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Why Old English was first deciphered
Sunday, March 15th, 2026 09:55 pmThe first printer in England, William Caxton, wrote people bringing him manuscripts to print, and how he would modernise the English in them, replacing "thridde" for instance with "third"; but also that he would turn away manuscripts in Old English, because he could not understand them at all.
Musing about this, I wondered if there was a time when knowledge of Old English was lost, and subsequently painstakingly recovered, or was Caxton's problem simply that he relied on his own abilities, and didn't call in scholarly experts? So I did what one does under such circumstances and asked ChatGPT.
Turns out that when thinking of, for example, the twelfth-century mini-Renaissance, I had forgotten to take into account that English was at that time the despised language of a conquered people, and all official business took place in Latin and French. Old English was not studied at all, and all knowledge of it had lapsed. What is interesting, though, is why scholars later went to the considerable effort (considering Old English's highly complex grammar and many words which had dropped out by the Early Modern English period) of deciphering the language.
It was during the English Reformation, and scholars wanted to prove that the early English Church had traditions independent of Rome, which is why they began studying Anglo-Saxon texts.
Early scholars included the Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker, the antiquarian historian William Camden, and Elizabeth Elstob, who wrote one of the first grammars of Old English in 1715, and came from my old stomping grounds in Newcastle upon Tyne.
Musing about this, I wondered if there was a time when knowledge of Old English was lost, and subsequently painstakingly recovered, or was Caxton's problem simply that he relied on his own abilities, and didn't call in scholarly experts? So I did what one does under such circumstances and asked ChatGPT.
Turns out that when thinking of, for example, the twelfth-century mini-Renaissance, I had forgotten to take into account that English was at that time the despised language of a conquered people, and all official business took place in Latin and French. Old English was not studied at all, and all knowledge of it had lapsed. What is interesting, though, is why scholars later went to the considerable effort (considering Old English's highly complex grammar and many words which had dropped out by the Early Modern English period) of deciphering the language.
It was during the English Reformation, and scholars wanted to prove that the early English Church had traditions independent of Rome, which is why they began studying Anglo-Saxon texts.
Early scholars included the Archbishop of Canterbury Matthew Parker, the antiquarian historian William Camden, and Elizabeth Elstob, who wrote one of the first grammars of Old English in 1715, and came from my old stomping grounds in Newcastle upon Tyne.
