Mr. Carr on the Northumbrian Dialect, &c. 859 



Anglian inhabitants were driven northwards by dread of the 

 Norman conquerors, Avhose hand fell with peculiar severity 

 upon the country north of the Humber. To the northward 

 again of the Tweed, and from thence to the Forth and the 

 Avon, near Linlithgow, the speech of the people possesses a 

 distinctive character, and may be termed the North-Bernic or 

 Lothenic-Anglian. It is broader in its vowels, stronger and 

 more archaic in its consonants, and, from having been 

 cultivated as the language of a court and of a national litera- 

 ture, from the period of the establishment of the Scottish 

 throne at Edinburgh, it not only bears the stamp of a courtly 

 and aristocratic idiom, but has been preserved from much of 

 the progressive deterioration incidental to mere popular dia- 

 lects, such as the rustic Northumbrian. 



As to the first known settlement of a Gothic colony in this 

 region, we are greatly indebted for information to the inde- 

 pendent research and vigorous judgement of John Hodgson 

 Hinde, in his General History of the County of Northumber- 

 land, undertaken at the instance of the Society of Antiquaries 

 of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. It is there shown that, according 

 to the narrative of Nennius, not long after the year 450 a 

 Jutish- Anglian colony came over in forty ships, under Octha 

 and Ebissa, the son and the nephew of Hengist, the Jutish 

 king of Kent, that " having laid waste the Orkneys they 

 passed the country of the Picts, and took possession of a large 

 tract immediately adjoining." And this statement is strongly 

 though indirectly corroborated by Beda, where he speaks of a 

 subsequent league between the invaders and the Picts, against 

 the Britons, which could only have been made by a colony 

 established in the neighbourhood of the Pictish possessions. 

 It is further shown that these were the Saxon invaders 

 against whom were fought several severe battles, recorded by 

 Nennius, on the part of the Britons under Arthur, one on the 

 river Glen, others on the strong frontier afforded by the 

 waters of Dunglass and the Peass-burn. 



It cannot, I think, be doubtful, that this colony, north of the 

 Tweed, maintained a footing in the country till the time when 

 subsequent invasions of their countrymen, the Angles, on the 

 coast extending between the Humber and the Tweed, termin- 

 ated in the election of Ida, as king of all the Northan-Hum- 

 brian Angles in 547 or thereabouts. 



It is more than probable that the dialects of colonists, of 

 which the earliest came to the Bernician shores, north of 

 Tweed, more than 90 years before the establishment of Ida at 



2 A 



