The following paper from the pen of Dr. Prior was read at a Conversazione of the Society at Taunton, in the winter of 1871, and as it treats the subject from a more general point of view than is usually taken of it, we print it with his permission as an introduction to our vocabulary:—

On the Somerset Dialects.

The two gentlemen who have undertaken to compile a glossary of the Somerset dialect, the Rev. W. P. Williams and Mr. W. A. Jones, have done me the honour to lend me the manuscript of their work; and the following remarks which have occurred to me upon the perusal of it I venture to lay before the Society, with the hope that they may be suggestive of further enquiry.

Some years ago, while on a visit at Mr. Capel’s, at Bulland Lodge, near Wiveliscombe, I was struck with the noble countenance of an old man who was working upon the road. Mr. Capel told me that it was not unusual to find among the people of those hills a very refined cast of features and extremely beautiful children, and expressed a belief that they were the descendants of the ancient inhabitants of the country, who had been dispossessed of their land in more fertile districts by conquerors of coarser breed. A study of the two dialects spoken in the county (for two there certainly are) tend, I think, to corroborate the truth of this opinion.

It will be urged that during the many centuries that have elapsed since the West Saxons took possession of this part of England the inhabitants must have been so mixed up together that all distinctive marks of race must long since have been obliterated. But that best of teachers, experience, shows that where a conquered nation remains in greatly superior numbers to its conqueror, and there is no artificial bar to intermarriages, the latter, the conqueror, will surely be absorbed into the conquered. This has been seen in our own day in Mexico, where the Spaniards, who have occupied and ruled the country nearly four hundred years, are rapidly approaching extinction. Nay, we find that even in a country like Italy, where the religion, language, and manners are the same, the original difference of races is observable in different parts of the peninsula after many centuries that they have been living side by side.

It seems to be a law of population that nations composed of different stocks or types can only be fused into a homogeneous whole by the absorption of one into the other—of the smaller into the greater, or of the town-dwellers into the country stock. The result of this law is, that mixed nations will tend with the progress of time to revert to their original types, and either fall apart into petty groups and provincial distinctions, as in Spain, or will eliminate the weaker or less numerous race, the old or the new, as the one or the other predominates. The political character of our English nation has changed from that which it was in the time of the Plantagenets by discharging from it the Norman blood; and our unceasing trouble with the Irish is a proof that we have not yet made Englishmen of them, as perhaps we never shall. A very keen observer, M. Erckman, in conversation with the Times correspondent, of the 21st December, 1870, made a remark upon the state of France which is so illustrative of this position, as regards that country, that I cannot forbear to give it in his own words. The correspondent had expressed his fear that, if the war were prolonged, France would lapse into anarchy. “It is not that,” said M. Erckman, “which fills me with apprehension. It is rather the gulf which I begin to fear is widening between the two great races of France. The world is not cognisant of this; but I have watched it with foreboding.” “Define me the two types.” “They shade into each other; but I will take, as perhaps extremes, the Gascon, and the Breton.” “He proceeded,” says the correspondent, “to sketch the characteristics of the people of Provence, Languedoc, and Gascony, and to contrast them with those of Brittany, middle, and north France, their idiosyncrasies of race, feeling, religion, manners—their diverse aspirations, their antagonisms. For sufficient reasons I pass over his remarks.” A still more striking case of the kind is that of Egypt, a country that for more than 2,000 years has been subject to foreign conquerors, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Turks, and Mamelukes, and the annual influx of many thousand negro slaves, and where, notwithstanding all this, the peasantry, as far as can be judged by a careful examination of the skull, is identical with the population of the Pharaonic period.

This, then, being assumed, that a turbid mixture of different races has a tendency to separate after a time into its constituent elements, and certain originally distinct types to re-appear with their characteristic features, how does this law of population apply to Somersetshire?

