YouTube is one of those fantastic inventions that means anyone can get the information they need in video form. Sure, the majority of it is hype, irrelevant, sometimes plain wrong, and often naive, welcome to a democratic society. You have to do a bit of work to uncover the golden material, like a paleoarchaeologist, we brush away the crud and the muck to find the beautiful specimens waiting for us to admire. Deciphering where they belong on the grand scale of usefulness often means spending time with the content, watching, waiting for them to slip up somewhere. If they pass this brutal test of authenticity and reliability, we can feel assured in sharing the video with our people and perpetuating the good stuff against the favour of the bad.  
 
As a person born in England, to hear the term British Literature puts me in an outsider’s position. It’s called usually English Literature, even if the author was not English. If it was written in the language, it counts. British Literature, then, is a different subject. It considers works written by the British, and not necessarily in Modern English. A history of the subject must start at the beginning, and in this case, that was a time when the Latin speaking Romans left the administration opening the gates for Saxons and Angles from the German lands and the Norse from Scandinavia. The merging of these three major cultures along with the traditional homegrown Jutes, Picts, Iceni, Gaels, and Britons among others who were already here, the British and English language evolved from this pot of diverse people. Latin remained as part of the Roman Catholic Church, which established itself only a few generations after the emperors packed up. 
 
It didn’t end there, once this set-up had been left to run its course for a few hundred years, we had another inclusion of European language. The Norman invasion of 1066 saw King William defeat Harold Godwinson after his predecessor broke his promise to join the Norman and British Kingdoms. Taking the land by force, William of Normandy became the King of England and insisted that French words were used by the nobility. Because of this new influx of literary tools, the dictionary of the common people grew to incorporate this new vernacular.  
 
The way people communicate words, their meanings, and ideas that can be built from them is through literature. It therefore seems important to study the history of British literature so we can understand the evolution of the culture from a linguistic point of view. As the British personality is constructed of all the influences that surround it, the literature often gives us the best clues as to how this works from a third-person perspective. Understanding the layering of culture that decided what was right and wrong through the application of story and instruction over the two thousand years since the birth of modern British culture can help us define the future for all English-speaking people in ways that are relevant, meaningful, and effective.  
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Enjoy this Full course in the History of British Literature from Bob Ahlersmeyer

If you'd like to go even deeper into the subject and get a premium level knowledge of our shared language, I'd recommend this extraordinary book.