Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe

"...and lo, I have slain the beast without thy help, so verily I am bequeathed solo XPs!"

"Alden Bitteroot, I accuseth thee of beingeth a witch! ...eth."

— Timmy Turner, The Fairly OddParents!

Whether thine tale be sette in bonny 1300s Scotland or vexing 1840s Cardiff, suitably "old-fashioned" English shalt if baſed on the archaic King James Bible. Thine formulae is simple: addest thou "-eth" and "-est" to random verbs, scatterest thou silent Es like the leaves of autumne, bandyest about the words "thee", "thou", "thine", "doth", "hast", and "forsooth", reversest 'pon every other occasion thine noun-verb order, and strewth, thou dost be the next Billy Shakespeare! Shouldſt thou wiſh ſome cheaply earned bonus points, uſeſt thou the "long S" glyph (ſ) in every poſſible faſhion, be it hiſtorically accurate or otherwiſe.

This doth makest the characters soundeth like idiots complete to any viewer that possesseth pon a verse of uni degree… especially if it goeth on for long passages. Zounds!

And that's why there will be no more self-demonstration for the rest of this page. Yea! Verily!

This sort of faux-Shakespearian writing is often incorrectly referred to as "Old English", but "Old English" is the name of the earliest form of English that was spoken from circa AD 500 to the Norman conquest of England, also known as Anglo-Saxon (See Useful Notes: History of English). The confusion is understandable as Old English is really an ancestor of modern English rather than an earlier form of it, and is almost completely unintelligible to a modern English speaker. In case you were wondering, Old English looks like this: Gif þú eart feorwitgeorn (Eald) Englisc ætíewþ ðus.^{literal translation}If you are far-with-yearn (i.e., curious), Old English appears thus. The language Shakespeare spoke is called Early Modern English, and the faux language Hollywood uses is sometimes referred to as "gadzookery", from the archaic expression gadzooks ^note which was originally the oath "God's hooks," i.e., the nails by which Christ was hung on the Cross. Older examples may use terms such as "tushery" (from the archaic tush for "hush, be quiet") or "Wardour Street [English]" (from a street in London where fake antiques were frequently sold).

The Analysis page has a bigger breakdown of the common mistakes people make, but the "Ye Olde" construction just means "The Old" — the "ye" comes from an attempt to replace the letter "þ" (called a thorn), which produced the "th" sound but didn't exist in German, which created a bit of a problem when printing became a thing and the English had to import their type from Germany and the Netherlands.

If the emphasis isn't so much on generic Olde-Worlde gimmicks like "zounds" and "forsooth" and the "-eth" suffix, and instead is more on the language's being poetically ornate and old-fashioned in a Shakespearean and/or King James Bible style, then the trope you're looking for is probably Flowery Elizabethan English (especially if the characters are not people one might expect to be speaking something like Elizabethan English). Admittedly, there can be considerable overlap between the two.

Magick makes frequent use of Butchered Englishe. Often combined with Hollywood Apocrypha. Compare Canis Latinicus, Antiquated Linguistics, Law of Alien Names and Talk Like a Pirate. Can cause some Fridge Logic when you realise the characters wouldn't actually be speaking English anyway. Contrast Period Piece, Modern Language, when the writers don't bother with this and just have the historical characters talk like 21st-century casuals. Sometimes the result of Did Not Do the Bloody Research.

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A quick reference to medieval pronouns:

• Language at ''Life in Elizabethan England: A Compendium of Common Knowledge''

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Yon Straighte Exampleth

Ye Advertisinge

• A GEICO commercial depicts The Oldest Tricks in the Book as a man saying "Look!" When the victim looks, the man says "Ha-ha! Madest thou look" instead of "Made thee look".
• The Russian equivalent—badly using letters of the Cyrillic Alphabet that were eliminated over a century ago—is used to market the alcoholic product "ПортвейнЪ" (roughly, "Ye Porte Whynne"), which can't be called "port wine" for legal reasons as it's bum wine produced from the byproducts of fruit processing.

Ye Anime and Ye Manga

• Dragon's Dogma: The Dragon refers to Ethan with old-timey thou pronouns, but does so inconsistently, sometimes switching between thou and you within the same sentence. The grammar is also spotty at best. In Episode 7 alone, he uses three different conjugations for the verb "have" with the pronoun "thou": "hath", "hast" and "has".
• One of the alien yokai from Gantz during the Nurarihyon Alien mission speaks this way.
• Interspecies Reviewers: Averted except for the name of Ye Pubbe.
• Inuyasha:
  • In the English dub, Kaede speaks absolutely normally except for replacing you with "ye." It's made even stranger by the fact that other people from her era don't do it. Other old people from her era don't do it. Other old Shrine Maidens from her era don't do it.
  • In the very first episode, a few villagers also used heavy "old English". By the next episode this was conspicuously absent; it's likely the dubbers realized quickly it was either too much work, test audiences responded negatively, or the silliness of the second episode made it unneeded.
  • Especially strained in the first episode was this line where one villager is wondering if they'd have done better against Lady Centipede than Inuyasha:
    Villager: Lady Kaede, methinks mayhap that we might have chanced the centipede.
• Many fan translations of Himari's extremely formal speech in Omamori Himari have her use this.
• The English dub of One Piece has Kumadori. In addition to screaming his every line and reciting poems before an attempted deathblow, he even rambles on in faux-Shakesperian speech patterns as he fights. (In the Japanese version, he speaks and moves like a Kabuki Theatre actor, which fits with his aethestic of having Kabuki facepaint, tradition Japanese sandals, and a Buddhist Khakkara staff as his main weapon.)
  Kumadori: "NOOOOOOOOW THOOOUUUU AAAAART MIIIIIIIINE!!!!!"
• The Viz translation of Ōoku: The Inner Chambers, applies this quite liberally in rendering the old-fashioned Japanese of the original, with the effect of obscuring plot-relevant dialectical differences. As the manga progressed this trope became less and less prominent (to represent that the Japanese is getting more modern), but even the final volumes have people being painstakingly formal with each other during official conversations.
• Romeo × Juliet was dubbed in English with certain characters speaking in an approximation of Shakespearean English. Some characters do this all the time (William and Ophelia, who also talks in rhyming iambic pentameter), some characters talk entirely in more modern English, and some characters (such as the eponymous pair) shifting back and forth between the two modes.
• The English dub of (and in the English subtitles of the Japanese version on the DVD) Sekirei has Tsukiumi talk like this, most likely as a way of translating her formal Japanese. When she says "Have at thee, villain!", though, it's hard not to imagine her being Thor's Distaff Counterpart.
• Episode 23 of Star Driver uses this during the play scenes
• The official English translation of Trinity Blood has all the upper-class vampires speaking like this. Since they're all hundreds of years old and incredibly posh, it's implied that that's why they do it...but it makes little sense, since they're not actually English, their Empress (who's much older than her subjects) and her brother Abel don't speak like it, and as the whole thing takes place After the End, it's not sure how they'd know anything about Medieval English. It becomes quite annoying when dramatic scenes are sprinkled with lots of "dost thou"'s and "didst"'s.
• The 4Kids dub of season five of Yu-Gi-Oh! has the ancient characters occasionally speak this way, especially Priest Seto, in a case of Translation Convention.
• Jill deLauncebeaux talks like this in the English dub of Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds, likely to play up his old-timey personality.
• In fan translations of YuYu Hakusho, as well as the subs on the Funimation DVDs, a woman from 700 years ago whom Raizen met and fell in love with talks this way.
• The English Dub of Digimon Frontier has Mercurymon, who speaks like a character ripped straight out of Shakespeare. Using the classics like "thee", "thou", and "thine", even referring to Ranamon as "M'lady". Which actually fits pretty well with his overly dramatic personality.

Comedie

• Allan Sherman's song about a (stereotypically) Jewish Robin Hood included:
  All day with the slaying and slewing
  And smiting and smoting like Robin Hood
  Oh, wouldst I could kick the habit
  And give up smoting for good

Ye Comice Booketh

• Superman:
  • In the Masters of the Universe crossover "Fate Is The Killer", the dialogue of the Eternian characters is peppered with "Aye!", "ye", "thou", "thy", "yonder" "'tis", "nay", "whilst" and the like so that it looks more archaic...regardless proper Early Modern English grammar.
  Sorceres: "Ye have answered my summons with haste, sweet Prince— as it should be, for thou would not be so called did not the Sorceress have need of thy powers!"
  • "The Phantom Superboy": When Superboy activates an old Kryptonian device and listens to a mental playback, some few old-fashioned English words are used to make the message sound more archaic (even though it was recorded only twenty years before):
    Mental recording: "Harken, wearer of this helmet! Until outlawed by the rulers of Krypton, yonder weapon was used as a m eans of punishing criminals!"

Fanne Worketh

• Forbiden Fruit: The Tempation of Edward Cullen: Odious gives every line spoken by Edward Cullen a hideous faux-Shakespearian sprinkling of "thou"s "thee"s and "thine"s with absolutely no attempt to use them correctly. (of course the author doesn't seem to know how to speak regular English properly so this comes as no surprise):
  "OMG SWEET LADY! THY MUST NOT TELL ANYONE! " he screamed "it was a moment of madness thats all! Im so sorry for watt happened,i hope thine can forgive me, but ive promised myself to bella and thats just how it is, no matter how much thou intrests me"
  "its complecated tiaa my lady. Im sorry i hurt thine feelings. Its just i cant resist thee, but i cant be with thy either. I never ment to drag thou into this mess, its not thee fault I totally ruin everything"
  "first thee have to tell me who thou relay are!"
• Vloxemort from My Immortal also speaks like this, and it makes about as much sense as the above example. Of course, this is My Immortal, so it's to be expected.
  "I hath telekinesis!"
• TIOSEAFJ from Light and Dark The Adventures of Dark Yagami
  "I ART TIOSEAFJ. I ART SHAKESPEERS SHINIGAMI?!"
• Go find a Shakespeare fanfiction that isn't "modern-language" or "modern AU". It will almost definitely be this. Same goes for Shakespeare-based school assignments.
• In A Boy, a Girl and a Dog: The Leithian Script the author chose to write the Eldar who never left Valinor speaking this way. Notably, to catch the full scope and dissonance of it, there are dialects of it. Finrod's enraged wife regularly shouts in an over formal shade of it, Finarfin speaks a quieter, more restrained and less forced mode, Maiwe hardly uses any, being from a more rural region. Overlaps with Flowery Elizabethan English, and is amazingly well done.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfictions written after Princess Luna's return in "Luna Eclipsed" have sprouted this at times. Luna herself used archaic forms with some accuracy, and had a decent reason for it. Fan writers who have not visited this page... not as much.
  • In works set before or during the time of Nightmare Moon/Discord, writers are forced to apply this to everypony.
  • The Conversion Bureau: The Translation Convention (as it's a rendering of Middle English into Old Equestrian) of a medieval manuscript in The 800 Year Promise consists of this.
    She was a fairye hors, white and faire
    And she was cleped the princesse Celestea.
    And Anglish she spak ful faire and fetisly
    Entuned in hir nose ful semely.
  • Another common MLP fanon concept regarding this trope is that Celestia, who's been there to watch the language evolve and change with it, will slip back into the old way of speaking when sufficiently emotional.
  • The Palaververse: Parodied in Thunderstorm and the Four Winds, where Rainbow Dash tries to use antiquated linguistics when reciting an old legend, fails miserably and drops the attempt.
    Rainbow Dash: [narrating] "Prithee, O Wind of the North," Thunderstorm, um, declaimed. "I do beseech thee for thine most ... something-or-other aid, on behalf of... wait, should that have been 'thy'? I can never remember the-"^note It should indeed have been "thy".
    ...Y'know, maybe making it all Shakelancy doesn’t add that much to the experience.
    "Yo, North Wind," said Thunderstorm.
  • RainbowDoubleDash's Lunaverse, given it has Celestia as the one banished, instead has her in the Olde Speake. Until Cheerilee starts mocking her for her, ah, "command of the tongue". Then, one story has an odd variation, where a (very inaccurate) play based on the first story has Celestia speaking in rhyme, and Zecora speaking with thees and thous.
• In the Yu-Gi-Oh! GX fanfic Jaden Without a Cause, Jack, a Wicked Cultured gas station owner says this while raping, torturing and ultimately killing Jaden
  Jack: Thy redemption is for vain, unless thou are willing to avouch that ye are ready to undergo the most deuced part of this ancient attendant's ritual! Do ye accept, ye caitiff little fool?
• My Inner Life utilizes this in its worst form possible. Some characters using this are justified (e.g. the Great Deku Tree, who used archaic English in Ocarina of Time). However, he uses it completely improperly in the fiction.
• The King and Her Queen (NSFW) is a Fate/stay night Rin/Saber lemon fic where Rin and Shirou travel back to Arthurian times, and so almost all the dialogue in 3/4 of the story is in Ye Olde Butcherede English.
• In the AU Harry Potter fic ''The Legend of Chastity Lorna," there are many examples, the best of which is probably "Dost the lady not liken herself to the wine?" (for "Does the lady not like her wine?"). Better yet, an author's note explains, "A/N - Arrghhh!!!! Old English is crap so I quit even trying to write dialogue in it about two sentences into the story."
• A 17th-century Ministry edict in Harry Potter and the Natural 20:
  When something really, really, really wyrd happens, and hear ye me I do mean REALLY wyrd, and lo, it hath never happened before, and neither sir nor gentle lady knoweth what to do, let the goddamned Department of Mysteries handle it, y'hear? And forsooth, maketh sure there are at least a half-dozen Aurors around, if ye know what be good for ye.
  —1634 Statute on Inexplicable Phenomena of a Magical Nature, Section Thirty-Two-Point-One-Four-One-Alpha
• In the Percy Jackson fic Moon Daughter, Artemis speaks using this some of the time.
  "thou can only use the deep death word if you are a virgen with no bf an no makin out"
  "FUCK THOU!" She yelled.
• A few bits of this are sprinkled throughout Calvin & Hobbes: The Series for little to no reason.
• In Perfection Is Overrated, Sekai tends to talk like this as a parody of characters in fanfics who do so, but tends to drop this mode of speaking in moments of extreme emotion, such as when she's dying after her SLAVE is destroyed.
• A certain Final Fantasy Tactics Doujinshi was translated to English in this manner.
• Profesor Layton Vs Jack The Raper has "Shakespear" as the King Of England. Combining this trope with the author's inexperience with the English language leads to some very odd dialogue. Shakespear uses 'thou' as a plural, thinking it means 'you' and 'thine' as a synonym for 'thou', has a tendency to add a random 'e' to his words, throws in some Did Not Do the Bloody Research, by using sodded as though it means stopped, and also, Shakespear randomly refers to himself as ore-sama at one point.
• Rakenzarn Tales gives this to Dirk the Daring. It's lampshaded at least once.
• In The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World:
  • Terb the bard speaks this way in public, though he gets a lot of the words wrong.
    Terb: Prithee, knavish louts who maketh mock, couldst thou doest any better?
  • And George maketh more mock.
    George: Well, leth giveth them a chanceth to theeth if I liveth up to thoth thtandards, thall we?
• In The Loud Awakening, aside from gaining superpowers, Lincoln's transformation caused by the Light Orb has the side effect that his speech is permanently altered to this way of speaking. His sisters like it however, stating it suits him.
• In Amazing Fantasy, Torunn Thorsdóttir-Foster tries (and fails) to speak like this in an attempt to act like a "true Asgardian" despite being raised on Earth, misplacing her "'thy’, ‘thou’, and ‘verily’s".
• Behind Closed Doors and Family Affairs, a pair of Fate/stay night fanfics by our own Moczo, have the Arthurian characters speak this way. It's all part of the comedy.
  "I shalt truly and most grievously stab thee if thou finish the idiot sentence thou currently spew from thy foolish, foolish mouth."

