# The Sources of Standard English/Chapter V - The New English

CHAPTER V.
the new english.
(1303-1873.)
None of the great European literatures, as Hallam has said, was of such slow growth as the English; the reason is not far to seek. The French, Spanish, Pro­vençal, Italian, Norse, and German literatures were fostered by high-born patrons. Foremost stand the great Hohenstaufens, Emperors of the Romans, ever August; then come Kings of England, of Norway, of Sicily, of Castile; Dukes of Austria, Landgraves of Thuringia, Counts of Champagne; together with a host of knights from Suabia, Tuscany, Provence, and Aragon. A far other lot fell to the English Muse; for almost three hundred years after 1066, she basked not in the similes of King or Earl; her chosen home was far away from Court, in the cloister and the parsonage; her utterance was by the mouths of lowly priests, monks, and friars. Too long was she content to translate from the lordly French; in that language her own old legends, such as those of Havelok and Horn, had been enshrined for more than a hundred years. It was in French, not in English, that Stephen of Canterbury had preached ​and Robert of Lincoln had rimed, good home-born patriots though they might be. In our island there was no acknowledged Standard of national speech; ever since 1120, each shire had spoken that which was right in its own eyes. We have seen how widely the Northern, the Midland, and the Southern dialects differed from each other; and this was remarked by Giraldus Cam­brensis almost seven hundred years ago. But not long after that keen-eyed Welshman's death, it might be seen that some great change was at hand. Of course, any dialect that was to hold the position once enjoyed by the Winchester speech, would have to win its way into London, Oxford, and Cambridge — towns that, after the year 1000, had become the heart and the eyes of England. Of these three, Cambridge lay within the bounds of the East Midland speech; her clerks, drawn to her from all quarters of the land, may have helped to spread abroad her dialect, such as we (it may be) see it in the Bestiary of 1230. To Cam­bridge came young Robert Manning, as he says himself. That University, thronged as it must have been with lads from the North, West, and South, may have had her influence on his great work of 1303.
Had the most renowned of all Lincoln's Bishops been a writer of English, I should have given him a great share of credit for the Southern conquest achieved a hundred years after his death by the speech of his flock. But we must go much further back than his time, when ​essaying to account for the origin of oar Standard English. The Danish settlers of 870 gave fresh life-blood to our race; their pith and manliness have had, I suspect, a far greater share in furthering England's greatness than is commonly acknowledged. Much do we owe to the Scandinavian cross in our breed. They could not, it is true, keep their Kings upon the English throne; but their Norse words by slow degrees made their way into every corner of the land: we have seen how under King John many of the terms, employed by this pushing and enterprising race, took root in distant counties like Worcestershire and Dorset, where there never was a Danish settlement. Often has a Danish word become confused with an Old English word, as in the case of the verbs beita and beatan: often has a Danish word altogether driven out an Old English word, closely akin to Sanscrit. Thus the Scandinavian draumr (som­nium), corrupted into dream in Suffolk, has altogether made an end of the older sweven; and the former word has moreover become confounded with the English dream, which of old meant nothing but sonitus or cantus: the sense of these Latin words has long vanished from dream as we now employ it.
It may often be remarked that one form of a great speech drives another form before it. Thus, in our own day, the High German is always encroaching on its Northern neighbour the Low German; and the Low German, in its turn, is always encroaching upon its Northern neighbour the Scandinavian. Something of the like kind might have been seen in England six hun­dred years ago; but with us the Dano-Anglian speech ​of the Midland was working down Southwards towards London and Oxford all through the Thirteenth Century. Its influence may be seen so early as the Essex Homilies of 1180; many years later we find a still clearer token of the change. In some hundred Plural substantives that had been used by Layamon soon after 1200, the Southern ending in en was replaced by the Midland ending in es, when Layamon's work came to be written out afresh after 1250. East Midland works became popular in the South, as may be seen by the transcript of the Havelok and the Harrowing of Hell. In the Horn, a Southern work, we find the Present Plural en of the Midland verb replacing the older Plural in eth. In the Alexander (perhaps a Warwickshire work) the Midland I, she, they, and beon encroach upon the true Southern ich, heo, hi, and beoth. Even in Kent we find marks of change: in the sermons of 1290 the contracted forms lord and made are seen instead of louerd and maked. Already mid (cum) was making way for the Northern with. This was the state of things when the Handlyng Synne was given to England soon after 1303; it was believed, though wrongly, to be the translation of a work of Bishop Ro­bert's, and it seems to have become the great pattern; from it many a friar and parson all over England must have borrowed the weapons wherewith the Seven Deadly Sins (these play a great part in English song) might be assailed. Another work of Robert Manning's is entitled Medytacyuns of the Soper of our Lorde, a translation from Buonaventura, the well-known oracle of Franciscans abroad. The popularity of these works of the ​Lincolnshire bard must have spread the influence of the East Midland further and further. We know not when it made a thorough conquest of Oxford, the great strong­hold of the Franciscans; but its triumph over the London speech was most slow, and was not wholly achieved until a hundred and sixty years after Manning's first work was begun. That poet, as may be seen by the Table at the end of the foregoing chapter, heralded the changes in English, alike by his large proportion of French words and by his small proportion of those Teutonic words that were sooner or later to drop.
The following examples will show how the best En­glish of our day follows the East Midland, and eschews the Southern speech that prevailed in London about the year 1300. A is what Manning would have written; B is what was spoken at London in Manning's time.
A. But she and thei are fyled with synnes, and so I have sayd to that lady eche day; answer, men, is hyt nat so?
B. Ac heo and hi beoth ifuled mid sunnen, and so ichabbe iseid to thilke levedy uche day; answereth, men, nis it nought so?
The last sentence is compiled mainly from the works of Davie, of whom I gave a specimen at page 209, It is interesting to see what the tongue of London was thirty years before her first great poet came into the world.
It may seem strange that England's new Standard speech should have sprung up, not in Edward the First's Court, but in cloisters on the Nen and the Welland. We must bear in mind that the English Muse, as in the tale ​of the Norfolk bondman, always leaned towards the common folk; it was the French Muse that was the aristocratic lady. As to Edward, he was in the main a truly national King, and what we owe to him is known far and wide; but one thing was wanting to his glory — he never made English the language of his Court, sore worried though he was by Parisian wiles. Our tongue had to plod on for about forty years after his death, before it could win Royal favour. The nobles still clave to the French: the struggle for mastery between the Romance and the Teutonic lasted for about a hundred and twenty years in all. In 1258 a proclamation in English was put forth, the first Royal acknowledgment of the speech of the lowly; about 1380 the Black Prince, lately dead, was mourned in French poems compiled by Englishmen; and these elegies seem to be almost the last effort of the tongue which had been the fashion at Court for three centuries, and in which Langtoft had sung the deeds of Edward the First. Robert of Gloucester could say in 1300 that England was the only country that held not to her own speech, her ‘high men’ being foreigners. This reproach was taken away fifty years later. By that time it was becoming clearer and clearer that a New Standard of English had arisen, of which Robert Manning was the patriarch; much as Cadmon had been the great light of the Northern Anglian that had fallen ​before the Danes, and as Alfred had been the great light of the Western Saxon that had fallen before the Frenchmen. Throughout the Fourteenth Century the speech of the shires near Rutland was spreading in all directions; it at length took possession of Oxford and London, and more or less influenced such men as Wick­liffe and Chaucer. Gower, when a youth, had written in Latin and French; when old, he wrote in English little differing from that of Manning. This dialect more­over made its way into the North: let any one compare the York Mysteries of 1350 with the version of them made forty years later, and he will see the influence of the Midland tongue. The Western shires bordering on North Wales had long employed a medley of Southern and Northern forms; these were now settling down into something very like Manning's speech, as may be seen in the romance of William and the Werwolf. Kent, Gloucestershire, and Lancashire were not so ready to welcome the dialect compounded in or near Rutland; their resistance seems to have lasted throughout the Fourteenth Century; and Langland, who wrote Piers Ploughman's Vision after the year 1362, holds to the speech of his own Western shire. He was the greatest genius that had as yet employed English, though he was soon to be outdone, perhaps in his own lifetime. Chaucer has given us a most spirited sketch of the ​Yorkshire speech as it was in his day. The Northern English had become the Court language at Edinburgh. The Southern dialect, the most unlucky of all our va­rieties, gave way before her Mercian sister: Dane con­quered Saxon. After Trevisa wrote in 1387, no purely Southern English work, of any length, was produced for almost five hundred years. Shakespere, in his Lear, tries his hand upon the Somersetshire tongue; and it also figures in one of the best of the Reformation bal­lads to be found in Bishop Percy's collection. But Mr. Barnes in our own day was the first to teach England how much pith and sweetness still lingered in the long-neglected homely tongue of Dorset; it seems more akin to Middle English than to New English.
A few improvements, not as yet brought from the North, were still wanting; but now at last our land had a Standard tongue of her own, welcome alike in the Palace and in the cottage. King Edward the Third, not long after Cressy, lent his countenance to the mother-tongue of his trusty billmen and bowmen. He in 1849 had his shield and surcoat embroidered with his own motto, on this wise:
‘Hay, hay, the wythe swan, By Godes soule, I am thy man.’
His doublet bore another English device: ‘it is as it is.’ Trevisa says that before the great Plague of 1349 high and low alike were bent on learning French; it was a common custom: ‘but sith it is somedele chaunged.’ In 1362 English was made the language of the Law-courts; and this English was neither that of Hampole to the North of the Humber, nor that of Herebert to the South of the Thames. Our old freedom and our old speech had been alike laid in the dust by the great blow of 1066: the former had arisen once more in 1215 and had been thriving amain ever since; the latter was now at last enjoying her own again.
After this glance at Kingly patronage, something almost unknown hitherto, we must now throw a glance backward, and mark the changes since the Handlyng Synne had been given to the world. Many writers, both in prose and in rime, had been at work in the first half of the Fourteenth Century: of their pieces I have already given some specimens. Forme-fader, ganed, hyrwe, ilîc, iseowed, ileaned, lawerce, ofþurst, sêli, ismêþet, spinnere, tœppet, þridde were now turned into forefader, yâned (yawned), harew, aliche, isewed (the participle of the Latin suere), ilend, larke, athurst, sili, ismôþed (smoothed), spiþre (spider), tippet, þirde. There are new words and forms such as awkward, bacward, tall, until, ded as a dore­nail, a biwey (bye-way). The most startling are turn up swa doune (upside down) in Hampole, and she-beast much ​about the same time. Layamon's no (nec) becomes nor, in the Salopian poem quoted at page 205; this is shortened from nother. Reule, having long been a sub­stantive, now becomes a verb, and we see ine mêne time. The form graciouser, in the Ayenbite, is one of the last attempts to force the English sign of comparison on a French adjective ending in ous. The old dysig (stultus) gets our modern sense of dizzy; and Langland's kill (occidere) replaces the old cwell, which now has only the meaning of opprimere.
A curious poem, the Debate of the Carpenter's Tools (Hazlitt's Collection, I. 88), is the compilation that best represents Manning's style; it seems to have been written about 1340, and must belong to the Rutland neighbour­hood: it certainly has a dash of the Northern speech. I give a few lines as alink between Manning and Mandeville.
