No More Learning

While Barbour's Bruce is a long,
sustained narrative, composed in the same metre throughout, the
verse of Minot is essentially lyric in character, and, as has been
seen, ranges over a large variety of measures.
Minot's patriotism is everywhere apparent. His contempt for
the “wild Scots and the tame" (the Highland and Lowland Scots)
is undisguised, and he has equally small respect for the lily-flowers
of France. When the English meet with misfortune, he always
finds plenty of excuses for them. Thus, in the fight at Southampton,
the galleymen were so many in number that the English grew
tired, but, “since the time that God was born and a hundred years
before, there were never any men better in fight than the English,
while they had the strength. ” His admiration and loyalty for the
king are without measure. The most is made of Edward's per-
sonal bravery at Sluys, his courteous thanks to his soldiers and
the esteem shown him by foreign dignitaries, while the poet con-
tinually insists on the righteous claim of his sovereign to the
throne of France. And, though his poems are sometimes quite
unhistorical in matters of fact, they are important in that they
evidently reflect the growing feeling of solidarity in the nation,
and the patriotic enthusiasm which made possible the victories
of Sluys and Crecy.


## p. 360 (#380) ############################################

CHAPTER XVII
LATER TRANSITION ENGLISH
II
SECULAR LYRICS; TALES; SOCIAL SATIRE
FROM the middle of the thirteenth century to the days of Piers
Plowman, writers of English were still polishing the tools used
in the preceding century. We have seen their predecessors at
work in monasteries on saints' lives and religious verse; chroniclers
have come under consideration; and the flourishing of romance,
both home-grown and imported, has been noted. It remains to
discuss the evidence which is gradually accumulating that neither
court nor cloister were to exercise a monopoly in the production
and patronage of English letters: there was also " the world out-
side. " Certain of the romances-Havelok notably-bear traces,
in their extant forms, of having been prepared for ruder audiences
than those which listened, as did the ladies and gentlemen of
plague-stricken Florence towards the close of this period, to tales
of chivalry and courtly love and idle. dalliance.
A famous collection of Middle English lyrics shows signs that
there were writers who could take a keen pleasure in “notes suete
of nyhtegales,” in “wymmen” like "Alysoun” and in the “northerne
wynd. " There are still poems addressed to “Jhesu, mi suete
lemman,” full of that curious combination of sensuousness and
mysticism which is a notable feature of much of the religious
verse of these centuries; but more purely worldly motifs were
beginning to be preserved; tales which were simply amusing and
cared little for a moral ending were being translated; and indica-
tions appear that the free criticism of its rulers, which has always
been a characteristic of the English race, was beginning to find
expression, or, at any rate, preservation, in the vernacular.
To the early years of the period under consideration belongs
one of the most beautiful of Middle English lyrics:
Sumer is i-cumen in,
Lhude sing cuccn3.
Its popularity is attested by the existence of the music to which it
1 Harl. MS. 2253, Brit. Mus.
• Harl. MS. 978.


## p. 361 (#381) ############################################

Secular Lyrics
361
was sung in the first half of the thirteenth century. If summer
had not yet “come in,” spring, at any rate, was well on the way when
verses like these became possible. A sense of rime, of music, of
sweetness, had arrived; the lines were settling down into moulds
of equal length, and were beginning to trip easily off the tongue to
an expected close. And, instead of the poet feeling that his spirit
was most in harmony with the darker aspects of nature, as was the
case with several of the Old English writers whose works have been
preserved, the poet of the Middle English secular lyric, in common
with the poet of The Owl and the Nightingale, feels “the spring-
running” and cannot refrain from entering into the spirit of it with
a gladsome heart:
Groweth sed and bloweth med,
And springth the wdo nul.
Sing cuccu!
Awe bleteth after lomb,
Lhouth after calve cu:
Bulluo sterteth, bucke verteth,
Murie sing oucou!
The same note is struck, only more often, in the Harleian lyrics
above referred to, which are dated, approximately, 1310, and were
collected, apparently, by a clerk of Leominster. The slim volume
in which these lyrics were printed sixty-five years ago, by Thomas
Wright", contains poems familiar, perhaps, to most students of
English poetry and familiar, certainly, to all students of English
prosody. The measures of the trouvères and troubadours had
become acclimatised in England-Henry III had married a lady
of Provence-80 far as the genius of the language and the nature
of the islanders permitted; and the attempt to revive the principle
of alliteration as a main feature, instead of, what it has ever been
and still is, an unessential ornament, of English verse was strong
in the land. And first among these spring poems, not so much in
respect of its testimony to the work of perfecting that was in
progress in the matter of metre, as in its sense of the open air,
and of the supremacy of “humanity,” is the well-known Alison
lyric beginning
Bytuene Mershe & Averil
When spray biginneth to springe,
The lutel foul hath hire wyl
On hyre lud * to synge;
3 runs to the greenwood.
8 Specimens of Lyric Poetry composed in England in the Reign of Edward I, Peray
Society, 1842. Some had been printed before by Warton and Rilson.
• In her own language.
I now.


## p. 362 (#382) ############################################

362
Later Transition English
Ich libbel in love-longinge
For semlokest of alle thynge,
He may me blisse bringe,
Icham in hire baundoun .
An hendy hap ichabbe yhents,
Ichot from hevene it is me sent,
From alle wymmen mi love is lent
& lyht on Alysoun.
There is a world of difference between these lines and the ideal
of convent-life set forth in Hali Meidenhad. By natural steps, the
erotic mysticism that produced the poems associated with the Virgin
cult passed into the recognition, not merely that there were “sun,
moon and stars," "and likewise a wind on the heath,” but also that
there existed earthly beings of whom
Some be browne, and some be whit. . .
And some of theym be chiry ripe 6.
In another of the Harleian poems, “the wind on the heath”
inspires a refrain:
Blou, northerne wynd,
Send thou me my suetyng.
Blou, northerne wynd, blou, blon, blou!
which, by its very irregularity of form, shows the flexible strength
that was to be an integral feature of the English lyric. Yet another
poem has lines:
I would I were a thrustle cock,
A bountyng or a laverok,
Sweet bride!
Between her kirtle and her smock
I would me hide:
which form a link in the long chain that binds Catullus to the
Elizabethan and Jacobean lyrists. And the lines beginning
Lenten ys come with love to toune,
With blosmen & with briddes roune?
are full of that passionate sense of “the wild joys of living" which
led “alle clerkys in joye and eke in merthe” to sing
Right lovesom thu art in May thu wyde wyde erthe.
I live.
? power.
8 Good fortune has come to me. • turned away.
6 See ante, p. 229.
6 A Song on Woman, MS. Lambeth 806, 135, printed by Wright and Halliwell,
Reliquiae Antiquae, I, 248.
i Bong. Cf. The Thrush and the Nightingale, Digby MS. 86, Bodl. , printed in
Reliquiae Antiquae, 1, 241 “Somer is comen with love to toune," etc.


