Suppose the author is the Flemish man they suggest, one Christian monk holed into his cathedral priory. He must have written feverishly to copy as many texts as he did, and all with such a divine significance, though are any of them really his, as he was only scribe – simply who should take responsibility for the words, the first saint or his parroting monks that repeat him. Of course our Flemish monk couldn’t be the plagiarist, but if not he, then a few others – perhaps they are the guilty ones. I investigated further, and at a side of the page, there was a line of mashed letters that must have formed some kind of a test. How messy they are. All know that first marks are often the most feral, and here, ‘the buoyant child survives in the man’, so they must be his first marks, just look at how innocently they dance, with cursive free, no syntax, only childish play in its shapeless folly. It seems the words don’t matter here, no, this is writing for writings sake, a probatio pennae – scratches to test a quill’s edge. If you thought it difficult to write without regard to justice or responsibility, for the monk it was simple – beside Ælfric of Eynsham’s sermons he would recite a rhyme, likely the words of his childhood in the Low Countires – ‘Hebban olla uogala nestas hagunnan hinase hic enda thu uuat umbidan uue nu’. I read it and find myself at a loss for this is no language of mine, no, nor exclusively any others. You see these words are Old English, yet others read Old Dutch, and now we are at a loss once more, for the verse is both and neither. The earnest monk, ‘devilish in his innocence’, dared to frolic with language at its most trivial, and in the margin where a language forgives significance, he chose to amuse himself with by crossovers of two dialects he finds familiar, so the verse remains as this, ‘All the birds have begun nests, except for me and you—what are we waiting for now’.