Old English (OE). Historical background.

Lecture plan:
1. Pre-Germanic Britain.
2. Germanic settlement of Britain. Beginning of English.
3. Events of external history between the 5th and 11th c.
4. OE dialects. Linguistic situation.
Lecture text:
1. Pre-Germanic Britain. The history of the EL begins with the invasion of the
British Isles by Germanic tribes in the 5 th c. of our era. According to archeological
research, prior to the Germanic invasion the British Isles must have been inhabited
for at least fifty thousand years. The earliest inhabitants whose linguistic affiliation
has been established are the Celts. The Celts of the British Isles are known as
Britons.
Economically and socially the Celts were a tribal society made up of kins,
kinship groups, clans and tribes; they practiced a primitive agriculture, and carried
on trade with Celtic Gaul.
The first millennium B.C. was the period of Celtic migrations and expansion.
Traces of their civilization are still found all over Europe. Celtic languages were
spoken over extensive parts of Europe before our era; later they were absorbed by
other IE languages and left very few vestiges behind. The Gaelic branch has
survived as Irish (or Erse) in Ireland, has expanded to Scotland as Scotch-Gaelic of
the Highlands and is still spoken by a few hundred people on the Isle of Man (the
Manx language). The Britonnic branch is represented by Kymric or Welsh in
modern Wales and by Breton or Armorican spoken by over a million people in
modern France.
In A.D. 43 Britain, Britannia that time, was invaded by Roman legions under
Emperor Claudius, and towards the end of the century was made a province of the
Roman Empire. Even before the invasion the British Isles had long been known to
the Romans as a source of valuable tin ore, pearls and corn.
 On the whole, the Romanisation of Britain was more superficial than that of
continental provinces Gaul and Iberia, where the complete linguistic conquest
resulted in the growth of new Romance languages, French and Spanish.
The Roman occupation of Britain lasted nearly 400 years; it came to an end in
the early 5th c. In A.D. 410, the Roman troops were officially withdrawn to Rome
by Constantine.
Since the Romans had left the British Isles some time before the invasion of
the West Germanic tribes, there could never be any direct contacts between the
new arrivals and the Romans on the British soil. It follows that elements of Roman
culture and language which the new invaders learnt in Britain were mainly passed
on to them at second hand by Romanised Celts.
2. Germanic settlement of Britain. Beginning of English. The 5th century was
the age of increased Germanic expansion. About the middle of the century several
West Germanic Tribes overran Britain and had colonized the island by the end of
the century.
The invaders of Britain came from the western subdivision of the Germanic
tribes. To quote Bede (673-735), a monastic scholar who wrote the first history of
England, the newcomers were of the three strongest Germanic races: the Saxons,
the Angles and the Jutes. They were called Angles and Saxons by the Romans and
by the Celts but preferred to call themselves Angelcyn (English people) and applied
this name to the conquered territories: Angelcynnes land (‘land of the English’,
hence England).
The first wave of the invaders, the Jutes or the Frisians, occupied the extreme
south-east: Kent and the Isle of Wight.
The second wave of the immigrants was largely made up of the Saxons. They
set up their settlements along the south coast and on both banks of the Thames and,
depending on location, were called South Saxons, West Saxons and East Saxons.
The Saxons consolidated into a number of petty kingdoms, the largest and the most
powerful of them being Wessex, the kingdom of West Saxons.
 Last came the Angles. They made their landing on the east coast and moved
up the rivers to the central part of the island. They founded the large kingdoms:
East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria.
Gradually the Germanic conquerors and the surviving Celts blended into a
single people. The invaders certainly prevailed over the natives so far as language
was concerned; the linguistic conquest was complete. After the settlement West
Germanic tongues came to be spoken all over Britain with the exception of a few
distant regions where Celts were in the majority: Scotland, Wales and Cornwall.
The migration of the Germanic tribes to the British Isles and the resulting
separation from the Germanic tribes on the mainland was a decisive event in the
linguistic history. Geographical separation, as well as mixture and unification of
people, are major factors in linguistic differentiation and in the formation of
languages. Being cut off from related Old Germanic tongues the closely related
group of West Germanic dialects developed into a separate Germanic language,
English. That is why the Germanic settlement of Britain can be regarded as the
beginning of the independent history of the English language.
