And the georne gebide gece and miltse fore alra his haligra gewyrhtum and ge-earningum and boenum be [hiwe]num, tha the domino deo gelicedon from fruman middan-geardes; thonne gehereth he thec thorh hiora thingunge. Do thonne fiorthan sithe thin hleor thriga to iorthan, fore alle Godes cirican, and sing thas fers: domini est salus, saluum fac populum tuum, domine, praetende misericordiam tuam. Sing thonne pater noster. Gebide thonne fore alle geleaffulle menn in mundo. Thonne bistu thone deg dael-niomende thorh Dryhtnes gefe alra theara goda the ænig monn for his noman gedoeth, and thec alle soth-festæ fore thingiath in caelo et in terra. Amen.[*]
[*] I write hiwenum in l. 2 in place of an illegible word.
That is:—
And earnestly pray for-thyself for help and mercy by-reason-of the deeds and merits and prayers of all his saints on-behalf-of the [households] that have pleased the Lord God from the beginning of the world; then will He hear thee because-of their intercession. Bow-down then, at the fourth time, thy face thrice to the earth before all God’s church, and sing these verses: The Lord is my salvation, save Thy people, O Lord: show forth Thy mercy. Sing then a pater-noster. Pray then for all believing men in the world. Then shalt thou be, on that day, a partaker, by God’s grace, of all the good things that any man doth for His name, and all true-men will intercede for thee in heaven and in earth. Amen.
Another discovery was the assignment of a correct description to the glosses found in a document known as the Vespasian Psalter; so called because it is an early Latin Psalter, or book of Psalms, contained in a Cotton MS. in the British Museum, marked with the class-mark “Vespasian, A. 1.” This Psalter is accompanied throughout with glosses which were at first mistakenly thought to be in a Northumbrian dialect, and were published as such by the Surtees Society in 1843. They were next, in 1875, wrongly supposed to be Kentish; but since they were printed by Sweet in 1885 it has been shown that they are really Mercian. This set of glosses is very important for the study of Old Mercian, because they are rather extensive; they occupy 213 pages of the Oldest English Texts, and are followed by 20 more pages of similar glosses to certain Latin canticles and hymns that occur in the same MS.
There are also a few Charters extant in the Mercian dialect, but the earliest contain little else than old forms of the names of persons and places. There are, however, some later Charters, from 836 to 1058 in the Mercian dialect, which contain some boundaries of lands and afford other information. Most of these relate to Worcestershire.
But the most interesting Mercian glosses are those to be found in the Rushworth MS., which has already been mentioned as containing Northumbrian glosses of the Latin Gospels of St Mark, St Luke, and St John. For the Gospel of St Matthew was glossed by the scribe Farman, who was a priest of Harewood, situate on the river Wharfe, in the West Riding of Yorkshire; whose language, accordingly, was Mercian. In my Principles of English Etymology, First Series (second edition, 1892), p. 44, I gave a list of words selected from these glosses, in order to show how much nearer they stand, as a rule, to modern English than do the corresponding Anglo-Saxon forms. I here repeat this list, as it is very instructive. The references, such as “5. 15,” are to the chapters and verses of St Matthew’s Gospel, as printed in my edition of The Holy Gospels, in Anglo-Saxon, Northumbrian, and Old Mercian Versions, synoptically arranged (Cambridge, 1871-87). The first column below gives the Modern English form, the second the Old Mercian form (with references), and the third the Anglo-Saxon or Wessex form:
In l.5, the scribe Farman miswrote caldas as galdas, in Matt. x 42; but it is a mere mistake. In l. 20, the accent over the a in áld is marked in the MS., though the vowel was not originally long.
Even a glance at this comparative table reveals a peculiarity of the Wessex dialect which properly belongs neither to Mercian nor to Modern English, viz. the use of the diphthong ea (in which each vowel was pronounced separately) instead of simple a, before the sounds denoted by l, r, h, especially when another consonant follows. We find accordingly such Wessex forms as eall, ceald, fealleth, -feald, gealla, healf, healt, nearu, eald, seald, weall, gearo, where the Old Mercian has simply all, cald, falleth, -fald, galla, half, halt, naru, ald, sald, wall, iara. Similarly, Wessex has the diphthongs ēa, ēo, in which the former element is long, where the Old Mercian has simply ē or ī. We find accordingly the Wessex cēace, ēac, ēage, scēap, as against the Mercian cēke, ēk, ēge, scēp; and the Wessex lēogan, lēoht, as against the Mercian līgan, līht.