THE rise of the vernaculars of Europe towards their thirteenth-century maturity in relation to (and eventually in competition with) Latin as the language of international religion, literature, learning, administration, and much else, was far from being a uniform or steady process in terms of time and place: in a full survey it would be necessary to consider each century and each region one by one.

In broad terms a first distinction may be made between the areas of the old Roman empire which remained Latin-speaking – and absorbed Germanic and other invaders and settlers to the extent that these rapidly or eventually adopted Latin speech – and areas of Celtic, Germanic and Slavonic speech. In the former, even though literacy must have declined sharply in the fifth century, the Latin alphabet and the ability to use it to write in Latin (with what-ever novelties or deviations from classical norms) survived and was strongly buttressed by Christianity as it spread and as the Church took over many functions of the extinct secular state, Latin being the sole language of the Bible (at first, though early translations were very important), the liturgy, preaching and administration. In the other areas a distinction existed between Celtic regions and the rest, in that in post-Roman Britain enough Christianity and Latinity (both written and, for a short period, spoken) survived to sustain what became known as the ‘Celtic Church’ in the west of Britain and notably in Ireland from the days of St Patrick, this passing to Saxon Northumbria and introducing both Christianity and written Latinity there. The mission of Augustine accomplished the same in the southern Anglo-Saxon realms and soon more widely. The evangelisation of the Netherlands, of parts of Germany and later of Scandinavia and Iceland, of Hungary, carried the spoken and written Latin of the Church to those regions, while the Slavic peoples were first evangelised in Greek from Byzantium.