• Contact
  • About
  • Authors
DONATE
NEWSLETTER SIGN UP
  • Login
East Anglia Bylines
  • HOME
  • News
    • All
    • Brexit
    • Education
    • Health
    • Welfare
    • World
    Stephen Toope, Vice Chancellor Cambridge

    Lack of access to EU funding could lead to “brain drain” – Cambridge Vice-Chancellor

    Owners of the wooden Dutch built yacht ordered to leave the UK.

    Soviet-style border force order Dutch couple to abandon sailing holiday and go home

    A&E

    Crisis looming for Southend Hospital and the Mid and South Essex NHS Trust

    Luton town hall

    Luton Deputy Mayor regrets Covid breach

    Liz Truss

    EU taking legal action against UK over Northern Ireland protocol: how did we get here?

    Rook

    Northern Ireland Protocol Bill results in Cambridge lab losing its EU funding

    17 May BPI occupation

    BP hypocrisy on climate challenged by Cambridge sit-in

    People in masks

    Eight changes the world needs to make to live with COVID

    Queen Elizabeth II Crossing

    Anxiety grows over viability of planned Lower Thames Crossing

    • Brexit
    • Health
    • Education
    • World
  • Opinion
  • Politics
    • Local government
    • Justice
    • Activism
  • Climate
    • Environment
  • Lifestyle
    • All
    • Community
    • Culture
    • History
    • Humour
    Stapleford Granary concert hall

    July classical events at Stapleford Granary, Cambridge

    Suffolk SketchFest is back

    Traditional beers by the Brentwood Brewing Company.

    Brentwood’s own craft beer company

    People in masks

    Eight changes the world needs to make to live with COVID

    Norwich Floods in 1912: handing a loaf to a flooded-out cottager

    Spectre of 1953 looms as East Anglia faces flood warnings

    University of East Anglia. Photo by Michael John Button via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

    A civic university for the East

    Southend Section 60 map

    Police issue Dispersal Order in Southend

    Ukraine wins Eurovision 2022

    Sam Ryder helps Eurovision’s possible return to the UK

    Robert Walpole

    Walpole: When did the end game begin?

    • Community
    • Culture
    • History
    • Humour
    • Property
  • Business
    • All
    • Economics
    • Finance
    • Transport
    RMT Ipswich Branch

    Mick Lynch and a new wave of trade unionists

    Traditional beers by the Brentwood Brewing Company.

    Brentwood’s own craft beer company

    Sunak & Johnson

    The economics of the government’s pay disputes don’t stack

    Queen Elizabeth II Crossing

    Anxiety grows over viability of planned Lower Thames Crossing

    Rishi Sunak

    There is a solution to public sector pay disputes if the government wants to find one

    'For sale' boards.

    Housing Association “Right to Buy” proposal is ‘just wrong’ say experts

    East Anglia One windfarm

    One in three Suffolk manufacturing jobs lost since Tories came to power

    Foodbank parcels

    Hunger crisis: is it a national emergency?

    Mortgage debt.

    Sub-prime from Hollywood farce comes to UK housing

    • Economics
    • Finance
    • Transport
    • Farming
  • ANGLIA
    • All
    • Anglia
    • Bedfordshire
    • Cambridgeshire
    • Essex
    • Hertfordshire
    • Norfolk
    • Suffolk
    Hedgehog

    Crisis as falling volunteer numbers threaten Norfolk hedgehogs with potential extinction

    Stephen Toope, Vice Chancellor Cambridge

    Lack of access to EU funding could lead to “brain drain” – Cambridge Vice-Chancellor

    Fuel pumps

    Frustration at the cost of fuel sees protests returned to East Anglia

    Saffron Walden turf maze

    Essex town fighting health threat of poor air quality

    Latton Island campaigners

    Rich and poor dispute new Essex river crossing

    Owners of the wooden Dutch built yacht ordered to leave the UK.

