Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/314

Rh written with pen and ink, as other books are, to the end that every man may have them at once.’ Wherein did the Duchess and the Printer differ in their views of English? In this, that the one came of a Northern house, while the other had been born and bred in the South. Owing to the new influence, in Caxton's first work we see the loss of the old Southern inflections of the Verb; and we find Orrmin's their, them, and that (iste) well established, instead of the Southern her, hem, and thilk, beloved of Pecock. Plural Adjectives no longer end in s; for we read ‘strange habitacions’ in the first page of the Recuyell. The word yle (insula) in the same page is spelt without the intruding s. Manning's way of writing y instead of i is often found; but this we have happily refused to follow. The old form ''that oon. . . that othir'' (in Latin, alter . . . alter) comes once more. In the Game of the Chess, published in 1474, we find ner for the Latin neque, an odd mixture of the Southern ne with the North Western corruption nor. The hard g is seen once more, as in agayn, driving out the usurper y. When we weigh the works of Caxton, who wrote under the eye of the Yorkist Princess, we should bear in mind the English written by her father in 1452. The Midland speech was now carrying all before it. The Acts of Parliament passed under the last Plantagenet King were printed by the old servant of the House of York.