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

Here is an article by Richard Coates which provides some interesting background on why place-names are generally given Anglo-Saxon derivation, even in the face of more likely alternatives.

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/linguistics/documents/rc_britons.pdf

In the 1920's a study of English placenames was carried out by Ekwall. This has become a reference work. However the attached article gives some insight into Ekwall's thinking when (on page 5) it states that:

"In early English toponymic scholarship, the default hypothesis for an etymology was English. The most Celtically-inclined of the first generation of place-name scholars and the one with competence over the widest range of languages, Eilert Ekwall, advised that once scholars had studies the names of rivers, hills and forests, they "..would do well to try as hard as possible to explain place-names belonging to other categories [ie ie mainly names of inhabited places RC] with the help of Germanic material. The fact that a name is difficult to explain or has an unusual appearance should not be taken to point to a pre-English origin, unless there is some special circumstance to render it plausible".

If you study the text you will also see a discussion about the use of 'combe' and 'tor' and whether they were loan words into Anglo-Saxon or evidence of Celtic connection. Of note - the suggested Anglo-Saxon use of combe meaning 'cup' holds little relevance to Devon. Very few (if any) '-combes' in Devon would fit that bill.

Also of note, Coates mentions Clovelly (page 6) not only for its likely Celtic origin - but also that the name first appears in the records in the supposedly Anglo-Saxon or even post-Conquest period - suggesting (again) an ongoing Celtic population that continued to use Celtic for its new settlements.

The Sussex University article is very interesting, especially in the observation that the Celtic name Clovelly appears to have arisen after the Saxon conquest.

However, like many academic articles on the subject of the apparent and still inexplicable loss of the Brythonic language across most of what is now England it ignores a very real alternative possibility.

It is assumed without question (as far as I know) that a language like Welsh was being spoken in what is now England up until, and for some time beyond the Saxon invasions. This language then inexplicably disappeared, very quickly, despite mounting evidence the indigenous people survived in greater numbers than the settlers.

The article mentions that many Britons may have willingly become English; adopting the Saxon language and customs over their own. But is it not just as likely, considering that what is now England had been under Roman rule for nearly 400 years, that many of the Britons had become heavily romanized and by the 5th century were speaking a dialect of Latin instead of a Brythonic language?

This is what I was alluding to in my previous post, when I suggested ‘English’ in its modern form may be somewhat older than is currently accepted. I was not suggesting that English evolved from Celtic but instead may have been influenced by a kind of British Latin patois—similar to the dialects that gave rise to languages like French and Spanish—that may have been the common speech of Roman Britain. If this is true, the reason why there was so little Brythonic borrowing into English is because most of what is now England did not speak a Brythonic language at the time of the Saxon invasion—the people were Celts, but like their counterparts in Gaul, they spoke a dialect of Latin. And Latin is, by far, the largest and most obvious borrowing into English. This British Latin dialect may be what actually latinised ‘Old English’, rather than the effects of the Norman invasion, where French remained, as a language of officialdom and the aristocracy, a separate and quite distinct language well into the late middle ages.

There is an article on the WordIQ website about the influence of Norman French

http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Anglo-Norman

which throws up an interesting question towards its end.

‘Yet as well as continuing as a written language of record for all sorts of purposes right through the Middle Ages (and in the case of Law French, beyond), in a determinedly multilingual context, it is clear that Anglo-Norman must also have penetrated sufficiently into all social classes to ensure numerous borrowings into various English dialects. On the one hand the bulk of the Anglo-Norman influence on the lexis of English can probably be attributed to the trilingual scribes in charge of records of all sorts from the late thirteenth century onwards; on the other, there is a layer of vocabulary (of lower status) not so readily explained by this process.’

This unexplained layer of ‘lower status’ Norman French vocabulary may have been not Norman French at all, but the resurfacing influence of a now forgotten British Latin dialect after its long oppression under Saxon rule.

Regarding placenames, I made an interesting discovery. In an etymology of the placenames in the Alpine Jura region of France ‘Combe’ makes an interesting appearance;

Combe
coomb, a valley in the flank of a mountain, in principle above the highest springs, various diminutives exist: Combasses, Comballon, combettes etc. [from Celtic comb, in present day Welsh cwm, dale or valley]

The old French form is so similar to the English version that it could be proposed that this was a Celtic word borrowed into Roman-era Latin dialects and that Combe-Coomb is its generic latinised form, the same in Roman Britain as it was in Gaul.

My argument is that the Britons in what is now England were part of a well-established Roman province, and it makes more sense—comparing Britannia to other parts of the empire—that its people would have spoken a dialect of Latin, as Roman subjects did elsewhere. The pre-Roman Brythonic languages would have continued to have been spoken in areas that were outside of Roman control.

ExeValleyBoy,

Your quoted instances of the usage of the Brythonic ‘combe’ in the Jura region of France are very revealing. If indeed it was a Celtic word borrowed into the Latin dialect of Gaul, such a borrowing could also have occurred in southern Roman Britain. Coates has noted that, in the latter part of the second millennium, the word ‘cwm’ was re-borrowed from Welsh. This time, its English meaning was exactly the same as the Gaelic word ‘corrie’, i.e. a hollow in a hill or mountain.

This is basically the same meaning given to the word ‘combe’ by Gelling in “The Landscape of Place-Names”. As I have stated previously, Gelling notes that almost all instances of ‘combe’ in England are associated with ‘bowl’ shaped valleys of this type. However, she also notes that there is one important exception to this general rule, in that the numerous ‘combe’ place-names in Devon seem to be associated with any shape of valley (apart from steep sided gorges). She explains this away by the contention that by the time that the Saxons had spread into Devon, they had forgotten that ‘combe’ only applied to ‘bowl’ shaped valleys, and started to apply it to all types of valley. I have always considered this to be a very feeble and unlikely explanation for the different usage of ‘combe’ in Devon.

However, when one considers that the heavily Romanised region of Southern Britain had a western boundary to the east of Devon and West Somerset, it would be reasonable to assume that if a British dialect of Latin was in use by the end of the Roman occupation, it would have been in the Roman villa territory to the East of this border where it would most likely have been encountered. Therefore, in this lowland area ‘combe’ would probably have been used in the ‘borrowed’ sense to mean a hollow, whereas in Devon and West Somerset the original Brythonic meaning of the word (valley) would have applied. This explanation for the different uses of the word would seem to me to be far more plausible than the Gelling explanation. Also as you state, the differences in everyday language between the east and the west of Southern Britain would go a long way towards explaining the apparent disappearance of the Britons and the paucity of Celtic loan words in the English language, without requiring an impossibly large replacement of the native British population by the Anglo-Saxons (which we know from the DNA data did not occor).

I have had some further thoughts concerning Coates’s reference to Clovelly as being problematic, as the name first appears either in Anglo-Saxon times or in the post Conquest period. He quotes Clovelly (in the form ‘Clovelie’) as being recorded in 1086 (i.e. Domesday Book). If this case is problematic, then the cases mentioned by W.G. Hoskins in his book “Devon” (1954) must be even more problematic, quote: “It is significant, for example, that many of the undoubtedly Celtic place-names do not appear in the records until the assize rolls of 1219-1249, or the Book of Fees in 1242, or the early 13th-century fines.” Unfortunately, Hoskins does not name these places, but it is clear that they post-date the first records of Clovelly. If such names did in fact first appear in the 13th century, the implication would be that they had been named by Brythonic speakers of this period.

Another thing, which Coates stated, struck me as rather odd. He mentions that the borrowed word ‘cumb’ (valley) was only found in place-names (not in conversational speech or as a generic ‘valley’ word in Anglo-Saxon documents). It would seem to me to be very odd that the word ‘cumb’ (or ‘combe’) should be borrowed into the language of the Saxons, and then not used except for formulating hundreds of place names in the South West. They must have used some word for valley in conversation and documentation, so why didn’t they use ‘cumb’, if it had really been borrowed into their language. I would contend that it is much more likely that the Britons had named these places before (or after) the arrival of Saxon settlers and that the latter had merely continued the use of these names, maybe adding their own qualifiers in order to differentiate between them.

Dear All

I have been reading this thread with interest and fascination, and I hope that you don't mind me adding a few thoughts of my own. This is also my first ever post on one of these boards, so please forgive any mad ramblings.

