Many poems were printed from it, with the title of _Altenglische Dichtungen_, by Dr K.Boeddeker, in 1878.

Another similar collection is contained in the Vernon MS.

at Oxford, and belongs to the very end of the same century; the poems in it are all in a Southern dialect, which is that of the scribe.

It contains, e.g., a copy of the earliest version of _Piers the Plowman_, which would have been far more valuable if the scribe had retained the spelling of his copy.

This may help us to realise one of the great difficulties which beset the study of dialects, namely, that we usually find copies of old poems reduced to the scribe's _own_ dialect; and it may easily happen that such a copy varies considerably from the correct form.
It has already been shown that the rapid rise and spread of the Midland dialect during the fourteenth century practically put an end to the literary use of Northern not long after 1400, except in Scotland.