Historical background of Old English

English appeared in Britain in the 5th century AD on the basis of the dialects of Germanic tribes – Angles, Saxons and Jutes.

These events in the history of Britain are well described by Bede the Venerable in his “Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum”.

In the middle of the 5th century (as early as 449 AD), as Bede narrates, Britain was conquered by Angles, Saxons and Jutes. Those were Germanic tribes belonging to the Ingvaeone group. According to Bede, in 449 AD the Germanic tribes headed by the chieftains Hengist and Hors landed on the island of Tanet in the Thames estuary. The transmigration of these tribes lasted for 150 years and ended in their occupation of most English territory.The territory of Britain was divided as follows:

– the Saxons and the Angles who came from the European coast of the North Sea occupied the territories south and north off the Thames;

– the Jutes who came from the Juteland Peninsula in Europe settled on the Peninsula of Kent and the Isle of White. The Britons fought against the conquerors till about 600. It is to this epoch that the legendary figure of the British king Arthur belongs. The Celtic tribes were eventually done to the world (wide) and retreated to the north and to the west – to Cornwall and Wales.

By the end of the 7th century the invaders had conquered the territory which was later named the Kingdom of Anglia (under King Egbert of Wessex, who united England in one feudal state in the 9th century). Moving northward they reached Fort-of-Firth and in the West they got as far as Cornwell, Wales and Cumbria.

Angles, Saxons and Jutes spoke similar West Germanic dialects. The similarity of the dialects helped them to understand each other very easily. Close contacts of the tribes and their isolation from other Germanic tribes living on the Continent resulted in the penetration of the dialects into each other and, finally, the formation of a new language community – the English language.

The Germanic tribes who settled in Britain in the 5th century originally had no state unity and permanently waged wars. In the 6th century there were nine small kingdoms in Britain: Deira, Bernicia (Angles), East Anglia (Angles), Mercia (Angles in the north, Saxons in the south), Essex, Middlesex, Sussex, Wessex (Saxons), and Kent (inhabited by Jutes).

Later Deira and Bernicia were united and named Northumbria. There was no concord among the kings, and no peace among the kingdoms. Each ruler desired to gain the supreme power and subordinate the others.

At the end of the 6th century there were 7 kingdoms: Northumbria, East Anglia, Wessex, Essex, Sussex, Kent and Mercia. Later they united into the 4 kingdoms: Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex and Kent.

Northumbria which appeared as a result of the forcible unification of Deira and Bernicia in the 7th century gained the dominating position. Edwin, the King of Northumbria, enlarged the borders of his kingdom and built the citadel Edinburgh. In the 8th century Mercia became the most powerful kingdom. The zenith of her power is associated with the name of King Offa.

At the beginning of the 9th century the dominating position passed over to Wessex. This kingdom dominated and united nearly all the territory of Britain, its capital Winchester becoming the capital of Britain. The Wessex king Alfred the Great (849-901), the enlightened monarch, played an important role in the strengthening of the Wessex position, as he increased the fleet, strengthened the army, built new fortresses and forts, set up the England’s first school for feudal lords, invited scholars and writers to England and himself translated from Latin.

In the 9th AD Egbert, the King of Wessex, defeated Mercia’s troops and became the first king of all all England (the Kingdom of Anglia). The country was divided into the administrative units, the counties, headed by King’s officers – sheriffs. Several counties were united under the power of earls, who became major feudal lords.

English history and the development of the English language were greatly influenced by Scandinavian invasions. The first incursion of the Vikings in England took place in the 8th century. By the end of the 9th century the Scandinavians had occupied a considerable part of the country to the North of the Thames.

The king of Wessex Alfred the Great(849-99) is renowned for his defence of England against the Danes and for his encouragement of learning. The Danish invasion of Wessex in 871 ended in inconclusive peace, and in 876 the Danes struck again. Based at Athelney, Alfred harassed the enemy until winning, in 878, the great victory at Edington. It is to this period that the probably apocryphal story (told in the 12th century Chronicle of St. Neot’s) of Alfred burning the cakes relates. The subsequent peace with the Danish leader Guthrum gave the Danes control over much of eastern England (Danelag), but by 890 Alfred’s authority was acknowledged over all the remainder of England.

In the years that followed Edington, Alfred reorganized the fyrd, strengthened the system of burhs (fortresses), and developed a fleet, which enabled him to repel further Danish invasions in the 890s.

Alfred is largely responsible for the restoration of learning in England after the decay in scholarship, which the Norse raids had accelerated.

By the end of the 10th century, however, the contradictions between the Scandinavians and the English crown had become aggravated, and a new war resulted in the Scandinavians’ conquest of the whole country. Thus in 1013 England became a part of the large Scandinavian state. The English King Æthelred II (968-1016), a weak and cruel man, who got the name of Æthelred the Unready (deriving from the Old English Redeless, devoid of counsel), bought the Danes off with money several times and finally fled to France (Normandy) and the Danish King Cnut (Kanute) became the official ruler of England. But the situation did not last long, the Danish power failed in 1042.

The Scandinavian dialects spoken by the invaders were well understood by the people of England. And as early as in Old English one can observe the impact of the Scandinavian dialects. It goes without saying that that impact was especially strong in the North where the main Scandinavian settlements were situated.

