ex. We must also
certainly include, if not Oxfordshire, at any rate the city of Oxford.
This is by far the most important group of counties, as it was
the East Midland that finally prevailed over the rest, and was at last
accepted as a standard, thus rising from the position of a dialect to
be the language of the Empire. The Midland prevailed over the Northern
and Southern dialects because it was intermediate between them, and so
helped to interpret between North and South; and the East Midland
prevailed over the Western because it contained within its area all
three of the chief literary centres, namely, Oxford, Cambridge, and
London. It follows from this that the Old Mercian dialect is of
greater interest than either the Northumbrian or Anglo-Saxon.

Unfortunately, the amount of extant Old Mercian, before the Conquest,
is not very large, and it is only of late years that the MSS.
containing it have been rightly understood. Practically, the study of
it dates only from 1885, when Dr Sweet published his _Oldest English
Texts_.

But there is more Mercian to be found than was at first suspected; and
it is desirable to consider this question.

An important discovery was that the language of the oldest Glossaries
seems to be Mercian. We have extant no less than four Glossaries in
MSS. of as early a date as the eighth century, named respectively, the
Epinal, Erfurt, Corpus, and Leyden Glossaries. The first is now at
Epinal, in France (in the department Vosges); the second, at Erfurt,
near Weimar, in Germany; the third, in Corpus Christi College,
Cambridge; and the fourth, at Leyden, in Holland. The Corpus MS. may
be taken as typical of the rest. It contains an enumeration of a
large number of difficult words, arranged, but imperfectly, in
alphabetical order; and after each of these is written its gloss
or interpretation. Thus the fifth folio begins as follows:

Abminiculum . adiutorium.
Abelena . haeselhnutu.
Abiecit . proiecit.
Absida . sacrarium.
Abies . etspe.
Ab ineunte {ae}tate . infantia.

The chief interest of these Glossaries lies in the fact that a small
proportion of the hard words is explained, not in Latin, but in
Mercian English, of which there are two examples in the six glosses
here quoted. Thus Abelena, which is another spelling of Abellana or
Avellana, "a filbert," is explained as "haeselhnutu"; which is a
perfectly familiar word when reduced to its modern form of "hazel-nut."
And again,