Bot lythe to me a lytelle space, I schall ʓow telle all the case, How that they wyrke fore ther gode, I wylle not lye, be the rode. When thei have wroght an oure ore two, Anone to the ale thei wylle go. And drinke ther, whyle thei may dre: Thou to me, and I to the. And seys the ax schall pay fore this. Therefore the cope ons I wylle kys; And when thei comme to werke ageyne, The belte to hys mayster wylle seyne: ‘Mayster, wyrke no oute off resone. The dey is vary longe of seson.
give in my Appendix a specimen of Sir John Mande­ville: it is strange to think that he is separated by only a score of years or so from the compiler of the Ayenbite of Inwit. The travelled knight was born at St. Albans, and went abroad in 1322. We may look upon his En­glish as the speech spoken at Court in the latter days of King Edward III.; high and low alike now prided themselves upon being Englishmen, and held in scorn all men of outlandish birth. The earlier and brighter days of King Harold seemed to have come back again; Hastings had been avenged at Cressy, and our islanders found none to match them in fight, whether the field might lie in France, in Spain, or in Italy. King Edward was happy in his knights, and happy also in the men whom he could employ in civil business, men like Wick­liffe and Chaucer. Mandeville's language is far more influenced by the Midland forms than that of Davie had been fifty years earlier; in the new writer we find sche, I, thei, theirs, have, are, and ben, forms strange to the Thames, at least in 1300; the Southern ending of the Third Person Plural of the Present tense is almost wholly dropped, being replaced by the Midland ending in en; even this is sometimes clipped, as also is the en of the Infinitive, and the Prefix of the Past Participle. A hundred years would have to pass before these hoary old ​relics could be wholly swept away from Standard English. The corruption first seen in 1220, whereby most dreadful replaced the old Superlative, is sown broadcast over Man­deville's works. He has the new form, houshold. The Northern same (idem), so sparingly employed of yore even in the North, is now found instead of ilk; ask instead of axe, ren (currere) instead of urn, chough instead of choʓ, mordrere instead of murþerere. Ayens now takes a t at the end, in the true English style, and becomes ayenst (contra). The old forms dwerghes, o ferrom, thilke, overthwart, are still kept. There are barely more than fifty obsolete English words in the whole of Man­deville's book, though it extends over 316 printed pages. It was wonderfully popular in England, as is witnessed by the number of copies that remain, tran­scribed within a few years of the worthy knight's death. Few laymen had written in English, so far as can be known, since King Alfred's time.
We now find a University lending its sanction to the speech of the common folk. In 1384, William of Nassington laid a translation into English rimes before the learned men of Cambridge. The Chancellor and the whole of the University spent four days over the work; on the fifth day they pronounced it to be free from heresy and to be grounded on the best authority. Had any errors been found in it, the book would have been burnt at once. For the last thirty years there had been a great stirring up of the English mind; ​many works on religion had been put forth both in the North and the West.
Having spoken of Cambridge, I next turn to Oxford, which had been lately roused by the preaching of Wick­liffe; she was now glowing with a fiery heat unknown to her since the days of the earlier Franciscans. The ques­tions at this time in debate had the healthiest effect upon the English tongue, though they might jar upon Roman interests. Wickliffe, during his long residence in the South, seems to have unlearned the old dialect he must have spoken when a bairn on the banks of the Tees. His first childish lessons in Scripture were most likely drawn from the legends of the Cursor Mundi. He was now bestowing a far greater blessing upon his countrymen, and was stamping his impress upon England's religious dialect, framed long before in the Ancren Riwle and the Handlyng Synne. In reading Wickliffe's version of the Bible, of which so many scores of manuscripts have been happily snatched from Roman fires, we are struck by various peculiarities of speech in which he differs from Mandeville and Chaucer. In these we have followed him. The greatest is the Dano-Anglian custom of clipping the prefix to the Past Participle, as founden instead of yfoun­den. He sometimes, although most seldom, clips the ending of the Plural of the Imperative, as in Herod's request to the wise men:
‘Whan yee han founden, telle ayein to me.’
If he has now and then the Northern theire (illorum), he employs thilke (iste), and has both ilk and same; whiche, eche, suche, and myche, all occur in his writings. He still uses the old sum man for quidam, but this was soon to drop, and to be replaced by a certain man. He has one peculiarity that may be still found in Yorkshire; the Old English butan (nisi) is not enough for him, but he turns it into no but. In Mark xvi. 5, he has a ʓong oon, instead of the old Accusative ânne geongne; the oon (one) seems to stand for wight; the phrase is common enough with us. He corrupts Orrmin's þu wass into thou wast (Mark xiv. 67); the old form was kept by Roy 150 years later. He also corrupts a Strong Perfect now and then, as, ‘thou betokist’ (Mat. xxv. 20). He speaks of ‘thi almes,’ not ‘thine alms’ (Mat. vi. 4). We see our well-known yea, yea; nay, nay (the Gothic ya and ne). Wickliffe has both the old windewe and the new winewe, our winnow. He has shipbreche, which had not yet become shipwreck, a strange corruption. We find also debreke (Mark i. 26), one of the first instances of a French preposition being prefixed to an English root; renew and dislike were to come long afterwards. A rem­nant of the older speech lingers in his nyle ye drede (fear not); we still say willy, nilly. Hys efen-þeowas was in 1380 turned into his even servauntis; but this most useful prefix, answering to the Latin con, was soon to drop. To express forsitan, he uses by hap and happily (our haply). The Old English reafung is with him ra­veyn (our ravening).
The great English Reformer clave far too closely to the idioms of the Latin Vulgate, whence he was ​translating; he therefore produced English by no means equal to that of the year 1000. Thus he will not say, that ‘it thundered,’ as the English writer of the Tenth Cen­tury wrote; but puts, ‘the cumpany seide thundir to be maad.’ One of his most un-Teutonic idioms is, ‘he seith, I a vois of the crying in desert.’ Again, Wickliffe writes, ‘Jhesu convertid, and seynge hem suwynge him.’ Tyndale handles this far better: ‘Jesus turned about, and sawe them folowe.’ We now happily keep sue to the law courts; and we may also rejoice that the earlier Reformer's diction was improved upon in other respects a hundred and fifty years later; we have thus been saved from such phrases as, ‘I am sent to evangelise to thee thes thingis;’ ‘to ʓyve the science of helthe to his peple;’ ‘if I schal be enhaunsid (lifted up) fro the erthe;’ ‘it perteynede to him of nedy men;’ ‘Jhesus envyraunyde (went about) al Galilee;’ ‘Fadir, clarifie thi name;’ ‘he hath endurid (hardened) the herte;’ ‘my volatilis (fatlings) ben slayn;’ ‘he that hath a spousesse (bride).’ On the other hand, we have pre­ferred Wickliffe to Tyndale in sundry passages.
| Wickliffe. | Tyndale. |
| Sone of perdicioun. | That lost chylde. |
| It is good us to be here. | Here is good beinge for us. |
| Entre thou in to the joye of thi lord. | Go in into thy master's joye. |
| I shulde have resceyved with usuris. | Shulde I have receaved with vauntage. |
| Thou saverist nat tho thingis, &c. | Thou perceavest nott godly thynges. |
Purvey, after referring to Bede and Alfred as trans­lators of the Bible ‘into Saxon, that was English, either comoun langage of this lond,’ writes thus: ‘Frenshe men, Beemers, and Britons han the bible, and othere bokis of devocioun and of exposicioun, translatid in here modir langage; whi shulden not English men have the same in here modir langage, I can not wite, no but for falsenesse and necgligence of clerkis, either for oure puple is not worthi to have so greet grace and ʓifte of God, in peyne of here olde synnes. God for his merci amende these evele causis, and make our puple to have and kunne and kepe truli holi writ, to liif and deth!’ Purvey and his friends stand out prominently among the writers, who settled England's religious dialect; few of the words used in the Wickliffite version have become obsolete within the last five hundred years. The holy torch was to be handed on to a still greater scholar in 1525; for all that, Wickliffe is remarkable as the one Englishman who in the last eleven hundred years has been able to mould Christian thought on the Continent; Cranmer and Wesley have had small in­fluence but on English-speaking men.
Wickliffe had much help from Purvey and Hereford. The latter of these, who translated much of the Old Testament, strove hard to uphold the Southern dialect, and among other things wrote daunster, syngster, after the Old English way. But the other two translators leant to the New Standard, the East Midland, which was making steady inroads on the Southern speech. They write daunseresse, dwelleresse, &c., following Robert ​of Brunne, who first led the way to French endings fastened to English roots. They also write ing for the Active Participle, where Hereford writes the old ende; they do not follow him in employing the Southern Imperative Plural. In the Apology for the Lollards (Camden Society) there is a strong dash of the North­ern dialect. If Wickliffe were the writer, he must have here gone back to the speech of his childhood far more than in his Scriptural translations. In this Apo­logy there are 94 obsolete English words.
The last half of the Fourteenth Century employed many of the phrases that live for ever in the English Bible and Prayer Book. We find such expressions as albeit, surely, passing rich, during, on this condition that, considering this, as to this, with one accord, to that ende that, touching these things, enter in, under colour of, that is interpreted, if so be that, oft time, according as, in regard of, upon a time, ensaumple, rebuke, she-wolf, outrely (utterly), go a begging, whereas, because. The Lord's Prayer took its shape much as we have it now, Wickliffe employing in its latter part the French words dettours, temptacioun, delyvere. I pass on to the Belief, that other stronghold of wholesome English; and I give a few other forms of this age, now embodied in our Prayer Book. I take the following from a Primer of the year 1400. We see that the speech of Religion was being moulded into the shape which has come down to us in the Anglican Prayer Book; little remained to ​be done in the way of change. The Creed maybe compared with the one of 1250, printed in page 145 of my work:
‘I bileve in god, fadir almygti, makere of hevene and of erthe : and in iesu crist the sone of him, oure lord, oon alone : which is conceyved of the hooli gost; born of marie maiden : suffride passioun undir pounce pilat : crucified, deed, and biried : he went doun to hellis : the thridde day he roos agen fro deede: he steig to hevenes : he sittith on the right syde of god the fadir almygti : thenns he is to come for to deme the quyke and deede. I beleve in the hooli goost : feith of hooli chirche : communynge of seyntis : forgyveness of synnes : agenrisyng of fleish, and everlastynge lyf. So be it.’
Preie we. For the pees.
‘God of whom ben hooli desiris, rigt councels and iust werkis : gyve to thi servantis pees that the world may not geve, that in our hertis govun to thi com­mandementis, and the drede of enemys putt awei, oure tymes be pesible thurgh thi defendyng. Bi oure lord iesu crist, thi sone, that with thee lyveth and regneth in the unitie of the hooli goost god, bi all worldis of worldis. So be it.’
‘God, that taughtist the hertis of thi feithful ser­vantis bi the lightnynge of the hooli goost : graunte us to savore rightful thingis in the same goost, and to be ioiful evermore of his counfort. Bi crist our lorde. So be it.’
‘Almyghti god, everlastynge, that aloone doost many wondres, schewe the spirit of heelful grace upon bisschopes thi servantis, and upon alle the congregacion ​betake to hem : and gheete in the dewe of thi blessynge that thei plese evermore to the in trouthe. Bi crist oure lord. So be it.’
Holy Matrimony. (From a Manual of 1408.)
‘Lo breyren and sustren her we beon comyn to gedre in ye worsschip of god and his holy seintes in ye face of holy chirche to joynen to gedre yuse tweyne bodies yat heynforward yei be on body in ye beleve and in ye lawe of god for te deserven everlastynge lyf wat so yei han don here byfore. Wherfore i charge you on holy chirche byhalf all yat here bes yat gif eni mon or womman knowen eny obstacle prevei or apert why yat yey lawefully mowe nogt come to gedre in ye sacra­ment of holy churche sey ye now or never more.’
(From another Manual, rather older, of the Fourteenth Century.)
‘Also I charge you both, and eyther be your selfe, as ye wyll answer before God at the day of dome, that yf there be any thynge done pryvely or openly, betwene your selfe : or that ye knowe any lawfall lettyng why that ye may not be wedded togyther at thys time : say it nowe, or we do any more to this mater.’
‘N. — Wylt thou have this man to thy husbande, and to be buxum to him, serve him and kepe him in ​sykenes and in helthe : And in all other degrese be unto hym as a wyfe should be to hir husbande, and all other to forsake for hym : and holde thee only to hym to thy lyves end? Respondeat mulier hoc modo : I wyll.
1. . . . . .
