Studies of Old English dialects are based heavily on manuscript texts, of which none survive from Anglo-Saxon East Anglia. But coins produced in the kingdom bear forms of personal names, potential evidence for an East Anglian dialect....
moreStudies of Old English dialects are based heavily on manuscript texts, of which none survive from Anglo-Saxon East Anglia. But coins produced in the kingdom bear forms of personal names, potential evidence for an East Anglian dialect. Although East Anglia in the eighth and ninth centuries came under dogged Mercian control, this paper hypothesises that, just as Kentish coin-spellings conform to dialect characteristics of Kentish manuscripts, rather than to those of the dominating Mercians and West-Saxons, so the East Anglian moneyers represented their own dialect on their coins. Somewhat deflatingly, the
coin-spellings show nothing specifically ‘East’ about the Anglian features represented.
