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

Plymouth Exile,

Thanks a lot for the information. I am familiar with both of these websites. I’ve gone through a fair bit of the Dewnans site - lots of great stuff! I haven’t spent as much time with the second site but I’ll have a good look when I get a chance. I’ve come across a couple of references to “English Places, Celtic Voices” and I have to see if I can track down a copy. If you are interested, there is a short biography of Whiteway at this site (hopefully the link will work) but unfortunately it deals almost exclusively with his career in Newfoundland. Here’s the link:

http://www2.marianopolis.edu/nfldhistory/Newfoundland%20biographies%20Q-Z.htm

I find the Celtic/Brythonic names for sacred places in Devon fascinating. It was mentioned somewhere else in this forum that Nymet is a Brythonic name for a sacred grove. I just did a quick Google search and came up with seven Nymet names in Devon (Nymet Rowland, Nicholas Nymet, Nymet Tracey, Nymet St. George, Nymet Episcopi, Nymet Regis, and a Nymet in Plymouth). If I can find that many that fast there must be more. The idea of a “sacred grove” suggests to me that these originally may have been pagan places of worship that were later Christianized.

I was going through W.G. Hoskins’ “Devon” looking for Celtic place-names. The book was first published in 1954 so it is, of course, quite dated. Ongoing research is revealing many more Celtic names in Devon than was once believed. Still, Hoskins does list a number of Celtic place-names including Charles (from “carn” meaning “rock” and “lis” meaning “court” or “palace”, p. 362); Dunchideock, near Exeter, (meaning ‘the wooded fort or camp’, p. 390); King’s Nympton (This is in part Celtic, the Nympton deriving from “Nymet” meaning “Sacred Grove”, p. 420); as well as Treable which Hoskins says, “is a Celtic place-name [and] there can be little doubt that it has been continuously inhabited since Celtic times” (p. 363).

I was struck by what Hoskins had to say about the high proportion of people of Celtic (or older) stock in the native Devonian population. Here is part of what he has to say:

“Scattered about the country are isolated Celtic names which show that the Romano-British population of Devon were not entirely upland dwellers. There are two Crookes, one in North Tawton, the other in Combe Raleigh, both in low-lying country. The hamlet of Aunk, in Clyst Hydon parish, certainly has a Celtic name: it lies on a low spur of the valley of the Clyst about two miles north of Whimple, which is also a Celtic name (“White pool”). There can be little doubt that most of these Celtic names designate hamlets and farmsteads which have been continuously occupied from Celtic times into the period of Saxon settlement, when they were left undisturbed, and so down to the present day. When we stand in such places as this we are in the presence of a remote antiquity, going back to the days of the Celtic kingdom of Dumnonia. On this spot farmers have lived and tilled the soil since the 5th, 6th or 7th centuries, if not earlier in some instances, for Aunk and Whimple lie in the shadow of Hembury, that great fortress of the early Iron Age which was abandoned for the lower ground in the first century of the Christian era, and Treable has produced a coin of the second century....

“It is probable that the number of Celtic settlements that continued an unbroken life into the Saxon period and so down to the present day is considerably greater than the evidence of place-names alone would indicate. There is, above all, the evidence of the predominant physical types one finds among the native Devonian population to-day, a high proportion of whom clearly reveal a pre-Saxon ancestry. ‘On the coasts of Devon there may be several patches with dark and broad-headed stalwart men’ who are found also in nearly all the Cornish fishing harbours. ...

“Other pre-Saxon types abound on the fringes of Dartmoor, short, dark long-heads. A very common type all over Devon, especially perhaps in the east of the county, is the short dark round-head, with dark brown hair, a quick hazel eye, small hands and small feet. The Saxon type, taller with fair hair and grey eyes, is also conspicuous in Devon as we might expect in the light of what has been said already, but the older stocks form a high proportion of the native population and suggest that many pre-Saxon groups survived the English settlement and went on undisturbed in their hamlets and farmsteads” (pp. 47- 48).

The quotations above are take from W.G. Hoskins, “A New Survey of England: Devon”. (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1972).

Newvonian,

Hoskins was a very astute man. Although he did not have access to the results of modern historical, archaeological and genetic studies as part of his armoury of evidence in 1954, he did realise that the weight of evidence was in favour of large scale British survival in Devon. It is probable that he relied to a large extent on the two volumes of “The Place-Names of Devon”, by Gover, Mawer and Stenton (1931-2). When these volumes were compiled, the accepted wisdom was that the Anglo-Saxon invasion/settlement had either overwhelmed the Britons in numbers, or had driven them out (even as far west as Devon). Link this with the fact that one of the authors, Sir Frank Stenton, was one of the greatest stalwarts of this hypothesis, and it is no wonder that these authors adhered to the methodology laid down by Eilert Ekwall in 1920, that Germanic etymologies should be sought for English place-names unless it was impossible to do so.

