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212 wynter in toune. As far as sense-development goes "embroideress" would be a very satisfactory original sense for burde, and is perfectly in keeping with the manner and ideas of the alliterative verse to which the word originally belongs. It is not, perhaps, so easy to show that this was in fact its origin; the following are indications of the possibility:

The required OE. *byrde, weak feminine, "embroideress" has not, unfortunately, been discovered. The word borde embroidery, however, should be noted; it actually occurs in the quotation above. This has been referred to OFr. bord, border, hem (it is not in N.E.D. at all), but the word is of Germanic origin, and the ME. word is direct from OE. OE. has borda, embroidery (act and product); cf. ON. borði. Noteworthy are:

II. Notes on the glossary to the E.E.T.S 1922 edition of Hali Meidenhad—or Meiðhad it should perhaps rather be called, since that is the form used throughout the Bodleian text (B), which offers a purer dialect, a more archaic vocabulary, and often a better text than the Cotton Titus MS. (T).

(a) wori, B 704. This is hidden under weorren, "make war," the word substituted by T. The extremely consisten phonology and spelling of B forbid this, unless wori is emended outright to weorri. T, however, not infrequently has a commoner word instead of an archaic or rarer one preserved in B; while here weorren must