[§ 547]. Next to the search after traces of the original differences in the speech of the Continental invaders of Great Britain, the question as to the origin of the written language of England is the most important.
Mr. Guest has given good reasons for believing it to have arisen out of a Mercian, rather than a West-Saxon dialect—although of the Anglo-Saxon the West-Saxon was the most cultivated form.
This is confirmed by the present state of the Mercian dialects.
The country about Huntingdon and Stamford is, in the mind of the present writer, that part of England where provincial peculiarities are at the minimum. This may be explained in various ways, of which none is preferable to the doctrine, that the dialect for those parts represents the dialect out of which the literary language of England became developed.
Such are the chief problems connected with the study
of the provincial dialects of England; the exhibition of the methods applicable to their investigation not being considered necessary in a work like the present.
NOTE.
That Saxon was the British name of the Germanic invaders of Great Britain is certain.—See § [45].
The reasons which induce me to consider it as exclusively British, i.e., as foreign to the Angles, are as follows,—
a. No clear distinction has ever been drawn between, e.g., an Angle of Suffolk, and a Saxon of Essex.
b. The Romans who knew, for some parts at least, every inch of the land occupied by the Saxons of Germany, as long as there is reason for believing that they took their names from German sources, never use the word. It is strange to Cæsar, Strabo, Pliny, and Tacitus. Ptolemy is the first who uses it.
c. Ecbert, who is said to have attached the name of England, or Land of Angles, to South Britain, was, himself, no Angle, but a West-Saxon.[[66]]