In more recent times these guidelines have been relaxed somewhat, although most modern place-name etymologists still tend to believe (from linguistic studies) that “in certain parts of what became England there were few visible Britons, and that this state might in principle have been achieved by emigration, annihilation or enslavement”. This was the conclusion of Professor Richard Coates in his paper “Invisible Britons: the view from linguistics” (2004). Perhaps surprisingly, it has been Coates (together with Andrew Breeze) who has been largely responsible for taking a more critical look at Ekwall’s tenet, and realising that many more place-names probably have Brittonic etymologies than had previously been supposed (“Celtic Voices English Places – Studies of the Celtic impact on place-names in England”, by Richard Coates and Andrew Breeze, 2000). In fact it is these authors who have either revised or added to the list of attested Brittonic Devon place-name etymologies, with such places as Clovelly, Clyst, Crediton and the River Creedy, Croyde, Culm, Teign, Treable and Trusham.

When one believes in the large-scale replacement of the Britons by the invading Anglo-Saxons (as Professor Coates clearly still does), this can lead to some crazy logic, when trying to sort out which place-names, with suspected Brittonic origins, are ones given to the places by the Britons themselves, from those which involve (so-called) loan words, which the Anglo-Saxons adopted from the Britons and used to form their own place-names. Another eminent place-name etymologist, Margaret Gelling, proposed that the high frequency of place names containing ‘crug’, ‘monith’ and ‘penn’ elements, must mean that the majority of these would be ‘loan word’ usage, and therefore Anglo-Saxon in origin. This can only be as a result of Gelling’s continued belief in the population replacement theory. If however one is convinced by the evidence for substantial British survival in most areas (as much as 75% in areas such as Devon), one would surely arrive at a very different conclusion from that reached by Gelling.

It is probable that Hoskins (1954) was relying to a large extent on the Victorian surveys of Beddoe (with his now politically-incorrect “Index of Nigrescence”), when he (Hoskins) postulated about the native origins of the Devon population of his time, as there was little else to go on. It has now been shown that this index is only an approximate indicator of such origins, and has now been completely replaced by the much more scientific discipline of population genetics. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, two studies were carried out which indicated that there was no significant genetic difference between the Devonians and the Cornish (“How Celtic are the Cornish? A Study of Biological Affinities.” By R. Harvey et al – 1986, and “Cornish Genes and Celtic Culture.” By M. Smith – 1991). At that time the UK and European genetic surveys were nothing like comprehensive enough to determine whether the Cornish and Devon populations were both indigenous British (Celtic) in origin, or both Germanic. All that could be said was that they were essentially the same as each other. This led to some taunts in newspapers that “there were no Celts left in Cornwall”. More recently, surveys such as “A Y Chromosome Census of the British Isles” by Capelli et al, have concluded that British survival in all parts of England was much higher than had previously been suspected (at least by the place-name etymologists) and that in the South West the survival rate was as high as 75% (similar to that in the Scottish Highlands).

If the place-name etymologists were prepared to remove their blinkers and accept this scientific data, there would no longer be any excuse for them to stick rigidly to the ‘loan word’ hypothesis, on the assumption that there would not have been enough indigenous Britons left in place to formulate the high proportion of names incorporating the elements ‘ced’, ‘cors’, ‘crug’, ‘cumb’, ‘dun’, ‘monith’, ‘penn’, ‘pol’, ‘torr’ etc. As names containing these elements make up a sizeable percentage of Devon’s place-names, such realisation of the genetic reality would transform the etymological map of Devon. Instead, the linguist have managed to embed themselves into a circular argument:-
1. Assumption: The number of Anglo-Saxon immigrants massively outnumbered the remaining indigenous Britons.
2. The high proportion of Brittonic elements found in certain areas therefore implies that these are Anglo-Saxon names using Brittonic ‘loan words’.
3. This significantly increases the percentage of names of Anglo-Saxon origin in many areas of England.
4. This high percentage of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ names indicates that the initial assumption of Anglo-Saxon massive superiority in numbers was correct.
Circular arguments defy logic.

Plymouth Exile, Thank you once again for the information. Of course I realize that the classifications used by Hoskins are dated and ‘politically incorrect’ but I thought it was still worth quoting this passage because it does demonstrate a considerable amount of insight. Clearly, Hoskins was simply using the jargon of the time to frame his otherwise insightful observations. Robert Graves uses basically the same system to distinguish between ‘Celtic’ and ‘Germanic’ physical types in “The White Goddess”.

I remember as an undergraduate in history back in the mid-1970s reading with horror in Dorothy Whitelock’s “The Beginnings of English Society” (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1976) that “the Anglo-Saxon word for a Briton came to be used as a common noun denoting a slave, a fact which tells its own tale of the Britons who remained in the parts conquered by the invaders”( p. 18). Whitelock’s book was originally published in 1952. At least by the mid 1970s this attitude was starting to change. The preface to the 1976 edition (I’m not sure if it’s in the original or not) states that, “Few scholars would now maintain that they [the native Britons] were completely massacred or wiped out, even from the earliest areas of settlement” (p. 17).

The whole idea that the Saxons would either destroy or enslave an entire population just didn’t make sense to me and it was with considerable relief (and I mean that literally) that I discovered the writings of Geoffrey Ashe and others in the early 1980s which clearly demonstrated that, at least in the West Country, the situation is quite different and that there is considerable Celtic survival even if one sometimes has to dig through a thousand or more years of debris to get at it. I don’t think anyone who takes an objective look at the data today can deny that there is an ancient undercurrent of Celtic culture in Devon.

