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Period: 400 to
The History of English
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Jan 1, 700
First text
Writing was very, very limited , and generally, only specially trained scribes (usually monks) could write. Writing was only used for special records. Therefore, whatever writing there was tended to have the feel of conversation – there are many paratactic structures in OE texts. -
Jan 1, 1000
Suspected date of Beowulf's writing
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Jan 1, 1000
Discovery of the Americas
Saint Brendan the Navigator (c.550 CE)
Norse colonization of the Americas
Gunnbjörn Ulfsson, who first sighted islands off Greenland, probably in the early 10th century
Bjarni Herjólfsson, who sighted mainland North America (Labrador, Canada) around 986
Leif Eriksson, who landed in North America (Newfoundland, Canada) around the year 1000 -
Jan 1, 1066
The Norman Invasion
The Norman conquest of England was the 11th-century invasion and occupation of England by an army of Norman, Breton, and French soldiers led by Duke William II of Normandy, later William the Conqueror. -
Jan 1, 1066
a dynastic quarrel over the throne of England
In 1066, a dynastic quarrel over the throne of England ended in victory for William, Duke of Normandy at the Battle of Hastings. William became King William I of England and his Norman companions (Normans were originally Norsemen who had conquered Northern France) became the feudal overlords of the Anglo-Saxon population. There was never a great amount of Norman immigration into England. Instead there was a grafting of a great superstructure of economic, political, religious and military power o -
Jan 1, 1100
Anglo-Saxon vocabulary
Early Middle English has a largely Anglo-Saxon vocabulary (in the North, with many Norse borrowings). But it has a greatly simplified inflectional system. The complicated grammatical relations that were expressed in Old English by means of the dative and accusative cases are replaced in Early Middle English with constructions that involve prepositions. This replacement is incomplete. -
Jan 1, 1200
Love Rune
In the mid-1200s, an English friar named Thomas of Hales wrote a remarkable piece called "Love Rune," an erotic (and because he was medieval, probably also allegorical) lyric poem. In the middle of the poem, Thomas realizes that it's probably a good idea to start sucking up to Henry III for a bit: He is ricchest mon of londe,
So wide so mon spekeð with muð;
Alle heo beoð to His honde,
Est and west, north and suð!
Henri, King of Engelonde,
Of Hym he halt and to Hym buhð.
Mayde, to þe He send Hi -
Jan 1, 1387
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
The Canterbury Tales is a collection of stories written in Middle English by Geoffrey Chaucer at the end of the 14th century, during the time of the Hundred Years' War. -
Jan 1, 1439
The invention of the Printing Press
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Jan 1, 1439
Invention of the Printing Press
A printing press is a device for evenly printing ink onto a print medium (substrate) such as paper or cloth. The device applies pressure to a print medium that rests on an inked surface made of movable type, thereby transferring the ink. Typically used for texts, the invention and spread of the printing press are widely regarded as among the most influential events in the second millennium[1] revolutionizing the way people conceive and describe the world they live in, and ushering in the period -
Jan 1, 1492
The discovery of North America
The population figure for Indigenous peoples in the Americas before the 1492 voyage of Christopher Columbus has proven difficult to establish. Scholars rely on archaeological data and written records from settlers from the Old World. Most scholars writing at the end of the 19th century estimated the pre-Columbian population at about 10 million; by the end of the 20th century the scholarly consensus had shifted to about 50 million, with some arguing for 100 million or more. -
Publication of Shakespeare's First Folio
Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies is the 1623 published collection of William Shakespeare's plays. Modern scholars commonly refer to it as the First Folio.[1]
Printed in folio format and containing 36 plays (see list of Shakespeare's plays), it was prepared by Shakespeare's colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell. It was dedicated to the "incomparable pair of brethren" William Herbert, 3rd Earl of Pembroke and his brother Philip Herbert, Earl of Montgomery. -
loss of the second-person singular pronoun
Two significant changes since 1650 or so are the loss of the second-person singular pronoun and a vowel-shift in the RP "ask" words. -
Industrial Revolution
From the margins of Western Europe, the English language came into common use on all the world's continents. England also became the world's greatest economic power, the motor of the expansion of capitalism that we call the Industrial Revolution in the 1700s and 1800s. One of the driving forces in this imperialist expansion was the homogeneity of standard written English. -
The American Revolution
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vowel shift
The second change is more trivial but interesting. In the early 1800s, another smaller vowel shift occurred in British English, between an older /æ/ and a newer /a/ before certain consonant clusters. Say the words "gas mask." If you are a native speaker of American English, you probably have an /æ/ in both words. Speakers of the RP, by contrast, have /æ/ in "gas" and /a/ in "mask." Speakers from the West Indies or from India frequently have /a/ in both words. -
Germanic tribes
Germanic tribes started attacking and migrating to Britain. (As a group, we can call them the Anglo-Saxons or the Germanics. There were four main groups, each with their own dialects: the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians. They settled in different parts of the country and the accent and dialectal differences in Britain today can be traced back to the original dialects of the Germanics.) They were originally from around present-day Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands (Holland) -
Scandinavian attacks on Britain
These people were commonly known as the Vikings and they were Germanic inhabitants in presently Denmark, Norway and Sweden. What is interesting therefore is that they were originally also neighbours of the Anglo-Saxons, and therefore spoke a closely related language (Old Norse) that they would have understood a lot of.