Filmeth — Lyve-Actionne

• Popping up where ye least expecteth it...in the Nollywood "Snake Girl" films, where the royals (both humans and shapeshifted snakes) speak thus. Well, better that than thisssss way.
• The English subtitles in Damnatus have Makkabeus speaking like this, possibly as a kind of Accent Adaptation for the relatively formal German he uses in the film itself.
• Friendly Persuasion: The Quakers use the old-timey thee instead of you in speech. However, they consistently misuse it, saying "thee" both as the object (correct) and also as the subject (incorrect) in sentences, when they should be using "thou." This is how Quakers habitually talked in the 19th-century, although latter-day Quakers have fallen out of this habit.
  "What is thee saying, child?" (should be "What art thou saying, child?")
• In Heart of Darkness (1958), a character prays: "Bring happiness to all thy creatures no matter what form thou hath [sic] cast them in."
• The characters who speak in this archaic English in Disney's Hocus Pocus are the Sanderson Sisters, Thackery and Emily Binx, and the rest of the Salem townsfolk in 1693. They did make some attempt to get it right, both in the 1693 scenes (using "thee" as the subject was actually done in some communities) and when sprinkling it among the modern English of 1993.
  • Played with on the bus:
    Sarah: Thou wouldst hate me in the morning.
    Bus Driver: No I wouldn'st!
  • Sarah's version ("Thou wouldst") was grammatically correct, and the bus driver's was a parody.
• The Asgardians in the Marvel Cinematic Universe Thor do this, but not as bad as in the comics. It manifests mostly as some old-fashioned word choice and a lack of contractions. By Thor: Ragnarok, Thor and Loki have spent enough time around modern humans to talk like them, Skurge is implied to visit Midgard with some regularity, and Hela was imprisoned long before early modern English was developed and ignores it entirely, meaning that Odin is really the only Asgardian who still talks even remotely like that.
  • Played for Laughs in The Avengers with Tony Stark throwing this line towards Thor in their first encounter:
    Stark: [in his Iron Man suit] Uh... Shakespeare in the park? Doth mother know you weareth her drapes?
• The 1922 Robin Hood has characters mixing and matching "thou" and "you", like when Friar Tuck says to Robin, "Prepare thyself. Within these walls there is someone dear to you."
• Used in a Precision F-Strike in Rumpelstiltskin when the titular antagonist is about to crash his truck:
  Rumpelstiltskin: Fucketh me!
• The best line from 10 Things I Hate About You: "The shit hath hitteth the fan...eth."
• In The Three Stooges short "Knutzy Knights", the Stooges' names are Moe-eth, Larryeth, and Shempeth.
• The Green Knight inconsistently and sometimes incorrectly uses "thee" and "thy" in its Arthurian dialogue.

Yon Litteratturre

• David Wellington's short story Pinecones, set in 1587 Roanoke, provides what would have been a reasonably accurate depiction of fifteenth-century English (that is to say, English of the 1400s.) Of note is this rendition of The Lord's Prayer:
  "Our father which art in heuen, hallowed be thy name. Let thy kingdome cum unto us. Thy wyll be fulfylled as well in erthe, as it is in heuen. & lede vs nat in to temtacyon. But delyuer vs from euyll. So be it.
• The short story "Ezekiel" by Desmond Warzel also takes place in 1587 Roanoke. The English is, at least approximately, accurate for its time, mimicking in style other primary documents from that colony.
• Appears in some works of David Eddings - and almost immediately afterwards someone else present will comment on how silly the person using it sounds. Also Eddings was very attentive about the proper usage of the words, which made his examples rather easy on the ears.
• Thomas Chatterton (1752 - 1770, yes, he died that young) was a Teen Genius famous for publishing the poems of one Thomas Rowley, a monk who, according to his claims, lived in the 15th century and left behind a legacy of manuscript ballads (these were, of course, a hoax and Chatterton's own creation). They were written in "Middle English" which mostly consisted of writing normal English words in mock-archaic orthography with little consistency ("dead" could be written as "dedde", "ded", "dedd", etc.), with a couple of archaisms and dialect words thrown in. When the hoax was discovered, the poor youth was laughed out of literary circles and Driven to Suicide.
• In Cervantes' Don Quixote, the protagonist often, but not always, speaks in mock-medieval Spanish, imitating the intentionally archaic language of chivalric romances.
• A couple of the older characters (the Fae, a couple of vamps, etc.) use this in The Dresden Files. Thankfully, it's used sparingly. In at least one case, Harry actually corrects the grammar of a character speaking like this.
• The same trope is used in Spanish-speaking literature, especially in translations of foreign fantasy novels or anything older from the 20th century, but sometimes is used even in translations of modern literature as well, possibly as a signal that the characters doesn't speak Spanish or sometimes because the translator is old-fashioned. Sometimes justified because almost all the translations of foreign literature are done in Spain (and sometimes in Colombia) and that country is the biggest market for literature in the Spanish-speaking world. "Thous" and "thees" appear in Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, which is written in English originally, to represent characters speaking Spanish with informal pronouns.
• Older Than Steam: Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene, from circa 1590, contains certain features (such as the "y-" past participle prefix and the "-en" plural verb ending), used with varying degrees of success, that hadn't been current for about a century or so.
• Ursula Le Guin warns aspiring fantasy writers against this in her essay From Elfland To Poughkeepsie- unless they are, like Lord Dunsany, 19th C. Anglo-Irish aristocrats and know what they are doing.
• Used in Traitor General to represent the old, proto-Low Gothic language used by the Nihtganes. Although there, it was a combination of normal Butcherede Englishe, random "misspellings" that make everything look like it's weirdly pronounced and some words that Abnett just plain made up.
• Played for Laughs in Good Omens.
  • Each and every 17th century character's dialogue gets a large dose. For example:
    "It is a licence to printe monney!" said Master Bilton to Master Scaggs. "The public are crying out for such rubbishe! We must straightway printe a booke of prophecie by some hagge!"
  • The typesetter's "error" in the Buggre Alle This Bible of 1651;
    Buggre Alle this for a Larke. I amme sick to mye Hart of typefettinge. Master Biltonn if no Gentelmann, and Master Scagges noe more than a tighte fisted Southwarke Knobbefticke. I telle you, onne a daye laike thif Ennywone withe half an oz of Sense shoulde bee oute in the Sunneshain, ane nott Stucke here alle the liuelong daie inn thif mowldey olde By-Our-Lady Workefhoppe. @ *Ӯ@;!*
• Harry Potter: Book 2 mentions a book called "Moste Potente Potions", while book 6 mentions another called "Magick Moste Evile".
• In one of the Last Herald-Mage Vanyel lampshades this when he observes that when she's really upset, his none-too-educated mother tries to write this way, and simply cannot get her thees and thous right.
• Fantasy novels can be especially bad with this. The Inheritance Cycle tends to have "yea" and "thou art" thrown in with what is normal, modern English, with no reason and to no end.
  • Not to mention the annoying usage of "mine (subject)" by the dwarves, which is used even when the (subject) begins with a consonant. ^note Use of "mine" and "thine" is only correct when in front of a vowel, e.g. you'd say "mine arms" but "my legs" (cf. a/an). Also note that the letter "H" could be treated as either a vowel or consonant in this case.
  • One phrase that encapsulates this tendency in the Inheritance Cycle is "you and thine dragon".
• The title character of Eragon reads the following inscription in a cathedral:
  May thee who enter here understand thine impermanence and forget thine attachment to that which is beloved.

  "Thee" is an accusative pronoun being used in a place where the nominative pronoun is required,^*The error isn't immediately obvious to modern-day English speakers, but is on the same level as saying, "May me live to see it," "May us meet again," or "May them be very happy." and the verbs aren't even conjugated properly. The inscription should begin, "May thou who enterest here..." Or better yet, "May ye who enter here...", given that it's presumably addressed to more than one person.^*"Thou" and "thee" are strictly singular pronouns, whereas "you" can refer to one person or many.

• Piers Anthony's "Phaze" characters speak this way in his Apprentice Adept series, though the grammar seems to be fairly accurate — or at least consistent. The word "thee" as an intimate form of "you" is even a plot point — saying "thee" three times to any other character is more or less an eternally binding declaration of love.
• Most of the language in the Pit Dragon Chronicles is normal modern English, but dragon trainers deliberately speak Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe to their dragons.
• In the Redwall series, some characters who are aristocrats in their respective societies or are at least nominally conservative have a very archaic way with words.
  • A tribe of hedgehogs replaces every instance of "you" with "thee" to the point it stops looking like an error and more like a dialectal quirk.
• Natives of The Secret Country use a tolerable form of this, including "likes" for "pleases", "a" for "he or she" and "an" for "if". Interestingly, the author manages to vary it to less and more formal depending on the situation, and includes a described language that English-speaking visitors from modern Earth find maddening because they almost understand it; it might be a form of Old (not Middle) English. The one example occurs in The Hidden Land where they are able to pick out a few of the lines. They are from Chaucer's The Knight's Tale, which is Middle English.
  What is this world? What asketh men to have?
  Now with his love, now in his colde grave,
  Allone, withouten any compaignye.
• In Sergey Lukyanenko's New Watch, Anton goes to London to meet with a prophet named Erasmus Darwin (the grandfather of Charles Darwin). He calls Darwin's cell, and is amazed when the guy starts using Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe, especially since Erasmus was born in 1731, when such language was not used. However, Erasmus has spent much of his time as a recluse, and Anton assumes the guy is just being eccentric. Later on, Erasmus tones down on the "thou"s.
• In The Stainless Steel Rat Wants You, the Rat proposes that the Space Police use time travel to get rid of the alien invaders. A representative from the Time Police shows up in 17th-century French garb to tell them they can't (time is so vast, they can miss the prevailing fashion by a few centuries). And utters the immortal words: "Few things be hid from ye Temporal Constabulary."
• William Henry Ireland (1775 - 1835), a slightly later forger inspired by Chatterton but rather less talented, started out by forging William Shakespeare ephemera but finally worked himself up to two complete plays, Vortigern and Rowena, and Henry the Second. Some of his attempts at "Elizabethan" spelling have to be read to be believed, such as "[G]ratitude is alle I have toe utter and that is tooe greate ande tooe sublyme a feeling for poore mortalls toe expresse".
• Similarly, in Wizard and Glass, the flashback book of The Dark Tower series, Susan and Cordelia use "thee" (said to be part of "the old tongue") in both the subject and the object position, when in reality it was only the object form of "thou". And when it's used as a subject, verbs after it are conjugated in the third person, which is also incorrect. Also, Cordelia sometimes switches between "you" and "ye" with no apparent rules for distinguishing between them, and even uses "yerself" - seemingly meant to be a reflexive form of "ye" - although when "ye" was used in early modern English, its reflexive form was still "yourselves" (or "yourself" if used singularly). (The described use of "thee" is identical to that in modern Quaker/Amish "plain speech" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testimony_of_simplicity#Simplicity_in_speech), which has evolved from its Early Modern English roots. But there's no excuse for the "ye" errors.)
• The Dolorous Adventure Of Brother Banenose is ostensibly a translation of a series of 14th-century pamphlets, and abounds in terrible attempts at medieval English. Author Matt Catania attributes these errors to his inexperience in translating foreign languages, but they are almost certainly deliberate.
• Esther Friesner's short story "Titus!", published in the 1994 anthology Weird Tales From Shakespeare, invokes this. It takes place in a Star Trek-like future where artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, and space travel are common, but the classics of literature and culture still flourish. A young British theatre director is tasked with putting on a Shakespeare play as part of the festivities to welcome a group of interstellar delegates. To aid in the task, an A.I. scientist revives the consciousness of Shakespeare himself and puts it into an android body. The director, once he's gotten over his shock, speaks to Shakespeare in such phrases as "I crave thy pardon, gentle sir," and "What aileth thee, good sir?" Shakespeare quickly corrects him: the A.I. scientists have updated his language to better fit in with the times. After all, he points out, communication is the most important thing we have, and several of his tragedies deal with a failure or lack thereof. (The trope is zig-zagged somewhat in that the director does use the correct form of Elizabethan grammar.)

