h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>>I think ExeValleyBoy has a good point concerning the survival of Brythonic in the east. It’s hard to imagine Celtic language and culture surviving intact in those parts of Britain most impacted by almost 400 years of Roman occupation. After all, in Gaul, Latin had taken such a hold that even the invading Germanic tribes adopted it. If the Brythonic language was not destroyed in the southeast it must have been greatly diminished.<<

Roman culture was probably not quite that inclined to displace native culture from conquered areas. It was Roman custom to leave conquered peoples with their own social structure (including local princes or lords) and way of life, and not interfere too much, provided they remained loyal to Rome, paid tribute etc.; but they encouraged people to have a knowledge of, and use, Roman ways and language; but this doesn't mean a discarding of native ways. As far as language is concerned, it seems probable that displacing (as opposed to speaking Latin alongside) of local languages in favour of Latin would have spread from Italy and Southern Gaul toward the North, which means it would have reached Northern Gaul later. But Britain, being even further north, and with the additional factor of being an island, would mean it took a lot longer; it was also conquered later, and left the Empire earlier. So I'd suggest, even from a theoretical viewpoint, that Latin is far less likely to have entrenched itself in Britain than on the Continent.

And from a historical viewpoint, even the rulers (who, along with traders, are the kind of people who would have been the most likely to speak Latin) of Post-roman Britain have British names; such as Cunoglassus, Maglocunus and Gwrangon. There is also evidence from various writers of the time that Britons were considered less "Roman".

To me, the evidence seems to suggest that the centuries of Roman rule resulted in widespread knowledge of Latin in Britain, but that it failed to entrench itself as a native language, even among the educated ruling classes.

I certainly am one with Einion on the idea that Latin never entrenched itself on these islands compared with western Mediteranean Europe. I example, mentioned else where is the 5th and 6th century Latin memorials in Britain are in gramatically correct Latin, compared to those in Spain which already at this point are showing the moves to the local romance languages, which can be seen by Charlemagne's degree that sermons be given in the "lingua latina rustica" ie in his case Francien and relatives, rather than "lingua latina classica" - Latin. What I am trying to say is British Latin after the Romans left our shores was more of a schoolbook Latin, much the same way as if we were to learn French or Spanish they would be more gramatically correct, ie we do not know the cheats, slang used by native speakers. A few years ago there was a technological conference held in Scandinavia, in English. No simultaneous translations were required when the speakers spoke, except for when the native English speakers spoke. They used colloquialisms, slang etc that non native speakers could not understand so they needed translations. The Latin on Britain's monuments is that kind of Latin, a known language yes, a spoken language, yes, but not a daily language. Francis Pryor expands on this further in "Britain AD", the Latin on these monuments I feel would back up Eion's last comment. Few in British society used Latin as their language.

Also it must be remembered Latin on the continent had the church to fall back on. It was the superpower of the era and used Latin, though not classical Latin, as it's language. The Anglo Saxons were pagans and would have worshipped in their own languages meaning any commonality in understanding a shared liturgy would be lost.

From a linguistic point of view Anglo SAxon started off with an advantage, it had no elite powerful rival, and right until 1066 English law was codified in English and unusual position in Christian Europe, although Wales and Ireland had codes in Welsh and Irish respectively. If the church had gained it's a foothold in England earlier, it is possible our language would be more latinate than it is.

Newvonian,

Although Hoskins was an excellent historian for his time, things have moved on since the mid 20th century, and I suspect that Grimmer is nearer the mark with respect to the extent of the West Saxon conquests at the beginning of the 8th century. Incidentally, it wasn’t Geraint who was reputed to have built a border fortress near Taunton, but Ine. However, Welsh sources seem to imply that Geraint continued to rule in Dumnonia for a few more years after the 710 battle.

Skene seems to have fallen into the trap of assuming that there was only one Geraint who ruled Dumnonia. In fact it is almost certain that the Geraint mentioned in the well-known ‘Elegy for Geraint’ was a much earlier ruler of that name, who was reputed to have taken part in some of the battles prior to Mons Badonicus (Badon) around the beginning of the 6th century. The ‘Elegy’ implies that he fell at the Battle of Longborth, the location of which is uncertain. Some say that it was Langport in Somerset, but others claim that it was at Porchester near Portsmouth. Langport seems to be too far west for a battle between the Saxons and the Britons early in the 6th century (well before the Battle of Deorham in 577). On the other hand, what would a Dumnonian king have been doing fighting as far east as Porchester?

