The Cambridge History of the English Language Volume 1 Part 1 ppt

The Cambridge History of the English Language is the first volume work to provide a full account of the history of English.. Volume I deals with the history of English up to the Norman C

The Cambridge History of the English Language is the first volume work to provide a full account of the history of English Its authoritative coverage extends from areas of central linguistic interest and concern to more specialised topics such as personal and place names The volumes dealing with earlier periods are chronologically based, whilst those dealing with more recent periods are geo- graphically based, thus reflecting the spread of English over the last

multi-300 years.

Volume I deals with the history of English up to the Norman Conquest, and contains chapters on Indo-European and Germanic, phonology and morphology, syntax, semantics and vocabulary, dialectology, onomastics and literary language Each chapter, as well

as giving a chronologically-oriented presentation of the data, surveys scholarship in the area and takes full account of the impact of developing and current linguistic theory on the interpretation of the data The chapters have been written with both specialists and non- specialists in mind; they will be essential reading for all those interested in the history of English.

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTOR Y

OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

GENERAL EDITOR Richard M Hogg

VOLUME I The Beginnings to 1066

Facsimile page from the Exeter Book of Anglo-Saxon poetry

(Exeter D & C MS 3501, s x): The Wanderer, 76v, lines 1-33.

Reproduced by kind permission of the Dean and Chapter

of Exeter Cathedral.

Smith Professor of English Language and

Medieval Literature, University of Manchester

| CAMBRIDGE

UNIVERSITY PRESS

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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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© Cambridge University Press 1992

This book is in copyright Subject to statutory exception

and to rhe provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,

no reproduction of any part may take place wirhout

rhe written permission of Cambridge University Press

First published 1992

Sevenrh printing 2005

Printed in rhe United Kingdom at rhe University Press, Cambridge.

A catalogue recordfor this book is available from the British library

li~ryo/u~~u~~~m~MM~nMm

The Cambridge history of rhe English language/edited by Richard M.

Hogg.

p cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents: v 1 The beginnings to 1066

List of illustrations page x hist of contributors xi General Editor's preface xiii Acknowledgements xvii List of abbreviations xix Map of Anglo-Saxon England xxii

1 I N T R O D U C T I O N Richard M.Hogg 1

1.1 Political history and language history 11.2 Ecclesiastical history and language history 101.3 Literary history and language history 141.4 The nature of the evidence 19Further reading 25

vn

Old English dialects: origins and sources

Orthographic and phonological variation

Variation and dialectology

290290299338355400407

409409414429433451

452452456471487

Vlll

8 LITERARY LANGUAGE

Malcolm R Godden 490

8.1 Introduction 4908.2 Poetry 4918.3 Prose 513Further reading 535

Glossary of linguistic terms 536 Bibliography

Primary sources and texts 548 Secondary sources 550 Index 589

ix

Facsimile page from the Exeter Book of Anglo-Saxon poetry (Exeter

D & C MS 3501, s x): The Wanderer, fo 76v, lines 1-33 Reproduced

by kind permission of the Dean and Chapter of Exeter Cathedral

European 342.4 Schematic representation of the consonant shift in Pre-

Germanic 383.1 Maps of pre-650 and post-650 runic monuments (Page

1973) 80

3.2 Futhark from Kylver, Gotland, ca 400 (Page 1973) 81

3.3 Old English futhorc (Dickins, 1932) Reproduced by

courtesy of heeds Studies in English 1, from Bruce Dickins,

' A system of translation of Old English runic

inscriptions' 813.4 The development of consonants (especially voiced stops

and fricatives) from Germanic to Old English 1114.1 Diagrammatic representation of restrictions on extractioncalled 'island constraints' Reproduced by courtesy of

Mouton, from Charles R Carlton, Descriptive Syntax of the

Old English Charters (Mouton, 1970), p 177 231

6.1 Map of areas of rhotacism 4126.2 New York City (r) by class and style (after Labov 1966) 4146.3 Map of early Anglo-Saxon England 4196.4 The products of literacy in their political context 425