There are too few Latin originated words in Welsh beyond the church and religious words for a Latin dialect to have survived long in Britannia, after all there was only really a century and a half between the fall of Britannia and the first recognisably Anglo Saxon state. And most of modern Englishes' latin borrowings are church in origin, modern coinage or highly Francified. For example most of the given names in modern English are mispronounced or misspelt French names (from the Conquest)Anglo Saxon English likewise has very few Latinate elements from what I can see to indicate that a latin language survived.

But English shows one element that seems not to have been noticed here. English is a west Germanic (WG) language in that it shares it's basic grammar, lexicon and sentence structure with Dutch, Flemish, Fresian and Afrikaans. German is a south Germanic language and not a closley related as is often thought, hence thanks to the Normans we have a closer vocab link with French! (the closest language of the WG family to English is Fresian).

However English is like Afrikaans. It is a creole. English is a creole of Anglo Saxon, like Afrikaans is a creole of Dutch.

Afrikaans evolved from Dutch partly by the settlers giving their children to be cared by nurses and because some of the other groups in the cape found much Dutch grammar difficult, it simplified and eventually the Cape Dutch became more confortable in this new language than in Dutch.

English creoled in a similar way. THe death of the old order meant no one was writing the language on a regular basis (except the Anglo Saxon Chronicle (ASC)), which meant no Académie française control of language. No contol meant that the language was in the hands of its speakers. They assimilated new words, even major words if that is how they could understand and be understood by the new rulers. Within 50 - 100 of the conquest most of the names we find of ordinary people in England are Norman French, virtually all the most English given names today are not Anglo Saxon, they are not Celtic, they are French names made to fit English pronunciation.

For the lower gentry they would have had English nannies, and by the second or third generation would have been more confortable in English than French. Several would have had English wives, William I incouraged this though after him more of an aprtheid system was introduced.

The ASC continued to be written in Anglo Saxon until the outbreak of civil war in 1135. 19 years later it resumed, but in those 19 years the language had lost a lot of it's verb mutations, the use of gender for objects (and English does have the three Germanic genders, its just that it is always neuter in English unless it is an animal and even then only when you know the gender of the animal in question, including humans), the word mutations of nouns like book. THey'd all gone. In less than two decades.

What I am trying to say is that it is really easy for a language to change, easier than most people think. After all 120 years ago as a vernacular Hebrew was a dead languiage. Yoday 5.5 million people speak it as a native language. Four generations is all it takes.

Eg I move to Spain. My wife and I are native English speakers, we bring up our children to speak English.

They go to a Spanish school, they talk to their friends in Spanish, but their parents in English.

They marry Spaniards. Their home language is Spanish. THe children thanks to one side of the family understand English but are prefer speaking Spanish. THey answer Nan and Grandad's questions in English in Spanish.

Their children would have virtually no home English, they would be almost thoroughly Spanish, it not English would be their language of choice and they would be making the same blunders in English speakers of Spanish generally do.

I hope that this tries to go someway to explain my theory of language change in England, and it doesn't ramble on too much!

tb

Tivvyboy,

Welcome to the forum. It is good to see fresh thoughts being introduced to the discussion.

You make a good point about the limited introduction of Latin words into Welsh, but I can’t help thinking that Wales (like the Dumnonian peninsula) was always a bit remote from the centre of Roman administration in Britain. Therefore it is less likely that the Britons of Wales would have acquired Latin words than would have been the case among the Britons of the South East, where daily contact with the Romans would have been greatest. Maybe there are specialists in the history of languages in Britain who would be able to show that the South Eastern Britons continued to speak a Brythonic dialect throughout the Roman occupation, and did not end up speaking a form of Latin, but I certainly haven’t seen any references, which show this to be the case. It therefore must remain an open question, and a distinct possibility, that Latin was the everyday speech of South East Britain at the End of the Roman era.

Your analogy of your grandchildren speaking Spanish, proving that a language change can occur in the space of two or three generations, is an interesting one, but this example is not quite equivalent to the case of the Britons switching from Brythonic to Old English. In your example, your grandchildren are living in a land where almost everyone speaks Spanish as their native language, so the transition to that language would be natural and rapid. However, the DNA evidence shows us that the Britons greatly outnumbered the Saxon invaders/settlers in Southern England; so one would not expect a natural change from Brythonic to Old English by the Britons in a land where their own language was the majority language, especially as very few words in Old English were borrowed from Brythonic vocabulary. However, if the Romanised Britons of the South East had gradually switched from Brythonic to a form of Latin during the 350+ years of the Roman occupation, then the problem vanishes, as the Roman influence to sustain the use of Latin would have gone, and we know that there was a lot of Latin influence in Old English. It has always been supposed that this influence came from continental Europe, but if the Britons had spoken Latin, the Latin borrowings into Old English could have come from this source.

