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Old English literature

The Anglo-Saxon or Old English period goes from the invasion of Celtic England by the Angles, Saxons and Jutes in the first half of the fifth century up till the conquest in 1066 by William of Normandy. Many Anglo-Saxon poems, in the form they are extant, were not written down until perhaps two and one-half centuries after their compositions, since scribal effort had been spent on Latin, the new language of culture. This was possible thanks to the further development of the programs of King Alfred in the late tenth century and the Benedictine Revival of the early eleventh century. After their conversion to Christianity in the seventh century the Anglo-Saxons began to develop a written literature; before that period it had been oral. The Church and the Benedictine monastic foundations and their Latin culture played an important part in the development of Anglo-Saxon England cultural life, literacy and learning. No poetry surely pre-Christian in composition survives. The survival of poetry was due to the Church: it was the result of the tenth-century monastic revival. The Benedictine Revival was the crowning of a process that had begun in the sixth century and had produced a large body of English prose by the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066. Anglo-Saxon England is thought to have been rich in poetry, but very little of it survives. Most of the available corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature, little more than 30,000 lines in all, survives in just four manuscript books.

From the Anglo-Saxon period dates what is known as Old English literature, composed in the vernacular Anglo-Saxon. It includes early national poetry: Pagan Epic Poetry and Pagan Elegies,Old English Christian Poetry,Latin Writings and Old English Prose.