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

Just found a quote from Edward Nicholson's book 'Keltic Researches' (1904). In it, he says that "There is
good ground to believe that Lancashire,
West Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Worcestershire,
Warwickshire, Leicestershire, Rutland, Cambridgeshire,
Wiltshire, Somerset, and part of Sussex, are
as Keltic as Perthshire and North Munster ; that
Cheshire, Shropshire, Herefordshire, Monmouth-
shire, Gloucestershire, Devon, Dorset, Northamptonshire,
Huntingdonshire, and Bedfordshire
are more so-and equal to North Wales and
Leinster ; while Buckinghamshire and Hertfordshire
exceed even this degree and are on a level
with South Wales and Ulster."

Hmm, I always thought that North Wales was more "Keltic" than South Wales, but leaving that aside, if you plot those counties on a map, it paints a very strange picture of Celtic England. All the Western counties, sure, but also the whole East Midlands with "part of Sussex" forming an isolated cluster of Celts. Seems very different from current beliefs about genetic distribution.

Nick,

I have seen this quote before and also wondered where Nicholson got his data from. I later discovered the probable answer. His list of counties aqnd districts correlates exactly with Beddoe’s map showing his (so-called) “Index of Nigrescence”. Beddoe (together with others of his time) believed that hair and eye colour, height, cephalic index, etc. were accurate indicators of ‘race’, as the Victorians understood the term to mean.

Modern genetics has shown that the concept of distinct racial groupings is a myth, but that there are genetic variations between regions, which can be identified with population migrations. These regional variations only show a weak correlation with Beddoe’s “Index”.

North Wales can only be considered to be more “Keltic” than South Wales if one considers the current usage of the Welsh language, and even then the demarcation is not that clear cut. For instance the population of Haverfordwest (in South Wales) is just as strongly Indigenous British in origin as that of Llangefni (in North Wales), according to “A Y Chromosome Census of the British Isles”.

Hadn't heard of the "Index of Nigrescence" before, but it's very telling that when I did a Google image search for Beddoe's map, the only place I could find it reproduced was on a white supremacist "history" site. Reading about Beddoe's views, the guy could give Hitler a run for his money. Substitute "Irish" for "Jews" and their rantings are virtually indistinguishable from each other.

I had heard that Hertfordshire (listed above as one of the most Celtic counties) had a late surviving Celtic kingdom. If I recall it was in an article from The Times.

By late survival I seem to recall they were talking sixth or seventh century - which isn't that late in comparison to some of the western counties - but may well be relative to neighbouring "home counties".

Personally I have not come across any site that suggests that there is any degree of celtic identification in any of the home counties nor in the Midland counties - although I know there are a few websites that focus on Cumbria and Elmet (in the Pennines).

http://www.aboutulverston.co.uk/celts/cumbric.htm

http://www.oldtykes.co.uk/Elmethome.htm

Elmet seems to have been lost in the seventh or eighth century, but Cumbria appears to have survived until the middle ages - and gave rise to some famous Celtic bards.

I don't know what other contributors to this site think, but personally I don't feel threatened if other counties (other than Devon) also claim something of a Celtic identity and history!

Personally I think that the whole of England is, like France, essentially a country of Celtic origins with an overlay of Germanic influence, although the latter is perhaps surprisingly superficial.

It's interesting to note that the kingdom of Sussex had, in the seventh century, a king called Aethelwalh, which means "noble Briton". Then there is Penda of Mercia, who apparently has a Celtic name, together with many of ancestors. His son was Merewalh, an English name meaning "illustious Briton".
He had another close relative Penwalh, which seems to be a mixture of an actual British name with the epithet "Briton". Penwalh's son, Guthlac (an English name), a hermit, is said to have conversed in Brythonic with "demons" who were assailing him.

It seems to me then that Penda's dynasty were actually native British speakers who had perhaps gained the throne by intermarriage, from the Anglian founding dynasty, but that English was still the language used officially, much as Latin had been in Roman times.

My impression is also that Britons often took on an English name (or were given it) in addition to their native one. This would explain why some have a Celtic name, while others have an English name, though they were apparently British. Still others have what seems to be a mixture, which could possibly be due to later traditions merging their English and British names.
This would parallel the custom of men taking a Roman name on gaining citizenship, a concept which I believe may have been borrowed by the early Germanic peoples.


Concerning genetics and hair colour etc., I think there is something to be said for the idea that darker hair is to some extent an indication of a relative lack of "Germanic invader" influence (though presence of light hair is probably not necessarily an indication Germanic influence). At any rate, from what I've read, the English are on average, notably darker haired than North Germans.

