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 THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY


The subject of the last chapter was one of great importance. When it
is once understood that, down to 1400 or a little later, the men of
the Scottish Lowlands and the men of the northern part of England
spoke not only the same language, but the same dialect of that
language, it becomes easy to explain what happened afterwards.