In the Dumnonian peninsula (as in Wales), in the absence of daily contact with the Romans, the Brythonic language would have remained in use, and it is in this region that we see the greatest influence of Brythonic vocabulary on the South West dialect of Old English, with such words as ‘combe’, ‘dun’ and ‘tor’, although it remains possible (if not probable) that most of the places containing these roots were in fact named by the Britons themselves and not the Saxons.

Thanks for your kind comments.

I agree that Latin was probably the dominant language spoken in the SE of England when Roman rule ended. But I believe it as a second language rather like Spanish in the Basque Country or English in Wales. Like Spanish and English, Latin had the full power and glory of its political centre behind it. It was a language of power, to get anywhere you had to speak Latin, and the Roman world was unusual in being highly literate. Western Europe would have to wait until the 19/20 Century.

But, when these people went home or to the pub they would have used the language they found most suitable, probably their native Brythonic language. I say this because there is little evidence of the levels of Roman settlement needed to create a purely Latin speaking society. The survival of Welsh proves, in my opinion, that most of the people in Britannia would have been more comfortable in Brythonic rather than Latin, Brythonic was the language of the heart whereas Latin was the language of the head, and in a battle between head and heart, heart usually wins.

This would have been compounded by the fact that the natural people to step in when Roman Rule disappeared were the client rulers of the tribal areas in the west. These rulers would probably have courts that normally functioned in Brythonic rather than Latin and so Brythonic would have become again the language of power.

Additionally unlike the visigoths in Spain and the Franks in Gaul, the Angles and Saxons do not appear to have wanted to be Roman, they appear to have wanted to be Angles and Saxons but in a new land. Bede says that the whole structure of post Roman Britain in Kent was destroyed. The same choice would have been offered to the Celtic peoples of Kent in 490ish by the Angles and by the Romans to the Celts of Britainnia after Boudica. Join us or die. Not much of a choice. They would have become "Anglicised" very easily.

With regards to the place names, the Angles, Saxons and Vikings seem to have had the same disregard as the settlers in North America among other places had of local names. Only keep them if they sound nice! This is most evident in the east of England where even Anglo Saxon place names were changed by the Vikings eg English Eoforwic became viking Jorvik.

In the west, by the time of the Saxon conquest the church was back in business big time the Saxons appear to have used local names where possible. Although the Saxons appear to be early proponents of what Terry Prachett calls "the surly native school" of topology, the number of River Avons in England is an example, another is Torpenhow Hill in the North West which translates as Hill hill hill Hill.

One final thing about Celtic survival, travelling around the Scots, the Irish and the Welsh can't seem to seperate Devon from Cornwall as far as being Celtic goes, they seem to think sometimes that we are one and the same. They can't understand the reluctance of some of Cornish brethren to accept that Devon is Celtic, after all we share so much of our culture and customs with each other.

Does any of this make sense?

Tivvyboy,

The problem is that we will probably never know how much Brythonic was spoken in South East Britain at the end of the Roman occupation, as it was almost exclusively a spoken language at that time, so there are no surviving records of its use.

I am always a bit cautious concerning the writings of Bede. He certainly had his own agenda, and modern historians regard him (together with the other Dark Age historians) as something of a ‘spin doctor’ of his time. When he spoke of ‘total destruction’, he was probably referring only to those in combat and the immediate environs. We shouldn’t judge what such people wrote by today’s standards, as they wanted their accounts to be well received by the victorious side in any combat. Thus a minor skirmish might well end up sounding like a major victory in a large-scale battle.

You are quite right about the different attitude towards Devon from the Scots, Irish and Welsh, compared with the Cornish. They don’t see Devon as any sort of threat to their national status, but the Cornish do. The Cornish fear is that their status as a uniquely Celtic region will be threatened if it can be shown that they are no different from their next-door neighbours.

The discussion on how other Celtic nations view Devon led me to look up how the Welsh language describes us.

In Welsh, Devon is known as Dyfnaint. I understand this to mean 'Deep Valley Dwellers'.