## p. 363 (#383) ############################################

Proverbs of Hendyng 363
The Proverbs of Hendyng, “Marcolves sone,” are to be found
in the MS that contains the above lyrics and may, therefore, be
mentioned here. They appear to have been collected from older
material in their present form before the close of the thirteenth
century; and they recall the wisdom literature to which reference
has already been made in dealing with Old English proverbs and
with the poems attributed to Alfred. These proverbs are obvious
summaries of the shrewd wisdom of the common folk, which is as
old as the hills, and not confined to any one race or country:
Tel thou never thy fo that thy fot aketh,
Quoth Hendyng . . .
Dere is botht the hony that is licked of the thorne;
and they enshrine many phrases that are still common property :
Brend child fur dredeth,
Quoth Hendyng;
but their main interest for us lies in the form of the stanzas which
precede the proverb, and which consist of six lines rimed aabaab;
here it is evident that the nebulous outlines of earlier attempts
have taken shape and form out of the void, and become the ballad
stanza ; the unrimed shorter lines are now linked by end-rime,
and the reciter from memory is aided thereby.
The literature of the Middle Ages was of a much more
“universal,” or cosmopolitan, character than that of later times-
it will be remembered that “the book” in which Paolo and
Francesca “read that day no more” was the book of Lancelot
and not a tale of Rimini-and, one of the reasons for this width
of range was that letters were in the hands of a few, whose
education had been of a "universal,” rather than a national, type.
English literature, in the vernacular, had to compete for many
a long year, not only with Latin, which, even so late as the days
of Erasmus, was thought to have a fair chance of becoming the
sole language of letters? , but, also, though in a rapidly lessening
degree, with Norman-French, the language of all who pretended
to a culture above that of the common folk. And it is to Latin,
therefore, that we have often to turn for evidence of the thoughts
that were beginning to find expression not only among monastic
1 Cf. A Father's Instruction, ante, p. 62.
· Cf. also, its long use in legal documents : “To substitute English for Latin as the
language in which the King's writs and patents and charters shall be expressed, and
the doings of the law-courts shall be preserved, requires a statute of George II's day. "
Maitland, in Traill's Social England, Vol. 1


## p. 364 (#384) ############################################

364. Later Transition English
chroniclers and historians, but also among social satirists and
writers of political verse. At first the amusement of those only
who had a knowledge of letters, Goliardic verses and political
satires in Latin became models for the imitation of minstrels and
writers who set themselves to please a wider circle, and who made
themselves the mouthpieces of those who felt and suffered but
id not express hat the people had of Hereward”, a son
Some hint of what the people had liked to hear in the way of
tales is preserved for us in The Deeds of Hereward', a son of Lady
Godiva, and an offspring of the native soil, the recital of whose horse-
play in the court of the king and of whose deeds on his speedy mare
Swallow would appeal to all who liked the tale of Havelok, the
strapping Grimsby fisher lad, scullery boy and king's son. But the
secular tale and satirical poem of the thirteenth and fourteenth
century appealed to a different audience and are of direct historical
value. In Latin and in English, the tyranny and vice and luxury
of the times are strongly condemned, the conduct of simoniacal
priest and sensual friar is held up to ridicule ; and, in that way,
the ground was prepared for the seed to be sown later by the
Lollards. Monasticism, which had risen to an extraordinary
height during the reign of Stephen and borne excellent fruit
in the educational labours of men like Gilbert of Sempringham,
began to decline in the early years of the thirteenth century.
"Then came the friars; and their work among the people, especially
in relieving physical suffering, was characterised by a self-sacri-
ficing zeal which showed that they were true sons of Assisi; but
there were some among those who succeeded them whose light
lives and dark deeds are faithfully reflected in the songs and
satires of Middle English; and there were others, in higher stations,
equally false to their trust, who form the subject of the political
verse coming into vogue in the vernacular. Even though it be borne
in mind that the mutual antagonism between regulars and secu-
lars, and between members of different orders, may be responsible
for some of the scandals satirised, and that there was always a
lighter side to the picture—against bishop Golias and his clan
there were, surely, people like Richard Rolle of Hampole-yet
sufficient evidence remains, apart from the testimony of Matthew
Paris, of the steadily growing unpopularity of monks and friars,
and the equally steady growth of the revolt of the people against
clerical influence.
Social satire of the nature indicated is seen in Middle
1 Extant in a Latin version only.


## p. 365 (#385) ############################################

Dame Siriz
365
English in the few examples of the fabliau still extant. The
short amusing tale in verse appealed greatly to the French-
man of the thirteenth century; and, though the few that have
survived in English show strong signs of their foreign origin,
their popularity proved that they were not only accepted as
pleasing to “the ears of the groundlings" but as reflecting, with
somewhat malicious, and wholly satiric, glee, the current manners
of monk and merchant and miller, friar and boy. The Land of
Cokaygne tells of a land of gluttony and idleness, a kitchen-land,
not exactly where it was “always afternoon," but where the monk
could obtain some of the delights of a Mohammadan paradise.
The very walls of the monastery are built “al of pasteiis," "of
fleis, of fisse and riche met," with pinnacles of "fat podinges”;
The gees irostid on the spitte
Fleez to that abbai, god hit wot,
And gredith? , gees al hote, al hot;
and entrance to this land could only be gained by wading
Seve zere in swineis dritte. . .
Al anon up to the chynne.
The Land of Cokaygne has relatives in many lands; it lacks
the deep seriousness of the Wyclifian songs that came later, and
the light satirical way in which the subject is treated would
seem to imply that a French model had been used, but its
colouring is local and its purpose is evident.
Dame Siriz, an oriental tale showing traces of the doctrine
of the transmigration of souls, was put into English after
many wanderings through other languages, about the middle of
the thirteenth century, and is excellently told in a metre varying
between octosyllabic couplets and the six-lined verse of the Sir
Thopas type. Other renderings of the same story are contained
in Gesta Romanorum (28), Disciplina Clericalis (XI) and similar
collections of tales; and the imperfect poem in the form of a
dialogue between Clericus and Puella, printed by Wright and
Halliwell, may be compared with it. A tale of this kind was
certain of popularity, whether recited by wandering minstrel or
committed to writing for the pleasure of all lovers of comedy. To
the “common form” of an absent and betrayed husband, is added
the Indian device of the “biche" with weeping eyes (induced by
mustard and pepper), who has been thus transformed from human
shape because of a refusal to listen to the amorous solicitations of
Reliquiae Antiquae, 1, 145,
I cry.


