A! blynd folk, fulle off all foly,
Had yhe wmbethowcht[14] yowe inkkyrly[15]
Quhat peryle to yowe mycht appere,
Yhe had noucht wroucht on this manèr.
Had yhe tane kepe[16], how that that kyng
Off Walys, forowtyn sudiowrnyng[17],
Trawaylyd[18] to wyn the senyhowry[19],
And throw his mycht till occupy
Landys, that ware till hym marchand[20],
As Walys was, and als Irland,
That he put till sic threllage[21],
That thai, that ware off hey parage[22],
Suld ryn on fwte, as rybalddale[23],
Quhen ony folk he wald assale.
Durst nane of Walis in batale ryd,
Na yhit, fra evyn fell[24], abyde
Castell or wallyd towne within,
Than[25] he suld lyff and lymmys tyne[26].
Into swylk thryllage[27] thame held he
That he owre-come with his powsté[28].
[14.] bethought [15.] especially [16.] taken heed [17.] without delay [18.] laboured [19.] sovereignty [20.] bordering [21.] such subjection [22.] high rank [23.] rabble [24.] after evening fell [25.] but [26.] lose [27.] thraldom [28.] power
In this extract, as in that from the Metrical Psalter above, there is a striking preponderance of monosyllables, and, as in that case also, the final -e is invariably silent in such words as oure, stere, lede, yhere, thare, were, etc., just as in modern English. The grammar is, for the most part, extremely simple, as at the present day. The chief difficulty lies in the vocabulary, which contains some words that are either obsolete or provincial. Many of the obsolete words are found in other dialects; thus stere, to control, perfay, fonden (for fanden), chesen, to choose, feloun, adj. meaning “angry,” take kepe, soiourne, to tarry, travaile, to labour, parage, rank, all occur in Chaucer; barnage, reauté, in William of Palerne (in the Midland dialect, possibly Shropshire); oughte, owned, possessed, tyne, to lose, in Piers the Plowman; umbethinken, in the Ormulum; enkerly (for inkkyrly), in the alliterative Morte Arthure; march, to border upon, in Mandeville; seignorie, in Robert of Gloucester. Barbour is rather fond of introducing French words; rybalddale occurs in no other author. Threllage or thryllage may have been coined from threll (English thrall), by adding a French suffix. As to the difficult word nyt, see Nite in the N.E.D.
In addition to the poems, etc., already mentioned, further material may be found in the prose works of Richard Rolle of Hampole, especially his translation and exposition of the Psalter, edited by the Rev. H.R. Bramley (Oxford, 1884), and the Prose Treatises edited by the Rev. G.G. Perry for the Early English Text Society. Dr Murray further calls attention to the Early Scottish Laws, of which the vernacular translations partly belong to the fourteenth century.
I have now mentioned the chief authorities for the study of the Northern dialect from early times down to 1400. Examination of them leads directly to a result but little known, and one that is in direct contradiction to general uninstructed opinion; namely that, down to this date, the varieties of Northumbrian are much fewer and slighter than they afterwards became, and that the written documents are practically all in one and the same dialect, or very nearly so, from the Humber as far north as Aberdeen. The irrefragable results noted by Dr Murray will probably come as a surprise to many, though they have now been before the public for more than forty years. The Durham dialect of the Cursor Mundi and the Aberdeen Scotch of Barbour are hardly distinguishable by grammatical or orthographical tests; and both bear a remarkable resemblance to the Yorkshire dialect as found in Hampole. What is now called Lowland Scotch is so nearly descended from the Old Northumbrian that the latter was invariably called “Ingliss” by the writers who employed it; and they reserved the name of “Scottish” to designate Gaelic or Erse, the tongue of the original “Scots,” who gave their name to the country. Barbour (Bruce, iv 253) calls his own language “Ynglis.” Andro of Wyntown does the same, near the beginning of the Prologue to his Cronykil. The most striking case is that of Harry the Minstrel, who was so opposed to all Englanders, from a political point of view, that his whole poem breathes fury and hatred against them; and yet, in describing Wallace’s French friend, Longueville, who knew no tongue but his own, he says of him (Wallace, ix 295-7):
Lykly he was, manlik of contenance,
Lik to the Scottis be mekill governance
Saiff off his tong, for Inglis had he nane.
Later still, Dunbar, near the conclusion of his Golden Targe, apostrophises Chaucer as being “in oure Tong ane flouir imperiall,” and says that he was “of oure Inglisch all the lycht.” It was not till 1513 that Gawain Douglas, in the Prologue to the first book of his translation of Virgil, claimed to have “writtin in the langage of Scottis natioun”; though Sir David Lyndesay, writing twenty-two years later, still gives the name of the “Inglisch toung” to the vulgar tongue of Scotland, in his Satyre of the three Estaitis.
We should particularly notice Dr Murray’s statement, in his essay on The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland, at p. 29, that “Barbour at Aberdeen, and Richard Rolle de Hampole near Doncaster, wrote for their several countrymen in the same identical dialect.” The division between the English of the Scottish Lowlands and the English of Yorkshire was purely political, having no reference to race or speech, but solely to locality; and yet, as Dr Murray remarks, the struggle for supremacy “made every one either an Englishman or a Scotchman, and made English and Scotch names of division and bitter enmity.” So strong, indeed, was the division thus created that it has continued to the present day; and it would be very difficult even now to convince a native of the Scottish Lowlands—unless he is a philologist—that he is likely to be of Anglian descent, and to have a better title to be called an “Englishman” than a native of Hampshire or Devon, who, after all, may be only a Saxon. And of course it is easy enough to show how widely the old “Northern” dialect varies from the difficult Southern English found in the Kentish Ayenbite of Inwyt, or even from the Midland of Chaucer’s poems.