3. Events of external history between the 5 th and 11th c. The history of Anglo-
Saxon Britain from the 5th to the 11th c. has been reconstructed from multiple
sources: Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon historical
chronicles and legal documents. Some events of external history have a direct
bearing on the development of the language. They are: the economic and social
structure of society, the introduction of Christianity and the relations between the
kingdoms.
The period from the 5th till the 11th c. was a transitional period from the tribal
and slave-owning system to feudalism. The basic economic unit was the feudal
manor; it was a self-contained economic unit, as it grew its own food and carried
on some small industries to cover its needs. Consequently, there was little social
intercourse between the population of the neighboring areas. The growth of
feudalism was accompanied by the rise of regional dialectal division replacing the
tribal division of the Germanic settlers. These forces, however, worked together
with a unifying force: the complete separation from related continental tribes and
tongue, which united the people into one corporate whole and transferred their
closely related dialects into a single tongue different from its continental relations.
Four of the kingdoms at various times secured superiority in the country:
Kent, Northumbria and Mercia – during the Early ME, pre-written period, and
Wessex – all through the period of Written English. Wessex had come to the
superior position in the early 9 th century and acquired the leadership till the end of
the OE period.
In the 8th c. raiders from Scandinavia (the “Danes”) made their first attacks on
England. Step by step the Scandinavians subdued Northumbria and East Anglia,
ravaged the Eastern part of Mercia, and advanced on Wessex. The Scandinavians
came in large numbers to settle on the new territories. The ultimate effect of the
Scandinavian invasions on the EL became manifest at a later date, in the 12 th-13th
c., when the Scandinavian element was incorporated in the central English dialects;
but the historical events that led to the linguistic influence date from the 9 th and 10th
c.
A most important role in the history of the EL was played by the introduction
of Christianity. The first attempt to introduce the Roman Christian religion to
Anglo-Saxon Britain was made in the 6th c. during the supremacy of Kent. In 597 a
group of missionaries from Rome landed on the shore of Kent and made
Canterbury their centre and from there a new faith expanded to Kent, East Anglia,
and other places. The movement was supported from the North; missionaries from
Ireland brought the Celtic variety of Christianity to Northumbria. The Celts had
been converted to Christianity during the Roman occupation of Britain. In less than
a century practically all England was Christianized. The strict unified organization
of the church proved a major factor in the centralization of the country.
The introduction of Christianity facilitated the growth of culture and learning.
Monasteries were founded all over the country, with monastic schools attached.
Religious services and teaching were conducted in Latin. A high standard of
learning was reached in the best English monasteries, especially in Northumbria,
as early as the 8th and the 9th c.
4. OE dialects. Linguistic situation. The following four principal OE dialects are
commonly distinguished:
1) Kentish, a dialect spoken in the area known now as Kent and in the Isle of
Wight. It has developed from the tongue of Jutes and Frisians.
2) West Saxon, the main dialect of the Saxon group, spoken in the rest of
England south of the Thames and the Bristol Channel, except Wales and Cornwall,
where Celtic tongues were preserved. Other Saxon dialects have not survived in
written form and are not known to modern scholars.
3) Mercian, a dialect derived from the speech of the southern Angles and
spoken chiefly in the kingdom of Mercia, that is, the central region, from the
Thames to the Humber.
4) Northumbrian, another Anglian dialect, spoken from the Humber north to
the river Forth.
The distinction between Mercian and Northumbrian as local OE dialects
testifies to the new foundations of the dialectal division: regional instead of tribal,
since according to the tribal division they represent one dialect, Anglian.
In Early OE from the 5th to the 7th century the would-be English language
consisted of a group of spoken tribal dialects having neither a written nor a
dominant form. At the time of written OE the dialects had changed from tribal to
regional; they possessed both an oral and a written form and were no longer equal;
in the domain of writing the West Saxon dialect prevailed over its neighbors.
Alongside OE dialects a foreign language, Latin, was widely used in writing.