## p. 366 (#386) ############################################

366 Later Transition English
a "clerc. " The device is used by the pander, Dame Siriz, who,
for twenty shillings, promises another “clerc” to persuade the
merchant's wife to yield to his desires.
There is, unfortunately, very little of the famous satirical beast
epic Reynard the Fox that can be claimed for England. Some of
the animals were known to Odo of Cheriton, the fabulist, who
makes use of stories of Reynard to point the moral of his sermons;
and a short fabliau of about the same period as those above
mentioned is extant; but this is about all In The Vox and the
Wolf is cleverly related, in bold and firm couplets, the familiar
story of the well and the device of Renauard for getting himself
out of it at the expense of the wolf Sigrim. The teller of the
story in Middle English is learned in his craft, and the poem is an
admirable example of comic satire, perhaps the best of its kind
left to us before the days of Chaucer. Not only are the two
characters well conceived, but they are made the vehicle, as in
the romance of the Fleming Willem, of light satire on the life of
the times. Before admitting the wolf to the paradise in the bucket
at the bottom of the well, the fox takes upon himself the duties of
a confessor, and the wolf, to gain absolution asks forgiveness, not
only for the ordinary sins of his life, but, after a little pressing
even repents him of the resentment shown when the confessor
made free with the penitent's wife. Few things show more clearly
the failings and vices current in the Middle Ages than do the
various stories of the deeds of Reynard in his ecclesiastical dis-
guises : stories that were carved in stone and wood and shown in
painted glass, as well as recited and written. His smug cowled face
looks out from pulpits and leers at us from under miserere seats.
The literary needs of those who were familiar with the
“romances of prys” in which deeds of chivalry were enshrined,
and who, with the author of Sir Thopas, could enjoy parodies of
them, were met by such salutary tales as The Turnament of
Totenham. A countryside wedding, preceded by the mysteries of
a medieval tournament, is described by Gilbert Pilkington, or by
the author whose work he transcribes, in language that would be
well understood and keenly appreciated by those of lower rank
than “knight and lady free. ” It is an admirable burlesque; rustic
"laddis" contend not only for Tibbe the daughter of Rondill the
refe, but for other prizes thrown in by the father :
He shalle have my gray mare [on which Tibbe “was sett"],
And my spottyd sowe;
and, therefore, Hawkyn and Dawkyn and Tomkyn and other noble


## p. 367 (#387) ############################################

The Tale of Gamelyn
367
youths “ffro Hissiltoun to Haknay," "leid on stifly,” “til theyre
hors swett,” with much “clenkyng of cart sadils” and many
“brokyn hedis," and
Woo was Hawkyn, woo was Herry,
Woo was Tomkyn, woo was Terry
when they sat down to the marriage feast of the winner. The
Tale of Thopas exercises its useful office with a rapier; if The
Turnament of Totenham performs its duty with a cudgel, the
result, so far as the victim is concerned, is none the less effective.
The middle of the fourteenth century gave us The Tale of
Gamelyn', which is dealt with elsewhere as a metrical romance and
in connection with the works of Chaucer. It forms an admirable
link between the courtly romance and the poetry of the outlaws •
of the greenwood. A younger brother, despoiled of his share
in the inheritance, is ill-clothed and given poor food by his
eldest brother, handed over to understrappers to be thrashed and
otherwise maltreated. But, after the fashion of Havelok, Gamelyn
proves himself adept at the staff and strong in the arm; and, after
a fair supply of adventures, with much success and further tribu-
lation, he becomes head of a forest band of young outlaws; then,
after justice has been done to his unnatural brother, he becomes
king's officer in the woodland. It is a "loveless” tale of the
earlier Stevenson kind; no courtly dame has part or parcel
therein; nevertheless, in the form in which we now have it, The
Tale of Gamelyn is quite excellent, is, in fact, typically English in
its sense of free life and open air.
Of the two collections of stories referred to above, one, the most
famous of its kind, and the source-book for many later English
writers, Gesta Romanorum, probably took shape in England, in
its Latin form, in the period under discussion. Early preachers
and homilists were only too willing to seize hold of stories from
every quarter in order to "point the moral," and their collections
have served many ends different from the purpose designed. If
the "moral" attached to each tale, and dragged in, often, on the
most flimsy excuse, be ignored, the tales in Gesta Romanorum
become readable, for they are often excellently, even though baldly,
told. Other Latin collections of cognate kind, the work of English
compilers, have been referred to in a preceding chapter", and
all are of importance in the light they throw on the manners of
the time. One, the Summa Praedicantium of John de Bromyarde,
a Dominican friar, scholar of Oxford and antagonist of Wyclif,
1 Volume I, p. 298, Volume 1, pp. 194 ft. See Chapter 3, Map, Neokham, eto.


## p. 368 (#388) ############################################

368 Later Transition English
devotes a thousand pages to subjects likely to be acceptable to
congregations, and deserves more attention than has hitherto been
paid it. In the legendaries and poems compiled and written
by monks for homiletic purposes, there are many germs of the
tale-telling faculty, and much folk-lore. Things charming and
grotesque are inextricably mixed. In the legends of the Child-
hood of Jesus, for instance, there is a delightful account of the
reverence paid by the animal creation and by inanimate nature to
the Infant during the journey to Egypt; and then the poem is
marred by the addition of crude miraculous deeds recorded as
afterwards wrought by Him. Many of our tales have originally
come from the east; but, in spite of the proverb, they have
gathered much moss in rolling westward, and flints from the same
quarry that have travelled a fairly direct course look strangely
different from others that have zigzagged hither.
Of Middle English political verses, the earliest preserved are,
probably, those on the battle of Lewes, which was fought in 1264.
The battle was celebrated by a follower of the fortunes of Simon de
Montfort, in a poem which is of considerable philological and
metrical importance. The number of French words it contains
reveals the process of amalgamation that was going on between the
two languages, and lets us into the workshop where the new speech
was being fashioned. The interest of the poem is also considerable
from the evidence it furnishes that the free-spoken Englishman was
beginning to make the vernacular the vehicle of satire against his
superiors in the realm of politics, following the example of the
writers of the Latin satirical poems then current. The educated
part of the race was beginning to show signs of the insular prejudice
against foreigners which is not even absent from it to-day—though
it could loyally support “foreigners” when they espoused the
national cause—and, more happily, it was showing signs of the
political genius which has ever been a quality of our people. Metri-
cally, these political lyrics in the vernacular are of importance
because of the forms of verse experimented in and naturalised
The minstrel who sang or recited political ballads had to appeal to
more critical audiences than had the composer of sacred lyrics; he
had to endeavour to import into a vernacular in transition some-
thing of the easy flow of comic Latin verse. The Song against the
King of Almaigne', above referred to, is in mono-rimed four-lined
stanzas, followed by a “bob,” or shorter fifth line, “maugre
* Richard of Cornwall, King of the Romans, brother of Henry III.