However Devon is one of only a small number of counties which have Welsh names - most English counties are known either by their English name only (such as Berkshire, Hampshire, Sussex, or Dorset) or by using the prefix "Swydd" - which means county in this context - such as Swydd Buckingham, Swydd Worcester, Swydd Hertford etc..

Other counties which do have Welsh names include Cornwall (Cernyw), Somerset (Gwlad yr Haf) and perhaps Cumbria (Cymbria). There are others, but these are the exception rather than the rule.

The fact that Devon has a 'proper' Welsh name suggests to me that the Welsh have seen us as having a separate identity, probably dating back in an unbroken fashion to pre-Saxon times. The fact that they do not have names for many other counties suggests that those counties did not.

The naming adopted is not simply a question of proximity. After all Worcestershire is closer to Wales than Devon and yet gets a simple "Swydd Worcester".

Even Herefordshire - right on the border - gets "Swydd Henffordd" providing a Celtic name but specifically as a county rather than as an identity in its own right.

I could be wrong on this, but if my memory serves me correctly, the name of Berkshire comes from "bearruc" (sp?), the Brythonic word for the Boxwood trees that grew in profusion in the area.

Nick,

A quick test on the internet found only the following entry in the online Anglo-Saxon dictionary.

"Baroc-scír, e; f. The bare oak shire or BERKSHIRE, so called from a polled oak in Windsor forest, where public meetings were held, Brompt. p. 801. It was most commonly written by the Anglo-Saxons-Barruc, Bearruc, and Bearwucscíre, Chr. 860; Th. 130, 3."

http://dontgohere.nu/oe/as-bt/read.htm?page_nr=68

If another derivation exists I did not find it.

Even if a Brythonic derivation existed, it would not weaken my argument because the Welsh language still uses only the "English" name.

nxylas,

You appear to be on the right lines, but perhaps not in the meaning of the word. Coates "Celtic Voices English Places" (2000) gives the derivation of the 'Berk' part of Berkshire as Brittonic 'barrog', being the adjectival form of 'barr' (by the addition of 'og'), meaning 'summit like'. Asser (the biographer of Alfred), who was Welsh, used the Old Welsh form of this word 'Bearruc'.

Welcome to the discussion TivvyBoy,

I have been interested in the idea of Romano-British language survival, basically a late British Latin dialect, for some time as a possible answer to the mystery disappearance of Brythonic speech in what is now England.

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.

I agree with Plymouth Exile that the Anglo-Saxon writers may been the ‘spin doctors’ of their day. I think they tried to make out they created ‘England’ when in fact they inherited an admittedly fragmented and chaotic, but still culturally viable Britannia. Surely it is no coincidence that the modern day territory of ‘England’ is almost identical to that of the Roman province, and outside of the boundaries of that province Brythonic speech carried on either until comparatively recently, or still does today, and that within the boundaries of the old Roman province, English, the most Latinised of all the Germanic languages, evolved into its present day form.

Many of the major old towns of England, most notably its present day capital, retain Latin or Romano-British derived placenames, that correspond, as they do in the rest of what was the Roman empire, to the towns and cities that were central to the Roman administration.

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’.

The correspondence between between Aldhelm, who was abbot of Malmesbury and the bishop of Sherborne, both in neighbouring Wessex, and Geraint, king of Dumnonia, regarding the status of the church in Dumnonia in the early 8th century, shows the divergence between Celtic and Latin culture. The Saxons, after their conversion to Christianity, adopted the Latin, Roman church (as did the rest of the former western Roman empire), while Devon and Cornwall appear to have stayed with the dissident Welsh-Irish Celtic orthodox version. As well as the Adhelm-Geraint correspondence, the influence of St Petrock and St Brannock gives clear evidence of Christianity in Devon existing in a different form, and at the same time, to that introduced into England by St Augustine in 597.

I recently came across some references to the formation of the Devon/Cornish (Church) See.

It seems that a joint Devon/Cornwall episcopal see was established in 1027 by Lyfing who based it in Crediton. He was succeeded by Leofric (1016 -1072) who moved the seat from Crediton to Exeter where it stayed until the 19th century - when it was divided again into two (Devon and Cornwall).

