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During the Ice Age, Great Britain was inhabited by Neanderthals and Cro-Magnons. The period ended around 8000 BC, when the sea level rose to isolate the islands by the English Channel. With the advent of agriculture in the Stone Age, new groups of people populated the territory. Two such groups included the Iberians, who lived in Southern England around 3000 BC, and the Beaker folk, who are known for their pottery, stonework and bronze tools.
Around 1600 BC, the Celts seized control of the British Isles. They brought innovative skills and tools such as iron plows for easier cultivation of the river valleys, more effective iron weapons, and horse-drawn chariots. Their society was moderately orderly and run by their Druid priests.
The Celts absorbed the native population and thenceforth dominated England and Ireland, speaking an early dialect of Indo-European. After conquering Gaul, Julius Caesar led an occupation of the islands by Roman soldiers in 55 BC, only to retreat shortly after due to instability and administrative problems in Rome itself. It was not until 43 AD, under Emperor Claudius, that they returned to conquer Britain. Almost twenty years passed before the Romans were finally able to capture the Druids at Anglesey and suppress the revolt of Boadicea, the angry and vengeful queen of the Celtic Iceni tribe.
However, even with southern Britain under control the Romans could not subdue the Picts, a northern tribe of Scotland. To prevent another uprising, the Roman emperor Hadrian had a wall constructed around the year 120 that spanned 73 miles across the entire island. The wall, which became known incidentally as "Hadrian's Wall," was fortified with eighteen permanent camps to repel a possible attack. It became the northern border during the Roman occupation.
Attempts at a Celtic insurrection, most notably the uprising in 61AD in which thousands were massacred, were unsuccessful. Britain was a military outpost of the Romans, whose rule was well established. The Romans attempted to civilize several areas by raising cities with baths and amphitheaters. Though they built monuments and noble estates, Latin never overtook the Celtic language. The countryside remained controlled by the Celts.
With the collapse of the Empire in about 407 AD, the Romans withdrew from Britannia and ended their occupation. Four centuries of Roman government left little enduring influence; a road network, a few town names (such as those ending in -cester and -caster, the Roman suffix for fort) and Christianity were all that remained. In the Romans' absence, the British Isle was ruled by nominally Christian warlords who fought each other for power and land.
Though this withdrawal left the Celts temporarily free, the sudden removal of the Roman soldiers also left them defenseless against other aggressors. Caledonian tribes (the Picts) were a constant threat, crossing Hadrian's Wall to ravage the Celtic lands from Scotland and Ireland in the north. In 449 AD, Teutonic tribes of southern Denmark and Norway, including the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians, invaded the British islands. With neither Roman military aid nor a strong alliance among themselves, the Celtic tribes were unable to resist their takeover.
The milder climate of Britain induced them to stay in their newly conquered land. The first true settlement resulted from an agreement between the Celtic prince, Vortigern, and two Jute mercenaries, the brothers Hengist and Horsa. The Jutes agreed to drive the invading Picts and Scots back into Scotland in exchange for land in Britain. They then revolted against the Britons and sent for more of their tribesmen to establish a permanent claim to the territory. With a greater population of settlers came the demand for more land, which the Teutons took from the Celts by force.
The invaders pushed back the Celtic tribes into Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and south to France. They then established seven kingdoms of their own, consisting of Mercia, Kent, Northumbria, Wessex, Sussex, Essex, and East Anglia. In the conquest, the Celtic people virtually disappeared. Very few Celtic words were preserved in the new language spoken by the invaders. They survive today only in Gaelic languages of Scotland, Ireland and Wales. The Teutons instead spoke four Germanic dialects in their kingdoms-Kentish, West Saxon, Mercian, and Northumbrian.
Thus began the history of England, a distortion of the words "Angle-land." The Anglo-Saxons (a relatively modern term-the groups were not thought of as one homogenous populace until modern times) further crushed any potentially enduring Roman influence by abandoning the towns, eliminating Christianity and renaming the Roman road network. Their societies were organized by strong kinship bonds, feuds, customary law, and a system called 'wergeld' that provided monetary compensations for death, injury and theft. They had no written language and lived by hunting, fishing and agriculture with little or no trade.
