The Anglo-Saxon dialects

Britain became divided into seven kingdoms: Kent, Sussex, Essex, Wessex, Mercia, East Anglia, and Northumbria which were constantly at war with one another. Four dialects were spoken in these seven kingdoms:

· the Northumbrian dialect was spoken by the Angles who lived to the north of the river Humber, in the north-east of England;

· the Mercian dialect was spoken by the Angles who lived between the river Humber and the Thames;

· the West-Saxon dialect, or Wessex, was spoken by the Saxons who lived to the south of the Thames;

· Kentish dialect was spoken by the Jutes.

The language of Scotland, Ireland and Wales remained Celtic.

The 7^th century was the century of Northumbrian supremacy. The king of Northumbria Edwin extended his domain to the river Forth and built his stronghold there which he called Edinburgh. He was an early convert to Christianity and very soon Northumbria became a cultural centre. It was here that Caedmon, the first Anglo-Saxon poet, created his religious poem in Anglo-Saxon.

The Angles, Saxons and Jutes fought with one another for supreme power; they nevertheless became one nation in the course of a few centuries. The first king to rule over all of them was Egbert, king of Wessex. He was made king at the beginning of the 9^th century. Most of the works and documents in Old English that are in existence today are written in the Wessex dialect of Anglo-Saxon.

By the time the Angles and Saxons conquered Britain, they had already had letters of their own called ‘runes’ which they carved on stone and wood, but they had no written literature yet, and the stories and poems they made up had to be memorized. Those were brought to Britain, and runic inscriptions made in Britain are still in existence.

The conquest of England by the Normans began in 1066 with the battle at Hastings, where the English fought against the Normans. The conquest was completed in 1071.

Who were those Normans who conquered England? They were Vikings or ‘Northmen’, men from the North. Some 150 years before the conquest of England they came to a part of France, opposite England, the part which we now call Normandy. There they adopted the French language of their new home in France. They became French.

Lecture 3

MEDIEVAL ENGLAND

Plan

1. The Scandinavian invasion.

2. The Norman Conquest.

3. Historical background from the 12^th to the 14^th century. The struggle between English and French.

From the 5^th century to the first half of the 11^th century one step after another was made on the way to feudalism, so that gradually the ancient fyrd was replaced by the thanes force, elected tribal and community leaders were replaced by the King’s functionaries, the democratic popular community meetings were replaced by the Witenagement of land magnates, thanes and bishops, and the feudal lords’ court of law came to replace the court of the hundred.

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