Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/294

Rh many works on religion had been put forth both in the North and the West.

Having spoken of Cambridge, I next turn to Oxford, which had been lately roused by the preaching of Wick&shy;liffe; she was now glowing with a fiery heat unknown to her since the days of the earlier Franciscans. The ques&shy;tions at this time in debate had the healthiest effect upon the English tongue, though they might jar upon Roman interests. Wickliffe, during his long residence in the South, seems to have unlearned the old dialect he must have spoken when a bairn on the banks of the Tees. His first childish lessons in Scripture were most likely drawn from the legends of the Cursor Mundi. He was now bestowing a far greater blessing upon his countrymen, and was stamping his impress upon England's religious dialect, framed long before in the Ancren Riwle and the Handlyng Synne. In reading Wickliffe's version of the Bible, of which so many scores of manuscripts have been happily snatched from Roman fires, we are struck by various peculiarities of speech in which he differs from Mandeville and Chaucer. In these we have followed him. The greatest is the Dano-Anglian custom of clipping the prefix to the Past Participle, as founden instead of yfoun&shy;den. He sometimes, although most seldom, clips the ending of the Plural of the Imperative, as in Herod's request to the wise men: