The author is dead. 🙂

In literary studies, we say that the biography of the author is irrelevant to the interpretation of a text because the author either managed to say what they meant to say, in which case we should be able to find it in the text itself even if we didn’t know anything about the author, or they didn’t manage to say it, in which case it doesn’t matter. (Umberto Eco said this, I think.)

It’s the same with language. If there’s something in history but the data don’t show it, it’s irrelevant. If there’s something in history and the data show it, too, you don’t need the history.

Granted, in a paper on Latin loanwords in Old English, it does make sense to mention that Britain ceased to be a Roman colony about 100 years before the coming of the Anglo-Saxons, and that the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in Britain were christianized starting in the sixth century, Latin being the language of the church. But you don’t need an extra section for it, mention it in the introduction if you like. More importantly, see if you can confirm the story with your data: do the Latin words in Old English transport Roman concepts, or are they Christian terms? You can speculate about what the contact situation is likely to have been after your analysis, on the basis of your findings.

Or take language contact with French. (The topic of Norman-French loanwords in English is banned, by the way.) Of course it’s never a bad idea to remind people of the Norman Conquest in 1066 (one sentence!), but rather than begin with “French was the language of the upper class” (How do you know? How does your history book know?), look at the loan words themselves and see what they tell you about who was or wasn’t upper class. This doesn’t belong into a “Historical Background” section, it’s in the foreground, it’s your main research interest, in fact.

Final example: Scandinavian place names and switching code. The whole point of investigating non-cognate sound substitution is to find out whether Old Norse and Old English ought to be considered different languages or not. You cannot present a tree diagram and say “look here, Old Norse is in a different branch from Old English, so they are different languages”. People draw these tree diagrams based on studies of language. They illustrate our best guess, they are not independent information. Your job is to present linguistic evidence and confirm or revise the diagrams.

Term papers are argumentative, not narrative texts. Purely narrative passages will not win you any points. You are writing about the history of English, not of England. So, whenever you’re tempted to preface your paper with a “Historical Background” section, make sure it contains only the information really necessary to understand the rest of the paper, and see if it really needs to be a separate section. You don’t have space to waste.