English Dialects from The Eighth Century to The Present Day

The following brief sketch is an attempt to present, in a popular form, 
the history of our English dialects, from the eighth century to the
 present day. The evidence, which is necessarily somewhatimperfect,
 goes to show that the older dialects appear to have been few in number, 
each being tolerably uniform over a wide area; and that the rather
 numerous dialects of the present day were gradually developed by
 the breaking up of the older groups into subdialects.