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The main source of information for the culture of the Germanic peoples (the ancestors of the English) in ancient times is Tacitus Germania, written around 200 AD
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Old English was not static, and people used it for about 700 years, from the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain in 400 AD to about 1100 AD, after the Norman invasion. The invading Germanic tribes spoke similar languages, which in Britain developed into what we now call Old English.
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For about 300 years following the Norman Conquest in 1066, the Norman kings and their high nobility spoke only one of the langues d'oïl called Anglo-Norman, which was a variety of Old Norman used in England
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English literature started to reappear around 1200, when a changing political climate and the decline in Anglo-Norman made it more respectable
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Modern English is often dated from the Great Vowel Shift, which took place mainly during the 15th century. By the time of William Shakespeare (mid-late 16th century),The language had become clearly recognizable as Modern English.
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It was the height of the English Renaissance and saw the flowering of English poetry, music and literature.
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From around 1600, the English colonization of North America resulted in the creation of a distinct American variety of English. Some English pronunciations and words "froze" when they reached America. In some ways, American English is more like the English of Shakespeare than modern British English is.
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On 1755, Samuel Johnson published the first significant English dictionary, his Dictionary of the English Language.
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The difference between early- and late-modern English is vocabulary. Pronunciation, grammar, and spelling are mostly the same, but Late-Modern English has many more words