## p. 369 (#389) ############################################

Songs of the Soil
369
Wyndesore," "to helpe Wyndesore," etc. , and a constant, mocking,
two-lined refrain, with a kind of internal rime:
Richard, thah thou be ever trichard,
trichen shalt thou never more.
The recurrence of lines consisting of perfect ana paests? and
showing but little tendency towards alliteration, indicates the
direction in which popular rimes were looking.
In the civil struggles of the barons' wars, and in the years that
followed, the poetry of the people rose to the surface. The Robin
Hood ballads, to which we shall recur in a later volume, and a few
rude verses here and there, give voice, not only to the free, open life
of the outlaw in the greenwood, but, also, to the cry of the down-
trodden at the callous luxury of the rich. The real condition of
the poor is but rarely reflected in the literature of a nation: the
unfree in feudal times were voiceless, and the labouring free of
later times have been but little better. Patient beyond belief, the
children of the soil do not, as a rule, make literature of their wrongs:
we can only learn what is at work by conscious or unconscious
revelations in other writings. The ploughman in the eleventh-
century dialogue of Aelfric had said with truth, "I work hard. . . . Be
it never so stark winter I dare not linger at home for awe of my
lord. . . . I have a boy driving the oxen with a goad-iron, who is hoarse
with cold and shouting. . . . Mighty hard work it is, for I am not
frees. ” The “bitter cry" of the oppressed people was echoed in the
Old English Chronicle of the sad days of Stephen and, ignored
by court historians and writers of romance, centuries had to elapse
before it could find adequate expression in the alliterative lines of
Piers Plowman, and in the preaching of the "mad priest of Kent”
-one of the earliest among Englishmen, whose words are known
to us, to declare for the common and inalienable rights of man.
It is a far cry from the speech of the land slave to John Ball,
Jack Straw and Wat Tyler, and the intervening years show
but fragments of the literature of revolt, but the rude rimes
sent across the country by John Ball should no more be forgotten
in a history of English literature than the rude beginnings of
its prosody, for they contain the beginnings of the literature
of political strife, the first recognisable steps on the road of
political and religious liberty that was later to be trodden by
1 treacherous.
Sitteth alle stille & herkneth to me . . .
Sire Simond de Mountfort hath swore bi ya chyn, eto,
3 York Powell's translation in Social England, 1.
E. L. I. CH. XVII.
2+


## p. 370 (#390) ############################################

370
Later Transition English
Milton and Shelley and Cobbett. In the Song of the Husbandman
one of the notable poems of the alliterative revival, which may
be dated towards the close of the thirteenth century, in octaves
and quatrains rimed alternately on two rimes with linked ending
and beginning lines--a complicated measure handled with great
skill—the tiller of the soil complains that he is robbed and picked
“ful clene"; that, because of the green was, he is hunted “ase
hound doth the hare. ” And the insolence of the grooms and stable
boys, the lackeys and servants, of the great towards the peasantry
is told in the rude, coarse lines of A Song against the Retinues of
the Great People, preserved in the same MS! .
The luthernessed of the ladde,
The prude3 of the page,
are the subject of as keen invective as are the deeds of the
consistory courts', where the peasants are treated as dogs.
When Edward I died, the writer of an elegy on his death
expressed the pious hope that “Edward of Carnarvon” might
ner be worse man
Then is fader, ne lasse of myht
To bolden is pore-men to ryht
& understonde good consail.
It remained an unrealised hope; and the condition of things in the
times of Edward II is reflected in the fugitive literature of his
reign. The curiously constructed lines in Anglo-Norman and
English On the King's Breaking his Confirmation of Magna
Charta, preserved in the Auchinleck MS, Edinburgh, and the Song
on the Times in lines made up of Latin, English and Anglo-Norman
phrases, tell the same tale of ruin and corruption. Before the end
of the reign, Bannockburn had been fought and won, fought and
lost; Scottish girls could sing of the mourning of their southern
sisters for "lemmans loste"; and, in place of an elegy on the death
of a king who "ber the prys” “of Christendome",” we have a poem
in the Auchinleck MS on The Evil Times of Edward II, which, in
some 470 lines, pitilessly describes the misery of the state and
the evil of the church. It is a sermon on the old text, “Ye
cannot serve God and Mammon,” “no man may wel serve tweie
lordes to queme," and every line bites in, as with the acid of
an etcher, some fresh detail of current manners. As soon as the
1 Harl. 2253, ed. Wright.
8 conceit.
5 Elegy on Edward I, before cited.
· malicious ill-temper,
• Political Songs of England, 1839.


## p.
371 (#391) ############################################

The Black Death
371
young priest can afford it, he has a concubine; if those in high
places protest, “he may wid a litel silver stoppen his mouth"; the
doctor is the doctor of the comedies of Molière, a pompous
charlatan, ready enough to take silver for his advice, “thouh he
wite no more than a gos wheither” the patient "wole live or die”;
“the knights of old” no longer go forth on brave, if Quixotic,
quests, they are “liouns in halle, and hares in the field,” and any
beardless boy can be dubbed of their company; everywhere are
the poor of the land oppressed
Ao if the king hit wiste, I trowe he wolde be wroth,
Hou the pore beth i-piled, and ha the silver goth;
Hit is so deskatered bothe hider and thidere,
That halvendel sbal ben stole ar hit come togidere,
and acounted;
An if a pore man speke a word, he shal be foule afroanted.
Before the fourteenth century had come to a close, the ravages
of the Black Death had brought about radical changes in the
relations of labourers to the soil and had left indelible impressions
on life and letters. The presence of a disease that, at its height,
meant the death of one out of every two people in London and,
in the eastern counties, of two out of every three, led to a relaxa-
tion of the current laws of life and to the Peasants' Revolt in 1381.
The outbreak of lawlessness consequent upon the dislocation of
life in town and country, and the labour troubles that followed,
sent outlaws to the greenwood and helped to build up the legends
of Robin Hood. Murmurs of discontent grew in volume, and
protests against papal authority acquired fresh strength by the
existence of the Great Schism. The Lollards began their attacks on
social abuses and sought to reform the church at the same time.
The people "spoke,” and, though the “cause” was not “finished” for
many centuries to come, yet the end of many of the political and
religious ideals of the Middle Ages was in sight. Wyclif, and
those associated with him, had begun their work, the poems that
go by the name of Piers Plowman had been written and the
"commons," in the fullest sense of the word, were beginning their
long struggle for political freedom.
24—2


## p. 372 (#392) ############################################

CHAPTER XVIII
THE PROSODY OF OLD AND MIDDLE ENGLISH
OF Old English poetry, anterior to the twelfth century
and, perhaps, in a few cases of that century itself, it has
been calculated that we have nearly thirty thousand lines. But
all save a very few reduce themselves, in point of prosody, to
an elastic but tolerably isonomous form, closely resembling
that which is found in the poetry of other early Teutonic and
Scandinavian languages. This form may be specified, either
as a pretty long line rigidly divided into two halves, or as a
couplet of mostly short lines rhythmically connected together by
a system of alliteration and stress. Normally, there should be
four stressed syllables in the line, or two in each of the half
couplets; and at least three of these syllables should be allite-
rated, beginning with the same consonant or any vowel, as in this
line (29) of The Wanderer:
Wenian mid wynnum. Wat se be cunnað.
Around or between the pillar or anchor stresses, unstressed
syllables are grouped in a manner which has sometimes been
regarded as almost entirely licentious, and sometimes reduced, as
by Sievers, to more or less definite laws or types. Probably, as
usual, the truth lies between the two extremes.
To any one, however, who, without previous knowledge of the
matter, turns over a fair number of pages of Old English verse, a
singular phenomenon will present itself. For many of these pages
the line-lengths, though not rigidly equated, will present a coast-
line not very much more irregular than that of a page of modern
blank verse. And then, suddenly, he will come to pages or
passages where the lines seem to telescope themselves out to
double their former length. The mere statistical process of enu-
meration, and of subsequent digestion into classes of more or less
resembling type, finds no difficulty in this, and merely regards it


