Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/214

Rh came one of the worst of all our corruptions, Layamon's Active Participle in ing instead of the older form: Robert leans to this evil change, but still he often uses the old East Midland Participle in and. With the North Robert has much in common: we can see by his rimes that he wrote the Norse þeþen (page 81) and mykel (page 253), instead of the Southern þen and mochyl, which have been foisted into his verse by the Southerner who transcribed the poem sixty years later. The following are some of the forms Robert uses, which are found, many of them for the first time, in the Northern Psalter: childer, fos, ylka, tane, ire, gatte, hauk, slagheter, handmayden, lighten, wrecched, abye, sle, as sone as, many one, dounright, he seys, thou sweres, sky (cœlum). He, like the translator of the Psalter, delights in the form gh; not only does he write sygh, lagheter, doghe, nyghe, neghbour, but also kneugh and nagheer (our knew and nowhere). This seems to show that in Southern Lincolnshire, in 1303, the gh had not always a guttural sound. He also sometimes clips the ending of the Imperative Plural; but turns the Yorkshire thou has into thou hast. In common with another Northern work, the Sir Tristrem, Robert uses the new form ye for the Latin tu; also the new senses given in that work to the old words smart and croun. To the bond (servus) of the aforesaid poem he fastens a French ending, and thus compounds a new substantive, bondage, where&shy;with he translates the French vileynage: this is a most astounding innovation, the source of much bad English. Our tongue might well seem stricken with barrenness,