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  Meanwhile, the Anglo-Saxon kings were still fighting for supremacy. By the late 700s, King Offa of Mercia had more or less taken control of all the kingdoms, by various means (such as beheading the king of East Anglia). Offa called himself Rex Anglorum – Latin for “King of the English.” But when he died in 796, his little empire fell apart. In the early 800s King Egbert of Wessex likewise managed, for a time, to control all the Anglo-Saxon domains, and he is sometimes counted as the first king of England.

  But while the Anglo-Saxons continued their rivalry, some Scandinavian tribes to the east, across the sea, had plans of their own. By the late 700s, these bold Norsemen (“north-men,” also called Vikings or Danes) were sailing to Britain and making fast, brutal raids – looting unprotected churches and monasteries of their gold and silver treasures, burning precious manuscripts, smashing tombs, plundering villages, stealing horses, and slaughtering people or seizing them as slaves. “‘From the fury of the Norsemen,’ prayed the peasants in their churches, ‘good Lord, deliver us!’”

  The Vikings (Danes) had learned to be the world’s best shipbuilders and sailors, because the rough northern seas were often the only road between their villages. In the 800s and 900s they were not only raiding Britain and northern France, but building their own settlements there. Sometime around the year 1000, their square-sailed, dragon-headed longboats, powered by oarsmen, even traveled as far as North America. (photo credits 6.4)

  Before long, the Danes were not only raiding and going home again. They were beginning to take over the country for themselves – just as the Anglo-Saxons had done a few centuries earlier. Year after year the Vikings attacked Britain’s coasts, and year after year they claimed more land as their own. Sometimes the Anglo-Saxons bribed them to go away, with payments called Danegeld (Danes’ gold) – but sooner or later they always came back.

  In 851, a fleet of Viking dragon boats moored in the Thames River, and the raiders burned London and Canterbury. In 865 they crossed Northumbria, looting and burning; they seized the city of York, and destroyed the school and library. In 869 they murdered the ruler of East Anglia when he refused to give up Christianity. In 872 the King of Mercia abandoned his crown and fled to Europe.

  Now only one Anglo-Saxon dominion stood against the Danes – Wessex. It was ruled by a young king named Alfred.

  The religious life offered women a refuge from difficult circumstances. For a few it was also a rare chance for a professional career. Princess Hilda of Northumbria (614-80) became a Christian when she was thirteen, and took her vows as a nun twenty years later. Revered for her wisdom and piety, she founded a church and “double convent” (for both men and women) at Whitby, on a cliff overlooking the sea. Hilda is now a saint.

  When Alfred became King of Wessex in 871, the Vikings (Norsemen) controlled all of England north of the Thames – including the city of London – and they were attacking Wessex. Unable to defeat them right away, the new king played for time, paying a large bribe of Danegeld in exchange for a few years’ peace. Meanwhile, he started building a fleet of warships to fight off the raiders. By 878 his army was able to win a decisive victory, and England was divided into Alfred’s kingdom, and a region to the north and east (called the Danelaw) that was still held by the Norse.

  Alfred trained and equipped a strong army to defend the kingdom, and fortified many of the towns. He took back London, and rebuilt it. He compiled a code of laws, reformed the justice system, and reorganized finances. He built monasteries and convents, and brought in foreign scholars to make the Church once again a center of learning. He even invented some handy household gadgets, including a candle-lantern “clock” that measured time by the burning-speed of specially made candles. While he was doing all this, he was also fending off fresh attacks by the Vikings (Norse).

  At the age of forty he learned Latin, and began translating important writings – including some by Saint Augustine – into Old English. Before then, English had been used for practical purposes like record-keeping and law-writing, and for poetry, but almost everything else was in Latin. Now, both translations and new works began to appear in Old English – Englisc, as it was called then.

  Alfred the Great (849-899) is remembered as much for his wisdom and scholarship as for his political and military feats. “There will be more wisdom,” he wrote, “the more languages we know.” (photo credits 7.1)

  The Old English verb witan meaning “know” has fallen out of use, but it still casts a shadow. Today wit means cleverness or intelligence. Unwittingly means without knowing (“He unwittingly revealed the secret.”) Wise people, witnesses, and witches and wizards are all named for their knowledge.

  There were further clashes between the English and the Norse after Alfred’s death in 899. In 1012, the Archbishop of Canterbury was slaughtered by drunken Vikings. For a short while, from 1016 to 1042, Norse kings once again ruled much of England. But Alfred was the turning point. He brought the Anglo-Saxons together, restored Christianity, and showed his people that they could be one great nation, with a language and literature of their own. For all of this, history remembers him as Alfred the Great.

  Many of our most basic day-to-day words – land, cow, sheep, dog, plow, bread – come from Old English. This and that come from this and thaet. Our comparisons of long, longer, longest come from Old English lang, lengra, lengest. But as many of the invaders adopted Christianity, and the two peoples lived together and intermarried, their language – Old Norse – affected Old English. About seven percent of our words – take, get, and keep; sky, skin, and skirt – come from the Vikings. He is from Old English, but they is from Old Norse.

  Etheldrida was a princess of East Anglia. As a girl she loved to wear fancy necklaces, but later she became deeply religious. When she developed a tumor on her neck, she saw it as God’s punishment for her youthful vanity. After her death she became Saint Audrey, and the cheap, badly made lace sold in her honor — “Saint Audrey’s lace” — gave us our word tawdry (t’audrey), meaning gaudy but worthless.

  As Norse words passed into English, people could choose between an English-based term and a Norse-based one: wish or want, craft or skill, hide or skin. Over time, those similar words picked up slightly different meanings, different associations, and the English language grew more subtle and versatile. We still have distinctions like this, even if we don’t think about them. For example, Nativity and Yule both mean “Christmas” – but Nativity (“birth,” from a Latin root) suggests the religious side of the season, while Yule – from Old Norse jol, a twelve-day pagan festival – suggests a jolly good party. (Yes, jolly is also from jol.)

  Old English nouns and pronouns varied depending on their case, but the changes were not as complicated as they had been in Latin and Greek. In fact, many pronouns looked very similar to ours:

  In Old Norse, by meant “town.” Today, bylaws are town laws (such as parking laws), and town names like Grimsby, Whitby, and Rugby echo those long-ago Viking invasions.

  Although these forms haven’t changed much in the past thousand years, people still get confused about the cases of pronouns. I or me? He and she, or him and her? There’s an easy trick that can help you keep them straight.

  Are these sentences right or wrong?

  Dad saw John and I.

  Mom wants she and Chris to go.

  Harry thinks Lily and us are right.

  Kids like you and I know a lot!

  If you’re not sure (and here’s the BIG SECRET), drop one of the people. Drop John and, and Chris, Lily and and you and. See how wrong they all sound now? So if you’re ever not sure which pronoun to use, you can either stop and think about the case – is it the subject or the object of the verb? – or you can try dropping that confusing other person!

  Old English had some letters we don’t have: (th as in “cloth”), (th as in “clothe”), and (a w sound). A and E joined together ( or ) sounded like a in “cat.”

  But if Old English and Old Norse were both inflected, with words changing their form depending on how they were used, why don’t we have all those endings in modern English? As the Norse and Anglo-Saxons struggled to understand each other, they probably gave up most of the pesky endings, just to save trouble.

  After all, if you were talking to someone who didn’t speak much English, would you say, “Might I trouble you to pass the salt?” Or “Pass the salt, please”?

  Much of what we know about Anglo-Saxon times comes from Saint Bede, who wrote – by hand, of course – countless works of history, religion, medicine, astronomy, even poetry and grammar. Bede was born about two hundred years before Alfred’s reign, in the days when most prose was still written in Latin. Other works – poems, word games, and long, elaborate riddle-verses – were sometimes written in Old English. What creature shoots from the stomach and can “serve no master when unstrung”? What complains that “Everybody lifts me, grips me, and chops off my head”? (See end of chapter.) But most of these writings have been lost, and the ones that survive are often anonymous.