It seems that more and more historian are starting to question the whole idea of a Saxon invasion. This appears to be based largely on recent genetic (and to a lesser extent archaeological) research and, while I feel that the denial of an invasion (at least in the southeast) is probably going too far, the genetic and archaeological evidence clearly indicates that there was nothing like the type of ‘ethnic cleansing’ that was once believed. All that talk about ‘destroying every man, woman and child’ is obviously just jargon employed by a warrior elite to impress other warriors and has little to do with the reality of settling a land already occupied by others. In reality, the horror of ethnic cleansing is confined mostly to the 19th and 20th centuries.

As far as the place-name etymologists are concerned, they are obviously caught up in that quagmire that engulfs so many academics. The recent discoveries in history, linguistics, archaeology and genetics will eventually be adopted by them. Like everything in the academic world it will take time but in time it will come.

Newvonian,

Your point about the “idea that the Saxons would either destroy or enslave an entire population” not making sense is a good one. Even in core Wessex, where kings from Ine to Edgar had law codes, which singled out Britons (‘Welshmen’) for lower privileges (wergilds), it is quite clear that many of them were regarded as landholders. The categories for the determination of wergilds (covering Saxons and ‘Welsh’ in Wessex) were:-

Saxons: Slave, Ceorl, Landless Thegn and Thegn.

Britons: Landless Welsh, Landless Welsh with ½ Hide, Welsh tribute payer (1 hide), Welsh tribute payer’s son, King’s Welsh Horseman, Welsh with 5 hides.

Interestingly, the category of ‘slave’ only appears in the Saxon list (although it is possible that ‘slave’ refers to both groups), and the number of categories for Britons (‘Welsh’) outnumbers that for Saxons, probably acknowledging the fact that the Britons outnumbered the Saxons in Wessex (confirmed by the genetic surveys).

It is probable that the wergilds were not applied outside core Wessex, as William of Malmesbury stated that the Britons of Exeter, at the time of Athelstan, shared equal privileges with the Saxons of the city.

The number of historians who question whether the Saxon invasion/settlement ever happened is quite small (Francis Pryor plus a few maybe), but quite a lot seem to favour the concept known as “Elite Dominance”, in which a very small number of Saxon warriors became the new ‘elite’ over the Britons. To counter this hypothesis, there remain some members of the ‘old school’ who still believe in the ‘Population Replacement’ model. The genetic data clearly shows that neither of these models is tenable. Capelli et al have concluded that the ‘Germanic’ contribution to the English gene-pool must have been in the region of 40% overall, ranging from 25% in much of the region south of the Thames, to 60% in East Anglia and 70% in the region of York. These figures do not correlate with either ‘Elite Dominance’ or the ‘Population Replacement’ models. Admittedly, some of the Germanic element in East Anglia and Yorkshire can almost certainly be attributed to the later Danish influx, but even if the base level of Saxon input was as low as 25% (as in the south), it would still be much greater than ‘just an elite’.

I have always regarded the words of Gildas, Bede and the writers of the ASC as being essentially ‘spin’. When the ASC refers to entire populations of Britons being driven into the sea, I take it with a very large pinch of salt. The logistics of such an operation would not have been remotely possible, so in reality they were probably only talking about a minor skirmish involving small war bands, and ‘hyping’ it up a lot. You are quite right; this was not ethnic cleansing.

The theories of population replacement and elite dominance you mention only arise from one obvious, inescapable fact: the almost complete loss of Celtic language in what was Roman Britain.

As I have pointed out before, is it realistic to think that the Brythonic language and culture survived the Roman period intact and unchanged, and that once the Romans had gone, the Britons just reverted back to their previous culture?

When we look at Britain today, and look where Celtic culture has survived, it is mostly in places that were not under Roman rule (like Ireland and Scotland), or were under peripheral Roman rule (like Cornwall, Devon and Wales).

It seems to me that it was Roman rule that caused the Romano-Britons to lose their language and culture. The old genocide explanation suggests the English were uniquely harsh in their destruction of the native culture, but read what happened with the Romans after the Boudicca rebellion and that was pretty harsh too.

In the traditional scenario, we see the following strange conclusion.

The Romans were a far better organised and more sophisticated force than the English. The Romans had centuries of experience in subjugating conquered lands and assimilating them into their own culture. The English, in contrast, were culturally no more sophisticated than the most rural of Romano-Britons. Yet, in less than 200 years, they had apparently done what 400 years of Roman rule had not managed. They had completely eliminated the Britons’ culture and language, as well as almost all vestiges of imperial Rome.

Genocide and elite dominance are theories that have been employed to explain this improbable scenario.

But modern archaeology seems to show far more continuity between Roman and what is called sub-Roman Britain than was previously thought. Although British society was obviously degraded and often in a state of civil war, elements of the Roman world survived in Britain to a far later date than was previously thought.

But what caused the seemingly abrupt change to Germanic language? One explanation may be that there were influential Germanic speakers in Roman Britain some time before the end of imperial rule. These were the Saxon mercenaries employed by the Roman army because of a shortage of manpower. There is evidence that much of the Roman army in Britain towards the end of imperial rule was composed of these Germanic mercenaries.

It was, as we know, these people who seized power in a military coup shortly after the Romans’ departure.

But we don’t know how many of them there were in Britain at this point. It may have been many more than we think.

As a reward for serving in the Roman military, the mercenaries were entitled to a generous grant of land in the territory in which they had served. This would have made them wealthy by local standards. It is certainly possible there were significant numbers of quite affluent, Germanic speaking ex-mercenaries in late Roman Britain.

