History of English/England

[Carol]

KEN ADAMS wrote:
<snip>
> Carol is quite correct that England was invaded by Angles, Saxons
and Jutes, but not for some strange reason the Frisians who seem to
have been the most warlike and adventurous of all. 

Carol responds:
My books say that a few Frisians invaded Britain, but not enough to ve
influential. They didn't form kingdoms there like the other three
tribes (Northumbria, Mercia, Wessex, East Anglia).

Ken:
> But these three tribes invaded different parts of "England" leading
to further confusion. 

Carol:
Right. Sussex, for example, was the South Saxon kingdom. Kent was
settled by the Jutes, the last Germanic tribe in Britain< IIRC, to be
converted to Christianity.

Ken:
But then they seem to have welded together, until the coming of the
Vikings. The Vikings were actually the same people whose ancestors had
originally formed the Angles and Saxons out of the earlier southern
migrations that Carol refers to. The Vikings were from Norway (the
norse) who mainly first attacked then settled northern Scotland and
Ireland. They were also from Denmark who were more active in eastern
England. 

Carol:
Even after the Vikings began their invasions, the three tribes were
still the same people, what we now call Anglo-Saxons, speaking
different dialects and warring with each other. First Northumbria,
then Mercia, then Essex was the dominant kingdom. Then the (Danish)
Vikings invaded, killing or subjugating the kngs of all the kingdoms
except Wessex. They were eventually defeated by Alfred the Great and
his son Athelstan (who also conquered the northern Celts). Eventually,
the Vikings (the Danish variety) merged with the Anglo-Saxons. Then,
thanks to Aethelred the Unready, the Vikings conquered England.
Fortunately, Cnut (Canute) followed policies similar to those of
Alfred, and after his sons died without heirs, the crown went back to
the House of Wessex. Unfortunately, the new king, Edward the
Confessor, would have been better off becoming a monk. When he died
childless, his kinsman Harold Godwinson (Harold the Saxon) was
appointed king by the Witengamot (rather than the nearest relation,
Edgar Aetheling, who was a child).

But, yes, the three tribes were essentially the same people in that
they were all Germanic tribes and could partially understand each
others' languages. The Viking (Old Norse influence) is partly
responsible for the erosion of inflected word endings.

Ken:
Before the battle of Hastings (actually a place called Battle several
miles away) the Norse king Harald Hardrader had attacked the English
Harold who defeated hardrader at the Battle of Stamford Bridge. <snip>

Carol:
I think it's Harald Hardrada (for "hard reign").

Ken:
> This defeat effectively ended Norse power and they became part of
Denmark. Norway only became an independant country again in the last
century. <snip>

Carol:
Unfortunately for Harold the Saxon, his defeat of Harald Hardrada
weakened his forces, and without reinforcement from Mercia and
Northumbria, he was defeated and killed by William of Normandy, whose
claim to the throne I won't go into here. As a result of that victory,
the whole history of England and the English language changed
dramatically. The language, though relegated for a few centuries to
Anglo-Saxon peasants while the aristocrats spoke and wrote Norman
French, eventually became greatly enriched by the new loan words (and
lost almost all its inflections). Whether the loss of inflections and
the change from Saxon to Norman rulers was good or bad I leave to each
person to decide. Perhaps it was a felix culpa, a fortunate fall or
good bad thing (a bad thing with fortunate consequences like the death
of the Potters in the HP books).

Carol, whose sympathies lie with Harold as they lie with Richard III,
who suffered a similar fate more than four hundred years later