MIddle English is a fascinating langauge to read, as I have found, because it is exactly phonetic, people seemed to spell words according to the way they were pronounced in thier accent. Hence, you sometimes end up speaking in the accent of the writer when reading it aloud.....

I learned that RP developed from the accent spoken in the so called 'Home counties' or the Southern Counties, around Kent, Sussex, Surrey etc. Yet,as others have said, there is so much varitation, even just within England, let alone in the whole of Britain, that there is really no so thing as a 'British accent'.

The accent spoken in parts of Northern England, and the non-Gaelic accent of Soutth-Eastern Scotland is said to be the closely related to Old English, or Anglo-Saxon- probably with a fair degree of Norse thrown in.