ne wearþ drḗorlīcre dǣ́d | gedṓn on þisan éarde,
siððan Déne cṓmon | and hēr frýð nā́mon.
The verses of the year 1087 of the Saxon Chronicle have a similar but on the whole less rhythmical structure. In some of the lines the hemistichs are neither joined by alliteration, nor by end-rhyme, but merely by the two-beat rhythm of each of them; cf. 11. 1–5:
Castelas he let wyrcean | and earme men swiðe swencean.
Se cyng wes swa swiðe stearc | and benam of his under-þeoddan
manig marc goldes | and ma hundred punda seolfres;
þat he nam be wihte | and mid mycelan unrihte
of his landleode | for litelre neode.[97]
On the other hand, the poetical piece of the Saxon Chronicle on Eadweard of the year 1065 is written in perfectly regular alliterative lines.
These two ways of treating the old alliterative line which occur in the latter part of the Saxon Chronicle, and which we will call the progressive and the conservative treatment, indicate the course which this metre was to take in its further development. Out of the long alliterative line, separated by the caesura into two hemistichs, again connected by rhyme, there sprang into existence a short rhyming couplet. This was by no means identical with the three-beat couplet evolved from two rhyming hemistichs of a line on the model of the French Alexandrine, nor with the short four-beat couplets modelled on the French vers octosyllabe, but had points of similarity enough to both, especially to the former one, to be easily used in conjunction with them, as several Early English poems show.