Our knowledge about regional dialects in Early Modern English comes basically from four sources: 1.- The comments made by contemporary orthoepists, grammarians and lexicographers. 2.- The data that can be gleaned from personal manuscript documents such as letters or diaries. 3.- Dialect literature. 4.- The use of dialect in literature. The information provided by the first of these sources has been studied and analized in depth by linguists, but the same cannot be said about the other three sources. In the case of manuscript material, the reason for this is the scarcity of available material on the one hand, and its difficult accessibility on the other. As far as sources number three and four are concerned, it is thought that the morpho-syntactical, lexical and phonological traits selected by writers may often be archaetypical and therefore not trustworthy. This may well be the case often. However, there are instances in which these traits do reflect contemporary dialect usage. Indeed, sometimes they offer tantalizing evidence.
    The purpose of this paper is a description of the reflexes of Old English long a in the North of England in the sixteenth-century in the light of some evidence provided by the literary representation of Northern English.