It is difficult to determine how many of these people existed because it was only towards the end of the Roman period that the military stopped issuing mercenaries with standard issue Roman military equipment, with which they were buried. After that it is straightforward to identify mercenaries because they had recognisably Germanic artefacts buried with them. Also, civilian ex-mercenaries probably chose not to have military objects buried with them, and would appear as Romans, or Romano-British.

As settlement of mercenaries grew in number, and the quantity of affluent Germanic speakers increased, it seems likely that the Romano-Britons learnt their language to trade with an increasingly profitable minority living in their communities. Wealthy and largely self-sufficient, the mercenaries would have no incentive to learn Celtic, a language of low status peasants away from the Roman towns. But the Celtic peasants, excluded from Roman town life, would have had a strong motive for trading with the rich, but uncultured mercenaries. The mercenaries, although enriched by Roman money, would have had tastes and culture much closer to the Celtic peasantry of Roman Britain and were more likely, unless they had experienced a full Latin education and Roman cultural assimilation--which is unlikely in most cases--would be consumers of local goods: beer, cider and other long standing regional food and drink more familiar to them without any Roman influence or pretences. This could have formed a healthy commercial trade that eventually proved disastrous both for the Britons and the Romanizied upper class that once had been their masters.

Regarding the writers of these times...

Gildas cannot be automatically dismissed as melodramatic, although he is often inaccurate. In many ways, he is all we have to go on regarding this period, and he provides, apparently, a better account of what was going on 6th century Britain than we actually have from the late Roman period itself.

http://www.mun.ca/mst/heroicage/issues/4/Hunter-Mann.html

Gildas presents a picture of a corrupt and incompetent post-Roman British administration, forming dubious alliances with Germanic tribes that it does not properly understand the nature of, has little power to control, with maybe thousands of their heavily armed and well-trained soldiers already encamped on British soil, and with even greater numbers of ex-military individuals and their families settled in Roman-era mercenary land grants already going back a century or more.

The British authorities carried on the practice of inviting the Germanic mercenaries into Britain to shore up their military, but without the clout and the finance that had been available from the Roman Empire. The way Gildas describes how it hideously backfired does not seem in any way improbable, and to me, remains the likeliest explanation for how England came into existence.

I think it is important not to reinvent this early period as one where Britons and Saxons gradually came together to form a co-operative society. All the sources we have point to a prolonged and bitter struggle between the two groups in post-Roman Britain. When societies break down in the way that post-Roman Britain did, we know from our own historical experience that warfare and atrocities will occur. Romano-Britain fought for the survival of its way of life and eventually lost. Large-scale dislocations of people were inevitable in the chaos of the period. Regarding the DNA evidence, this can be deceptive. Because people were once driven out does not mean that they did not come back later, when things had settled down. People flee for their lives, sometimes settle where they find refuge, but others go back to their old homes when it is safe again. Many, driven out by the English, would have returned to their homes when the wars had ended, but in doing so, probably had to contend with a changed culture and government, and reduced circumstances for themselves. If to go back home meant to speak English, many may have decided to do it, as opposed to being a refugee in foreign parts, with nothing except their clothes and whatever they could carry with them. The fact that many refugees from the English invasion saw themselves eventually returning is supported by the large number of treasure troves, of gold and coins, buried in this time.

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

They buried this treasure to go back to.

It was chaos, civil war and invasion, but probably not genocide. The Celtic language and culture, I think, had already been denuded by the centuries of Roman rule, and the Germanic language was imposed by force as a result of a wealthy and powerful military class seizing the political apparatus. The ethnically Celtic people who remained in England became English because their Celtic culture had already been stripped from them by the Romans a long time before and because they were unable to exert much influence on the rebel Germanic mercenaries who steadily took over their country, district by district, using what was left of the Roman administrative system and road network to impose their rule. What survived of their language died out, and the result was that most of the pre-Saxon place names that survive in England are of Roman origin, representing administrative centres or military installations, the very places where the mercenaries would have been based.

EVB,

The puzzle of why England lost its Celtic language - and so completely and so utterly - is puzzling when one compares it to neighbouring Wales.

Wales was also influenced by the Roman occupation, but like Devon and Cornwall it appears to have retained greater autonomy than most areas. For example "Isca Silurum" in what is now Gwent mirrors (in name and status) "Isca Dumniorum" that is modern day Exeter. Both appear to have been capitals of some sort of pricipality during Roman times.

However it should be remembered that this relates only to a part of what is now Wales as at that point Wales was a number of independent kingdoms.

From what I understand the earliest semblance of welsh nationality seem to date from the 4th century - essentially after the Roman period - and perhaps was not defined until the time of Offa's Dyke in 784.

Wales remained a number of separate kingdoms well into Norman times.

And yet the Welsh language has survived throughout. Although its use is concentrated to the North and West it appears that even on the English border Welsh speakers can account for more than 25% of the population.

Only in the south-east corner does this drop further - and generally even here its speakers average over 12.5% of the population.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Welsh_language

Why then the profound difference with neighbouring English counties???


Did the Roman occupation delineate Britain along this border - with another border for Dumnonia that has been less enduring? And if so - why?

