INTRODUCTORY REMARKS.

THE peasantry of Northamptonshire still retain much of the diversity of dialect which we may suppose to have characterised the early settlers of one of the march or border counties of Mercia and Wessex. Two distinct and very opposite modes of speech may be observed among the rural population of the two extremities of the county. The inhabitants of the districts bordering on Oxford and Buckingham make use of a speech nearly allied to that which is current throughout the Southern and Western counties, and which is generally known as the West Country dialect; while the dwellers in the Northern and Eastern portions of the county speak a variety of the Anglian dialect, more or less similar, according to locality, to those of Leicester, Lincoln, and North Bedford.

In the central districts of Northamptonshire, where the two dialects come into contact, and the Anglian

speech of Mercia blends with the Saxon idiom of the West, a third and intermediate variety is current: partaking in some measure of the peculiarities of both, but which, from its utter want of tone, and freedom from dialectic inflexion, has become proverbial among the neighbouring counties for its superior purity and resemblance to our present standard English. In order to prove that this peculiarity is no result of the various modern causes which militate against the retention of local idiom, we have only to point to the varied and strongly marked dialectic character of the language of the peasantry situated at a greater distance north and south of the Watling Street.* A passage of Fuller, also, here steps to our aid, and affords a valuable illustration of the point. In the description of the county prefixed to his list of Northamptonshire Worthies, he

* Morton has alluded to the supposition that the Watling Street was the boundary between the Mercians and West Saxons, " as it is now the boundary of parishes and lordships, parting betwixt field and field, lordship and lordship, for almost the whole length of its course through the county."-Natural History of Northamptonshire, p. 501. This opinion is countenanced in some degree by the language of the peasantry, for the two varieties of which, in the first half of its course, it may be taken as a pretty correct line of demarcation. The south-western district appears to have been first settled by the men of Wessex; and in the numerous intestine wars and broils which characterised the days of the Octarchy, it seems, in conjunction with North Oxfordshire, to have constituted a kind of debateable ground between the West Saxons and their powerful Anglian neighbours of Mercia, till finally annexed to Wessex, A. d. 827.

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gives the following curious remarks on the dialect:"The language of the common people is generally the best of any shire in England. A proof whereof, when a boy, I received from a hand-labouring man herein, which since hath convinced my judgment. We speak, I believe (said he), as good English as any shire in England, because, though in the singing Psalms some words are used to make the meeter unknown to us, yet the last translation of the Bible, which, no doubt, was done by those learned men in the best English, agreeth perfectly with the common speech of our country,"

It is to this Lingua franca, which at the present day presents precisely the same analogy to the national speech that the Northamptonshire dialect of the seventeenth century did to the language of the Church historian,—and which is current, in slightly varied forms, along the whole line of march counties,-that we must, in all probability, look for the origin of our present literary language. We have, indeed, the authority of Mr. Guest for looking upon the Leicestershire variety in a similar light;* but the patois of the Western counties is no where spoken in that county, and that dialect is therefore wanting in one of the principal requisites for the production of a mixed language. To judge, also, from the printed specimens of Dr. Evans, the speech

* History of English Rhythms. Lond. 1838. Vol. ii. p. 198.

of the Leicestershire peasantry is much more dialectic than the Mercio-Saxon of central Northamptonshire.*

As it will be interesting to the philologist to know how far the Western idiom may have become modified by its proximity to the Anglian dialects, we detail the principal peculiarities of our South-Western district.

The more marked peculiarities of the Western dialect, the interchange of the v and ƒ, the retention of the z sound of the s, and the substitution of d for the th, are all to be observed in this district; though but slightly, in comparison with the usage prevailing in the more Southern provinces. For the long open sound of a, or ai, in such words as face, bake, fair, &c., the dipthongal sound of ia is invariably substituted, making them fiace, biake, &c. We, also, still preserve the original sound of the ea, thus-break, meat, mean, are pronounced as if written bre-ak, me-at, me-an: the pronunciation is perhaps better represented by the insertion of y, thus-breyak, meyat, &c. The dipthongs oi and

This view is fully borne out by the Bedfordshire dialect, in which the boundaries of the two varieties appear to be accurately marked by the Ouse; and along the valley of that river we find the same admixture of phraseology, and a similar want of tone. The author of the Herefordshire Glossary (another march county), though apparently unacquainted with the cause, has also a remark strikingly to the purpose:-"It may be observed," he says, "that the Herefordshire dialect is not so remote from the literary language, and does not contain so many provincial expressions as some other local dialect; for example, the Lancashire and Exmoor dialects, as exemplified in Tim Bobbin, and the Exmoor Dialogue.

or wo.

oy, as Mr. Jennings has remarked of the Somersetshire dialect, and Mr. Akerman of that of Wiltshire, are commonly changed into wi; hence, the usual spwile for spoil, bwile for boil. The long o in such words as boat, coat, lone, &c., receives the sound of uo Ee becomes i: we continually hear grin, fit, wid, ship, &c., for green, feet, &c. Oo receives the sound of u, as in bruk, tuk, &c., for brook, took. The long and broad pronunciation of the o in such words as horn, corn, morning, becomes a, thus making harn, carn, marnen, &c.; and the curious form of the verb substantive, you'm, wẻm, he'm, we possess in common with the counties of Bedford and Somerset. The broad sound of the ou in fought, bought, &c., becomes o, rendering them fote, bote, &c. D after n is very generally omitted, as in groun, boun, for ground, bound, &c.

The dialects of the Northern and Eastern districts may be esteemed identical in all essential particulars. Great diversity of pronunciation is, however, observable in different localities; and the speech in general is much less uniform than that of the inhabitants to the south of the Watling Street. The pronunciation of a word will often vary considerably in the same village; and numerous changes are apparent in the articulation of the vowels. The provincialisms of this part of Northamptonshire, as will be seen from the following Glossary, betray evident traces of Danish colonization.