The Old English Period (ca 450 – 1100)
Pre-Roman Britain
Settlement of humanoids in Britain extends back to at least 500,000 years ago, when Britain and France were still joined by land. Remains of Homo Heidelbergensis and Homo Neandertalensis have been discovered, with Homo Sapiens probably moving into the area around 30,000 years ago. Although probably driven out by the last Ice Age, humans returned to the island around 14,000 or 15,000 years ago. The most celebrated of these post-Ice Age inhabitants is probably Cheddar Man, whose remains were discovered in a cave in southwest Britain in the early twentieth century. The results of an analysis of his DNA was released in early 2018.
These early peoples spread through most of the island. They are the ones who built Stonehenge (started around 3100 B.C.), as well as other henges, and a number of highways like the Ridgeway and the Icknield Way that you can still walk on today. It has been estimated that about 80% of the genes of modern-day Britons come from these first post-Ice Age inhabitants (something to keep in mind through all the invasions we will be discussing).
It was perhaps not until around 600 B.C. that Indo-European tribes moved into the area. These were speakers of Celtic languages from Gaul (modern France), and although they did not wipe out the original inhabitants genetically, they must have been of sufficiently high cultural status that the inhabitants started speaking Celtic instead of their original language (which is now lost to us).
Roman Britain
When Julius Caesar was conquering the Celtic tribes of Gaul in 55 BCE, he also sent a small invasion force to Britain, landing in Kent. He returned the next year, but did not bring Britain into the Roman Empire. Nevertheless, the Celtic kings maintained a connection with the Roman Empire, especially with their Celtic neighbors in Roman Gaul. For example, the King Cunobelinus (Shakespeare’s Cymbeline) called himself rex (“king” in Latin) and issued coinage showing himself in Roman fashion with a laurel wreath crown.
It was not until almost 100 years later that the Emperor Claudius, in 43 CE, sent a much larger invasion force, sending troops into Kent and up the Thames and Severn valleys. (Several recent archaeological discoveries have been made concerning the earliest Roman forts in Wales and in Kent). Once Rome had control of Britain it did what Rome did best – build. Roman engineers built an extensive (and paved) highway system throughout the island.
The Romans also built Hadrian’s Wall (begun in 122), built across the entire island both as a defensive barrier against the Picts and also as a boundary for enforcing trading tariffs and taxation of goods. The tribes who lived north of the wall were named Picti (Latin for “painted”) by the Romans. The old story is that before battle the tribesmen would strip themselves naked and paint themselves blue with a dye made from the plant woad, and wash their hair with lime, making it stand up. This scared the Romans so much that they built the wall across the entire island. Like many great stories, this is probably not true, but that didn’t stop Mel Gibson from painting himself blue in Braveheart to recall a sense of Scottish/Pictish nationalism.
Perhaps one of the most astounding Roman building works in England is in the city of Bath which take advantage of the hot springs in the area. The complex included buildings with hot, cold, and warm baths, public plumbing, and heated rooms (the Roman invention of hypocausts was ingenious, and you can still see signs of it in Bath today).
In the early part of this period, there was still an strong ethnic divide between the Romans and the Celtic tribes, as Tacitus discusses in the Agricola, and there were several rebellions as well, most famously by Boudica, the queen of the Iceni, one of the major tribes of Britain. By the end of Roman Britain, however, many of the inhabitants had been Romanized, many Christianized (though not universally), and it is quite likely that much of the population spoke Latin in addition to their native British (which eventually became Welsh).
During this period, all the land around the Mediterranean Sea was part of the Roman Empire. You can see from this map just how big the empire was, and you can imagine the difficulties in administration – one of the reasons for the partition. For several centuries, various barbarian tribes had been putting pressure on the borders of the empire. (The word “barbarian” literally means people who do not speak Greek but who instead sound like they are just saying “bar-bar-bar-bar” when they talk, in other words, “babblers”). The East Germanic tribes who lived originally in southern Sweden had been moving south and east for a number of reasons (such as overpopulation and flooding in their homelands), and were coming into contact with the eastern part of the Empire. In the meantime, the Huns, a non-Germanic tribe from further east in Russia, had been attacking several of these Germanic tribes, primarily the Goths, who named the Hun leader Attila (Gothic for “little father”). To escape from the Huns, the Goths invaded the Empire, leading to the Battle of Adrianople in 378, in which the Goths decimated the eastern Roman army, killing almost all of them, including the Emperor Valens himself.
Britain is on the outskirts of the empire — on the edge of the world as it was known then. In 410, the Emperor Honorius was asked by Britain for help against certain barbarians, decided he needed to consolidate the empire and that Britain would have to look to itself for defense. Also in 410, the Visigothic Army reached Rome and sacked and burned it. That the city which represented the height of civilization and had stood pre-eminent for over half a millennium had been burned down by a bunch of barbarians was beyond shocking to inhabitants of the empire. This then is the date traditionally assigned to the end of Roman Britain.