Was it simply a matter of geography as often suggested? (eg the Romans didn't bother with highland/hilly terrain??)

Greetings and a Happy Europe Day to everybody!

The Romans were interested in conquering the whole island of Great Britain as can be seen by Roman remains in Scotland such as the Antonine Wall, basically a earthwork running across the central belt between the Clyde and Forth. It is most probable "Imperial Overstretch" meant the Romans could not conquer further. By the time of the northern of the two walls was built the Empire were really on foederatii for their troops, there simply were far too few Italians in the Empire to run it and the army.

After the collapse of the Empire in Britain, an idea of Rome, "Romanitas", survived in the British tribes who had been under Roman rule. Most Welsh princes had family trees with Macsen Wledig (Magnus Maximus) at the top. There was autonomy, yes, but most of the Empire from Spain to Egypt had a degree of that, it is what held together the Roman Empire for 600 years. The Romans left most, not all but most, of their subjects to run themselves if that did not conflict directly with Roman interests. This was most typical in border areas.

The survival of a P-Celtic language is linked. Can I recommend a book? AD 500 "A Journey Through the Dark Isles of Britain and Ireland" by Simon Young. This book is written as a travelogue by a historian as if travelling in these islands from Justinian's court. The bit that is relevant is when he refers to the kingdom of Deira (Yorkshire), the old timers remember Christianity, they remember Latin and they remember the BRYTHONIC languages they were bought up in. And then the invaders came. The youngsters so do not want to be associated with the Wealsc they only speak the invaders' tongue and insist on being Angles or Saxons that they fail to notice that they often have Wealsc names.

The invaders, having no interest in Latin (hence our Latinate borrowings have a suspiciously French post 1066 ring) that the conquered had to learn their language, in a pre literate society the language of the majority could shift thus quite quickly. Only in a generation of two. Furthermore, after 1066 English became a symbol of an oppressed people, only becoming official in the 14th Century. After the 14th there was a national pride of sorts in the language that unified it as a spoken language quite quickly, national pride etc. Most English people spoke English by the time of the Tudors, Italian by contrast, was the native language of the majority of Italians from only about 1980.

This national pride came at the expense of regional dialects and regional languages. Welsh became one of the symbols of Welsh nationality quite early, a differentiation from the "Saes". That helped it to survive the offical persecution in the 19th C. A persecution that almost cost Scots Gaelic it's life. It was "nationalism" that killed off Celtic tongues in most of England, but there are pockets of Welsh still spoken in Shropshire, Herefordshire, Cheshire and Gloucestershire. And that Cornish survived shows that Celtic languages were spoken in England at some point.

There was a Welsh academic who said the Welsh and the English were like "Christmas Pudding and Christmas pie, the same ingredients but in different proportions, but one was baked the other boiled." (I wish I had the name!!)

The thing is I do not speak the same English as my parents and especially my grandparents. Though I wish I had a stonger accent, it is Devonian if roused or pointed out. Language does change. And sadly so do languages.

Once again, Happy Europe Day to all.

EVB,

Just like you, it has always struck me that there is no conclusive evidence that the British language was still in common use in lowland Britain when the Romans departed, and that this could be the cause of the rapidity with which Old English spread throughout most of England. Unfortunately, at the beginning of the 5th century, there is no evidence that the common people (Britons), in what is now lowland England, were anything other than illiterate, so there is little likelihood that any textual remnants are going to appear, to answer the question. We know that whenever educated people wrote anything, they did so in Latin, but that doesn’t tell us what language either they or the common people spoke in conversation. It is often said that graffiti is a good indicator of the common spoken language, and there have been some finds of 4th and early 5th century graffiti by archaeologists, but they have all been in Latin. Does this indicate that the British tongue (at least in the towns and cities) had largely been replaced by Latin by this time?

However, there is some later evidence, which appears to counteract this assumption. We know from historical records that as late as the 10th century, the Britons in Wessex were still being identified as a separate grouping from the Saxons (wergilds). How could these Britons have been distinguished from the Saxons if they were all speaking Old English by that time? Most of Wessex was in the region of Britain where the Roman lifestyle had been prevalent, as can be clearly seen from the archaeological distribution of Roman Villa remains. Apart from a couple of isolated instances (both to the east of Exeter), the density of these was fairly high to the east of the Dumnonian border, but ceased abruptly west of the border. One might therefore have expected that, if Latin had become the common language of Romanised Britain by the end of the Roman era, this would have been the case in what was to become Wessex.

At least one conclusion can be inferred from the apparently long period of dual language (British and Old English) in core Wessex. Linguists usually claim that if there is any reasonable period of overlap between two languages, then the incoming language always ‘borrows’ significantly from the vocabulary of the outgoing language. This phenomenon has been cited as an indisputable tenet, by which the period of mixing of two language traditions can always be judged. The linguists have used this tenet in the case of 5th and 6th century England to argue that any mixing between the Saxons and the Britons must have been very transitory, because lexical borrowings from British to Old English were demonstrably very few. However, in Wessex we have a clearly recorded case in which this particular tenet breaks down. We know that the mixing between the Saxons and the (British speaking) Britons was far longer than transitory (centuries in fact), yet the number of ‘borrowed’ words was still very small.

