Old English corpus of runic inscriptions from the 5th to 7th centuries, but the oldest coherent runic texts (notably the Franks Casket) date to the 8th century. The Old English Latin alphabet was introduced around the 9th century. With the unification of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms (outside the Danelaw) by Alfred the Great in the later 9th century, the language of government and literature became standardised around the West Saxon dialect (Early West Saxon). Alfred advocated education in English alongside Latin, and had many works translated into the English language; some of them, such as Pope Gregory I's treatise "Pastoral Care", appear to
Dutch language of the local Germanic populace as opposed to Latin, the non-native language of writing and the Catholic Church. In the first text in which it is found, dating from 784, "theodisce" refers to Anglo-Saxon, the West Germanic dialects of Britain. Owing to commercial and colonial rivalry in the 16th and 17th centuries between England and the Low Countries, a cognate of "theodisk" (most likely Middle Dutch "Duutsc") was borrowed into English and developed into the exonym "Dutch", which came to refer exclusively to the people of the Netherlands. (A usage of the English term "Dutch" that includes German survives in