‘I N. take the N. to my weddyd husbonde to have and to holde fro thys day for bether, for wurs, for richer, for porer, in sykenesse and in helthe, to be bonour and buxum in bed and at bort : tyll deth us departe yf holy chyrche wol it ordeyne : and ther to I plycht the my trouth.
‘With this rynge I wedde the, and with this gold and silver I honoure the, and with this gyft I honoure the. In nomine Patris : et Filii : et Spiritus Sancti. Amen.’
The middle of the Fourteenth Century was the time when English, as it were, made a fresh start, and was prized by high and low alike. I take what follows from an old Lollard work, put forth about 1450 and printed eighty years later, when the term Lollard was being swallowed up by the term Lutheran: ‘Sir William Thorisby archebishop of Yorke did do draw a treatyse in englishe by a worshipfull clercke whose name was Gratryke, in the whiche were conteyned the articles of beleve, the seven dedly synnes, the seven workes of mercy, the X commaundmentes. And sent them in small pagines to the commyn people to leame it and to knowe it, of which yet many a copye be in england. . . . Also it is knowen to many men in ye tyme of King Richerd ye II. yat into a parlement was put a bible ​(bill) by the assent of II archbisshops and of the clergy to adnulle the bible that tyme translated into Englishe with other Englishe bookes of the exposicion off the gospells; whiche when it was harde and seyn of lordes and of the comones, the duke of Lancaster Jhon an­swered thereto ryght sharpely, sayenge this sentence: We will not be refuse of all other nacions; for sythen they have Goddes law whiche is the lawe of oure belefe in there owne langage, we will have onres in Englishe whosoever say naye. And this he affermyd with a great othe. Also Thomas Arundell Archebishoppe of Canter­bury sayde in a sermon at Westmester at the buryenge of Queue Anne, that it was more joye of here than of any woman that ever he knewe. For she an alien borne hadde in englishe all the IIII gospels with the doctours upon them. And he said that she had sent them to him to examen and he saide that they were good and trewe.’ Here we see that English had kept its ground in the Palace; an intrusion which would have seemed strange, I suspect, to Edward the Second, the grandfather of stout Duke John. Not long after the Duke's death, an inscription in English was graven upon the brass set up in Higham Ferrars church to the memory of Archbishop Chicheley's brother.
We have seen what was the language of the Church in the days of Richard II.; we now turn to the speech of the Court. England had the honour of giving birth to one of the two great poets of the Middle Ages, of the ​two bright stars that enlighten the darksome gap of fourteen hundred years between Juvenal and Ariosto. Dante had been at work upon the loftiest part of his Divina Commedia at the precise time that Manning was compiling his Handlyng Synne, the first thoroughly-formed pattern of the New English; the great Italian was now to be followed by a Northern admirer, of a somewhat lower order of genius indeed, but still a bard who ranks very high among poets of the second class. Chaucer was born at London, a city that boasts a more tuneful brood than any single spot in the world; for this early bard was to have for his fellow-townsmen Spenser, Milton, Pope, and Byron. Never has English life been painted in more glowing hues than by Chaucer; his lines will be more long-lived than the frescoes of Orcagna, which are dropping off the Pisan cloister; though poet and painter belong to the same date.
Chaucer has many new forms; such as gossib (as well as godsib), harwed instead of the old heregede, arowe (sagitta) instead of arwe. He led the fashion of doubling the vowel o, for he has both the old stôl and the new stool. He turns the old tôh into tough, akern into acorn. Indeed there are whole sentences in his writings, espe­cially in the Parson's prose sermon, that need but the change of a few letters to be good modern English, spelling and all. He follows Manning's way of writing syn, or rather sin, for quoniam. In one of the earliest sentences of the Parson's attack on Pride, we find the words, ‘those bountees . . . . that he hath not;’ but this corruption as yet comes very seldom.
We see many new phrases like, what ails him? now ​a dayes, belike, as helpe me God, ten of þe clokke, no malice at all, bi and bi; and Chaucer uses the phrases, to bring about, to drive a bargain, platly ayenst him. Bondman in the Parson's sermon is taken in the Gloucester sense, not in that of Rutland; and this bad sense it has kept ever since. We see caterwaw and newe fangel; also award, which seems to come from the Icelandic aqvarda (allot). Badder stands for pejor.
As to the many French words employed by Chaucer, he often yokes them with their English brethren, using them in the same breath; thus he talks of seuretee or sikernesse, robbe and reve. He has also scarcely and menes (instrumenta). In the Squieres Tale, about line 180, we see the first instance of a well-known vulgarism:
‘There may no man it drive: And cause why, for they con not the craft.’
Our lower orders have refused to part with Chaucer's markis, though our upper class can only talk of a mar­quis or marquess. That nobleman's lady is called by Chaucer a markisesse. The adjective able had been used in England before he was born. He has sextein (sexton) and raffle, and talks of a pair of tonges. He sometimes leans to the Latin rather than the French, writing equal as well as egality, perfection as well as parfit.
Chaucer's speech is much the same as Mandeville's, and very unlike it is to what must have been the Lon­don dialect a hundred years before their time. Gower ​resembles his brother bard, except that he clips the prefix to the Passive Participle, and tries to keep alive the Active Participle in and; Chaucer unluckily stuck to the corrupt ending ing, first seen in Layamon. Lyd­gate and Occleve followed in the steps of the great Londoner; their loving reverence for him atones for much dulness in their song. Even King James I. of Scotland sometimes dropped his Northern speech, and clave to Chaucer as a pattern; though the aforesaid speech was the Court language to the North of the Tweed, and so remained down to the days of the later Stuarts. Toward the end of the Fourteenth Century, a son of Edward III. made what we may call his dying confession in English; and early in the next age our tongue was employed instead of French by Princes, by Cardinals, and by the future hero of Agincourt. Ellis' Letters on English History show us best how the language was being by degrees pared down; its most obsolete form is to be found in the despatches of the Royal officers who were fighting against Glendower. It is curious to mark the differ­ence of the speech of Northern knights, such as Assheton and Waterton, from that of a Somersetshire man like Luttrell. The State papers, drawn up by the men of the Irish Pale, prove that Dublin was now taking London for her pattern in these Agincourt days; Friar Michael of Kildare's speech was a thing of the past.
If we wish to know what was the best, or rather the most fashionable, English spoken in 1432, we must glance at a petition given in by Beauchamp Earl of Warwick ​to the good Duke Humphrey and many of our Bishops. The Earl, having the charge of the boy King Henry VI., craved full powers as to whipping the future founder of Eton College; the child's growing years were causing him ‘more and more to grucche with chastising, and to lothe it.’ The petition shows us that the endings of verbs had been much clipped, that the Southern thilke had, in some measure, made way for that (ille), that Wickliffe's suche (talis) had come to be preferred to Chaucer's swiche, and that the Northern their and theim were encroaching on the Southern her and hem. It was still thought the right thing to say, like Manning, yeve and ayeins, though Caxton was afterwards to bring us back to the true old spelling. The phrase ‘speech at part’ shows us whence comes our ‘apart,’ and ‘owe’ (debent) makes us aware that some resistance was made to our corrupt ‘ought.’ The Plural Adjectives in the phrase, ‘causes necessaries and resonables,’ are a token of lingering French influence, which acted upon Warwick, an old soldier of the great French war. One half of the nouns, verbs, and adverbs in this State paper are of French birth; indeed, there could not well be a greater proportion of Romance terms in a Queen's speech compiled by the Gladstone cabinet. The unhappy Suffolk, one of the Council to whom the petition is addressed, was himself the writer of a noble letter of advice; this, being drawn up not long before his death for his son's behoof, is far more Teutonic than Warwick's petition. Still homelier are the letters ​coming from Norfolk manor-houses; here we find the East Anglian arn (sunt) and the qu replacing hw, as quhat for hwat, qwan for hwen, much as in the Genesis and Exodus of the same shires, compiled two hundred years before. Manning's way of writing ho for who is repeated. A paper of the date 1419 shows that almost all inflections had been pared away. Soon afterwards we find the French z employed for the old English s at the end of words. In a letter of 1440 we see Mande­ville's corruption of ayenst repeated. We also find the new phrases that meene tyme and be the meene of, in 1424; the last phrase was one generation later to become be menys of. Many a corruption, now used by us, had its rise in shires far to the North of London; in the great city, writers who aimed at dignity of style preserved the old inflections that were on the wane elsewhere. Shillingford, Mayor of Exeter, shows us the lingering remnant of Southern speech in a letter of his ‘y-written yn Alle Sawelyn day.’ He reports from London, whither he had gone on a lawsuit, the ‘Alagge! alagge!’ (alack) uttered by Archbishop Kemp the Chancellor in 1447, one of the first instances of that exclamation, which may come from the old eala of our fathers. We are rather amazed to find that the Northern tham (illos) had already taken root in Devonshire by the side of the old ham and buth (sunt).
Capgrave and Lydgate, both East Anglians, were reckoned two of the great lights of the first half of this ​Century. A far greater master of English was Bishop Pecock, the best of our prose writers in this age, a man who was in theology a compound of Bellarmine and Hooker, and who therefore drew down upon himself the wrath of the Anglican Church. Pecock is the last good writer in whom we see the old Southern form thilk for iste. By 1450 the speech of the Mercian Danelagh had all but made a thorough conquest of London; the prefix to the Past Participle was nearly gone; and the endings of Verbs were not to last many years. Chaucer's example, though he was held to be the best of all patterns of language, had been unable to preserve the few traces of Southern speech that lingered in his day. The old ʓede (ivit) had made way for went; Capgrave's eldfœder for graunt fadir. We find both schulde and schude, the last showing the rise of our present pronunciation of should. The helpful for is no longer used to compound verbs, as to fordo. We see both esilier and esier, the old and the new form of the Comparative in the Adverb. England hence-forward became so slovenly as to express the Comparative of both the Adjective and the Adverb by one and the same word. The Bishop is most fond of tacking on a French ending to an English root, like the bondage of 1303; we find in his work se-able, knowe-able, here-able, do-able, dout-able; also craftiose. The English un is preferred to the Latin in in uncongruité, unmoveable and ​other words. As to terms which were to be built into the English Bible fourscore years later, we find Jewry, ensaumple, sutil, enquire, according to; these had been in use much earlier.
The great change we owe to Pecock is a new phrase that took off a part of the heavy load thrown upon but. The source of our unless is now seen. In the Repressor (page 51), he speaks of the Lollards, ‘whiche wolen not allowe eny governaunce to be the lawe and service of God, inlasse than it be grondid in Holi Scrip­ture.’ It was hundreds of years before this word could be used freely; in our New Testament it comes but once: ‘unless ye have believed in vain.’ Pecock uses his new phrase four times in his Repressor. Another word, common in our mouths, is seen for the first time in a Lancastrian ballad of 1458: ‘acros the mast he hyethe travers.’ This is not found once in our Bible.
At this time English prose rose high above English poetry; and herein the Fifteenth Century stands alone. That one short passage of Mallory's, pro­nouncing Sir Lancelot's elegy, outweighs many pages of later poets, such as Barclay, Skelton, and Hawes. Civil war is commonly thought to forebode evil to literature; England for forty years after Duke Hum­phrey's death was harassed by risings of the Commons, or was divided between the Red and the White Roses, as many a bloody field bore witness. Yet this is the ​precise time when English prose was handled with wonderful skill. Theology, chivalry, law, and homely life found the best of representatives in Pecock, Mallory, Fortescue, and Caxton. This was the time when our inflections were almost all driven out; there is a great difference between the Bishop's writings and those of the Printer thirty years later. At this latter date, few inflections remained. Pity it was that the printing press did not come to England a few years earlier; we might then have kept the old Plural ending of the Verb in en. Ben Jonson long afterwards bemoaned this heavy loss.