## p. 373 (#393) ############################################

Old English Verse
373
as an instance of "stretched” or “swollen " verses, with three or
four accents in each half instead of two. Curiosity of a different
kind may, perhaps, pine for a little explanation of a more real
nature—may wish to know whether this lengthening was parallel,
say, to Tennyson's at the close of The Lotos Eaters-a definitely
concerted thing—or whether it was a mere haphazard licence.
But there are no means of satisfying this curiosity except by
conjecture. Further, our means of deciding whether, as is usually
said, the stressed syllables were bound to be “long” beforehand or
not are very scanty. It seems admitted that more than one short
syllable may do the duty of one long; and this is of the highest
importance. What, however, is certain is that, in spite of this
great variation of length, and in spite of considerable differences,
not merely in syllabic volume, between the members of the
"stretched” and unstretched groups respectively, there is a certain
community of rhythmical tone, sometimes full, sometimes muffled,
which not only distinguishes the whole body of this ancient poetry,
but is distinguishable, with some alteration, in the later revived
alliterative verse of Middle English up to the beginning of the
sixteenth century. In order to detect and check this, the student
should take the Corpus Poeticum of Old English and read pages of
different poems steadily, letting his voice accommodate itself to the
rhythm which will certainly emerge if he has any ear. Different ears
will, perhaps, standardise this rhythm differently, and it certainly
admits of very wide variation and substitution. The simplest
and most normal formula-not necessarily the one which mere
statistics will show to be commonest as such, but that which, in
itself, or in slight variations from it, predominates—appears to the
present writer to be
tum-ti-ti
tam-ti | tum-ti tum-ti.
ti-tum-ti)
These are almost the lowest terms of a fully resonant line. They
are sometimes further truncated; they are often enlarged by the
addition of unstressed syllables ; but they are never far off except
in the obvious and admitted “magnums. "
Long or short, these lines, in all but an infinitesimal proportion
of the total, are arranged in mere consecution. A kind of para-
graph arrangement—which is, in fact, a necessity—may be often
noticed; but there are, save in one famous exception, no "stanzas. ”
This exception is the extremely interesting, and, to all appearance,
extremely early, poem Deor. Here, things which are undoubtedly


## p. 374 (#394) ############################################

374 Prosody of Old and Middle English
like stanzas (though the number of lines in them is variable) are
formed by a refrain:
baes oferoode, pisses swa maez.
With some rashness, it has been assumed that this semi-lyrical
arrangement was the earlier, and that it broke down into the
continuous form. It may be so; but, in Old English, at any rate,
we have no evidence to show it
Further, in the main range of this poetry, though not to such
an exclusive extent, rime is absent. Attempts have been made
to discover it in some of the mainly rimeless poems of later
dates ; but the instances adduced are probably accidental. In
fact, the majority of them, alleged chiefly by German critics,
are not properly rimes at all, and are often mere similarities
of inflection. The real exceptions are (1) the famous piece in
the Exeter Book called, significantly, The Riming Poem, which
exhibits a system, probably imitated from the Norse, of internal,
and sometimes frequently repeated, consonance at the ends
of lines and half lines ; and (2) a few fragments, especially
the inset in the Chronicle about the imprisonment and death of
the "guiltless aetheling" Alfred. They are exceptions which
eminently prove the rule. A quest for assonance has also been
made, and a few instances of something like it have been pointed
out. But they are very few. Assonance, in fact, has never held
any important place in English prosody; and, where it exists in
unsophisticated times and instances, it is always, most probably,
the result either of inattention or of an attempt to rime. On
the whole, the body of Old English verse, as we have it, is
one of the most homogeneous to be found in any literature.
Alliteration, accent and strict separation of lines or half-lines
for its positive laws; rimelessness for its negative: these nearly
sum up its commandments, and its result is dominated by an
irregular quasi-trochaic rhythm which will retreat, but always
comes back again.
When, after the lapse of some two centuries, which furnish only
scraps of verse, we meet, at, or before, the end of the twelfth
century, with a fresh crop of English poetry, the results of prosodic
scrutiny are strikingly different. Instead of the just summarised
regularity-not in the least cast-iron, but playing freely round two
or three recognised principles, which are never absolutely deserted,
I see ante, p. 86.


## p. 375 (#395) ############################################

The Transition
375
and attempting nothing beyond their rangewe find what may, at
first, look like chaos; what has sometimes been taken for the same
dispensation a little obsolescent and broken down, but, when
examined fully and fairly, is seen to be a true period of transition.
The old order finds itself in face of a new, which does not by any
means merely replace it or destroy it; but, after an inevitable
stage of confusion, blends with it and produces something different
from either, something destined to be permanent as far as we can
yet see. In all the pieces usually dated a little before or a
little after 1200—the fragments of St Godric, Paternoster, The
Moral Ode and others, as well as the two long compositions of
Layamon and Orm-this process and its results are observable.
The new agency is the syllabic prosody (accentual, also, in general
character, but strictly syllabic) of French and of contemporary
Latin, with its almost invariable accompaniment of rime, and its
tendency, invariable also in French, though by no means so in
Latin, to iambic rhythm. It must be sufficient here to examine
the working out of this clash in the two long poems just referred
to, Ormulum and the Brut, with slighter remarks on the others.
In both poems it is possible to trace the older principle of
a rimeless line of more or less length, divided sharply in the
middle, or a rimeless couplet of two halves, in which, though not
invariably, there is a certain tendency to shorten the second. But
the two writers have been affected by the opposite and newer
system in ways curiously different, but quite intelligible as results
of the clash. Orm has unflinchingly kept to the old principle of
rimelessness; but he has as unflinchingly adopted the new
principles of uniformity in syllabic volume and of regular iambic
metrical beat. His lines are invariably of fifteen syllables, or his
couplets of eight and seven. That he achieves—as any example,
however selected, must show-nothing but the most exasperating
and wooden monotony, does not matter to him, and it ought not
to matter to us. He has sacrificed everything to regularity in
number and cadence, and he has achieved this.
Layamon's result, if not more actually important, is much more
complicated, much more interesting, with much more future in it;
but, for these very reasons, it is much less easy to summarise.
In fact, to summarise it in uncontroversial terms is very nearly
impossible. At first sight, if we can suppose an eye familiar with
Old English poetry and not familiar at all with Middle English,
it may seem to present no great difference from the former; and
there are still some who think that it does not present any that


