242 STRATHCLYDE AND GALLOWAY CHARTERS. 
and strangely enough in ‘* hwylkun ”’ (after the word ‘‘ foc *’) 
and in ‘‘ eallun mine kynling ’’ towards the end, in both of 
which cases the words ought to be nominative and not dative ; 
There is nothing 
and again in ‘‘ ofer eallun pam landan.’ 
to account for this repetition of the same characteristic but 
the possibility of its being a local usage. That these charters 
in Anglo-Saxon followed the local usage is quite clear to any 
one who will go through those which are given in Thorpe, 
and notice the differences which show themselves between 
those of different provinces granted by the same person. 
They must have been written by a local scribe in the dialect 
of the district. 
The next thing noticeable is that the plural of the verbs 
ends in an and ann. This present tense indicative ending, for 
the more usual -ad, has been recognised as beginning in the 
East Midlands, among the Anglo-Danes, and hence it has 
been called the East Midland English. But this, after all, 
amounts to no more than that the earliest instances of its being 
adopted throughout occur in literature remaining of that dis- 
trict. There seem to be signs of its beginning in the Rush- 
worth Gospels—rare enough it is true—and these were 
Northumbrian. As a theory of how it began, I venture to 
suggest that it was a replacement of the indicative form by 
the subjunctive, made by the Norse settlers, who found it 
easier not to be too much troubled by forms and moods in the 
language they found where they settled : they had plenty ot 
grammatical forms of their own. But as it was Anglo-Dane 
it might easily have reached Cumberland. A characteristic, 
however, of that dialect when developed was the participle in 
ende, while the Northumbrian had ande, and this we have in 
‘“ boenand ”’ and leofand ’’ in the charter. Now neither at 
the time of the original nor of the copy should we expect a 
Midland characteristic (embracing East Aglian) round Car- 
lisle. The charter when vernacular, as | have said, was 
addressed to the local people in their tongue. And had the 
scribe of the thirteenth century altered this to modernise it to 
his days he would have made the plural of the verbs end in s 
or would have dropped the inflection, approximating it to the 
Norse. Therefore we are thrown back on to the idea that in 
