Which stage of English came before Middle English?

The stage of English that came before Middle English was Old English.

Old English, also called Anglo-Saxon or Englisc, developed from West Germanic varieties brought to Britain by Angles, Saxons, and Jutes from around the 5th century. It was the earliest extensively attested form of English and was spoken across much of what is now England and southeastern Scotland.

The language changed gradually rather than switching overnight. The Norman Conquest of 1066 brought sustained contact with Anglo-Norman French, while Old Norse had already influenced English in areas settled by Scandinavians. Over the following centuries, inflectional endings weakened and vocabulary changed, producing Middle English, conventionally dated from about 1150 to 1500.

Modern readers should not confuse Old English with an old-fashioned version of today’s language. Texts such as Beowulf are largely unintelligible without study. Old English had dialects including West Saxon, Mercian, Northumbrian, and Kentish, and it could be written first with runes and later with a Latin-based alphabet.