The Anglo-Saxon conquest and the formation of the English Language.
The 5th century A.D. was the beginning of the period of the migration of considerable numbers of Germanic tribesmen, the beginning of large scale invasion of Britain from the east and south by Germanic war-bands who, in course of time, established a number of Germanic kingdoms in various parts of the conquered country. The invaders from the 5th and the following centuries came from various West Germanic tribes referred to as Angles, Saxons, Frisians and Jutes. About the middle of the century these West Germanic tribes overran Britain and, for the most part colonized the island by the end of the century, though the invasion lasted in the 6th c. A.D. too. The story of the invasion was told by Bede (673-735), a monastic scholar who wrote the first history of England, HISTORIA ECCLESIASTICA GENTIS ANGLORIUM.
According to Bede the invaders came to Britain in A.D. 449 under the leadership of two Germanic kings, Hengist and Horsa; they had been invited by a British king, Vortigern, as assistants and allies in a local war. The newcomers soon dispossessed their hosts, and other Germanic bands followed. The invaders came in multitude, in families and clans, to settle in the occupied territories; the conquest of Britain was not a migration of entire continental Germanic tribes but a process which involved numerous, and often probably, mixed bands of many continental tribes. The Britons fought against the conquerors for about a century and a half till about the year 600.The Anglo- Saxons slowly conquered the southern and eastern lands of the British Celts. Armed warriors may have carried a long knife called a sax.The conquerors settled in Britain in the following way:
The Angles occupied most of the territory north of the river the Thames up to the Firth of Forth in Scotland. The Saxons, the territory south of the Thames; the Jutes settled in Kent and in the Isle of Wight. Since the settlement of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain their language ties with the continent were broken, and its further development went its own way. It is at this time, the 5th century A.D. that the history of the English language begins. Its original territory was England in the strict sense. The speech of Anglo-Saxons became the English language, mixed with Celtic and Latin.
The direct evidence about the language of the early Germanic settlers in Britain is almost non-existent before 700 A.D. However, the great bulk of the writings that have survived from the Old English period do not go back further than the tenth and eleventh centuries. The England of the Old English period was not one kingdom. The country was divided into seven separate kingdoms; Kent, Essex(East Saxons, the capital - London), Sussex(South Saxons), Wessex(West Saxons), Mercia(Angles), Northumbria (Angles) and East Anglia, but only three, namely Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex, developed into powers of major importance, which exercised supremacy over all England. The conquest of Britain by Anglo-Saxons was completed by the end of the seventh century. Members of various Germanic tribes were brought into contact with Celtic –speaking Britons. The speech of the population, living in the country, was a hybrid Anglo-British intermixture. The Old English speech community was heterogeneous. The main point to note is that these kingdoms actually spoke different languages based on the grammars, vocabularies and pronunciations of the original Germanic languages of the different tribes. The people, who came across the sea to conquer and settle in the country, brought their North-Sea Germanic tribal dialects along with them. These dialects formed a kind of ‘natural basis’ of the ‘insular dialects’. This partly explains the very great dialectal differences that exist in the relatively small geographic area represented by modern day England. By the beginning of the ninth century Britain was broadly divided into the Celtic areas of Wales, Scotland and Cornwall and Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Northumbria, Mercia and Wessex. The Anglo-Saxon kingdoms emerged through battle and conquest between rival warlords. The Anglo-Saxons were farmers, landsmen and woodsmen. They lived in clusters in small townships or in small villages of rectangular thatched houses or in groups alone in the forest. They were suspicious of each other and did not take kindly to strangers. In the ninth century Wessex, the strongest among seven kingdoms, won the victory in their struggle for supremacy. Winchester, the capital of Wessex, became the capital of England. In 871 the King of Wessex, King Alfred, became the major leader, the King, who ruled the whole country till 899. He is the only king in British history to be called “Great”. West Saxon dialect, as a regional dialect, developed primarily in the South West of England, dominated at that period of the development of the English language. The spread of this standardized form of West Saxon, its knowledge and use in writing throughout England in the tenth and eleventh centuries was greatly facilitated by the political and cultural supremacy of Wessex during most of this period and the unification of England under a single crown. There are a lot of texts, records, written in West Saxon dialect found from that time.