The Anglo-Saxons and the establishment of the Heptarchy
According to Anglo-Saxon legend, it was in the year 449 that the first ships of Germanic warriors landed in Britain to begin a slow conquest of the island. The leaders of these troops had been invited by the British aristocracy to help fight their enemies. Without the Roman army, they were unable to defend themselves against hostile tribes like the Picts or the Irish or even other British kingdoms, and so they hired Germanic warriors as mercenaries. When they got to Britain, they evidently liked the land and they did not put much stock in the ability of the British to defend against them. Thus, they betrayed the British leaders, killing them all at a feast, and took over. What followed were several decades of fighting between the British and the Germanic tribes, including some years of peace following the British victories of King Arthur, until eventually the Germanic tribes were victorious and the British were pushed back. Some fled to the hills in the north, what is now Scotland, some fled to the hills in the west, in what is now Wales and Cornwall, and some fled across the channel to the northwestern tip of France, in what is called Lesser Britain or Brittany.
In reality, Germanic troops had been in Britain since Roman times, often serving as mercenaries, but more certainly came during the fifth century, either to fight or to settle and farm. As earlier colonizers did, the Germanic tribes started in the southeast and the eastern coasts of Northumbria. They came from a number of related and similar Germanic tribes: specifically, the Angles (from the area of Germany known today as Schleswig-Holstein, just south of Denmark), the Saxons, from Saxony, the vast regions to the south and east of the Angles, and the Jutes, from modern-day southern Denmark, but others such as Frisians, Franks and Scandinavians also came. There has been much debate in recent decades about the size of the invasions, from the older view of huge numbers of invaders killing off all the British, to a more modern view of a relatively small number of invaders who filled the positions of the social elites, so that much of Celtic culture was undermined and subsumed into Germanic culture.
As the various settlers spread across England, a process that took the rest of the fifth century and most of the sixth, they formed various political groups based around leaders who eventually took pains to show their descent from the earliest invaders. Thus the Saxons, who invaded the southern parts of the country, divided themselves into the kingdoms of the West Saxons (Wessex), the South Saxons (Sussex) and the East Saxons (Essex). The Jutes took over Kent in the southeast. And the Angles made three very large kingdoms: Mercia (whose name means “borderlands”), which is most of central England bordering on Wales; East Anglia (to the east of Mercia, and later divided into two regions, Norfolk (the “North Folk”) and Suffolk (the “South Folk”); and finally, the area north of the Humber, called Northumbria. These seven kingdoms are known as the Heptarchy. There were numerous, smaller “kingdoms,” but generally the kings of these areas were client-kings of the larger areas and served only at the will of the kings of the major kingdoms.
The Heptarchy reminds us that the early English were not in fact “English.” Some were English (that is, the Angles), some were Saxons, some were Jutes, and some were Frisian, or members of any of a number of other Germanic ethnic groups. So the language spoken by these inhabitants that we think of as English was really one of numerous individual dialects of the West Germanic area. The Angles spoke Anglian, the Saxons spoke Saxon, the Jutes spoke Jutish, and the Frisians spoke Frisian. Even this is not quite correct, for the Saxons did not all speak a single language known as Saxon. The West Saxons spoke West Saxon, the East Saxons spoke East Saxon and the South Saxons spoke South Saxon. These divisions between any of these dialects were probably not that strong. Certainly a West Saxon would have no difficulty whatsoever speaking to an East Saxon. A South Saxon probably wouldn’t even have much difficulty speaking to a Northumbrian. But there were differences, in pronunciation, grammar and word usage, and these differences form the basis of the dialectal divisions of Old English (as well as of Modern English).
The Conversion to Christianity
Perhaps some time in the 570s, a very wealthy Roman named Gregory had converted his villa in Rome into a monastery. While abbot of this monastery, he was walking through the Roman forum one day when he saw two very pale-skinned and blond-haired boys for sale in the slave auction. Gregory was astounded at their appearance (hair of that color being fairly rare in Rome) and asked who they were. What follows in the account of this event is a series of puns Gregory made in Latin: he is told that they are Angli (Angles); “that’s great,” he says,” for they look like angels.” He asks where they are from and is told Deira (a part of the kingdom of Northumbria). Again he is pleased, saying that they should be saved de ira, that is, “from the wrath” of God. Finally, hearing that their king is named Ælle, he responds, “Alleluia!” This is the beginning of the mission to convert the English, at least as told in an anonymous Life of Gregory written in Northumbria, and later picked up by the Northumbrian monk Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, published in 731. Gregory later became Pope Gregory the Great, and in 596 he decided to send Augustine, one of the monks from his old monastery, as the leader of an effort to convert the English to Christianity.
