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ford to your right hand. “ Stand, or Staae,” — to stop, to 
stay, to put a stop to (Danish dictionary) ; Atkinson’s 
Cleveland dialect — “ Stand, — to be stopped, not to be going, 
of a clock” 
I do earnestly press upon my hearers that in this North 
of ours it is the Scandinavian, and not the Saxon, which 
is the ground-work of our language. What a wonderful 
incidental witness is borne to this fact by one of the after- 
events of this battle ! Strykar, fleeing from the fight with- 
out his armour, meets with a Northumbrian peasant, and 
asks him to sell his sheepskin coat. “ I know thee by thy 
tongue,” says the peasant ; “ thou art a Norseman, I would 
I had a sword to slay thee.” “But I have one,” rejoins 
Strykar; cuts off his head, and takes his coat. Here is 
clear evidence that the Norwegian and the Northumbrian 
peasant understood one another, and that their folk-talk was 
only diverse in its Shibboleth.* 
Only recently, in a Yorkshire paper, I read an account of 
a man telling another to come down from the “stee” — - 
ladder ; and those middle-aged gentlemen amongst you who 
declare that driving grouse is such first-rate sport, hear 
your keepers talking to you in Danish of “ligging pits.” 
Your streets and roads are called “ gates ;” your fords, 
“wath or vade;” your Roman way, “Roman-rig;” your 
meadows, “ ings ;” your low lands, liable to floods, “ Had or 
flats;” your election saturnalia, “hustings or hus-things;” 
in a bad temper you send your opponents to Old Nick, 
“Nokte;” your Christmas festival is “jude;” your very 
division of your county into ridings is a division of country 
still known in Norway. 
One more evidence and I have done. Whenever I am in 
* Mr. Atkinson, writing to me, says that Professor Worsae seems to consider 
that the termination “ bi ” or “ by ” is Danish, as opposed to Norwegian “ bo ” or 
“ boer •” as also that “ thorpe ” is Danish, “ thwaite” Norse. 