  When Bede (673-735) was just seven years old, he was sent to the northern monastery of Jarrow. He spent almost all his life there, studying in the monastery’s library and filling it with his own books – including a history of the English people (in Latin) ever since the days of Julius Caesar. Because of his intelligence and tireless scholarship, he’s often called the Venerable (much-revered) Bede. (photo credits 8.1)

  The earliest English poet we know by name was a man called Caedmon, who lived around 670. In those days, before TV or radio or even printed books, poets recited works by memory, to entertain and inspire their audiences. According to Bede, Caedmon was an uneducated stablehand at the abbey in Whitby. One night a vision came to him and he was suddenly able to make up a hymn praising the weorc Wuldor-Faeder (“work of the Glory-Father,” meaning God). Caedmon remained in Whitby as a lay brother (not a monk), composing other works.

  In 1898 a sandstone cross was erected at Whitby with this picture of Caedmon; notice the horses in the stable. (The image of Saint Hilda in Chapter 6 is from the same cross.)

  Although Old English looks hard to read, the sounds suggest modern English. Speaking of God, Caedmon says, He aerest sceop eorthan bearnum heofon to hrofe. Try reading that out loud (pronouncing sc as sh) and comparing it to this translation: “He first shaped for earth’s bairns [children] heaven as a roof …” (The next thing God shaped, according to Caedmon, was middangeard – middle earth.)

  The most famous Old English work is Beowulf, an epic poem of over three thousand lines celebrating the feats of a “prince of warriors,” and his courage and honor. The story comes from the myths and history of Scandinavia, where the adventures are set. We don’t know when or where the poem was first recited, but the version that has come down to us is from a manuscript more than a thousand years old.

  Beowulf defeats a gruesome monster, Grendel, ripping off Grendel’s arm with his bare hands. Grendel’s mother later attacks Beowulf in vengeance, and Beowulf dives to the bottom of a haunted lake and slays her and cuts off her head. Beowulf becomes king, but many years later he has to defend his people against a fiery dragon. The dragon is defeated but Beowulf dies in the battle, and is mourned as a noble and beloved leader.

  Like Caedmon’s poem, Beowulf is built out of short half-lines that build up into sentences. The lines are held together not by rhyme, which the English rarely used in those days, but by powerful rhythm and lots of alliteration (words beginning with the same sound). Try reading these phrases out loud, pausing at the break; imagine how dramatic they would have sounded to an audience sitting in a great hall lit only by a fire, surrounded by darkness.

  Grendel gongan Godes yrre baer …

  (Grendel walked in, bearing God’s ire [anger]) ….

  on fagne flor feond treddode …

  (on the fine floor the fiend trod) ….

  Here’s the opening of Beowulf, in Old English written around 1000. This manuscript – the only one surviving from ancient times – was badly damaged in a fire in 1731, before any copies had been made, so some bits have been lost forever. The word order differs from ours, but the beginning says, “Truly we have heard of the glory of the Spear Danes’ kings [cyninga] in yore-days [in gear-dagum].” Gar is an old word for spear; the Danes are called Gar dena. (photo credits 8.2)

  Late in Alfred’s reign, once Old English had been established as a language for serious writing, some monks began compiling a historical record called The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. They filled in past events from whatever sources they could find, and kept adding to the book as the years went by. Here’s some of the description of the desperate, bloody year when Alfred became king:

  871: Then King Æthered fought the troops of the [Viking] kings, and King Barsecg [of the Vikings] was killed; and Æthered’s brother Alfred fought the troops of the Viking earls, … and many thousand were slain, and they were fighting until nightfall. About a fortnight later, King Æthered and Alfred his brother fought the invading force at Basing, and there the Vikings were victorious. Two months after that, King Æthered and Alfred his brother fought at Merton, and there was great slaughter on both sides, but the Vikings controlled the battlefield…. Over Easter, King Æthered died; he had ruled for five years…. Then Alfred son of Æthelwulf came to the throne of Wessex. About a month later, King Alfred fought with a small company against the whole Viking force…. In that year, nine great battles were fought against the invading Vikings in the kingdom south of the Thames….