About the time that the Red Rose was withering, the Northern words their and them drove out the Southern her and hem. King Henry VI. uses the former in a pro­clamation, put forth at York a fortnight before Towton field. There are other words, common in our mouths, which we owe to Yorkshire. Robert of Brunne had written syn, instead of the old siððan; but in a Knares­borough petition of 1441, we find a formation from this syn, the new synnes or since; this we have kept. We also see ‘my verray good maister’ in a letter of 1462: this very (valdè) was not well established in Standard English until sixty years later, when it un­happily almost wholly drove out right. The ending of verbs are clipped in these Yorkshire letters, and ​corruption soon spread Southward. In a letter of 1464, the old Northern Plural of the Present Tense in s is seen; and Robert of Brunne's holy (integrè) is changed into wholie, a wretched corruption which we are still doomed to write. In the same letter, we see far (procul) replacing the old ferre, as it did in the Northern Psalter. I give the Knaresborough wedding formula of 1450: ‘Here I take the . . . to my wedded wife to hold and to have, att bed and att bord, for farer or lather, for better for warse, in sicknesse and in hele, to dede us depart, and thereto I plight the my trouth.’
Salop, like Yorkshire, has had some influence upon Standard English. In 1426, an old blind monk, known as ‘Syr Ion Audlay,’ was compiling his poems, striking at Lollards and worthless priests alike. He lived on the border land between the Northern and the Southern varieties of English speech, as we could tell from a few lines in page 65:
And vii aves to our lady, Fore sche is the wel of al peté, That heo wyl fore me pray.
The Salopian shows us that the old lewd (indoctus) was getting its bad modern meaning, when at page 3 he brands the wicked lives of the clergy of his time. He ​pronounced one (unus) much as we do: in page 35 we read:
‘thai serven won Lord.’
This won was to be brought into the English Bible, a hundred years later, by another Western man. What Chaucer called a persone, Audlay calls a parsun; he also tries to Latinize the old siker (securus), writing it secur.
We must glance at Audlay's shire thirty years after he wrote; in this interval, the Southern speech seems to have been losing ground. There is hardly a spot, throughout England, so closely linked both to our his­tory and to our literature, as that Salopian stronghold, Ludlow Castle. Here it was that Richard Duke of York (he held also Sandal in Yorkshire) brought up his children; from hence in 1464 was written the joint letter of the future King Edward IV. and of the boy Rutland, who was soon to fall at Wakefield. This letter is most unlike in its forms (geve replaces ʓeve) to the language Bishop Pecock would have used at Paul's Cross before his London hearers; it shows us the clipped English that must have been learnt in childhood by King Edward and his sister, the future wife of Charles the Bold. When the Sun of York was making glorious summer in England, more Northern forms came in; the conqueror's diction may be studied in some of the Paston Letters. Now it was, if ever, that Kings brought ​influence to bear upon England's tongue. After 1460, the clipped inflections of Ludlow and Sandal must have become familiar in the ears of the ladies and knights that begirt Edward IV. and the Kingmaker at the Court of London. But it was abroad, more than at home, that change was at work. Caxton, a Kentish man, whose grandfather must have been born about the time that the Ayenbite of Inwit was compiled, lived long in London; and then about 1440 betook himself to the Low Coun­tries, where he printed the first English book in 1471. We might have expected, from his birth and breeding, that he would have held fast to the old Southern forms and inflections, at least as much as Bishop Pecock did. But Caxton had come under another influence. In 1468 he had begun translating into English the Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye; and in the same year King Edward's sister was given to Charles the Bold. The new Duchess took an interest in the work of her coun­tryman, who had sickened of his task after writing five or six quires. In 1470, ‘she commanded me,’ says Caxton, ‘to shew the said five or six quires to her said grace. And when she had seen them, anon she found defaute in mine English, which she commanded me to amend.’ She bade him (he had a yearly fee from her) go on with his book; and this work, the first ever printed in our tongue, came out in 1471. It was ‘not ​written with pen and ink, as other books are, to the end that every man may have them at once.’ Wherein did the Duchess and the Printer differ in their views of English? In this, that the one came of a Northern house, while the other had been born and bred in the South. Owing to the new influence, in Caxton's first work we see the loss of the old Southern inflections of the Verb; and we find Orrmin's their, them, and that (iste) well established, instead of the Southern her, hem, and thilk, beloved of Pecock. Plural Adjectives no longer end in s; for we read ‘strange habitacions’ in the first page of the Recuyell. The word yle (insula) in the same page is spelt without the intruding s. Manning's way of writing y instead of i is often found; but this we have happily refused to follow. The old form that oon . . . that othir (in Latin, alter . . . alter) comes once more. In the Game of the Chess, published in 1474, we find ner for the Latin neque, an odd mixture of the Southern ne with the North Western corruption nor. The hard g is seen once more, as in agayn, driving out the usurper y. When we weigh the works of Caxton, who wrote under the eye of the Yorkist Princess, we should bear in mind the English written by her father in 1452. The Midland speech was now carrying all before it. The Acts of Parliament passed under the last Plantagenet King were printed by the old servant of the House of York. ​
Caxton's press was of great use in fixing our speech. The English spoken at London, brought thither from the Mercian Danelagh, was now established as the Standard; Puttenham, in a well-known passage written a hundred years later, will have nothing to say to any speech but that of London and the neighbouring shires. Strange it is that Caxton, a Kentishman, should have been the writer who sealed the triumph of Midland English as our Standard for the future. One of his best works is Renard the Fox (Percy Society), which he translated from the Dutch; traces of the sister tongue we see in words like moed, saacke, lupaerd, ungheluck, which must be due to Dutch handicraftsmen. Caxton says, ‘I have folowed as nyghe as I can my copie, which was in dutche, and translated into this rude and symple Englyssh;’ the date of the work is 1481. There are here many old Teutonic words, now obsolete, which we could ill afford to lose, and which Tyndale unhappily did not employ in his great work, though they must have been household words in his childhood. Such are eme, overal, lief, bleeve, wyte, elenge, sybbe, to dere, to bote, and others. Caxton's great claim upon us is, that in many words he gave us back the old g, which for the foregoing three hundred years had been softened into y in words like gate, get, again; he even writes galp instead of yelp. It was now settled that we were to employ peyne and not pine. We find brydge and hedche, the spelling showing how they ​were pronounced in the late Plantagenet days; bury follows the Southern, gylty the Northern form; there are herke, hearke, and harkene, all three; there are both lawhe and laugh. When we see borugh, we think of a borough of men, but it means only a burrow of conies; our spelling was not yet thoroughly settled. Theft is expressed by roving; we have since given a new meaning to the word. The bear is called both Bruyn and Brownyng. We find the interjection O ho, and also our common pronuncia­tion of me lorde. The z is employed to spell wezel, which had of old been wesel; puf is used where we say pooh.
Caxton had many words and phrases which Tyndale was afterwards to make immortal; such are, skrabbing, ravyn, kyen, adoo, good luck, to you-ward, oftymes, in lyke wyse, chyde with, bewraye, take hede, al be it that, if so be that, how be it. As to Romance words, we find rere­ward, concubyne, tarye, stuff, straytly, sauf that, secrete chamber, dwellyng place, according to, sporte, abhor, mock, refrayne himself. There is also the portentous com­pound, disworshipped. Still the home-born mis held its own against the outlandish dis; two hundred years later Bunyan writes mistrust and not distrust.
In 1482, Caxton brought out an old chronicle written by Trevisa a century earlier; the great printer says, ‘I somewhat chaunged the rude and old Englyssh, that is to wete, certayn wordes which in these days be neither usyd ne understanden.’ We thus see that the Verbs clepe, fonge, won, welk, steihe, wilne, and behote had become obsolete; buxom, nesche, lesue, and bede now sounded strange in London ears; swiþe had to be turned into right, and sprankeleþ into sperclyth. The letter ʓ ​(standing for y) is clean gone, and þ is hardly ever used for th; this þ, which had been often employed in the Recuyell, is a sad loss. England was slowly forgetting her old words; and the bad habit would have been carried further, but for Caxton's press and for a great religious change that happened forty years after this time.
Lord Berners' translation of Froissart may be looked on as a new landmark in our tongue. Those who filled up the gap between Caxton and the learned noble­man, men like Hawes, Skelton, and Barclay, have few worshippers now but antiquaries. The Englished Froissart, given to the world in 1523, heads a long roll of noble works, that have followed each other, it may be said, without a break for three hundred and fifty years. Since 1523, there is not an instance of twenty years passing over England, without the appearance of some book, which she has taken to her heart and will not willingly let die. No literature in the world has ever been blessed with so continuous a spell of glory. Two of her great men, whose works are inscribed on the aforesaid roll, would by most foreign critics be reckoned among the five foremost intellects of the world; a large proportion forsooth to be claimed by one nation.
One of the earliest English works that followed Lord Berners' Froissart was the New Testament, published at Worms in 1525, by William Tyndale of Gloucestershire. ​Wickliffe had made his translation from the Vulgate, and his work is sadly marred by Latin idioms most strange to English ears; Tyndale, being a ripe Greek and Hebrew scholar, went right to the fountain-head. His New Testament has become the Standard of our tongue; the first ten verses of the Fourth Gospel are a good sample of his manly Teutonic pith. It is amusing to think how differently one of our penny-a-liners would handle the passage; he would deem that so lofty a subject could be fairly expressed in none but the finest Romance words to be found in Johnson or Gibbon. Most happily, our authorized version of the Scriptures was built upon the translation which Tyndale had almost completed before his martyrdom. When we read our Bibles, we are in truth taken back far beyond the days of Bacon and Andrewes to the time of Wolsey and More.
Tyndale, a man well known alike at Oxford, Cam­bridge, and London, may be said to have fixed our tongue once for all; a few words were now changing for the worse. He it was who brought in the corrupt Yorkshire those (isti) instead of the old tha or tho, though the latter also may be found now and then in his Testament. He thus established a vicious form, which had been used almost three hundred years earlier in the ​Northern Psalter. He speaks of twyse and thryse, but has unluckily the corrupt once instead of ones. Fadir and modir now become father and mother. We see almost the moment of their change, when we find in Tyndale's New Testament the three forms hidder, hyd­ther, and hetherto; we also find gadther. Against and amongst appear with their last consonant, which they were never to lose. We have both the old coude (potui) and also the corruption into coulde from a false analogy; there is the good old Teutonic rightewes and also the new Latinized righteous: pity it was that Tyndale had no share in Leland's knowledge of Old English. The upstart kill comes as often as slay. Pecock's ʓou silf is corrupted into youre selves, as if self was a substantive. The symle (semper) of 1000, and the ever of 1380, now become all wayes. We find some old forms almost for the last time, as, do on hym a garment, anhongred, hedling, unethe, he leugh (risit). There are some forms which seem to be relics of the writer's native Gloucestershire: honde (manus), awne (proprius), axe (rogare), moo­are (plus), lawears (juris periti), visicion (medicus). Tyndale sometimes goes much nearer to the Old English of the year 1000 than Wickliffe does; thus geve replaces yeve; he has one loofe instead of o loof; feawe, not fewe; brydegrome, not spouse; lende, not ʓyve borwynge; lett the deed bury, not suffre that deede men burie; in the middes, not in the middil. Tyndale brought in some ​words hitherto unused in Scriptural translations; such as, at all, nor, lyke wyse, ado, God forbid: this last re­places Wickliffe's ‘fer be it.’ Whole (sanus) takes the hideous interloping letter that begins the word; the Salopian won is used for unus. The word abroad had been used earlier in a sense like the Latin latè: since 1525 we have used it to express also the Latin foris. This last meaning comes, not from the Old English brad, but from the Norse braut, a way. We see a few new terms; thus, the word already was beginning to come in, and was employed twice in the Gospels. Wickliffe's wawes (fluctus) are now turned into waves. The adjective sad had hitherto meant nothing more than gravis; it now began to take its new meaning, tristis. What was called unróte in the year 1000, and sorwful in 1380, is here called sadde; but this new sense comes only twice in the Four Gospels. Wickliffe had trans­lated volvere by walew (wallow); but Tyndale uses this English verb in an intransitive sense only; he writes roll for volvere. The verb werian (induere) had been of old a Weak verb, and made its Perfect werode; but Tyndale turns this into a Strong Perfect, a change most seldom found in English. In his translation of St. Luke viii. 27, we read that the man which had a devil ‘ware noo clothes.’ We still say wore and worn. He gave us a few words hardly ever used before his time, such as immediatly (he has also the old anon, to which he should have stuck), exceedingly, and streyght waye. He stands almost at the end of the old school of writers, ​before the Latin forms had come in like a flood, as they were to do all through this Century. He therefore leans to the old way, when writing baptim, advoutry, crysten, soudeour (miles), parfit, unpossyble. I could wish that he had kept to the English, instead of the French pattern, in such words as afrayed and defyle. He made a sad mistake in not writing ‘Peter was to blame’ in a well-known passage. He was too fond of similitude, conclusion, seniours; and we have to regret that by 1525 such words as certain, herbes, loins, physician had sup­planted good old English equivalents. About forty Strong verbs, which we still keep, had by this time been turned into Weak verbs; since then, holpen has been corrupted into helped, though the former occurs in a well-known passage.
