ABSTRACT
It was during this period, from about 450, that English-speaking peoples first settled in the British Isles. They were people of diverse origins and affiliations, and the chief thing they had in common was language. People of similar speech occupied extensive territories in Scandinavia and Continental Europe; they did not form any kind of political unity, but were organised in numerous tribes and small bands. As a whole, they and their language may be designated Germanic. Then, as later in England, when they occupied territory they did not usually claim it as a geographical block, but simply took over the parts it suited them to live in - coasts, river valleys, lowish country that was neither fen nor forest. This type of occupation is very extravagant of land-resources, and in a time of rising population leads to constant expansion. In the early centuries of the Christian era the population of the Germanic peoples apparently did rise continually, and perhaps even sharply. For this, and probably for less immediately practical reasons, those centuries were a time of movement, of a long and complex pattern of raiding and settlement known as the age of migrations. Germanic territories in Scandinavia gave little scope for expansion; as population rose settlers could only move south, east or west. Already before our period one great wave of southward expansion had carried the Goths from southern Scandinavia to the Mediterranean. The early separation of this group led to the development of their speech (East Germanic or Gothic) on lines different from those followed elsewhere in the Germanic world-just how different it is hard to say, since our principal evidence for Gothic is confined to a date earlier than that of most other Germanic records; we cannot altogether compare like with like. Within the Germanic family of languages, the threefold division into North, East and West, with a rather close relationship between the first two, is the primary grouping, but another line of division has come to intersect it. After the early migrations, the Germanic peoples were geographically distributed in two linguistically significant groups. There are inland Continental peoples - those around the Mediterranean, and east of it, and those in what is now central and southern Germany; and there are coastal peoples, those of Scandinavia, the North Sea coasts, etc., who remain sea-goers, and thus, to some extent in touch with each other. The dialects of the inland peoples will predominantly develop divergently, while those of the coastal peoples will in some respects converge. Though we have spoken of the Germanic languages as forming a family, the metaphor must not be pushed too far. In particular it will mislead if it makes us think of a single, unidirectional line of descent. The relationships between the Germanic dialects are by no means simple, and one reason is that after initial movements of divergence on one pattern, some dialects are caught up in movements of convergence, on quite a different pattern. The complexity of relationships in such a small and homogeneous language-group as this must be remembered when we try to find a model by which we can understand the much more complicated and heterogeneous situation from which Germanic itself evolved.
