[quote=@Legend] Not when we have one account of it. It could be a literary error for all we know. And if that's the only piece of ancient literature that we have that uses "their" as singular, it's safe to assume the rest of them used "his." Old English actually had a neutral term. Middle English had a semi-neutral term, which is connected to the modern term "he." "The third person singular neuter (it, also found in the older form hit) relates to the possessive his (not its!)" http://www.nativlang.com/middle-english/middle-english-grammar.php (As am I, but I'm not willing to spend as much time on it.) [/quote] It's not safe to assume the rest of them used "his" as a gender-neutral singular if there are no references that use "his" as a gender-neutral singular. I'm saying that we have a reference of "their" being used as a gender-neutral singular in Chaucer, but there are no references of "his" used like that, so it's actually much safer to assume that "their" was the common usage, at least with the knowledge that we have at the moment. You might say that we can look into somewhat later English literature to find uses of "he/his" and "they/their" as a gender-neutral singular and weigh which one is used most often, and I'll point to the many examples of "they/their" as the gender-neutral singular by respected writers of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, and the lack of examples of the other. I was considering mentioning that, but I thought you would note that that corresponds to our use of "it". In fact, in Middle and Old English, nouns actually did have genders, so the neuter pronoun "hit" corresponded to nouns considered neuter, not both masculine and feminine. As an aside, I'll cite Susanne Wagner in "Gender in English Pronouns: Myth and Reality" where she states that "there was an extended period of time in the history of the English language when the choice of a supposedly masculine personal pronoun (him) said nothing about the gender of the referent." This could be taken to mean that "him" referred to both males and females, but her next statement clarifies: "It could be masculine, male, neuter, or asexual..." No mention is made of "him" ever referring to females. Therefore, even though you could perhaps say that the neuter "hit" is related to the masculine "him", you could not say in any capacity that either was related to the feminine "sche[o]". Therefore, we're back to the challenge of finding a gender-neutral singular pronoun that referred to both females and males.