[I. East Midland]
The Mercian district lies between the Northern and Southern, occupying an irregular area which it is very difficult to define. On the east coast it reached from the mouth of the Humber to that of the Thames. On the western side it seems to have included a part of Lancashire, and extended from the mouth of the Lune to the Bristol Channel, exclusive of a great part of Wales.
There were two chief varieties of it which differed in many particulars, viz. the East Midland and the West Midland. The East Midland included, roughly speaking, the counties of Lincoln, Rutland, Northampton, and Buckingham, and all the counties (between the Thames and Humber) to the east of these, viz. Cambridge, Huntingdon, Bedford, Hertford, Middlesex, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex. We must also certainly include, if not Oxfordshire, at any rate the city of Oxford. This is by far the most important group of counties, as it was the East Midland that finally prevailed over the rest, and was at last accepted as a standard, thus rising from the position of a dialect to be the language of the Empire. The Midland prevailed over the Northern and Southern dialects because it was intermediate between them, and so helped to interpret between North and South; and the East Midland prevailed over the Western because it contained within its area all three of the chief literary centres, namely, Oxford, Cambridge, and London. It follows from this that the Old Mercian dialect is of greater interest than either the Northumbrian or Anglo-Saxon.
Unfortunately, the amount of extant Old Mercian, before the Conquest, is not very large, and it is only of late years that the MSS. containing it have been rightly understood. Practically, the study of it dates only from 1885, when Dr Sweet published his Oldest English Texts.
But there is more Mercian to be found than was at first suspected; and it is desirable to consider this question.
An important discovery was that the language of the oldest Glossaries seems to be Mercian. We have extant no less than four Glossaries in MSS. of as early a date as the eighth century, named respectively, the Epinal, Erfurt, Corpus, and Leyden Glossaries. The first is now at Epinal, in France (in the department Vosges); the second, at Erfurt, near Weimar, in Germany; the third, in Corpus Christi College, Cambridge; and the fourth, at Leyden, in Holland. The Corpus MS. may be taken as typical of the rest. It contains an enumeration of a large number of difficult words, arranged, but imperfectly, in alphabetical order; and after each of these is written its gloss or interpretation. Thus the fifth folio begins as follows:
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Abminiculum . adiutorium. Abelena . haeselhnutu. Abiecit . proiecit. |
Absida . sacrarium. Abies . etspe. Ab ineunte ætate . infantia. |
The chief interest of these Glossaries lies in the fact that a small proportion of the hard words is explained, not in Latin, but in Mercian English, of which there are two examples in the six glosses here quoted. Thus Abelena, which is another spelling of Abellana or Avellana, “a filbert,” is explained as “haeselhnutu”; which is a perfectly familiar word when reduced to its modern form of “hazel-nut.” And again, Abies, which usually means “a fir-tree,” is here glossed by “etspe.” But this is certainly a false spelling, as we see by comparing it with the following glosses in Epinal and Erfurt (Nos. 37,1006):—“Abies. saeppae—sæpae”; and “Tremulus. aespae—espæ.” This shows that the scribe ought to have explained Abies by “saeppae,” meaning the tree full of sap, called in French sapin; but he confused it with another tree, the “trembling” tree, of which the Old Mercian name was “espe” or “espæ,” or “aespae,” and he miswrote espe as etspe, inserting a needless t. This last tree is the one which Chaucer called the asp in l. 180 of his Parliament of Fowls, but in modern times the adjectival suffix -en (as in gold-en, wood-en) has been tacked on to it, and it is now the aspen.
The interpretation of these ancient glosses requires very great care, but they afford a considerable number of interesting results, and are therefore valuable, especially as they give us spellings of the eighth century, which are very scarce.
One of the oldest specimens of Old Mercian that affords intelligible sentences is known as the “Lorica Prayer,” because it occurs in the same MS. (Ll. 1. 10 in the Cambridge University Library) as the “Lorica Glosses,” or the glosses which accompany a long Latin prayer, really a charm, called “lorica” or “breast-plate,” because it was recited thrice a day to protect the person who used it from all possible injury and accident. I give this Prayer as illustrating the state of our language about A.D. 850.