‘The period of history which we now call ‘Anglo-Saxon’ lasted from about the mid-fifth century to the end of the eleventh, after the Norman conquest. Most surviving Anglo Saxon manuscripts date from the latter part of that period and the majority of them are in Latin, but England was unique in Early Medieval Europe in having a thriving vernacular literature also – written in a language we all now call ‘Old English’ to distinguish it from the ‘Middle English’ stage of the evolving language, which culminated in the works of Chaucer and Malory’.
“A language and culture brought to us in the cut and thrust of sword and axe, the cry of the woman in her labour pains and the serf sifting the grain and obeying his thegn in the battle line.”
