Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/312

Rh pronounced one (unus) much as we do: in page 35 we read:

This won was to be brought into the English Bible, a hundred years later, by another Western man. What Chaucer called a persone, Audlay calls a parsun; he also tries to Latinize the old siker (securus), writing it secur.

We must glance at Audlay's shire thirty years after he wrote; in this interval, the Southern speech seems to have been losing ground. There is hardly a spot, throughout England, so closely linked both to our his&shy;tory and to our literature, as that Salopian stronghold, Ludlow Castle. Here it was that Richard Duke of York (he held also Sandal in Yorkshire) brought up his children; from hence in 1464 was written the joint letter of the future King Edward IV. and of the boy Rutland, who was soon to fall at Wakefield. This letter is most unlike in its forms (geve replaces &#x0293;eve) to the language Bishop Pecock would have used at Paul's Cross before his London hearers; it shows us the clipped English that must have been learnt in childhood by King Edward and his sister, the future wife of Charles the Bold. When the Sun of York was making glorious summer in England, more Northern forms came in; the conqueror's diction may be studied in some of the Paston Letters. Now it was, if ever, that Kings brought