University of Virginia Library

04. CHAPTER IV
THE DIALECTS OF NORTHUMBRIA; A.D. 1300-1400

A little before 1300, we come to a Metrical English Psalter, published by the Surtees Society in 1843-7. The language is supposed to represent the speech of Yorkshire. It is translated (rather closely) from the Latin Vulgate version. I give a specimen from Psalm xviii, 14-20.

The literal sense is:--"He sent His arrows and scattered them; multiplied (His) lightning and so afflicted them. And the wells of waters were shown, and the foundations of the earthly world are uncovered because of Thy snubbing (rebuke), O my Lord! because of the blast (Lat. inspiratio) of the breath of Thy wrath. He sent from on high, and took me up; from many waters He took me. He took me out there-among from my foes that were so strong, and from those that alway hated me; for they were strengthened together over me. They came before me in the day of affliction, and the Lord is made my protection. And He led me (so as) to be in a broad place; He made me safe, because He desired (lit. would) me; and the Lord shall requite me according to all my righteousness, and according to the cleanness of my hands shall He repay me in the end."

In this specimen we can already discern some of the chief characteristics which are so conspicuous in Lowland Scotch MSS. of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The most striking is the almost total loss of the final -e which is so frequently required to form an extra syllable when we try to scan the poetry of

Chaucer. Even where a final -e is written in the above extract, it is wholly silent. The words ware (were), are (are), myne, thine, toke, made, brede, hende, ende, are all monosyllabic; and in fact the large number of monosyllabic words is very striking. The words onesprute, forcome, foryhelde are, in like manner, dissyllabic. The only suffixes that count in the scansion are -en, -ed, and -es; as in sam-en, skat'r-èd, drev-èd, hat-èd, etc., and arw-ès, well-ès, watr-ès, etc. The curious form sal, for "shall," is a Northern characteristic. So also is the form hende as the plural of "hand"; the Southern plural was often hond-en, and the Midland form was hond-ès or hand-ès. Note also the characteristic long a; as in swa for swo, so; gast, ghost; fra, fro; faas, foes. It was pronounced like the a in father.

A much longer specimen of the Metrical English Psalter will be found in Specimens of Early English, ed. Morris and Skeat, Part II, pp. 23-34, and is easily accessible. In the same volume, the Specimens numbered VII, VIII, X, XI, and XVI are also in Northumbrian, and can easily be examined. It will therefore suffice to give a very brief account of each.

VII. Cursor Mundi, or Cursor o Werld, i.e. Over-runner of the World; so called because it rehearses a great part of the world's history, from the creation onwards. It is a poem of portentous length, extending

to 29,655 lines, and recounts many of the events found in the Old and New Testaments, with the addition of legends from many other sources, one of them, for example, being the Historia Scholastica of Peter Comestor. Dr Murray thinks it may have been written in the neighbourhood of Durham. The specimen given (pp. 69-82) corresponds to lines 11373-11796.

VIII. Sunday Homilies in Verse; about 1330. The extracts are taken from English Metrical Homilies, edited by J. Small (Edinburgh, 1862) from a MS. in Edinburgh. The Northern dialect is well marked, but I do not know to what locality to assign it.

X. Richard Rolle, of Hampole, near Doncaster, wrote a poem called The Prick of Conscience, about 1340. It extends to 9624 lines, and was edited by Dr Morris for the Philological Society in 1863. The Preface to this edition is of especial value, as it carefully describes the characteristics of Northumbrian, and practically laid the foundation of our knowledge of the old dialects as exhibited in MSS. Lists are given of orthographical differences between the Northern dialect and others, and an analysis is added giving the grammatical details which determine its Northern character. Much of this information is repeated in the Introduction to the Specimens of English, Part II, pp. xviii-xxxviii.

XI. The Poems of Laurence Minot belong to the middle of the fourteenth century. He composed eleven poems in celebration of events that occurred between the years 1333 and 1352. They were first printed by Ritson in 1795; and subsequently by T. Wright, in his Political Poems and Songs (London, 1859); and are now very accessible in the excellent and cheap (second) edition by Joseph Hall (Oxford University Press). There is also a German edition by Dr Wilhelm Scholle. The poet seems to have been connected with Yorkshire, and the dialect is not purely Northern, as it shows a slight admixture of Midland forms.

XVI. The Bruce; by John Barbour; partly written in 1375. It has been frequently printed, viz. in 1616, 1620, 1670, 1672, 1715, 1737, and 1758; and was edited by Pinkerton in 1790, by Jamieson in 1820, and by Cosmo Innes in 1866; also by myself (for the Early English Text Society) in 1870-89; and again (for the Scottish Text Society) in 1893-5. Unfortunately, the two extant MSS. were both written out about a century after the date of composition. Nevertheless, we have the text of more than 260 lines as it existed in 1440, as this portion was quoted by Andro of Wyntown, in his Cronykil of Scotland, written at that date. I quote some lines from this portion, taken from The Bruce, Book i, 37-56, 91-110; with a few explanations in the footnotes.