It is clear from the repeated allusions to the Welsh in the laws of Ina, King of the West Saxons, that in his kingdom the ancient inhabitants of the country were not exterminated, but reduced to the condition of serfs. Some appear to have been landowners; but in general they must have been the servants of their Saxon lords, for we find the race, as in the case of the negroes in the West Indies, to have been synonymous with the servile class, so that a groom was called a hors-wealh, or horse Welshman, and a maid-servant a wylen, or Welsh-woman. As long as slavery was allowed by the law of the land—that is, during the Anglo-Saxon period, and for two centuries at least after the Conquest—there was probably no very intimate mixture of the two races. The Normans, as, in comparison with the old inhabitants of the country, they were few in number, cannot have very materially affected them. We have, therefore, to consider what has become of them since—the Saxon master and the Welsh slave. In the Eastern Counties the invaders seem to have overwhelmed the natives, and destroyed or driven them further inland. Here, in Somerset, their language continued to be spoken in the time of Asser, the latter part of the 9th century; for he tells his readers what Selwood and other places with Saxon names were called by the Britons. We may infer from this mention of them that they were still dispersed over these counties, and undoubtedly they still live in our peasantry, and are traceable in the dialect. Now, is there any peculiarity in this which we may seize as diagnostic of British descent? I submit that we have in the West of Somerset and in Devonshire in the pronunciation of the vowels; a much more trustworthy criterion than a mere vocabulary. The British natives learnt the language that their masters spoke, and this is nearly the same as in Wilts, Dorset, Gloucester, Berks, and Hampshire, and seems to have formerly extended into Kent. But they learnt it as the Spaniards learnt Latin: they picked up the words, but pronounced them as they did their own. The accent differs so widely in the West of Somerset and in Devonshire from that of the counties east of them that it is extremely difficult for a native of these latter to understand what our people are talking about, when they are conversing with one another and unconscious of the presence of a stranger.

The river Parret is usually considered to be the boundary of the two dialects, and history records the reason of it. We learn from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, A.D. 658, that “Cenwealh in this year fought against the Welsh at Pen, and put them to flight as far as the Parret.” “Her Kenwealh gefeaht Æt Peonnum wiÞ Wealas, and hie geflymde oÞ Pedridan.” Upon this passage Lappenberg in his “England under the Anglo-Saxon kings” remarks: “The reign of Cenwealh is important on account of the aggrandisement of Wessex. He defeated in several battles the Britons of Dyvnaint and Cernau [Devon and Cornwall] who had endeavoured to throw off the Saxon yoke, first at Wirtgeornesburh, afterwards, with more important results, at Bradenford [Bradford] on the Avon in Wiltshire, and again at Peonna [the hill of Pen in Somersetshire], where the power of the Britons melted like snow before the sun, and the race of Brut received an incurable wound, when he drove them as far as the Pedrede [the Parret] in A.D. 658.”

The same author in another passage says (vol. i. p. 120): “In the south-west we meet with the powerful territory of Damnonia, the kingdom of Arthur, which bore also the name of ‘West-Wales.’ Damnonia at a later period was limited to Dyvnaint, or Devonshire, by the separation of Cernau or Cornwall. The districts called by the Saxons those of the SumorsÆtas, of the ThornsÆtas [Dorset], and the WiltsÆtas were lost to the kings of Dyvnaint at an early period; though for centuries afterwards a large British population maintained itself in those parts among the Saxon settlers, as well as among the DefnsÆtas, long after the Saxon conquest of Dyvnaint, who for a considerable time preserved to the natives of that shire the appellation of the Welsh kind.”

In corroboration of Lappenberg’s opinion, one in which every antiquary will concur, I may notice in passing that many a farm in West Somerset retains to the present day an old name that can only be explained from the Cornish language. Thus, “Plud farm,” near Stringston, is “Clay farm,” or “Mud farm,” from plud, mire. In a word, the peasantry of West Somerset are Saxonized Britons. Their ancestors submitted to the conquering race, or left their country and emigrated to Brittany, but were not destroyed; and in them and their kinsmen of Cornouailles in France we see the living representatives of the ancient Britons as truly as in Devonshire and Cornwall, in Cumberland, or Wales.

The characteristic feature of their dialect, and the remark applies of course equally to the Devonian which is identical with it, is the sound of the French u or the German u given to the oo and ou, a sound that only after long practice can be imitated by natives of the more eastern counties. Thus a “roof” is a rÜf, “through” is thrÜ, and “would” is wÜd. The county might consequently be divided into a “Langue d’oo” and a “Langue d’Ü.”

An initial w is pronounced oo. “Where is Locke?” “Gone t’ Ools, yer honour.” “What is he gone there for?” “Gone zootniss, yer honour.” The man was gone to Wells assizes as a witness in some case. In a public-house row brought before the magistrates they were told that “Oolter he com in and drug un out.” (“Walter came in and dragged him out.”) Ooll for “will” is simply ooill. An owl doommun is an old oooman. This usage seems to be in accordance with the Welsh pronunciation of w in cwm.