A L F R E D B A M M E S B E R G E R Professor of English Linguistics,

Katholische Universitdt Eichstdtt

CECILY CLARK Cambridge

MALCOLM G O D D E N Kawlinson and Bosworth Professor of

Anglo-Saxon, University of Oxford

R I C H A R D M H O G G Smith Professor of English Language and

Medieval Literature, University of Manchester

D I E T E R K A S T O V S K Y Professor of English Linguistics, lnstitut

fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, Universitdt Wien

T H O M A S E T O O N Professor of Linguistics, Program in Linguistics,

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

E L I Z A B E T H CLOSS T R A U G O T T Professor of Linguistics,

Department of Linguistics, Stanford University

GENERAL EDITOR'S PREFACE

Although it is a topic of continuing debate, there can be little doubtthat English is the most widely-spoken language in the world, withsignificant numbers of native speakers in almost every major region —only South America falling largely outside the net In such a situation anunderstanding of the nature of English can be claimed unambiguously

to be of world-wide importance

Growing consciousness of such a role for English is one of themotivations behind this History There are other motivations too.Specialist students have many major and detailed works of scholarship

to which they can refer, for example Bruce Mitchell's Old English Syntax,

or, from an earlier age, Karl Luick's Historische Grammatik der englischen

Sprache Similarly, those who come new to the subject have both

one-volume histories such as Barbara Strang's History of English and

introductory textbooks to a single period, for example Bruce Mitchell

and Fred Robinson's A Guide to Old English But what is lacking is the

intermediate work which can provide a solid discussion of the full range

of the history of English both to the anglicist who does not specialise inthe particular area to hand and to the general linguist who has nospecialised knowledge of the history of English This work attempts toremedy that lack We hope that it will be of use to others too, whetherthey are interested in the history of English for its own sake, or for somespecific purpose such as local history or the effects of colonisation.Under the influence of the Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure,there has been, during this century, a persistent tendency to view thestudy of language as having two discrete parts: (i) synchronic, where alanguage is studied from the point of view of one moment in time; (ii)diachronic, where a language is studied from a historical perspective Itmight therefore be supposed that this present work is purely diachronic

xv

General Editor's preface

But this is not so One crucial principle which guides The CambridgeHistory of the English Language is that synchrony and diachrony areintertwined, and that a satisfactory understanding of English (or anyother language) cannot be achieved on the basis of one of these alone.Consider, for example, the (synchronic) fact that English, whencompared with other languages, has some rather infrequent or unusualcharacteristics Thus, in the area of vocabulary, English has anexceptionally high number of words borrowed from other languages(French, the Scandinavian languages, American Indian languages,Italian, the languages of northern India and so on); in syntax a common

construction is the use of do in forming questions (e.g Do you like

cheese ?), a type of construction not often found in other languages; in

morphology English has relatively few inflexions, at least comparedwith the majority of other European languages; in phonology thenumber of diphthongs as against the number of vowels in EnglishEnglish is notably high In other words, synchronically, English can beseen to be in some respects rather unusual But in order to understandsuch facts we need to look at the history of the language; it is often onlythere that an explanation can be found And that is what this workattempts to do

This raises another issue A quasi-Darwinian approach to Englishmight attempt to account for its widespread use by claiming thatsomehow English is more suited, better adapted, to use as aninternational language than others But that is nonsense English is nomore fit than, say, Spanish or Chinese The reasons for the spread ofEnglish are political, cultural and economic rather than linguistic Sotoo are the reasons for such linguistic elements within English as thehigh number of borrowed words This History, therefore, is based asmuch upon political, cultural and economic factors as linguistic ones,and it will be noted that the major historical divisions between volumesare based upon the former type of events (the Norman Conquest, thespread of printing, the declaration of independence by the U.S.A.,rather than the latter type

As a rough generalisation, one can say that up to about theseventeenth century the development of English tended to be cen-tripetal, whereas since then the development has tended to be centri-fugal The settlement by the Anglo-Saxons resulted in a spread ofdialect variation over the country, but by the tenth century a variety offorces were combining to promote the emergence of a standard form ofthe language Such an evolution was disrupted by the Norman

xvi

General Editor's preface

Conquest, but with the development of printing together with othermore centralising tendencies, the emergence of a standard form becameonce more, from the fifteenth century on, a major characteristic of thelanguage But processes of emigration and colonisation then gave rise tonew regional varieties overseas, many of which have now achieved ahigh degree of linguistic independence, and some of which, especiallyAmerican English, may even have a dominating influence on BritishEnglish The structure of this work is designed to reflect these differenttypes of development Whilst the first four volumes offer a reasonablystraightforward chronological account, the later volumes are geo-graphically based This arrangement, we hope, allows scope for theproper treatment of diverse types of evolution and development Evenwithin the chronologically oriented volumes there are variations ofstructure, which are designed to reflect the changing relative importance

of various linguistic features Although all the chronological volumeshave substantial chapters devoted to the central topics of semantics andvocabulary, syntax, and phonology and morphology, for other topicsthe space allotted in a particular volume is one which is appropriate tothe importance of that topic during the relevant period, rather thansome pre-defined calculation of relative importance And within thegeographically based volumes all these topics are potentially includedwithin each geographical section, even if sometimes in a less formalway Such a flexible and changing structure seems essential for any fulltreatment of the history of English

One question that came up as this project began was the extent towhich it might be possible or desirable to work within a singletheoretical linguistic framework It could well be argued that only aconsensus within the linguistic community about preferred linguistictheories would enable a work such as this to be written Certainly, it wasimmediately obvious when work for this History began, that it would

be impossible to lay down a' party line' on linguistic theory, and indeed,that such an approach would be undesirably restrictive The solutionreached was, I believe, more fruitful Contributors have been chosenpurely on the grounds of expertise and knowledge, and have beenencouraged to write their contributions in the way they see most fitting,whilst at the same time taking full account of developments in linguistictheory This has, of course, led to problems, notably with contrastingviews of the same topic (and also because of the need to distinguish theephemeral flight of theoretical fancy from genuine new insights intolinguistic theory), but even in a work which is concerned to provide a

xvii

General Editor's preface

unified approach (so that, for example, in most cases every contributor

to a volume has read all the other contributions to that volume), suchcontrasts, and even contradictions, are stimulating and fruitful Whilstthis work aims to be authoritative, it is not prescriptive, and the finalgoal must be to stimulate interest in a subject in which much workremains to be done, both theoretically and empirically

The task of editing this History has been, and still remains, a long andcomplex one As General Editor I owe a great debt to many friends andcolleagues who have devoted much time and thought to how best thiswork might be approached and completed Firstly, I should thank myfellow-editors: John Algeo, Norman Blake, Bob Burchfield, RogerLass and Suzanne Romaine They have been concerned as much withthe History as a whole as with their individual volumes Secondly, thereare those fellow linguists, some contributors, some not, who have sogenerously given of their time and made many valuable suggestions:John Anderson, Cecily Clark, Frans van Coetsem, Fran Colman, DavidDenison, Ed Finegan, Olga Fischer, Jacek Fisiak, Malcolm Godden,Angus Mclntosh, Lesley Milroy, Donka Minkova, Matti Rissanen,Michael Samuels, Bob Stockwell, Tom Toon, Elizabeth Traugott, PeterTrudgill, Nigel Vincent, Anthony Warner, Simone Wyss One occasionstands out especially: the organisers of the Fourth InternationalConference on English Historical Linguistics, held at Amsterdam in

1985, kindly allowed us to hold a seminar on the project as it was justbeginning For their generosity, which allowed us to hear a great manyviews and exchange opinions with colleagues one rarely meets face-to-face, I must thank Roger Eaton, Olga Fischer, Willem Koopman andFrederike van der Leek

With a work so complex as this, an editor is faced with a wide variety

of problems and difficulties It has been, therefore, a continual comfortand solace to know that Penny Carter of Cambridge University Presshas always been there to provide advice and solutions on everyoccasion Without her knowledge and experience, encouragment andgood humour, this work would have been both poorer and later Afterthe work for Volume I was virtually complete, Marion Smith took over

as publishing editor, and I am grateful to her too, not merely forensuring such a smooth change-over, but for her bravery when facedwith the mountain of paper from which this series has emerged

Richard M Hogg

xvm

xix

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OSax

Osc

PDEPN

PrGmcRBRPScand

SktVLWWS

Oxford EnglishDictionary ( = Murray etal., 1888-1933)

Old FrisianOld High GermanOld IcelandicOld IrishOld NorseOld PersianOld SaxonOscanPresent-Day EnglishCounty Volume ofEnglish Place-NameSociety survey (seeReferences)

Primitive Germanic

Romano-BritishReceived PronunciationScandinavian

SanskritVulgar LatinWelshWest Saxon

(b) Grammatical

acc

abl

accusativeablative

poss

postpr.

