Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, is the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages. It developed from the languages brought to Great Britain by Anglo-Saxon settlers in the mid-5th century, and the first Old English literary works date from the mid-7th century. After the Norman Conquest of 1066, English was replaced, for a time, by Anglo-Norman as the language of the upper classes. This is regarded as marking the end of the Old English era, since during this period the English language was heavily influenced by Anglo-Norman, developing into a phase known now as Middle English in England and Early Scots in Scotland.
The Anglo-Normans were the medieval ruling class in England following the Norman Conquest, and were primarily a combination of Normans, Frenchmen, Flemings, Bretons, and Anglo-Saxons. A small number of Normans had earlier befriended future Anglo-Saxon king of England, Edward the Confessor, during his exile in his mother's homeland of Normandy in northern France. When he returned to England, some of them went with him; as such, there were Normans already settled in England prior to the conquest. Edward's successor, Harold Godwinson, was defeated by Duke William the Conqueror of Normandy at the Battle of Hastings, leading to William's accession to the English throne.
English is a West Germanic language that originated from Ingvaeonic languages brought to Britain in the mid-5th to 7th centuries AD by Anglo-Saxon migrants from what is now northwest Germany, southern Denmark and the Netherlands. The Anglo-Saxons settled in the British Isles from the mid-5th century and came to dominate the bulk of southern Great Britain. Their language originated as a group of Ingvaeonic languages which were spoken by the settlers in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the early Middle Ages, displacing the Celtic languages that had previously been dominant. Old English reflected the varied origins of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms established in different parts of Britain. The Late West Saxon dialect eventually became dominant. A significant subsequent influence on the shaping of Old English came from contact with the North Germanic languages spoken by the Scandinavian Vikings who conquered and colonized parts of Britain during the 8th and 9th centuries, which led to much lexical borrowing and grammatical simplification. The Anglian dialects had a greater influence on Middle English.
Walter William Skeat, was a British philologist and Anglican deacon. The pre-eminent British philologist of his time, he was instrumental in developing the English language as a higher education subject in the United Kingdom.
Anglo-Norman literature is literature composed in the Anglo-Norman language and developed during the period of 1066–1204, as the Duchy of Normandy and the Kingdom of England were united in the Anglo-Norman realm.
Linguistic purism in English is the opposition to foreign influence in the English language. English has evolved with a great deal of borrowing from other languages, especially Old French, since the Norman conquest of England, and some of its native vocabulary and grammar have been supplanted by features of Latinate and Greek origin. Efforts to remove or consider the removal of foreign terms in English are often known as Anglish, a term coined by author and humorist Paul Jennings in 1966.
Tail rhyme is a family of stanzaic verse forms used in poetry in French and especially English during and since the Middle Ages, and probably derived from models in medieval Latin versification.
Amis et Amiles is an old French romance based on a widespread legend of friendship and sacrifice. In its earlier and simpler form it is the story of two friends, one of whom, Amis, was sick with leprosy because he had committed perjury to save his friend. A vision informed him that he could only be cured by bathing in the blood of Amiles's children. When Amiles learnt this he killed the children, who were, however, miraculously restored to life after the cure of Amis.
Anglo-Norman, also known as Anglo-Norman French, was a dialect of Old Norman that was used in England and, to a lesser extent, other places in Great Britain and Ireland during the Anglo-Norman period.
Ipomedon is a romance composed in Anglo-Norman verse by Hugh of Rhuddlan in the late 12th century at Credenhill near Hereford. In the sequel Protheselaus, which must have been composed slightly later, Hugh acknowledges as his patron Gilbert fitzBaderon, lord of Monmouth. Gilbert's death in or just before 1191 gives an approximate terminus ante quem to both romances.
Walter Fitz Robert of Woodham Walter, lord of Little Dunmow, Essex, was steward under Stephen of England, having succeeded to that position upon the death of his father, Robert Fitz Richard. Walter died in 1198 and was buried at Little Dunmow, in the choir of the priory of Austin canons.
Nicholas Bozon, or Nicole Bozon, was an Anglo-Norman writer and Franciscan friar who spent most of his life in the East Midlands and East Anglia. He was a prolific author in prose and verse, and composed a number of hagiographies of women saints, reworkings of fables, and allegories.
The Karlamagnús saga, Karlamagnussaga or Karlamagnus-saga was a late-thirteenth-century Norse prose compilation and adaptation, made for Haakon V of Norway, of the Old French chansons de geste of the Matter of France dealing with Charlemagne and his paladins. In some cases, the Karlamagnús saga remains the only source for otherwise-lost Old French epics.
Guernes de Pont-Sainte-Maxence, also known as Garnier, was a 12th-century French scribe and one of the ten contemporary biographers of Saint Thomas Becket of Canterbury.
The Master of Game is a medieval hunting treatise written by Edward of Norwich, 2nd Duke of York, between 1406 and 1413, of which 27 manuscripts survive. It is considered to be the oldest English-language book on hunting. The Master of Game was first printed in 1904 in modernised English by William and Florence Baillie-Grohman, with an essay on medieval hunting, and a foreword by then-American President and noted hunter Theodore Roosevelt.
Walter of Bibbesworth (1235–1270) was an English knight and Anglo-Norman poet. Documents confirm that he held land in the parish of Kimpton, Hertfordshire at the farm now called Bibbsworth Hall. About 1250 he served in Gascony under the seneschal Nicholas de Molis in the army of the English king Henry III. In 1270/1271 he is believed to have taken part in the Ninth Crusade on the evidence of a tençon or poetic argument between himself and Henry de Lacy, 3rd Earl of Lincoln. In the poem Walter, about to depart for Palestine, teases Henry for staying at home for the love of a certain woman. In fact the young Henry de Lacy, "recently married and with heavy responsibilities at home", did not take part in the Ninth Crusade. Walter went and returned. He was buried early in Edward I's reign at Little Dunmow in Essex.
Dionisie de Munchensi was the second wife of landowner Warin de Munchensi, stepmother to Joan de Munchensi, and addressee of Walter de Bibbesworth's Anglo-Norman language-learning poem The Treatise.
Lacock Abbey was a monastery founded at Lacock, in the county of Wiltshire in England, in the early 13th century by Ela, Countess of Salisbury, as a house of Augustinian Canonesses regular. It was seized by the crown in 1539 during the Dissolution of the Monasteries under Henry VIII. It then became a country house, Lacock Abbey, notable as the site of Henry Fox Talbot's early experiments in photography.
The influence of French on English pertains mainly to its lexicon, including orthography, and to some extent pronunciation. Most of the French vocabulary in English entered the language after the Norman Conquest in 1066, when Old French, specifically the Old Norman dialect, became the language of the new Anglo-Norman court, the government, and the elites. That period lasted for several centuries through the Hundred Years' War (1337–1453). However, English has continued to be influenced by French. Estimates of the proportion of English vocabulary that originates from French range from one third to two thirds.
Constance Bartlett Hieatt was an American scholar with a broad interest in medieval languages and literatures, including Old Norse literature, Anglo-Saxon prosody and literature, and Middle English language, literature, and culture. She was an editor and translator of Karlamagnús saga, of Beowulf, and a scholar of Geoffrey Chaucer. She was particularly known as one of the world's foremost experts in English medieval cooking and cookbooks, and authored and co-authored a number of important books considered essential publications in the field.
