CHAPTER VIII

THE MERCIAN DIALECT


I. EAST MIDLAND

The Mercian district lies between the Northern and Southern, occupying
an irregular area which it is very difficult to define. On the east
coast it reached from the mouth of the Humber to that of the Thames.
On the western side it seems to have included a part of Lancashire,
and extended from the mouth of the Lune to the Bristol Channel,
exclusive of a great part of Wales.

There were two chief varieties of it which differed in many
particulars, viz. the East Midland and the West Midland. The East
Midland included, roughly speaking, the counties of Lincoln, Rutland,
Northampton, and Buckingham, and all the counties (between the Thames
and Humber) to the east of these, viz. Cambridge, Huntingdon, Bedford,
Hertford, Middlesex, Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex. 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