She hath no wight to whom to make hir mone.
O blood roial! that stondest in this dredë
Fer ben thy frendës at thy gretë nedë!”
Here, with the exception of the imperative in Haveth som routhe (= have some pity), stant, and ben (= are), the grammar of Chaucer is very near the grammar of to-day. How different this is from the simple English of Langlande! He is speaking of the great storm of wind that blew on January 15, 1362:—
“Piries and Plomtres weore passchet to þe grounde,
In ensaumple to Men þat we scholde do þe bettre,
Beches and brode okes weore blowen to þe eorþe.”
Here it is the spelling of Langlande’s English that differs most from modern English, and not the grammar.—Much the same may be said of the style of Wycliffe (1324-1384) and of Mandeville (1300-1372). In Wycliffe’s version of the Gospel of Mark, v. 26, he speaks of a woman “that hadde suffride many thingis of ful many lechis (doctors), and spendid alle hir thingis; and no-thing profitide.” Sir John Mandeville’s English keeps many old inflexions and spellings; but is, in other respects, modern enough. Speaking of Mahomet, he says: “And ȝee
schulle understonds that Machamete was born in Arabye, that was first a pore knave that kept cameles, that wenten with marchantes for marchandise.” Knave for boy, and wenten for went are the two chief differences—the one in the use of words, the other in grammar—that distinguish this piece of Mandeville’s English from our modern speech.
[10.] The English of the Sixteenth Century.—This, which is also called Tudor-English, differs as regards grammar hardly at all from the English of the nineteenth century. This becomes plain from a passage from one of Latimer’s sermons (1490-1555), “a book which gives a faithful picture of the manners, thoughts, and events of the period.” “My father,” he writes, “was a yeoman, and had no lands of his own, only he had a farm of three or four pound a year at the uttermost, and hereupon he tilled so much as kept half a dozen men. He had walk for a hundred sheep; and my mother milked thirty kine.” In this passage, it is only the old-fashionedness, homeliness, and quaintness of the English—not its grammar—that makes us feel that it was not written in our own times. When Ridley, the fellow-martyr of Latimer, stood at the stake, he said, “I commit our cause to Almighty God, which shall indifferently judge all.” Here he used indifferently in the sense of impartially—that is, in the sense of making no difference between parties; and this is one among a very large number of instances of Latin words, when they had not been long in our language, still retaining the older Latin meaning.