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We see what wild anarchy of speech was raging throughout the length and breadth of England in the first half of the Fourteenth Century; and this anarchy had lasted more than two hundred years. But at the same time we plainly see that the dialect of the shires nearest to Rutland was the dialect to which our own classic speech of 1873 is most akin, and that Robert of Brunne in 1303 was leading the way to something new. In a later chapter we shall weigh the causes that led to the triumph of Robert's dialect, though this triumph was not thoroughly achieved until a hundred and sixty years after he began his great work. Strange it is that Dante should have been compiling his Inferno, which settled the course of Italian literature for ever, in the self-same years that Robert of Brunne was compiling the earliest pattern of well-formed New English. Had King Henry VIII. known what we owe to this bard, the Lincolnshire men would not have been rated in 1536 as follows: ‘How presumptuous are ye, the rude commons of one shire, and that one of the most brute and beastly of the whole realm, and of least experience!’

Words, akin to the Dutch and German, first found in England in the Fourteenth Century.