Lyve-Actionne Tellevisionne

• Good Omens (2019): All of Agnes Nutter's prophecies are written in this.
• Hot in Cleveland presents a horrifying example, wherein Amish folk are shown to speak the most awfully butchered Olde English imaginable. Made worse because the Amish were originally German so why are they speaking an archaic version of English?
• Discussed in an episode of The Big Bang Theory. After the gang returns from a renaissance fair, Sheldon, pedantic as he is, complains about its lack of historical accuracy, including its use of pseudo-archaic English.
  Sheldon: My god, those people need to learn you can't just put "ye olde" in front of anything you want and expect to get away with it!
• Jeannie from I Dream of Jeannie initially spoke this way. It was very quickly dropped.
• Q from Impractical Jokers tries this while working at a White Castle, with a side order of Large Ham.
  Q: What ist thou craving?!
• Used by Adam Savage on MythBusters as a running joke involving medieval myths and legends.
  Adam: It turns out that 'ye olde' techniques take 'ye olde' sweet time.
• Behind Mr. Bumble in the workhouse/orphanage in the 2007 TV dramatization of Oliver Twist, just before Oliver approaches to say "Please sir, I want some more," we see in capitalized foot-high lettering painted on the wall, "GOD SEEST THOU" rather than "GOD SEETH THEE." In fact, "GOD SEEST THOU" would mean "YOU SEE GOD" (with a very peculiar word ordering) rather than "GOD SEES YOU".
• Power Rangers Dino Charge: "'Tis morphing time!"
• A 1960 telecast of The Price Is Right had a bonus game for the winner of a prize. The game was called "Cullen's Ye Olde Antique Shoppe." (The contestant had to select which of three museum antiques was most expensive and would receive the equivalent value in cash.)
• In the miniseries, Shogun, every time Blackthorne waxes romantic over his Japanese interpreter, he falls into this. "I say thou art beautiful, and I love thee!" This is meant to show by Translation Convention that he is speaking Latin, a language that few Japanese people know. The novel makes it somewhat clearer.
• In the first episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Q addresses Picard et al with "Thou art notified that thy kind have infiltrated the galaxy too far already. Thou art directed to return to thine own solar system immediately." This is grammatically correct... but most interpretations assume, logically, that Q is referring to all of humanity here, or at least Starfleet, or at least the Enterprise crew. In fact, thou can never be plural... so Q is telling Picard, specifically, to go home. Not quite as grandiose a demand as the writers probably intended.
• Star Trek misuses archaic English in "Amok Time". Writer Theodore Sturgeon apparently wanted to show that the Vulcan language, or at least an older form of it, had separate second-person singular and plural forms (as French does with "tu" and "vous"). They showed this by using the archaic second-person familiar pronoun "thee" for "you". But both T'Pau and Spock, when using these formal archaisms, used "thee" even when "thou" would have been the correct word.^note Spock says "Thee has the power, T'Pau" when he means "Thou hast." Even if Vulcan used the same word for both pronouns (as modern English does with "you"), the translator should have been programmed to recognize the difference between subjective and objective pronouns. As it was, formal Vulcan as rendered by Celia Lovsky and Leonard Nimoy sounded more like Quaker 'plain speech.' If thou art the subject of a sentence then the object of the sentence wouldst be thee.

Muſicke

• Many metal bands try to use archaic English in their lyrics because it sounds cool. Most fail badly.
  • Bal-Sagoth spam "thou" regardless of number and "thine" regardless of what the next letter is.
  • Nile spam the "-eth" ending without regard for person and number.
  • Arcturus makes a brave attempt with the song "To Thou Who Dwellest in the Night". Alas, it falls flat already in the title. ("To thou" is a hypercorrection. It should be "to thee".)
  • "I shalt", "thou shalt", "he/she/it shalt", "we shalt", "ye shalt", "they shalt." Only one of these is correct, but Cradle of Filth will happily use the other five anyway.
  • At least Stormwarrior keeps it to the titles and liner notes in Heading Northe.
• Oddly enough, so do many churches, with a largely similar failure rate. It's fine when you're singing a hymn that was indeed written in that era, but all too often, churches either (1) convert part of the archaic English, but not all of it, to modern English, or (2) insert archaic English in a modern song.
  • A typical, fairly mild example: "You alone are my heart's desire / And I long to worship thee." Not really ungrammatical, but weird nonetheless.
    • Strangely enough, Martin Nystrom's original word was "you." However, the original first lines were "As the deer panteth for the water / So my soul longeth after you."
• Used properly (albeit archaically) by Stan Rogers in "Harris and the Mare," with the line "Harris, fetch thy mare and take us home."
• Most Bardcore songs are often more concerned with rewritings songs to have a medieval-ish feel rather than strict period linguistic accuracy (aside from some exceptions, such as Rīċa Ēastlēah's "Never Gonna Give You Up" and "Findġum Soccum").
• "Upside Down" by Diana Ross features the infamous line "Respectfully I say to thee"
• Edguy's "Robin Hood" features Tobias Sammet telling everyone to "bewareth."
• The first line of The Brobecks' "Second Boys Will Be First Choice" uses "ye" rather than "you", though the rest of the song is in normal English.
• Strangely enough Insane Clown Posse attempts this with "walk into thy light" which they probably thought meant "walk into the light" but accidently translates to the more nonsensical "walk into your light"

Yon Radioe

• In The Shadow episode "The House of Horror", Margo Lane takes Lamont Cranston to a tea house for lunch. Lamont objects to a tacky, twee tea house called "Ye Olde and Quainte Gypsy Tea Room". It's definitely spelled that way because the actor pronounces the words as "old-y" and "quaint-y".

Ye Gameth Upon Yon Tabelle

• Forsooth! is a Shakespeare-inspired game where players are encouraged to ape Elizabethan language. That aspect tends to be about as accurate as you'd expect.
• Some elves in Shadowrun talk like this, particularly ones who are members of The Ancients street gang in an attempt to make themselves sound more sophisticated. It's often regarded both in and out of universe as another reason to shoot them.

Yon Theatre

• The 1970s musical Godspell has many lines and songs written in this way. That's because much of the dialogue is taken straight from The Bible, and many of the songs are pop/rock settings of older hymns—and the hymns' language was often archaic even when they were written.
• Pippin, though using this trope very little, does have a beggar tell Pippin, "Up thine, sire."