## p. 376 (#396) ############################################

376
Prosody of Old and Middle English
is vital. But, when it is examined a little more carefully, differences
the most vital, if as yet sometimes not more than embryoni-
cally vital, emerge. Regarded as alliterative verse of the old
pattern, it can only be called very bad verse—verse which turns
the already abundant liberties of the original into mere chaotic
licence, for the most part, and which very seldom conforms at all
successfully. But, in addition to this, it succumbs, constantly
though irregularly, to the temptation which, except in late and
few instances, the old verse had rigidly resisted, and which Orm
was resisting absolutely—the temptation of rime. And this rime
seems to be forcing on it a new regularisation, that of equal-halved
distichs rimed together in the exact fashion of the French
octosyllabic couplet.
When we turn to the other and smaller poems of the period we
find this process of “slowly quickening into other forms” even
more importantly and interestingly exhibited. The Paternoster
is wholly in more or less regular rimed couplets of the kind just
noted. In The Moral Ode, the fifteen-syllabled line of Orm,
which, by the frequency of feminine endings, already promises
the reduction to fourteen, comes even nearer to the ballad metre
of eight and six, and exhibits a still more valuable characteristic
in its tendency towards maintaining the old syllabic freedom and
substitution of trisyllabic feet for the strict dissyllables of Ormulum.
Further, this heritage of Old English manifests itself in the
octosyllabic couplet; and, in the version of Genesis and Exodus,
which is assigned to about the middle of the thirteenth century,
anticipates exactly the Christabel metre which Coleridge thought
he invented more than five hundred years later. And, before very
long, though at dates impossible to indicate with precision, owing
to the uncertainty of the chronology of the documents, other
approximations of the old staple line or couplet to the metres
of French and Latin (especially the rime couée or combination
of two eights and a six doubled) make their appearance. These
transformations, however, as the liberty of their forms shows, and
as may be specially studied with greatest ease in the various
adaptations of the octosyllabic couplet, are neither mere aimless
haphazard experiments, nor mere slavish following of French and
Latin forms previously existing and held up as patterns. They
may be much more reasonably regarded as attempts to adjust
these latter to the old couplet with its middle division, and its
liberty of equality or inequality of syllabic length in the halves;
though, in all cases, the special rhythm of the older line or stave


## p. 377 (#397) ############################################

Foreign Influence
377
has become faint in the ear, and the new metrical swing prevails.
An equal division of the halves gives a distich which, for some
time, hesitates between eight and six syllables, the latter having
the additional assistance of the French alexandrine as pattern.
But it proves less suitable for English verse than the longer form,
and it is dropped or very rarely used. An unequal division-from
the first most popular-into eight and seven or eight and six,
gives the long line of Robert of Gloucester-sometimes called, for
convenience, a “fourteener” or, by Warton and others, but most
improperly, a "long alexandrine. ” This, when itself “disclosed”
in “golden couplets,” becomes at once the famous “common" or
ballad measure, the most distinctly popular metre for seven hundred
years past, and, at certain times, one yielding the most exquisite
harmony possible, though very easily degraded and reduced to
sing-song. In the course, moreover, of the give and take of this
commerce between material and mould, the beginnings of the
great decasyllabic, five-foot, or five-stress line emerge with a
frequency which has, for the most part, been inadequately noted;
as well as, more rarely, the alexandrine itself. In fact, it furnishes
the poet, by luck or design, with every possible line from four,
or even fewer, syllables to fourteen; while his examples in Latin
and French in turn furnish almost endless suggestions of stanza-
combination.
In one all-important particular, however, the foreign influence
exercised—by French altogether and, by Latin, in the greatest
part by far of its recent and accentual verse writing—in the
direction of strict syllabic uniformity, is not, indeed, universally,
but, to a very large extent, and stubbornly, resisted. The rime-
lessness of Old English might be given up with pleasure; its
curious non-metrical, or hardly more than half-metrical, cadences
might be willingly exchanged for more definite harmony; the
chains of its forced alliteration might be attenuated to an agreeable
carcanet worn now and then for ornament; and its extreme length-
licence might be curtailed and regularised. But, in one point which
had made for this latter, English refused to surrender; and that
was the admission of trisyllabic feet, as some phrase it, or, as some
prefer to describe the process, the admission of extra unstressed
syllables. The question was, indeed, not settled ; as a question it, no
doubt, never arose; and, when such problems came to be considered,
there was a dangerous tendency from late in the sixteenth century
till later in the eighteenth to answer them in the wrong way. But
practice was irreconcilable. Of the octosyllabic couplet there were,


## p. 378 (#398) ############################################

378 Prosody of Old and Middle English
almost from the first, two distinct forms, the strict and the elastic;
in nearly all other metres the licence is practically assumed. By
1300, or a little later, say 1325—to admit the latest possible dates
for the Harleian lyrics and the bulk of the early romances—all the
constitutive principles of modern English prosody are in operation,
and are turning out work, rougher or smoother, but unmistakable.
One curious postscript has to be made to these few general
remarks. During the period just referred to—from Layamon, that
is to say, to the appearance of William of Palerne and other
things, at a time probably nearer to the middle of the fourteenth
century than to its beginning--attempts at the old alliterative metre
are absolutely wanting. It is not unusual to meet with assumptions
that, though wanting, they must have existed, at any rate in
popular literature; and to these assumptions, as to all such, no
reasonable answer can be made, except that it may have been so.
So far, however, no trace of any such verse in the period referred
to has been discovered; nor any reference to such ; nor any
evidence, direct or indirect, that it existed. About the end of the
period it reappears : sometimes, simple of itself, with a cadence
altered, indeed, but not out of all likeness, after the fashion that
was to produce its capital example in The Vision of Piers
Plowman; sometimes, in a very remarkable blend with rime, and
with metrical and stanza arrangement, after the fashion of which
the most notable instances, in less and more regular kind, are
Gawayne and the Grene Knight and Pearl. But this revival
or reappearance has no effect on the main current of English
verse; which continues to be distinctly metrical, to be, in effect
universally, rimed and to use alliteration only for a separable and
casual ornament, not as a constituent and property.


