Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/69

40

The Northern men of the year 800 said, ‘doema strong and longmod,’ where the Southerners would have put ‘déma strang and langmod.’ We find no used just as the Scotch now use it, ‘gif ic no fore-settu,’ where na would have been used in the South. One of the most remarkable things in this Psalter is the first appearance of our them, used as a Pronoun, not as an Article. See Psalm cxlv. 6: ‘All ða in ðœm sind.’ This is found but seldom; the settlers soon to come from Denmark would recognise it as a form akin to their own.

Much about the time that the Northumbrian Psalter was compiled, the Norsemen began to harry unhappy England. The feuds of near kinsmen are always the bitterest; and this we found true in the Ninth Century. Soon the object of the heathen became settlement in the land, and not plunder. The whole of England would have fallen under their yoke, had not a hero come forth from the Somersetshire marshes.

In A.D. 876, we read in the Saxon Chronicle that the Danish king, ‘Norðhymbra land gedælde, and