This final collection of the author's papers devoted to the history of English comprises ten recent (revised) contributions to conferences, journals and festschriften combined with a few original chapters. Topics range from corpus linguistics to linguistic problems of editing, text type analysis and to the impact of rhetoric, and from semantic change to transnational problems of medieval texts. These are framed by an outline account of the structural development of English and the contribution of world English to historical linguistics. Finally, an annotated bibliography of the 300 most relevant titles of the discipline is included.