THE FALL OF COCKNEY

What we call Cockney speech today, in its backbone, was the speech of citizens of London. Not necessarily the lower-order, citizens of all classes, except probably the Court, in certainly the late Middle-Ages and certainly in Elizabethan times.

In Queen Elizabeth’s reign, a London funeral director, Henry Maichin, kept a diary. The spelling mistakes in Maichin’s diary are vital clues to the sound of Elizabethan London English. When Maichin wrote

- half a hundred in red and white (“…alff a hundred in red and wyht…”), this is spelling of “half”.

- Describing a mugging: a man thrust between the ribs (“…frust be-tweyn the rybes…”), this is spelling of “thrust”.

Henry Maichin dropped “h”s off his words because he hardly ever heard the “h” sounded. He wrote words like chains and strange with a “y” in them instead of an “a”. He actually wrote them as chynns and strynge because he heard people say them like that. What you see in thses is the representation of the way people spoke. He wrote words like “mother” and “feather” as “mover” and “fever” with “v”s in them; and you know there were so many more of these. Up to the 18^th century, up to say about 1750, Cockney was the speech of anybody and every body in the city of London.

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