Text 4 Shall I compare thee to a Summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate: Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May, And Summer's lease hath all too short a date: Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines, And often is his gold complexion dimmed, And every fair from fair sometime declines, By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimmed. Text 5 ...prydswyd beheold maeg Higelaces, under fergripum Ne part se aglaeca ac he gefeng hrade slaependne rinc, hu se manscada gefaran wolde. yldan pohte, forman side slat unweamum, Activity 2 1. Which text was written when? Try to match the texts to the dates. 2. How did you work it out? Here are some clues you might have used. Tick the ones you used, giving an example from one or more of the five texts. Dates between 700 and 1000 around 1380 around 1600 1853 2007 Clue How easy the text was to understand Used Example Clue What the writer was writing about Used Example Clue The words the writer used Used Example Assess your progress This table shows you how to get better at recognising the ways in which language changes. How well are you doing? Level 4 I can say which texts are old and which are more recent Level 5 I can explain the clues I used to work out the order in which the texts were written and give examples Level 6 I can comment on some of the ways in which English has changed in the last 1500 years
