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 English People, which is an indispensable record of the advance of

Christianity in England (it also treated England as a unit even though it was still divided

among several kingdoms)

- Alcuin (735 – 804) was the most respected and widely accomplished scholar at the

influential court of Charlemagne, where he established educational system; through him,

Britain became known throughout Europe

The six kingdoms that England was divided into in the 7 th and 8 th cts.:

1. Northumbria (ruled in the 7 th century)

2. Mercia (ruled in the 8 th century)

3. East Anglia

4. York

5. Kent

6. Wessex with the capital Winchester (ruled in the 9 th century)

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