## p. 379 (#399) ############################################

CHAPTER XIX
CHANGES IN THE LANGUAGE TO THE DAYS OF
CHAUCER
1. CONTINUITY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
THE three Germanic peoples-the Jutes from Jutland, the
Angles from Schleswig and the Saxons from Holstein—who, in
the fifth and sixth centuries, made themselves masters of the
greater part of south Britain, spoke dialects so nearly allied that
they can have had no great difficulty in understanding each other's
speech. It does not appear, however, that, in their original seats,
they had any general name for their common race or their common
language. The sense of their unity, with the consequent need for
a general designation for themselves, would, naturally, be the pro-
duct of the time when they found themselves settled among a
population speaking an alien and unintelligible tongue. In fact,
it was probably not by themselves, but by other nations, that the
Jutes, Angles and Saxons of Britain were first regarded as forming
an ethnic whole; just as in earlier times the larger kindred of
which they were part had received the name of Germans from the
Celts. The Britons applied to all the Germanic invaders of their
country the name of Saxons, because, in the days of Roman rule,
that nation had been the most conspicuous among those who
ravaged the coasts of Britain; and, as is well known, the Celtic-
speaking inhabitants of the British islands still continue to call the
English people and its language "Saxon. ” On the Continent, the
Germanic conquerors of Britain seem, for a long time, to have been
called indiscriminately sometimes Saxons, after the Celtic practice,
and sometimes Angles, the latter being the name of the people
which had the largest extent of territory. At the end of the sixth
century, Pope Gregory I uses only the name Angli. This is a
somewhat remarkable fact, because the missionaries sent by Gregory
laboured in the Jutish kingdom of Kent, which, at that time, was
paramount over all the country south of the Humber. Possibly,
the explanation of Gregory's choice of this name may be found in


## p. 380 (#400) ############################################

380
Changes in the Language
the famous story, according to which his zeal for the conversion of
the pagans of Britain was first awakened by his admiration of the
beauty of the boy slaves from the Anglian kingdom of Deira.
On the other hand, about A. D. 660, pope Vitalian, writing to an
Angle king, Oswiu of Northumbria, addresses him as rex
Saxonum.
The Roman missionaries naturally followed Gregory's practice;
and it was probably from the official language of the church that
the Jutes and Saxons learned to regard themselves as part of the
“Angle kindred” (Angolcynn, in Latin gens Anglorum). The
political ascendency of the Angle kingdoms, which began in
the seventh century, and continued until the time of the Danish
invasions, doubtless contributed to ensure the adoption of this
general name. In the early years of the eighth century, Bede
sometimes speaks of Angli sive Saxones, thus treating the two
appellations as equivalent. But, with this sole exception, his
name for the whole people is always Angli or gens Anglorum, and
he calls their language sermo Anglicus, even when the special
reference is to the dialect in which the Kentish laws were written.
When he does speak of lingua Saxonica, the context, in every
instance, shows that he means the language of the East or West
Saxons. It is true that Bede was an Angle by birth, and this fact
might seem to detract from the significance of his use of the name.
But, a century and a half later, the West Saxon king Alfred, whose
works are written in his native dialect, never uses any other name
for his own language but Englisc—the language of the Angles. It
is in the great king's writings that we find the earliest vernacular
examples of the name which our language has ever since continued
to bear.
In a certain sense it may be said that this name, as applied to
the language of the south of England, became more and more
strictly appropriate as time went on. For the history of southern
English, or of the language of English literature, is, to a consider-
able extent, concerned with the spread of Anglian forms of words
and the disappearance of forms that were specifically Saxon.
Moreover, several of the most important of the processes of change
that transformed the English of Alfred into the English of Chaucer
—the loss of inflections and grammatical gender, and the adoption
of Danish words—began in the Anglian regions of the north, and
gradually extended themselves southward. Leaving out of account
the changes that were due to French influences, we might almost
sum up the history of the language during five centuries in the


## p. 381 (#401) ############################################

“English” and “Saxon”
381
formula that it became more and more "English" and less and less
"Saxon. ”
It will be convenient at this point to give some account of the
history of the nomenclature of the various stages in the development
of the English language. When, in the sixteenth century, the re-
mains of vernacular literature earlier than the Norman conquest
began to attract the attention of scholars, Englishmen naturally
found it inconvenient to apply the name of "English" to what to
them was, practically, a foreign language, requiring not less study
to understand than the Flemish of their own day. It became
customary, therefore, to speak of this language as “Saxon. ” As the
few pre-Conquest texts then known were written in the south, this
designation may be said to have been accurately descriptive. It
was so, however, merely by accident, for those who employed it
were accustomed to use the term “Saxons” as a general name for
the Germanic inhabitants of England before the Norman conquest.
The popular view was that the "English" people and the "English"
language came into being as the result of the fusion of “Saxons”
and Normans. Traces of this misuse of names, indeed, are to be
found in various forms of expression that are still current. Although
the double misnomer of “the Saxon heptarchy" no longer appears
in our school histories, modern writers continue to speak of “the
Saxon elements in the English vocabulary," and to misapply the
epithet “Saxon” to the architecture of the parts of the country
inhabited by the Angles.
The term “Saxon,” besides being historically incorrect as a
designation for the whole early Germanic population of Britain,
was inconveniently ambiguous, because it survived as the proper
appellation of a portion of the inhabitants of Germany. In the last
years of the reign of Elizabeth, Camden revived the use of the old
name Anglosaxones, and, probably for the first time, used lingua
Anglosaxonica for the language of England before the Norman
conquest. He explains that Anglosaxones means the Saxons of
England, in contradistinction to those of the continent; and, in his
English Remains, he, accordingly, renders it by “English Saxons. ”
Throughout the seventeenth century, and even later, "English
Saxon” continued to be the name ordinarily applied by philo-
logists to the language of king Alfred, but, in the eighteenth
century, this gave place to “Anglo-Saxon. ”
Camden's explanation of the compound name was, there can be
little doubt, historically correct. In its early use, it was applied
to distinguish those Saxons who were considered part of the


## p. 382 (#402) ############################################

382
Changes in the Language
“Angolcynn," and whose language was called “English,” from the
"Old Saxons," who remained in Germany; and the structure of the
native form Angulseaxe shows that the first element was intended
as a descriptive prefix. It was, however, natural that the com-
pound should be interpreted as meaning “Angle and Saxon," and,
apparently, it was taken in this sense already at the end of the
seventeenth century by George Hickes, who also applied the
analogous name “Dano-Saxon” to the Old Northumbrian dialect,
under the mistaken notion that its peculiar features were the
result of Scandinavian admixture. As thus misunderstood, the
term “Anglo-Saxon” was accepted as supplying the need for a
general name applicable to the Anglian and Saxon dialects in
their fully inflected stage. In this comprehensive sense it con-
tinues to be extensively used. The proposal of some scholars to
restrict its application, on grounds of historical propriety, to the
Saxon dialect failed to gain acceptance, because what was wanted
was an inclusive name for the early language of England, as the
object of a well-defined branch of linguistic study. When pro-
fessorships of “Anglo-Saxon” had been founded at Oxford and
Cambridge, it was hardly possible to narrow the meaning of the
name to a part of the subject which the professors were appointed
to teach.
As a popular designation, the name "Anglo-Saxon” has the
merits of definiteness and intelligibility, which may possibly long
preserve it in use. It has, however, the great disadvantage of con-
cealing the important fact that the history of our language from
the earliest days to the present time has been one of continuous
development. When this fact became evident through the atten-
tion bestowed by scholars on the language of the thirteenth
century, the inconvenience of the traditional nomenclature could
not escape recognition. The language of this period was too
different from the Anglo-Saxon of the grammars to be conveniently
called by the same name, while, on the other hand, it could hardly
be called English, so long as "English" was understood to mean a
language which the unlearned reader could at once perceive to be
substantially identical with his own. An attempt was made to
meet the difficulty by the invention of the compound "Semi-
Saxon," to denote the transitional stage between “Anglo-Saxon”
and “English," but this name was so obviously infelicitous that its
introduction helped to procure acceptance for a nomenclature
which recognised that the language of Caedmon was no less
"English" than that of Chaucer. The great German philologist,


