Episode 136: The Real Robin Hood
The History of English Podcast
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Rhyming Poetry in the Late 1400s
In Middle English, words that ended in Y and E were almost never used with each other to create rhyming verses. In the 1400s, we start to see poets using them together for the first time in rhyming poetry. A Jest of Robin Hood has a lot of these rhymes where a word ending in a Y rhymes with an E. The vowel sounds in those words were being pronounced the same way by this point in the mid to late 1400s.
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