Languages often present cases in which two rules together express content some of which cannot be attributed to either rule individually. The inflection of regular verbs in Breton presents several examples of this sort; holistic rule combinations are a way of modeling this phenomenon. Some instances of holistic combination have an emergent character; these are cases in which all of the forms realized by the composite of two rules happen to possess a property P that neither rule realizes on its own. In such cases, the composite is open to reanalysis as a holistic combination realizing P. Limbu verb morphology provides an example of this sort. A particularly compelling case for the postulation of holistic combinations arises in systems in which the same two rules express different holistic content in different contexts; Old English verb inflection is a system of this sort.

Literary practice is a distinctive form of historical thinking and early medieval culture is an important component of literary creativity and innovation in the 1940s and 1950s. This chapter examines the opportunities early medieval English poetry afforded writers and scholars in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s. Modern writers in this period negotiated the medieval past in their work in different ways. Outright hostility sits alongside an awareness that thinking of the medieval is a necessary component of modern culture. To give a sense of this literary engagement, this chapter offers an account of Old English at the mid-century in relation to four profoundly different writers, Kingsley Amis (1922–1995), Gavin Bone (1907–1942), Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman, 1894–1983), and Angus Wilson (1913–1991). The work of these writers and scholars demonstrates that early medieval culture is part of a broader post-War inquiry into society, culture, sexuality, race and ethnocentrism.

Vernacular literature in English first developed in two separate iterations: the first ‘Old English’, the language brought to the island by Germanic invaders in the fifth century, and used (alongside Latin) in writing from as early as the seventh century; the second, after the hiatus brought about by the Norman Conquest, the twelfth-century re-emergence of ‘Early Middle English’, a non-standardized rendering of a fast-changing vernacular, dialectally highly variant, in constant textual contact with Latin and French. This chapter discusses each in turn, arguing that Old English literature, for all its astonishing precocity, variety, and brilliance, provides us with a fascinating study of a centuries-long, and eventually truncated, ‘beginning’: a vernacular literature sustained over time by a particular, and crucially coterminous, audience and patronage context (the royal or aristocratic court; the monastery) without ever reaching the point of being self-sustaining. In contrast, Early Middle English emerged spontaneously in the margins of multilingual manuscripts, and as an act of translation and adaptation without institutional support or aristocratic patronage; but it emerged into a different world, in which growing community literacy gave it an audience – potentially the whole population – that would drive its development ever forward.

This chapter introduces the principal methodologies used in the book. It describes the existing tools for the study of Old and Middle English, including grammars, dictionaries, handbooks and corpora, and explains that while their direct documentation of twelfth-century English is scanty, the information they contain can be reconceptualised to help date texts to the twelfth century, assess the likely effect of twelfth-century texts on their readers and evaluate the extent to which they inherited earlier conventions for writing English. This approach is exemplified with reference to four different English versions of Ps 111.9 found in manuscripts copied in the final two-thirds of the twelfth century and which are typical of the kinds of text that the book as a whole treats: understudied, textually complex and requiring a gamut of philological techniques to be fully understood and contextualised.

This chapter emphasises the principal finding of the book, that the practices for writing English developed before 1066 survived the Norman Conquest. It offers a reading of the short poem, ‘Sanctus Beda was iboren her’, taking it as typical of the texts considered in the book, with no agreed title, an uncertain date of composition and viewed here as “Old” English, there as “Middle” English. It argues the poem, often read as an indictment of post-Conquest cultural rupture, in fact speaks powerfully to the continuities between twelfth-century texts and earlier works. The chapter closes by considering other genres the book has not mentioned but for which English was occasionally used in the long twelfth century, including non-homiletic religious texts, prognostics, glosses, medical works and memoranda.

This chapter examines ten or so English language or bilingual documents obtained, produced, copied, adapted and forged at Christ Church Canterbury between the 1090s and the mid 1150s. Beginning with a remarkable series of bilingual writs issued by Henry I and his successors, it also analyses a purported bilingual notification of Cnut, apparently confected around 1100, and a remarkable English-language version of a diploma of Cnut, relating to the port of Sandwich, produced at approximately the same time, as well as a document of Æthelred contrived from it fifty years later. Consideration of the documents suggests this activity involved monks, both English and French, who felt the use of English made their contentious claims more plausible. In the hundred years after the Norman Conquest, these men continued, and even expanded, the range of ways in which English could be used as a language of documentary record.

This chapter considers the maintenance of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle at Christ Church Canterbury in the first decade of the twelfth century, as well as the acquisition, adaptation, expansion and recopying of earlier manuscripts of the Chronicle contemporary with it. It argues those involved were of both English and foreign descent and worked with a knowledge of the template for vernacular annalistic writing laid down in King Alfred’s reign and developed over the succeeding 150 years. However, in their overt monastic chauvinism, length, use of first person pronouns and direct speech and disregard for chronological organisation, their additions, especially of documents, also anticipated developments in twelfth-century historiography. The Chronicle tradition in effect came to an end at Christ Church by the 1120s, elsewhere by the 1130s, a consequence of changes in the twelfth-century linguistic ecology, the success of Latin translations and, arguably, the innovations introduced by its early twelfth-century adapters.