Despite the fact that Leofric is a Saxon name it was reported by both William of Malmesbury and John of Worcester that Leofric was British/Devon Celt (Britonicus) rather than Saxon. Although neither William or John are thoroughly reliable historians, the fact is that Leofric remained in his post after the Norman invasion, and the seige of Exeter, which is of itself noteworthy.

Perhaps the differing religious practices of the early Celtic Church in Devon and Cornwall made the appointment of a Celt (or someone who held himself out to be one) beneficial in this case.

Whether Leofric was a Celt or Saxon may be arguable, but it appears from his name that his successor was no Saxon - Osbern FitzOsbern

http://www.britannia.com/bios/leofricex.html

http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/United%20sees%20of%20Devon%20and%20Cornwall

ExeValleyBoy,

I'm not sure that Brythonic speech disappeared as early as is commonly stated. I have read a number of reports (many as yet unverified) of its survival to quite late dates. Apparently, the Domesday book records that it was still spoken in Wiltshire, Staffordshire and Derbyshire (even by land-owners in this county) at the time the book was written. I have also heard of Brythonic surviving in the fens district until the 1300s and until Tudor times in the Pennines.

I would be fascinated to read the Domesday book, it may be that there are many other counties mentioned in it as containing Celtic speakers, because the references I came across were only incidental. I have had trouble finding anything else on the internet about this subject.

Concerning Ozzie Exile's mention of Leofric, I find it interesting that he is said by two well-known men to be a British Celt, and yet he has a Saxon name. I think it may be evidence for that citizenship theory I mentioned some time ago, in which perhaps Britons could become legally Saxons and yet remain culturally and linguistically Celtic. If this was the case, many Celts on receiving citizenship, would have taken on a Saxon name (additionally), and possibly given their children such names; this was a common custom with Roman citizenship.
So perhaps Leofric was legally an Englishman/Saxon but ethnically a Briton.

Hi all.

I have been checking my (admittedly abridged and in modern English) guide to the Domesday book and there is no reference in it to language at all. The Domesday survey of 1087 was only concerned with how much money William I could get out of a conquered people. THe only way in the book of even possibly working out the language survival is the percentage of the population held in slavery. The Anglo Saxon word for slave was wealcynn, the same as for foreigner and for the Welsh (in Flemish the same word "waelsch" is used for the French speakers of southern Belgium - the Walloons). It must be remembered that the word for "slave" in a lot of languages was usually the same as the ethnic origin of most of these unfortunates, and the word slave itself indicated that most of the slaves in the medieval period were slavic in origin, the brand name becoming the generic name, like in the UK "hoover" for a vacuum cleaner.

The south and west of England has the highest proportion in 1087 of it's population held in bondage, over 40% in parts of Devon and Cornwall, falling to nil in the Danelaw, where slavery was illegal. As most of the slaves in Anglo Saxon England were "Welsh" one can assume that they spoke a brythonic language amongst themselves.

Regarding how Leofric's status, most pre modern societies operated on the Loi du Sol (law of the soil) not loi du sang (law of the blood) when determining nationality, ie you were born in the territory of King X, you were therefore one of his subjects and didn't care beyond that. (much) Leofric would have been considered west saxon because it was to the west saxon kings he owed fealty. Even if he could only speak the court language badly and with a heavy accent. And with the names, remember how quickly after the conquest old English names died out to be replaced by variants of Norman French ones.

tb

Even the notion of what constituted King X's territory was fairly fluid. Rather than having fixed boundaries, kingdoms constisted of places where people paid taxes to, and were bound by the law codes of, King X. Kingdoms could have overlapping boundaries, as Wessex and Dumnonia did for a time, with Saxon Devonians being subject to the king of Wessex and British Devonians being subject to the King of Dumnonia. The question we have been discussing on the Gesithas forum is whether ethnicity was determined by fealty or vice versa. Was someone British because he chose to be subject to King Geraint rather than King Ine, or was it determined by his blood (or genes, as we would say nowadays)?

Einion,

I would be very interested in hearing about any references to non-English languages being spoken at the time of the Norman Conquest, but as Tivvyboy pointed out, the Domesday Book is probably not the best place to start. From what I know of the book, it is essentially a giant ledger recording the contents of William’s new domain and does not discuss anything much aside from who owned what and where.

Ozzie Exile,

Leofric may have come from a similar background to St Boniface of Crediton.