>>It is probable that the wergilds were not applied outside core Wessex, as William of Malmesbury stated that the Britons of Exeter, at the time of Athelstan, shared equal privileges with the Saxons of the city.<<

Exeter was the second-biggest city in Wessex and seems to have operated almost like a state within a state, so it is possible that this situation was unique to Exeter. William seems to have considered it sufficiently unusual to be worthy of comment.

William makes no mention of Exeter (or Devon) being a part of core Wessex, and the fact that the wergilds were not applied in Exeter also indicates that this was the case. Why otherwise would Exeter have been singled out for such special treatment? Were the inhabitants of the largest city in Wessex exempt from the wergilds? There is no evidence for it.

I didn’t mean to suggest in my last posting that the Saxon Invasion did not occur. Certainly, one of the sources I was thinking of was Francis Prior but I have noticed a tendency on the part of some other historians to play down words such as ‘conquest’ and ‘invasion ‘ in favor of words like ‘migration’.

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. It is probably no coincidence that those areas of Britain most effected by the Roman occupation also were those least able to resist the Saxon onslaught and that resistance to the Saxons arose mostly in the west.

The idea of substantial Celtic survival in the southwest is certainly not new. Geoffrey Ashe presented a convincing argument for it almost forty years ago and has repeated it numerous times since then. While some people may think of Ashe as ‘the King Arthur guy’, the fact is that although Arthur remains a shadowy figure at best the attempts by Ashe and others to better understand the events that took place around the time that Arthur is supposed to have existed have added greatly to our knowledge of ‘Dark Age’ Britain. Ashe believes that matters would have been very different had the Britons not rallied after the initial impact of the Saxon Rebellion.

There can be little doubt that a series of battles were fought between the Britons and the Saxons in the late fifth and early sixth centuries which culminated in a period of relative peace that lasted for about a generation and during which the Saxons were contained mostly in the east. Gildas seems to have been writing near the end of this period (AD 540-547). Ashe argues that this “delay made a difference, because the Anglos-Saxons who finally won were no longer the murderous pirates of the fifth century. They had had time to settle, to organize, to study the arts of peace and to absorb something of the culture and moral outlook promoted by Christian missions. Civilization never entirely perished in Britain” (Ashe,1968: 235).

Ashe suggests that these influences may have had a particularly strong effect on the West Saxons and points out that two of their early kings (Cerdic and Ceadwalla) had British/Celtic names. He argues that by the time the West Saxons under Ceawlin had renewed their push westward in 577 and reached the Severn (thus divided Wales from Dumnonia) their attitude towards the British had undergone a fundamental change. “Annihilation and oblivion were no longer the Saxon watchwords”, says Ashe and he claims that, “Saxon place-names beginning ‘Weala’, Welsh, prove that the former people were allowed to exist in organized communities”. He goes on to say that, “Throughout much of the West Country ... the proportion of Celtic place-names is high” and that in “the seventh century, princes of Wessex were marrying princesses of Wales” (Ashe 1968: 240-241).

There is some debate over exactly when certain parts of Dumnonia fell under Saxon control but the most generally accepted dates for the fall of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall appear to be 658, 710 and 825 respectively. As Plymouth Exile has pointed out, from the reign of Ine (688-726) the laws of Wessex encoded the rights of both Saxons and ‘Welsh’ and while the latter seem to have had a somewhat lower status than the former, this clearly indicated that the two groups coexisted. It may be no coincidence that the first of these laws were issued around the time that the West Saxons were moving into Dumnonia. Ashe also points out that Ine “enlisted his West Welsh subjects in his own service - even in his bodyguard” (p. 241).

Ashe sees Glastonbury as a symbol of this new attitude. When the abbey came under Saxon control during the conquest of central Somerset in 658 it was allowed to retain its Celtic character and even its Celtic abbot. According to Ashe, “At Glastonbury, for the first time, the English adopted a major Celtic institution and made it their own in a spirit of collaboration” (p. 241-242). These are obviously not the actions of a conquering people bent on extermination but of a victorious minority imposing its rule partly by force and partly by conciliation.

Given the above, it only makes sense, as Plymouth Exile points out, that the genetic evidence indicates that the population is still about 75% pre-Saxon “in areas such as Devon” and that there are so many Celtic place-names there. Why should place-name etymologists need to rely on concepts such as ‘loan words’ to explain Celtic place-names in a place where people of Celtic ancestry clearly make up the majority of the population?

What happened in Dumnonia was not the replacement of one group by another but the gradual and tragic decline of the Old Language from east to west until the last speakers passed away in western Cornwall sometime around the end of the eighteenth century.


The passages quoted above are from Geoffrey Ashe, ‘Arthur and English History’ in Geoffrey Ashe (ed), “The Quest for Arthur’s Britain”. London: Pall Mall, 1968.

Of course William of Malmesbury makes no mention of Exeter being part of something called "core Wessex". Why would he write about a concept that hadn't been invented yet?

I have final managed to pick up a copy of “Celtic Voices, English Places”. Here are a few of the Devonian Celtic place-names listed in it:

Crook, Coombe Raleigh - from ‘crug’ meaning ‘mound or tumulus’.

Crowdy (Mill) - from ‘crou’ and ‘tiy’ meaning literally ‘sty-house’.

Dawlish - from ‘dub’ and ‘gleis’ meaning ‘dark stream’.

Duvale - from ‘dub’ and (probably) ‘bal’ meaning ‘dark peak’.