Ye Gameſ of Yon Video

• Build-a-Lot: The Elizabethan Era, a Casual Video Game, attracted multiple denunciations for this trope on its Big Fish Games forum. One gamer contrasted the developers bragging (in a Premium Edition making-of segment) about the care taken, and the repeated revisions necessary, to produce good visuals for the game.
• Just like in the literature case, this is the de facto language used in many, many video games, PC software, and even fan translations, translated into Spanish (the European Spanish dialect). This is justified for four reasons:
  • Spain was and still is the main market for videogames in Spanish because Spaniard laws normally requires foreign media to be translated into Spanish, while in Latin America this is not always the case.
  • Spain was the only legal market in the Spanish-speaking world, as piracy in Latin America made unattractive to translate and dub games into local dialects,^note In fact, Spaniard players dwarfs Latin American ones in numbers, at least in Steam, despite Spain having less population than Mexico, the most populated Spanish-speaking country in the region. Spain is ranked 12th on numbers of Steam users, while Latin American countries (excluding Brazil, for obvious reasons) like Argentina are ranked 23th, despite having more or less the same population than Spain, and the aforementioned Mexico in a paltry 34th. albeit this started to change in the 2000s when Microsoft and many other Western developers^note Japanese developers didn't start to include Spanish translations in masse until the 2010s for the same reasons, not to mention is more cheaper to translate into English because the U.S. is their main market for both cultural and economical reasons. begin to include Spanish subs and dubs in many of their games since Halo 2.
  • It's more cheaper to translate into European Spanish partly for the aforementioned reasons and because they normally assume since Spain is the mother country, the European dialect should be already known by everyone in the Spanish-speaking world.^note While this is partly true, they forgot to consider not everyone in Latin America can understand Spaniard slang, in the same way an American cannot understand British slang as well.
  • European Spanish is the de facto Spanish dialect taught in language schools worldwide, even in non Spanish-speaking countries like the U.S., Canada, Brazil and others, causing lots of textual dissonance in American or Canadian-developed games when using the European dialect and mixing it with Mexican or many other Latin American words.
  • Since this is a very omnipresent trope in the Spanish-speaking world, only aversions, subversions, exaggerated/out-of-place examples, and odd cases will be included:
    • Possibly the most extreme case of this trope are the Spanish subs of Resident Evil 5, since this trope is applied in full force, as the speech is translated into an archaic Spanish not even used so much even in Spain, basically making the characters speak like medieval knights, while killing zombies in a modern setting.
    • Street Fighter IV and Street Fighter 6 uses European Spanish for all the characters, albeit not as archaic like the aforementioned Resident Evil 5. The only exceptions on this rule are El Fuerte and T.Hawk in IV and Lily in 6, since they are Mexicans and their dialogues are translated as Mexican Spanish, rather than the European dialect.^note Albeit in T.Hawk and Lily's cases, they speak using polite neutral Spanish, while El Fuerte's uses the Mexico City accent, despite most of his backstory heavily implies he hails from Southern Mexico. On the other hand this is played straight with Evil Ryu in IV.
    • Oddly enough, Street Fighter V mostly avert this, as it use neutral Spanish instead, with the sole exception of some words used exclusively in Spain, such as partida for "game/match", instead of the Latin American "juego".
    • Square Enix games includes this kind of speech as well in all their games; The sole exceptions are Front Mission's Nintendo Switch's port, Final Fantasy XVI and Deus Ex: Mankind Divided, the latter two translated and dubbed in Mexico.
    • Path of Exile is a bizarre inversion of this trope: The Spanish translation use Mexican Spanish exclusively, despite the original English dialogue and text use British English, when one could expect the use of the European dialect in this game, due of its premise and the speech patterns used by almost all the characters in-universe.
    • The European Spanish translation of Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon features one of the most archaic (and justified) uses of this trope. Unlike other translations used for both Spain and Latin America, the Spanish translation is exclusive for the European release, as it was not included in the American version, possibly because the translation is too old-fashioned for Latin American use. On the other hand, this is averted in Fire Emblem Heroes, when both Spain and Latin America has their own translations in their own dialects.^note Albeit the Latin American translation uses polite Mexican Spanish by default, it uses some Spaniard words, like "partida" instead of "juego" for the translation of "game" and it uses Spaniard politeness by default, rather than Latin American, when people with higher social or military standing are addressed in casual terms. Doing this in Latin America, depending of the country and region, can be a very serious and sometimes in extreme cases, deadly faux pas.
    • SNK's games translated into Spanish zig-zags this trope a lot. By rule of thumb almost all of their Spanish-translated games use neutral Latin American Spanish by default, albeit some games like The King of Fighters 95 and XIII^note Special mention on this game, since the translation not only it's archaic-even-for-Spain and out-to-place for many characters, but also not very good as well. used European Spanish exclusively, but this is subverted in XIV, when you can choose between European and Mexican Spanish dialects in the options screen, something incredibly unusual in a videogame, much less for a Japanese-developed one.
    • Until the 2000s, most of the FIFA Soccer games were translated into the European dialect exclusively, and at least in the earlier games, it even used some very archaic spellings for some countries, being the biggest offender the spelling of Mexico, who was spelled as Mejico, an archaic spelling used exclusively in Spain until the 90s and it's considered as a borderline Berserk Button for Mexicans. Luckily, they corrected this in later games.
• In an inversion of this trope, and unlike Spanish, most of the translations to Portuguese are done with the Brazilian dialect, and rarely with the European one. This is done for two reasons: Brazil is the most populated Portuguese-speaking country of the world (200 million people) in stark contrast with Portugal (10 million), so the Brazilian market is much bigger than the Portuguese one. Another reason is the fact the Brazilian dialect is much easier to read, understand and learn compared with the European dialect, so any programmer or translator dealing with Portuguese will probably use the former for the sake of simplicity. This trope is discussed throughfully here.
• In Age of Empires III, British units speak in a really baffling pseudo-Elizabethan patois that a player is lucky to understand even half of. Especially jarring as the British characters in the game's story mode speak modern English, and units from other nations speak their language authentically.
• Dynaheir in Baldur's Gate. Ye gods, Dynaheir in Baldur's Gate. Her death before the start of Baldur's Gate II was no doubt cause for much rejoicing among anyone who can even remotely speak English. Among other things, she used "thy" as an all-around 2nd person pronoun, and "thee" for a 1st person pronoun! All this despite being some kind of cultural mashup of Middle Eastern and Russian, or something like that. Elminster and other characters dabbling in archaic pronouns were also a bit confused about them.
• Steward Ribson of Brave Fencer Musashi talks like this; in fact he's the only character in the game that does and it's ramped up to a ridiculous level as per Rule of Funny:
  Steward Ribson: We foundeth thou sleeping after thou defeated Thirstquencher's abominable roboteth! So, we broughteth thou to hither roometh...
• In the Let's Play for Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, Sakura Oogami's extremely old-fashioned and formal speech patterns are rendered as this.
• Several characters in the Dark Souls trilogy speak like this, and it's pretty clear the writers had little clue what they were doing (making the "from whence" mistake ^note  to be fair, even the King James Bible did that, misuse of "thee/thou", not declining verbs properly, etc). Humorously, the Giant Blacksmith combines this with Hulk Speak for a truly unique manner of speech ("I hath shiny-shiny!").
• Dragon Quest:
  • The original English versions (later translations removed this) of Dragon Quest and Dragon Quest II had not only all of the characters speak pseudo-Early Modern English, but the "narrator" in the game's user interface as well. Similarly, the names of characters and locations were changed to names either relating to Arthurian legend or fitting the tone of the game.
    Menu: The Slime attacks! Thy hit(s) have decreased by 1.
  • They had to drop it in Dragon Quest III and Dragon Quest IV because those games take place across the globe rather than being in one territory. In the DQIV DS version, though, Orifiela and many others at The Azimuth and Zenithia talk in this way, which is a nod to the first two NES Dragon Quest games.
  • The mobile phone version of III has a new translation in the vein of Dragon Quest VIII, and uses this when the hero reaches Alefgard, where Dragon Quest I will take place.
  • The DS remakes of Dragon Quest V and Dragon Quest VI paid homage to this by using this as the accent for the Zenith Dragon and Lord Zenith, respectively.
• Dragon's Dogma is probably the worst offender for this trope. Nearly every line is delivered in some sort of butchered pseudo-Shakespearean dialect that confuses some to the point of actually requiring translation. Of course, the developers seemed to be aware of this to a degree and actually had quest-essential dialogue written and delivered in as near to modern English as possible, albeit with a few "olde"-sounding words chucked in for good measure.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Cyan in Final Fantasy VI talks the same way, making grievous errors like "I art" (though in Cyan's case he spoke in faux-historic Japanese in the Japanese version as well). Gau mimics Cyan and uses it as the basis of calling Sabin Mr. Thou, much to Sabin's dismay. An optional, late-game cutscene and the lack of anyone else in the entire world, including Cyan's hometown and family speaking this way imply this is an affectation that he adopts, rather than his normal speech. This was because Ted Woolsey was in charge of translation back then, but it was then retranslated into actual Flowery Elizabethan English in the GBA version and every other version ever since.
  • Ingus, from the DS version of Final Fantasy III also does this kind of thing occasionally. No one else talks this way.
  • Happens in Final Fantasy VIII if you go to fight Odin. "The Heavens hath decreed thy fate".
  • Final Fantasy XIV mostly averts this trope. A couple of the characters speak in a Shakespearean manner, but for the most part they just say thou and mine instead of you and my. Conjugation is done correctly by early modern English standards for the most part as well. Most characters don't speak this way and just speak modern English. This is also justified as Translation Convention, as Hydaelyn/Eorzea are NOT Earth, and it can be assumed that they're not speaking English at all, but another language entirely, and it's just translated for our benefit (with some more archaic dialects being translated as early modern English).
    • Played entirely straight with Urianger, who speaks in such a flowery language on top of this that it gives everyone within earshot a headache.
• In the 5★ uncap episodes of the ten Eternals of Granblue Fantasy, it is revealed that the Revenant Weapons speak in this manner (at least in the English language setting). Threo even lampshades them as "hard words".
• The Great Deku Tree in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time speaks in this. Like the Elminster example above, it could have something to do with the Deku Tree's age. Weirdly. Great Deku Tree II, appearing in the second half of Ocarina of Time and The Wind Waker does not speak like this, despite retaining Great Deku Tree I's memories and personality.
• In Octopath Traveler, H'aanit and her fellow villagers speak, interestingly enough, a variant of Middle English rather than the usual Elizabethan English, so the grammar is closer to Chaucer's than Shakespeare's. Many times, the archaic grammar isn't too bad, but the inconsistencies and inaccuracies that do appear are rather glaring. For instance, the characters can't seem to decide what to use as the infinitive ending, so we get such phrases as "he must speaketh", "must thou makest", "I shan't faile", (note that the "e" is silent), "dost thou ask", and "not merely to keepen". Only the last three are historically correct; "est" and "eth" are never used to mark the infinitive.
• Personas in Persona tend to speak either like this, or in modern English with No Indoor Voice. The series catchphrase "I am thou, thou art I" is an example of this, too, though in this case, the grammar is correct; because "be" is a linking verb and requires the complement to be in the nominative case, "I am thou, thou art I" is technically correct, though a bit of an odd amalgamation of 16th-18th century pronouns and modern grammar. (The original Japanese was "Ware wa nanji, nanji wa ware", which basically means "I am you, you are I" using very old-fashioned pronouns.) In other instances, the archaic grammar isn't so good; for instance, using "doth", "hath", and the like for anything that is not third-person singular.
• In Persona 2: Innocent Sin, the part-time clerk at Peace Burger talks like this in the English translation, despite being a modern Japanese girl. It turns out one of the regulars spread a rumor about it (since rumors have the supernatural power to come true) because she thought it would be funny.
• Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time: The publicity and the internal content shows this in Dark Ages levels, with different forms of "thou" thrown around randomly and "eth" added to the end of verbs regardless of proper conjugation.
• In Pokémon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team, when you go to evolve a Pokemon, the voice of whatever allows a Pokemon to evolve refers to that single Pokemon as "ye" to sound old-fashioned and mysterious, but "ye" is plural, which shouldn't be used when talking to a single Pokemon.
  • For the Pokémon series as a whole: the use of "Forme" for certain pokemon with multiple forms (e.g. Giratina, Deoxys, Shaymin, Aegislash), instead of "Form".
• The Ever-Faithful Leobuilt in Primordia (2012) speaks this way, for no apparent reason other than that he was created to preach the local Robot Religion. Horatio comments that "something must be wrong with his language processing unit".
• Puyo Puyo: The Ocean Prince, fitting his royal nature, speaks using archaic English in the English translation of Puyo Puyo Fever and in fan translations for some of the other games; he no longer has this trait starting with the English version of Puyo Puyo Tetris. In the Japanese originals, his speech heavily utilizes Katakana.
• Dormin in Shadow of the Colossus is actually speaking creator-designed gibberish, but their dialogue is subtitled as archaic English. Butchered, improper archaic English, including using the -eth suffix incorrectly in the first cutscene.
• Shin Megami Tensei:
  • In the fan translation of Shin Megami Tensei II, the Final Boss and his fake from earlier in the game speak in this manner.
  • In Shin Megami Tensei IV, the Archangels speak like this in their DLC quests.
• In Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, Sir Galleth Cooper, Sly's Medieval England ancestor speaks like this. This includes using "Forsooth!" as an exclamation.
• Yoshimitsu of SoulCalibur speaks in terribly mangled Shakespearean English that completely ignores proper declension ("-est" being applied to third person verbs, for instance) and seems to gain and lose "Olde English" features at random. In his more pretentious moments, his diction tends to take on aspects of Delusions of Eloquence as well.
• Jelfonzo from Splatoon 2 is one of the few jellyfish who can speak the Inkling's language. Alas, he learned Inkling from an archaic source. In contrast to Jelonzo's mangled speech in the first game, Jelfonzo speaks like this.
• In the original translation of the Squaresoft game Chrono Trigger, the character Frog, born in the "Middle Ages", spoke this way. For some reason or other, he was the only one given such ridiculous lines, despite the Middle Ages having hundreds of other, un-butchered lines of dialogue, and Frog himself talking normally in flashbacks to when he was just Glenn. However, this trope has been averted in the new, improved translation used for the Nintendo DS (and later, smartphone) port, where he's merely a bit formal. This was a complete change from the Japanese version, in which he spoke very roughly and rudely.
  Frog: Awaketh, Crono!
• In Super Paper Mario, the Nimbis speak this way, but they still use modern expressions. This leads to lines such as "Thou art toast!"
• Luna in Tales of Symphonia. Summoners are expected to talk like this as part of the pact ritual, despite only one spirit doing so. Gnome finds it annoying.
• In TearRing Saga, the already wonky Engrish intro text breaks into olde-fashioned dialogue:
  "Thou, the brave, the beauty. Thou have this sword to concur Evil, to accomplish my will."
• Two Worlds mixed modern English phrasing and mostly American accents with old-timey words such as "forsooth" and "verily" regularly thrown into the mix.
  • Humorously lampshaded in Two Worlds II. In a giant RPG universe, all characters speak more or less normal English (or an otherwise localised language), with the exception of a single one, who delivers all his sentences with an Extreme Overdose of mock-Middle English (complete with a parody accent). "Lo, wayfarer! Pray tell, whenceforth comest thou? What bringeth thee hereabout?" is just his greeting. This leaves the game's hero puzzled, scratching his head and trying to decipher what he's just heard. The character is even named "Iocus Munduo", which, in Dog Latin, would sort-of stand for "a Two Worlds joke". You can listen to him for yourself. Played quite straight in the original.
• In the Ultima series, Britannians use "thee/thou/thine" everywhere, and occasionally add "art" and "hast," but otherwise speak in a modern style. On the plus side, it's at least internally consistent. In Ultima Underworld II, at one point the game itself lapses into this manner of speech: after successfully training lockpicking with Julia, a message informs you that "She briefly tutors thee on lockpicking." Elsewhere, it just refers to you as "you". In Ultima VII the Guardian speaks using modern (or rather Earth) English, which helps reinforce the feeling he is from another world. Curiously, he starts speaking like other Britannians in later games.
• Vagrant Story actually quite thoroughly subverts this. Although the script is in Early Modern English, it's rather moderate and tame compared to what one would suspect from translation attempts of the time period.
• Valkyrie Profile: Covenant of the Plume uses a decidedly 'old' flavor of speech, but achieves this primarily through the use of archaic (but legitimate) grammar structures, and the occasional uncommon word like "unto."
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption makes extensive use of this trope: all these thou's and thee's can easily make your head spin - but only before you realize that it actually sounds fun.
  • You have to wonder how much of it is supposed to be Translation Convention, seeing how Christof and most of his fellow knights are French, the first half of the game takes place in medieval Prague and Vienna (where everyone speaks just like him and they have no trouble understanding each other) and the second half is in London and New York, where his archaic (English) syntax becomes somewhat of a Running Gag.
• Grahf's catchphrase in Xenogears, "Doth thou desire the power?" It seems to be part of an incantation of some kind, as he speaks normally otherwise.
  Grahf: Blossom, o fallen seed, and draw upon thy hidden powers!! Grant unto thee the power of the glorious 'Mother of Destruction'!
• Cadin from Yo-kai Watch speaks like this.
  Cadin: I am Cadin. I am a Yo-kai that dons the lowly disguise of a mere cicada. Noble Player, my heart was abuzz as I witnessed thy bug catching. To thee, able Player, I offer this: my Yo-kai Medal!

Webbe Comickeſ

• In Drowtales daydream's sidestory Vel'cahal, they all speak this way because the setting is based around 1000 years before the main comic. However it gets terrible when the high queen summons an even more ancient sentient aura.
  Sharess: Thou hast much to answer for, Reshalt. My mind is now greatly burdened by the events which thy Empress did'st arrange.
  Reshalt: ...then whyfoore do ye calle me? Why haf I ben broghte to liyf? Am I to be torchured?
• Latchkey Kingdom features Titans and You, a how-to guide on how to kill multi-story giants with lines like "Find a place where thou art hidden".
• Sluggy Freelance uses different solutions at different times for depicting the speech of the Medieval Mercians (and Trents) that pop up now and then thanks to being involved in some back stories. The first flashback of Warlord Torgamous in "Vampires!" is pretty jokey, and he says "I shall-eth return safe-eth!" Next, when the characters travel back in time in "The Stormbreaker Saga", the Mercians and Trents speak pretty much modern English, even in that same scene that was in the flashback. Many years later in "The Immortal King", Pete makes an effort to make Mercians speak real "Middle Ages English" but still understandably to modern readers, but admits he's pretty bad at it and says he'll listen to reader suggestions for corrections.

