University of Virginia Library

07. CHAPTER VII
THE SOUTHERN DIALECT OF KENT

Though the Kentish dialect properly belongs to Southern English, from its position to the south of the Thames, yet it shows certain peculiarities which make it desirable to consider it apart from the rest.

In Beda's Ecclesiastical History, Bk I, ch. 15, he says of the Teutonic invaders: "Those who came over were of the three most powerful nations of Germany--Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. From the Jutes are descended the people of Kent, and of the Isle of Wight, and those also in the province of the West-Saxons who are to this day called Jutes, seated opposite to the Isle of Wight"; a remark which obviously implies the southern part of Hampshire. This suggests that the speech of Kent, from the very first, had peculiarities of its own. Dr Sweet, in his Second Anglo-Saxon Reader, Archaic and Dialectal, gives five very brief Kentish charters of the seventh and eighth centuries, but the texts are in Latin, and only the names of persons and places appear in Kentish forms. In the ninth century, however, there

are seven Kentish charters, of a fuller description, from the year 805 to 837. In one of these, dated 835, a few lines occur that may be quoted:

Ic bidde and bebeode swælc monn se thæt min lond hebbe thæt he ælce gere agefe them higum æt Folcanstane l. ambra maltes, and vi. ambra gruta, and iii. wega spices and ceses, and cccc. hlafa, and an hrithr, and vi. scep.... Thæm higum et Cristes cirican of thæm londe et Cealflocan: thæt is thonne thritig ombra alath, and threo hund hlafa, theara bith fiftig hwitehlafa, an weg spices and ceses, an ald hrithr, feower wedras, an suin oththe sex wedras, sex gosfuglas, ten hennfuglas, thritig teapera, gif hit wintres deg sie, sester fulne huniges, sester fulne butran, sester fulne saltes.

That is to say:

I ask and command, whosoever may have my land, that he every year give to the domestics at Folkestone fifty measures of malt, and six measures of meal, and three weys [heavy weights] of bacon and cheese, and four hundred loaves, and one rother [ox], and six sheep.... To the domestics at Christ's church, from the land at Challock: that is, then, thirty vessels of ale, and three hundred loaves, of which fifty shall be white loaves, one wey of bacon and cheese, one old rother, four wethers, one swine or six wethers, six goose-fowls, ten hen-fowls, thirty tapers, if it be a day in winter, a jar full of honey, a jar full of butter, and a jar full of salt.

At pp. 152-175 of the same volume, Dr Sweet gives 1204 Kentish glosses of a very early date. No. 268 is: "Cardines, hearran"; and in several modern dialects, including Hampshire, the upright part of a gate to which the hinges are fastened is called a harr.

Several years ago, M. Paul Mayer found five short sermons in a Kentish dialect in MS. Laud 471, in the Bodleian Library, along with their French originals. They are printed in Morris's Old English Miscellany, and two of them will be found in Specimens of Early English, Part I, p. 141. The former of these is for the Epiphany, the text being taken from Matt. ii 1. The date is just before 1250. I give an extract.

The kinges hem wenten and hi seghen the sterre thet yede bifore hem, alwat hi kam over tho huse war ure loverd was; and alswo hi hedden i-fonden ure loverd, swo hin an-urede, and him offrede hire offrendes, gold, and stor, and mirre. Tho nicht efter thet aperede an ongel of hevene in here slepe ine metinge, and hem seide and het, thet hi ne solde ayen wende be herodes, ac be an other weye wende into hire londes.

That is:

The kings went (them), and they saw the star that went before them until it came over the house where our Lord was; and as-soon-as they had found our Lord, so (they) honoured him, and offered him their offerings, gold, and frankincense, and myrrh. The night after that (there) appeared an angel from heaven in their sleep, in a dream, and said to-them and commanded, that they should not wend again near Herod, but by another way wend to their lands.

In the days of Edward II (1307-27) flourished William of Shoreham, named from Shoreham (Kent), near Otford and Sevenoaks, who was appointed vicar of Chart-Sutton in 1320. He translated the Psalter

into English prose, and wrote some religious poems, chiefly relating to church-services, which were edited by T. Wright for the Percy Society in 1849. His poem "On Baptism" is printed in Specimens of Early English, Part II. I give an extract:

In the year 1340, Dan Michel of Northgate (Kent) translated into English a French treatise on Vices and Virtues, under the title The Ayenbite of Inwyt, literally, "The Again-biting of In-wit," i.e. Remorse of Conscience. This is the best specimen of the Kentish dialect of the fourteenth century, and is

remarkable for being much more difficult to make out than other pieces of the same period. The whole work was edited by Dr Morris for the Early English Text Society in 1866. A sermon of the same date and in the same dialect, and probably by the same author, is given in Specimens of Early English, Part II. The sermon is followed by the Lord's Prayer, the Ave Maria, and the "Credo" or Apostles' Creed, all in the same dialect; and I here give the last of these, as being not difficult to follow:

Ich leve ine God, Vader almighti, makere of hevene and of erthe. And ine Iesu Crist, His zone onlepi [only son], oure lhord, thet y-kend [conceived] is of the Holy Gost, y-bore of Marie mayde, y-pyned [was crucified, lit. made to suffer] onder Pouns Pilate, y-nayled a rode [on a cross], dyad, and be-bered; yede [went] doun to helle; thane thridde day aros vram the dyade; steay [rose, ascended] to hevenes; zit [sitteth] athe [on the] right half of God the Vader almighti; thannes to comene He is, to deme the quike and the dyade. Ich y-leve ine the Holy Gost; holy cherche generalliche; Mennesse of halyen [communion of holy-ones]; Lesnesse of zennes [remission of sins]; of vlesse [flesh, body] arizinge; and lyf evrelestinde. Zuo by hyt [so be it].

