The Middle Ages in England lasted from the fall of Roman Britain (around 410 AD) to the late 15th century, and during this long period the English language was born, shaped by invasions, monasteries and royal courts.
When Roman legions left Britain at the beginning of the 5th century, the island was settled by Germanic tribes coming from the North Sea coast: the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes. These peoples brought their dialects, which gradually merged into what we now call Old English, or Anglo-Saxon. The Middle Ages, however, were not only a linguistic event: they were also a time of small warring kingdoms, of conversion to Christianity in 597 AD with Augustine of Canterbury, and later of devastating Viking raids that started in 793 AD with the attack on the monastery of Lindisfarne. Understanding this background is essential, because every wave of newcomers — Celts, Romans, Germanic settlers, Scandinavians, Normans — left a visible mark on vocabulary, grammar and literature.
Old English: a Germanic language
Old English, spoken roughly from 450 to 1150 AD, looks almost like a foreign language to a modern reader, and this is its first important feature. It was a synthetic language, which means it expressed grammatical relations through endings rather than through word order or prepositions. Nouns had three grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and four cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative), so the same word could appear in many different forms depending on its function in the sentence. Verbs were divided into strong verbs, which changed their root vowel (a system still visible in sing–sang–sung), and weak verbs, which added a dental suffix similar to modern -ed. The core vocabulary was almost entirely Germanic and included the most common words still used today, such as house, water, eat, child, love, and the personal pronouns. Contact with Latin through the Church and with Old Norse during the Viking settlements added new words: from Latin came school, priest and altar, while from Old Norse came sky, leg, window and the crucial pronoun they.
Anglo-Saxon literature and Beowulf
The literature of this period was originally oral, composed and performed by court poets called scops, who recited tales of heroes and battles to the sound of the harp. The most important surviving work is Beowulf, an epic poem of about 3,182 lines preserved in a single manuscript copied around the year 1000 and now kept in the British Library. The poem tells the story of the Geatish hero Beowulf, who travels to Denmark to free King Hrothgar from the monster Grendel, then defeats Grendel's mother, and finally dies as an old king fighting a dragon. Anglo-Saxon poetry does not use rhyme; instead it relies on alliteration, the repetition of the same initial consonant sound in stressed syllables of the same line, as in "grim and greedy, gruesome and cruel". Another typical device is the kenning, a compressed metaphor made of two nouns: the sea becomes "whale-road" (hronrad), the body becomes "bone-house" (banhus), and a ship becomes "sea-wood". Important themes are loyalty to the lord, the value of courage, the inevitability of fate (wyrd) and a melancholic awareness that all glory fades.
Ricorda
- The English Middle Ages stretch from about 410 to 1485 AD, and Old English (450–1150) is a Germanic, highly inflected language brought by Angles, Saxons and Jutes.
- Old English vocabulary is mostly Germanic but absorbed Latin words through Christianity and Norse words through Viking settlements; literature was oral, alliterative and centred on heroic values, with Beowulf as its masterpiece.
- Active check (write in your notebook): in three or four English sentences, explain who composed Anglo-Saxon poems, why they used alliteration instead of rhyme, and give one original kenning you invent for "smartphone" or "school".