I think anthropology can shed quite a bit of light on these issues. For example, skeletal remains indicate that there were indeed physical differences between the early Celts and the Germanic invaders. These differences were already noted decades ago, but for some reason scientists seem to be saying now that the possibility of distinct differences is a new idea which should be investigated.

I agree to an extent that “England is, like France, essentially a country of Celtic origins” in that there are Celtic elements remaining in England, but I am coming back to the idea that something truly disastrous happened to the native people of Romano-British “England” or Britannia between the 5th and 6th centuries.

There are two things I cannot get past in relation to England. The first is the overwhelming minority of Celtic place names; in many regions no more than the names of rivers survive. Then there is the replacement of the Celtic language. The Celtic languages have nothing in common with English. After thinking about this for a long time, I cannot see how this total language replacement came about, and why a Romance language failed to arise in Britain as it did in almost every other province of the Roman Empire. In provinces where a Romance language did not develop, the indigenous language reasserted itself. Britain (England) is the odd one out; we should either be speaking Welsh or something like French.

The Romano-British culture does not seem to have been gradually supplanted or modified; the evidence suggests it was totally wiped out. Both the Celtic and the Latin culture were almost completely removed within the borders of the old Roman province. This eradication involved an ancient Celtic culture, which if you take the example of Wales and Cornwall, was incredibly persistent despite invasions and occupations, plus the eradication of 400 years of subsequent Roman culture; a longer time than the present United States has existed. The almost complete loss of both Latin and Celtic in the common speech and the majority of place names in England cannot be explained by slow assimilation into a dominant Anglo-Saxon culture. The Germanic invaders were not the Romans, and until the English state came together under Alfred in the 9th century, it was a chaotic and poorly run affair that frequently disintegrated.

The English settler culture, often under threat, was constantly invaded and frequently divided among itself, I see it as being in a very poor position to completely alter the place names and everyday speech of hundreds of thousands of native Celtic Britons across such a huge area in under two hundred years, who had been, for four centuries before, part of a sophisticated cosmopolitan society that had contained some of the Roman Empire’s major cities.

As I have argued before, what did the Germanic settlers do that the Romans could not? The Romans, not known for their humanitarian values, apparently allowed Celtic society to survive throughout the centuries of their rule, yet 200 years after they left, there is little sign of Celts surviving anywhere in England, and almost nothing left today.

An old argument is that the Germanic invaders killed everyone, in a now unrecorded act of genocide. This 2002 research seems to give that idea new strength;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/2076470.stm

But this is then contradicted by a different study, in 2004;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3514756.stm

I think epidemics of Bubonic Plague may be the answer to England’s origins. There is evidence that plague broke out in Britain in the 5th century, and it was this disease, rather than genocide, that was responsible for the desertion and abandonment of Roman era cities and farmland. The final blow may have been the catastrophic “Justinian’s Plague” of 535, which effected the whole of the remaining Roman empire and may have killed over 100 million people (the 14th century outbreak killed 25 million), and which may have come into Britain through existing trade links with the Mediterranean. Although it happened later than the first Germanic settlements into what is now England, this final plague may have been the tipping point that destroyed the British post-Roman society, and its resistance to Germanic settlement.

In the records we have of post-Roman Britain abandoned cities are described. St Cuthbert is reported visiting the deserted Roman city of Carlisle.

The abandoned Roman city of Viroconium, now Wroxeter in Cheshire was abandoned between 500 and 650; some time after the first Germanic settlers arrived, but within the period of the Justinian Plague. Apparently, work was done in the 5th century to improve the Basilica and the bath house in the city after a period of decline after the Romans had left. But then the city was abruptly abandoned.

If plague had attacked post-Roman Britain it would, as in the 14th century, have been largely an urban disease, and infection would have spread down the routes of the Roman road network. The extinction of Romano-British culture would have occurred in the centres of population; killing the people most able to write down what was happening, and leaving behind mostly small illiterate rural populations, outside the towns, who had no ability to keep civil society going. These were most likely the Celtic-speaking survivors of the Roman time.

In Canterbury, archeology points to the Germanic invaders settling not in Roman towns, but around their outskirts.

“Historical sources suggest that there were several outbreaks of plague in Britain at this time which may have reduced the local population considerably. As in more recent times of turmoil, there were doubtless many factors which came into play. Evidence so far suggests that the town itself may have been practically deserted throughout the 5th century, with any habitation being of a temporary kind. The first waves of Anglo-Saxon invaders passed through or erected only makeshift shelters while they consolidated their position. When they had succeeded in dominating the local population it seems that the first settlers chose to live outside the old Roman town.”

http://www.canterburytrust.co.uk/schools/randascr/rascr06.htm

Maybe the Germanic settlers chose to keep away from the old Roman towns because they were seen as centres of disease and infection. Pockets of survivors, in the countryside, would have been the Celtic people not assimilated into Roman culture. These survivors, in tiny isolated settlements, may have been the only people the new settlers encountered in an empty land of abandoned cities, towns and villages.

“An old argument is that the Germanic invaders killed everyone, in a now unrecorded act of genocide. This 2002 research seems to give that idea new strength;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/2076470.stm

But this is then contradicted by a different study, in 2004;

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3514756.stm”

ExeValleyBoy,

The first of the above links is a Welsh newspaper report of a research paper from UCL. It happens to be a gross distortion of the conclusions of the original research paper:-

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/tcga/tcgapdf/Weale-MBE-02-AS.pdf

As can be seen from this paper, the only English towns surveyed were Fakenham and North Walsham in Norfolk, and Ashbourne, Southwell and Bourne in the East Midlands, all of which were in the old Danelaw region. The conclusion drawn by Weale et al, was that somewhere between 50% and 100% population replacement must have occurred in this narrow strip of eastern central England. The newspaper report has extrapolated this to mean that the whole of England was subjected to an ethnic cleansing event, which left only Wales as a refuge for the Britons. This is total nonsense, as it is not permissible to draw conclusions about the whole of England from the results for a small cluster of towns in central England. One should never take the word of newspapers when seeking reliable data. Always refer back to the original research papers.

Further research at UCL discovered that the Angles, Saxons and Jutes were genetically indistinguishable (in the Y-Chromosome) from the Danes, who later ravaged eastern England, so as the five towns in the Weale et al study were all within the confines of the Danelaw, some (or even most) of the supposed Angles that they said made up the majority of the population of that narrow strip of central England, could have been of Danish Viking descent and not Angles.

The second of your links is hardly more reliable, as the tooth enamel isotope test only indicates where a person spent his/her childhood. Thus second (and subsequent) generation Anglo-Saxon migrants would have the same isotope signature in their tooth enamel as the Britons. This is not a reliable way to determine ethnic origins therefore. However, the article does briefly mention a more comprehensive Y-Chromosome survey, which gives more reliable data concerning population origins. The original research paper is:-

http://www.ucl.ac.uk/tcga/tcgapdf/capelli-CB-03.pdf

The results from this research are not only in close agreement with those from the Weale et al paper, with regard to the Danelaw area (45% to 70% population replacement in this case), but results for the rest of the British Isles are presented (Fig. 3). These imply that in the whole of southern England (with the exception of Chippenham) the survival rate of the Britons was in the region of 70-75%. Only in Norfolk and York, were the descendents of the Anglo-Saxons or Danes found to be in the majority.

I realise that on the face of it these results fly in the face of the language and place-name evidence for much of England, but genes do not lie. A possible explanation for the unexpected change from Brythonic to Old English over most of England is that in the most Romanised parts of Britain, Brythonic had long ago been abandoned in favour of a dialect of Latin, by the time that the Anglo-Saxons arrived, so one would not expect to find Brythonic speech hanging on in there as it did in the less Romanised West. Also you will find very few present day historians or archaeologist who subscribe to the theory of large-scale population replacement by the Anglo-Saxons.

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I think the only difficulty here is the fact that the language of the Germanic invader prevailed. Other than that, it's no surprise that in an English-speaking country, most place-names are derived from that language. I think it's very telling that the majority of rivers, and as far as I know, towns dating from Roman times, retain their pre-Germanic names.

If a village formed when local nobility were either English-speaking or bilingual, then we would expect that it would have had an English and a Celtic name (perhaps most often mutually translated forms of the same name); and given the fact that the English language eventually supplanted Celtic, it stands to reason that the English name would also prevail. So this would mean that even areas with few Celtic place names could well have been essentially Celtic speaking when its villages were formed.

I also think one problem is that people often assume that (if it's speakers were not massacred)the Celtic language disappeared rapidly. I think there is good evidence that it did not dissapear any more quickly than for example Gaulish under Rome's domination (I've read that it had still not died out in the time of Gregory of Tours).