In 597 Augustine arrived in Kent where he met with the current king Æthelberht. Æthelberht at that time was the Bretwalda, the name granted to the most powerful of all the kings of the Heptarchy. He was also married to a Frankish princess named Bertha who was already Christian and who had brought her own priest with her to Canterbury. (The Franks are the Germanic tribes who took over Gaul after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire). Æthelberht would only meet with Augustine in the open air since he was worried Augustine might try to perform magic upon him if he was indoors, but he granted Augustine the use of the church that still remained standing from Roman times. Augustine was consecrated as archbishop of Canterbury (which remains the current seat of the Archbishop of England) and built both a cathedral and a monastery.
Augustine’s arrival in Canterbury is one of the most important events in the history of early English because with him and Christianity came the technology of writing. Christianity is one of the so-called “religions of the book,” meaning that it has a set of sacred documents that must be read and followed to guide one’s belief. To be a member of the clergy, one needed to be taught how to read and write, specifically in Latin. The earliest written documents we have from England are Latin texts, probably written at Canterbury, and the earliest writings in Old English are words written in the margins or between the lines of Latin texts to help explain the foreign language. (It is true that the Germanic tribes, including the Saxons and the Angles, had the technology of writing in the runic alphabet, this was only really used for carving on rock or wood.)
The First Wave of Viking Invasions
The next major event to affect the History of English was the invasion of the Vikings. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle:
In 787 King Beorhtric took the daughter of Offa in marriage, and in his days three ships first came, and the reeve rode to them, and wanted to escort them to the king’s town, since he did not know who they were, and he was slain. Those were the first ships of Danish men who came to the land of the Angles.
Six years later, in 793, the Vikings came in force and attacked Lindisfarne, the Holy Island of the Northumbrian Church. They burned the monastery there and killed many of the monks (several escaped though, carrying the coffin with the bones of St Cuthbert and the Lindisfarne Gospels).
For the next century the Vikings (usually called simply the “Danes” in Anglo-Saxon sources, which could refer to someone from any Scandinavian country) ravaged the countryside, concentrating first on monasteries, which were incredibly wealthy and not well defended, and then moving on to cities. At first, they came only in the summer months, going back home to spend the winter months, but in 835 they started wintering in England. One by one the kingdoms of the Heptarchy fell to them, until most of England was ruled by Viking chieftains and warlords.
Alfred the Great
Alfred the Great (the only English ever to be called “the Great”) was born in 849 as the youngest son of Æthelwulf, king of the West Saxons. He became king of Wessex in 871, in the midst of the wars against the Vikings. By this time, the Vikings had taken over all of the other kingdoms of the Heptarchy, with Wessex alone still in the hands of an English king. Finally, in 878, Alfred defeated the Viking army at the Battle of Edington, and signed a peace treaty granting to the Vikings the land north of Watling Street (one of the old Roman roads still in existence). The area north of this boundary was to be governed by the Danes under their own system of laws (and hence called the Danelaw), but their kings were to be officially subordinate to Alfred, who thereby became king of all England, not just Wessex.
The settlement of Danes in a large portion of England had major consequences for the English spoken in this area. They evidently mixed thoroughly with the English, trading with them, converting to Christianity, marrying them. The English spoken here became something of a hybrid, with much Norse influence in pronunciation, grammar and word usage. Many of the everyday words that we use in modern English are in fact Norse in origin, basic words like “sister” or “husband.” or “sky.” The same is true of many of our pronunciations. For instance, we say “egg” in the Norse way rather than the English way, which would be something like “ey.” The word “skirt” is simply a Norse cognate of the word “shirt.” Even some of our most basic grammatical usages are Norse in origin, such as the inflectional morpheme –s on verbs, replacing the English –eth (compare “he runs” with “he runneth”).
The Rise of West Saxon
Since Alfred was the king of Wessex and Wessex was the only English political unit to survive the Viking invasions intact, Alfred became in effect the king of all of England. One effect that this had on English itself is that much of what was written down in English in the tenth century was written in a West Saxon context, and therefore in the West Saxon dialect. West Saxon consequently achieved the status of something like a “standard” literary dialect. This term “standard” should not be pushed too far. It would be wrong to assume that it was promoted in any overtly conscious way or that other dialects were suppressed, but the major monastic schools in the tenth century were associated with the West Saxon elite, both secular and religious. Even in Canterbury, which was in the midst of (Jutish) Kent, much of what was written appears to conform largely with West Saxon dialectal features.
The Norman Conquest
Anglo-Saxon England came to an end as a political unit with the Norman Conquest in 1066. English of course was still spoken after this, but it ceased being an official language of the government or indeed of any of the upper classes. Thus, the various dialects that we have already mentioned, e.g. West Saxon, Jutish (Kentish), Mercian (Anglian), and so on, were allowed to thrive with no “official” written version to act as a guide towards which usage might be more favored in court. It was not for several centuries that English regained its place as an official language of the country and it was several centuries after that before a new dialect asserted itself as a standard.