Tyndale, though hunted out of his own land, was always a sound and wise patriot; his political tracts are as well worth studying as his religious books. He up­lifted his voice against the folly of England's meddling in foreign wars, at the time when Zwingli was giving the like wholesome rede to the Switzers. Tyndale's works fill two goodly volumes, yet these contain only about twelve Teutonic words that have become obsolete since his time; a strong proof of the influence his trans­lation of the Bible has had upon England, in keeping her steady to her old speech. As to the proportion of Latin words in his writings, of his nouns, verbs, and adverbs, three out of four are Teutonic, and in this pure ​style he is rivalled by his great enemy, the Chancellor. Never were two English writers better matched in fight than More and Tyndale; loud was the wrangling over the Reformer's rendering of the Greek Scriptural words charis, ecclesia, presbyteros, metanoia. All Greek scholars must see what an advantage Tyndale had over Wickliffe, when we read an absurd version of Wickliffe's in the parable of the son, who at first refused to work in his father's vineyard, but afterwards ‘stirid by penaunce’ went. The men that loved not the Reformation had a rooted mistrust of Tyndale's Bible. Long after the Martyr's death, Bishop Gardiner in 1542 brought for­ward a list of 102 Latin words (so he called them), which ought to be retained in any English version ‘for the majesty of the matter in them contained.’ Among these majestic words were olacausta (sic), simulacrum, panis, peccator, zizania, hostia, and others of the like kind. It was a happy thing that the Bishop was ​forbidden to meddle in the business; and this Protestants and philologers alike must thankfully acknowledge. But the old housel, which in the English mind was linked with the Roman idea of the Eucharist, was cast aside when the Reformation triumphed.
In the wordy strife between Tyndale and More, the two best English writers of their day, we trace further changes in English. The Chancellor often employs the old form sith (quoniam), and we also find the corrupt since; the two lingered on side by side into the next Century. Are (sunt) sometimes replaces be, in spite of the Reformer having been bred in Gloucestershire. He is perhaps the first Englishman who used the word popish. He speaks of a flock ‘going to pot,’ and gives us bo-peep and ‘huker-muker,’ which has been but little changed. He applies naughty, a new word, to a priest. The ever-waxing influence of classical learning was ere long to substitute victuals for the old vitaille, the sound of which we still partly keep: this influence may be traced in Tyndale's use of words like delectable and crudelity in the works he printed just before his death; these forms he would not have used when he fled from England a dozen years earlier. He kept his eye upon each suc­ceeding edition of Erasmus' Greek Testament, and thus made his own English version more perfect. I now ​quote a passage from his Obedience of a Christian Man, put forth in 1527; this will show the scholarship of
Ille Dei vates sacer, Esdras ille Britannus, Fida manus sacri fidaque mens codicis.
‘Saint Jerom translated the bible into his mother tongue: why may not we also? They will say it cannot be translated into our tongue, it is so rude. It is not so rude as they are false liars. For the Greek tongue agreeth more with the English than with the Latin. And the properties of the Hebrew tongue agreeth a thousand times more with the English than with the Latin. The manner of speaking is both one; so that in a thousand places thou needest not but to translate it into the English, word for word; when thou must seek a compass in the Latin, and yet shall have much work to translate it well-favouredly, so that it have the same grace and sweetness, sense and pure understanding with it in the Latin, and as it hath in the Hebrew. A thousand parts better may it be translated into the English, than into the Latin.’
The Reformer lived to English most of the Bible; the little he left undone at his death in 1536 was finished by his friend Rogers, Queen Mary's first victim. This was the Bible set up in every English parish church by Henry VIII., though he had long plotted against the Translator's life.
I must glance at another of Tyndale's helpers. William Roy, a runaway Franciscan, was employed by Tyndale in 1525 to compare the texts of the New Testament and to write. The two men had not much in common. ​‘When that was ended,’ says Tyndale, ‘I toke my leve and bode him farewel for oure two lives and, as men saye, a daye longer.’ Roy went to Strasburg, and there in 1528 printed his biting rimes against the English clergy. I give an extract from page 71.
Alas, mate, all to geder is synne. And wretchednes most miserable. What! a man of religion Is reputed a dedde person To worldly conversacion.
Here we see that Religion still keeps its old sense of monkery; but Tyndale was bringing a new sense of the word into vogue among Englishmen.
Roy talks of ‘wholy S. Fraunces’ (sanctus). We have been mercifully spared this corruption of the old English; wholly (integrè) is bad enough, with its useless first letter. He has both Christen and Christian, the old and the new form. His defoyle (page 113) shows how the French defouler became our defile. He still uses ryches as a noun singular; and he has per hapis (forsitan).
The translations of the Bible, put forth by Tyndale and Roy, slipped into many an out-of-the-way corner of England. Young Robert Plumpton, who was at the Temple about 1536, sends ‘the Newe Testament, which is the trewe Gospell of God,’ to his mother in her Yorkshire home. He says that he wishes not to bring her into any heresies. ‘Wherefore, I will never write nothing to you, nor saye nothinge to you, concerninge ​the Scriptures, but will dye in the quarrell.’ I give this sentence, as it is one of the last occasions that we find a gentleman of good blood, and eke learned in the law, piling up negatives after the true Old English fashion; a habit that now prevails only among the lower orders. Tyndale had looked askant upon this idiom, of which Caxton was not ashamed. Our tongue was in this respect to leave the old path and to fol­low the Latin; the land was now athirst for classic learning.
The time, when England broke away from the Italian yoke, falls in precisely with the time, when the diction of her bards was greatly changed for the better. Lang­land, true genius though he might be, was wrong in employing so vast a number of French words in his work; the Passus Decimus-Quartus of his Vision has one French word for two English, counting the nouns, verbs, and adverbs alone. Chaucer penning a hymn to the Virgin is most different from Chaucer laughing over the pranks of naughty lads at the Universities; in the former case he heaps up his French words to a wondrous extent. The same tendency may be seen in Lydgate, Hawes, Dunbar, and their brethren; the worst sinners in this respect being monks and writers of Church legends. To prove my point, I give a stanza from a poem composed by the Abbot of Gloucester in 1524; we may almost call it the last dying strains, somewhat
xxi.
Where is and shall be eternall Joy, incomparable myrth without heaviness, Love with Charity and grace Celestiall, Lasting interminable, lacking no goodness. In that Citty virtue shall never cease, And felicity no Soule shall misse, Magnifying the name of the Kinge of Blisse.
xxii.
This compendious Extract compiled was new, A thousand yeere 5 hundred fower and twenty From the birthe of our Saviour Christ Jesue, By the Reverend Father of worthy memory, Willm Malverne, Abbot of this Monastery, Whome God preserve in long life and prosperity, And after death him graunt Eternall Felicity.
But about the time that Tyndale was giving the En­glish Bible to his countrymen in their own tongue, and that Cromwell was hammering the monks, a new soul seems to have been breathed into English poetry. Surrey and Wyat stand at the head of the new school, and show themselves Teutons of the right breed; they clearly had no silly love for lumbering Latinized stuff. The true path, pointed out by them, was soon to be followed in this Sixteenth Century by Buckhurst, Gascoigne, Sidney, and by two men greater still. Even Southwell, who died in the Pope's behalf, cleaves fast to the new Teu­tonic diction of his brother bards. The Reformation ​has been called an uprising of Teutonism against Latin­ism; nowhere does this come out clearer than in En­glish Poetry.
But this Sixteenth Century had a widely different effect on our Prose. Latin was the great link between our own Reformers and those of other lands; and the temptation was strong to bring into vogue Latin terms for the new ideas in religion that were taking root in our island. Theology was the great subject of the age; and King Henry VIII. remarked to his Parliament in 1545: ‘I am very sorry to know and hear how un­reverently that most precious jewel, the Word of God, is disputed, rimed, sung, and jangled in every ale house and tavern, contrary to the true meaning and doctrine of the same.’ Besides this intense thirst after religious discussion, our fathers later on in the Century saw for the first time the authors of Greece and Rome clad in an English dress; and the sailors who bore the English flag round the world were always printing wondrous tales of their wanderings. Plymouth, as well as Oxford, was making her influence felt. Our land, therefore, owned at the end of the Sixteenth Century thousands of new words, which would have seemed strange to Hawes and Roy; a fair store of words was being made ready for Shakespere, whose genius would not bear cramping. The people, for whom he was to write, had a strong taste for theology, for the classics, and for sea roving; each of these tastes brought in shoals of new words. We had long had Latin words in their corrupt French form, such as balm, feat, frail, sure; we now began to write the original Latin of these forms, balsam, fact, fragile, ​secure; keeping all the words, original and corrupt, alike. English was becoming most copious.
It is to the ripe and mellow wisdom of Cranmer that we owe the English Prayer Book almost as it now stands. It is his best monument; he had no vulgar wish to sweep away what was old, unless the sacrifice were called for by the cause of Truth. We have seen that some of the Book's formularies date from Wickliffe's day; others, such as the Bidding prayer, betoken a wish to yoke together the Teutonic and the Romance in pairs, like acknowledge and confess, humble and lowly, goodness and mercy, assemble and meet, pray and beseech, Even so the Law talks of yielding and paying. In the Collects, the proportion of French to English is much the same as in Chaucer's prose earlier, and as Addison was to write later. Lord Macaulay long ago contrasted our English prayers, compiled when our language was full of sap and vigour, with the older Latin forms translated by Cranmer, the work of an age of third-rate Latinity. Yet the Archbishop's work was held cheap by some of his flock. The stalwart peasantry of our Western shires, the men who rose against his system, called this new Prayer Book nothing but ‘a Christmas game.’
