Old English

1

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND. GERMANIC CONQUEST OF

BRITAIN. OLD ENGLISH CULTURE & CIVILIZATION. (450 – 1066)

THE GERMANIC CONQUEST (after the Roman withdrawal)

- three mayor Germanic tribes: the Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes (Pagans)

- they came from Denmark and Norway

- successfully invaded the Roman colony of Britain in the 5 th and 6 th cts.

- brought with them their language, specific poetic tradition, their paganism and their

warrior traditions

- driven the Christianised Celtic inhabitants of Britain westwards to Wales and Cornwall

and northwards into the Highlands of Scotland

- the colonisation was evident in new place-names, the exceptions were the names of the

fortified Roman towns which were delineated by the Latin-derived suffixes –chester and

-cester

- clash of religions and values between the Romans and the Pagans (also reflected in

literature)

RE-CHRISTIANIZATION

- began in the late 6 th ct.

- in the south the mission was entrusted to a group of Benedictines sent from Rome by

Pope Gregory the Great, the mission was led by Augustine, the first Archbishop of

Canterbury (the southern kingdoms became Christian)

- a chain of monasteries was eventually established

- in Northumbria the Christianity came from Ireland

- by the end of the 7 th ct. all the kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England had accepted the

discipline and order of Roman Christianity

- the old runic alphabet of the Germanic tribes, which seems to have been used largely for

inscriptions, was gradually replaced by Roman letters (until the 8 th ct. literature was

transmitted orally – the oral phase)

- newly imposed written literature was in Latin

- England was thus brought into the mainstream of Western European culture

- Bede (673 – 735) was the first great English historian, who wrote The Ecclesiastical

History of the

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