In this extract, as in that from the Metrical Psalter above, there is a striking preponderance of monosyllables, and, as in that case also, the final -e is invariably silent in such words as oure, stere, lede, yhere, thare, were, etc., just as in modern English. The grammar is, for the most part, extremely simple, as at the present day. The chief difficulty lies in the vocabulary, which contains some words that are either obsolete or provincial. Many of the obsolete words are found in other dialects; thus stere, to control, perfay, fonden (for fanden), chesen, to choose, feloun, adj. meaning "angry," take kepe, soiourne, to tarry, travaile, to labour, parage, rank, all occur in Chaucer; barnage, reauté, in William of Palerne (in the Midland dialect, possibly Shropshire); oughte, owned, possessed, tyne, to lose, in Piers the Plowman; umbethinken,

in the Ormulum; enkerly (for inkkyrly), in the alliterative Morte Arthure; march, to border upon, in Mandeville; seignorie, in Robert of Gloucester. Barbour is rather fond of introducing French words; rybalddale occurs in no other author. Threllage or thryllage may have been coined from threll (English thrall), by adding a French suffix. As to the difficult word nyt, see Nite in the N.E.D.

In addition to the poems, etc., already mentioned, further material may be found in the prose works of Richard Rolle of Hampole, especially his translation and exposition of the Psalter, edited by the Rev. H.R. Bramley (Oxford, 1884), and the Prose Treatises edited by the Rev. G.G. Perry for the Early English Text Society. Dr Murray further calls attention to the Early Scottish Laws, of which the vernacular translations partly belong to the fourteenth century.

I have now mentioned the chief authorities for the study of the Northern dialect from early times down to 1400. Examination of them leads directly to a result but little known, and one that is in direct contradiction to general uninstructed opinion; namely that, down to this date, the varieties of Northumbrian are much fewer and slighter than they afterwards became, and that the written documents are practically all in one and the same dialect, or very nearly so, from the Humber as far north as Aberdeen. The irrefragable results noted by Dr Murray will

probably come as a surprise to many, though they have now been before the public for more than forty years. The Durham dialect of the Cursor Mundi and the Aberdeen Scotch of Barbour are hardly distinguishable by grammatical or orthographical tests; and both bear a remarkable resemblance to the Yorkshire dialect as found in Hampole. What is now called Lowland Scotch is so nearly descended from the Old Northumbrian that the latter was invariably called "Ingliss" by the writers who employed it; and they reserved the name of "Scottish" to designate Gaelic or Erse, the tongue of the original "Scots," who gave their name to the country. Barbour (Bruce, IV 253) calls his own language "Ynglis." Andro of Wyntown does the same, near the beginning of the Prologue to his Cronykil. The most striking case is that of Harry the Minstrel, who was so opposed to all Englanders, from a political point of view, that his whole poem breathes fury and hatred against them; and yet, in describing Wallace's French friend, Longueville, who knew no tongue but his own, he says of him (Wallace, IX 295-7):

Later still, Dunbar, near the conclusion of his Golden Targe, apostrophises Chaucer as being "in oure Tong

ane flouir imperiall," and says that he was "of oure Inglisch all the lycht." It was not till 1513 that Gawain Douglas, in the Prologue to the first book of his translation of Virgil, claimed to have "writtin in the langage of Scottis natioun"; though Sir David Lyndesay, writing twenty-two years later, still gives the name of the "Inglisch toung" to the vulgar tongue of Scotland, in his Satyre of the three Estaitis.

We should particularly notice Dr Murray's statement, in his essay on The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland, at p. 29, that "Barbour at Aberdeen, and Richard Rolle de Hampole near Doncaster, wrote for their several countrymen in the same identical dialect." The division between the English of the Scottish Lowlands and the English of Yorkshire was purely political, having no reference to race or speech, but solely to locality; and yet, as Dr Murray remarks, the struggle for supremacy "made every one either an Englishman or a Scotchman, and made English and Scotch names of division and bitter enmity." So strong, indeed, was the division thus created that it has continued to the present day; and it would be very difficult even now to convince a native of the Scottish Lowlands--unless he is a philologist--that he is likely to be of Anglian descent, and to have a better title to be called an "Englishman" than a native of Hampshire or Devon, who, after all, may be only a Saxon. And of course it is

easy enough to show how widely the old "Northern" dialect varies from the difficult Southern English found in the Kentish Ayenbite of Inwyt, or even from the Midland of Chaucer's poems.

To quote from Dr Murray once more (p. 41):

"the facts are still far from being generally known, and I have repeatedly been amused, on reading passages from Cursor Mundi and Hampole to men of education, both English and Scotch, to hear them all pronounce the dialect 'Old Scotch.' Great has been the surprise of the latter especially on being told that Richard the Hermit [i.e. of Hampole] wrote in the extreme south of Yorkshire, within a few miles of a locality so thoroughly English as Sherwood Forest, with its memories of Robin Hood. Such is the difficulty which people have in separating the natural and ethnological relations in which national names originate from the accidental values which they acquire through political complications and the fortunes of crowns and dynasties, that oftener than once the protest has been made-- 'Then he must have been a Scotchman settled there!'"

The retort is obvious enough, that Barbour and Henry the Minstrel and Dunbar and Lyndesay have all recorded that their native language was "Inglis" or "Inglisch"; and it is interesting to note that, having regard to the pronunciation, they seem to have known, better than we do, how that name ought to be spelt.