In 1042, when the power of the Anglo-Saxon nobility was restored, Æthelred’s son Edward the Confessor (called so because he grew in a monastery and cared more for quiet, learned life) was summoned from Normandy and became the new King of England. Edward the Confessor remained the ruler of the country for about a quarter of a century – until his death in 1066. The year of Edward’s death was to appear a turning point in the English history. 1066 has entered the annals as the year of the Norman Conquest, which for the history of the English language was the event marking the transition to a new period – Middle English.

It is said that Edward promised his cousin, William of Normandy, who visited him in 1051, that the latter would be King of England. Normans were descendants of vikings, to be more exact, of Danes, who had settled in the 9th century (after King Alfred victory over them in 896) on the territory of France (the lower Seine) later called Normandy. They had sworn allegiance to the French king Karl, adopted Christianity, took on the French language and Romanic customs.

In 1066, with the backing of the papacy, William claimed his right and landed an invasion force at Pevensey, Sussex. He defeated and killed his rival, King Harold, at Hastings in October 1066 and then formally accepted the kingdom at Berkhamsted before being crowned in Westminster Abbey at Christmas Day.

The Norman conquest was not, however, complete. William faced a number of English revolts during the years 1067 to 1071, which he effectively, if ruthlessly, crushed. Furthermore, the subjection of the new kingdom involved the introduction of Norman personnel and social organization (feudalism), as well as administrative and legal practices. The effect of the conquest on English culture was considerable. William’s reign witnessed reforms in the church under his trusted adviser Lanfranc, who became archbishop of Canterbury in 1070, and, most notably, the compilation of the Domesday Book (1086) – the book containing lists of population of Britain.

1066 shook Britain. After the Norman Conquest English was no longer the state language of England. At court, in the universities, in all the official spheres English was superseded by French, the language of the conquerors. English remained the language of the peasantry and the urban poor. English was changing under the influence of French soaking up French words and morphemes. Of course it took time for the new elements to get absorbed in the English language.

 

OLD ENGLISH DIALECTS

 

Kingdom	Kent	Wessex	Mercia	Northumbria
Dialect	Kentish	West Saxon	Mercian	Northumbrian
Spoken	in Kent, Surrey, the Isle of Wight	along the Thames and the Bristol Channel	between the Thames and the Humber	between the Humber and the Forth
Origin	from the tongues of Jutes/ Frisians	a Saxon dialect	a dialect of north Angles	a dialect of south Angles
Remarks		9th century – Wessex was the centre of the English culture and politics. West Saxon – the bookish type of language		8th century – Northumbria was the centre of the English culture

 

As it is seen from the table above the main dialects of the Old English language were: Wessex, Northumbrian, Mercian and Kentish. These four dialects consisted of smaller dialectal variants of the Old English language.

The Old English dialects were basically tribal, i.e. they had the features and peculiarities which the Germanic tribes brought to Britain in the 5th century. Yet it is problematic whether the Old English dialects may be regarded as a historic continuation of the dialectal differentiation of the Old Germanic (West Germanic) tribes that moved to Britain from the Continent in the 5-6th centuries or whether these dialects developed and differentiated in England.

The territorial distribution of the dialects was as follows. The Northumbrian dialect was spoken by the tribes that had settled to the North of the Hember river. The Mercian dialect was used by the tribes living between the Hember and Thames. The Wessex dialect was spread in the South-West of Britain, in the Kingdom of Wessex. The Kentish dialect was spoken in the South-East of the country.

The Northumbrian and Mercian dialects had many features in common and are sometimes collectively referred to as the Angle dialect.

The most important surviving documents in the Old English language were written in the Wessex dialect, that is why it is the main source of our knowledge of Old English. But it would be a mistake to think that the modern English language has developed from the Wessex dialect. J.L. Brook proves that the basic form for contemporary English was a species of the Mercian dialect, though individual words were taken from other dialects as well.

The modern verb to hear, for example, originates from the Mercian form heran.

Mercian (or Northumbrian) forms developed into the modern adjectives old and cold; in the Mercian dialect they were ald and cald, while in the Wessex dialect they had the forms eald and ceald and according to well-known phonetic laws they should have developed into something like eald [i:ld] and cheald.

Actually there were not many language features that would be characteristic only for one of the Old English dialects and would not be found in others. The reason is that various forms could easily pass from one dialect to another. The difference between the dialects was mainly of quantitative character, i.e. it generally depended on the frequency of this or that group of forms.

The Wessex dialect is represented by multiple and various literary documents. Many of them are very important as a source of information about the Old English language.

On the basis of the Wessex dialect there developed koine, the transdialectal literary language of the Old English period. The development of the koine on the basis of the Wessex dialect was possible due to the political and cultural progress which the Kingdom of Wessex achieved in the 10th century.

The Northumbrian dialect is not represented in the literary documents so abundantly as the Wessex dialect. As important sources for the study of the Northumbrian dialect the inscriptions of the 8th-9th centuries and the interlinear glosses in the Lindisfarn Gospel, the Durham Prayer-Book and the Rushwoth Bible may be regarded. Judging by the errors in the glosses, their authors were not acquainted with the Old English grammar very well and, which is quite remarkable, in some cases they anticipated the norms of the later – Middle English – language.

The role of the Mercian dialect was rather important as many forms of it became the basis for the development of the forms of the English literary language. There is an opinion that the Mercian dialect should be considered as the ground of the modern English language.

The number of Old English documents written in the Kentish dialect is not large. The oldest of them are legal documents. Some features of the language of those documents allow to presume that their authors might have spoken other dialects.