301 



SAXON LANGUAGE AND LITERATUKE. 



SAXON LANGUAGE AND LITERATUKE. 



302 



then expect that in the counties colonised by the Engle we should find 

 many peculiarities of the Northern languages, and in the counties 

 colonised by the Sexe much that reminded us of the Netherlandish or 

 Low-Dutch. We believe the Northern and Southern dialects of our 

 island have been at all times distinguished by such peculiarities, but 

 so few early records have come down to us written in the pure dialect 

 of our northern counties, that it is only by comparing them in the 

 second or Old- English stage of their progress that we can form any 

 just notion of their distinguishing features. Perhaps these are best 

 seen in the conjugation of the verb. The following table may show 

 us how closely the inflexions which distinguish our northern dialect 

 agree with those of a Swedish conjugation : 





J-crf., 



Impcr., 



Inftn., 



SouH Dialect. 

 Ich hop-e 

 thu hop-eat 

 he hop-eth 

 we hop-eth 

 ye hop-eth 

 they hop-eth 

 thu hoped. ct 

 hup-eth ye 

 to hop-en 



Xorlh Dialect. 



I 



thu 

 he 

 we 

 yc 



hop-es 

 hop-es 

 hop-es 

 hop-es 

 hop-es 

 they hop-cs 

 thu hoped-es 

 hop-es ye 

 to hop-e 



Swnluli. 



jig hopp-ai 



du hopp-as 

 ban hopp-as 

 vi hopp-as 

 hopp-ens 

 hopp-as 

 hoppad.es 



I 



de 



du 



att hopp-aj 



The inflexions in are generally used in the Northern languages 

 with a passive meaning ; and there are some traces of their having 

 been used in our Northern dialect for the same purpose. 



Another peculiarity of our Northern dialect is the frequent use of 

 the substantival ending er (in which it again resembles the languages 

 of Northern Europe), as wW/er, a wolf; hunker, a haunch; teamer, a 

 team ; heather, heath : fliMier, a tletch, 4c. 



In this dialect we have also a lew frequent use of the articles, con- 

 junctions, and personal pronouns. This is one of its most striking 

 features. Every person who has been in the North of England must 

 have heard such phrases a "come out o' house," " gang into field," 

 " put'n in poke," Ac. 



All these peculiarities of our Northern dialect may be traced to the 

 Anglo-Saxon period ; and there is little doubt that the most striking 

 feature of the Southern dialect, namely, its preference of the vocal 

 to the whisper letters, as z for , and v for /, is equally ancient. It 

 always prevailed in the Netherlandish dialects, and may be traced 

 in the orthography of our Southern manuscripts to the beginning of 

 the 13th century ; but, as the Anglo-Saxons had neither a v nor a 

 :, it is only by analogy we infer the existence of the corresponding 

 rounds in their language. The argument however from analogy is so 

 strong, that wo may safely conclude either that the Anglo-Saxon 

 /, i, were pronounced in our southern counties as r, z, or that, like 

 the modern i, they represented both a whisper and a vocal sound ; 

 in other words, were pronounced sometimes as /, , and sometimes 

 as r, 2. 



It may jioBsjbly be asked, were not the forms here attributed to our 

 Northern dialect introduced by the Danes ? Are they not, in fact, the 

 peculiar features of the " Dano-Saxoti .' " We will not affect t 

 these question* as altogether without difficulty ; but there are gome 

 rations which may be laid concisely before the reader, and 

 . if they appear to him as forcible as they appear to us, may 

 lead him to answer these questions in the negative. 



In the first place, it must be remembered, that if no Dane had ever 

 set foot on the island, the very results which i place might 



have been expected. It is also an argument of weight, that we find all 

 the great features of our Northern dialect in places where there never 

 was a Danish settlement, and vainly search for them, or at best only 

 faintly trace them, in counties where we have historical evidence that 

 rthuien were numerous. But the strongest argument may be 

 dr.iwn from tin- |ges of our Northern manuscripts. We have two of 

 it-lent date the Gloss of the Din-Iran I'.ible, written by 

 : A hired, and the Durham Ritual, published by the Surtecs 

 Society. The first of these was written, according to Wanley, in the 

 age of Alfred, and the xecond has been assigned by its editor to the 

 early part of the 9th century. If we can rely on the judgment of 

 either of these at/ -testion seems to lie answered; for 



there was no Danish - :i the north of En^lan-l till a later 



1 we hav ': .11 ami other peculiarities 



of the Northern dialect in every page of the lllom, ami in many parts 

 of the Ritual. The name too of Aldred is thoroughly English; and 

 we can hardly sup]>ose that the monks of Durham would have per- 

 mitted a rude and unlettered foreigner to interpolate their most 

 precious manuscript a volume which we know they regarded with 

 even superstitious veneration. The language used by Aldred was pro- 

 bably a mixture of the written language of the day and the spoken 

 dialect of his shire, such as might be used by a provincial writer of the 

 present day, and such as was avowedly used by Gawiu Douglas in the 

 15t.li century, and at a later ]n'riod by I'.iirns. 



