larly notice Dr Murray's statement, in his essay on
_The Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland_, at p. 29, that
"Barbour at Aberdeen, and Richard Rolle de Hampole near Doncaster,
wrote for their several countrymen in the same identical dialect." The
division between the English of the Scottish Lowlands and the English
of Yorkshire was purely political, having no reference to race or
speech, but solely to locality; and yet, as Dr Murray remarks, the
struggle for supremacy "made every one either an Englishman or a
Scotchman, and made English and Scotch names of division and bitter
enmity." So strong, indeed, was the division thus created that it
has continued to the present day; and it would be very difficult even
now to convince a native of the Scottish Lowlands--unless he is a
philologist--that he is likely to be of Anglian descent, and to have
a better title to be called an "Englishman" than a native of Hampshire
or Devon, who, after all, may be only a Saxon. And of course it is
easy enough to show how widely the old "Northern" dialect varies from
the difficult Southern English found in the Kentish _Ayenbite of
Inwyt_, or even from the Midland of Chaucer's poems.

To quote from Dr Murray once more (p. 41):

"the facts are still far from being generally known, and I have
repeatedly been amused, on reading passages from _Cursor Mundi_ and
Hampole to men of education, both English and Scotch, to hear them
all pronounce the dialect 'Old Scotch.' Great has been the surprise
of the latter especially on being told that Richard the Hermit [i.e.
of Hampole] wrote in the extreme south of Yorkshire, within a few
miles of a locality so thoroughly English as Sherwood Forest, with
its memories of Robin Hood. Such is the difficulty which people
have in separating the natural and ethnological relations in which
national names originate from the accidental values which they
acquire through political complications and the fortunes of crowns
and dynasties, that oftener than once the protest has been made--
'Then he must have been a Scotchman settled there!'"

The retort is obvious enough, that Barbour and Henry the Minstrel and
Dunbar and Lyndesay have all recorded that their native language was
"Inglis" or "Inglisch"; and it is interesting to note that, having
regard to the pronunciation, they seem to have known, better than we
do, how that name ought to be spelt.

CHAPTER V

NORTHUMBRIAN IN