prep

pret

pron

PTreflx

S

s

subj

g-uninfl

V

voc

!sg, 2sg.,3sg etc

objectpastparticiplepluralpossessivepostpositionpresentprepositionpreteritepronounparticlereflexivesubjectsingular(i) subject (of nouns);(ii) subjunctive (ofverbs)

uninflected(i) verb (syntax); (ii)vowel (phonology)vocative

first person singular, etc

Richard M Hogg

1.1 Political history and language history

Bede begins his story of the Anglo-Saxon invasions and settlements ofBritain as follows (it seems more appropriate here to quote from the OldEnglish translation than from the original Latin text):

Da waes ymb feower hund wintra and nigon and feowertig fram uresDrihtnes menniscnysse paet Martianus casere rice onfeng ond VIIgear haefde Se waes syxta eac feowertigum fram Agusto pam casere

Da Angel^eod and Seaxna was geladod fram )>am foresprecenan

cyninge [Wyrtgeorn wses gehaten], and on Breotone com on \>tim

miclum scypum, and on eastdasle J>yses ealondes eardungstowe onfeng

>>urh )?aes ylcan cyninges bebod, \>e hi hider gela&ode, past hi sceoldan

for heora e31e compian and feohtan And hi sona compedon wi& heora

gewinnan, ]>c hi oft aer nor&an' onhergedon; and Seaxan pa sige

geslogan I>a sendan hi ham aerenddracan and heton secgan pysseslandes wsestmbaernysse and Brytta yrgpo And hi pa sona hidersendon maran sciphere strengran wigena; and waes unoferswi6endlicweorud, pa hi togaedere gepeodde waeron And him Bryttas sealdanand geafan eardungstowe betwih him, past hi for sybbe and for haeloheora edles campodon and wunnon wid heora feondum, and hi himandlyfne and are forgeafen for heora gewinne

{Bede 1.12)

It was four hundred and forty-nine years after the birth of our Lordthat the Emperor Martian came to the throne, and reigned for sevenyears He was the forty-sixth Emperor since Augustus The Anglesand the Saxons were invited by the aforesaid king [he was calledVortigern] and they came to Britain in three large ships and receiveddwelling places in the eastern part of this island by order of that sameking who had invited them here, so that they would battle and fight

Richard M Hogg

for their land And at once they fought against their enemies who hadoften come down on raids from the north, and the Saxons won thebattles Then they sent messengers home, ordering them to tell of thefertility of this land and the cowardice of the Britons And then theyimmediately sent here a larger fleet with stronger warriors; and, whenthey were gathered together, they formed an invincible army And theBritons gave them dwelling places to share between them, oncondition that they fought for peace and for prosperity in their landand defeated their enemies, and the Britons would give themprovisions and estates on account of their victory

Bede was writing in the eighth century, although he uses as a source thewritings of Gildas which date from the middle of the sixth Even so,approximately 100 years stands between Gildas and the arrival of thosetwo famous brothers Hengist and Horsa, the traditional founders of theEnglish nation

It is therefore reasonable to suggest that the truth of Bede's account

is sanctified more by tradition than by a correspondence with actualevents There is, for example, a growing body of archaeologicalevidence of Germanic peoples being in Britain during the fourthcentury (note, for example the fourth-century rune at Caistor-by-Norwich mentioned in §3.2.2 of chapter 3 and see the careful discussion

in Hills 1979) But a clue to the most important event relating to theGermanic settlements comes at the very beginning of the Bede extract,with the reference to the Roman Emperor Until 410 the Romans hadoccupied and governed Britain, but in that year they left Britain, andthere can be no doubt that a major consequence of their departure wasthat the organisational structures which the Romans had erected for thegovernance of the country began to decay In essence a vacuum ofauthority and power was created by their departure, and the Germanictribes on the other side of the North Sea, who would already have beenaware of the country's attractions, perhaps by their fathers or forefathersbeing mercenaries in the Roman army in Britain, were eager and willing

to step into the breach

The first two hundred years of Anglo-Saxon occupation of Britain arealmost wholly unsupported by contemporary documentary evidence,the evidence being primarily archaeological and also, although morespeculatively, toponymical (see chapter 7), or to be deduced from laterwriters such as Bede But it is safe to conclude that the earliestsettlements were in East Anglia and the south-east, with a gradualspread along the Thames valley, into the Midlands, and northwards

through Yorkshire and into southern Scotland From the linguisticpoint of view the most remarkable feature of the Anglo-Saxonsettlement must be the virtually complete elimination of the Celticlanguages, principally Welsh and Cornish In the whole of Old English

it is doubtful whether there are more than twenty Celtic borrowingsinto literary vocabulary (of which the most widespread now, but not in