Asser's biography of king Alfred is interesting because Asser sometimes mentions a place in England and then says what it was called in "British", for example Nottingham was Tiggocobauc. Since some of these places were not notable, it seems unlikely that a memory of the British name was retained in Wales while not being used by local inhabitants. The most likely explanation to me would seem to be that British was still widely spoken in these areas (and in all likelihood throughout England) by locals. The examples I gave earlier also point to Celtic speakers being present even in the nobility 200 years after the invasion.

Now a language which is used, at the expense of all others, for official and administrative purposes, historically seems almost inevitably to supplant, given time, the local language(s). So the question which needs to be asked is why English achieved such a position.

Generally, one would expect that when invaders conquer a country, the conquered will make an effort to learn the language of the invaders, and vice versa. If the conquered are reduced to unfree serfdom, then really they are politically irrelevant, even if they constitute a large majority; so in this case, it is to be expected that their language would also become irrelevant, and only the language of the invaders would be used for official purposes.

But in a situation where the conquered population constitutes a majority even of the nobility, we would expect that both languages would be used officially, and after a period of bilingualism, the language of the invaders would eventually become irrelevant, since they could communicate easily enough in the language spoken natively by the majority of politically relevant people.

Clearly then, it would take an exceptional circumstance for the language of an invader to dominate in a country where the nobility retain their positions, outnumbering the nobility of the invaders. I believe that there was indeed an exceptional circumstance in early England.

One exceptional circumstance would be when the invaders bring political union to a linguistically diverse area. In this case, the invaders language would be used for official purposes because it will become the only language common to the whole area. This applies to Empires, and it perhaps also accounts for the eventual dominance of invader languages like Croatian or Hungarian in their respective areas of conquest. Clearly though, this was not the case in Britain, and I think there was another circumstance which ensured the dominance of English.

Firstly, I think the available evidence makes it fairly clear that Latin had not replaced Celtic as the native language, even among the ruling class. Evidence for this includes the fact that kings in Post Roman Britain (even the southeast) had British names. Then there is the fact that even late in the Roman Empire, Romans and Gauls seem to have had something of a prejudice against Britons, and tended to consider them, in the words of a British Archaeology article, "treacherous and rebellious no-goods". Gildas and other Britons also don't seem to have considered themselves "Romans", which would indicate a relative lack of cultural Romanisation. The fact that Britain is an island, and indeed a more distant part of the Empire, would sufficiently explain why Romanisation could be slow to establish itself. However, if even Gaulish was still spoken at the fall of the Empire, though not by the ruling classes, it's no great surprise if Latin hadn't established itself among that class in the more peripheral province of Britain.

But after the separation from Rome, both Celtic and Latin would have been used in administration.

Together with this, it's highly likely that the invaders (at least their leading men) had a knowledge of Latin, because they had a long history of contact with the Empire, serving in its army, and trading.

So this would have led to a situation where the conquered people, naturally enough, made an effort to learn the invaders' language, but the invaders did not need to learn Brythonic, since they could already communicate in Latin; so Latin and English would both have been used for official and administrative purposes. But then, because Latin was not the native language of anybody, it became increasingly irrelevant, and eventually died out (probably hastened by the decline in education). But by the time it died out, anyone of political relevance would have been able to speak English, so there was no point in the Saxons learning Brythonic, and Britain was left with English as the only language of administration.

So in other words, Latin allowed time for the spread of knowledge of English, whilst preventing the necessity for knowledge of Brythonic to spread among the Saxons, but then conveniently died out, leaving a puzzling situation for historians to assess



I would appreciate any comments on this theory, because I'm not sure that I always explain things very well. So if no-one understands it, or if someone can see problems with it, I'd be interested to know.

“because I'm not sure that I always explain things very well”

No problem Einion, I found your theory perfectly clear. I think I was the one explaining my own idea not very well! Having not posted anything for a while I tried to cram too much in all at once.

My main point was the possible consequences of the 6th century Justinian Plague, and earlier outbreaks of plague which affected post-Roman Europe.

This article provides some brief information about the Justinian Plague;

http://www.strath.ac.uk/Departments/History/barton/ds11.htm

“One of earliest recorded outbreaks in 542, the Justinian Plague which began in Egypt or possibly Abyssinia brought by traders from the Indian Ocean, before travelling throughout the Mediterranean and Northern Europe, reaching Ireland in 549. The outbreak in Constantinople was recorded by the historian Procopius... Epidemiologist Hirsch argues Justinian plague "depopulated towns, turned the country into a desert and made the habitations of men to become the haunts of wild beasts." Venerable Bede suggests plague reached the British Isles. Kiple believes this is possible due strong trade links with the Mediterranean and to depopulation of islands noted by chroniclers at time. Overall 25% of the population of the Roman Empire was lost and plague marks end of Classical World and beginning of the Dark Ages.”

