what was so important about Old English and Middle English that we felt the need to label them and what are the main differences?
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Old English was a Germanic language, brought to England by the Anglo-Saxon settlers near the end of Roman rule of Britain, around 410 AD.
Middle English came into existence when with the Norman invasion of Britain around 1066. As the Normans spoke a proto-French language at the time, this shifted a lot of the language closer to French and farther from German. Around this same period is the development of the Early Scots* language, spoken in Lowland Scotland, which saw much less influence from the Normans and so retained more of the Germanic traits.
Modern English occurred due to the Great Vowel Shift that occurred between about 1400 and 1700. Much of this was due to migration effects from the Black Death and various influences with the French. As spelling was heavily standardized in the 1500 and 1600s, this shift is why English has a lot of very odd rules for spelling of vowels.
* This is not to be confused with Scottish Gaelic, spoken in Highland Scotland, which derives from Irish and lacks the Germanic influence.
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