The mere examination of an Early English work with respect to its
vocabulary and grammatical forms, will not enable us (as Price asserts) to
settle satisfactorily the date at which it was written. The place of
composition must also be taken into consideration, and a comparison, if
possible, must be made with other works in the same dialect, the date of
which is known with some degree of certainty. The date of the text before
us must not, therefore, be confounded with that of the manuscript, which
is, perhaps, a few years earlier than A.D. 1300. A careful comparison of
the poem with the Bestiary, written in the same dialect, and most probably
by the same author[9] (and printed by Mr Wright in the Reliquiæ Antiquæ, p.
208, and by myself in an Old English Miscellany), leads me to think that
the present poem is not later than A.D. 1250.[10]
The vocabulary, which contains very few words of Romance origin,[11] is not
that of Robert of Gloucester, or of Robert of Brunne, but such as is found
in Laȝamon's Brut, or Orm's paraphrases, and other works illustrating the
second period of our language, i.e. the twelfth and earlier part of the
thirteenth centuries.
The employment of a _dual_ for the pronouns of the first and second persons
marks an _early_ date (certainly not much later than the time of Henry
III.) even in works composed in the Southern dialect, which, it is well
known, retained to a comparatively late period those Anglo-Saxon
inflections that had long previously been disused in more Northern
dialects.
The Corpus manuscript is evidently the work of a scribe, to whom the
language was more or less archaic, which accounts for such blunders as
_ðrosing_ for _ðrosem_, _waspene_ for _wastme_, _lage_ for _vn-lage_,
_insile_ for _vn-sile_, _grauen_ for _ðrauen_, etc.
The original copy of Genesis most probably terminated with ll. 2521-4:
"And here ended completely
The book which is called Genesis,
Which Moses, through God's help,
Wrote for precious souls' need."
The concluding lines, in which both the author and scribe are mentioned,
seem to me to be the work of a subsequent transcriber:
"God shield his soul from hell-bale,
Who made it thus in English tale (speech)!
And he that these letters wrote,
May God help him blissfully,
And preserve his soul from sorrow and tears,
Of hell-pain, cold and hot!"
The Ormulum is the earliest[12] printed Early English work which has come
down to us that exhibits the uniform employment of the termination _-en_
(_-n_) as the inflection of the plural number, present tense, indicative
mood; or, in other words, it is the earliest printed example we have of a
_Midland_ dialect. I say _a_ Midland dialect, because the work of Orm is,
after all, only a specimen of _one_ variety of the Midland speech, most
probably of that spoken in the northern part of the eastern counties of
England, including what is commonly called the district of East Anglia.
Next in antiquity to the Ormulum come the Bestiary, already mentioned, and
the present poem, both of which uniformly employ the Midland affix _-en_,
to the exclusion of all others, as the inflection of the present plural
indicative.
There are other peculiarities which these works have in common; and a
careful comparison of them with the Ormulum induces me to assign them to
the East Midland area; but there are certain peculiarities, to be noticed
hereafter, which induce me to believe that the work of Orm represents a
dialect spoken in the northern part of this district, while the Story of
Genesis and Exodus, together with the Bestiary, exhibits the speech of the
more southern counties of the East Midland district.[13] Thus, if the
former be in the dialect of _Lincoln_, the latter is in that of
_Suffolk_.[14]
The chief points in which the present poem and the Bestiary agree with the
Ormulum are the following:—