[Highlights of the lecture given on February 15.]
The Celts
The first historical reference to Great Britain
comes from a Greek named Pythaeus,
who sailed out of Marseilles and visited the island approximately 324 BC. At that time it was inhabited exclusively
by Celts. These Celts, the original inhabitants of the island, as far as we
know, spoke Celtic.
The Roman
Conquest and Colonization of Britain
In 55 BC, at the height of Roman power, Julius
Caesar, then governor of the province of Gaul (modern France), expanded the
northwest frontier of the empire on to the island by invading the island.
The Celts of Britain were then faced
with two alternatives:
(a)
submit to Roman domination by remaining in the territory of Roman, or
(b)
resist it from outside, that is, the western and northern parts of the island
colonization [Scots and the Picts in the north and the Welsh in the west].
The empire used what had been the
dialect spoken around the city of Rome, Latin,
and the spoken forms of Latin called Vulgar
Latin.
The arrival
of the Saxons in Britain came about through Roman military
service.
The Roman presence in Britain was eventually
reduced, and by the beginning of the fifth century (409), the Roman's abandoned
the island, leaving the Romanized Celts
and others at the mercy of the hostile
tribal Celts in the north and west.
The king of the Britons, Vortigern, probably aware of the
ferocity of the Saxons and other Germans who had fought for Rome, invited Germans from tribes around the
North Sea coast to come and help fight the Scots and the Picts. The traditional
account, doubtless oversimplified, is that in the year 449, men from three tribes—the Angles,
the Saxons, and the Jutes—under the leadership of Hengest and Horsa came to fight the Scots and the Picts. This is the beginning of what is now called
the Germanic Invasion.
The Germanic
Invasion
The migration of the North Sea
Germans into the southern two‑thirds of the island of Britain quickly
brought about rapid dominance of their language.
While little of the historical record
of the Germanic conquest is preserved, the general tenor of the times is
preserved in European literature in the form of the legend of Arthur. The basis, if one existed, for
the tradition was a minor skirmish in the late fifth century, the so‑called
battle at Mount Badon (somewhere in
the southwest probably) in which the Britons had the upper hand.
The
Christianization of England
The invaders brought
with them a change in the religious outlook on the island. Roman Britain had
been nominally Christianized when Christianity went from being an outlaw
religion to an established religion almost overnight with the conversion of the
emperor Constantine in the early fourth century. When the collapse of the empire came later, the Irish maintained
Christianity despite their removal from access to the seat of Roman
Christianity. This is the beginning of a difference between the Roman and Irish
versions of Christianity.
The traditional
religion of the Germanic people is still preserved in the days of the week.
The Unification
of England Under the West‑Saxons
To a large extent, the
German settlement followed the tribal groups with the Jutes taking the
southeast comer of the island, the Saxons in the southwest, and the Angles
settling in the central part of the island. Eventually, seven small states
developed in the settlement areas. The Saxon area was divided along geographic
lines into Essex (= East Saxon), Sussex (= South Saxon), and Wessex (= West Saxon). Likewise, the
Anglian settlement area was divided into East
Anglia, Mercia (west Midlands),
and Northumbria (north of the Humber
River). The name of Angles also
became the general name for the larger area, England (= Angle‑land).
Egbert, the son of the West Saxon king Offa, was the
first king of England, and it is he who established the political dominance of
the West Saxons. His role model was
Charlemagne.
The Viking
Invaders
Shortly before Egbert unified England,
a new group began to visit the island.
The term Dane was used by the English to refer to the invaders,
although it is clear they came from other parts of Scandinavia as well, and the
modem term Viking is perhaps therefore more appropriate. By the middle
of the ninth century, the Vikings were coming in such numbers that their
presence was a serious problem for the West‑Saxon kings of England who
succeeded Egbert.
When Egbert's grandson Alfred came to
the throne in 871, the situation with the Danes had reached a crisis. He was able to make a deal with the invaders
within a few years that permitted them to come into a large portion of the east
central part of England to settle in exchange for staying out of Alfred's home
territory of Wessex and adjacent lands.
The result was a substantial
immigration of Vikings into the area known as the Danelaw.
Alfred, then in his thirties, turned his attention to reading and
writing both Latin and English. The
spoken language that became the basis for the written form he and those experts
used was the language of the court, namely, the West Saxon dialect, and the
oldest corpus of sustained texts we have in English are those done under the
patronage of Alfred.
Much of what Alfred did or
commissioned was translations of important church works. He apparently had his
scholars research the history from various Latin sources and compile, to the
extent possible, a year‑by‑year chronicle of the English people.
This work is known as the Anglo‑Saxon Chronicle, which was
continued after Alfred's death in 899. The last entry in the most recent
version of the Chronicle, known as the Peterborough Chronicle, is dated 1154
The
Benedictines
After the fall of the Roman Empire, the major sources of the new
intellectual energy were the monasteries, and the monastic order whose
revitalization was the principal locus of activity was the Benedictines. The
Benedictine abbeys at Cluny and Fleury in France were the places that the
ideals of scholarly activity emanated from. By the end of the tenth century,
the Benedictine movement had taken root in England under the aegis of Æthelwold
and Dunstan, both English bishops, who wanted to promote education and learning
in England.
The important feature of the movement
in England was the promotion of vernacular writing. The leading figure was Ælfric, the abbot of the monastery at
Winchester, the capital of Wessex and therefore, a leading city of England at
the time. Under his aegis, a uniform way of writing based on the local dialect
was established by the production of a number of works, mostly of practical
religious nature.
More importantly, the written forms of the
Winchester abbey were imitated by other scriptoria
outside Wessex with the result that the language of Ælfric, now called late
West Saxon, was established as the first standard form of English, which indeed
gave English a standard form considerably earlier than many other European
languages. The literary activity of the Benedictines and others around the
beginning of the millennium gives a substantial corpus of material in Old
English, including a record of the pre-Christian Germanic poetic tradition of
heroic verse, the most celebrated example of which is Beowulf.
The Norman
Conquest
The English crown passed into the
hands of the Danes under King Canute
in the eleventh century. Canute had a long reign on the English throne, but his
heirs were unable to hang on to it, and it reverted to the West Saxon lineage
as one last great Saxon king, Edward the
Confessor, ruled for over 20 years.
Although the use of French never
extended to the English masses following the Norman Conquest under William over
the Saxon king (Harold), the linguistic result of the Norman conquest was to
establish French as the language of England, at least in the sense of the language
of power and authority.