The interpretation of these ancient glosses requires very great care, but they afford a considerable number of interesting results, and are therefore valuable, especially as they give us spellings of the eighth century, which are very scarce.

One of the oldest specimens of Old Mercian that affords intelligible sentences is known as the “Lorica Prayer,” because it occurs in the same MS. (Ll. 1. 10 in the Cambridge University Library) as the “Lorica Glosses,” or the glosses which accompany a long Latin prayer, really a charm, called “lorica” or “breast-plate,” because it was recited thrice a day to protect the person who used it from all possible injury and accident.  I give this Prayer as illustrating the state of our language about A.D. 850.

And the georne gebide gece and miltse fore alra his haligra gewyrhtum and ge-earningum and boenum be [hiwe]num, tha the domino deo gelicedon from fruman middan-geardes; thonne gehereth he thec thorh hiora thingunge.  Do thonne fiorthan sithe thin hleor thriga to iorthan, fore alle Godes cirican, and sing thas fers:  domini est salus, saluum fac populum tuum, domine, praetende misericordiam tuam.  Sing thonne pater noster.  Gebide thonne fore alle geleaffulle menn in mundo.  Thonne bistu thone deg dael-niomende thorh Dryhtnes gefe alra theara goda the {ae}nig monn for his noman gedoeth, and thec alle soth-fest{ae} fore thingiath in caelo et in terra. Amen.{1}

    {Footnote 1:  I write hiwenum in l. 2 in place of an illegible
    word.}

That is:—­

And earnestly pray for-thyself for help and mercy by-reason-of the deeds and merits and prayers of all his saints on-behalf-of the [households] that have pleased the Lord God from the beginning of the world; then will He hear thee because-of their intercession.  Bow-down then, at the fourth time, thy face thrice to the earth before all God’s church, and sing these verses:  The Lord is my salvation, save Thy people, O Lord:  show forth Thy mercy.  Sing then a pater-noster.  Pray then for all believing men in the world.  Then shalt thou be, on that day, a partaker, by God’s grace, of all the good things that any man doth for His name, and all true-men will intercede for thee in heaven and in earth.  Amen.

Another discovery was the assignment of a correct description to the glosses found in a document known as the Vespasian Psalter; so called because it is an early Latin Psalter, or book of Psalms, contained in a Cotton MS. in the British Museum, marked with the class-mark “Vespasian, A. 1.”  This Psalter is accompanied throughout with glosses which were at first mistakenly thought to be in a Northumbrian dialect, and were published as such by the Surtees Society in 1843.  They were next, in 1875, wrongly supposed to be Kentish; but since they were printed by Sweet in 1885 it has been shown that they are really Mercian.  This set of glosses is very important for the study of Old Mercian, because they are rather extensive; they occupy 213 pages of the Oldest English Texts, and are followed by 20 more pages of similar glosses to certain Latin canticles and hymns that occur in the same MS.