The Teutons brought their own form of Norse mythology to England. This influence can be seen in our modern days of the week, which are named for Norse gods. Sunday and Monday are named for the Sun and the Moon, Tuesday for Tew, Wednesday for Woden, Thursday for Thor, Friday for Frey, and Saturday for Saturn. Though Christianity was gone with the Romans' departure, the Christian church was responsible for re-civilizing England. Pope Gregory sent a convoy of priests, led by Saint Augustine, to bring Christianity to the Anglo-Saxons. Augustine landed in Kent in 597. Bertha, the Queen of Kent, was the Christian daughter of a Frankish king. She and Augustine succeeded in convincing her husband, King Ethelbert, to accept the Christian religion. With the influence of the king's conversion, Christianity had reached all corners of England-except Sussex-by 650 AD. Augustine became the first archbishop of Canturbury.
Saint Columba and Saint Aiden had also brought Christianity from Ireland to Scotland and Northumbria. Aiden founded the monastery at Lindisfarne in 635. Their Celtic church agreed in beliefs with the Roman church, but differed in organization. It reflected the clan traditions of Ireland rather than the centralization of the Roman Empire. King Oswy of Northumbria agreed in 664 to merge with the Roman church and unify England's religion. Theodore of Tarsus, who became archbishop of Canterbury in 668, established the basic structure of England's church with the creation of dioceses.
With the advent of Christianity, monasteries were established throughout the island. The educated monks who resided in them produced the earliest written accounts of British history, many of which survive to this day. The most scholarly and influential monk of the era was the Venerable Bede, a Northumbrian monk who wrote the Ecclesiastical History of the English People. This chronicle treated England as a whole, though it was still divided into kingdoms, and first used the historical dating system of BC and AD. The monks encouraged literacy by copying books in Latin. They taught the people more effective farming methods and manufacturing skills and also built stone churches. Their demand for brass, silver and gold ornaments and glass windows for the churches was instrumental in reviving trade with civilized Europe.
Meanwhile, the Anglo-Saxon kings were contesting for the title of Bretwala, ruler of all Britain, by battling for control of all the kingdoms. The kings of Northumbria ruled in the 7th century and the kings of Merica in the 8th century. King Egbert of Wessex finally gained a more secure control. He had grown up in the court of Charlemagne in France, where he learned the art of war. He built up the strength of the army of Wessex upon his return to England in 802. With a series of successful military campaigns, he confirmed his supremacy as a feudal overlord of England by 830. However, his dominance was short-lived.
King Egbert's fragile hold was upset with the arrival of the Vikings, another group of invaders from Sweden, Norway and Denmark. The Vikings, called Danes or Norsemen by the Anglo-Saxons, raided the monasteries and granaries. They also seized cattle and burned villages. The English were no match for the Vikings, who had the advantages of surprise attack and superior battle gear. The Vikings used battle axes, chain mail and armor very effectively. Like the Anglo-Saxons before them, they seized land and settled in the recently conquered region, aiming to conquer all Britain.
In 878, King Alfred the Great of Wessex finally overpowered the barbarian invaders. After a time in exile, he regrouped his men to defeat the Danes in battle at Edington. He then forced the Danish king Guthrum to convert to Christianity and sign the Treaty of Wedmore, which provided the Danes with land above the Thames River in return for a pledge not to fight the West Saxons. Their land, including parts of Essex, East Anglia and Northumbria, became known as the Danelaw. Though resented by the English, the treaty created a delicate peace.
In the following years, Alfred the Great organized and recorded English laws, called dooms, to create a fairer system. He brought teachers from Europe's mainland to educate nobles and other wealthy men. He also repaired much of the damage done to the monasteries, built new churches, and promoted the translation of Latin works into Old English. Furthermore, Alfred constructed strategic forts and reformed the fyrd, the Anglo-Saxon militia. He created a system in which his warriors were able to alternate between farming and fighting. Due to his success in both war and peace, Alfred remains the only English king to be known as "the Great."
Alfred's descendents gradually won the Danelaw back from Norse leaders who failed to keep the peace. His grandson Athelstan won a victory against the Danes at Brunanburh in 937 and conquered Wales and Scotland as well. England's agriculture, industry, literature and art flourished under his rule. Saint Dunstan, archbishop of Canturbury from 960 to 988, restored the English Church to prosperity.
The subjugation of the Danelaw led to the political unification of England. The government evolved from the earlier system. The witenagemot, also called the Witan, was a council of nobles who selected the king and aided him in the formation of dooms. Shires arose out of the previous kingdoms, each of which was administrated judicially by a shiremoot court. An alderman originally officiated the shiremoot, and later an earl and a shire reeve. Smaller local matters were overseen by the hundredmoots, which met more often. With its crucial link between the king and the local offices, England's government became the most sophisticated in western Europe.
