscript of the Chronide,\ and how far even 

 Alfred and St. Swithin contributed to its pages. These are 

 difficult questions ; but I feel sure that much additional light 



* The word " more " was in good use less than a century ago ; Avliilst 

 the term " morcfall," as we have seen in chapter iv. p. 43, foot-note, was 

 very common in the time of the Stuarts. Mr. Barnes, in his Glossari/ of 

 the Dorset Didlect, pp. 363, 391, gives us "mote," and " stramote," as "a 

 stalk of grass," which serve still better to explain St. IMatthew. 



t Thorpe's Preface to the English translation of Pauli's Life of Alfred 

 the Great, p. vi. 



J Thorpe's Preface to The Chronicle, vol. i., p. viii., foot-note 1. Sec, 

 however, Lappcnberg's History of England under the Anglo-Saxon King.i; 

 translated by Thorpe, Literary Introduction, p. xxxix. ; and the Preface to 

 Monumentu Ilistorica Britannicu, p. 75, where, as IMr. Thorpe notices, the 

 examples quoted, in favour of the Mercian origin of the manuscript, are 

 certainly, m several instances, wrong. 



101 



