The former substantive, akin to the Latin anas, anatis, was still to last two hundred years, before it was supplanted by the word duck. As to drake, this poem first shows us that the word had lost its old form end-rake, that is, anat-rex. There is hardly a word in English that has been so corrupted; one letter, d, alone remains now to show the old root, and this letter is prefixed to a word akin to the rajah of Hindostan.
In line 968, we find a new phrase:
‘And bouthe him cloþes, al span-newe.’
Span, the old spón, means a chip.
In line 27, we see an idiom well known to ballad-makers, when it becomes something like an indeterminate pronoun: this first appeared in the Ancren Riwle.
It was a king bi are dawes
That in his time were gode lawes, &c.
In line 1815, a man slaughtered is said to be stan-ded. The word smerte (painful) keeps its old English sense, though we saw other meanings of the word farther to the North.
The verb leyke (ludere) is sounded in this poem, just as the Northern shires still pronounce it; we of the South call it lark, following the Old English lácan.[1]
To fare of old meant only to journey: we see in the line 2411 a derivative from another old verb, ferian:
‘Hwou Robert with here loverd ferde’ (egit).
- ↑ One of the earliest instances I remember of the modern use of this good old word, which is thought to be slangy, occurs in Miss Eden's Letters from India, about 1839. She calls one of the Hindoo gods, ‘a kind of larking Apollo.’
