The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written in Latin by the Venerable Bede, a monk at Jarrow in Northumbria. Although it is thought to be broadly accurate, Bede's history was
written almost 300 years after the events it describes – which is rather like us
writing a history of Elizabethan England based on hearsay.
Despite their long existence on the island – the Romans for 367 years, the Celts
for at least 1,000 – they left precious little behind. Many English place names are
Celtic in origin (Avon and Thames, for instance) or Roman (the -chester in
Manchester and the -caster in Lancaster both come from the Roman word for
camp), but in terms of everyday vocabulary it is almost as if they had never
been. In Spain and Gaul the Roman occupation resulted in entirely new
languages, Spanish and French, but in Britain they left barely five words
[according to Baugh and Cable, page 80], while the Celts left no more than
twenty—mostly geographical terms to describe the more hilly and varied British
landscape.
This singular lack of linguistic influence is all the more surprising when you
consider that the Anglo-Saxons had freely, and indeed gratefully, borrowed
vocabulary from the Romans on the continent before coming to the British Isles,
taking such words as street, No one, of course, can say at what point English
became a separate language, distinct from the Germanic dialects of mainland
Europe. What is certain is that the language the invaders brought with them soon
began to change. Like the Indo-European from which it sprang, it was a
wondrously complex tongue. Nouns had three genders and could be inflected for
up to five cases. As with modern European languages, gender was often
arbitrary. Wheat, for example, was masculine, while oats was feminine and corn
neuter [cited by Potter, page 25], just as in modern German police is feminine
while girl is neuter. Modern English, by contrast, has essentially abandoned
cases except with personal pronouns where we make distinctions between
I/me/mine, he/him/his, and so on.
Old English had seven classes of strong verbs and three of weak, and their
endings altered in relation to number, tense, mood, and person (though, oddly,
there was no specific future tense). Adjectives and pronouns were also variouslyinflected. A single adjective like green or big could have up to eleven forms.
Even something as basic as the definite article the could be masculine, feminine,
or neuter, and had five case forms as a singular and four as a plural.
It is a wonder that anyone ever learned to speak it.
And yet for all its grammatical complexity Old English is not quite as remote
from modern English as it sometimes appears.
Scip, boed, bricg, and poet might look wholly foreign but their pronunciations—
respectively "ship, "bath, "bridge," and " that" have not altered in a thousand
years. Indeed, if you take twenty minutes to familiarize yourself with the
differences in Old English spelling and pronunciation—learning that i
corresponds to the modern "ee" sound, that e sounds like "ay" and so on—you
can begin to pick your way through a great deal of abstruse looking text. You
also find that in terms of sound values, Old English is a much simpler and more
reliable language, with every letter distinctly and invariably related to a single
sound. There were none of the silent letters or phonetic inconsistencies that
bedevil modern English spelling.
There was, in short, a great deal of subtlety and flexibility built into the
language, and once they learned to write, their literary outpouring was both
immediate and astonishingly assured. This cultural flowering found its sharpest
focus in the far northern kingdom of Northumbra. here, on the outermost edge of
the civilized world, sprang forth England's great poet, the monastic Caedmon; its
first great historian, the Venerable Bede; and its first great scholar, Alcuin of
York, who became head of Charlemagne's palace school at Aachen and was on
of the progenitors of the Renaissance. "The light of learning then shone more
brightly in Northumbria than anywhere else in Europe," Simeon Potter noted
without hyperbole in his masterly study, Our Language. Had it not been for
Alcuin much of our ancient history would almost certainly have been lost.
"People don't always realise," wrote Kenneth Clark [in Civilisation, page 18],
"that only three or four antique manuscripts of the Latin authors are still in
existence: our whole knowledge of ancient literature is due to the collecting and
copying that began under Charlemagne."
Barely had this cultural revival gotten underway than England and her infant
language were under attack again – this time by Viking raiders from Scandinaviaand Denmark. These were people who were related to the Anglo-Saxons by both
blood and language.
In fact, they were so closely related that they could probably broadly understand
each other's languages, though this must have been small comfort to the monks,
farmers, and ravaged women who suffered their pillaging. These attacks on
Britain were part of a huge, uncoordinated, and mysterious expansion by the
Vikings (or Norsemen or Danes, as history has variously called them). No one
knows why these previously mild and pastoral people suddenly became
aggressive and adventurous, but for two centuries they were everywhere—in
Russia, Iceland, Britain, France, Ireland, Greenland, even North America. At
first, in Britain, the attacks consisted of smash-and-grab raids, mostly along the
east coast.
The famous monastery of Lindisfarne was sacked in 793 and the nearby
monastery of Jarrow, where Bede had labored, fell the following year.
Then, just as mysteriously, the raids ceased and for half a century the waters
around the British Isles were quiet. But this was, to dust off that useful cliché,
the quiet before the storm, a period in which the inhabitants must have watched
the coast with unease.
In 850 their worst fears were confirmed when some 350 heavily laden Viking
ships sailed up the Thames, setting off a series of battles for control of territory
that went on for years, rolling across the British landscape rather like two
wrestlers, with fortune favoring first one side and then the other. Finally, after an
unexpected English victory in 878, a treaty was signed establishing the Danelaw,
a line running roughly between London and Chester, dividing control of Britain
between the English in the south and the Danes in the north. To this day it
remains an important linguistic dividing line between northern and southern
dialects.