The earliest written works in Old English were originally composed orally and passed down verbally before being written down. Little of their early oral poetry survives. The English learned to write after converting to Christianity in 597 AD, with the first written works appearing around 600 AD when King Aethelberht of Kent had the first English law code written down using the Roman alphabet.

6. The Angles, the Saxons and the Jutes were illiterate. The earliest written works in Old English (as
their language is now known to scholars) were probably composed orally at first, and may have been
passed on from speaker to speaker before being written. However, of their earliest oral poetry, probably
used for panegyric, magic, and short narrative, little or none survives.
The English learned to write only after they had been converted to Christ by missionaries sent
from Rome in 597. Strictly, there is no Old English writing that is not Christian, since the only literates
were clerics. English was first written about the year 600 when King Aethelberht of Kent was
persuaded by St Augustine of Canterbury that he needed a written law-code; it was written with the
Roman alphabet.

9. RUNES ALPHABETS

25. THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY
 The beginning of the middle English prose was marked by John Wycliffe’s translation of the Bible into the London
dialect.
 William Langland ( 1330 or 1331-1400) created a poem The Vision of Piers the plowman.
 Geoffrey Chaucer (1340-1400) showed his masterpiece The Canterbury Tales , a true panorama of 14th century
England. Geoffrey Chaucer’s writings are usually divided into three periods :
1. The first one is the French Period
2. The second period of Chaucer’s writing was that of the Italian influence (The House of Fame, The Parliament Foules
).
3. The third English period of Chaucer’s creative work, The Canterbury Tales.
 Geoffrey Chaucer, the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages.

26. THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
 The fifteenth century was marked by the appearance of the first printed press by William Caxton (1476) in
Westminster, London. The second printing press was set up at Oxford. During the next fifteen years, he
printed 65 books (Sir Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur and the works of Geoffrey Chaucer).
 Caxton was a well-educated person who knew French.
 Sir Thomas Malory used to be a knight and took part in the hundred years’ war and in the war of Roses.
 Le Morte Darthur, the first English prose collection by Sir Thomas Malory completed in 1469 or 1470 (translated
from French).