Kelly - from ‘celli’ meaning ‘grove’.

Morchard - from ‘mor’ and ‘ced’ meaning ‘big trees’ or ‘big wood’.

Penquit - from ‘penn’ and ‘ced’ meaning something like “top of the wood’.


Source - Richard Coates & Andrew Breeze with David Horovitz, “Celtic Voices, English Places: Studies of the Celtic Impact on Place-Names in England”. Stamford: Shaun Tyas, 2000.

Quote from nxylas:-
“Of course William of Malmesbury makes no mention of Exeter being part of something called "core Wessex". Why would he write about a concept that hadn't been invented yet?”

Unless you can come up with a good reason why the wergilds should not apply to a part of Wessex, one can only conclude that Exeter (and the rest of Devon) was not considered to be a part of Wessex. This is in line with modern references that define Wessex as ending at Somerset, with Devon and Cornwall being regions conquered by Wessex, but not incorporated into ‘core Wessex’.

“There is some debate over exactly when certain parts of Dumnonia fell under Saxon control but the most generally accepted dates for the fall of Somerset, Devon and Cornwall appear to be 658, 710 and 825 respectively.”

Newvonian,

Because the battle of 710 between Gerent and Ine was recorded in the ASC, some historians assume that Devon fell under Saxon control at that time. However there are two pieces of evidence, which throw doubt on this interpretation. The ASC does not mention an outcome of the battle, which it normally does if the Saxons were victorious (some Welsh sources attribute the victory to Gereint). The other piece of evidence, which does not indicate a Saxon advance throughout Devon at that time is that Ine is recorded as having built a frontier fort near Taunton after the battle. If this is the case, then it is probable that Devon fell at a later date, and not necessarily all at the same time.

“Why should place-name etymologists need to rely on concepts such as ‘loan words’ to explain Celtic place-names in a place where people of Celtic ancestry clearly make up the majority of the population?”

For some unaccountable reason, most place-name etymologists still seem to accept the Victorian version of history (i.e. that the Saxons had arrived in overwhelming numbers, even in Devon), as implicitly believed by their mentor of the 1920s, Eilert Ekwall. They found it difficult to reconcile this (now discredited) version of history with the substantial number of Brythonic place-names in places like Devon, without invoking the concept of ‘loan words’.

One useful source of information concerning the influence of Saxons are their Land Charters.

A useful site in this respect is the British Academy who have a website with considerable detail.

http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/chartwww/charthome.html

According to my best reading of the site it appears that the earliest charters referencing Somerset are very early indeed - the mid seventh century onwards. The first record for Dorset that I can see is 704AD.

The earliest record for Devon is 739AD which relates to some land at Crediton to a bishop. We believe that St Boniface was born in Crediton around this time.

However there is then a long gap until the next charter in Devon. The earliest I can find is in the ninth century (833AD) and they become reasonably frequent thereafter.

The earliest record for Cornwall that I can find is 943AD. The Saxons certainly owned land in Cornwall before this as Triggshire is mentioned in King Alfred's will in 899AD.

Why Crediton seems so 'out of step" with other land charters for Devon is not clear. The only surviving copy of this charter dates from the 11th century as the original was presumably lost, so there is some uncertainty as to its authenticity. Putting that aside there are records of land grants by Celtic Dumnonian Kings to the Kings of Wessex for church land (eg King Geraint) so this may explain why Crediton was granted so early.

Crediton aside it would seem that Saxons had sufficient authority to grant land rights in Somerset and Dorset in the seventh century, but they do not seem to have done so in Devon until the ninth century, and not in Cornwall until the tenth.

In Cornwall it is not clear that they could do so across the whole county even then.

Ozzie Exile,

I find it interesting that the earliest apparent Saxon land grant in Devon (739) concerns Crediton and the church, and that there seems to be a long gap before subsequent grants appear in the record.

St Boniface may have been connected to this land grant. It has been suggested that St Boniface, although he was in Germany by that point, had been involved with setting up a new monastery at Crediton in 739.

In the section of the Crediton town website that discusses St Boniface, the following is mentioned;

“The young Wynfrith, as a monk in Exeter, would have seen the different traditions and problems of Celtic and Roman Christian practices.”

Also that;

“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.”

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

I think it is possible that St Boniface chose obscure Crediton rather than Exeter as the site for his monastery because he could start there with a blank slate. At Exeter, it seems likely, there was still a powerful Celtic religious tradition present in the city.

Traditions suggest that St Boniface was of mixed parentage;

“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.”

St. Boniface seems to have had more enthusiasm for the Roman church and is not associated with Celtic Christianity. Influenced more by the continental church, he soon left Devon for missionary work in Germany.

Going forward some 250 years to Bishop Leofric of Exeter, and the ecclesiastical see is moved from Crediton to Exeter. The reason for this move was supposed to have been the Viking raids. Crediton being much more vulnerable to the Vikings than walled Exeter.

However, Joyce Hill of Leeds University, proposes that it had as much to do with Leofric’s perception of Exeter’s ancient status;

“My contention is that Leofric transferred the see not so much because Crediton had been ravaged when Exeter had not - as he skilfully implies in his letter to Pope Leo - but because, as a cleric trained in Lotharingia, he saw Exeter, as former Roman civitas and still a fortified "city ", as a more suitable place for an episcopal see than Crediton, which was a mere villula.”

