The "Saxon Chronicle," which closes with the year 1155, had been continued at progressive intervals by different writers; this authentic document of the Anglo-Saxon diction exhibits remarkable variations of style; and a critical Saxonist has detected the corruptions of its idiom, its inflections, and its orthography--in a word, that through successive periods it had suffered a material alteration in its character.[2] Somewhat more than a century after the Norman invasion, about 1180, Layamon made an English version of Wace's "Brut"--that French metrical chronicle which the Anglo-Norman had drawn from the Latin history of "Geoffry of Monmouth." Here we detect an entire changeableness of style, or rather a transformation; but what to call it the most skilful have not agreed. George Ellis drew a copious specimen of a writer unnoticed by Warton; but, confounded by "its strange orthography," and mournfully doubtful of his own meritorious glossary, he considered the style, "though simple and unmixed, yet a very barbarous Saxon." A recent critic opines that Layamon "seems to have halted between two languages, the written and the spoken." Mr. Campbell imagines it "the dawn" of our language; while some Saxonists have branded it as semi-Saxon. It seems a language thrown into confusion, struggling to adapt itself to a new state of things; it has no Norman-French, it is saturated with Saxon, but the sentences are freed from inversions.[3] About the same period as Layamon's version of Wace, we have a very original attempt of a writer, in those days of capricious pronunciation, to convey to the reader the orthoepy by regulating the orthography. As it is only recently that we have obtained any correct notion of a writing which has suffered many misconceptions from our earlier English scholars, the history of this work becomes a bibliographical curiosity. An ecclesiastic paraphrased the Gospel-histories. He was a critical writer, projecting a system to which he strictly adhered, warning his transcribers as punctually to observe, otherwise "they would not write the word right;" they were therefore "to write those letters twice which he had written so." The system consisted in doubling the consonant after a short vowel to regulate the pronunciation. He wrote broth_err_ and afft_err_; is _iss_, and it _itt_.[4]