A few remarks may well be made here on some of the peculiarities of Southern English that appear here. The use of v for f (as in vader, vram, vlesshe), and of z for s (as in zone, zit, zennes) are common to this day, especially in Somersetshire. The spelling lhord reminds us that many Anglo-Saxon words began with hl, one of them being hlāfweard, later hlāford,

a lord; and this hl is a symbol denoting the so-called "whispered l," sounded much as if an aspirate were prefixed to the l, and still common in Welsh, where it is denoted by ll, as in llyn, a lake. In every case, modern English substitutes for it the ordinary l, though lh (= hl) was in use in 1340 in Southern. The prefix y-, representing the extremely common A.S. (Anglo-Saxon) prefix ge-, was kept up in Southern much longer than in the other dialects, but has now disappeared; the form y-clept being archaic. The plural suffix -en, as in haly-en, holy ones, saints, is due to the fact that Southern admitted the use of that suffix very freely, as in cherch-en, churches, sterr-en, stars, etc.; whilst Northern only admitted five such plurals, viz. egh-en, ey-en, eyes (Shakespeare's eyne), hos-en, stockings, ox-en, shoo-n, shoes, and fā-n, foes; ox-en being the sole survivor, since shoon (as in Hamlet, IV iv 26) is archaic. The modern child-r-en, breth-r-en, are really double plurals; Northern employed the more original forms childer and brether, both of which, and especially the former, are still in dialectal use. Evrelest-inde exhibits the Southern -inde for present participles.

But the word zennes, sins, exhibits a peculiarity that is almost solely Kentish, and seldom found elsewhere, viz. the use of e for i. The explanation of this rests on an elementary lesson in Old English phonology, which it will do the reader no harm to

acquire. The modern symbol i (when denoting the short sound, as in pit) really does double duty. It sometimes represents the A.S. short i, as in it (A.S. hit), sit (A.S. sittan), bitten (A.S. bĭten), etc.; and sometimes the A.S. short y, as in pyt, a pit. The sound of the A.S. short i was much the same as in modern English; but that of the short y was different, as it denoted the "mutated" form of short u for which German has a special symbol, viz. ü, the sound intended being that of the German ü in schützen, to protect. In the latter case, Kentish usually has the vowel e, as in the modern Kentish pet, a pit, and in the surname Petman (at Margate), which means pitman; and as the A.S. for "sin" was synn (dat. synne), the Kentish form was zenne, since Middle English substantives often represent the A.S. dative case. The Kentish plural had the double form, zennes and zennen, both of which occur in the Ayenbite, as might have been expected.

The poet Gower, who completed what may be called the first edition of his poem named the Confessio Amantis (or Confession of a Lover) in 1390, was a Kentish man, and well acquainted with the Kentish dialect. He took advantage of this to introduce, occasionally, Kentish forms into his verse; apparently for the sake of securing a rime more easily. See this discussed at p. ci of vol. II of Macaulay's edition of Gower. I may illustrate this

by noting that in Conf. Amant. i 1908, we find pitt riming with witt, whereas in the same, v 4945, pet rimes with let.

We know that, in 1386, the poet Chaucer was elected a knight of the shire for Kent, and in 1392-3 he was residing at Greenwich. He evidently knew something of the Kentish dialect; and he took advantage of the circumstance, precisely as Gower did, for varying his rimes. The earliest example of this is in his Book of the Duchess, l. 438, where he uses the Kentish ken instead of kin (A.S. cynn) in order to secure a rime for ten. In the Canterbury Tales, E 1057, he has kesse, to kiss (A.S. cyssan), to rime with stedfastnesse. In the same, A 1318, he has fulfille, to fulfil (cf. A.S. fyllan, to fill), to rime with wille; but in Troilus, iii 510, he changes it to fulfelle, to rime with telle; with several other instances of a like kind.

It is further remarkable that some Kentish forms seem to have established themselves in standard English, as when we use dent with the sense of dint (A.S. dynt). When we speak of the left hand, the form left is really Kentish, and occurs in the Ayenbite of Inwyt; the Midland form is properly lift, which is common enough in Middle English; see the New English Dictionary, s.v. Left, adj. Hemlock is certainly a Kentish form; cf. A.S. hymlice, and see the New English Dictionary. So also is kernel (A.S. cyrnel);

knell (A.S. cnyllan, verb); merry (A.S. myrge, myrige); and perhaps stern, adj. (A.S. styrne).

There are some excellent remarks upon the vocalism of the Kentish dialect in Middle English by W. Heuser, in the German periodical entitled Anglia, vol XVII pp. 73-90.