[244] Morsbach, 271.
[245] Chadwick, Heroic Age, 4.
[246] "Thus in place of the expression to widan feore we find occasionally widan feore in the same sense, and even in Beowulf we meet with widan feorh, which is not improbably the oldest form of the phrase. Before the loss of the final -u it [widan feorhu] would be a perfectly regular half verse, but the operation of this change would render it impossible and necessitate the substitution of a synonymous expression. In principle, it should be observed, the assumption of such substitutions seems to be absolutely necessary, unless we are prepared to deny that any old poems or even verses survived the period of apocope." Chadwick, Heroic Age, pp. 46-7.
[247] Heroic Age, 46.
[248] Birch, Cart. Sax. No. 81. See Morsbach, 260.
[249] The most important examples being breguntford (Birch, Cart. Sax. No. 115, dating between 693 and 731; perhaps 705): heffled in the life of St Gregory written by a Whitby monk apparently before 713: -gar on the Bewcastle Column, earlier than the end of the first quarter of the eighth century and perhaps much earlier: and many names in ford and feld in the Moore MS of Bede's Ecclesiastical History (a MS written about 737).
[250] An English Miscellany presented to Dr Furnivall, 370.
[251] Grienberger, Anglia, XXVII, 448.
[252] i.e. flodu ahof might stand for flōd u[p] ăhōf, as is suggested by Chadwick, Heroic Age, 69.
[253] In the Franks casket b already appears as f, and the n of sefu, "seven," has been lost.