One of the prayers familiar to my youth was as follows:
‘Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,
Bless the bed that I lie on;
Four corners to my bed,
Four angels at my head;
Two to watch and one to pray,
And one to carry my soul away.’
An M.P., who shall be nameless, supplies me with an apt illustration of East Anglian dialect. It
was at the anniversary of a National School, with the great M.P. in the chair, surrounded by the benevolent ladies and the select clergy of the district. The subject of examination was Christ’s entry into Jerusalem on an ass’s colt. ‘Why,’ said the M.P.—‘why did they strew rushes before the Saviour? can any of you children tell me?’ Profound silence. The M.P. repeated the question. A little ragamuffin held up his hand. The M.P. demanded silence as the apt scholar proceeded with his answer. ‘Why were the rushes strewed?’ said the M.P. in a condescending tone. I don’t know,’ replied the boy, ‘unless it was to hull the dickey down.’
Roars of laughter greeted the reply, as all the East Anglians present knew that ‘hull’ meant ‘throw,’ and ‘dickey’ is Suffolk for ‘donkey,’ but some of the Cockney visitors present were for a while quite unable to enjoy the joke.
It is to be feared the three R’s were not much patronized in East Anglia, if it be true that some forty or fifty years ago, in such a respectable town as Sudbury, it was the fashion for some fifty of the leading inhabitants to meet in the large bar-parlour of the old White Horse to hear the leading paper of the eastern counties read out by a scholar and
elocutionist known as John. For the discharge of this important duty he was paid a pound a year, and provided with as much free liquor as he liked, and there were people who considered that the Saturday newspaper-reading did them more good than what they heard at church the next day.
In some cases our East Anglian dialect is merely a survival of old English, as when we say ‘axe’ for ‘ask.’ We find in Chaucer:
‘It is but foly and wrong wenging
To axe so outrageous thing.’
In his ‘Envious Man,’ Gowing made ‘axeth’ to rhyme with ‘taxeth.’ No word is more common in Suffolk than ‘fare’; a pony is a ‘hobby’; a thrush is a ‘mavis’; a chest is a ‘kist’; a shovel is a ‘skuppet’; a chaffinch is a ‘spink.’ If a man is upset in his mind, he tells us he is ‘wholly stammed,’ and the Suffolk ‘yow’ is at least as old as Chaucer, who wrote: