Chris McCully

Chris is editing Adam Knott's extensive work on 'A history of English - in three minutes' for electronic publication. By clicking on the links below you will find section-by-section information on the history of the English language. The sections are themed. Just click on the topic which you would like to research. Additions to this work will be made periodically, as the relevant shoe-boxes are found and become available, so please check back if you can't immediately find what you're looking for.

NOTE: because it remains in copyright, and indeed in its original shoe-boxes, no part of this work may ever be reproduced in any form whatsoever, and those who attempt to sing it (or even hum it a bit) in churches will be visited by the full, and not inconsiderable, weight of Adam Knott's legal team.

Grimm's Law i-mutation Breaking Palatal Diphthongisation Inflections WO in OE Anglo-Saxon manuscripts Specimen of Old English poetry Specimen OE translation (prose) Beowulf Anglo-Saxon alliterative verse Translating OE poetry Anglo-Saxon prose Old English morphology Old Norse and Old English Late Old English Old English pronouns Towards the Norman Conquest The linguistic situation in post-Conquest England The Peterborough Chronicle The history of the definite article English in the 12th century Early 13th century poetry The history of modal verbs in Middle English The emergence of written English Chaucer The language of Piers Plowman Chaucer's final -e The language of Gawain Chaucer and Chaucerians The language of the Paston Letters John Skelton and his era Middle English Open Syllable Lengthening French loan-words in later Middle English The English Bible and early printed books The Great Vowel Shift English in the Tudor period