Earliest Influence and The Beginning of English Language

Earliest Influence and The Beginning of English Language:

The British Isles were originally settled by Celts, people who spoke languages that were part of the great Celtic branch of the Indo-European family tree. Celtic languages were once dominant in Europe, and the earliest peoples who crossed the English channel spoke related languages. Within the boundaries of what is now the main part of England, the ancestors of the Celtic languages (Welsh, Cornish, and Breton) were spoken. The ancestors of Irish and Scottish Gaelic and Manx were spoken in more peripheral areas. But in 55 BCE, Julius Caesar invaded Britain and made it part of the Roman Empire. Latin became the language of the military and the aristocracy in Roman Britain, where it dominated for approximately four hundred years. For a long time historians argued that Latin was spoken throughout Britain and that, had the Anglo Saxon invasions not occurred, the English would still be a Latinate tongue. More recently, other scholars have argued that while Latin may have been spoken in the towns, Celtic languages persisted in the countryside. The question has not yet been resolved. Major problems in Rome, however, brought about the withdrawal of the Roman legions in the late fourth century. The remaining Romano-British were sorely oppressed by the Celtic-speaking peoples whom they had for so long dominated. The story goes (given to us by the greatest of all early medieval historians, the Venerable Bede) that the Romano-British sent across the sea to tribes living in the part of Europe that is now north-western Germany and southern Denmark. These tribes were “invited” to come to England and protect the Romano-British from the Celts.

Whether it was an invitation or an invasion, around 449 Germanic tribes began migrating to England and rapidly took over the island. According to Bede, and to tradition, there were three tribes, the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. The Jutes settled in Kent (the east of England) and on the Isle of Wight. The Angles settled the northeast of England, and the Saxons in the center and west. There are definitely dialect variations in Old English that basically correspond to those boundaries, so it is likely there is some truth to this story, at least to the point of different tribes with different language variants settling in specific areas. The Angles, Saxons, and Jutes spoke a form of Old English, and this language rapidly replaced whatever language the Romano-British had spoken, Latin or Celtic. Although England was divided into many petty kingdoms, the people seem to have been able to communicate with each other without difficulty.However, we know very, very little of either the history or the culture of England in the period between the migrations from Europe and the end of the sixth century. But that changed in 597, when Pope Gregory the Great sent the missionary Augustine of Canterbury to England. Augustine was able to convert King Ethelberht of Kent and soon set up a Roman Catholic see in Canterbury (Kent – wara – byrig: the town of the dwellers in Kent). England underwent a remarkably bloodless conversion over the next seventy years: There are no records of priests being martyred or pagans being killed, possibly because Pope Gregory had thought to tell Augustine not to destroy the pagan temples, but to enter into them and replace the idols with the Christian cross, therefore allowing people to maintain many of their traditional customs in their traditional places. There is some dispute as to whether England and Ireland would follow Roman church customs or Irish church customs (which were more similar to those of the church in Greece), but by the last third of the seventh century, all of England is Christian and unified under Roman practice. With Christianity came both Latin and writing, and it is from the Christian era in Anglo-Saxon England that our first written records of language come.