Old english story

OLD ENGLISH
HISTORY



CONTENTS

Pag.
Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3
The beginning . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4
The Celts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . 6
The Roman raids in Britain: Julius Caesar and Claudius . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8
The invasions of Britain by Germanic tribes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10
Anglo-Saxon rule in Britain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11
The Advent of Christianity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
Old English Dialects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12
The Scandinavians in Britain: The Vikings and the Danes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
The Vikings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13
The Danes . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14
Bibliography . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

INTRODUCTION

We distinguish three stages in the history of the English language:

Apart from this, we can also distinguish three main periods inside the “OldEnglish period”:

Finally, we are going to see in depth the Old English History, which means that we are going to focus on the main facts as settlements, raids and other features with an important relevance before and in the Old English period.

THE BEGINNING

Old English is an early form of the English language that was spoken in parts of what is now England and southern Scotland between thefifth century and the twelfth century.
At the beginning, all languages, which come from Proto-Indo-European, spread themselves across Europe, as we can note in the following map.



After that, some of them split themselves into other languages, as we will see later in the “Proto-Indo-European languages tree”. For that reason, we can speak about that Old English is a West Germanic language.Moreover, it is closely related to Old Frisian and Old Saxon. It also experienced heavy influence from Old Norse, a member of the related North Germanic group of languages.
In the following tree of languages, we are going to appreciate better what the origin of Old English was:


Seeing this tree, we understand that Old English comes from:

Proto-Indo-European → Germanic → West Germanic →Anglo-Frisian → Old English

English has been the language of England for a comparatively short period in the world’s history. It was introduced in the island around the middle of the fifth century, which means, it is 1500 years-old.
During many years, there has had the presence of a lot of cultures in the island, for example, Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons... (as we will define later). These hadtheir own languages, which have influenced or had an important relevance till to reach the current English language.
The information we have of the earliest inhabitants of England has its provenance in the archaeological researches.
The classification of these inhabitants is consequently based upon the types of material culture that characterized them in their successive stages.
We can considerseveral ages to classify these inhabitants:

At the beginning, human societies used stone for the fabrication of devices and weapons. Later, they started to discover the use of the metals instead of stone. For that reason, they were gradually giving way to the incorporation of metals like bronze, iron…

THE CELTS

One of the earliest westward migrations was made by people whose descendants...