rekordy: Old English

Evidence: 100 • authority: 72

Old English (Englisċ or Ænglisċ, pronounced [ˈeŋɡliʃ] or [ˈæŋɡliʃ]), Early English or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest attested form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th century, and the first Old English literature dates from the mid-7th century. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, English was replaced as the language of the upper classes for several centuries by Anglo-Norman, a type of French. 1066 is therefore regarded as marking the end of the Old English era, since during the subsequent period the English language was heavily influ…

Evidence: 26 • authority: 88

(Old) English, Anglo‐Saxon Legal Texts in the Later 11th to Mid‐12th Centuries. Abstract Manuscripts containing English language copies of Anglo‐Saxon laws and related texts continued to be produced and used well into the mid‐12th century. Interpretations of the underling manuscript contexts prevalent in the scholarship have tended to prioritise the Conquest as the defining feature underlying their production and use. Such interpretations assume that the collation of a wide range of Anglo‐Saxon legal texts into a single manuscript context was a direct result of Norman rulers struggling to understand their newly acquired realm. This article reassesses the impact of the Conquest on the manusc…

Evidence: 20 • authority: 72

The evolution of languages or history of language includes the evolution, divergence and development of languages throughout time, as reconstructed based on glottochronology, comparative linguistics, written records and other historical linguistics techniques. The origin of language is a hotly contested topic, with some languages tentatively traced back to the Paleolithic. However, archaeological and written records only extend the history of language into ancient times and the Neolithic. The distribution of languages has changed substantially over time. Major regional languages like Elamite, Sogdian, Koine Greek, or Nahuatl in ancient, post-classical and early modern times have been overta…

Evidence: 20 • authority: 80

The Old English Martyrology And Anglo-Saxon Glosses

Evidence: 20 • authority: 88

A ninth-century Old English homily from Northumbria. Abstract A careful consideration of a ‘scribble’ in English in the margin of a page of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Digby 63, a ninth-century Latin manuscript, yields a number of important conclusions: that the English material is homiletic, that it was written before the Latin, that the manuscript is certainly of Northumbrian origin and the English shows traces of Northumbrian dialect, and that therefore at least one vernacular homily in Old English was available for copying in Northumbria in the ninth century. It also adds to the evidence that a group of homilies in the Vercelli Book were drawn from an early and a non-West Saxon source-boo…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

English literature is a form of literature written in the English language from the English-speaking world. The English language has developed over more than 1,400 years. The earliest forms of English, a set of Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the fifth century, are called Old English. Beowulf is the most famous work in Old English. Despite being set in Scandinavia, it has achieved national epic status in England. However, following the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, the written form of the Anglo-Saxon language became less common. Under the influence of the new aristocracy, French became the standard language of courts, parliament, and polite s…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

Old English literature refers to poetry (alliterative verse) and prose written in Old English in early medieval England, from the 7th century to the decades after the Norman Conquest of 1066, a period often termed Anglo-Saxon England. The 7th-century work Cædmon's Hymn is often considered as the oldest surviving poem in English, as it appears in an 8th-century copy of Bede's text, the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. Poetry written in the mid-12th century represents some of the latest post-Norman examples of Old English. Adherence to the grammatical rules of Old English is largely inconsistent in 12th-century work, and by the 13th century the grammar and syntax of Old English h…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The Saxons, sometimes called the Old Saxons or Continental Saxons, were a Germanic people of early medieval "Old" Saxony (Latin: Antiqua Saxonia) which became a Carolingian "stem duchy" in 804, in what is now northern Germany. Many of their neighbours were, like them, speakers of West Germanic dialects, including both the Franks and Thuringians to the south, and the coastal Frisians, Angles and Danes to the north who were among the peoples who were originally referred to as "Saxons" in the context of early raiding and settlements in Roman Britain and Gaul. To their east were Obotrites and other Slavic-speaking peoples. The political history of these continental Saxons is unclear until the 8…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The settlement of Great Britain by Germanic peoples from continental Europe led to the development of an Anglo-Saxon cultural identity and a shared Germanic language, Old English, whose closest known relative was Old Frisian, spoken on the other side of the North Sea. The first Germanic speakers to settle in Britain permanently are likely to have been soldiers recruited by the Roman administration in Britain in the 4th century or earlier. In the early 5th century, during the end of Roman rule in Britain and the breakdown of the Roman economy, larger numbers arrived, and their influence upon local culture and politics increased. There is ongoing debate about the scale, timing and nature of t…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The Anglo-Saxon period of the history of London dates from the end of the Roman period in the 5th century to the beginning of the Norman period in 1066. Romano-British Londinium was abandoned by the late 5th century, although the London Wall remained intact. There was an Anglo-Saxon settlement by the early 7th century, called Lundenwic, about one mile west of Londinium, to the north of the present Strand. Lundenwic came under direct Mercian control in about 670. After the death of Offa of Mercia in 796, it was disputed between Mercia and Wessex. Viking invasions became frequent from the 830s, and a Viking army is believed to have camped in the old Roman walls during the winter of 871. Alfre…

Evidence: — • authority: 72

The Anglo-Saxons, in some contexts simply called Saxons or the English, were a cultural group who spoke Old English and inhabited much of what is now England and south-eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages. They traced their origins to Germanic settlers who became one of the most important cultural groups in Britain by the 5th century. The Anglo-Saxon period in Britain is considered to have started by about 450 and ended in 1066, with the Norman Conquest. Although the details of their early settlement and political development are not clear, by the 8th century an Anglo-Saxon cultural identity which was generally called Englisc had developed out of the interaction of these settlers with…

Evidence: — • authority: 88

New Old English: The Place of Old English in Twentieth‐ and Twenty‐first‐Century Poetry. Abstract This article begins by noting that the narrative coherence of literary history as a genre, and the inclusions and exclusions that it is forced to make, depend on the often unacknowledged metaphors that attend its practice. Literary history which is conceived as an unbroken continuity (‘the living stream of English’) has found the incorporation of Old English (also called Anglo‐Saxon) to be problematic and an issue of contention. After surveying the kind of arguments that are made about the place of Old English as being within or without English literary tradition, this article notes that a vast…