Webbe Originnale

• Doctor Steel's lament in "The Dr. Steel Show", Episode 1: "Damn Thee Spam, DAMN THEE!"
• The Potter Puppet Pals episode "Snape's Diary" has this gem:
  Button, oh button, where hast thou fled? Did thee tarry too long amongst needle and thread? Did thee roll off my bosom and cease to exist? How I wish I could follow thee into the mist.

Not too awful, however to nitpick, the word "thee" (the first two times) should be "thou". Although "thee" sounds more poetic, it would be like saying "Did him tarry too long...?" or "Did him roll of my bosom...?" It is grammatically incorrect.

• Ice Goose in The Damn Few throws in the occasional "thou" and "thine" when putting down one of his friends.
  Ice Goose: Oh, come now, Gunny. For once our tomahawk-laden friend speaks without hyperbole. I do believe I've witnessed Ebenezer Scrooge buy more rounds than thou.

Weſterne Animationne

• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • Luna did a fairly good job of this, although she didn't use it a lot. (Until, of course, she said, "Thou even got the bells right.") This also had the hilarious side-effect of torpedoing every fanfic ever with her in it.
  • In "Hearthbreakers", Pinkie Pie's parents speak this way. Notably, they didn't do this in their previous appearance. Granny Smith thought they talked funny, but after the Apple and Pie families got to know each other better, she attempted to imitate them, while they attempted to imitate her Southern accent.
• In the holiday classic Rudolph's Shiny New Year, Sir Ten-To-Three talks like this.
• The Transformers: In the Episode A Decepticon Raider In King Arthur's Court (spellcorrected from the original A Deceptacon Raider in King Arthur's Court), the inhabitants of the area around "Camelot" speak this way.
  Sir Waggon of Blackthorne pretends to nothing. Who art thou?
  Starscream: I am Starscream of Cybertron.

Ye Subversionnes, Parodyes, et cetera.

Yon Adverttisements

• The Progressive insurance ad. "More discounts than we knoweth what to do with"

Comicke Bookes

• In one issue of the ALF Comicbook Adaptation, Gordon "ALF" Shumway delivers a Melmac flashback that is a dual parody of the American Revolution and the Battle of Troy. When the Melmacian version of the Declaration of Independence is being written, one character asks about "In Congrefs", prompting the writer to ask for his ink eraser.
• The Sandman (1989): In the last book, The Wake, the people at the Renaissance fair do this, to the great annoyance of the six-hundred-year-old Hob Gadling. Ren fair actors are actually trained to talk like this, because authentic Elizabethan speech varies between being incomprehensible and actually sounding too modern. Almost nobody said 'thee' by that time except Shakespeare.
  Gwen: Prithee milord, how dost I look?
  Hob: Thou look'st passing fair, milady, except that thou manglest the King's good English and your tits are hanging out.
• The Mighty Thor
  • Parodied in an issue of Deadpool in which Deadpool briefly takes possession of Thor's hammer and changes his speech patterns accordingly.
  • All the Norse gods in Thor's various books talk like that. ALL. THE. TIME. When Asgard is floating over a field in Oklahoma this is countered by hilariously backwoods country talk. (Exactly why the Norse gods decided to talk in a dialect that was unknown to the Norsemen who worshipped them is something that no-one has ever bothered to explain.)
    • Except for in one miniseries, Thor: The Mighty Avenger, that updated Thor's origin somewhat, where the thees and thous were toned down to merely formal and old-fashioned English... and at least in the case of the Warriors Three, the speech patterns were explained by the fact that they learned English by (at Fandral's insistence, naturally) reading the autobiography of Casanova. And even then, Volstagg explicitly remarks that the language is "dated, but serviceable."
    • Thor also talks like a normal person in The Ultimates (set in the Ultimate Marvel alternate universe). The first two miniseries were written by Mark Millar. Jeph Loeb took the helm for Ultimates 3, Ultimatum and New Ultimates, and restored the classic speech pattern. In-universe, he said that he was embracing his Asgardian identity. When Millar returned, Tony Stark said that he would pay some millions to a charity if he started talking like a normal person again.
    • The Asgardians, like all deities in the Marvel universe, speak All-Speak (also called the All-Tongue). Whatever they speak is heard by the person hearing it in their native language.
    • Female Thor ie Jane Foster a regular Earth woman talks like this outloud but "speaks" casually in her internal monologues suggesting she's either compelled to talk like this or is putting on an act. Possibly the latter as occasionally her "Asgardian speak" slips or she otherwise fails or struggles to come up with appropriate words.
  • The Enchantress of the Young Masters in Young Avengers. She tries to talk in Thor-speak but often gets it wrong (even by Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe standards) or forgets to do it. It'll be like "Okay. —I mean, forsooth!"
  • The bad Norse dialogue in Heroes Reborn: Avengers turns out to be proof that "Thor" is a Counter-Earth duplicate after the real Thor arrives.
  • Marvel's Hercules used to talk like that, too, adopting a more modern style round about Civil War (2006). He targets the trope during a rant in The Incredible Hercules:
    Hercules: Why do you persist in talking in old-timey Shakespeare talk? We're from Greece! From two thousand years before Shakespeare!
    • Herc originally talked like that because he was a character first seen in Thor, and all the Asgardians didst speake in such manner — or they did once Stan Lee decided it was a cool idea to have them do so. It was a bit of a creeping growth over the first few years of the Thor comics. Initially, Thor talks pretty much standard American English, but gradually, as more and more Asgardian elements are introduced into the comic, his speech becometh more and more Butcherede, as doth that of other non-Midgard characters, including the Olympians when they are introduced.
  • In Loki: Agent Of Asgard #4:
    Sigurd: —For thy bewitching gaze doth compel noble Sigurd do get thy digits...
    Verity Willis: —Aaand this conversation is over.
    Sigurd: Everyone loves the oldie-worldie talk when Thor does it.
    • Again in Loki: Agent of Asgard #4:
      Sigurd: Then I guess it's thee. Thou. Whatever.
• The sound Spider-Man's web-shooters normally make is "thwip". In Spider-Man 1602, the sound effect is instead "thwippe".
• In Alan Moore's Promethea, current Promethea Sophie Bangs and predecessor Grace Brannaugh (who illustrated fantasy pulp magazines about Promethea during the late 20s), encounter the evil wizard Neptura in the Immateria. The wizard is modeled after Promethea's adventures in the 20s pulps (his full name, Marto Neptura, was originally the house pseudonym for the writers of the Promethea pulps), and speaks in grammatically incorrect Olde Englishe:
  Neptura: Promethea. Think not that I do not SEE thou, little one. Neptura sees ALL!
  Grace: Stupid man, it's "Thee", not "Thou". Hopeless without an editor!
• In Adam Warren's Dirty Pair: Sim Hell, Yuri is shown as an anime-type RPG character trying to rescue the "fair elven princess" Kei from the Big Bad:
  Yuri: I say thee nay, foul varlet! Thy fate is sealed bigtime!
  Kei: "Fair elven princess"? This is really stupid.
• In Peter David's run on Supergirl, a villainess named Satan Girl is a resurrected Satanist from the 18th Century. When she's brought back, she speaks with the expected "thee's and thy", only in the next issue she tells her resurrected nemesis that she'll drop the formal speak if she'll drop her "holier-than-thou name calling."
• Lucky Luke (set in the 19th century) has an unintentional version. Luke received a ransom note that uses the style (in French though, so it uses the "s that that looks like f") and figures out the local printer sent it.
• The Cartoon History of the Universe: Indulges in it from time to time, especially when discussing "Merrie Olde Angle-Lande":
  Anglo-Saxons: [while gleefully invading the place] A great, drizzling dumppe of a lande!
• In Soulsearchers and Company, Baraka talks like this whenever he is attempting to pick up chicks; generally to the annoyance of his teammates. It is a complete put-on.
• Wonder Woman (1987): Likely taking after The Mighty Thor, Perez had the Olympians (and occasionally other 'ancient' characters) speak like this. Pretty much nobody followed him on this one.
• Hawkeye talks like this when he takes on the identity of Golden Archer in Captain America #179. The "real" Golden Archer also uses Butcherede Englishe in Heroes Reborn (2021). (In his earliest appearances, the Golden Archer instead talked in what Roy Thomas thought an Australian accent sounded like.)
• The Simpsons Futurama Crossover Crisis: Naturally, The Mighty Thor talks like this when he makes a Lawyer-Friendly Cameo:
  Thor: Thou hath made me drop my helmet! Have at thee!

Comicke Strippes

• In The Family Circus, Dolly says "I need to goeth to the bathroom" at church.
• A Pearls Before Swine comic had an obvious parody of Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe, including phrases such as "Howeth caneth that beith?" Some reader took it seriously, and emailed the author to correct his mistakes.
• In a Sovisa filler, Ryn murders a bartender while trapped in the past because he's talking like this. And because It's Ryn we're talking about apparently it really annoys her, she states it bugs her more than being shot.

Comidie

• Behold Who's on First in the "style" of Shakespear.

Fanne Worketh

• Mocked in the Compelled series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer fanction, especially when several characters begin talking like this just to annoy Buffy who was complaining about their foul language. She quickly decides she's better off with the foul language.
• Parodied in Dimensional Links when the three goddesses of Hyrule discuss ways to guide the different incarnations of Link.
  Din: Have we considered just sending them a message? You know, have the local Great Fairy turn up and say, 'Hero, thou must goeth into yonder hole'?
  Farore: (looking flatly) Nobody talks like that.
• Parodied in Event Horizon: Storm of Magic. Littlefinger's (later his underling's) newspaper (printed using a Company-supplied press) is deliberately written in Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe. In the North, the Wintertown town crier yells out news and advertisements in this way as well. Meanwhile, everyone else from the Westerosi to the visitors from Earth speak normal English.
• An extract from Chaffinch's Mythology^note A parody of the seventeenth century compendium of myths and legends by Thomas Bulfinch quoted in Discworld fic Hear Them Chatter On The Tide does this, when telling the tale of Bissonomy, a Virtue Who Fell From Grace:
  Errata also knew thatte other Goddesses had had their Noses put Outte of Jointe by Bissonomy's elevation. Mutterings there were, of Thatte Bittche Hath Slept Her Way To The Toppe, and Evidently Hard Work Counts no Longer, and It's Notte What you Knowwe, It's Who You Knowwe.
  Thus, in full awareness thatte Bissonomy was not Popular amongst the Goddesses, and knowing allso that both she and Tubso hadde let their Duties as Virtues slip to the point that mortals were forgetting what virtues they represented, Errata spread whisper and rumour among the Goddes, until one day, Harmony threw up her hands in Desppair, and fled sobbing even unto the privy.
• Jericho (MLP): Jericho, a Teuton, notes that when he gets nervous or otherwise overly emotional, he tends to speak English with a more 1:1 German-English translation, which happens to sound very Shakespearean. As the story does on, Jericho's narration and speech patterns pick up more archaisms and formalities, while still being accurate. Earlier in the story, though, Jericho actually parodies Old English in a scene wherein he is confronting a perceived witch regarding a demon within her body.
  Jericho: What price does it demand of thee?! Lie not to me, witch! None but the unholy can the future see! Speak'st thou to me of sorcery, witchcraft, Bruchmagie!? Thou hast clearly to me dealing with a demon been. [Beat] I appear to only be able to speak in weird, half-sensical archaisms when dealing with demons. Should probably see a doctor about that.
• The Official Fanfiction University Of Middle-earth: Parodied. During Grammar Booth Camp, Dwimordene teaches Elizabethan English to the students while reminding them it is their fault that they are doing this. She would much rather teach them to speak and write modern English properly, but since they insist on using older forms of English even though Tolkien hardly used them...
  Dwimordene: If you can't use older forms of English properly, stick to contemporary English forms—Tolkien used those, too, you know. [...] You know, we wouldn't even be working on this but for you lot. Who talks like this, anyway? Aragorn, maybe twice in the entire trilogy. The Mouth of Sauron, once Eowyn, once. Not many characters use older forms of English, and they barely use them at that. I'd much rather discuss the common, erroneous substitution of the contraction, "it's," for the possessive, "its." A far more basic mistake, yet the egregious misuse of older English is so blatant that it causes headaches.
• Rise of the Minisukas: Baraqijal speaks with a real and hilariously fake Shakespearean accent:
  Baraqijal: Forsooth, the Lilim doth arriveth in their constructs of false flesh. No matter, it shall taketh more than that to striketh down I, Baraqijal the Lightning of God! So shall ye faceth my acidic wrath Lilim! Have at thee!
• Do not write Asgardians with this speech pattern in Superhero RPF or Sassgardian; aka Loki will personally Fan Wank at you!
• Trolling the Toad: In Chapter 17, in response to Umbridge restricting the language used in schoolwork to the medium of instruction, i.e. English (long story), Harry submits a DADA assignment written in Shakespearean English as an act of Loophole Abuse, just to mess with her.
• Turnabout Storm has Twilight's conveniently titled How to Be a Lawyer in 24 Hours book, which mixes this with Purple Prose for a painful effect.
  Spike: [Reading] "Smithe thy prosecuting knave and make the whelp feel thy wrath of the glorious voice of justice"?
  Twilight: Alright... maybe it's a little outdated...
  Spike: A little outdated?