    Soviet-style border force order Dutch couple to abandon sailing holiday and go home

    Fertiliser spreading

    Fertiliser – Where there’s muck…

    Stapleford Granary concert hall

    July classical events at Stapleford Granary, Cambridge

    A&E

    Crisis looming for Southend Hospital and the Mid and South Essex NHS Trust

    • East Anglia
    • Bedfordshire
    • Cambridgeshire
    • Essex
    • Hertfordshire
    • Norfolk
    • Suffolk
  • Series
No Result
View All Result
  • HOME
  • News
    • All
    • Brexit
    • Education
    • Health
    • Welfare
    • World
    Stephen Toope, Vice Chancellor Cambridge

    Lack of access to EU funding could lead to “brain drain” – Cambridge Vice-Chancellor

    Owners of the wooden Dutch built yacht ordered to leave the UK.

    Soviet-style border force order Dutch couple to abandon sailing holiday and go home

    A&E

    Crisis looming for Southend Hospital and the Mid and South Essex NHS Trust

    Luton town hall

    Luton Deputy Mayor regrets Covid breach

    Liz Truss

    EU taking legal action against UK over Northern Ireland protocol: how did we get here?

    Rook

    Northern Ireland Protocol Bill results in Cambridge lab losing its EU funding

    17 May BPI occupation

    BP hypocrisy on climate challenged by Cambridge sit-in

    People in masks

    Eight changes the world needs to make to live with COVID

    Queen Elizabeth II Crossing

    Anxiety grows over viability of planned Lower Thames Crossing

    • Brexit
    • Health
    • Education
    • World
  • Opinion
  • Politics
    • Local government
    • Justice
    • Activism
  • Climate
    • Environment
  • Lifestyle
    • All
    • Community
    • Culture
    • History
    • Humour
    Stapleford Granary concert hall

    July classical events at Stapleford Granary, Cambridge

    Suffolk SketchFest is back

    Traditional beers by the Brentwood Brewing Company.

    Brentwood’s own craft beer company

    People in masks

    Eight changes the world needs to make to live with COVID

    Norwich Floods in 1912: handing a loaf to a flooded-out cottager

    Spectre of 1953 looms as East Anglia faces flood warnings

    University of East Anglia. Photo by Michael John Button via Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0)

    A civic university for the East

    Southend Section 60 map

    Police issue Dispersal Order in Southend

    Ukraine wins Eurovision 2022

    Sam Ryder helps Eurovision’s possible return to the UK

    Robert Walpole

    Walpole: When did the end game begin?

    • Community
    • Culture
    • History
    • Humour
    • Property
  • Business
    • All
    • Economics
    • Finance
    • Transport
    RMT Ipswich Branch

    Mick Lynch and a new wave of trade unionists

    Traditional beers by the Brentwood Brewing Company.

    Brentwood’s own craft beer company

    Sunak & Johnson

    The economics of the government’s pay disputes don’t stack

    Queen Elizabeth II Crossing

    Anxiety grows over viability of planned Lower Thames Crossing

    Rishi Sunak

    There is a solution to public sector pay disputes if the government wants to find one

    'For sale' boards.

    Housing Association “Right to Buy” proposal is ‘just wrong’ say experts

    East Anglia One windfarm

    One in three Suffolk manufacturing jobs lost since Tories came to power

    Foodbank parcels

    Hunger crisis: is it a national emergency?

    Mortgage debt.

    Sub-prime from Hollywood farce comes to UK housing

    • Economics
    • Finance
    • Transport
    • Farming
  • ANGLIA
    • All
    • Anglia
    • Bedfordshire
    • Cambridgeshire
    • Essex
    • Hertfordshire
    • Norfolk
    • Suffolk
    Hedgehog

    Crisis as falling volunteer numbers threaten Norfolk hedgehogs with potential extinction

    Stephen Toope, Vice Chancellor Cambridge

    Lack of access to EU funding could lead to “brain drain” – Cambridge Vice-Chancellor

    Fuel pumps

    Frustration at the cost of fuel sees protests returned to East Anglia

    Saffron Walden turf maze

    Essex town fighting health threat of poor air quality

    Latton Island campaigners

    Rich and poor dispute new Essex river crossing

    Owners of the wooden Dutch built yacht ordered to leave the UK.

    Soviet-style border force order Dutch couple to abandon sailing holiday and go home

    Fertiliser spreading

    Fertiliser – Where there’s muck…

    Stapleford Granary concert hall

    July classical events at Stapleford Granary, Cambridge

    A&E

    Crisis looming for Southend Hospital and the Mid and South Essex NHS Trust

    • East Anglia
    • Bedfordshire
    • Cambridgeshire
    • Essex
    • Hertfordshire
    • Norfolk
    • Suffolk
  • Series
No Result
View All Result
East Anglia Bylines
No Result
View All Result

A linguistic light thrown on a Dark Age

What happened to the native Britons after the Romans left? Little trace is left of them. Martin Waller investigates their fate.

Martin WallerbyMartin Waller
March 21, 2022
in Anglia, Community, History, UK
Sutton Hoo helmet

Replica of the Sutton Hoo helmet. Photo by Gernot Keller via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)

Share on FacebookShare on Twitter

Living in East Anglia, you are never far from the evidence of the Anglo-Saxon invasions from the 5th Century AD onwards that transformed what had been Roman Britain – starting with the region’s own name.

From the street outside my house I can look way across the River Deben to the banks on the other side and the Anglo-Saxon burial ground of Sutton Hoo. Its discovery, just before the Second World War, features in the film The Dig.

The discovery was of the remains of a ship and of a burial ground within it containing some extraordinary treasures. Some of them came from a long way away.

Six years ago, archaeologists found what they believed to be an Anglo-Saxon palace at Rendlesham, not far from Sutton Hoo. This is currently being excavated, and the experts think there may be another burial site nearby.

Early Britons

One question looms over all this which has always fascinated me. If by the time the Venerable Bede was writing his history of the English People in the first half of the eight century, England, barring Cornwall, was an Anglo-Saxon country, what happened to the original inhabitants?

They were Celtic, like the peoples of Gaul across the Channel, and spoke a Celtic language we call Brythonic. This survives as Welsh and Cornish but appears, along with their Celtic culture, to have disappeared completely by Bede’s time and probably some while before.

Most people’s perception is that the Anglo-Saxons, hard-eyed, well-armed warriors, leapt from their longships like the Vikings a few centuries later and set about killing and enslaving the Celts. The Vikings certainly were like that, though if they came across a well defended settlement, they were often more inclined to trade than raid.

Anglo-Saxon migration

Most historians now believe that those Anglo-Saxon migrations may have been for the most part peaceable. I have been reading “The First Kingdom”, published last year by Max Adams, who has written several histories of early medieval England.

He largely goes along with the peaceful theory rather than rapine and slaughter. Early battles tend to leave behind plenty of evidence, in the form of bones and mangled bits of metal. Adams points out that there are very few such sites discovered from the pre-Viking period in England, and one appears to date from the early Roman period.

Historians at the time, such as Gildas probably writing in the 6th Century, have talked of war and conquest but their accounts appear unreliable.

Adams even queries the existence of a substantial warrior caste among the Anglo-Saxons. A classic warrior grave found at Lakenheath, Suffolk, does indeed appear to contain a warrior, buried with his weapons. But children, too, were interred with weapons. And as Adams says, warfare “was not the only manly pursuit requiring prowess and shiny equipment”.

Hunting was another. There is no evidence Lakenheath Man ever went into battle. In the burial of such weapons “ideas of manhood were being expressed,” he says.

What language tells us

So if they were not slaughtered or driven off into the Celtic enclaves of Wales and Cornwall, where did those Celts go? Adams looks at one aspect of their disappearance I have long thought of as essential to understand this. That evidence is linguistic.