  J.R.R. Tolkien was a professor of English with a special interest in early languages. When he wrote Lord of the Rings he borrowed words from Old English: an orc is a demon, an ent is a giant, and the name of Rohan’s King Theoden means “ruler.” As for the dread land of Mordor, morthor is Old English for “death, destruction;” it’s the root of our word murder.

  At last, English was the accepted language of prose and poetry, of science and history, of law-writing and account-keeping. Priests and scholars might still work in Latin and Greek, but English had finally won its place as the language of England.

  Or so it seemed.

  ANSWERS

  England was not the only land invaded by the Vikings. During the 800s, the Norsemen had sent their dragon boats up the rivers of northern France, raiding and burning Paris and other cities. Then they had moved in and begun building settlements. In 911, to put an end to their raids, the French king had granted them land on the north coast of France. The Norse leader had converted to Christianity and had been made a duke. Now these Vikings were called Normans, their territory was Normandy, and they came to speak their own Norman version of French.

  By 1042, England was ruled by a religious but weak king named Edward the Confessor. Edward was descended from Alfred the Great, but his mother was from Normandy and he had grown up in the Norman court. Many people in England thought he was much too friendly with the Normans. Apparently Edward even promised the English throne to their leader, William, Duke of Normandy, since Edward himself had no heir.

  In 1064, a rich and powerful English nobleman – Harold, Earl of Wessex – was shipwrecked on the coast of Normandy. It seems that he vowed to support the duke’s claim to the throne of England. (Harold may have been forced to make this promise.) But two years later, when Edward the Confessor died, it was Harold who took over the throne.

  (photo credits 9.1)

  William of Normandy’s victory is portrayed in the Bayeux Tapestry, an ancient strip of embroidered linen that is 230 feet (70m) long. The Latin shown here says, Harold Rex Inter-fectus Est — “King Harold is killed.” According to legend, Harold was shot in the eye with an arrow, but experts aren’t sure whether he’s the victim on the left, or the one on the right – or both! (photo credits 9.2)

  William of Normandy was furious. He loaded troops onto a fleet of ships and sailed for England, to claim the country for himself. The two armies met in battle near the town of Hastings in October 1066, shooting rafts of arrows, hurling spears, dueling face to face with swords, clubs, and battle-axes. The Normans probably had no more than five thousand soldiers, but they had one great advantage: their knights rode horses specially bred and trained for combat. The English used horses for transportation, but they had never before faced an enemy fighting from horseback.

  By the end of the day King Harold was dead, and so were many of his noblemen. William of Normandy – who was clever and practical, but merciless – led his army across southern England and seized the city of London. On Christmas Day he was crowned England’s new king – William the Conqueror.

  The Normans expanded their power throughout England, building massive stone castles with moats and drawbridges, and manning them with soldiers. One by one, the English lords were killed or driven from their lands, and Norman barons took their place. Each baron had to keep a host of armed knights ready to do battle whenever the king needed them. Norman French was suddenly the language of law and government, the language of the ruling class, the language of fashionable literature.

  When William of Normandy landed in England in 1066, he set up camp inside the walls of Anderida, a sea fort built by the Romans eight hundred years earlier to hold off the Vikings. After defeating King Harold, the Normans built Pevensey Castle on Anderida’s remains, and used it for about two hundred years. Notice the mighty keep (refuge) at the back, and the twin towers of the gatehouse in front, where the bridge crosses the moat. In the 1500s, when Spain sent a vast “Armada” of warships against England, Pevensey was refortified to resist the attack. In World War II, machine-gun posts were hidden in Pevensey’s walls in case of a German invasion. (photo credits 9.3)