Filmeth — Animationne

• Shrek:
  • In Shrek, Fiona uses this (inconsistently) early in her appearances, especially just after the escape from the dragon's castle. It doesn't last.
  Fiona: But thy deed is great, and thine heart is pure. [...] Please, I would'st look upon the face of my rescuer.
  Shrek: No, no you wouldn't...'st.
  • Shrek the Third: Worcestershire high school merges this with 21st-century American teenage slang.
    • The cheerleaders' chant:
    Wherefore art thou headed? To the top?
    Yeah, we think so, we think so!
    And dost thou thinkest thine can be stopped?
    Nay, we thinkst not, we thinkst not!
    • Guinevere exclaims "Ah! Totally ew-eth!" upon being approached by Shrek. Later, she approaches him in return to ask him "my friend Tiffany thinkest thou vex her so soothly, and she thought perchance thou would wanna ask her to the homecoming dance or something..."
    • Donkey gets pranked by some students and has a piece of paper reading "I suck-eth" taped on his back.

Filmeth — Lyve-Actionne

• Black Knight (2001): After falling into real medieval England, Jamal talks like this briefly, believing himself to be auditioning for the Renaissance Fair. After he gets stared at for being a weirdo, he drops it and speaks normally.
• Reefer Madness: The Musical: Jimmy tries to speak Shakespearean English to Mary.

Yon Litteratturre

• The poem "Thumbe-Hearte" in the poetry collection Raving Lunacy is written exclusively as an extremified parody of William Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, complete with ridiculous spellings and capitalisation, making it near impossible to decipher.
• One interesting aversion is that while Henry Fielding's 18th century writing style is somewhat similar to what is commonly thought of as Olde English, in his novel Jonathan Wild, when detailing Wild's ancestry, he depicts the one living in the Dark Ages speaking actual Old English.
• The British series What the Tudors Did for Us has episode titles like this, e.g. "Desygner Livinge."
• Dave Barry
  • Dave Barry Slept Here has this "actual example" of British colonial tax forms:
    To determineth the amounteth that thou canst claimeth for depreciation to thine cow, deducteth the amount showneth on Line XVLIICX-A of Schedule XVI, from the amount showneth on Line CVXILIIVMM of Schedule XVVII... No, waiteth, we meaneth Line XCII of Schedule CXVIILMM... No, holdeth it, we meaneth... ^note  Sadly, while it is this trope, it isn't that far off the mark as to the brand of impenetrability and verbosity of 18th-century British legislation: try reading the offending Stamp Act, for instance, without clutching your head at the one-two punch of Antiquated Linguistics combined with legalese.
  • In "Ye Olde Humor Columne," Barry offers an original proposal for having the federal government raise taxes by making stores pay an annual rate of $50,000 for each unnecessary "e" in their names, with the word "ye" incurring an additional $50,000 tax. Under this proposal, the owner of "Ye Olde Shoppe" would pay $150,000 a year, and the owner of "Ye Olde Barne Shoppe" "would simply be taken outside and shot."
  • In Claw Your Way To The Top, he gives a quick guide for salespeople who are looking to entertain a client. In his chart, he lists "Examples of classy restaurant names": Eduardo's, Le Pleuve en Voiture, and Ye Reallie Olde Countrie Manour Downes Inne. (The examples of non-classy names were "Booger's", "The Chew 'n' Swallow", and "Commander Taco".)
  • The Shakespeare quotes that occasionally appear in his writings, aside from variations on "O Romeo, Romeo," are simply a bunch of archaic words arranged nonsensically to form heroic couplets.
    What dost thine flinder knowest of thy face? Doth not the savage bull his row displace?
  • A parody of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales:
    In a somer sesunn when softe was the sunne, I kylled a young byrd and I ate it on a bunne.
• Elminster. Maybe this doth somehow reflect that olde lecher liveth there for more than thousand years, how do ye think?
• Poet Ezra Pound wrote "Ancient Music", a parody of a Middle English poem "Sumer is icumen in"; his version begins "Winter is icumen in, lhude sing goddamn" and his descriptions of what goes on in the winter are very 20th-century; "skiddeth bus" being one of the lines.
• From Henry Beard's short Raymond Chandler parody "The Big Recall": ". . . the El Olde English Pubbe, with beer in test tubes and a menu that offered mafhed potatoef and firloin fteak."
• In Archer's Goon by Diana Wynne Jones, Hathaway, who lives in the past, sends Quentin Sykes a letter with "f" used freely instead of "s". (In the TV adaptation, the effect is retained by having the letter read aloud by a meffenger with a ftrange fpeech impediment.) Hathaway himself speaks modern English to the main characters, but period English to his wife and children.
• The Bartimaeus Trilogy is about a djinn who is summoned by a 12-year-old magician living in the modern world. The human boy tries to use Ye Olde Butchered English, presumably to sound impressive, but the millennia-old djinn makes fun of him for it, and his narrator-self comments:
  More than the renewed captivity, it was these occasional archaisms that annoyed me so much. "Thee, recreant demon" — I ask you! No one used language like that anymore, and hadn't for two hundred years.
  • Generally speaking this is shown as a hallmark of amateur magicians still totally reliant on ancient books to practice their craft — experienced magicians can be curt and downright casual with their orders.
• Bored of the Rings uses this for a one-off joke involving the sentence "Greetingf ye olde wayfarerf" printed in blackletter type.
  • This wasn't just a one-off joke. It was lampshading the fact that Tolkien got frequently accused of this by people who didn't know any better. Tolkien's writing is actually a peculiar variety of subversion however. His Purple Prose isn't historically accurate Elizabethan English...but it's also not this trope either. He uses all the archaic elements correctly, whether it's word endings or sentence structure. However, he will also include elements that are distinctly modern (for the early 1950s that is): words, phrasing, etc. He largely tried to avoid idioms specific to his time period, since he wanted to give his writing the feeling of being from the distant past. Many of the idioms characters use are instead setting-specific. This is of course because Tolkien was first and foremost a Linguist (or Philologist as they say in Britain). Also, he did literally write (parts of) the dictionary: the Oxford English Dictionary, to be precise. The blend of archaic and modern elements creates a prose style that is unique to Tolkien, and quite aesthetically pleasing if not necessarily all that clear.
• Played with along with a case of Shown Their Work in the novel Captain Corelli's Mandolin. A British officer is dropped on the Greek island of Cephallonia during WWII to foment a resistance movement. The officer was chosen because of his university studies in Ancient Greek. His Greek is rendered in the text as (proper) Old English, which none of the Greeks initially understand.
• Castle Hangnail:
  • The ſpellbook Molly findſ in the caſtle library uſeſ the kind of antiquated ſpelling where "every s looked like an f (which happens in very old books)".
  • Another book in the library is A Witche's Grimoire of Practicale Magicke, "written in an era when E's were plentiful".
• In David Weber's Heirs of Empire series, Jiltanith insists on speaking in "Elizabethan English". She says she does this to show her disdain for the modern world, but everyone else, including her father Horus (who has been around long enough to have inspired the Egyptian god), finds it annoying. This is justified in-story—most of the crew of the counter-mutineer battleship have been awake through most of human history, but Jiltanith was put back into cryosleep around the Wars of the Roses and only woke up relatively recently.
• Discworld
  • When characters are involved in correspondence (e.g. Carrot, Vimes, and William de Worde), they are shown writing in Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe and basically read like Samuel Pepys, despite speaking in modern English.
  • Several books say it's not strictly Ye Olde Butchered Englishe, it's more that practically no-one in Ankh-Morpork can spell. Known exceptions are the Patrician and de Worde, whose style is excessively formal but uses standard spelling. Likewise, Rincewind apparently spells in a modern fashion, despite the hat, at least in the diary he keeps in The Last Continent.
  • In Mort, Ysabel says that the Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe book was written "before they invented spelling."
  • The Science of Discworld:
    • In The Science of Discworld 2: The Globe, the wizards are trying to evict the Elves from Roundworld (Earth). Towards the end they visit William Shakespeare in the chapter "A Woman on ftage?"
    • The Science of Discworld III: Darwin's Watch mentions in a footnote that Paley's watch argument was almost old enough to use these, leading to 'manifeftation of defign'
  • Soul Music played with ſ , mentioning the guitar primer "Play your Way to Succefs in Three Easy Lefsons and Eighteen Hard Lefsons."
  • In Witches Abroad, where Magrat pronounces ſ s as "f"s while quoting her herbal, prompting Nanny to tell her that a "herbal drink" (absinthe) would "put a cheft on your cheft".
  • Played with in Lords and Ladies, when the magically sleeping bodies of a long-dead army are casually reawakened.
    Ancient King: What tyme does thou call thys then?
  • Played with in Pyramids. When Teppic's ancestors come back to life, the older they are, the more butchered their English gets.
  • In Thud!, Grag Bashful Bashfullson speaks in this manner when translating the old Dwarfish language spoken by the ancient king on the recorded on the Device. Well, until he gets to the part about the trolls, at which point he's so shocked he forgets.
• This is actually a minor clue in the third book of The Dresden Files. Part of the backstory has Harry and the Chicago PD taking down a sorcerer. In a flashback, you hear the sorcerer talking with "thee"s and "thou art"s strewn about his language, to which Harry responds something like, "Shut up, nobody talks like that any more." Later, when the demon pursuing him speaks the same way, Harry says the same thing. He doesn't catch on to it for awhile, but it's the first clue as to the real identity of the villain.
  • Harry also subverts this by correcting other people's Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe. When a demon tells him, "I will tear out thy heart! I will hunt thy friends and their children!" he replies, "It's THINE heart."
  • And then, occasionally, he just uses it to give a vibe of Sophisticated as Hell.
    Harry: Thrice I say unto thee, bite me.
• The Gaunt's Ghosts series has the Nightgane, descendants of the first colonists on the planet of Gereon, who eventually rebelled against the Imperial rule. Due to centuries of isolation from the Imperial culture, they speak an archaic dialect of Low Gothic, which is essentially corrupted Middle-English.
• Averted in The Goblin Emperor. Ethuverazhin, the language the characters speak, has a you formal/you familiar distinction. The author shows this by resurrecting "thee" and "thou" and using them correctly.
• In Nick Harkaway's The Gone-Away World, students of the Jarndice University take an oath stating that they will looke upon ye world with an eye to ye proper managemente thereofe, ye goode conducte of ye businesse of livynge and ye keeping of ye pease, and that all magisters will give heede to ye thoughts one of another, and not take untoe themselves an excessive pryde.
• Parodied in Good Omens, where the passages from The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter are all written like this, and in flashbacks to Agnes Nutter's burning at the stake the people talk like this too, complete with non-standard spelling.
• Lampshaded in House of Leaves: one of the book's various editors, as the book discusses an old account written in Elizabethan English, mistakes the long "s" for an "f" and starts using "f" in place of "s" everywhere. Another editor explains his mistake.
• In Kraken by China Miéville, Collingswood first reads about Psychos for Hire Goss and Subby in a seventeenth century reference and amuses Baron by referring to them as "Goff and Fubby."
• Michael Crichton's Timeline. The main character goes back in time to the 14th century, and can't understand a word he hears, aside from rudimentary "methinks" and "thousayeth". When he does recognize a word, "genteel", he takes it to mean the current meaning "gentle" - instead of the old meaning "noble".
• In Peter S. Beagle's The Folk of the Air, the Olde Englishe spoken by members of a society based on the SCA is derided as "Castle Talk." One character remarks, "It's got no rules!"
• 1066 and All That includes a fragment of Saxon poetry in "eaold" English, and part of a Danish epic poem titled Beoleopard, or The Witan's Wail. The latter includes some actual Old English words, but is nevertheless a parody.
  Swingéd Cnut Cyng with swung sword
  Howléd Witanĕ hellĕ but hearkened his word
  Muriĕ sang Cnut Cyng
  Outfangthief is Damgudthyng.
• Ozymandias, of The Tripods, uses this as part of his disguise, a brain-damaged Vagrant.