This catastrophe really happened, and there much more information published about its known and believed effects. I only have a tiny amount of time to research the subject, so I only am at the beginning of looking into this area.

Plague may have massively depopulated urban areas in 5th and 6th century Britain. Many Roman cities in Britain—including Exeter—went through a period of apparent abandonment or very low population which is often argued as proof of desertion. But as Martin Henig of Oxford University points out;

“Scholars often repeat, glibly, the old view that towns were abandoned in this period. The very fact that most of them survived to the present day makes this inherently implausible.”

http://www.britarch.ac.uk/ba/ba68/feat1.shtml

Bringing the Justinian plague into this picture shows why old Roman towns were either abandoned or had very low populations during this period, but then rebounded as thriving Anglo-Saxon centres later on. It also offers an explanation as to why a few towns like Viroconium (Wroxeter) carried on after the Roman withdrawal, with evidence of further building works, but were then completely abandoned later in the 6th century.

In the Justinian Plague, British cities and towns may have suffered massive mortality and were temporarily emptied as the survivors fled into the countryside. In some places, like Wroxeter, the devastation may have been so severe that the city was completely abandoned. But in most of the old cities and towns, people came back again after the disease had abated, and eventually resettled them.

What would have been the linguistic and cultural effects of the plague? Literate city dwellers and post-Roman administrators decimated. A flight of survivors out towns and cities into the countryside to escape the plague, spreading the disease beyond the cities and possibly decimating nearby lowland rural populations as well.

Explanations of Romano-British genocide have been undone by genetic findings, which PE mentions above. The plague explanation would fit with the genetic evidence that the Romano-Britons were not wiped out as a country-wide population, but the depopulation evidence of archaeology from post-Roman cities, suggests that in the urban centres of their culture, they were.

Maybe the number of Germanic settlers was small, as modern studies seem to indicate, but they entered a plague devastated lowland area where urban centres had been deserted and most of the survivors had fled into the countryside, reverting back to pre-Roman lifestyles, not out of choice, but necessity.

The Germanic settlers, in this post-plague hypothesis, moved into a traumatised and weakened society, which had only been Romanised (but quite intensively) in a few key southern areas, that was isolated from continental Europe, where there was no outside support for plague ravaged Roman urban centres and agricultural lowlands, and from which the people had literally fled to the hills to survive.

I am not saying the plagues of the 5th and 6th centuries are the whole explanation, but any one of them—particularly the devastating 6th century outbreak—taken together with the other factors, may have been a tipping point in the profound change of language and culture that took place in post-Roman Britain.

I think it is worth considering, anyway. These plagues are not a theory, they really happened.

But if the plague was Europe-wide, why didn't it also devastate the Germanic population?

There are many references to the "Yellow Plague" across Europe, Britain and Ireland in the sixth and seventh centuries.

For example

http://members.aol.com/michellezi/timelines/nature.html

Not only would such plagues be a logical reason to flee the cities, but they might also (partially) explain the migrations of the time - such as the settlement of Britany from Devon and Cornwall and the Germanic settlement into eastern England.

In answer to nxylas' question, it is certain that the plague effected the Germanic peoples as well, but it may well be (and is supported somewhat in the attached link) that the plague did not strike all of Europe at the same time - but rather there were different outbreaks of it at different times in different areas.

Settlers would not necessarily associate the disease with population density and so might happily occupy a depopulated city.

Looking at the list, the dark ages did not seem to be a particularly god time to feel a fever coming on.

I don't see how the Plague hypothesis could explain why only England ended up with a Germanic language, because plagues hit all of Europe, and it is well known that cities all over the Empire became depopulated.
There doesn't seem to be any reason why Britain would have been hit harder than anywhere else, especially considering it's an island.

The depopulation of cities seems to have been part of a general changing of society, with a general movement from city to country, the reverse of what happened in early Roman times.

From the evidence that I'm aware of, it seems that what happened to the Britons was not more catastrophic than what happened elsewhere, and that the dominance of the Germanic language had little to do with a greater proportion of invader to invaded.

Anyway, any comments on my theory? Am I making too many assumptions and speculations? If it's unintelligible or invalid, I'd still like to know If necessary, I'll try to explain some of the difficulties.