It must be recollected that the Ormulum is much earlier than the Story of Genesis and Exodus.
See Ormulum, Introduction, p. lxxviii., note 105; lxxxi., note 112.
While agreeing with the editor of the Ormulum, that the simplicity of grammatical forms may fairly be considered as indicating a less artificial, and therefore advanced, stage of the language, I cannot adopt his theory, that "the strict rules of grammar" were therefore abandoned, and thereby was anticipated, to a certain extent, a later phraseology and structure; or that Orm, or any other O.E. writer, ever sacrificed "the more regular for a simpler, though more corrupt, structure and style." It must always be borne in mind that our earlier writers always speak of their language as English; but it was the English of the district in which they lived. In some districts, as in the Northumbrian, for instance, the language underwent certain changes at a very early period, which more Southern dialects did not adopt for more than a century afterwards: thus, in works of the 14th century, we find the Midland more archaic than the Northumbrian, and the Southern more archaic than either. Authors seeking to become popular would write in the dialect best understood by their readers, without considering whether it was simple or complex. Thus the Ayenbite of Inwyt (A.D. 1340), written for the men of Kent, contains far more of the older inflectional forms than the Ormulum of the twelfth century.
Southern writers before 1340 formed the g.s. of fem. nouns in -e and not in -es.
In the Southern dialect the article had separate forms for the nominative fem. (theo, tho), and neuter (thet, that); the fem. gen. sing. (thar, ther), and the masc. acc. (than, then).