Lyve-Actionne Tellevisionne

• Averted in Babylon 5: When a guy who believes he is King Arthur arrives at the station, one of the crew theorize that he may be the real King Arthur abducted and kept alive by the Sufficiently Advanced Vorlons. (It happened before with a Victorian character, after all.) This is shot down by another member pointing out that he speaks modern English with a heavy British accent, whereas the real King Arthur would be speaking a completely different language.^note Brythonic (a variety of Celtic), ancestor of modern Welsh.
• Batman (1966): When fighting a Robin Hood-like villain, the Hit Flash effects get olde englishe suffices: Pow-eth!
• The ſ was also used as an extended gag in The Benny Hill Show, in a novelty song called "Fad Eyed Fal", in which all of the S's were replaced with Fs.
• In The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon criticizes a historically inaccurate Renaissance Fair, saying, "My God, those people need to learn you can't just put 'ye olde' in front of anything you want and expect to get away with it."
• Blackadder II:
  Blackadder: Tell me, young crone, is this Putney?
  Young Crone: [in a cackling Cockney accent] That it be. That it be.
  Blackadder: "Yes, it is", not "that it be." You don't have to talk in that stupid voice to me. I'm not a tourist.
• The ſ became a Running Gag in an episode of Cheers: "Life, liberty, and the purfuit of happineff" (which was actually written "happineſs").
• In an episode of Dempsey and Makepeace, Dempsey finds Makepeace at an archery range and launches into a fake monologue full of butchered English before Makepeace tells him to "stop butchering the language".
• Doctor Who: Lampshaded to amusing effect in "The Shakespeare Code", in which companion Martha Jones speaks briefly in some rather horrid-sounding "Olde Englishe", at which point the Doctor quickly quiets her and tells her to just speak normally. In-universe, all languages are translated by the TARDIS automatically, and trying to speak the actual language just messes up that process. (A similar thing occurred when a companion tried to speak Latin in ancient Rome.)
• Used to hilarious effect in this Key & Peele sketch. A lot of the old timey dialogue consists of adding "-eth" to the end of words ("fucketh yeah!") and turning the usual statement "[Blank] is my shit!" into "Othello is my shite!", which apparently makes it Shakespearean.
• Mystery Science Theater 3000
  • In "Space Mutiny", the 'bots are complaining about Mike's really outdated encyclopedia, with at one point Crow remarking that "Congress is spelled with an 'f'! How do you pronounce it? 'Congrefffffff'?"
  • Then there was the Roger Corman movie The Undead (the plot involves no undead, which should be a clue to its quality) where everybody in the past portions talked in an especially bad form of this, up to and including words like "now-eth". Mike and the bots got a lot of comedic gold out of that.
• The MythBusters frequently refer to "Ye Oldie Times".
• Stargate SG-1: Averted in "Demons". The team finds a sign written in Middle English. Daniel (the Omniglot archaeologist) is the only person on the team who is even able to recognize it as English at all, and he has to translate.
• In an episode of The Vicar of Dibley, The Ditz Alice Tinker reads from a very old Bible, and pronounces all the ſ s as "f"s. The vicar stops her before she gets to the word "succor".

Muſicke

• Stan Freberg used this gag for his "United States of America Volume One" album.
  Franklin: [reading the Declaration of Independence] "...life, liberty, and the purfuit of happineff"?
  Jefferson: It's "pursuit of happiness".
  Franklin: Well, all your S's look like F's!
  Jefferson: Oh, it's "in"; it's very "in"!
  Franklin: Well, if it's "in"...
• Just for the sake of completeneſs, the English comedy songwriting team of Flanders and Swann mentioned this in their treatment of Greensleeves. "And at the top it said, Green Fleeves. [Thomas] Kyd looked at this; he thought, 'Well, that's a pretty unlikely title ... for a fong.'"
• Lupe Fiasco with a fake British accent? Trope Averted. Lupe Fiasco without the accent?
  "O ye tormented souls!"
  "No Heaven up above you, no Hell underneath ye, and no one to receive thee..."

Neweth Media

• Ursula Vernon sometimes paints fictionary ads, and naturally one for "Blackbeard's Rugged Tampons" uses Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe.
• The non-parody version is denounced at Everything2: If you're going to speak archaic English, use it correctly!
• The Bayeux Tapestry meme (examples here), which involves reproducing other memes using a Bayeux Tapestry generator, is full of these.
• GameChap's Minecraft videos do this a lot, such as calling the Skeleton mob "Ye Olde Skellingtonne".
• From the Unix 'Fortune' file:
  Hollerith, v:
  What thou doest when thy phone is on the fritzeth.

Profeffionalle Wreftling

• Layeth The Smacketh Down
• Olde Wrestling. It's right there in the name.

Yon Theatre

• One quotation ("O Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?") has misled most people about "wherefore", which means "why" and not "where". Juliet is not asking where Romeo is, but rather complaining about his identity as a member of a rival family (she goes on "What's in a name? That which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet."), signifying his family, feuding with hers. The word "wherefore" is related to "therefore", but as the latter is still in common use it doesn't cause the same confusion. (And if the phrase "whys and wherefores" wasn't dying out of the common vernacular, it would help understanding no end.)
  • It doesn't stop joke writers who should know better from having Romeo answer, "Over here!" (And it's probable that many of them do know better, given that it would make no sense in context to have Romeo shout that to Juliet, because he's sneaking up in the middle of the night to her balcony to see her. Stock Parodies are not required to be faithful to the play, though.)
    Macbeth: Oh! Yet I do repent me of my fury that I did kill them.
    Macduff: Wherefore did you so?
    Macbeth: Um, hello? The bedchamber? Where they were? Look, I know it's early, but try to keep up, okay?
    [nervous pause]
    Macbeth: Oh... right.
• The Rodgers and Hart musical A Connecticut Yankee (based on Mark Twain's novel In Name Only) gleefully mixed archaic diction with twentieth-century slang. The show's hit song "Thou Swell" (quoted above) is representative.
• "The Golden Ram" from Two By Two begins, "Ye who thirsteth, come and drinketh." It gets worse.

Parkeths of Ye Themes

• In Universal Studios Florida, the exit gift shop of Shrek 4D is named "Shrek's Ye Olde Souvenir Shoppe".

Ye Gameſ of Yon Video

• The shopkeepers from the Master System game Golvellius shout hilarious◊ insults to our hero every time we don't have enough money to pay for the items.
• Ultimuh, a parody of the Ultima series. "Howevereth", indeed.
• A cutscene from Super Adventure Island 2 on the SNES: "The Ice Giant cometh and breaketh openeth the dooreth".
• Taken over-the-top by Steward Ribson of Brave Fencer Musashi who seemingly can't say a word without tacking a pseudo-oldtimey suffix on. ("Thou art beeth correcteth!")
• Cragne Manor: Christabell's speaking style consists of butchered old English — words are misspelled, and nouns are randomly capitalized, such as "Deathe", "Seight", and "Towne".
  Christabell: I do thank you for diverting summe Houres with mee in Discourse sweet. I do entreat you return upon your Convenience that we may again share some Werdes.
• Deltarune exaggerates it with Rouxls Kaard, who seldom makes it three words without misapplying some archaism; he's particularly fond of 'thoust' and adding "e" to the endes of wordes, and "decidedesteth" is one of the worse ones he dares to use. He also completely drops it when flustered, the most famous example being when Kris and the others solve his first puzzle:
  Rouxls Kaard: ...
  Rouxls Kaard: GOD
  Rouxls Kaard: DAMN IT

This becomes even worse in Chapter 2, when he mixes this accent with pirate slang.

Rouxls: (dressed as a pirate) Arrrrrrr-t thou ready-eth to visiteth Davith Jones' Lockre???
Ralsei: Could... Could you NOT speak with more than one accent?
Rouxls: Yeahth, alright.

• The Elder Scrolls:
  • In addition to other instances of Early-Installment Weirdness, Arena and Daggerfall use this dialect indiscriminately. When rescued at the end of Arena, Emperor Uriel Septim VII speaks entirely in this fashion. (A trait which is dropped from later appearances in the series.) The later games have dropped this almost entirely, reserving just a bit of Shakespearean dialogue for the nobles.
  • The recurring in-universe book "The Red Book of Riddles" uses this for its entire first paragraph.
• In Fire Emblem Warriors: Three Hopes, Petra suddenly bursts into old-timey English (Fódlanish) speech during her A-rank support with Linhardt, which she picked up from reading a love letter someone wrote to her and studying texts in the same style. Linhardt tells her that no one has spoken seriously like that since the age of the goddess, and Petra herself is surprised that with all of her struggles of speaking Fódlan's language, she finds herself having greater success with an archaic version of it.
  Petra: Ah! O'er what wat'ry expanse wilst our hook'd morsel fly? What piscine denizen dost thou...thee? Nay, that! Dost thou be intending to make thy quarry?
  Linhardt: Umm...
  Petra: In days of yore, I oft partooketh of the angler's art. Yea, forsooth! I was being quite adept! But in this place, thou are knowing thy waters better. Mayhap thou are being my guide...eth?
• In The Great Ace Attorney, William Shamspeare, a failed actor who is actually an ex-convict often speaks this way as a Shakespeare enthusiast. He drops this when he's angry or shocked, especially when he goes into his Villainous Breakdown.
• Heretic had difficulty levels called "Bringest them oneth," "Black Plague Possesses Thee", "Thou needest a wet nurse," and the inexplicably modern "Yellowbellies-R-Us".
• Kenseiden contains gems such as, "Thou have learnt to slash with your sord." [sic]
• This ad for The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time uses this rather liberally: "Willst thou run?" Its "willst" is German, where Early Modern English requires "wilt". But the error is less obvious than many others. Also, it suddenly uses "ye" at the end ("Have ye what it takes?"), when for consistency, it should be "Hast thou what it takes?".
• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom uses a form of Middle English to represent the old Hylian language used in various Ancient Hylian texts. While it isn't 100% free of errors, the result is surprisingly well-researched, and includes a number of features of the real historical language that have been obscured by sound change and spelling standardisation in Modern English (e.g. using "stan" for "stone", reflecting the word's actual Old and Early Middle English pronunciation).
• The Quake manual had this to say about the game's zombies: "Thou canst not kill that which doth not live. But you can blast it into chunky kibbles." The game has plenty of Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe in the framing narrative as well.
• Parodied in Recettear with Tielle's map of Pensee, which is titled (as read aloud by Recette) "Beinge a Mape of Alle Welle-Lovede Shoppes of Confectionesse to be Founde in the Citee of Penseeee…ee"
• Surprisingly averted in Sonic and the Black Knight, which uses Arthurian Legend as its Framing Device. Everyone in the game speaks in non-accented modern English.
• A Tale of Two Kingdoms
  Helloeth! Thou appeareth to be playingeth an adventure gameth. Wouldeth thou liketh help with thateth?
• A few Easter Egg pages for Team Fortress 2 (already Retraux as it is) features bits from fictional old publications aimed at impossibly snooty audiences.
  You are as PRESUMPTUOUS as you are POOR and IRISH. Tarnish notte the majesty of my TOWER of HATS.
  • This text was then used in-game to describe the "Tower Pillar of Hats".
  • Also, the "Ye Olde Baker's Boy" Scout hat.
  • Enforced in Medieval Mode, forsooth! Whatever is written and posted in the text chat gets wordfiltered into medieval-styled speech.
• The Hammerites from the Thief series regularly get their thees and thous mixed up, and apply -est and -eth to verbs arbitrarily.
  • Subverted in the Polish version of the game, where their speech was translated into archaic - but mostly grammatically fine - version of Polish language. They're still sound like pompous asses there, but at least they get their thesaurus right.
• Wizards & Warriors frequently uses the grammatically erroneous construction "Thou hath..."
• Several quotes from the first World Heroes game are translated from Japanese into this instead of using normal English. It's dropped in the sequels, though.
• The official strategy guide for World of Warcraft (with guest artwork by the fellows at Penny Arcade) advises players against doing this. Makes sense, since characters in the Warcraft verse don't talk like that in the first place.
• Yon Astounding Castle! milks this for all it's worth. The beginning of the game is an ample sample.
  Outside Yon Castle
  Ye standeth at ye edge of ye forest outside yon castle, which is surrounded by yon moat. Yon drawbridge in ye east is up, preventing ye entry into yon castle. Nearby there groweth yon nut tree.
  
  To learneth how to playeth yon game, typeth tutorial or tut and presseth return. Typeth not of ye word help, for yon message knoweth not what it talketh about.
  
  Always presseth ye return key after ye typeth ye commands.

Webbe Animationne

• Homestar Runner
  • Thy Dungeonman starts with the title and goes downhill from there, mixing with modern slang and Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe. To illustrate how bad (and funny) this is:
    Ye find yeself in yon dungeon. Ye see a FLASK. Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH, and DENNIS. What wouldst thou deau?
    > Get ye flask
  • In the Strong Bad Email "sbemail22", Strong Bad gets an email from a viewer in England asking what he thinks of the English. His assessment starts with assuming that the writer is supposed to have a superfluous -e on the end of his name (and editing the message accordingly) and goes downhill from there. (This is Played for Laughs, of course.)
  • In "love poems", one of Strong Bad's suggestions for writing love poetry is to "replace random letters in the middle of words with apostrophes".
    Strong Bad: "It is never ever over, my lover of clover" becomes "'Tis ne'er e'er o'er m'lo'er o' clo'er".
    Coach Z: Now you're sporkin' my language!
• If Disney Cartoons Were Historically Accurate: Some of the signs, like those in the barber-surgeon's office, are filled with excessive "ye"s and flowery language.