Plymouth Exile,

Oops! I misread what you said about the fort at Taunton. Still, if Ine did built a frontier fort there after the battle of 710, it suggests that, while the border may have move west, it still would have been in western Somerset, probably not far from the current Devon-Somerset border.

I was aware that several Geraints had ruled in Dumnonia - Grimmer says in his article that the Geraint to whom Aldhelm wrote may not have been the same one who made the grant to Sherborne abbey about 40 years later - but I wasn’t sure for which Geraint the ‘Elegy’ had been written.

I think Hoskin’s idea that a single defeat at Penselwood would have opened up Somerset to vast hordes of invading Saxons indicates a rather naive assumption about the Saxon advance, albeit one that was common at the time. We should be careful not to take some of the statements made in these early documents too literally. In her introduction to “A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century”, Barbara Tuchman says that the problems caused by “the chronic exaggeration of medieval numbers - of armies for example - when accepted as factual has led in the past to a misunderstanding of medieval war as analogous to modern war, which it was not, in means, method or purpose.” She goes on to say that, “the chroniclers did not use numbers as data but as a device of literary art to amaze or appal the reader. Use of Roman numerals also made for lack of precision and an affinity for round numbers."

tivvyboy,

Good points about the Latin memorials. It has occured to me that the fact that Old English has a fairly pure Germanic character may derive from a similar reason. If the Britons in the English kingdoms were not using English as an every day language, and only used it when speaking to Saxons (who were capable of correcting their mis-uses), then they are much less likely to have started mixing it with their own language, or developing their own Brythonised colloquial variety; it seems that an adopted language really starts to mix with the native one only when the former begins to be widely spoken by the "adoptees" among themselves.

Of course, we know that the Britons must have eventually started speaking English among themselves, because ultimately it displaced their native tongue, which leaves the question of why Old English retained it's Germanic character until 1100; but my suggestion is that this widespread usage of English among the Britons themselves only started to happen after English had become a written language (c. 700, I think); I hypothesise that the written form retained a more conservative, archaic character throughout (archaic written forms were common in ancient times) and was therefore always closer to the language of 700 A.D. than was the spoken form.

So, ironically, it may be that the relatively pure Germanic character of Old English, so long used as evidence that the Britons and their culture were crushed (or even obliterated), is in fact evidence that the British language was thriving, even many generations after they were conquered.

> I hypothesise that the written form retained a more conservative,
> archaic character throughout (archaic written forms were common in
> ancient times) and was therefore always closer to the language of
> 700 A.D. than was the spoken form.

Einion,

I believe I have seen this suggested in a book - but cannot recall the name or author. It could have been Bill Bryson.

Interesting, Ozzie Exile. I'll try searching about that.

“Few in British society used Latin as their language.”

I’m afraid I’m still not convinced. A substantial amount of graffiti from the Roman era has been found in what was Roman Britain and all of it is in Latin. In London Latin was found scratched on a tile with this frustrated protest about a work colleague;

Australis has been going off by himself every day these last thirteen days!

This was discovered in what was believed to have been a tile factory, hardly the elite of society. The discovery of this type of graffiti shows that reading and writing in Latin was actually quite widespread in Roman Britain and not was not necessary the preserve of the upper classes.

Even in Wales, which was outside of direct Roman control, a significant amount of Latin entered the Welsh language during this period.

A few examples.

Welsh numbers; un (1), dau (2), tri (3). Cant (100), mil (1,000). Examples of some other words; Dant (tooth), pysgodyn (fish), nos (night), ffenestr (window). Also some of the days of the week; Dydd Llun (Monday), Dydd Mawrth (Tuesday), Dydd Mercher (Wednesday), Dydd Sadwrn (Saturday), Dydd Sul (Sunday).

Nobody knows for sure what language was being spoken in what is now England at the end of Roman rule. If there was still a Brythonic language being spoken in lowland post-Roman Britain, it is likely that it would have borrowed heavily from Latin by that point. If there is a noticeable Latin presence in Welsh, which was outside the Roman mainstream, it makes sense to think there was even more in the ‘English’ version of Brythonic.

I am inclined to think that Latin had become the language of the towns and cities in late Roman Britain and that the Brythonic language by that point was confined to rural areas. All the archaeological evidence points to massive depopulation of Roman towns in the 5th and 6th centuries (look up the abandoned city of Wroxeter in Shropshire) caused by a mixture of disease (a number of disastrous plagues are mentioned) and the Saxon invasion. We are looking at a situation where the evidence points to a catastrophic dislocation of urban life which wiped out the Latin culture of urban lowland Britain, but probably left highland Celtic-speaking rural people unscathed.

It took nearly a 1,000 years for the population of England to return to the levels seen in Roman times.

While the Britons and the Saxons undoubtedly fought for control of the country, many Saxon settlers may have arrived in a land where the towns and cities were already abandoned or sparsely populated and where organised agriculture in many places had collapsed through labour shortages and loss of essential technical and administrative skills. Also Britain’s geographical isolation meant that links to remaining centres of functioning civilization broke down much faster than they would have on the continent. If you no longer had the money, resources, or technical skills to maintain existing ships or build new ones, you simply couldn’t get to Europe.

Relating perhaps to the accounts of plagues and other disasters at the time, there is also evidence that Britain experienced climate change during the late Roman period. The climate became much colder and wetter. After 400, the climate began to change and it has been speculated that the highly urbanised, densely populated and deforested lowland area of Roman Britain was effected very badly by the change.

A summary of this evidence can be read at this site, and comes from a book called the End of Roman Britain by Michael E. Jones.

http://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/britannia/saxonadvent/climate.html

I don’t believe that in the most Romanized areas of Britain, the well developed lowland villa culture, that the Britons lived separate lives from the Roman Empire, and then after the Romans left, just went back to their old way of life, language and customs. I think there is a lot of evidence that they were assimilated, just like the Gauls over the channel, into the social, religious and commercial life of the empire. Roman remains in Britain are not second or third rate, some villas, as at Fishbourne, are among the most affluent and sophisticated found outside of Italy. The reason so little monumental architecture survives is because subsequent generations dismantled Roman buildings and reused the pieces. Archaeologists will tell you about ‘robber trenches’ where later people systematically dismantled first the walls of the Roman buildings and then dug down to take out the foundations. Many churches and city walls in England display these recycled Roman bits.

Where there is Celtic language and culture today, there was little if any Roman presence. The archaeology of Wales and the West Country shows villa culture never took root in these regions. There are few major Roman settlements, most of the remains being of military encampments. The culture of the Celtic people in these regions persisted because they lived in places outside of direct Roman rule and had never given up their old way of life. In the wilder reaches of the West Country and Wales, life had simply gone on as before, with the Romans just a passing phase. In Devon and Cornwall, I have read, there is evidence that the old tin trade with the Mediterranean started up again after the Romans left.

The evidence for the lowland villa country of Roman England, in contrast, shows a completely different picture. Society collapsed in chaos, cities were abandoned, little trace of either Brythonic or Latin language and culture survives, with the entire region appearing to have become predominantly Anglo-Saxon within 200 years of the end of Roman rule.

As I have said before, my opinion is that some kind of natural disaster struck late Roman Britain. This was not a disaster that effected everyone equally, but one which hit worst the towns and cities which were the centres of learning, religion, technology and civil administration. This disaster, I am inclined now to think, was a combination of plague and climate change, and left post-Roman Britain essentially empty of functioning civilization. The towns and cities were still there, it was just there was no-one left in them. The Saxons arrived, and were very impressed by the remains. See the poem ‘The Ruin’ from the Exeter Book, but there was no civil society left operating in these structures which offered sufficient resistance or competition to their own objectives. Early Welsh literature and inscriptions, as well as inscriptions in the West Country, and the ability of writers like Gildas, show that a high degree of Latin literacy survived, ironically, far away from what had been the centres of the Roman civilization in Britain in the south east where almost all evidence of this high culture very quickly ceased to exist.

>>I’m afraid I’m still not convinced. A substantial amount of graffiti from the Roman era has been found in what was Roman Britain and all of it is in Latin. In London Latin was found scratched on a tile with this frustrated protest about a work colleague;

Australis has been going off by himself every day these last thirteen days!

This was discovered in what was believed to have been a tile factory, hardly the elite of society. The discovery of this type of graffiti shows that reading and writing in Latin was actually quite widespread in Roman Britain and not was not necessary the preserve of the upper classes.<<

ExeValleyBoy,

Whether or not these were elites, it's clear from the fact that they could read and write (which was far from universal in those days), that they must have had a Roman education; this means they would also have learnt Latin. And of course, Brythonic didn't have a written form until after the Romans had left. So any writing must have been done in Latin, and I don't think their writing in Latin is an indication that they were native speakers.

Having said this, there probably would have been at least some native Latin speakers in the cities, but most likely (in my opinion) of foreign stock.

ExeValleyBoy,

It's certainly clear that a considerable amount of Latin exists in Welsh, however, Latin is actually closely related to the Celtic languages, and close similarities can also be found between Gaelic and Latin. For example, Lain for "pig" is porcus, Gaelic is "orc"; but these aren't borrwings from Latin.

Another point I'd make about Romanisation is that I think Roman culture didn't displace native culture, but neither did the Britons remain outside of it. They reaped the full economic benefits, as opposed to having third rate Roman architecture and buildings etc., and probably were well-acquainted with and adept (at least secions of society) at Roman ways, just like on the continent, but my point is that it was probably additional to their native culture, rather than replacing it. So when the Romans left, it wasn't so much a "return", to native ways because they had never discarded them. Usage of Roman ways is likely to have declined after the Romans left, but this could well have taken some time.

Even in Gaul, native culture probably survived to a large extent, it's just that their language was eventually replaced with Latin, and (perhaps because of this) they had more of a Roman identity. I've seen an interesting article about this on the internet.

“I think Hoskin’s idea that a single defeat at Penselwood would have opened up Somerset to vast hordes of invading Saxons indicates a rather naive assumption about the Saxon advance, albeit one that was common at the time.”

Newvonian,

You are quite right about this being the assumption that was common at the time. Unfortunately the place-name etymologists have not moved on from that outdated assumption, as evidenced by the following quotes:-

“Creedy, then, provides interesting evidence for Celtic speech in Devon. Creedy must have been borrowed by English before the late seventh century, because the English saint Boniface was supposedly born in Crediton in about 675 (he is known to have gone to school in Exeter). By that date the dialects of Brittonic in this region did not have long to survive, since the independence of Devon ended in 710, when Ine of Wessex fought the British king, Gerent. Celtic speech in Devon must thereafter have soon come to an end.” – Andrew Breeze in “Celtic Voices English Places” (quoting Jackson, 1953).

“It is not always possible to distinguish firmly in place-names between adoptions of pre-English names and use of borrowed words, but the relatively high frequency of the three British words ‘crug’, ‘monith’ and ‘penn’ supports the latter interpretation.” – Margaret Gelling in “The Landscape of Place-Names”.

“comm – ‘small valley’. The word was borrowed into English, where it was very productive as a place-name element, especially as a simplex name and in South-West England. Since Breton ‘komm’ is also used as a simplex name, the numerous Cornish instances of Combe and Coombe could theoretically be either Cornish or English; however, they are much more likely to be English, because of the great frequency of the name further east.” – O.J. Padel in “Cornish Place-Name Elements”.

“Tre- place-names in Devon should be noted as showing that ‘tre’ was already current before the 7th century at the latest, and that Tre- farms can be assumed to have existed in areas now thoroughly English in their nomenclature.” - O.J. Padel in “Cornish Place-Name Elements”.

All of the above place-name etymologists make the following assumptions:-
1. Devon was conquered by the West Saxons by the beginning of the 8th century at the latest.
2. Devon was overwhelmed by large numbers of Saxons.
3. Brythonic speech became extinct in Devon within a couple of generations of the Saxon conquest.
4. The presence of many Brythonic elements in Devon place-names represents ‘borrowed’ words used by the Saxons to form their own place-names.

None of these assumptions can be substantiated by modern scholarship, and only the linguists/place-name etymologists continue to cling to these outdated hypotheses.


ExeValleyBoy and Einion,

As the British (Brythonic) language of the late Roman and post-Roman era was a spoken-only dialect, it is impossible to determine whether it was still in common use in the most Romanised parts of what is now England (i.e. the lowland zone). I doubt whether this question will ever be resolved with any certainty. However, what is interesting is that there appears to be a very strong correlation between the distribution of Roman villa sites and the later distribution of Anglo-Saxon burial sites.

The desertion of the towns in the late Roman and post-Roman eras may not have been quite as complete as previously thought. Certainly the use of coins and Roman style stone building construction seem to have come to a fairly abrupt end, but relatively recent excavations at places such as Wroxeter have revealed some substantial post-Roman wooden buildings and evidence of continued habitation. It is thought that this period of habitation in Wroxeter only came to an end when the city was reputedly sacked by Penda of Mercia.

Hi exevalleyboy

I know I haven't written anything for a long while, I agree with some of your comments and with PE.

As elsewhere, in the towns and cities of Roman Britain, Latin speech would have been predominant and probably carried on long after the empire fell. This idea is supported by the fact many older English towns and cities have kept names that are Romano-British in origin or contain some Latin or Celtic elements. The south east, and the mid-west areas of Somerset, Wiltshire and Dorset, retain a good number of Latin influenced place names, even down to level of quite small settlements. The neighbouring mid-west was, in the fifth century, a well established area containing many affluent Romano-British villas.

Devon’s placenames are either wholly Brythonic (in the Welsh-Cornish sense) or wholly Anglo-Saxon.
This suggests, as it is today, Devon was sparsely populated in comparison to regions further east. If there was Latin speech in Devon, it would have been in Exeter, or Excester, its modern name being a Romano-British mixture like Dorchester.

However, Roman Exeter was not peripheral. It was one of the major Romano-British cities, and the architectural remains, of which only the walls remain above ground, are quite impressive. Beneath the cathedral lies buried a substantial basilica, and under the cathedral green are the remains of a large bath house. To me this indicates that, in the Exeter area at least, there would have been a substantial Latin speaking or bilingual (Brythonic and Latin) population in Roman times.

Regarding Romano-British survival I often feel the obvious has been disregarded. The county name of Kent is Celtic in origin from ‘Ceint’. The pre-Roman inhabitants of Kent were called Cantiaci, the modern day county town is Canterbury. The Isle of Wight was called ‘Weith’ in Romano-British; London itself retains its Romano-British name as well as that of the Thames that runs through it. The Pre-Saxon origins of many English placenames; the old British name for Somerset, ‘Glastenning’ as in Glastonbury, or that of Lincoln in ‘Lindum Colonia’ or Manchester in ‘Mamucium’, do not stretch the credibility of a theory of Romano-British linguistic survival that far.

The ‘chester’ or ‘cester’ element, common in English placenames, is the best example of a direct borrowing into Old English from Latin, from ‘castra’, meaning a fort or camp. The Saxons had no ‘chesters’ or ‘cesters’ of their own, their word was ‘burgh’, so where did Chester-Cester come from? Perhaps it came from the Latin dialect of the Romano-British, who may have colloquially referred to Roman towns as castles or forts (which was what they were mostly founded as), often prefixed by a Latin or Celtic personal or geographic feature.
In terms of Devon, and its present day position, I believe we inherited a Roman rather than an Anglo-Saxon arrangement. Exeter or Excester or Isca, was the only significant Roman town in the far west, and the only part of Dumnonia that belonged to the ‘mainstream’ of Britannia and the subsequent Anglo-Saxon English state that was based on the Roman province.
Beyond Exeter, the Romans made little incursion into Dumnonia, and like Wales, the area remained outside Roman control and continued with its own language and customs long after the start of the Saxon settlements. This is why I think, by the late Saxon period, the already Latinised Saxons found the West foreign and were writing so distinctively about ‘Wealcyn’.

Plymouth Exile,

The fact that Britons were still using non-Roman names right through the Roman period seems to indicate that they were not native Latin speakers. Most of the kings in all post-Roman kingdoms from which we have evidence have British names. It seems strange that they would continue to use such names if they were no longer speaking Brythonic.

Even the king of Kent had a Celtic name, Gwrangon or Guorancgonus.

You may well be right that the question may never be resolved with certainty, however I think there is some fairly conclusive evidence overall.

Perhaps the most likely possibility is that Britons had, during Roman rule, a Roman and a native name, using the former with Romans. This was usual with Roman citizens; the theologian Pelagius was a Briton whose native name was Morgan, and St. Patrick was Maewyn Succat. When the Romans left, Britons probably started to drop the extra Roman name, at least as far as common usage was concerned.

Einion,

I am not sure that the continued use of British personal names necessarily indicated that the people with those names still used Brythonic as their everyday language. One only has to look at name usage today to realise that Welsh personal names such as Dafydd, Elved, Geraint, Gwyn, Gwilym, Owain and Rhys are still popular in areas of Wales where Welsh has not been spoken as the everyday language for a very long time. The same is true in Scoltand with names such as Alasdair, Angus, Callum, Gregor, Iain, Stuart and Torin. Such names have been passed down from generation to generation regardless of the language currently spoken, and the original meanings have often been forgotten.

A number of the early kings of Wessex had British names (Cerdic, Cenwahl, etc.), probably indicating that they were of British (or part British) descent, but there is no indication that they were Brythonic speakers.

For such reasons, I would still reckon that there remains a great deal of uncertainty as to what the common language of the masses was in the lowland zone of Britain at the end of the Roman occupation.

I was just going through Hoskins’ “Devon” again and came across the following references to Celtic and Saxon settlement:

“Even in Saxon times, however, beyond the compact villages and their open fields, and on across the ‘waste’ of their outfields, one would have come across hundreds of small hamlets and of single farmsteads, each lying alone in a clearing of the oak and ash woods or upon the edge of the moorland. Here farming was carried on in small fields separately held (like those of today). A close reading of Domesday Book reveals many such small farms in outlying areas, cultivated by a single villein or a serf working for a distant lord, as at Bradworthy in the far west of Devon. Many of these small isolated farms were pastoral; they had no plough. And many, though we cannot prove it, may well have been Celtic farmsteads whose owners had remained undisturbed through the Saxon occupation, though their farms had gradually acquired an English name from the people who lived in the central village of the territory.” (Hoskins 1972:49).

One might add here that modern genetic evidence can now prove that this must indeed have been the case given the high proportion of people of pre-Saxon origin still living in Devon today. And that many more of these places may have retained at least part of their original Celtic names than had once been believed although in some cases they may have been Anglicized almost beyond recognition.

Here’s another quote:

“Once more we are led back to the possibility that the Saxon occupation and settlement of Devon was a juridical process rather than a military conquest. The English settlers lived under Wessex law, paid dues to the kings of Wessex, and as royal tenants enjoyed their direct protection. Their Celtic neighbours, isolated and scattered, lived under Celtic law, paid dues to the kings of Dumnonia, and were under their protection for what it was worth. From time to time hostilities broke out, followed usually by a Saxon victory and the extension of Wessex jurisdiction. This is surely what William of Malmesbury means when he says that the Britons and English inhabited Exeter (and presumably also the rest of Devon) ‘aequo jure’ until Athelstan made an end to their ‘equality’ and caused Wessex law to reign supreme.”(Hoskins 1972: 50).

This seems to me to be a much more accurate depiction of the Saxon advance into Devon than the old cliche about invading hordes putting all before them either to the sword or in chains. It’s also interesting that Hoskins suggests that the situation describe by William of Malmesbury for Exeter also may have applied to the rest of Devon. This suggests to me that until at least sometime after AD 925 Devon may have been considered something of a place apart from Wessex.

By the way, I don’t know a lot about genetics but if the population of Devon is approximately 75% pre-Saxon even today, surely that must mean that eleven or twelve hundred years ago the percentage was quite a bit higher. There had to be some intermarriage between the Saxons and Celts (I would imagine quite a bit) and this must have led to an overall increase in the percentage of people who carry Saxon genes. And then, of course, there are all the people who have move into Devon since that time. I wonder if there is any way of arriving at a rough idea (by calculating backwards) of how much of the population of Devon actually would have been Saxon in, say, AD 850.

I think natural disaster, specifically involving plague, is a good explanation for what happened in England between the 5th and 6th centuries. I turned to this explanation after reading so many forums on the internet, and academic writing on the subject, that seem locked into endless repetitive discussion of the same set of theoretical occurrences. English genocide, elite dominance, Saxon assimilation. No breakthrough can ever be made in these arguments because there is no real evidence to support any of them. The fact I cannot get around is how, after 400 years of Roman rule, and more than a thousand years of Celtic history beforehand, England managed to lose—quite comprehensively—both its Latin and Celtic cultural and linguistic heritage in a comparatively short period of time. Of pre-Saxon survivals, the Latin is actually the strongest in England, which led me to think that the Brythonic language had been in decline during Roman Britain, or was confined largely to agricultural communities.

Although we differ on the extent of Brythonic speech in late Roman Britain, my argument is actually not that different from Tivvyboy’s or Einion’s. All I suggest, is in common with other Roman provinces, in Britannia the Brythonic language had ceased to be the common language in Roman towns and cities. I do not doubt it continued to be spoken, in some form, in rural southern Britain long after the Roman departure. I think it probably survived in places like Hampshire and Dorset into the late Saxon period, and was certainly current in parts of far northern England, particularly Cumbria, until the middle ages. In Cornwall there is no doubting its persistence (on a par with Wales), and in Devon, there is anecdotal evidence of survival into about the 13th century. I would also think it survived to a comparable date, in the far west of Somerset, given notable survivals of Celtic place names and church dedications in the Somerset Exmoor region.

But the point I am making about language is not what was spoken the countryside, but in the larger towns and cities of late Roman and sub-Roman England. These were the centres that defined the civilization and culture of the entire country. I would see these centres as being largely Latin speaking by the late 5th century. Even if Brythonic speech had persisted in these places, the inhabitants would have needed to have known and have spoken Latin to participate in the cultural and economic life of the Roman Empire. To keep these centres going, as modern archaeological evidence suggests they did, after the departure of the Roman authorities, spoken and written Latin would have been vital. To assume that the vast majority of the population of late urban Roman Britain were solely Brythonic speakers would be to create a picture of an almost impossible society, in which every single recorded commercial or legal transaction in a busy Roman city would have to be translated from Brythonic into Latin. And this difficult society would have had to gone on for some 400 years, somehow never changing. If this had really happened, how on earth did the Anglo-Saxons, with so little to offer in comparison—technologically, politically, religiously and culturally—manage to produce such an abrupt turnaround in language and culture in less than a quarter of the time the Romans were in Britain?

The idea that a natural disaster, or a series of disasters, struck late Roman and sub-Roman Britain offers a new perspective on a lot of old mysteries. The plague, as in its 14th century occurrence, would have devastated both the large cities and important secondary settlements. The resultant mortality would have emptied the Roman-era cities of most of the Latin speaking Britons, either because they died, or fled the scene. It is has been suggested that the flight to Brittany owed more to the plague than to the invading English.

“St. Samson, a classmate of Gildas and bishop of St.David’s, went into exile in Brittany when the plague broke out, where he became the bishop of Dol.”

And

“Lady Charlotte Guest in a note to her translation writes that in The Book of Llandav it tells how St. Teilo sailed to Brittany to escape the Yellow Plague, called in Latin "Peste Flava" and called in Welsh ‘y Fad Falen’”

http://www.mun.ca/mst/heroicage/issues/6/gildas.html

The disaster in question here being the 6th century Justinian Plague which ravaged what remained of the Roman Empire.

It has been suggested that the settling English who had taken over south-eastern England by this point remained immune to the plagues ravaging Roman Europe because their trading links remained primarily with their Germanic homelands, and not the Roman Empire. The western Britons, in contrast, retained links to Rome throughout the 5th and 6th centuries and by doing so, imported the pestilence into Briton-controlled territory where it wreaked havoc. The plague, or plagues, that beset the Roman Empire at the time had been brought in from the eastern Mediterranean, and spread westwards through the remaining Roman or post-Roman territories over existing trading links.

The possibility this suggests is that, until the 6th century, the English had been contained by the British in a relatively small area of south-eastern Britain by a still militarily and culturally strong Romano-British state. The great Roman cities and towns of the south-east had been sacked and overthrown by the Germanic rebellion, but elsewhere the existing Celtic-Latin culture had survived. So, essentially, you had two countries and two civilizations up until that date, that potentially could have evolved into two separate nationalities.

The plague and the resulting devastation of Romano-British civilization gave what would later become the English the opportunity to move out of their south-eastern enclave and conquer the entire former Roman province. The plague, in this hypothesis, followed the commercial routes of the Roman road network and wiped out people living in the towns and cities along that network. The Saxons then used the Roman road network to invade and settle formerly plague-stricken Romano-British settlements. The areas around these settlements would have been largely emptied of their former inhabitants, who had either died of the plague or fled from it.

In all the regions effected by the Justinian Plague, mortality would have been least in the most isolated rural settlements. These are where Celtic speech and custom would have persisted in England. But they would have been scattered and inconsequential. English language and culture seems to have followed the Roman road system to the large English (former Roman) towns and cities, almost all of which seem to have become entirely English within a short period of time. In the plague hypothesis, the English did not wipe out or drive out the inhabitants of these towns, and their 400 year-old Romano-British culture, it is that these places were mostly empty by the time the Saxons ventured out of their south-eastern territory.

Quote: “This suggests to me that until at least sometime after AD 925 Devon may have been considered something of a place apart from Wessex.”

Newvonian,

William of Malmesbury does not indicate that the status of the Britons of Devon changed after Athelstan had evicted the Britons from Exeter. It is probable (as postulated by historian Michael Wood) that it was only the dissenting British clerics (those who rejected the edicts of the Synod of Whitby) who were evicted from Exeter. Certainly Exeter had a recognised ‘British quarter’ for centuries after this time.

Quote: ”By the way, I don’t know a lot about genetics but if the population of Devon is approximately 75% pre-Saxon even today, surely that must mean that eleven or twelve hundred years ago the percentage was quite a bit higher. There had to be some intermarriage between the Saxons and Celts (I would imagine quite a bit) and this must have led to an overall increase in the percentage of people who carry Saxon genes. And then, of course, there are all the people who have move into Devon since that time. I wonder if there is any way of arriving at a rough idea (by calculating backwards) of how much of the population of Devon actually would have been Saxon in, say, AD 850.”

Population genetics doesn’t actually work like that. The 75% figure comes from the Y-Chromosome study carried out by University College London (UCL). The Y-Chromosome is passed down the direct male line unchanged from generation to generation, so unless procreation rates were different between the Britons and the Saxons, one would expect that the percentages found today would be the same as in the Dark Ages. This would have been unaffected by intermarriage. The effects of recent migrations into the area have been taken into account by sampling only men whose paternal grandfathers were also born in the same area, thus ensuring that the direct male line was in the area at the end of the 19th century. Studies have shown that migrations within Britain prior to this time were minimal.

However, there is one possible reason why the 75% figure may be an underestimate, in that the sampling was carried out in small towns. If the British percentage was originally higher in the scattered rural hamlets than in the towns, it is possible that this may still be the case, so town samples may result in an apparently lower British percentage than the overall value.

Plymouth Exile,

That's a good point on the names; however, given the fact that Roman citizens in the Empire generally had a Roman name, which they presumably used when speaking Latin, it seems likely that native names would have largely died out with Brythonic if they were no longer speaking it. At any rate, one would perhaps expect Roman names to be a lot commoner in Post-Roman Britain if Latin was their native language; they seem to be rare if not non-existant.

>>Although we differ on the extent of Brythonic speech in late Roman Britain, my argument is actually not that different from Tivvyboy’s or Einion’s. All I suggest, is in common with other Roman provinces, in Britannia the Brythonic language had ceased to be the common language in Roman towns and cities. I do not doubt it continued to be spoken, in some form, in rural southern Britain long after the Roman departure. I think it probably survived in places like Hampshire and Dorset into the late Saxon period, and was certainly current in parts of far northern England, particularly Cumbria, until the middle ages. In Cornwall there is no doubting its persistence (on a par with Wales), and in Devon, there is anecdotal evidence of survival into about the 13th century. I would also think it survived to a comparable date, in the far west of Somerset, given notable survivals of Celtic place names and church dedications in the Somerset Exmoor region.

But the point I am making about language is not what was spoken the countryside, but in the larger towns and cities of late Roman and sub-Roman England. These were the centres that defined the civilization and culture of the entire country. I would see these centres as being largely Latin speaking by the late 5th century. Even if Brythonic speech had persisted in these places, the inhabitants would have needed to have known and have spoken Latin to participate in the cultural and economic life of the Roman Empire. To keep these centres going, as modern archaeological evidence suggests they did, after the departure of the Roman authorities, spoken and written Latin would have been vital. To assume that the vast majority of the population of late urban Roman Britain were solely Brythonic speakers would be to create a picture of an almost impossible society, in which every single recorded commercial or legal transaction in a busy Roman city would have to be translated from Brythonic into Latin. And this difficult society would have had to gone on for some 400 years, somehow never changing. If this had really happened, how on earth did the Anglo-Saxons, with so little to offer in comparison—technologically, politically, religiously and culturally—manage to produce such an abrupt turnaround in language and culture in less than a quarter of the time the Romans were in Britain?<<

As you say, ExeValleyBoy, I think our opinions aren't that different. I agree with your hypothesis that Latin was widely spoken in the towns, and I'm certainly not suggesting that the vast majority were solely Brythonic speakers (I'd say poorer and less influential people probably were though); what I'm suggesting is a largely bilingual society, as opposed to a population largely made up of monoglot Latin speakers.

I think this is actually important in understanding the later dominance of English. If the Saxon leaders could speak Latin (and this is quite probable), then when they arrived in Britain they had no need to learn Brythonic; but, being the conquerors, their language would have been the primary one used in the royal court, for government and the army (and probably used alongside Latin in trade); in which case Britons joining the new order would have found it convenient to learn the language in which much of the activity of government and army was conducted.
So I'm suggesting a period of Latin-English bilingualism in trade, government and army after the Saxon conquest; but of course, since Latin was nobody's native language, this meant that it was now rather redundant, and an unnecessary one to learn. So it would have declined and then dropped out of use (as a spoken language at any rate) , perhaps over a fairly short period of time. But by this time, Saxons still didn't need to learn Brythonic, because Britons (at least those whose activities in life required frequent contact with Saxons) could now speak English. In this case, English was now in the position Latin had been in during Roman rule, and considering this position caused Latin eventually to displace native languages on the continent, it stands to reason that English would eventually displace Brythonic.

Concerning your mentioning the oddity of an abrupt turnaround in language and culture in less than a quarter of the time Romans ruled Britain, I think there is really no less evidence for the continued (and widespread) survival of Brythonic in early England than there is in Roman Britain. As I said earlier, I think that the rather purely Germanic nature of Old English may, ironically, suggest that it wasn't until at least 700 A.D. that Britons began to use English among themselves as a native language.

So for more than two centuries, the situation of English in Britain could well have been parallell to what Latin had been earlier, but given that there must have been sizable communities of native English speakers, this would mean English had a better chance of entrenching itself more quickly.