Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: XVI. After the middle of the Thirteenth century, the language assumes the general shape and physiognomy of the English which we now write and speak. It may be called English rough-hewn. The space from about the middle of the Thirteenth to the middle of the Fourteenth century may be designated the Period of Old or (better) Early English. This division would accord sufficiently -with the common statement which gives as our earliest specimen of English (as distinguished from Saxon or semi-Saxon) a proclamation of King Henry the Third to the people of Huntingdonshire in 1258. It may be found, with a literal translation interlined, in the 4th vol. of Henry's History of Great Britain (Append. IV.). This historian does not say where he got it. It is printed, from the original preserved among the Patent llolls in the Tower of London, in the new edition of Rymer's Fcedera. But this legal paper can scarcely be safely quoted as exhibiting the current language of the time. Like all such documents, it is made up in great part of established phrases of form, many of which had probably become obsolete in ordinary speech and writing. The English of the proclamation of 1258 is much less modern than that of the Oimulum, and fully as Saxon, both in the words and inthe grammar, as any part otLayamon's Chronicle, if not rather more so. The two principal literary works belonging to this period (that of Early English) are the metrical Chronicles of Robert of Gloucester and of Robert of Brunne. The Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester was edited by Thomas Hearne in 1724. The writer may be considered as belonging to the first half of the present period: it has been shown by Sir Frederic Madden (Introd. to Havelok, lii.) that he must have survived the year 1297. The following passage is doubly cu...