6. Froissart and the Bruce.—Here Mr. Brown prints his parallels in full, and the matter can be safely left to the judgment of the unprejudiced reader. It need only be remarked that Froissart (1) calls Douglas William instead of James; (2) sends the heart to the Holy Sepulchre[177]; (3) makes Bruce choose Douglas; (4) embarks him at Montrose; (5) takes him to Sluys; (6) lands him at Seville: while Barbour (1) is right as to Douglas; (2) sends the heart against “Goddis fayis”; (3) makes the barons choose Douglas; (4) embarks him at Berwick; (5) says nothing of Sluys; and (6) lands him at Valentia. Of Barbour’s “motive” lines, of the repentance for blood-spilling and the saving of his sins,[178] Froissart (or Le Bel) has no trace. The two narratives are independent, though, in their trend, alike.
APPENDIX G
LANGUAGE AND ORTHOGRAPHY
The language of the Bruce is Northern English, the dialect spoken north of the Humber. Barbour himself calls it “Inglis” (Bk. IV. 253), and Scottish writers down to the sixteenth century do the same. The name “Scots” is therefore a term of pure convenience, signifying the English spoken within the political borders of Scotland, which continued to be an independent literary medium after the Northern English of England had ceased to be such, and had yielded place to the standard dialect of Chaucer and his successors. But the language of the Aberdeen Barbour is substantially that of the Yorkshire Richard Rolle.
The most obvious characteristic of the northern tongue is that in development it was far ahead of its southern contemporary, in so far as it had absolutely got rid of inflections, not even retaining the final e which casts its shadow over Chaucer. Where the final e occurs in the Bruce it is non-significant and unsounded. Like the variable spelling, it is the result of the writing of English by scribes accustomed to the sounds and orthography of contemporary French, which was rich in final e’s[179]—a process which had seriously complicated the straightforward phonetic spelling of Old English. A peculiar Scots fashion, however, was the representation of the long vowels by a combination with y or i, sometimes in addition to a final e, which came to be regarded as the sign of a long vowel. Thus we have such groups as mar, mair, mayr: done, doyn, doyne. In these and similar cases y is simply an alternative form of i; at first it would be written before letters like m, n, u, where i, having no dot, might be mistaken for a part of the succeeding letter; then in practice the two would become interchangeable according to the caprice of the writer. In this matter the scribe of C is rather more regular than that of E. Now, such a diphthong as ai was in time reduced to a simple sound, when the i became superfluous, and came to be looked upon as a sign of length. With this function it was afterwards, at the pleasure of the writer, transferred to the company of other long vowels where there was no original diphthong. Thus we have the long vowel sound represented in three ways—simple, with following i (y), or with terminal e. In cases like tais, gais, however, the i is part of the termination of the present tense of the verb, of which Barbour is particularly fond.[180]
But while Scots—in the sense indicated above—had thus early parted with its inflections, it was, on the other hand, more conservative than the southern dialects in its treatment of the vowel sounds. It retained, for example, the Old English ā, which in Southern English was rounded into broad o (oa)—cf. ga, stane (O.E. or A.S. gan, stan) for go, stone. In the Bruce (X. 199; XII. 299) the rhyme more, before may show the rounding influence of r.[181] Vowels in words of French origin show slight modification. Anglo-French nasal a before m, n tends to become au, whence daunger, etc., and o or u to become ou as in baroun, felloun. Ai and ei incline to merge in long e as feble (O.F. faible), and sesyt (O.F. seisir); but ai may also become a—e.g., tratour for O.F. traitor.
Aphæresis occurs in such shortened forms as stroy (destroy), semble (assemble), etc.
The following peculiarities may be noticed among the consonants:
ch sometimes = “tch” in middle and end of word—e.g., fech = fetch (II. 532).
h is silent in hoost, as in all Anglo-French words of Latin origin, and sometimes drops out—e.g., ost (II. 559, etc., O.F. ost), also in ayris (heirs, V. 520).