It is well known how great an influence Luther and Calvin have had upon their respective tongues; in like manner, one effect of the Reformation was to keep Eng­land steady to her old speech. As we have always had the voices of Tyndale and Cranmer ringing in our ears ​week after week for the last three Centuries, we have lost but few words since the time of these worthies; the most remarkable of our losses are bolled, daysman, to ear, silverling, and meteyard, found in parts of Scripture not much read. Hearne, writing 170 years later, mourned over the substitution of modern words for rede (con­silium) and behight (promisit), both used by Sternhold in his version of the Psalms, made in the days of Ed­ward VI. ‘Strange alterations,’ says the Antiquary, ‘all for the worse.’ On the other hand, we could have gladly spared out of the Bible such needless foreign words as affinity, artificer, champaign, choler, concupiscence, im­mutable, intelligence, magnifical, mollify, prognosticate, se­condarily, similitude, terrestrial, though they happily come but seldom. They stand in striking contrast to words like thank-worthy, stiff-necked, ringstraked, loving-kindness, yoke-fellow, undersetters, waterflood, well-spring, good-man, slaughter-weapon. We even find the old sith (quoniam), and steads (loca). The Old English grin (laqueus) was a word still common enough to be used in the Version of 1611, but already the Norse gin (first used in the Or­mulum) was encroaching on it; and the French engyne conveyed a kindred meaning. Shamefastness was printed in the right way; and this our writers and printers of ​1873 ought to restore forthwith. The English privative un comes often where we now use the Latin in. We find such old words as anon, chapman, halt, knap, let, list, neesing, trow, ward, wax, wot, still struggling for life. What fine old idioms we have preserved to us in well is thee, woe is me, woe worth the day, the gate opened of his own accord, the more part of them, do you to wit, to have an evil will at Zion, I was shapen, whether (uter) of the two, set them at one again! The phrase would God! which we owe to Manning in 1303, is a thoroughly English idiom, and is not sanctioned by the Hebrew. The Douay Bible has had a lot widely different from that of Tyndale's Version; already in 1583 Fulke was railing against the foreign work and its authors; he branded ‘affected novelties of terms, such as neither English nor Christian ears ever heard in the English tongue — scandal, prepuce, neophyte, depositum, gratis, parasceve, paraclete, exinanite, repropitiate, and a hundred such like ink horn terms.’ Fulke further on protests against azymes, schisms, zelators: ‘these and such other be wonders of words that wise men can give no good reason why they should be used.’ Why not talk of gazophilace and the encœnes? Fulke's book, reprinted by the Parker Society, should be in the hands of all philologers; it is to be wished that he could come to life ​and be clothed with fall power over the English press in our own day. Many a penny-a-lining quack would he yoke to the cart's tail.
It is well known that those who revised the English Bible in 1611 were bidden to keep as near as they could to the old versions, such as Tyndale's: this behest is one of the few good things that we owe to our Northern Solomon, the great inventor of kingcraft. The diction of the Bible seemed most archaic in the mouths of the Puritans in 1642, as their foes tell us; this could hardly have been the case had the version been a work of Bacon's time. The Book's influence upon all English-speaking men has been most astounding; the Koran alone can boast an equal share of reverence, spread far and wide. Of the English Bible's 6,000 words, only 250 are not in common use now; and almost all of these last are readily understood. Every good English writer has drawn finely upon the great Version: we know the skill with which Lord Macaulay and others interweave its homely, pithy diction with their prose. Even men who have left the English Church acknowledge that Rome herself cannot conjure away the old spell laid upon their minds by Tyndale's Bible. This book it is that affords the first lessons lisped by the English child at its mother's knee; this book it is that prompts the last words faltered by the English grey-beard on his death-bed. In this book we have found our strongest breakwater against the tides of silly novelties, ever ​threatening to swamp our speech. Tyndale stands in a far nearer relation to us than Dante stands to the Italians.
Among the East Midlanders who helped on the Re­formation were Cranmer, Latimer, and Foxe; Hall and Bunyan were to come later. English literature is so closely intertwined with English history and English religion that we are driven to ask, what would have been the future of our tongue, had the Reformation, the great event of this Sixteenth Century, been trampled down in our island? Our national character is nearer akin to that of Spain than to that of France; I fear, therefore, that had Rome won the day in England, our religion would have smacked more of Philip II. than of Cardinal Richelieu, more of grim bloody Ultramontanism than of the other and milder form of Romanism. We know how Cervantes felt himself shackled by the awful, overbearing Inquisition: English writers would have fared no better, but would have dragged on their lives in everlasting fear of spies, gaolers, racks, and stakes. Could Shakespere have breathed in such an air? Hardly so. Could Milton? Most assuredly not. Our mother tongue, thought unworthy to become the handmaid of religion, would have sunk (exinanited) into a Romance jargon, with few Teutonic words in it but pronouns, conjunctions, and such like.
Many Orders of the Roman Church have brought their influence to bear upon our speech. In the Seventh Century, the Benedictines gave us our first batch of Latin ware, the technical words employed by Western ​Christianity. In the Thirteenth Century, the Francis­cans, as I think, wrought great havock among our old words, and brought into vogue hundreds of French terms. In the Sixteenth Century, the Jesuits and their friends strove hard to set up a religious machinery of their own among us; happy was it for England that she turned away from their merchandise, so hated of old Fulke. These luckless followers of the Pope, as time wore on, found their English style as much disliked as their politics or their creed; glad were they in the days of James II. when so great a master as Dryden came to their help in controversy. Such evil words as proba­bilism and infallibilist were never to become common in English mouths.
The Reformation, among its other blessings, bound together those old foes England and Scotland by ties undreamt of in the days of Wolsey; it wrought a further change in the North country's speech. Tyndale's great work was smuggled from abroad into Scotland, as well as into England. A Scotch heretic on his trial in 1539, referred to his Testament, which he kept ready at hand; the accuser shouted, ‘Behold, Sirs, he has the book of heresy in his sleeve, that makes all the din and play in our Kirk!’ Tyndale, as I before showed, wrought for the good of England in more ways than one. John ​Knox was soundly rated by the other side for Anglicizing, not only in religion and politics, but also in his speech. Soon after 1600, Aytoun and Drummond wrote in the London dialect; Scotland, as she would have said her­self, had to ‘dree her weird.’ The false Southron was fast getting the upper hand by a new kind of warfare; the Lowland peasantry, among whom schools began to thrive, read the truths of religion enshrined in a dialect that would have jarred on the ears of John Bellenden or Gawain Douglas. To this day the Scotch minister in his sermons keeps as near as he can to the speech of Westminster and Oxford; though his flock, when in the field or at the hearth, cleave fast to their good old Northern tongue.
Thus the New Standard English, convoyed by the Reformation, made its way to the far North, and also into the Protestant settlements in Ireland; it soon after­wards crossed the Atlantic in the Pilgrim Fathers' ship. Tyndale's great work, beloved by all forms alike of English Protestantism, will for ever be a bond of fellow­ship between the seventy millions of the Angel cyn, whether they live on the Thames, the Potomac, the Kuruman, or the Murrumbidgee. Our tongue is like the Turk, who will bear no brothers near his throne; Irish and Welsh are dying out, as Cornish did long ago.
The great prose writers of the Sixteenth Century did much for the cause of sound English. Cheke, though writing some years after Tyndale's death, had a hanker­ing after Fifteenth Century words, and strove to keep ​alive againrising and againbirth. His pupil Ascham made head against the foreign rubbish, which ‘did make all thinges darke and hard.’ Wilson in 1550 branded the ‘strange ynkehorne terms’ of his day. One part of his criticism may be most earnestly recom­mended to the fine writers of our own time. ‘Some seke so farre for outlandishe Englishe, that thei for­gette altogether their mothers' language . . . . He that commeth lately out of France, will talke Frenche-En­glish, and never blush at the matter. The unlearned or foolishe phantasticall that smelles but of learnyng will so Latin their toungues that the simple cannot but wonder at their talke and thinke surely thei speake by some revelacion. I know them that thinke Rhetorique to stand whollie upon darke woordes, and he that can catche an ynke horne terme by the taile, hym thei coumpt to be a fine Englishman and a good Rheto­rician.’ In spite of all these drawbacks, Mulcaster wrote thus in 1583: ‘The English tung cannot prove fairer than it is at this day.’ He was a rash soothsayer, and little knew what was to be the literary history of the next thirty years.
I have dwelt much on Manning, Chaucer, and Caxton; but it was three Englishmen, writing within ninety years after 1525, who had the honour of settling the form of our speech for ever. I have spoken of Tyndale and Cran­mer; Shakespere, the employer of no fewer than 15,000 English words, was yet to come. It would be hopeless ​indeed for me to add aught to the praises so lavishly heaped upon the mighty Enchanter by all good judges both at home and abroad; be it enough to say that the lowest English clown who, wedged tight among his fellows in some barn, listens breathless to Lear's out­bursts or to Iago's whispers, is sharing in a feast such as never fell to the lot of either Pericles or Augustus, of Leo the Tenth or Louis the Fourteenth. In the last twelve years of Elizabeth's life, London had privileges far beyond any favours ever bestowed on Athens, Rome, Florence, Paris, or Weimar; the great Queen might have gathered together in one room Spenser, Shakespere, Bacon, and Hooker; to say nothing of her other guests, the statesmen who outwitted Rome, the seamen who singed the proud Spaniard's beard, the knights who fought so manfully for the good cause in Munster, in Normandy, and in Flanders. Nowhere does the spirit of that high-reaching age breathe stronger than in Spenser's verse; how widely apart stands his Protestant earnestness both from the loose godlessness of Ariosto, and from the burning Roman zeal of Tasso, that herald of the coming Papal reaction! A shout of triumph burst forth from England when the Faery Queen was given to her in 1590; our island had at last a great poet, such as she had not beheld for two centuries. Now began the golden age of her literature; and this age was to last for about fourscore years. Many a child that clapped its tiny hands over the earliest news of the ​Armada's wreck, and that saw Shakespere act in his own plays, must have lived long enough to read the greatest of all Milton's works.
The boyhood of such a child would witness a new corruption in English; the change of the old Neuter Genitive of he from his into its. This last comes not once in our Bible; but Shakespere sometimes has the unlucky new-fangled word. These corruptions com­monly begin with children, and are then passed up to women, and at length to men; in this way many of our Strong verbs have become Weak: in this very year 1873 I see a tendency in writers (who should know better) to change the participles sown and mown into sowed and mowed. Holpen has been replaced by helped, though the true form occurs in one of the oftenest-read parts of the Bible. But some old forms were hard of dying. In that first-rate little book on Ireland, printed by Sir John Davies in 1612, a book that may be called ‘Irish History in a nutshell,’ we find the Old English Genitive Plural of horse in the term mansmeate and horsemeat, two exactions that come under those evil words coigne and livery (page 174). In the same book we find sithence, I think for the last time. Two other Old English forms were now to drop out of men's speech; the old Genitive alre (omnium), used by Shakespere in the compound alderliefest; and the prefix to, our form of the Latin dis and the German zer. We read that a stone ‘all to-brake Abimelech's scull;’ and this Scriptural expression, oddly mangled by the printers, has puzzled many a man, woman, and child for the last two hundred years. The Version of ​1611 did much to fix our spelling; since that time little change has been made, except that we have got rid of the e tacked on to many a word in former days: this e was seldom pronounced after Spenser's time. A new set of words had cropped up about the time he began to write; we had turned the noun cross into a verb. The only de­rivative of this in the Bible is crossway, which comes but once. Aloof appears about the same time, a word due to the Norsemen. An uglier phrase was now coming on the stage; I mean, what is now the national oath of England. It is found twice or thrice in Shakespere, but had become common thirty years after his death.
Our tongue sometimes spins out of her own resources in a wonderful way: would that she did this oftener! The preposition þurh had long before given birth to the adjective thorough and the adverb thoroughly; a bold bad man was now to make immortal a noun substantive, borrowed from the adjective. Whatever philologers may say, the true Englishman will, in this case at least, be drawn to Langton's Charter, French word though it be, rather than to Strafford's Thorough, in spite of the new noun's Teutonic birth. So closely intertwined are English philology, politics, and religion, that it is hardly possible to keep them asunder. A subject of Strafford's in Ireland, Bishop Bedell, who came from East Anglia, was one of the last that wrote the good old sith for quo­niam, about the year 1630.
Among Strafford's stoutest foes stood the man, who was long afterwards to measure himself with Dante, and to match the Protestant Muse against the noblest creation of Roman Catholicism. Often has the ​resemblance between the Ghibelline and the Roundhead been pointed out; each, as it must be allowed, is seen at his best in the murkiness of Hell rather than in brighter climes. The learning of Milton, the deepest-read of all great poets, is well known; and critics have admired the skill with which he brings Latin words under his yoke in his Paradise Lost. For all that, were I to be asked for a short passage upon which to stake the fair fame of the English Muse, St. Peter's speech in Lycidas would be the specimen that I should choose. In that best of all patterns of Teutonic strength and pith, Milton throws away foreign gear and goes back to the middle of the Fourteenth Century; the proportion of Romance words in the passage is not greater than that employed by Minot, the bard who sang the feats of England at Cressy and Poitiers.