At the Crediton town website, the following background is given to St Boniface.

http://www.crediton.co.uk/tourism/boniface_crediton.html

“An attractive tradition says that Boniface's father was a Saxon thegn (lord) and his mother was British. They named their son Wynfrith, ‘Friend of Peace’ to show that the two peoples had come together.

“According to William of Malmesbury, the monk historian (born 1090), the Britons and Saxons lived side by side in Exeter until the tenth century. St Petroc’s was the British church and St Sidwell’s the Saxon. The young Wynfrith, as a monk in Exeter, would have seen the different traditions and problems of Celtic and Roman Christian practices.

“He was the spiritual child of the new ‘English’ church. The old Celtic monk-missionaries with their personal holiness and fiery evangelism were part of his inheritance. So, too, was the Roman genius for order and discipline.”

St Boniface was very much orientated towards the Roman church and left Devon for missionary work in Europe on its behalf. Leofric, in contrast, seems to have had a more local orientation and less enthusiasm for the Saxon reality. His moving of the episcopal see to Exeter is attributed—so I have read—to Viking raids. But, if he did have British parentage or British sympathies, he may also have had the restoration of the status of Devon’s original capital in mind. Having gone to school in Crediton I am familiar with the local myth of it having being a “market town” when Exeter was a “fuzzy down”. This may be a dimly remembered piece of Saxon propaganda, possibly an attempt to establish a rival capital with a rival church at their settlement at Crediton. This attempt by the Saxons to establish Crediton as a new Saxon capital—by having their church based there—having long before failed, Leofric may have used the Viking raids as an excuse to redress a long resented administrative absurdity.

If this seems far-fetched, I would say that Crediton was a strange place to establish the episcopal see in the first place, given that Exeter had definitely been the regional capital since Roman times, and there are no known significant pre-Saxon traces of Crediton.

The church of St Petrock still stands today only a minute’s walk from Exeter’s cathedral. The survival of a church with a Celtic dedication in such a central and high profile location strongly suggests that the Britons retained significant influence there.

Regarding Winifrith and Leofric’s Saxon names, if they were British or part-British, it is likely, given the social hierarchy of the time, that many more Saxon men took British wives than British men took Saxon wives, and that Saxon fathers would have imposed English names on their children. With influential English fathers, as the legend suggests with St Boniface’s father being a Saxon lord, these children would have had many opportunities denied to those of wholly British families. Leofric may have been in the same situation.

There is an interesting internet article "Militarisation of Roman Society" which I came across a while ago. In deals largely with ethnic identity in the post-Roman world and may be relevant to this discussion if anyone's interested. I think much of what is said in the article about the Franks could apply equally to the Saxons, many of whom were actually quite Romanised well before their invasion of Britain, despite the fact that many people like to say that they were of a particularly wild and bloodthirsty nature.
Now I'm not saying that they were great gentlemen but that they were no more inclined to massacre and enslave people than the other invaders of the Roman world.

Tivvyboy,
Am I wrong in saying that there were Welsh-speakers in Derbyshire and Wiltshire mentioned in Domesday book, or is it just that that there is little else in the book regarding language?

Tivvyboy has confirmed my understanding that Domesday Book makes no reference to language, even in Wiltshire or Derbyshire. If any mention had been made to language other than English, surely this would have been mentioned in reference to Cornwall. I have also seen references to Brythonic being spoken in some parts of Wiltshire and Derbyshire as late as the Norman Conquest, and Coates in “Celtic Voices English Places” includes a chapter on a cluster of Brythonic place names in North West Wiltshire, but he only deduces continued Brythonic speech until the 7th century from this. Incidentally, in contradiction to the evidence for North West Wiltshire having an abnormally high percentage of Britons, is the UCL DNA evidence, which indicates that Chippenham has one of the lowest indigenous percentages in Southern England (about 50%).

The data about the percentages of ‘slaves’ in Devon and Cornwall is interesting, as it implies a subjugated status for Cornwall (contrary to the Nationalists’ belief in an independent sovereign state). However, a ‘slave’ percentage of up to 40% would imply that many (35% or more) of the native Britons in Devon and Cornwall were free men, if the UCL DNA findings reflect the percentage of Britons in the population at the end of the Saxon era (about 75%). If those with ‘slave’ status were absent in the Danelaw region, it would imply that such status was a throwback to pre-Conquest times, and was still in force as late as 1087.