There are other peculiarities that seem to be more or less common to all the Western Counties, and to have descended to them from that Wessex language that is commonly called Anglo-Saxon—a language in which we have a more extensive and varied literature than exists in any other Germanic idiom of so early a date, itself the purest of all German idioms. It is a mistake to suppose that it is the parent of modern English. This has been formed upon the dialect of Mercia, that of the Midland Counties; and it cannot be too strongly impressed upon strangers who may be inclined to scoff at West Country expressions as inaccurate and vulgar, that before the Norman Conquest our language was that of the Court, and but for the seat of Government having been fixed in London might be so still; that it was highly cultivated, while the Midland Counties contributed nothing to literature, and the Northern were devastated with war; and that the dialect adopted, so far from being a better, is a more corrupt one.

The peculiarities to which I allude as common to all the Southern Counties are these: The transposition of the letter r with another consonant in the same syllable, so that Prin for Prince becomes Purn, fresh fursh, red ribbons urd urbans—a change that certainly is more general and more uniformly carried out in the Langue d’Ü district than in the Langue d’oo, but cannot be quite exclusively appropriated by the former.

Under the same category will fall the transposition of s with p, as in waps for wasp, curps for crisp; with k, as in ax for ask; with l, as in halse for hazel.

A hard consonant at the beginning of a word is replaced with a soft one, f for v, as in vire for fire; s with z, as in zur for sir; th with d, as in “What’s dee doing here dis time o’night?” k with g, as in gix, the hollow stalk of umbelliferous plants, for keeks. To be “as dry as a gix” is to be as dry as one of these stalks—a strong appeal for a cup of cider.

Of another peculiarity which our Western district has in common with Norway, I am uncertain whether it extends further eastward, or not; I mean the replacing an initial h with y, as in yeffer for heifer, Yeffeld for Heathfield. One it has in common with Latin as compared with Greek—the replacing an initial hard th with f, as in fatch for thatch, like L. fores for ???a. A singularly capricious alteration of the vowels, so as to make long ones short, and short ones long, is, as far as I am aware, confined to our Langue d’Ü district. For instance, a pool-reed is called a pull-reed, a bull a bul, a nail a nal, paint pant; and bills are sent in by country tradespeople with the words so spelt. Again, a mill is called a meel, and a fist a feest, pebble becomes popple, and Webber (a surname) Wobber. This looks like one of those dialectic peculiarities for which there is no means of accounting.

In the selection of words for their vocabulary I trust that these gentlemen will follow the example of Mr. Cecil Smith in his admirable work on “The Birds of Somersetshire”—not to admit one of which he had not positive proof that it had been shot in this county. Every one should be taken down from the lips of a native, and such as cannot be identified should be sternly rejected. The task that they have undertaken is a laborious one; but there is no county in England that affords such materials for tracing the influence of a subordinate upon a conquering race—of a Celtic language upon one that was purely German.

I cannot conclude these remarks without adverting to a rich and hitherto quite unexplored mine of antiquities—the names of our fields. There is reason to believe that our country roads were traced out, and the boundaries and names of our fields assigned to them, when these were first reclaimed from the primeval forest, and that they are replete with notices of ancient men and manners that deserve and will well repay our careful study.

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Since the above has been in type I have had the satisfaction of learning from Mr. G. P. R. Pulman, of the Hermitage, Crewkerne, that at Axminster, the river Axe, the ancient British and Saxon boundary line, divides the dialect spoken to the east of it (the Dorset, to judge from a specimen of it that he has enclosed) from the Devon. He goes on to say: “On the opposite, the west side of the river, as at Kilmington, Whitford, and Colyton, for instance, a very different dialect is spoken, the general south or rather east Devon. The difference between the two within so short a distance (for you never hear a Devonshire sound from a native Axminster man) is very striking.” That after a period of 1,200 years the exact limit of the two races should still be distinguishable in the accent of their descendants, is an interesting confirmation of the view that I have taken of the origin of these dialects, and at the same time a remarkable proof of the tenacity of old habits in a rural population; the more so that the boundary line of the dialects does not coincide with that of the two counties.