I find sew for sewed in ‘Piers Ploughman.’  Indeed, the anomalies in English preterites are perplexing.  We have probably transferred flew from flow (as the preterite of which I have heard it) to fly because we had another preterite in fled.  Of weak preterites the Yankee retains growed, blowed, for which he has good authority, and less often knowed.  His sot is merely a broad sounding of sat, no more inelegant than the common got for gat, which he further degrades into gut.  When he says darst, he uses a form as old as Chaucer.

The Yankee has retained something of the long sound of the a in such words as axe, wax, pronouncing them exe, wex (shortened from aix, waix).  He also says hev and hed (h[=a]ve, h[=a]d for have and had).  In most cases he follows an Anglo-Saxon usage.  In aix for axle he certainly does.  I find wex and aisches (ashes) in Pecock, and exe in the Paston Letters.  Golding rhymes wax with wexe and spells challenge chelenge.  Chaucer wrote hendy.  Dryden rhymes can with men, as Mr. Biglow would.  Alexander Gill, Milton’s teacher, in his ‘Logonomia’ cites hez for hath as peculiar to Lincolnshire.  I find hayth in Collier’s ’Bibliographical Account of Early English Literature’ under the date 1584, and Lord Cromwell so wrote it.  Sir Christopher Wren wrote belcony.  Our fect is only the O.F. faict. Thaim for them was common in the sixteenth century.  We have an example of the same thing in the double form of the verb thrash, thresh.  While the New Englander cannot be brought to say instead for instid (commonly ’stid where not the last word in a sentence), he changes the i into e in red for rid, tell for till, hender for hinder, rense for rinse.  I find red in the old interlude of ‘Thersytes,’ tell in a letter of Daborne to Henslowe, and also, I shudder to mention it, in a letter of the great Duchess of Marlborough, Atossa herself!  It occurs twice in a single verse of the Chester Plays,

‘Tell the day of dome, tell the beames blow.’

From the word blow (in another sense) is formed blowth, which I heard again this summer after a long interval.  Mr. Wright[24] explains it as meaning ‘a blossom.’  With us a single blossom is a blow, while blowth means the blossoming in general.  A farmer would say that there was a good blowth on his fruit-trees.  The word retreats farther inland and away from the railways, year by year.  Wither rhymes hinder with slender, and Shakespeare and Lovelace have renched for rinsed.  In ‘Gammer