A second Norse invasion occurred in the late 900's. The English king Ethelred II attempted to deter the offensive by bribing the Danish rulers. A tax, called the Danegeld, was placed on all English citizens to pay for these bribes in 991. Though England had the only government in Europe capable of collecting such a revenue, the taxes were ultimately unsuccessful. When the Danish King Swegen I attacked England in 994, Ethelred (frequently called the Redeless, meaning unready) fled to France. Swegen had conquered the entire island by 1013.
Ethelred returned upon Swegen's death, but he soon died as well. The Witan gathered to elect Swegen's son Canute II as king in 1016. Though Ethelred's son Edmund II claimed the title, he died in the same year. Canute ruled well and peacefully as king, sending most Danish warriors back to Denmark. Though a foreigner, he spoke a language very similar to Anglo-Saxon and shared English customs as well. Under his rule, England became part of an empire that included Denmark and Norway as well as the island of Britain.
However, Canute's sons Harold I and Hardecanute were poor rulers. After both died, the Witan had Ethelred's younger son Edward was established as king. Though a Saxon, Edward had spent his life in Normandy and spoke Norman French. He understood Norman customs much better than Anglo-Saxon and had weak control over his country, often submitting to the will of Godwin and his son Harold II, the earls of Wessex. He did, however, build Westminster Abbey.
Though the Witan instituted Harold II as the new king upon Edward's death, Edward's cousin, Duke William of Normandy, claimed that Edward had wished him to be king instead. Harold refused to acknowledge this claim, and William threatened to invade. Harold therefore fortified England's southern coast with an army for the entire summer, but withdrew with the arrival of harvest. At this time, the Norwegian king invaded from the north and Harold was forced to hastily remove his troops from the coast. The English army defeated the Norwegians in the Battle of Stamford Bridge.
At the same time, Duke William attacked in the south. The English army succeeded in repelling the Normans at Hastings for nearly an entire day, but eventually the Normans broke through the line and killed King Harold. Duke William and his victorious army marched up the coast, meeting determined Anglo-Saxon resistance on the way to London. The Witan selected an Anglo-Saxon king to replace Harold, but Duke William met his enemies mercilessly. The Witan yielded control of England on Christmas Day, 1066. William, known today as William the Conqueror, was crowned thereafter in Westminster Abbey.
Though it took four more years to quell resistance to his rule, William's victory at the Battle of Hastings marked the beginning of the Norman occupation and the end of the Anglo-Saxon era. By 1071, there was no force in England powerful enough to challenge his rule. England, under William and his sons, was transformed into a new country. The new system of Norman feudalism gave power to a French aristocracy, a power that would last for the next four centuries and would drive the Old English language into obscurity.
"A circumstance which greatly tended to enhance the tyranny of the nobility, and the sufferings of the inferior classes, arose from the consequences of the Conquest by Duke William of Normandy. Four generations had not sufficed to blend the hostile blood of the Normans and Anglo-Saxons, or to unite, by common language and mutual interests, two hostile races, one of which still felt the elation of triumph, while the other groaned under all the consequences of defeat...At court, and in the castles of the great nobles, where the pomp and state of a court was emulated, Norman-French was the only language employed; in courts of law, the pleadings and judgments were delivered in the same tongue. In short, French was the language of honour, of chivalry, and even of justice, while the far more manly and expressive Anglo-Saxon was abandoned to the use of rustics and hinds, who knew no other. Still, however, the necessary intercourse between the lords of the soil, and those oppressed inferior beings by whom that soil was cultivated, occasioned the gradual formation of a dialect, compounded betwixt the French and the Anglo-Saxon, in which they could render themselves mutually intelligible to each other; and from this necessity arose by degrees the structure of our present English language, in which the speech of the victors and the vanquished have been so happily blended together; and which has since been so richly improved by importations from the classical languages, and from those spoken by the southern nations of Europe."
The poetry of Old English has a unique character, a system of rhythm and alliteration as complex and artistic as the epics of Greek and Latin. However, that well developed system which structured and characterized Anglo-Saxon poetry is tragically absent from the poetry of Modern English. Most of the rules that defined Old English verse were changed or lost in the transition to Middle English, in the two hundred year period after the Norman Invasion of 1066 (Starr 1).