In Milton's time flourished Sir Thomas Browne, whose mantle long afterwards fell on Dr. Johnson, and who has therefore much to answer for as regards the corruption of English prose. It is strange to contrast Sir Thomas with another writer of his day, a tinker, who has written far better English than the learned knight, and who shows us our mother tongue in its homeliest guise, while giving us the loveliest of all Allegories. The common folk had the wit at once to see the worth of Bunyan's masterpiece, and the learned ​long afterwards followed in the wake of the common folk. Butler was now composing the riming couplets that are oftenest in our mouths. Our prose about this time was undergoing a great change; the stately march of Milton and Clarendon was no longer to be copied; En­glish conjunctions and forms compounded since 1300 were to undergo the pruning knife. For instance, we were no longer to write a certain man for quidam; a man, as in the oldest times, was quite enough. Cowley and Baxter about 1650 were the heralds of a new style, that was soon to be brought to further perfection by Dryden and Temple. About that year, 1650, our spelling was settled much as it is now. In 1661 our Prayer Book was revised; are was substituted for be in forty-three places. This was a great victory of the North over the South.
The earlier half of the Eighteenth Century was far more admirable in its English than the latter half. Defoe, Addison, Swift, and Pope are names worthy of all honour; and I could wish that no Latinized terms had been brought in since their day; at least, without good reason given. Compare Ockley, the lion's pro­vider, with Gibbon. Poetry was thriving; and in his Rape of the Lock, Pope beat the French on their own ground; the English Muse, forty-four years after bring­ing forth the Paradise Lost, showed that she could carve ​a face out of a cherry stone as well as hew a Colossus out of the rock. Dryden and Pope surpassed all mankind in the majestic art of reasoning in rime, and in the skill with which they wielded the keenest of weapons. One of the best passages in our literature is, where these two great poets are nicely weighed in the scales against each other by a kindred spirit.
Johnson has said, ‘Whoever wishes to attain an En­glish style, familiar but not coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his days and nights to the volumes of Addison.’ Would that the adviser had prac­tised what he preached! He was misled by Sir Thomas Browne, and he corrupted our tongue by bringing in out­landish stuff which would have moved the scorn of Swift, and from which our best writers have only of late shaken themselves free. Johnson was in his lifetime revered by a tasteless generation as the greatest of all masters of English; his disciples, more especially Gibbon, have still further Latinized our tongue. The Dictator, however, seems in his old age to have felt a lurking consciousness that he had gone too far; his last works show a far purer taste than those he wrote at forty. He now no more ‘depeditated obtunding anfractuosities;’ he was no longer the deep-mouthed Bœotian —
Thebes did his green, unknowing youth engage; He chooses Athens in his riper age.
with the vicious Latinisms that he penned. How forcible are his compounds, ‘an unclubbable man,’ ‘wretched unideaed girls!’ and his verb, ‘I downed him with this!’ While on the subject of Johnson, one cannot help regretting that neither he nor his friends ever knew of the kinsmanship between the tongues of Southern Asia and Europe. Had the great discovery been made thirty years earlier than it was, he and Burke would have found a safer topic for debate than the Rock­ingham ministry. How heartily would those lordly minds have welcomed the wondrous revelation, that almost all mankind, dwelling between the Ganges and the Shannon, were linked together by the most binding of ties! How warmly would the sages have glowed with wrath or with love, far more warmly than ever before, when talking of Omichund and Nuncomar, of the Corsican patriot and the Laird of Coll! From how many blunders in philology would shrewd Parson Horne have been kept! No such banquet had ever been set before the wise, since the Greeks, four hundred years earlier, unfolded their lore first to the Italians, and then to the rougher Trans­alpines. It was not in vain that the new lords of Hin­dostan induced the Brahmins to throw open what had been of yore so carefully kept under lock and key. But the main credit of the new feast must be given to others; if the English brought home the game, it was the Ger­mans who cooked it.
About the time that the aforesaid discovery was made, the English Muse was once more soaring on high. Her happiest efforts have mostly been made at the moment ​when English knights have been winning their spurs abroad; and this remark is as true of Wellington's time as of the days of the Black Prince or Raleigh. Nine or ten English writers, who are likely to live for ever, were at work soon after 1800. Scott rose aloft above his brethren; but he was dethroned in his own lifetime (never had such a thing been known in our literature) by a greater bard than himself. Byron had the good taste to tread in the path followed by his Northern rival; both of them in their diction set the simplicity of the early part of the Fourteenth Century above all the gewgaws of certain later ages. Now it was that such words as losel and leech awoke after a long sleep. Bishop Percy, though Dr. Johnson laughed, had already led the English back to old wells, streams purer than any known to Pope. Burns had written in his own dialect verses that were prized by the high and the low alike. Coleridge's great ballad betokened that the public taste was veering round; he also turned the eyes of England to the vast intellectual wealth that was now being poured into the lap of Germany. All the different nations of Europe had come to know each other better. Voltaire had many years earlier told his countrymen that an old Warwickshire barbarian had lived, whose works contained grains of gold overlaid with much rubbish; something might have been made of the man, had he lived at Paris at the right time and formed himself upon Racine, or better still, upon Monsieur Arouet. Somewhat later, Schiller and Manzoni alike felt the English spell.
Ireland as well as her sister came under the new ​influence. Moore, when arranging his Celtic gems in a new setting, worked in the best Teutonic style. In our own day, Mr. Aubrey de Vere, in his Legends of St. Pa­trick, has shown an equally pure taste. Thanks to the poetry of Burns and to the prose of Scott, the fine gentle­men of London and Oxford began to see what pith and harmony were lurking in the good old English of the North: would that every one of our shires likewise had its laureate! But Scott's romances, the wholesomest of all food for the mind, have, borne fruit; we have in our own day seen many attempts, like those of Mr. Barnes in Dorset, to bring the various dialects of England (they are more akin to Middle English than to New English) before the reading public. How many good old words, dropped by our literature since 1500, might be recovered from these sources! If our English Makers set them­selves earnestly to the task (they have already made a beginning), there is good hope that our grandchildren may freely use scores of Chaucer's words that we our­selves are driven to call obsolete. Lockhart, Macaulay, Davis, and Browning have done yeoman's service, in reviving the old English ballad.
Prose has followed in Poetry's wake. No good au­thors of our time, writing on a subject that is not highly scientific, would dream of abusing language as Gibbon ​did, when he cleverly in many passages elbowed out al­most all Teutonic words, except such as his, to, of, and the like. Cobbett roused us from foreign pedantry; and if we do not always reach Tyndale's bountiful pro­portion of Teutonic words in his political tracts, we at least do not fall below the proportion employed by Addison. In proof of this, let any one contrast the diction of our modern English writers on Charles V. with the Latinized style wherein Dr. Robertson revels when handling the same subject. That fine passage, in which Mr. Froude sets before us the Armada leaving the Spanish shore, would have been altogether beyond Hume a hundred years ago. Mr. Carlyle has had many dis­ciples, whose awkward efforts to conjure with his wand are most laughable; but one good result at least has followed — the stern rugged Teutonism of the teacher is copied by those who ape him.
It is amusing to look back upon what was thought sound English criticism barely forty years ago. In a sharp attack on Dr. Monk's Life of Bentley, the Edin­burgh Reviewer of July, 1830, lifts up his voice against such vulgar forms as hereby, wherein, hereupon, caught up, his bolt was shot, fling away his credit, a batch of fragments, it lay a bleeding. I know not whether Dr. Monk could have explained the a in the last phrase; but it seems pretty certain that he was one of the pioneers who brought us back to a homelier style or English. Most men in our time would allow, that a ​writer of prose may go so far back as Tyndale, a writer of poetry so far back as Chaucer, in employing old words; this rule would have jarred upon the mawkish Reviewer's feelings. I once saw it laid down in an old-fashioned book of good manners, that it was vulgar to say, ‘I would as lieve do it.’ For all that, let each of our English writers, who has a well-grounded hope that he will be read a hundred years hence, set himself heart and soul to revive at least one long-neglected English word. It may be readily allowed that an imitation of the French Academy on our shores would never come to any good; still a combination of our crack writers to effect much-needed reforms in spelling and word-building would lend fresh lustre to Queen Victoria's reign. More ought to be done by men who have some idea of the Old English grammar, than was done by Gibbon and Robertson.
The change from Latinism back to Teutonism may be seen in speaking as well as in writing. Whatever we may think of Mr. Gladstone's Irish University Bill in 1873, none can gainsay that the last few sentences of his great speech, uttered the moment before his defeat, were a masterpiece of wholesome English. But of all our Parliament men, none in our day has employed a racier diction than Mr. Bright. He has clearly bor­rowed much from the great Sixteenth Century; he sometimes seems to be kindled with the fire of one of those Hebrew prophets, whom Tyndale and his friends loved to translate into the soundest of English. Pitt the elder, as we hear, knew nothing well but the Faery Queen; Pitt the younger took for his pattern the great ​speeches in the First Book of Paradise Lost: Mr. Bright has gone still further back in search of a model. There is nothing pleasanter in our literature than the fond reverence with which each man, who is worth aught, looks back to the great spirits that went before.
Mr. Tennyson, a countryman of Robert Manning's and a careful student of old Mallory, has done much for the revival of pure English among us; not the least happy of his efforts has been the death-bed musings of his Northern Farmer. Further strides in the right direction have been made by Mr. Morris. The Earthly Paradise, more than any poem of late years that I know, takes us back to 1290 or thereabouts, and shows us how copious, in skilful hands, an almost purely Teutonic diction may be. It is hopeless to attempt the recovery of the English swept away in the Thirteenth Century; but Mr. Morris, in many places, cuts down his proportion of French words to the scale which Chaucer's grandfather would have used, had that worthy, when young, essayed to make his mark in literature. It may be said of Mr. Morris as of Spenser, ‘he hath labored to restore as to their rightful heritage such good and naturall English words as have been long time out of use, and almost cleane disherited.’ So swiftly are we speeding along the right path, that ere many years we may even come to take a hearty general interest in our old title-deeds that ​still lie unprinted. We may see the subscribers to the Early English Text Society reckoned, not by hundreds, but by thousands. Our German and Scandinavian kins­folk will then no longer twit us with our carelessness of the hoard so dearly prized abroad; like them, we shall purge our language of needless foreign frippery, and shall reverence the good Teutonic masonry where­with our forefathers built.
TABLE OF DATES BEARING ON ENGLISH LITERATURE.
| Fifth Century | The Saxon settlement in South Britain. |
| Sixth Century | The establishment of the Anglian kingdom in North Britain. |
| Seventh Century | The earliest written specimen of Northern English. |
| Eighth Century | The earliest written specimen of Southern English. |
| Ninth Century | The great Danish settlement in the North and East of England. |
| Tenth Century | The Court of the Southern English Kings becomes the central point for all the land. |
| Eleventh Century | The French Conquest. Loss of the Old English Court at Winches­ter, and of Old English poetic words. |
| Twelfth Century | Break-up of the Old English gram­mar; a variety of dialects pre­vail for two centuries, with no fixed standard. |
| Thirteenth Century | Loss of thousands of Old English words, which are slowly re­placedby French words. |
| Fourteenth Century | The New English, or Dano-Anglian, which had long been forming, gains possession of Lon­don and Oxford, and is spoken at Court. |
| Fifteenth Century | The Printing-press fixes the lan­guage, which had lost nearly all its inflections. |
| Sixteenth Century | The Reformation brings Standard English home to all men, and imports many Latin words. |
| Seventeenth Century | The Golden age of English Litera­ture. It began, indeed, ten years before this Century. |
| Eighteenth Century | A Latinized style prevails. |
| Nineteenth Century | Reaction from Latinism to Teuton­ism, at least in our good writers. Long may it last! |
* ↑ He says that Devonshire best preserved King Alfred's speech.
* ↑ He there saw the future King Robert I. of Scotland, and his brother. Seepage 202 of this book.
