What is the meaning of 'I was told' or 'I've been told'?

Answer 1

The meaning is "It was told to me" or "It has been told to me." This is an example of what is called the Peculiar English Passive. Before word order became the most important determinant of sentence meaning in Modern English, the grammatical relation between words was indicated by case forms. The dative case of the first person singular pronoun, me, could come before the verb of which it is the object, so that we might say Me was told a tale, meaning A tale was told to me. When the word order subject-verb-object became the norm, the me in such inverted constructions was mistaken for the subject of the sentence, and shifted to the subjective form I.