Adams points out that there are said to be just ten Brythonic words surviving into medieval English. They tend to be fairly obscure ones, “brock” meaning badger, “coomb” meaning valley and common in place names and “crag” for rock. (My examples.)

“Even more decisively for linguists,” Adams writes, “no obvious Brythonic linguistic structures, such as its phonetic system or syntax, made their way into Old English.” Some survivals from Brythonic would have been expected if there had been several generations of bilingual speakers, using both Celtic and Anglo-Saxon.

I now veer away from Adams and offer my own views. Celtic and Germanic Anglo-Saxon are on different branches of the great Indo-European language tree and mutually unintelligible. Generally, when two separate languages come together, by conquest or migration, what emerges is a creole.

Enter Chaucer

A good example is late medieval English. Read Chaucer and you can clearly spot which words derive from Anglo-Saxon and which from Norman French. The two languages fused, probably because the Normans were insufficiently numerous to impose their language on their subjects. This wider vocabulary gives English its extraordinary fluidity and flexibility.

The Anglo-Saxon invasions never created such a mix. There do not even appear to be many Brythonic loan words, where a language adopts a word from another because it lacks the term. This is surprising because Anglo-Saxon has a fairly limited vocabulary, which may explain why a more developed society later found the need for all those Norman French words.

(The best example in English of a loan word is “orange”. This derives from the Persian “naranj”, through the Spanish “naranja”. This applied to the fruit, and then to the colour, because early medieval English does not seem to have had a word for that particular shade.)

What place names tell us

Saxmundham village sign
Saxmundham village sign. Photo by Keith Evans via Geograph (CC BY-SA 2.0)

There do not even seem to be many Celtic place names that survived. Drive through southern England and you keep passing road signs to places with names that are recognisably derived from Anglo-Saxon. Drive around America and you come across names such as Niagara and Manhattan that clearly derive from the indigenous languages and were adopted by the early settlers.

So where did Brythonic go? Back to Adams, who says the notion of a Germanic elite takeover always assumed the displacement of the original Celtic nobility. “But it is more likely that in most cases the privileges of lordship remained in native hands.”

My speculation again, though Adams largely supports it, is that it was a process of cultural assimilation. The Celts simply became Anglo-Saxons, losing their language and culture. This is not uncommon in history when the incomers are perceived as more advanced and part of an elite.

When the Romans left in the early 5th Century, much of England and Wales fell into ruin, particularly the cities. I have seen estimates that the population may even have halved, to a million or more. With a population that small spread across the country, it would not have been hard for immigrants to gain a foothold without conflict.

Trans-continental trade

The Celts’ trade links with the Continent appear to have been lost. At Woodbridge Museum, where I am a volunteer, there is a coin from Sutton Hoo that originated in Byzantium, the Eastern Roman Empire. It found its way to East Anglia, at a time when there was no longer an overarching Continental authority like the Roman Empire, through numerous kingdoms in turbulent times.

This, and other evidence of high-quality trade goods making their way here, suggests a highly sophisticated trading network serving the Anglo-Saxons.

Adams makes the other point that life in Roman Britain for the Celts, outside the cities and huge country estates, must have gone on little changed. They would have had little attachment to Roman culture. “For the indigenous elite of eastern Britain, part of the attraction of adopting the new language and half-familiar customs… may have lain in embracing a culture that was both exotic and decidedly not Roman.”

And this is why I am not addressing you in a tripartite language derived from Celtic, Anglo-Saxon and French but in one that has its roots in a far more brutal invasion and subjugation of England and Wales some centuries later.


More from Martin Waller

River Deben anti-sewage protest

Fines for water pollution – a drop in the ocean?

