Some Facts from the History of the Franks: Migration, Language, and Relations with Britain

This chapter deals with some facts from the history of the Franks. It discusses the geographical movement of the Germanic tribes. A particular attention is paid to the Franks, who crossed the frontier, almost completely conquered Gaul, and founded the strong Frankish Realm on the remnants of the former Roman Empire. The chapter discusses the formation and inter-influence of the West Germanic languages determined by the movement of the Germanic tribes. Special attention is paid to the language of the Franks— Old Low Franconian, which developed from North Sea Germanic. The vowel system of the latter was similar to British Celtic spoken around 500 A.D. Moreover, the Angles’ language was the unspecified Ingvaeonic Germanic dialect known as North Sea Germanic, while the Saxons spoke one of the varieties of the Germanic dialects. Their mixture with British Celtic gave rise to the English language that draws our attention to the Frankish-British relations. These relations are discussed on the background of different scholars’ (Drew’s, Wood’s, Bavuso’s, Leneghan’s, and others) suppositions as well as according to various contexts, particularly, the royal marriages of the Kings of Wessex and Kent, the distribution of imports in the early Anglo-Saxon sites, the development of the sphere of medicine and maritime life, the missionary and monasterial works that strengthened the links binding England to the continent, etc. The results of the research revealed that there was an evident inter-influence of the Frankish and British societal lives of the sixth to tenth centuries.