In all such cases, in the versification of Orm, whose practice is to count the syllables, there can only be a question of level stress, not of inversion of accent. Ennglisshe at the beginning of the second hemistich of the above line, 322, is no more an example of inversion of rhythm than in the hemistich Icc háfe wénnd inntill Ennglíssh l. 13
§ 138. After the Moral Ode and the Ormulum the Septenary often occurs in combination with other metres, especially the Alexandrine, of which we shall speak later on.
In some works of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Septenary was, however, employed in a fairly unmixed form, as, for instance, in the Lives of Saints, ed. Furnivall, 1862, the Fragment of Popular Science, ed. Wright in Popular Treatises on Science, London, 1841, and several others.
The most important deviation from the Septenary of Orm and of the Moral Ode is the frequent occurrence of long lines with a masculine instead of the usual feminine ending. Both forms are to be found in the opening lines of the Fragment of Popular Science:
The ríȝte pút of hélle ís | amídde the úrþe wiþínne,
Oure Lóverd þát al mákede iwís, | quéinte ís of gýnne,
Héuene and úrþe ymákede iwís, | and síþþe alle þíng þat ís,
Úrpe is a lútel húrfte | aȝén héuene iwís.
It may fairly be assumed that the structure of the Alexandrine (which, according to French models, might have either a masculine or a feminine ending) may have greatly furthered the intrusion of monosyllabic feet into the Septenary verse, although the gradual decay of the final inflexions may likewise have contributed to this end. For the rest, all the rhythmic licences of the Septenary occurring in the Moral Ode are also to be met with here; as, for instance, the suppression of the anacrusis in the first hemistich of l. 4 of the passage quoted, and in the second of l. 2, and the omission of the unaccented syllable in the second hemistich of the fourth line, the inversion of accent and disyllabic thesis in the first hemistich of the third line, and other licences, such as the anapaestic beginning of the line, &c., in other places in these poems (cf. Metrik, i, p. 246)
§ 139. In lyrical poems of this time and in later popular ballad poetry the Septenary is employed in another manner, namely, in four-lined stanzas of four- and three-foot verse, rhyming crosswise, each of which must be looked on as consisting of pairs of Septenaries with middle rhyme inserted (interlaced rhyme), as is clearly shown by the Latin models of these metrical forms quoted above (p. [192]). Latin and English lines are thus found connected, so as to form a stanza, in a poem of the fifteenth century: