If I was to time travel, how far back could I go and still have a conversation with someone in my high street?

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I am sorry if I have asked this before, it is one of those things that I think about every now and then, but have no idea what the answer is.

My home town is now a West London suburb and has a quite long history.

I'm fairly sure that if I travelled back 100 years, I would still be able to understand the language of people around me, maybe even 200 years, though I imagine the accent would be a heck of a lot different to nowadays.

300 years ago? I doubt if I could understand much of what was being said.

I have no evidence to base my thoughts upon, so I was wondering if anyone out there could give a rough estimate as to how far back I could travel, and still understand people.

I really enjoyed 'Tulip Fever' by Deborah Moggach, a fictional love story set during the Tulip Mania era in the Netherlands. Very evocative of seventeenth-century Amsterdam.

Does English still borrow words from other languages?

Thank you for the link. I'd missed that article.