This book, as the title indicates, is largely about the historical background of Old English. The term ‘Old English’ itself, however, is not unproblematical. There is no single or uniform corpus of Old English, but rather a collection of texts from about the seventh to the eleventh centuries, representing dialects spread out from the North of England to the West Country and Kent. This collection is extremely heterogeneous, as the range suggests: runic OE of the seventh century is in many ways as different from ‘classical’ literary OE of the eleventh as Chaucer's language is from Shakespeare's. Mercian OE of the ninth century is at least as different from West Saxon of the same period as the local dialects of Staffordshire now are from those of Hampshire or Dorset.

This is bad enough when one is looking backward; looking forward, as we must in trying to construct a coherent historical picture, we find that there is no OE textual tradition directly ancestral to any variety of modern standard English, of the kinds presumably native to most users of this book, or learned as a second language. There is a problem then in defining what we mean by the language name identifying our object of inquiry, and some apparently serious difficulties in talking, as we will a good deal, about ‘ancestry’.