THE term ‘Old English’ was invented as a patriotic and philological convenience. The more familiar term ‘AngloSaxon’ has a far older pedigree. ‘Old English’ implied that there was a cultural continuity between the England of the sixth century and the England of the nineteenth century (when German, and later British, philologists determined that there had been phases in the development of the English language which they described as ‘Old’, ‘Middle’, and ‘Modern’). ‘Anglo-Saxon’ had, on the other hand, come to suggest a culture distinct from that of modern England, one which might be pejoratively linked to the overtones of ‘Sassenach’ (Saxon), a word long thrown back by angry Celts at English invaders and English cultural imperialists. In 1871 Henry Sweet, the pioneer Oxford phonetician and Anglicist, insisted in his edition of one of King Alfred’s translations that he was going to use ‘Old English’ to denote
‘the unmixed, inflectional state of the English language, commonly known by the barbarous and unmeaning title of “Anglo-Saxon”’. A thousand years earlier, King Alfred himself had referred to the tongue which he spoke and in which he wrote as ‘englisc’. It was the language of the people he ruled, the inhabitants of Wessex who formed part of a larger English nation. That nation, which occupied most of the ferale arable land in the southern part of the island
of Britain, was united by its Christian religion, by its traditions, and by a form of speech which, despite wide regional varieties of dialect, was already distinct from the ‘Saxon’ of the continental Germans. From the thirteenth century onwards, however, Alfred’s ‘English’ gradually became incomprehensible to the vast majority of the Englishspeaking descendants of those same Anglo-Saxons. Scholars and divines of the Renaissance period may have revived
interest in the study of Old English texts in the hope of proving that England had traditions in Church and State which distinguished it from the rest of Europe. Nineteenth-century philologists, like Sweet, may have helped to lay the foundations of all modern textual and linguistic research, and most British students of English literature may have been obliged, until relatively recently, to acquire some kind of mastery of the earliest written form of their language, but there remains a general and almost ineradicable prejudice that the culture of early England was severed from all that came after it by the Norman Conquest of 1066. 1066 is still the most familiar date in the history of the island of Britain, and, despite Henry Sweet’s Victorian protest, many latter-day ‘barbarians’ have persisted in seeing preConquest England, and its wide and complex civilization, as somehow that of a lost tribe of ‘Anglo-Saxons’.