* ↑ Why has not this work been printed long ago?
* ↑ The poet of 1220 (Old English Miscellany, p. 77) goes over all the classes of society, and pronounces that the bonde (colonus) has the best chance of escaping the grip of ‘Satanas the olde.’
* ↑ Robert might have found the same phænomenon in parts of Hungary. I have quoted his words at page 206.
* ↑ Garnett's Essays, p. 192; swylke, alane, and sall are changed into suche, allone, and shalle; and other words in the same way. þ is here corrupted into y; yat stands for þat. Many still write y$^e$ for the.
* ↑ See Page 205.
* ↑ The Southerner, on entering Leeds, still reads the old Northern names of Kirkgate and Briggate on two great thoroughfares. May the Leeds magistrates have more wit than those of Edinburgh, whom Scott upbraids for affectation in substituting the modern Square for the ancient Close!
* ↑ Audlay, the blind Salopian of 1420, has a mixture of Southern and Midland forms.
* ↑ We there see the true old Wessex sound of ea.
* ↑ Warton gives the Wardrobe Account, in Latin, with Edward's directions for his devices. — History of English Poetry, II. 32. (Edition of 1840.)
* ↑ It must have been confounded with the Norse harfr.
* ↑ Chaucer turned this into ilent, our lent.
* ↑ It is found under the form of ho-besteʓ, in the Lancashire poem quoted at page 204.
* ↑ In this last line, we have the first use of our foreign very (valdè), which appears next in Yorkshire letters of 1450; it was a long time making its way to London, though Chaucer uses it as an adjective. In the above poem we meet the expression ‘reule the roste.’
* ↑ I have given a specimen of this at page 208.
* ↑ See Halliwell's edition of it, published in 1866.
* ↑ Thornton Romances (Camden Society), p. xx.
* ↑ The Editors of Wickliffe's Bible give specimens of many of these treatises.
* ↑ This most popular work (about 1290) exists both in Northern and other forms of English.
* ↑ This first brought in the Greek ending ize, of which we have become so fond. What a mongrel word is proctorize!
* ↑ Wickliffite Versions (Forshall and Madden), p. 59.
* ↑ Blunt's Key to the Prayer Book, Edition of 1868, page 4. The first piece seems to be East Anglian.
* ↑ Here we see the Southern sustren, the Midland beon, and the Northern bes.
* ↑ This Prelate, in 1361, began the choir of York Minster.
* ↑ Arber's Reprint of Rede me and be nott wrothe, page 176. In page 157 will be found a Fifteenth Century pun: the endowing of the clergy should be called ‘all amiss,’ rather than ‘almes.’
* ↑ Garnett's Essays, p. 32.
* ↑ I remember in Somerset a yoke of oxen called Good Luck and Fortune.
* ↑ Gairdner's edition of the Paston Letters (in 1872), page 31.
* ↑ Do., page 121.
* ↑ Gairdner's edition of the Paston Letters (in 1872), page 7.
* ↑ Do., p. 40.
* ↑ Do., pp. 15, 17, 493.
* ↑ Shillingford's Letters (Camden Society), pp. 17, 18.
* ↑ Pecock's Repressor, whence I quote, was published by the Master of the Rolls. I give a long passage from it in my Appendix.
* ↑ When we want a new adjective, we almost always compound with this foreign able. Dr. Johnson spoke of an unclubbable man; we speak of a thing as uncomeatable, when it is inaccessible.
* ↑ Archæologia, XXIX. 326.
* ↑ England was, as a general rule, very different from France; the prose of Molière and Voltaire is far above their poetry, and no rim­ing Frenchman has come near Bossuet or Pascal.
* ↑ If we must subdivide New English prose, the decisive periods seem to be 1470, when many inflections were dropped by Caxton; 1650, when Cowley and Baxter began to write; 1740, when Johnson was becoming known; 1800, when Cobbett was making his mark.
* ↑ Chaucer talks of ‘a verray parfit gentil knight,’ but here the verray is an adjective.
* ↑ I have ventured on writing rime instead of rhyme; but I must leave to bolder men to write hole instead of whole, coud instead of could.
* ↑ Plumpton Letters (Camden Society), LIV., LXXVII. 1, 11, 233.
* ↑ Percy Society, No. 47. The Sir, applied to a priest, lasted two hundred years, down to Sir Hugh Evans.
* ↑ All inflections are here clipped, much as they are in 1878. The letter is in Gairdner's Paston Letters, I. cxi.
* ↑ Do., I. 298, (here the word adoo (negotium) comes; 325, lxxvii. The rightful g is here beginning to replace the usurping y.
* ↑ Mr. Earle tells us (Philology of the English Tongue, p. 97) that ‘a French family settled in England and edited the English lan­guage;’ he means the Plantagenets. I suspect that the Queen's English owes more to a Lincolnshire monk, on whom I have bestowed some pains, than to all our Kings put together who have reigned since the year 901.
* ↑ See Knight's Life of Caxton. The Recuyell, and some of Caxton's later works, are exposed to view in a case at the British Museum.
* ↑ See York's long State Paper in Gairdner's Paston Letters, lxxvii. He used the Northern Genitive bother (amborum), a very late instance. — Archæologia, XXIX. 132.
* ↑ It is wonderful that the Norse thrive and the French flourish between them drove out the Old English theon; for the expletive ‘so mote I the!’ lasted down to 1500, and is found in many a ballad.
* ↑ Higden's Polychronicon (Master of the Rolls), page 63. The her and hem, rejected by Caxton, still kept their ground in 1482, as we see in the Revelation of the Monk of Evesham, printed by De Machlinia; it is one of Arber's reprints.
* ↑ Mr. Demaus has lately written his life. Tyndale in prison wrote a letter, still extant, beseeching his Flemish gaolers to let him have his Hebrew books — the ruling passion strong in death. Of all our great writers, he is the one about whom most mistakes have been made by later enquirers.
* ↑ A scribe in the Daily Telegraph, July 14, 1873, speaks thus, in a leader on the Duke of Edinburgh: ‘He ranks next in geniture to the heir of our throne.’ Hoc fonte derivata clades, &c.
* ↑ See p. 145 of the present work.
* ↑ This is the form taken by the word in old Worcester charters drawn up seven hundred years before Tyndale wrote.
* ↑ Dasent, Jest and Earnest, ii. 63.
* ↑ This is pronounced yarbs in America, as we see in Cooper; and Tyndale wrote it yerbes.
* ↑ King Alfred and Tyndale are alike in this, that three-fourths of their ‘weighty words’ are Teutonic, such as can be now understood; but as to the other fourth, Alfred's Teutonic has been replaced by the French and Latin that Tyndale was driven to use, owing to the heedlessness of the Thirteenth Century.
* ↑ A corrupt religion will corrupt its technical terms. One of the most curious instances of the degradation of a word is St. Jerome's pœnitentia, an act of the mind, which he uses of God Himself; this word in Italy (penitenza) now means no more than some bodily act of atonement for sin. This is as great a drop as when we find virtus and virtu expressing widely different things; the one suits Camillus, the other Cellini. Coverdale, who translated the New Testament ten years after Tyndale had done it, sometimes turns metanoia into penance, one of the many faults of his version. Words, like coins, get worn away by the wear and tear of ages.
* ↑ Anderson's Annals of the English Bible, ii. 151.
* ↑ Tyndale went wrong in using worship to translate many widely different Greek words. We have now almost lost the true sense of that good old verb. I have heard men find fault with that clause of the Marriage Service, ‘with my body I thee worship;’ of old, this verb meant nothing more but ‘to honour.’
* ↑ Mr. Marsh has pointed out More's rebuke to Tyndale for using yea and nay improperly.
* ↑ So called by Johnston, Professor at St. Andrews in 1593. Anderson's Annals of the English Bible, ii. 486. I wish that the Parker Society had published Tyndale's works in his own spelling.
* ↑ Here we have the old Southern form of the Plural of the Verb; it is not often found after Tyndale's day.
* ↑ See Arber's Reprint of Rede me and be nott wrothe.
* ↑ Pecock assigns more than one meaning to Religion in his Re­pressor.
* ↑ Plumpton Correspondence, p. 233 (Camden Society).
* ↑ Hearne's Robert of Gloucester, ii. 584. The old spelling has been partly changed.
* ↑ Compare the prayers of Cranmer's compilation with those now and then put forth by authority in our own time. The art of com­piling prayers seems to be lost.
* ↑ We English abound in terms for this passion. Wrath and ire came over with Hengist; the Danes brought anger; the French gave us rage and fury; the Latin supplied indignation; the Greek choler. We further conferred this sense on passion.
* ↑ Habergeon and brigandine are relics of Sixteenth Century war­fare. By the bye, what would the old bowmen, who decided so many fields between Hastings and Pinkie, have said to our monstrous word toxophilite?
* ↑ This sense of more (major) lingers in our ‘more's the pity.’
* ↑ I have been guided here by Eastwood and Wright. May the Revisors of 1873 hold fast to the Teutonic element in our Version, whatever else they do!
* ↑ Fancy such words as exinanite and repropitiate being read out in our parish churches! Dî meliora piis erroremque hostibus illum!
* ↑ I take from Marsh my statistics as to the words of the Bible. The French have no need to go so far back as the Constable Bourbon's time for the standard of their tongue.
* ↑ Dryden came from the same district.
* ↑ There are but two or three Latin words in our tongue, brought hither before Augustine's time.
* ↑ ‘Hout, Monkbarns, dinna set your wit against a bairn!’ says Edie Ochiltree. This sentence might be applied to Stillingfleet, when we consider the men pitted against him. Dryden says that it was the great Anglican divines who taught him how to write English.
* ↑ Anderson's Annals of the English Bible, ii, 501.
* ↑ In like manner, Luther's speech is used in the pulpit among the Low Germans of the Baltic.
* ↑ The Art of Rhetorique, written by Wilson, about 1550. Can he have had a prophetic glimpse of the Daily Telegraph of 1873?
* ↑ Marsh, Lectures on the English Language, p. 51.
* ↑ The last Act of Othello is a rare specimen of Shakespere's diction; of every five nouns, verbs, and adverbs, four are Teutonic. Of course he is far more Teutonic in comedy than in tragedy.
* ↑ We still keep old Genitives Singular in hell fire, Lady day.
* ↑ It is curious that coarse and mean passages may be found in such sublime writers as Æschylus, Dante, and Milton, those kindred souls.
* ↑ In the Paradise Lost, the proportion of Romance to Teutonic is just double what it is in the Allegro.
* ↑ The most uncouth English spelling ever known was in the letters of the time of Henry VIII. Rather later, the spelling of Topcliffe, the Elizabethan persecutor of Roman Catholics, is something astounding.
* ↑ Earle, Philology of the English Tongue, p. 478.
* ↑ Of course, I use nicely neither in the sense of 1303, nor in that of 1873.
* ↑ Tendimus in Latium is a bad watchword for England, whether in religion, in architecture, or in philology.
* ↑ Dr. M'Crie, in an early page of his attack on Scott's Old Mortality, says of Guy Mannering: ‘We are persuaded not one word in three is understood by the generality of (English) readers.’ The Quarterly Review, vol. xv. p. 139, was so astoundingly ignorant as to call that novel, ‘a dark dialect of Anglified Erse.’ Surely there must be a great difference between readers in 1815 and in 1873.
* ↑ See my Tables at page 255.
* ↑ I grieve to say that he is guilty of ‘on the tapis;’ a vulgarism more suited to a schoolgirl than to a scholar.
* ↑ Our modern poets may take for their watchword the sentence wherein Dante (De vulgari Eloquio) praises the Italian poets who went before him: ‘The illustrious heroes, Frederick Cæsar and his noble son Manfred, followed after elegance and scorned what was mean.’
* ↑ The Secretary of the Society is G. Joachim, Esq., St. Andrew House, Change Alley, London. I wish they would print more works written before 1400, and fewer works written after that year.