STRATHCLYDE AND GALLOWAY CHARTERS 243 
this he made no change, and accordingly that this dialect 
which was afterwards East Midland had begun in the North- 
West in Gospatrik’s day. 
The change from accusative to dative which the address 
gives, ‘‘ Gospatrik greot mine wassenas & hyylkun mann— 
& eallun mine kynling ’’ is not to be rejected for its irregu- 
larity. For an analogous case (Thorpe, p. 333) is that in a 
charter of Cnut, which runs: ‘‘ Cnut cing . . . cyde minan 
biscopan & minum eorlum & ellan minan pegnan,’’ where the 
middle is dative and the others accusatives; and though this 
occurs with another verb it is a parallel. ** Wassenas,”’ 
which comes in place of the usual ‘‘ pegenas ’’ of Anglo- 
Saxon charters, is Keltic; gwasan (Welsh), a page, an atten- 
dant, a retainer, formed from gwas, a servant, which was 
Breton as well as Welsh, and, in fact, forms the first syllable 
of Gospatrik’s own name, Gwas-Patrik. The variation. 
‘“freals ’’ may be a misreading of the thirteenth century 
scribe; ““ bek ’’ as we know is Norse (a word like it was 
Anglo-Saxon), transplanted to Normandy as well as England. 
The sentence beginning ‘‘ & ne beo neann mann swa 
deorif,’’ with the blurred word following, is a difficult one for 
several reasons. In its midst comes the blurred letter, where 
after very close examination I think it is plain that the sertbe 
began a word with m. The remains of a partly expunged 
letter fits this letter only. He had, I imagine, begun the word 
‘““mid,’’ which next follows, by mistake; then he appears to 
have expunged and in doing this somewhat disturbed the 
word ‘‘ freals ’’ in the line above, and partly washed out the 
lower portions of the a and / and disarranged the lowest por- 
tion of the long s. The parchment shows this more clearly 
than the photograph. Then he continued his writing before 
the parchment was dry. Hence the ink spread. And one 
mistake often leads to another, though the very fact of this 
expunging, I take it, shows that he was awake to his work, 
c 
and instead of writing ‘“‘ peaht ’’ (which in pure Anglo-Saxon 
should have had an inflection e), he wrote ‘‘ pehat,’’ and then 
went on with ‘‘mid’’ in its proper place. But there ts 
another difficulty in the word preceding. -An Anglo-Saxon 
adjective ending in if is, I think, unknown. The f, too, ts. 