Old English, is perhaps cross) On the other hand, outside the literary

vocabulary a very large number of place-, especially river-, names were

retained by the invaders, hence Thames, Severn, and settlement-names such as Manchester (with the second element OE ceaster ' former Roman

settlement') It would seem that, although relations were sometimesfriendly, the fifth- and sixth-century Anglo-Saxons were in this respect

as resolutely monolingual as their twentieth-century descendants

It is linguistically improbable that the first Anglo-Saxons all spokethe same form of language Indeed Bede states that the Anglo-Saxoninvaders came from three Germanic tribes, the Angles, the Saxons andthe Jutes, and such a division, if accurate, would as much reflectlinguistic as geographical or social differentiation Since Bede's accountdirectly equates the Angles with Anglian, the Saxons with Saxon (forour purposes, West Saxon), and the Jutes with Kentish, it is clearlytempting to assume that the Old English dialects to which we mostusually refer (see here chapter 6) have their origins directly in pre-settlement Germanic Such a view was certainly widely accepted in thefirst half of this century and earlier, but it has been strongly challengedsince then (see especially DeCamp 1958 and, for a contrary view,Samuels 1971)

Without attempting to draw any firm conclusions, it may be worthformulating a number of general principles relevant not only to thisquestion but to other similar questions concerning the Anglo-Saxonperiod On the one hand, the reports of Bede, the Anglo-SaxonChronicles and other early records must be privileged by virtue of theircloseness in time to the events In addition, that closeness in time may

be further enhanced by the reliance of, say, Bede, writing ca AD 700, oneven earlier writers such as Gildas On the other hand, we can be certain

of one thing, namely that the transmission of historical information inthe earliest period of the Anglo-Saxon settlement must have beenconsiderably more unreliable than it is today, and hence subject to much(not necessarily deliberate) distortion In general, too, we must beware

of forcing anachronistic meanings on ancient terms As, for example,Strang (1970:377-9) points out, terms such as Angles, Saxons and Jutes

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need not have been mutually exclusive nor need they have referred tothe same kind of entity: thus Angle may have referred to a tribe, whilstSaxon referred to a tribal confederacy Jute remains yet moremysterious

These considerations seem to force us into a compromise position,namely that the Anglo-Saxon invaders, coming from northern Germanyand Denmark, already bore with them dialectal variations which in partcontributed to the differentiation of the Old English dialects, but thatnevertheless the major factors in that differentiation developed on thesoil of Anglo-Saxon England Certainly the remarks of Bede and otherearly writers are perhaps best viewed as iconic representations of thetruth, rather than as simply interpreted historical verities

The expansion of the Anglo-Saxon settlements in the centuriesimmediately following the initial invasions cannot be traced in anydetail Broadly, the first settlements were in East Anglia and south-eastEngland, and there was a fairly quick spread so that by the end of thesixth century Anglo-Saxon rule of whatever kind, but one presupposingthe dominance of Old English as the language of the people, had beenextended over most of what is now England and was quicklyencroaching on southern and south-eastern Scotland Areas whereCeltic remained dominant certainly included Cornwall and Wales,where in the eighth century Offa's Dyke was to become an importantdivide Of the further parts of north-west England little is known, butthe best estimate is that in such a sparsely-populated and remote areaAnglo-Saxon and Celtic settlements existed side by side

In strictly political and secular terms the seventh century probablywitnessed the consolidation of Anglo-Saxon authority over their newlywon territory, best symbolized by what we now know as the Heptarchy

or rule of the seven kingdoms These were the kingdoms of Wessex,Essex, Sussex, Kent, East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria Linguis-tically the concept of the Heptarchy is extremely important for it is fromthat concept that we obtain the traditional Old English dialect names:West Saxon, Kentish, Mercian and Northumbrian (the term Anglian as

a cover term for Mercian and Northumbrian is taken from Bede'stripartite division of the Germanic settlers discussed above) But severalwords of warning are needed here Firstly, it would be misleading tothink of these' kingdoms' in modern terms: their boundaries must havebeen vague and subject to change, not susceptible to the precisedelineation of the kind that we are accustomed to today Secondly,kingdoms of the Heptarchy and dialects areas are not necessarily