April 28, 2022
Pile-on

A Twitter pile-on, and how to avoid one

April 26, 2022
Previous Post

Ukraine is fighting for what UK walked away from

Next Post

Covid patients are still not seeking medical care early enough

Martin Waller

Martin Waller

Martin Waller worked for The Times as a financial writer for some three decades. He is now retired and living in Suffolk

Related Posts

Hedgehog
Anglia

Crisis as falling volunteer numbers threaten Norfolk hedgehogs with potential extinction

byJ.J. Jackson
July 6, 2022
Johnson cabinet meeting before resignations.
Party politics

Johnson’s dominoes begin to fall: who will be the last one standing?

byPeter Thurlow
July 6, 2022
Stephen Toope, Vice Chancellor Cambridge
Anglia

Lack of access to EU funding could lead to “brain drain” – Cambridge Vice-Chancellor

byCameron Holloway
July 5, 2022
Fuel pumps
Activism

Frustration at the cost of fuel sees protests returned to East Anglia

byJ.J. Jackson
July 4, 2022
House of Commons
Politics

GrubbyGates

byMadge McClary
July 3, 2022
Next Post
Covid-19 patient in ICU

Covid patients are still not seeking medical care early enough

Want to support us?

Can you help East Anglia Bylines to grow and become more sustainable with a regular donation, no matter how small?  

DONATE

Sign up to our newsletter

If you would like to receive the East Anglia Bylines regular newsletter, straight talking direct to your inbox, click the button below.

NEWSLETTER

LATEST

Hedgehog

Crisis as falling volunteer numbers threaten Norfolk hedgehogs with potential extinction

July 6, 2022
Johnson cabinet meeting before resignations.

Johnson’s dominoes begin to fall: who will be the last one standing?

July 6, 2022
Stephen Toope, Vice Chancellor Cambridge

Lack of access to EU funding could lead to “brain drain” – Cambridge Vice-Chancellor

July 5, 2022
Fuel pumps

Frustration at the cost of fuel sees protests returned to East Anglia

July 4, 2022

MOST READ

Johnson cabinet meeting before resignations.

Johnson’s dominoes begin to fall: who will be the last one standing?

July 6, 2022
Stephen Toope, Vice Chancellor Cambridge

Lack of access to EU funding could lead to “brain drain” – Cambridge Vice-Chancellor

July 5, 2022
Pylons at Aldringham, Suffolk

Shock as National Grid proposes 180km of new pylons across East Anglia

May 15, 2022
Hedgehog

Crisis as falling volunteer numbers threaten Norfolk hedgehogs with potential extinction

July 6, 2022

Tags

Activism Art Brexit Business Cambridgeshire Climate Community COP26 Culture Democracy Development Economics Economy Education Employment Energy Environment Farming Health Humour Hymns International Women's Day Justice Letters Local elections 2022 Local government National Grid NHS Norfolk Pandemic Partygate Party politics Pecksniff Poetry Politics Poverty Rivers of East Anglia Sewage Sizewell Social care Suffolk Ukraine VAWG Welfare Wildlife
East Anglia Bylines

East Anglia Bylines is a regional online newspaper that supports citizen journalism. Our aim is to publish well-written, fact-based articles and opinion pieces on subjects that are of interest to people in East Anglia and beyond.

Learn more about us

No Result
View All Result
  • About us
    • Contact us
    • Bylines Network
    • Complaints
    • Newsletter
    • Privacy Policy
    • Donate
  • UK
  • Anglia
  • About us
  • UK
  • Anglia

© 2022 East Anglia Bylines. Citizen Journalism | Local & Internationalist

No Result
View All Result
  • HOME
  • News
    • Brexit
    • Health
    • Education
    • World
  • Opinion
  • Politics
    • Local government
    • Justice
    • Activism
  • Climate
    • Environment
  • Lifestyle
    • Community
    • Culture
    • History
    • Humour
    • Property
  • Business
    • Economics
    • Finance
    • Transport
    • Farming
  • ANGLIA
    • East Anglia
    • Bedfordshire
    • Cambridgeshire
    • Essex
    • Hertfordshire
    • Norfolk
    • Suffolk
  • Series

© 2022 East Anglia Bylines. Citizen Journalism | Local & Internationalist

Welcome Back!

Login to your account below

Forgotten Password?

Retrieve your password

Please enter your username or email address to reset your password.

Log In