How far back in time can you understand English? This site goes back by centuries allowing you to test yourself.
(www.deadlanguagesociety.com)
I muddled through the 1200s with context clues, and was still catching words in the 1100s, but gave up on the 1000s. It was too brutally yuele.
I would love to find an audio version to see how far I could get on spoken word alone. Being from the Appalachians, I've always been told our dialect is older.