Pre-Germanic Britain

The history of the English language begins with the invasion of the British Isles by Germanic tribes in the 5^th c. of our era. Prior to the Germanic invasion the British Isles must have been inhabited for at least fifty thousand years. The earliest inhabitants were the Celts. Economically and socially they were a tribal society made up of kinship groups, tribes and clans; they were engaged in agriculture and carried on trade with Celtic Gaul. In the first century B.C. Gaul was conquered by the Romans. Having occupied Gaul Julius Caesar made two raids on Britain, in 55 and 54 B.C. The British Isles had long been known to the Romans as a source of valuable tin ore; Caesar attacked Britain for economic reasons – to obtain tin, pearls and corn, - and also for strategic reasons, since rebels and refugees from Gaul found support among their British kinsmen. The Roman occupation of Britain lasted nearly 400 years; it came to an end in the early 5^th c. In A.D. 410, the Roman troops were officially withdrawn to Rome by Constantine. This temporary withdrawal turned out to be final, for the Empire was breaking up due to internal and external causes.

Germanic Settlement of Britain. Beginning of English

Reliable evidence of that period is extremely scarce. The story of the invasion is told by Bede (673-735), a monastic scholar who wrote the first history of England, HISTORIA ECCLESIASTICA GENTIS ANGLORUM. According to Bede the invaders came to Britain in A.D. 449 under the leadership of two Germanic kings, Hengist and Horsa. The invaders came in multitude, in families and clans, to settle in the occupied territories. The first wave of invaders, the Jutes or the Frisians, occupied the extreme south-east: Kent and the Isle of Wight. The second wave of immigrants was largely made up of the Saxons, who had been expanding westwards across Frisia to the Rhine and to what is known as Normandy. The Saxons consolidated into a number of petty kingdoms, the largest and the most powerful of them was Wessex. Last came the Angles from the lower valley of the Elbe and southern Denmark. They made their landing on the east coast and moved up the rivers to the central part of the island. Angles founded large kingdoms which had absorbed their weaker neighbors: East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria. The invaders certainly prevailed over the natives so far as language was concerned. After the settlement West Germanic tongues came to be spoken all over Britain with the exception of a few distant regions where Celts were in the majority: Scotland, Wales and Cornwall.

Date: 2015-02-16; view: 1927