Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/76

Rh sample would be as precious as the bad Latin, the parent of the New Italian, which may be read on the walls of Pompeii. By Eadred's time, two or three generations of Norsemen and Angles must have been mingled together; the uncouth dialect, woefully shorn of inflections, spoken in the markets of Leicester and Stamford, would be found to foreshadow the corruptions of the Peterborough Chronicle after 1120.

The country, falling within a radius of twenty miles drawn from the centre of Rutland, would be acknow&shy;ledged, I think, as the cradle of the New English that we now speak. To go farther afield; all the land enclosed within a line drawn round from the Humber through Doncaster, Derby, Ashby, Rugby, Northampton, Bed&shy;ford, and Ipswich (this may be called the Mercian Dane&shy;lagh) helped mightily in forming the new literature: within this boundary were the Five Burghs, and the other Danish strongholds already named. Just outside this boundary were Southern Yorkshire and Northern Essex, which have also had their influence upon our tongue. Alfred's grandsons, on their way home to Winchester from their Northern fields, would have been much astonished, could it have been foretold to them that the Five Burghs, so lately held by the heathen, were to have the shaping of England's future speech. This New English, hundreds of years later, was to be handled by men, who would throw into the far back&shy;ground even such masterpieces of the Old English as the Beowulf and the Judith.

Some writers, I see, upbraid the French conquerors of England for bereaving us of our old inflections; it