History

The conquest of England by the Romans begins in 55 a. With Julius Caesar and it can be said that it ends with the abandonment of the last Roman legions that come to the aid of Rome besieged by Alaric in 410 AD. C. During these almost 500 years we can completely ignore the Roman conquest of the island and its occupation. England was one more province of the empire, and despite those that have been made to recover the history of this period, it must be recognized that archaeological sites remain scattered here and all. Of course, no literature from that period has survived and many years had to pass before any reference derived from the Celtic and Breton peoples, original inhabitants of the islands, whom the Romans ignored, was echoed.

Coinciding with the descent of the Germanic tribes from northern Europe to the conquest of the Roman Empire in the south, in the middle of the 5th century, the first assaults began on some of these tribes against England; at this time the last legions of the island were marching. However, sporadic invasions quickly turn into invasions and finally settlement and colonization. So gradually and not without setbacks - one of which seems to be attributed to the legendary ARTURO, the invaders pushed the Celts north and west, driving them out of the fertile lands to the east and south and taking them to Scotland, Wales and Cornwall. , an area that is globally known as celtic fringe. It is necessary to point out that when talking about these invasions, Bede the Venerable, in an attempt to offer a coherent model in such a confusing period, in his History generically groups these groups and divides them into three formidable and powerful tribes, the Saxons, the Anglos and Jutes, indicating that they are interested in the island considering it a better habitat than what they had previously enjoyed in their place of origin.

Finally, these towns ended up dividing the country into small kingdoms so that at the beginning of the 7th century we found ourselves with independent distributions. The two to the north will unite and the ten to the south of the Humber River will follow a process of fusion, thus coming to consolidate the heptarchia with the kingdoms of Northumbria and Mercia of the Angles, Wessex of the Saxons and Kent of the Jutes. But until the end of the Anglo-Saxon period a certain national unity was reached. From the point of view of literary history it is important to note that the different kingdoms alternate political leadership, although this recognition is more a matter of personal charisma than of the right of conquest.

The most representative texts of the Anglo-Saxon period, as far as prose is concerned, are Elene, Andreas, The Fates of the Apostles, St. Guthlac and The Dream of the Rood. The last of the manuscripts is the Cotton Vitellius at 15 o The Beowulf Manuscript. It contains prose and poetry, and its endowment is from the end of the 10th century and the beginning of the 11th. The texts form an eclectic group without a unifying principle, showing a predilection for the fabulous, the exotic and the wonderful, the purpose being to exemplify by means of monsters. goodness and badness.