194 The Neiv 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 Oros'ms, 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 Boethius.] 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 j^oints of 

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

 Corpus Christi manuscript of the Chronicle,^ 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 ; whilst 

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

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

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

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



f Thorpe's Preface to the English translation of Pauli's Life of Alfred 

 the Great, p. vi. 



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

 however, Lappenberg's History of England under the Anglo-Saxon Kings; 

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

 Monumenta Historiai Britanuica, p. 75, where, as Mr. Thorpe notices, the 

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

 certainly, in several instances, wrong. 



