Unveiling Anglo-Saxon History, Language, and Culture
The Anglo-Saxon period, spanning from approximately 450 AD to 1066, represents a formative era in the history of England and the English language. This era witnessed the migration and settlement of Germanic tribes in Britain, the development of a distinct Anglo-Saxon culture, and the evolution of Old English, the ancestor of the modern English language.
The Arrival of the Anglo-Saxons
At the time of the earliest written records, the British islands were inhabited by Celtic people known as the Britons. The Roman Empire made initial contacts with the Celtic people in Britain around 55 B.C., the Roman invasion of Britain began around A.D. 43. The Celtic people resisted but were unable to fend off the invading Roman troops. One of the principal figures fighting the Romans was the Celtic queen Boudicca. Unlike their Roman counterparts, Celtic societies allotted women rights often equal to those of men. When her husband, an ally of the Romans, died, the Romans took over the land of her tribe, the Iceni, flogging Boudicca and raping her daughters.
Long familiar with Britain as a source of tin, the Romans conquered Britain around A.D. 44 and set up fortresses, light houses on the coast, and a defensive wall across the entire Northern border of England named Hadrian’s Wall for the Roman emperor Hadrian. As they did in many parts of the world, the Romans built villas with beautiful mosaics, a series of roads which were used for centuries, and great Roman baths, such as those at Aquae Sulis, now known as Bath, England.
How did the Roman invasion affect the development of the English language? At the fall of the Roman Empire (ca. 420), the Roman troops were called back to the continent, and Britain was left undefended. This period of time produced the figure that was transformed in legend into King Arthur. The man who formed the basis of the Arthurian legend was probably a descendent of Celtic and Roman people who led his followers in resisting the Anglo-Saxons. The Anglo-Saxons were Germanic tribes who began raiding the coastal areas of Britain around 450. For over 100 years, the Anglo-Saxons continued to raid and gradually to settle in Britain, pushing the Celtic people into the remote parts of Britain-into what are today the countries of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. With them, they took their Celtic language which formed the basis of the Gaelic languages of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.
These tribes, primarily the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, migrated from the coastal regions of the North Sea, specifically modern-day Denmark and northwestern Germany. As they settled in Britain, they pushed the native Celtic population westward, into what is now Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.
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Anglo-Saxon Culture: A Heroic Ideal
The culture of the Anglo-Saxons is much in evidence in Old English literature, especially in the concept of the Germanic heroic ideal. The primary attribute of the heroic ideal was excellence-excellence in all that was important to the tribe: hunting, sea-faring, fighting. The leader of each tribal unit, often family units especially in earlier years, gained his position because of his physical strength and capabilities in the activities necessary for survival. Each man of the tribe, called a thane or retainer, an Anglo-Saxon warrior loyal to a specific leader, swore his allegiance, and in return his leader rewarded him with the spoils of their battles and raids. A group of Anglo-Saxon warriors bound by the reciprocal king-retainer relationship was known as a comitatus. These Anglo-Saxon tribes led violent lives governed as they believed by wyrd, the Anglo-Saxon word for fate, the power that controls one’s destiny, and bound by loyalty to their comitatus, including the obligation of exacting revenge for their comrades.
By the year 700, various tribes settled in different parts of Britain, each with its own dialect. Although mostly illiterate, the Anglo-Saxons had a rich tradition of oral literature. Gathered in the mead hall with its long tables around a central hearth, the Anglo-Saxons listened to tales of battle glory sung or chanted to the strums of a harp. The scop, the tribal poet/singer, entertained and commemorated significant events by composing and performing tales such as Beowulf. Although many scholars have varying ideas about how these performances might have sounded, little is known of secular music during this time period, and there is of course no evidence to suggest whether the songs were more like chants with strums of the harp perhaps in the caesura or whether they were lively, rambunctious, melodic performances.
The Anglo-Saxon invasion established the English language and the earliest English literature. Although certainly not a military invasion like the others in the list, the arrival of Christianity in Britain was as influential on the language and the culture, and therefore on the literature. Christianity was not unknown in Britain when St. Augustine arrived in 597 but had appeared during the time of the Romans. However, Christianity was suppressed along with the Celtic tribes during the Anglo-Saxon invasions. In 597, St. Augustine arrived on a mission to Christianize the pagan Anglo-Saxons, and the literature of the time bears witness to his influence. During the same time period, Celtic Christianity continued to spread from the northern and western reaches. The Anglo-Saxons were mostly illiterate; therefore, their oral stories were not written until the Christian monks recorded them. Many twentieth-century scholars believed that Beowulf, for example, was originally a pagan story and that references to Christianity are interpolations made by the recording monks in their reluctance to perpetuate strictly pagan literature or as a way of converting still-pagan Anglo-Saxons. The Christian Invasion: St. Burial site of St. The establishment of monasteries in Britain also led to the production of beautifully illuminated manuscripts, such as the Lindisfarne Gospels.
The Viking Invasions
Between 750 and 1050, another group of war-like, pagan tribes raided Britain and gradually established settlements, primarily in the north and east of England. The Vikings were from the area now known as Scandinavia. While they shared cultural similarities with the Anglo-Saxons, they brought their own language, another impact on the developing English language. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (translated by E. E. C. “Here terrible portents came about over the land of Northumbria, and miserably frightened the people: these were immense flashes of lightening, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the air. These fishing huts on the Holy Isle of Lindisfarne are built in the shape of overturned Viking boats, still suggesting the Viking heritage of this area as a result of the Viking raiding parties and the eventual coming of Viking settlers. The English language also retains evidence of the Viking influence.