Anglo-Saxon poetry has a strict, yet versatile set of rules that define its structure. It is divided by line and half-line, stress and alliteration. Each line is divided into two half-lines, each of which has two main stresses. In the second half-line, the first main stress is always alliterative, and the second stress is never alliterative. The initial sound of the first stressed syllable in the half line always alliterates with either the first main stress of the first half-line, its second main stress, or both. These three stress formulae can be employed variously throughout a single poem, as they are in Cædmon's Hymn.
| x A / A x | Nu ƿe sculon heriȝean | heofonrices ƿeard |
| A A / A x | meotodes meahte | ond his modȝe�anc |
| A x / A x | �a middanȝeard | moncynnes ƿeard |
Moreover, unlike subsequent forms of the language, Old English actually has three types of stressed syllables in its poetry, including the primarily accented, the secondarily accented, and the unaccented (Starr 2). Any number of unstressed syllables can occur before, after, or between the four primary stresses, which allows the poet extraordinary freedom of expression and the control over which ideas receive the greatest emphasis and emotion, while at the same time giving all Old English poetry a cohesive and uniform feel.
Though not all change in English poetry was directly brought about by the linguistic transition from Old to Middle English, the changes in the language that occurred during the time period between 1000 and 1200 A.D. did contribute to and accelerate changes in poetic meter and style. One notable change in this period arose from the influence on English from the French-speaking Normans. The new ruling class introduced vast amounts of vocabulary to the language, resulting in an abundance of new words with overlapping meanings. Words of French origin sometimes replaced native English words, introducing different sounds and unusual stress patterns to the language (Starr 7). This foreign influx of vocabulary provided English speakers with words that did not always conform easily to traditional patterns of stress and sound and in some cases supplanted the specialized poetic vocabulary of Anglo-Saxon (Friedlander 224). This made it increasingly difficult to compose poetry with familiar formulae and began to favor systems that did not rely so heavily on accent and alliteration to achieve the proper effect.
Another trend with direct and obvious effects on meter was the gradual loss of inflectional endings in Middle English (Starr 3). Whereas in Old English, most nouns and adjectives are marked for grammatical case by variable suffixes, Middle English more closely resembles Modern English in its tendency to mark a word's function in a phrase instead with a specific word order and functional prepositions. With the notable exceptions of the genitive case, which is regularly marked by an �-s' ending, and the plural, which is generally formed in the same way, Middle and Modern English alike have only a single form for each word.
The loss of inflections contributed directly to a loss of syllables and thereby to a loss of potential metrical variety. Many non-inflectional suffixes were lost as well, or else became fixed in only a small set of words, in the transition from Old to Middle English (Starr 4). With words having less syllables on average, fewer opportunities arose to distinguish between different degrees of accentuation in a line. This contributed to the leveling of accent in Middle English, which in turn led to the rising prominence of iambic meter, which will be discussed below.
A more important consequence of the loss of inflection in Middle English was the rigid fixation of word order as a necessary way to ensure clarity of meaning. The Old English language was by no means as highly inflected as other related Indo-European languages, but the several grammatical case endings that it did retain marked the function of each word and thereby afforded the language the ability to maintain relatively loose rules for the placement of subject, object, and verb phrases within a sentence. By contrast, in the transition to the Middle English period the majority of case markers were lost and the language was forced to adopt normative rules for word order as a new means of distinguishing word function.
This standardization of sentence structure brought about drastic effects on poetry. An inflexible word arrangement, for example, made the medial caesura of Anglo-Saxon poetry a practical difficulty; whereas in Old English, words could be rearranged with ease to fit the accentual and alliterative requirements of verse, in Middle English a similar rearrangement would irreversibly alter or destroy the meaning of the words. Instead of reordering words to bring about an artistic effect, Middle English poets were forced to create a completely new way to express themselves if they wished their words to achieve the same impression (Starr 5).
It was far more difficult in Middle English to arrange for strains of thought to break regularly at a similar place in every line while at the same time giving each word the proper stress and alliterative qualities, as they had done in Old English, without the option to reverse a subject and its object if the verse should require it.
Throughout the linguistic period of transition after the Norman invasion, the structure of English poetry displays a mixture of attributes from a wide range of styles. Elements of various styles are used in coordination, but over time the language shows a general progression from the traditional Anglo-Saxon style of alliterating half-lines to the modern preference for rhyming couplets and stanzas.
The strict system of Old English stress became obscure in Middle English poetry. Old English required four main stressed syllables in every line and assigned a secondary or weak stress to every other syllable. As English evolved, however, the half-line diminished in prominence as a basic structural unit of poetry. The early stages of Middle English still retained the use of Old English half-line oriented verse, but the line break gradually began to take on the role of the medial caesura in dividing phrases and regulating structure. Ideas and sentences began to be expressed in full lines or couplets, always beginning and ending at the break of a line (Starr 7).
