Couched in socio-economic history, the first chapter provides an overview of the origins and development of the English language in Britain from Anglo-Saxon times to the present day. Both internal and external factors for language variation and change are considered when discussing the major orthographic, lexical, phonological and morphosyntactic developments. The English language and its development will therefore also be viewed in relation to other languages that were spoken, written or printed in the British Isles over the last 1,500 years. The creation and increasing availability of new data sources (access to hitherto un- or underexplored social layers, text types, regions) during the last decade (e.g. historical corpora like the Corpus of Early English Correspondence and databases like Eighteenth Century Collections Online) have led to many new studies on a range of different linguistic variables. Many of the new findings form the basis of the chapter, which aims to complement traditional histories of English.

This introduction gives an overview of the scope of “bitch”, following its twists and turns from its humble beginnings as a word for a female dog, through to its popularity in the present day.

Cuthbert of Wearmouth-Jarrow wrote the wonderful letter giving a moving eye-witness account of the calm death of Bede in 735. He later became abbot of Wearmouth-Jarrow for many years, during which time he corresponded with Anglo-Saxon missionaries working in Germany. Here are included the complete work on the death of Bede and a letter from Cuthbert to Lul, written some thirty years later, in which he notes that he is sending Lul Bede’s prose and verse works on Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, and he asks for a skilled glassmaker as well as a cithara player to come to Northumbria to teach him to play.

The Domesday book, surviving now in the National Archives in London, was the great land survey of 1086 instigated by William the Conqueror to enable him to tax the land correctly. It summarises in a largely formulaic format in Latin the holdings of each of the royal tenants and the population and property across most of the country. The huge work contains amazing detail about named individuals. Here short excerpts are also included from Henry of Huntingdon’s History of the English and from the work called the Dialogue of the Exchequer which describes the DOmesday book and its inception.

Two short writs granting land to the Church show how in the early years of William the Conqueror’s reign the use of Latin was gradually adopted where Old English had been used in pre-Conquest times for royal writs, though Latin was used for charters.

Asser’s biography of king Alfred gives a vivid portrait of the man. It combines the use of earlier Anglo-Saxon chronicles as sources with Asser’s own composition, often based on his personal acquaintance with the king. Here some excerpts are given from both categories, showing that Asser’s style changes somewhat depending on the source. For the chapters covering the period 874-8 which give an account of Alfred’s dealings with the Danes, relevant excerpts from the Old English version in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle are given in an appendix to the Section.

Bede’s great Ecclesiastical history of the English people is probably the most famous Latin work of the early Middle Ages in Britain. It covers the history from the Roman period, through the withdrawal of the Romans, the reintroduction of Christianity with Augustine of Canterbury, and the lives of saints and kings in different parts of Britain until the beginning of the eighth century. Here are excerpts recounting Gregory the Great’s mission and the spread of Christianity through England, the end of paganism under king Edwin and the story of Cædmon of Whitby and his Old English poems.

Bede worte a number of educational writings, on grammar and literary skills, as well as history and science. Here excerpts are taken from handbooks on spelling, on rhetorical figures and on the subject of the measuring of time, including the names of the months in different languages including Old English and facts about the tides in the sea around Britain.

Ælfric, abbot of Eynsham, wrote a number of important works in both Latin and Old English. Here he writes a Latin preface for his first series of forty Catholic homilies in Old English which were intended to be read aloud to the congregation or read privately by the laity. He dedicates the work to Sigeric of Canterbury, explaining that he is basing the homilies on the works of the Church Fathers and more recent Latin theologians from the Continent, and that he believes in the need for Latin works to be translated into English. Ælfric makes use of the modesty topos in his elegant preface.

Gildas in the mid-sixth century writes a stinging attack on his fellow Britons for their pathetic behaviour after the withdrawal of the Romans and the coming of the Saxons, and for their sinfulness which he sees as responsible for their dramatic decline. His Latin is robust and complex, with references to the Bible and to earlier Latin literature, with neologisms and the occasional word drawn from English.

Two versions of the Life of the St. Frideswide (650-727) of Oxford exist, in rather different Latin styles though both written in the twelfth century, one more simple, the other more literary (probably the work of Robert of Cricklade, prior of St. Frideswide’s in the twelfth century. It is on this site that the present Christ Church cathedral was built. Parallel passages are given from these two versions to allow comparisons between the content and the language and style.

Excerpts from the Laws written in, or translated from English into Latin in the early twelfth century provide insight into the legal language of the period as well as the current laws affecting the king and his population.

Aldhelm of Malmesbury wrote important works on grammar and metre. Here excerpts are taken from his famous prose work on Virginity, with which one may compare his version in hexameter verse.Also from one of the few remaining letters, this one on the subject of education and the rivalry between the Irish and the English in this field. Aldhelm’s distinctively rheorical and inventive Latin prose was very influential in the following centuries.

Ælfric of Eynsham wrote a number of important educational works which are excerpted here: his Grammar, Glossary and amusing Colloquy with Old English gloss, showing the schoolboys lively interaction with their teacher and their desire to learn Latin. Ælfric Bata also wrote a series of Latin colloquies, one of which is given here, with an account of the cheeky schoolboys pretending to their teacher that they have been working hard in his absence.

Aldhelm wrote a set of 100 short riddles, following in the footsteps of earlier writers in this genre, such as Symphosius. Examples are also given here from the collections by other early eighth-century writers, namely Tatwine, Hwætberht and Boniface, including several different ways of writing a riddle on the popular subject of a pen. The riddle genre was also popular in Old English.

Æthelweard, the writer of the Chronicle, is mentioned in this Treaty, made between Æthelred the Unready and the Viking leaders in the early 990s after a period of disastrous attacks by the Danes in England. A set of agreed rules as to behaviour between the English and the Vikings is listed. Sigeric, Archbishop of Canterbury is also mentioned. The text contains a number of Old English words and Latin words created from Old English.

Old English poems frequently present death and deathlike states as synonymous with a loss of strength and social usefulness. Given the omnipresence of death in the corpus, this chapter explores a broader range of texts than previous chapters, but it focuses particularly on poems concerned with cosmic order and disorder: wisdom catalogues – including The Fortunes of Men, Maxims I and II, and Solomon and Saturn II – and poetry on Doomsday, especially Christ in Judgement and Judgement Day II. All these texts suggest death’s resemblance to dormant physical states which ostensibly belong to the living, such as sleep and drunkenness, attributing a strangely lively quality to the condition of death itself. Death emerges as a true part of the life course, not purely in terms of continued social identity, but continued embodied experience – physically, it is marked by the kind of restriction and uselessness which accompany sleep and drunkenness, suggesting a kind of spectrum of usefulness and wastefulness which cuts across life and death.

Old English poetry sometimes suggests that normative life phases are experienced by each person in the same way, but it also disrupts this idea, directing our attention to the contingencies, surprises, and sudden shifts which shape each person’s life course. This study’s introductory chapter advances this central argument and establishes the literary-critical scope of the wider monograph. It also provides a theoretical grounding in sociological and philosophical approaches to the life course, as well as the theories of the nonhuman which inform this study’s inclusion of narratives of the lives of objects, animals, and other natural phenomena in its discussion of human ageing – illustrated by a case study of the ‘oyster’ riddle of the Exeter Book (Riddle 74). Relevant material-cultural and linguistic contexts are then surveyed, and the structure of the rest of the book outlined.