The main points for discussion in this area of the vowel phonology are: (1) to establish the phonetic nature of the high front palatal vowel space itself; (2) to ascertain the extent to which the English Vowel Shift has affected those words showing stressed vowels originating in Middle English [ee]; in particular, to assess whether there has been a true MEAT/MEET merger; and (3) to determine whether there exists some kind of tense/lax [i]/[i] contrast of the type found in modern Standard English between items such as beat, beet on the one hand, and bit, hit on the other. In particular, under (1) and (2) we shall try to assess whether we are dealing in beet/beat words with a non-merged, phonetic contrast something like [i]/[e], while we shall examine evidence which suggests that, for this period at least, there was no lax, centralized [i] vowel in the phonology for hit, bit words; rather the vowel space in such items was seen as ‘close’ to that in beet/beat, and may have been something like [i], as Wyld observes (1953: 207): ‘the long forms with [ī] were far commoner during the first four centuries of the Modern period than at present. ‘Peety’ [pīti] for pity was occasionally heard until quite recently, and ‘leetle’ [lītl] is still used facetiously in the sense of ‘very little’, while on the other hand, Ekwall (1975: 36 footnote) is uncompromising in claiming that ‘ĭ must have been open [i] in Middle English and throughout the Modern English period’, so too Horn and Lehnert (1954: 128) and MacMahon (2001:138). The problem is that there is little by way of incontrovertible evidence to suggest that some lowered/centralized and lax [i] segment existed in bit/hit words in this period, a problem arising, perhaps as much as anything else, from the inability of observers to ‘hear’ what might have been a very fine phonetic distinction at this time between such vowel segments, as well as from the difficulties commentators faced in finding a suitable description for such a segment.