Without the Anglo-Saxon system of half-lines, alliterative stress patterns became ineffective, and indeed unusable, in later poetry. The sound device of alliteration underwent a functional change from Old to Middle English; in Anglo-Saxon poetry, alliteration played a fundamental structural role. The placement of alliterating syllables was a required technique and determined by specific, deliberate rules that produce an established pattern. However, though alliteration continued to be used as a poetic device in Middle English, there it functioned merely as an ornamental element and had no equivalent relationship with the structure of the poem (Starr 7). The presence of alliterating sounds in Middle English produces a poetic effect, but their positioning within the line itself is not restricted to a set arrangement.
With alliteration reduced to a decorative role, Middle English poetry came to rely on a system of iambic meter to maintain a steady rhythm. This was done, however, at the further expense of the poet's freedom to control the emotional response of his audience through accentuation. Though the iamb is a versatile tool and can be adapted for use in lines and sentences of any length and word order, it provides little room for a distinction between the various levels of stress that give Anglo-Saxon poetry its rich character. When freed from the strict stress pattern of Old English, which became increasingly difficult to incorporate into the longer, regularized sentences of Middle English, poets were able to make use of a far greater allowance for line length, but it became more difficult to prevent their poetry from taking on a monotonous feel (Friedlander 224). Without stress available as a poetic device, emphasis in Middle English had to be achieved by variation in the length of a line or of a sentence, which could span any number of lines, rather than by the stress of chosen elements by their placement and accentuation.
For Middle English poets it was no longer a matter of mere poetic convention to divide each line into two parts, as it had been in Old English. Instead, if used at all, the half-line became "roughly equivalent to a spoken phrase or clause" in a way that attempted to imitate the cadence of conversation (Friedlander 223). In this sense, Middle English poets did demonstrate a less contrived feel than their Old English predecessors. Opposed to this, however, was the innovation of rhyme.
Though it ceased to be bound by either the medial caesura or by the regular pattern of four alliterating stresses, much Middle English poetry took up the arguably more restrictive structural element of rhyme. Rhyme is essentially an organizational device in poetry, and not one that can effectively serve to heighten emotion in the listener. Instead, it simply works to group couplets or stanzas in a cohesive unit. Though this can be made to stress certain elements over others, it is not capable of regulating emphasis to the same degree as metrically defined stress patterns (Starr 6).
When English poetry began to use rhyme regularly and intentionally is debatable. There is strong evidence that it was derived from Latin vernacular verse by way of French "Parisian courtly poetry," which made use of syllable counting and regularly rhyming narrative verse (McKie 821). But there is also the possibility that rhyming developed from a vernacular variety of poetry native to Old English itself, for which we simply have no written evidence (Friedlander 227).
Changes within English itself, such as the loss of inflection, did contribute to the rise of rhyming over alliterative verse (McKie 822). It can often be difficult to tell with inflected languages whether rhyme is truly intentional or whether it simply results as an accident from the addition of the same case endings. Rhyming such as that in Cædmon's Hymn, the earliest attested occurrence of rhyming in Old English, is likewise most likely the result of an accident. A pair of half lines in the West Saxon version does exhibit a rhyming pattern, but it occurs without any regularity, appearing in only one line in the entire poem. Moreover, in the earlier Northumbrian version the pair does not provide such a perfect example of early Anglo-Saxon rhyming poetry, as it does not even make a perfect rhyme.
| West Saxon: | �a middanȝeard | moncynnes ƿeard |
|---|---|---|
| Northumbrian: | �a middunȝeard | moncynnæs uard |
True examples of rhyme do not appear in Old English poetry until a much later period, though the trend can be argued to begin before the Norman invasion. There was, in fact, a transitional period of English in which alliterative and rhyming verse were each used in combination with equal frequency, both separately and even within the same poems. The growing tendency for the end of a sentence or phrase to coincide with a line break made the occurrence of rhyming couplets more natural and more common in Middle English (Friedlander 229).
Poetry is language "charged with meaning to the utmost degree," perfectly and deliberately arranged to express an idea with the greatest possible impact on its audience (qtd. Jankowsky). Any development within the language can have extensive effects on poetic conventions and style. So in English, the linguistic trends that characterize the shift from Old English to Middle English revolutionize the phrasing, line structure, meter, and figurative devices used in English poetry. Many of those changes that inevitably result take away some of the character that made Anglo-Saxon such a unique and emotionally heightening quality. But despite their stylistic limitations, Middle English poets can rival their predecessors in subtlety and expression (Starr 9). The power of poetry ultimately depends on the ingenuity of the poet, no matter what conventions of poetic language are available to him in the current state of linguistic development.