And preserve his soul from sorrow and tears,
Of hell-pain, cold and hot!"
The Ormulum is the earliest[[12]] printed Early English work which has come down to us that exhibits the uniform employment of the termination -en (-n) as the inflection of the plural number, present tense, indicative mood; or, in other words, it is the earliest printed example we have of a Midland dialect. I say a Midland dialect, because the work of Orm is, after all, only a specimen of one variety of the Midland speech, most probably of that spoken in the northern part of the eastern counties of England, including what is commonly called the district of East Anglia.
Next in antiquity to the Ormulum come the Bestiary, already mentioned, and the present poem, both of which uniformly employ the Midland affix -en, to the exclusion of all others, as the inflection of the present plural indicative.
There are other peculiarities which these works have in common; and a careful comparison of them with the Ormulum induces me to assign them to the East Midland area; but there are certain peculiarities, to be noticed hereafter, which induce me to believe that the work of Orm represents a dialect spoken in the northern part of this district, while the Story of Genesis and Exodus, together with the Bestiary, exhibits the speech of the more southern counties of the East Midland district.[[13]] Thus, if the former be in the dialect of Lincoln, the latter is in that of Suffolk.[[14]]
The chief points in which the present poem and the Bestiary agree with the Ormulum are the following:—
I. The absence of compound vowels.
In the Southern dialects we find the compound vowels ue, eo, ie, ea (yea). In the Ormulum eo occurs, but with the sound of e, and ea in Genesis and Exodus is written for e.
II. The change of an initial ð (th) into t after words ending in d, t, n, s, that is to say, after a dental or a sibilant.[[15]]
"ðanne iſ tis fruit wel ſwiðe good."—(Gen. and Ex., l. [334].)