Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/191

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Corona now first stands for the top of the head, as in page 51:

‘Crounes thai gun crake.’

THE EAST MIDLAND DIALECT.

(About A.D. 1280.)

King Edward was now fastening his yoke upon Wales. The first Mercian poem of this time that I shall notice is the piece called The Harrowing of Hell, the earliest specimen of anything like an English dramatic work. It may have been written at Northampton or Bedford. The text has been settled (why did no Englishman take it in hand, and go the right way to work?) by Dr. Mall of Breslau. With true German insight into philology, he has compared three different English transcripts: a Warwickshire (?) one of 1290; a Herefordshire one of 1313; and a Northern one of 1330. Again we see the Midland tokens; the Pre&shy;sent Plural in en, the almost invariable disuse of the prefix to the Past Participle, the substitution of noht for ne, have I for habbe ich. The author wrote kin and man, not the Southern kun and mon, since the words are made to rime with him and Abraham. The old a is sometimes, but not always, replaced by o; the poet's rimes prove him to have written strong, not strang; he had both ygan and ygon, riming respectively with Sathan and martirdom. The plural form honden,