This mixture of Hi. written and the spoken language in our manu- 



\tinction in many com 



ly difficult to point out the limits within which our 



two great dialects were spoken. Layamon, whose language seems 



y to b<l'.ng to the Southern dialect, is described in all the 



histories of our poetry as a native of South Gloucestershire ; but the. 



localities mentioned in his poem belong to the north of Worcester- 

 shire ; and he was, beyond doubt, an inhabitant of Areley-Regis near 

 Stourport in that county. If he used the dialect of the neighbourhood 

 (and this must be assumed till the contrary be shown), the Southern 

 dialect must have prevailed over the whole of Worcestershire, and the 

 men of that shire must have been Sexe in origin, and not, as hitherto 

 supposed, a colony of Engle. Perhaps a line drawn from the north of 

 Essex to the north of Worcestershire would pretty accurately define 

 the portions of the island respectively colonised by the Eugle and the. 

 Sere. 



The origin of the Midland dialect may admit of the following 

 explanation. Neither natural obstacles nor political divisions ever 

 separated the Northern and the Southern dialects. During the hep- 

 tarchy, Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire belonged to Mercia, and not 

 to the kindred race of the West-Sexe ; and when the Danes held 

 possession of the north of England, the shires of Warwick and North- 

 ampton, and generally that of Leicester also, were united in the closest 

 ties with the Southern countries. This fellowship seems to have 

 led, at a very early period, to the use of an intermediate dialect, which 

 would naturally be encouraged by the vast numbers that flocked from 

 all parts of the country to the universities. The ' Reve's Tale' affords 

 us a specimen of the ridicule which attached to the forms of Northern 

 speech, and we know that the speech of the Southern was treated with 

 just as little ceremony in the north of England. (See ' Towneley 

 Mysteries.') Hence we may understand the progress made by the 

 intermediate dialect, and are prepared for the conclusion, to which 

 we are led by an examination of our Old-English manuscripts, no 

 less than by the express declaration of a contemporary philologist. 

 Higden, who lived in the 14th century, ranges our provincial dialects 

 under three heads, the Northern, the Midland, and the Southern ; aud 

 this division seems to have been generally recognised by our antiqua- 

 ries, for in our catalogues we find some manuscripts noticed as 

 belonging to our Southern dialect, others as belonging to the Northern, 

 while many of them, exhibiting the marked peculiarities of neither 

 dialect, are passed over without remark. 



The change which gradually produced the Midland dialect most pro- 

 bably first showed itself in the counties of Northampton, Warwick, 

 and Leicester. It seems to have been brought about not so much by 

 adopting the peculiarities of Southern speech, as by giving greater 

 prominence to such parts of the native dialect as were common to the 

 South. The Southern conjugations must at all times have been 

 familiar, at least in dignified composition ; but other conjugations were 

 popularly used, and in the gradual disuse of these and other forms 

 peculiar to the North the change consisted. We have many manu- 

 scripts written in the Midland counties, 'in which all trace of the 

 Northern dialect seems to have been studiously avoided ; yet in very 

 many of them may be found some verbal inflexion in en, or some 

 other popular form, quite sufficient to betray the writer. 



The Northern dialect was still broadly spoken, within the last three 

 centuries, in the counties of Lincoln, Rutland, Derby, and Stafford ; 

 but it has been gradually giving way before a language so much more 

 widely understood, till it is now to be found only iu scattered localities 

 amid the mountains of the north of England, or in the lowlands of 

 Scotland. The Southern dialect began to yield at a later period. It 

 was certainly spoken at the beginning of the 1 7th century in all the 

 counties round London. For specimens of the Middlesex dialect see 

 Ben Jousou's ' Tale of a Tub ;' ' Lear,' iv. 6, furnishes us with an 

 example of the Kentish dialect ; and nearly one half of ' Gammer 

 Gurton's Needle' is written in the same dialect of Essex. Milton, when 

 he issued forth 



" To breathe 

 Among the pleasant villages :ind farms," 



must have heard a dialect around him in all essential particulars thu 

 same as the Somersetshire. 



We will now take a rapid survey of the literature which belongs to 

 the language whose history and peculiarities we have been endeavour- 

 ing to trace. As in the cine with the literature of most nations, we 

 find that all its earlier specimens are metrical. We will therefore first 

 call the reader's attention to our Anglo-Saxon poems ; and to define 

 more clearly the ran;e of our present inquiry, we will briefly notice 

 the properties which, at that early period, distinguished verse from 

 prose. 



An Anglo-Saxon verse is made up of two sections, which together 

 may contain four, five, six, or even more accented syllables. These 

 sections are bound together (by the law of alliteration, or, in other 

 words, each verse must have at least two accented syllables (one in 

 each section) beginning with the same consonant or with vowels. 

 Sometimes, and particularly in the longer verses, there are two such 

 alliterative syllables in the first section, as in the verse 



met | od for j thy man \ e man \ cynne fratu | 



It is very incorrect to call this alliteration the "essence" or the 

 " groundwork" of Anglo-Saxon verso. It is certainly an important 

 part, but still a mere adjunct. The purposes it served were similar to 

 those which are provided for by the final rhyme of our modern versi- 

 fication. The essence of Anglo-Saxon verse consisted in its system of 

 rhythm. As the accents generally varied from four to six, it may be 



