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4 - Heading West Again: The North Sea Crossing, 400–600

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 May 2023

Peter Trudgill
Peter Trudgill
Affiliation:
Université de Fribourg, Switzerland
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Summary

During the late AD 300s and early AD 400s, 1,000 years after the arrival of Germanic-speaking tribes on the eastern shores of the North Sea and 300 years after the arrival of the Romans in Britain, boatloads of West Germanic people started crossing the North Sea to the eastern shores of Britain. Some arrivals had almost certainly come well before that, because the Romans had been employing Germanic mercenaries in their garrisons in Britain since the second century AD. These Germanic people were mostly members of the tribal groupings that we now refer to as the Jutes, Angles, Saxons and Frisians.

Keywords

Anglo-Saxon kingdomsJutesFrisiansrunesdialect contact
Type
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The Long Journey of English
A Geographical History of the Language
 , pp. 42 - 53
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2023

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References

Further Reading

Barnes, Michael. 2012. Runes: a handbook. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer.Google Scholar
Higham, Nicholas, & Ryan, Martin. 2013. The Anglo-Saxon world. London and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Holman, Katherine. 2007. The Northern Conquest: Vikings in Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Signal Books.Google Scholar
Nielsen, Hans Frede. 1998. The continental backgrounds of English and its insular development until 1154. Odense: Odense University Press.Google Scholar

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