Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/306

Rh to the good Duke Humphrey and many of our Bishops. The Earl, having the charge of the boy King Henry VI., craved full powers as to whipping the future founder of Eton College; the child's growing years were causing him ‘more and more to grucche with chastising, and to lothe it.’ The petition shows us that the endings of verbs had been much clipped, that the Southern thilke had, in some measure, made way for that (ille), that Wickliffe's suche (talis) had come to be preferred to Chaucer's swiche, and that the Northern their and theim were encroaching on the Southern her and hem. It was still thought the right thing to say, like Manning, yeve and ayeins, though Caxton was afterwards to bring us back to the true old spelling. The phrase ‘speech at part’ shows us whence comes our ‘apart,’ and ‘owe’ (debent) makes us aware that some resistance was made to our corrupt ‘ought.’ The Plural Adjectives in the phrase, ‘causes necessaries and resonables,’ are a token of lingering French influence, which acted upon Warwick, an old soldier of the great French war. One half of the nouns, verbs, and adverbs in this State paper are of French birth; indeed, there could not well be a greater proportion of Romance terms in a Queen's speech compiled by the Gladstone cabinet. The unhappy Suffolk, one of the Council to whom the petition is addressed, was himself the writer of a noble letter of advice; this, being drawn up not long before his death for his son's behoof, is far more Teutonic than Warwick's petition. Still homelier are the letters