Julius Caesar arrived in 55 B.C., and Britain became part of the Roman Empire a century later. Under Rome, until A.D. 410, the official and commercial languages of local government in "Londinium" (London) and other towns were Latin and Celtic.

The Jutes, Angles, Saxons, and Frisians invaded Britain in stages, peaking in the mid-400s. These Germanic speakers defeated the Britons, who were a Romanized, partly Christianized, Celtic population. The Britons fled to Ireland, France (Brittany), and Wales. Even today, a Frenchman selling onions can speak with some people in the U.K. in their common Gaelic (e.g. Breton) language.

The language of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms is called Old English, especially the Wessex dialect. Dr. Christopher Page says that many of the basic, little words of English come from Anglo-Saxon words. Although English has borrowed few word from Celtic, the conversion of Anglo-Saxons to Christianity resulted in the borrowing of many Greek and Latin words, e.g.: altar, angel, martyr.

In 793, during the Viking invasion of Britain, the great monestary at Lindesfarne was destroyed. The attacks continued for many years, and by 870, the only remaining Anglo-Saxon king was Alfred of Wessex. England became divided by a line, and the land northeast of the line became part of Denmark. Southwest of the line, King Alfred, the Great, commisioned the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and he encouraged the use of Old English for writing as well as speech.

Professor Tom Shippey says that, because of the history of language mixing of Old English and Old Norse, the noun and verb paradigms become simplified. Around the year 1000, the ancestor of modern English was created in the little valleys inhabited by English and Danish farmers.

In 1066, the Normans conquered England, and French became the language of government, law, and administration; and for about 300 years, the kings of England did not speak English. By 1155, the writing of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle had ended, and English was no longer written, but English continued to be spoken by the poor and rural people. There was a lot of French-English intermarriage, and, because about 10,000 new words were borrowed, the English vocabulary became about twice as large as that of other European languages.

Geoffrey Chaucer was the first great author of genius to write in English, and we call his English of the Canterbury Tales "Middle English".

The greatest writer of Elizabethan English was William Shakespeare.