isomorphic, even when they share the same name For example,although texts originating from the kingdom of Mercia are commonlyheld to be Mercian one and all, it is clear that they have widely varyingdialectal features, to the extent that two 'Mercian' texts may show asmany distinctions as a 'Mercian' text and a 'Northumbrian' text.Thirdly, the absence of a dialect corresponding to one or other of thekingdoms of the Heptarchy does not imply the non-existence of such adialect Thus the absence of an East Anglian dialect cannot sensibly betaken to imply that there were no dialect variations particular to thatarea during the Old English period Rather, all that is implied is thequite prosaic claim that we know of no texts certainly originating fromthe East Anglian area during the period, although place-name evidence,when collected and assembled, should allow us to ascertain some of thephonological and lexical characteristics of the dialect

Whatever the merits of the concept of the Heptarchy, from thelinguistic point of view the most important fact is that the politicalcentres of power fluctuated considerably from the seventh to the ninthcenturies At first, Kent was probably of major importance (so, too, atthe time must have been East Anglia, but without major linguisticconsequence) It was to Kent that the first Roman Christian missionariescame, notably St Augustine in 597 With the conversion of Anglo-Saxon England (but not necessarily the Anglo-Saxon inhabitants!) toChristianity, although not by virtue of St Augustine's mission (seebelow), came that crucial cultural artefact, the Roman alphabetic system

of writing The consequences of this are more fully spelt out both belowand in chapter 5, §5.2, but it needs to be said here that the Romanalphabet was essential in the remarkably early development of avernacular manuscript tradition in Britain compared with what obtainedelsewhere in the Germanic areas The Germanic runic alphabet waseither not fully used for normal communicative purposes or was written

on objects not likely to be preserved intact, or, most probably, acombination of both pertained

By about the middle of the seventh century the major centres ofpolitical (and hence cultural) power had shifted northwards, to theAnglian kingdoms of Mercia and Northumbria, especially the latter.Indeed for several decades around 700 Northumbria could claim, atJarrow, Durham and Lindisfarne, and in the persons of men such asBede and Alcuin, to be one of the major cultural centres of WesternEurope Since it was also at this time that texts began to be written inEnglish rather than Latin, it is not surprising that most of the earliest

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English texts are of Northumbrian origin, as in the case of Cxdmon's

Hymn, Bede's Death Song and the runic inscription on the Ruthwell Cross.

Other texts which survive in an early eighth-century form, such as the

Epinal Glossary, are predominantly Mercian, although they seem to bear

traces of an earlier southern origin Even at a later time this earlynorthern predominance leaves its traces in poetry Although the point

is now highly controversial (see Chase 1981 and especially the essay by

Stanley 1981 therein), the composition of Beowulf may be attributable to

the latter part of the eighth century, when the Mercian kingdom,especially under Offa, dominated much of England

Accelerated by events which we shall discuss shortly, by the end ofthe ninth century political power had been transferred, irrevocably, tosouthern England, more particularly the kingdom of Wessex centred atWinchester But even under Alfred, who ruled from 871 to 899,although we witness the first real flourishing of Anglo-Saxon literature,with the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles and various translations of Latinoriginals, the West Saxon dialect is markedly influenced by Mercian.This is because Alfred, in order to establish a firm cultural, educationaland literary foundation, had to seek the help of Mercians such as BishopWserferth, and the Welshman Bishop Asser, for it was only in Merciathat the scholarly tradition of the North had been able to survive, andthere is precious little evidence to support any such tradition in theSouth

One of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles reports for 793 that 'the harrying

of the heathen miserably destroyed God's church in Lindisfarne byrapine and slaughter' (Garmonsway, 1954:56) Tall oaks from littleacorns grow This note of righteous indignation, no doubt a reaction toAlfred's later battles, indicates the first known intrusion of the Vikingsonto Anglo-Saxon soil Sporadic raids continued thereafter, but from

835 onwards, when the Vikings plundered Sheppey, raids became moreand more frequent along the southern and, presumably, eastern coasts,until in 865 a Viking army over-wintered in East Anglia By 870 theseDanes had overrun not merely East Anglia but all the eastern andcentral parts of Mercia and Northumbria, whilst mainly NorwegianVikings occupied the north-western parts of Britain, the Isle of Man andthe area around Dublin Indeed the Danes were clearly threateningWessex

If Alfred had not come to the throne of Wessex in 871 the course ofEngland and of its language would no doubt have been immeasurablydifferent For Alfred's strategy and tactics in both war and diplomacy