## p. 383 (#403) ############################################

Periods of English
383
Jacob Grimm, had introduced the practice of dividing the history
of a language into three periods, designated by the prefixes “Old,"
“Middle," and "New" or "Modern”; and, in the latter half of the
nineteenth century, many scholars in this country adopted “Old
English" as the name for that stage of the language which had, till
then, been known as Anglo-Saxon. The change found much oppo-
sition, on the not wholly unreasonable ground that “Old English”
was popularly applied to any form of English that was characterised
by abundance of obsolete words and by antiquated spelling, so that
the novel use could not but lead to frequent misunderstanding.
The advantages of the new nomenclature for purposes of historical
treatment are, however, so considerable that it has now come into
general use, although a few philologists, both in England and
Germany, still decline to adopt it.
The main reason for restoring to the language of Caedmon and
Alfred its historical name of “English,” is to emphasise the truth
that there was no substitution of one language for another in
England after the Norman conquest, but only a modification of
the original language by gradual changes in pronunciation and
grammar, by the accession of new words and the obsolescence of
old ones. The change of nomenclature will be a mere useless
pedantry if we allow ourselves to imagine that there was any
definite date at which people ceased to speak “Old English" and
began to speak “Middle English," or even that there ever was a
time when the English of the older generation and that of the
younger generation differed widely from each other. Nevertheless,
owing partly to the fact that the twelfth century was an age of
exceptionally rapid linguistic change, and partly to other causes
hereafter to be explained, it is quite true that, while the literary
remains of the first half of the century exhibit a form of the
language not strikingly different from that of preceding centuries,
those of the latter half present such an amount of novelty in
spelling and grammatical features as to make the most superficial
observation sufficient to show that a new period has begun. The
date 1150, as the approximate point of demarcation between the
Old and Middle periods of English, is, therefore, less arbitrary
than chronological boundaries in the history of a language usually
are; though, if we possessed full information respecting the spoken
English of the twelfth century, we should have to be content with
a much less precise determination. While the Middle English
period has thus a definite beginning, it has no definite ending.
It is, however, convenient to regard it as terminating about


## p. 384 (#404) ############################################

384
Changes in the Language
1500, because the end of the fifteenth century coincides pretty
closely with the victory of the printing-press over the scriptorium;
and many of the distinctive features of literary Modern English
would never have been developed if printing had not been invented.
2. CHANGES IN GRAMMAR
The most striking characteristic of Old English, as compared
with later stages of the language, is that it retained without
essential change the inflectional system which it possessed at the
beginning of its history. So far as regards the verbs, this system
was very imperfect in comparison with that of Greek, or even of
Latin. There was no inflected passive, the need of which was
supplied by the use of auxiliaries; and there were only two
inflected tenses: the present, which often had to serve for a future,
and the past. The use of auxiliaries for forming compound tenses
was comparatively rare. The three persons of the plural had only
one form, which, prehistorically, had been that of the third person;
and, in the past tense, the first and third person singular were alike.
On the other hand, the system of declension was nearly as elaborate
as in any of the languages of the Indogermanic family. Substantives
had four cases : nominative, accusative, genitive and dative. The
adjective had two sets of inflections for gender, number and case-
the one used when the substantive was "definite” (as when pre-
ceded by the article or some equivalent), and the other when it
was "indefinite. " So far as this description goes, it might appear
that the Old English machinery for expressing the grammatical
relations of substantives, adjectives and pronouns was as adequate
for its purpose as even that of Greek. But, owing to the effect of
prehistoric changes of pronunciation, which had assimilated many
terminations that were originally distinct, the Old English declen-
sion of these parts of speech was, in fact, full of inconvenient
ambiguities. This will be evident if we place side by side the
paradigms of the word guma, a man, in Gothic (which, in this
instance, agrees very nearly with primitive Germanic) and in Old
English.
Gothic. Old English
Sing. Nom.
guma
guma
Accus.
guman
guman
guming
gaman
Dative gumin
guman
Plur. Nom.
gumans
guman
Accus.
gumans
guman
Gen.
gumanē
gumena
Dative
gumam
Gen.
gumum


## p. 385 (#405) ############################################

Old English Grammar 385
The Gothic declension of this noun, it will be seen, has only one
weak point, namely, that the accusative plural had assumed the form
of the nominative. But, in Old English, the one form guman had
five different functions. There were, in Old English, many other
declensions of nouns besides that of which the word guma is an
example; and all of them were, more or less, faulty. The accusa-
tive had nearly always the same form as the nominative. In some
nouns the genitive singular, and in others the nominative plural,
did not differ from the nominative singular.
These observations apply to the West Saxon or southern dialect
of Old English, in which most of the extant literature is written.
But, while the West Saxon system of noun-inflection was thus
seriously defective, that of the Northumbrian dialect was far
worse, because, in that dialect, the final -n had come to be regularly
dropped in nearly all grammatical endings; and, further, the
unaccented final vowels were pronounced obscurely, so that we
often find them confused in our texts. It was quite an exceptional
thing for the case and number of a substantive to be unambiguously
indicated by its form. The ambiguities were, to some extent, ob-
viated by the inflection of the accompanying article or adjective;
but the declension even of these parts of speech, though better
preserved than that of the substantive, had, itself, suffered from
wear and tear, so that there were only a few of the endings that
had not a multiplicity of functions.
The imperfection of the Old English system of inflections must
sometimes have caused practical inconvenience, and some of the
changes which it underwent were due to instinctive efforts to
remedy its defects. These changes naturally began where the evil
was greatest, in the northern dialect. It used to be believed and
the notion is not altogether extinct-that the almost universal
substitution of -es for the many Old English endings of the geni-
tive singular and the nominative and accusative plural was a result
of the Norman conquest. But, in fact, the beginnings of this
alteration in the language can be traced to a far earlier time. In
the Northumbrian writings of the tenth century we find that, very
often, when the traditional ending of a noun failed to indicate
properly its case and number, the required clearness was gained by
assimilating its declension to that of those nouns which made
their genitives in -es and their plurals in -as. As -es was the
only ending of nouns that never marked anything but a genitive
singular, and -as the only ending that never marked anything but
a nominative or accusative plural, the improvement in lucidity was
E. L.