Page:The Sources of Standard English.djvu/85

56 the union of many generations of Danes and Angles, dwelling not far from Rutland. Without the Peter&shy;borough Chronicle, we should be groping in the dark for many years, in striving to understand the history of our tongue.

This Chronicle bears the mark of many hands. It is likely that various passages in it were copied from older chronicles, or were set down by old men many years after the events recorded had taken place. A fire, whereby the old Abbey and town of Peterborough were burnt to the ground in 1116, marks a date both in English Architecture and in English Philology. After that year arose the noble choir, which has happily escaped the doom of Glastonbury and Walsingham. After that year, monks were sent out to copy the English chronicles of other Abbeys, and thus to replace the old Peterborough annals, which must have been burnt in the fire. The copyists thus handed down to us a mass of good English prose, a great contrast to the forged charters, drawn up in the Midland speech of 1120, which were newly inserted in the Chronicle. It is with these last that my business lies, as also with the local annals of Peterborough, taken down from the mouths of old men who could remember the doughty deeds of Hereward and his gang fifty years earlier, when men of Danish blood in the East and North were still hoping to shake off William's yoke.