With Leofric, Bishop of Exeter, we again see the same ‘legend’ of mixed English Celtic parentage.

“The assertion of John of Worcester, that Leofric was a Briton (Brytonicus - a native Celtic Devonian), is rendered doubtful by his name, though he may have been born in the West Country of Saxon parents. William of Malmesbury tells us that his early years were spent in training in Lotharingia on the Continent, presumably at a reformed house of secular canons.”

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

Leofric, possibly from a similar background to St. Boniface, may have taken a different view of the ecclesiastical arrangements in Devon, preferring to assert the old situation, in which Exeter was the centre of the church in preference to St. Boniface’s new monastery and the subsequent See that was based in Crediton.

I find with both St Boniface and Leofric that the possible indigenous Celtic elements of their upbringing—from old or ‘traditional’ sources saying so specifically—are both downplayed as “attractive traditions” or “rendered doubtful” when there is nothing much suggested to prove conclusively that either of them were of entirely English origin.

This bias is accepted because it is believed that Devon had become entirely English at the time of St Boniface in the 8th century.

From the Crediton town website;

“Boniface was born just at that time when the Saxon conquest of Devon was complete.”

You have a situation where old records—or “traditions”—attest that both St Boniface and Bishop Leofric had mixed Celtic-English parentage, but the accepted chronology of Devon’s history asserts incontrovertibly that this is unlikely because Devon’s conquest was ‘complete’ or that Leofric’s name was English, as if Leofric’s personal name represented total proof that he was an Englishman.

William of Malmesbury, writing in the late 11th century, and John of Worcester writing in the 12th century, are dismissed as being wrong, or their writing as fantasies, because historians writing 800 years after the time think they have more real facts at their disposal.

These records, I accept, are probably not absolute fact, but they point to knowledge, outside of Devon, of an early medieval Devonian culture that was identifiable and distinct. I know of no other place in England apart from Cornwall where such cultural distinctions were being made regarding important personalities in local tradition and medieval literature.

Plymouth Exile,

As I mentioned before, I realize that there is considerable debate over the timing of Saxon occupation of various parts of Dumnonia. I chose to use the dates I did in my last posting because they seem to be fairly widely accepted and I didn’t have time to go into any sort of detailed analysis.

Hoskins gives the date for the fall of Somerset as 658, when the Saxons defeated the Britons at the Battle of Penselwood on the Wiltshire/Somerset border. This, according to Hoskins, “opened the whole of Somerset to the Saxon advance at one single blow”. He goes on to argue that the Saxons has conquered “the whole of north and west Devon by 682 (Hoskins 1978:41 & 43)". I don’t agree with either of these dates. While the Battle of Penselwood gave the Saxons access to northern Somerset via Wiltshire, it seems that the battle for control of Somerset continued for many years and that the first inroads into Devon did not occur until probably sometime in the first half of the 8th century.

All the evidence seems to suggest that in the first decade of the 8th century the eastern boundary of Dumnonia was actually in western Somerset. In discussing the land grant made by King Geraint of Dumnonia to Sherborne Abby, Martin Grimmer says that the boundary between Wessex and Dumnonia was probably not far west of Sherborne at the time the grant was made - which he thinks was sometime between 705 and 709.

William F. Skene has suggest that the poem, “Battle of Llongborth” (also know as “Elegy for Geraint”) was written for King Geraint, whom Aldhelm calls "the lord who guides the sceptre of the western kingdom" also known as "Domnonia". Skene also suggests that the Llongborth in the poem, where Geraint is said to have fallen to the Saxons, is actually Langport in Somerset, about 20 miles west of Sherborne. If, as you say, Geraint constructed a fortress near Taunton after the battle with Ine in 710 then obviously he survived that battle and the poem, if it was written for him, must refer to a later battle fought perhaps at Langport.


Ozzie Exile,

When I first read your mention of the 739 land grant at Crediton the same idea came to me. It seems that it was possible for a ruler or an abbey to own and sometimes grant parcels of land that were outside their normal jurisdiction. As appears to have been the case with Geraint’s grant to Sherborne Abbey, this may sometimes have been done as a show of good will or perhaps to seal an agreement. So, the 739 grant might not necessarily mean that the Saxons had advanced as far as Crediton by then.


ExeValleyBoy,

Geoffrey Ashe mentions a Celtic connection, at least a theological one, to both Aldhelm and Boniface. He states that, “The Church of Wessex was educated by yet another Irishman, Maelduib, whose pupil St. Aldhelm developed an Anglo-Celtic scholarship [in the South West] comparable with that in the north. Aldhelmin in turn taught Boniface, the Apostle of Germany and restorer of the Church in Gaul” (Ashe 1968: 241). If what you say is correct, then Boniface’s ‘Celtic connections’ must have extended beyond theology.


For anyone who may not know, Martin Grimmer’s paper, “Saxon Bishop and Celtic King: Interactions between Aldhelm of Wessex and Geraint of Dumnonia”, is available online at the link below. By the way, this online journal is hosted by Memorial University of Newfoundland.

http://www.heroicage.org/issues/4/Grimmer.html

By the way, I should mention that I was first made aware of Martin Grimmer's paper via a posting to this forum made by ExeValleyBoy on June 28, 2005. Thanks EVB.