Webbe Comickeſ

• This strip from The Order of the Stick has police tape that says "Ye Olde Crime Scene - Do Not Crosse".
• Lampshaded in this episode of Not Quite Daily Comic.
• Parodied in "Period Speech"" on xkcd. Played straight in "Voynich Manuscript."
• DM of the Rings here:
  Legolas: Oh man, sucks to be you.
  DM: Oh, come on. You're not even trying [to stay in character]. I know you can do better than that.
  Legolas: Hark, thy fate sucketh?
  DM: That is... much worse.
• 8-Bit Theater takes this to extremes in this strip.
  WANTED: 4 Ye Olde Lighte Warriorse Ofe Destinye Toe Rescuee Kingdome Frome Darknesse. Inquiree Withine.
• El Goonish Shive:
  • An extra adds "-eth"s^note and yet doesn't use "doth" to the "Methinks the lady doth protest too much" quote when she tries to use it to convey a point.
  • A talking magic wand mangles the "Englishe" as well at first, only to switch over to completely mundane modern English upon realizing Ashley is a very weak wizard.
• Filth Biscuit: "Rob Ho & His Merry Bros" correctly utilizes certain conjugations of archaic English (which is more Elizabethan English than Middle English) while totally ignoring others in its punishing mash-up of goofy medieval-ish prose and obnoxious modern fratbro-speak.
• A story arc in Full Frontal Nerdity had the guys start speaking like this when they decided to attend a local Ren Faire in costume. Or not in costume, in Nelson's case.
  Nelson: I'd sooner the Black Death taketh me than set foot in public in yon fruit suit!
• Goblins: Forgath's prayer.
• Aside from the namesake strip, Hark! A Vagrant avoids this with a vengeance... by making all the historical figures use extremely casual modern speech patterns and slang. This has the side effects of a) not alienating the audience from the premise and b) making the stories even funnier.
• The space dragons in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! "Prison transport, thou hast cleared ye upper atmosphere. Accelerateth for 20 zarps, & then unfurleth thy ramscoop!"
• In Rusty and Co., one strangeness was a gibbering mouther speaking Shakespearean.
• Sluggy Freelance: Ironically, when the history of the name of The Book of E-Ville is finally revealed, it turns out to be in-universe faux Latin rather than bad old English. Quint Bookbinder wanted to call it the book of insignificant things as a ruse, but not knowing the Latin word for that, ended up using one he just made up.
• Arch-Angela from Super Stupor talks extensively in this (though Milholland does get the words right).
• Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff briefly uses this as part of its Stylistic Suck during a Sherlock Homage arc. The fact that Sherlock Holmes is long after the era this style of English is associated with fits right in.
• Terror Island has this as a joke. Everyone speaks like this in the flashback, even though it was five seconds ago.
• Parodied in Terror Island. Every single time the characters think about a past event, they imagine everyone speaking in flowery alliterative Shakespearean language, even if they're recalling a conversation that happened less than five seconds earlier.
• Times Like This: Shakespeare In Advertising.
• The Way of the Metagamer - every store is named "Ye Olde X", generally with "thy"s, "thou"s, and superfluous "e"s.

Webbe Originnale

• 'Tis the entire pointe of the webbe meyme "Medievel Macros"
  • Behold! The field in which I grow my fucks! Lay thine eyes upon it, and thou shalt see that it is barren.◊
• Also the Archaic Rap.
• Atun Shei Films: Averted for the Witchfinder General(of the Colony of Massachusetts Bay). He speaks in as accurate a reconstruction of Original Pronunciation^note How it is believed people spoke in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, when the Witchfinder General is from as possible.
• In I'm a Marvel... And I'm a DC Green Lantern vs. Thor:
  Green Lantern: Shall we get started?
  Thor: Aye, verily!
  Green Lantern: Does that mean yes?
  Thor: Aye, veri-
  Green Lantern: Okay, fine.
• Appropriately for a Bible-themed movie, the consensus for Left Behind (2014) on Rotten Tomatoes reads "Yea verily, like unto a plague of locusts, Left Behind hath begat a further scourge of devastation upon Nicolas Cage's once-proud filmography."
• The "thorn" ("Þ") confusion is explained in a MinutePhysics video^note Nevermind the fact that a physics channel discusses lingustics. This shorthand for "th" in handwriting looks a lot like the letter "y", and so when the character is dropped out of usage the letter "y" is assumed instead.
• Godfree speaks in this as part of his persona as The Roleplayer in Sword Art Online Abridged. Kirito and Kuradeel find it irritating. Kuradeel kills him over having to "sit and listen while [he runs] Shakespeare through a wood chipper".
• This is how the Emmanuel Matos characters speak in The Salem Witch Trials
  "What's goodeth, what's goodeth, what's goodeth?"
• The word "whomst" has gained memetic status and has essentially turned into the measurement unit according to which the butcheredeness of people's olde Englishe is judged. It's generally agreed upon that a person's speech has crossed the line between merely butchered old English and parody somewhere in the approximate vicinity of "whomst'd've."

Westerne Animationne

• Adventure Time: In "The Eyes", Finn talks like this while trying "diplomat-style" to persuade the Staring Horse to leave.
  Finn: Pardon me, horse, I beseech thou to split from mine land this night. But I welcome thee to come back for some luncheth some other day, okay?
• Mocked in Batman: The Brave and the Bold with the Cavalier.
  The Cavalier: If thou thinkest thou can stop me, then have at thee!
  Batman: [thinking] Somewhere, Shakespeare is spinning in his grave...
• In Codename: Kids Next Door, the minor villain, King Sandy, occasionally speaks in that form of English, along with his knightly cousins, which is part of the (fake) kingly act he pulls off.
• Danger Mouse does this in "The Great Bone Idol" then subsequently subverts it as he tries to get the mystic stick from the Great Gnuru of the Himalayas.
  DM: Alas, there are those abroad who wouldest stealeth from you of which you are the guardianeth of, so they mayest findeth the Bone-eth Idoleth. We musteth... [groping] stoppeth them.
  Gnuru: I just flung the thing to a barmy duck.
  DM: You hairy old twit! Don't you realize... [he and Penfold get covered in a bank of avalanche-driven snow]
• Dan Vs.: "YE OLD SHAKESPEARE DINNER THEATER!"
• One episode of The Fairly OddParents! involves Timmy going back in time to Dimmsdale's very Pilgrimesque founding (despite Dimmsdale being in California).
  Timmy: I accuseth thee of beingeth... a witch! ...Eth!
• Family Guy: A brief gag in "Mind Over Murder" sees Peter naming the bar in his basement "Ye Olde Pube". He then stares thoughtfully at the insignia for a few seconds... And paints over the extra "e" in "Olde".
• Futurama
  • A brief gag features an amusing clash between Fry's delusion that he's a robot and his ubiquitous idiocy.
    Fry: Fear not, for I shall assist ye!
    Hermes: Robots don't say "ye"! ...Quit thinking you're a robot!
    Fry: I'll show ye...
  • George Washington's head: "Oh, Bender, thou robots cracketh me up!"
    • Thankfully this character trait is dropped for his appearance in "All the President's Heads".
  • In "All The Presidents' Heads", Benjamin Franklin was angry at the ſ writing, saying "That's how we write our 'S's, you ſtupid ſhitheads!"
    Bender: "Bite my ſhiny metal aſſ!"
    • At one point, due to an historical mix-up with some time travel, the "Don't tread on me" Gadsden Flag ended up replaced with a flag showing Bender and that line.
    • It should be noted that the English never used the "long s" (ſ) at the end of a sentence. So "Bite my ſhiny metal aſs" would have been more accurate.
• Lampshaded and nicely combined with Buffy Speak in the Kim Possible pirate episode.
• Looney Tunes: Both Robin Hood Daffy and Rabbit Hood speak this way in shorts set at the time of Robin Hood.
  Bugs Bunny: Lo! The King approacheth!
  Sheriff of Nottingham: King indeed. Ha. Dost thou taketh me for a fooleth?
• In Making Fiends, all of the wise Puritan Malachi's dialogue consists of this.
  Question not thine clams, nor, thine jerked beef!
• In The Mask, the title character travels back to late 17th century Salem, Massachusetts:
  The Mask: Look! She is the witcheth! And she will cast a spelleth on us alleth...eth!
• Sweetie Belle's play in the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "For Whom the Sweetie Belle Toils" features this, as one of many elements of Stylistic Suck.
  Sweetie Belle: Forsooth and anon, I cometh forthwith and posthaste with glad tidings, miladies.
  • To explain why this is wrong: "Forsooth" means "truthfully" and is used to express an opinion. "Anon" means "shortly". "Cometh" is third-person conjugation. "Forthwith" means "immediately", contradicting "anon". "Posthaste" means "with great speed". So basically, she's saying "In my honest opinion and soon, I comes immediately and quickly" as she's casually walking on stage.
• In The Owl House, Luz's favorite books about Azura the Good Witch pile this on really thick:
  "'You shall not shant doeth no more harm!' Azura calleth out!"
  • Small wonder Eda gave in and agreed to take Luz to the Covention rather than have to listen to more of this.
• Popeye
  • Applied in the short "Robin Hood-Winked".
  • Also in "Wigwam Whoopee''. "Well bloweth me down!"
• The Ren & Stimpy Show
  • In the magical cheeses episode the jester Stimpy meets talks this way.
  • Also, in the "Robin Hoëk" episode, Stimpy talks this way, especially, "Sticketh them uppeth!" and "Thou may now kisseth the bride."
    Sheriff: Thou hast besquirted me!
• Used in an episode of Rugrats (1991) when the parents take the babies to a renaissance fair. Didi takes the babies to "Ye Olde Daycare" and the following conversation takes place:
  Didi: Raiseth thy gate, good sir, so I may droppeth off my kids...eth!
  Gatekeeper: Yeah, whatever, lady.
• In Scooby-Doo! and the Witch's Ghost, the ghost of Sarah Ravencroft speaks like this, as she died sometime in the 1600s. Oddly, her spellbook averts the trope, as it's written in proper modern English.
• The Simpsons
  • In "Lisa The Iconoclast", Homer became the town cryer of a festival, and would speak in this way whenever he rang his bell. He even refused to listen to Marge at one point unless she (reluctantly) played along.
    Homer: Hear ye, hear ye! What's for breakfast?
    Marge: Toast.
    Homer: I can't understand thee.
    Marge: [sigh] Ye olde toast.
  • Also used in the segment where Selma is Queen Elizabeth I. There is a gag using a banner that reads Miſſion Accompliſhed poking fun at a certain premature victory celebration aboard an aircraft carrier.
  • Played with in "Lisa's Wedding". At the Renaissance festival, Lunchlady Doris is roasting a pig on a spit. Homer asks if he can have some, but Doris' "ears are open only to the pleas of those who speak ye olde English." Homer, not missing a beat, falls to one knee and rephrases his request—in rhyming iambic pentameter, no less:
    Homer: Sweet maiden of the spit, grant now my boon
    that I might sup on suckling pig this noon!
    Lunchlady Doris: Whatever.
  • In "Bart Of Darkness", the Simpson family purchases a pool, but somehow manage to construct a barn with its materials.
    Homer: All right, everybody into the pool!
    Amish Man: Tis a fine barn, but sure tis no pool, English.
    Homer: D'oh-eth!
• SpongeBob SquarePants
  • In the episode "Dunces and Dragons", SpongeBob and Patrick are knocked back into the middle ages, where everyone adds -eth to the end of their every third word.
  • Before they actually go back in time, SpongeBob and Patrick come across an actor at the Medieval Moments event who plays a guard and directs them to their seats with a bored "Right this way." SpongeBob "corrects" him by claiming that he should be saying "Right-eth this way-eth." The guard is so aggravated (possibly by SpongeBob's mangling of the language in addition to the reminder of how undignified his job is) that he nearly slits his own throat on the spot.
    Guard: Someday, but not today.
  • "Ye Olde Bowling Alley"
  • And then there's Planktonamor. His many hilarious quotes include:
    Planktonamor: Psych-eth!
  • and:
    Planktonamor: Bring it on...eth.
  • And at the end, King Krabs gives us this gem:
    King Krabs: I doth wonder if I shouldst sell these.
  • Which is a pity, because a previous episode (from before The Movie, specifically, a brief gag in "Mid-life Crustacean") was actually pretty good with this.
    SpongeBob: Art thou feeling it now, Mr. Krabs?
  • Another early episode, "Squidward the Unfriendly Ghost", has Squidward talk like this when he is tricking SpongeBob and Patrick into thinking that he is a ghost that is haunting them. The archaisms he uses are actually mostly accurate, though he does slip up a few times.
    Squidward: Squidward's ghost commandeth you to clean out his back room. ^note This is not one of the errors; he is addressing both SpongeBob and Patrick here, so the plural "you" is correct.
• Steven Universe has this at the start of "Nightmare Hospital" where Steven, while giving Rose's sword to Connie, punctuates some of his words with "eth". Connie lampshades this at first, and tries to use the Olde Englishe correctly, but eventually just gives into the -eth as well.
• Teenage Fairytale Dropouts I think Evil Earl has read too much Shakespeare...
• A particularly odd example is the Angry Archer of Transformers: Animated, who talks like this all the time… even though he's in The Future. Mildly justified in that he's somewhere between Robin Hood and Green Arrow in terms of his gimmick, and has occasionally spoken in actual (mangled) Shakespeare quotes. Now, his excuse for doing that is pretty up in the air.
• The Venture Brothers: Hank Venture thinks Oscar Wilde's last name is simply "the ye olde fashioned way" of spelling "wild", which partially ruins an important riddle he and his brother are trying to solve.
• Wat's Pig features this on all of its parchments, such as "We Want Ye" and "Youre Lande."

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Doe not call up Any wordes whyche ye cannot putte downe in readable prose, lest Yogge-Sothoth drye yr inke in the pen, & eate yr face.

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