The Introduction shows that English language writing from the long twelfth century (1050 - 1215) has been seriously neglected in existing literary and linguistic histories because it falls between the subperiods of ‘Old’ and ‘Middle’ English. It argues for a rapprochment between literary and linguistic approaches, finding this in philology and seeing the question of the continuity between the two subperiods as residing primarily in the extent to which texts composed after the Norman Conquest inherited the conventions developed for writing in different genres before 1066 during the process of textualisation (Verschriftlichung). In addition to this focus on genre, the new literary history offered in the book, the chapter explains, sees English texts as the product of a multilingual literary environment, integrates consideration of the revision, adaptation and remediation of older texts alongside the investigation of the composition of new texts, and explores regional modulations in the writing of English.

This chapter argues that sermons are the one genre where there is a more-or-less continuous tradition of using English through the long twelfth century, a consequence of the pragmatic necessity of communicating with a largely monoglot laity. It begins with an account of twelfth-century preaching and the role of written texts vernacular and Latin in its performance. It then considers the Vespasian Homilies, a booklet of four sermons produced in Kent around 1200, focusing on Vespasian 2, which it argues is a distinctively Middle English text, probably composed around 1150, but which shows substantive debts to Ælfric and pre-Conquest textual culture. The final section of the chapter considers, along with two other related manuscripts, the Lambeth Homilies, copied around 1200 in Worcestershire, showing that similar continuities and developments can be traced there. Sermons, in short, were the primary vehicle for the continuity of practices for writing English in the period.

This chapter offers an analysis of the shifting fortunes of Latin, English and French between the mid eleventh and early thirteenth centuries, through the lens of linguistic ecology, drawing evidence from metalinguistic commentary in narrative sources, surviving texts, prosopography and onomastics and the findings of the linguistic subdiscipline of language contact. It argues for distinguishing between the period between 1066 and 1140, when the relatively high status English had enjoyed before the Norman Conquest reduced primarily at the hands of Latin, from that between 1050 and 1215, when emergence of French as a literary language, coupled with other late-twelfth-century social changes, more significantly diminished English’s importance as a written language. The chapter closes with some reflections on the factors that condition language choice in multilingual societies, rejecting a simple equation of language and identity.

This chapter assesses the linguistic evidence of politeness in medieval Britain. The written sources are scarce, especially for the Anglo-Saxon period. An analysis of relevant lexical items suggests that in Old English, politeness in the modern sense did not play a significant role. Discernment politeness (i.e. the appropriateness of behaviour in given situations) was more important in a strictly hierarchical society, and in religious contexts there is evidence of a politeness of humility and gentleness. The influence of French on Middle English brought new concepts, in particular the concept of courtesy. Detailed case studies of Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and of the anonymous poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight show how this concept reflects a new type of courtly politeness.

What connections might be found between those who write history and the different kinds of histories they write? An emphasis on gender often focuses on the dynamics of women’s collaborative authorship, whether produced anonymously or in the form of patron and client relationships. But it also highlights the fact that sole authorship is often associated with male writers; with masculinity. Beginning with the Earliest Life of Gregory the Great, an anonymous Life that may have been composed by a woman, the chapter next addresses Æthelweard’s Latin Chronicle, written by a secular, elite male author for and in collaboration with a female patron and family relation, Abbess Matilda of Essen. It concludes with another kind of history, that of the anonymous Old English poem, Widsith, and the insight that the sheer variety of early medieval historiography is also suggestive of the different uses of gender by its authors.

Literary representations of climate come in a range of forms, informed as much by culture as by physical conditions. The interregional applicability of climate motifs has implications for their dissemination, as narratives relying on specific environmental variables may tend to spread less widely unless they are read as accounts of the exotic. This chapter introduces responses to climate in medieval European literature by examining one motif at either extreme of the universality spectrum. Icelandic prose responds to Iceland’s short growing season by rooting many of its feuds in tensions over natural resources, with a prominent role for hay as the island’s most productive crop. At the other extreme, homiletic accounts of end-time climate describe conditions beyond anyone’s experience but made universally relatable by way of an analogy between world history and human ageing.

Over the past decade, anthropogenic climate change has encouraged authors and readers to confront new modes of imagining time, selfhood, and narrative and to reassess the relationships among experiential, historical, and climatological time. In Western literary culture, historical and climatological time traditionally have seemed one and the same. Working within the 5000-year time frame of biblical history, writers envisioned a world that, since the sixth day of creation, always has been inhabited and therefore always had been shaped and reshaped by humans. In this worldview, ‘nature’ is always a product of anthropogenic intervention. Beginning around 1800, however, work in geology, planetary astronomy, and palaeontology transformed conceptions of climate by decoupling planetary history from human experience, memory, and myth. In giving narrative form to the collision of experiential and climatological time, Anthropocene fiction explores the problem that science fiction often seems more ‘realistic’ than traditional narrative realism.