The Norman Conquest and its Linguistic Impact
The year 1066 is possibly the most important date in the history of Britain and in the development of the English language. When William the Conqueror defeated the English King Harold at the Battle of Hastings, he brought to England a new language and a new culture. Old French became the language of the court, of the government, the church, and all the aristocratic entities. Old English, the language of the Anglo-Saxons, existed only among the conquered lower orders of society.
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From Old English to Middle English
The language we know as Old English was never a static thing. Like all living languages, it changed from one generation to the next. Hwæt. As you can probably see, Old English is essentially a “foreign language” even for a native English speaker. The process that bridges Old English to Modern English took place over centuries. The political and linguistic situation changed dramatically when another group of people came to England in the year 1066: the Normans.
The arrival of the Normans, who spoke an early form of French, marks the end of the Old English period. It wasn’t as if everyone radically changed their way of speaking in 1066. Gradual change went on as before, but English fell out of the historical record, as the Normans preferred to use their own scribes brought over from France, who spoke French, and wrote in either French or Latin. Although ordinary people kept speaking English, the upper classes were native French speakers for many generations. As a result, there were very few works written in English from the 12th until the 14th century, by which point the upper classes had largely assimilated to English culture.
By the time English started being widely written again in the 14th century, it now looked very different, as if all the changes of the intervening centuries showed up at once. We call this stage of the language Middle English. Since so much official business had been done in French, especially from the 11th to 14th centuries, many words from French found their way into English during this period as well. This is the period in which Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales. Looking at an excerpt from The Canterbury Tales allows us to see the degree to which French had begun to influence English:
Whan that Aprill, with his shoures sooteThe droghte of March hath perced to the rooteAnd bathed every veyne in swich licour,Of which vertu engendred is the flour;(General Prologue to The Canterbury Tales, 1-4)
Of the 30 words in this excerpt, the 8 words marked in boldface derive from French. That’s almost a quarter of the passage.
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The Middle English period conventionally lasted from 1066 until the mid-16th century. What changed in the 16th century? The development of the printing press and the widespread publication of English versions of the Bible, which started to stabilize the written language.
Old English vs. Middle English vs. Early Modern English
If you’re wondering which of these terms corresponds to medieval English, you could say that both Old English and Middle English were medieval forms of the English language. If you assume the Middle Ages lasted from around AD 500 to 1500, Old English fits into the first half of that time period and Middle English fits into the second half.
If we keep that conventional division between ancient and medieval history in the year AD 500, only the very earliest forms of English could be called “ancient”. Since we don’t have almost any Old English writing until AD 650, information about this early “ancient” period in the history of English is very hazy, but very interesting to historical linguists.
By the 16th century, however, the language spoken in England had begun to look a lot like our own: for this reason, this period in the history of English is called Early Modern English. This is the language of Shakespeare:
Shall I compare thee to a Summers day?Thou art more louely and more temperate:Rough windes do shake the darling buds of Maie,And Sommers lease hath all too short a date:(Sonnet 18)
It is a popular misconception that Old English is the language Shakespeare wrote in. Although Shakespeare’s English is old - he wrote 400 years ago - Old English is much older than Shakespeare’s English. Shakespeare’s language has a great deal more in common with our own English than with the English of Beowulf.
Understanding Old English: A Glimpse into the Past
For a speaker of Modern English, Old English is a fascinating mixture of the strange and the familiar. Many words in Old English look identical, or at least very close, to their modern equivalents: land means ‘land’, folc means ‘folk’, wel means ‘well’. But other words, like wæstm (meaning ‘fruit’) or þearf (meaning ‘need’) give us no clues, not to mention the fact that they’re written with unfamiliar letters. And when it comes to grammar, Old English looks stranger still to the speaker of Modern English. The biggest difference between Old English and Modern English is that Old English is an inflected language.
Unlike Modern English, which tends not to change the forms of words in order to fit them into a sentence, Old English words often look quite different depending on the sentence they appear in.
For example, the word “king” doesn’t change its form or spelling depending on its grammatical use:
The king is here. (king = subject)I gave the king the sword. (king = indirect object)
But, in the equivalent Old English sentences, the word cyning (‘king’) does not look the same - it changes its form based on the grammatical role it plays:
Sē cyning is hēr. (cyning = subject; this is called the ‘nominative’ case)Iċ ġeaf þæt sweord þām cyninge. (cyninge = indirect object; this is called the ‘dative’ case)
Does this sound complicated? Guess what - you already use (a very small number of) cases in modern English!
Look at this sentence:
The king’s sword is sharp.Here’s the Old English equivalent, which uses the ‘genitive’ case:
Þæs cyninges sweord is sċearp.
Do you notice something similar between king’s and cyninges?
You may have never thought about it before, but in order to denote possession, you regularly transform English words into the “genitive case” by adding an ‘s to the end. Although the Modern English possessive ’s doesn’t work exactly like the Old English -es ending, it is nevertheless the descendant of the Old English ending genitive -es.
An aside, if you’re curious: the difference between Old English -es and Modern English ’s is that ’s is what’s called a clitic. It goes on the end of the whole phrase, not the word that refers to the possessor: the Mayor of London’s hand is the hand of the mayor, not of the city.
Anglo-Saxon or Old English: What's in a Name?
Another word for Old English is Anglo-Saxon. In fact, Anglo-Saxon is the term you’ll see most often in sources from before the middle of the 20th century. Why two different terms for the same language?
Using either one is fine, though we often default to “Old English” because it highlights the continuity of the English language, and reminds us that Old English is the ancestor of Modern English, no matter how many French-isms have been absorbed into our language. There is potential for confusion, however, in using the term “Old English”: since, for example, Shakespeare’s English is still “old” to us. As a result, many people… While Anglo-Saxon is an ancestor of modern English, it is also a distinct language. It stands in much the same relationship to modern English as Latin does to the Romance languages.
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