Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature. The term Anglo-Saxon was frequently applied, in the works of the last three centuries, to the earliest forms of the English language, up to the date of the Norman Conquest and a little later. English, in short, was described as Anglo-Saxon so long as it remained an inflected tongue, and no longer. The word, however, was never used by the people themselves who spoke that language: from the earliest times they knew themselves, collectively at least, as Engle, and their tongue as Englisc (or in Latin as Angli and Lingua Anglica). The Teutonic settlers of Southern Britain, commonly called Anglo-Saxons, were divided indeed into two main branches—one northern, the Anglians or English (in their own dialect,
Engle), who occupied the eastern coast from the Firth of Forth to the farther limit of Suffolk (see ANGLES); and one southern, the Saxons (in their own dialect, Seaxe), who held the portion of the island from Essex to Dorsetshire, extending inland to Oxford and the Severn valley. But even the Saxons appear from the beginning to have recognised themselves in a wider sense as Engle too: certainly they called their language Englisc, and as soon as the territory under the overlordship of the West-Saxon kings acquired a general name at all, it was known, not as Saxonia and Saxonland, but as Anglia and England.
The word Anglo-Saxon was applied only at a much later date to the early Teutonic inhabitants of South Britain and their language, after the latter had become so far obsolete in form and vocabulary as only to be comprehensible by means of special study. Professor Freeman, Dr Stubbs (Bishop of Chester), Mr J. R. Green, and others strongly argue for a return to the old and true name English; and since 1867 this return has become very general in linguistic and historical works. For particulars as to the Anglo-Saxon language and literature, therefore, see ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE: for Anglo-Saxon history, see ENGLAND. It is probable, however, that the word Anglo-Saxon, having taken deep root in the vocabulary of every-day life, will continue to designate, in popular speech, the early inflected form of the English language, and will still more widely be employed as a general name for the Teutonic element in the ethnology of Britain—an element now so largely mixed with the Celtic as to be practically almost indistinguishable. Even as a name for the language of King Alfred, it is still employed by Mr Sweet and many other eminent scholars. See Freeman's Norman Conquest, vol. i.; Green's History of the English People; Koch's Historische Grammatik der Englischen Sprache; Mätzner's Englische Grammatik (trans. 1874); Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Reader; Grein's Bibliothek der Angelsächsischen Poesie, and the same author's Bib. der Ang. Prosa; Green's Making of England; and Grant Allen's Anglo-Saxon Britain. The only recent Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, Bosworth's (new ed. by Professor Toller), is far from a good one.