July 19, 2006

• The real answer is it isn't that simple, it wasn't just an apartheid situation, it became all-out war & genocide. The Anglo Saxon invaders were actually originally hired by Vortigern as mercenaries after the Romans had withdrawn in, what, the 3rd century? Leaving a civilized, Romano-British society behind with infrastructure & very nicely advanced townships & trade routes after 3 centuries of Roman rule, but no significant military forces to speak of. Because the Angles were much more militarily adept than the now rather soft Romano-British, the former swept them West. Although recently discovered earthworks in the South, IIRC in the Thames estuary area, indicate that the Britons gave quite a hearty response to the invaders, obviously they were unsuccessful in the long term. Scotland, at least the far North, was never fully integrated into Romano-British culture, and in fact I think it was the Picts living up there who caused Vortigern to hire the original Anglo-Saxon mercs from the continent to help fight in the first place, the Picts engaged in deep raids into the South, down into even the Midlands if memory serves. It was Vortigern who brought in the first Angles, & he gave them the Isle of Thanet, but after his death, the settlers wanted more & better land, & invaded Kent. I don't know what kind of foreign troop levels were in Britain among the Romans, they usually used local populace for the most part, except for special units, but in any case once they were withdrawn to protect Italy from the barbarian raids, most of that lot would have gone back with them, leaving only locals. This is an extremely interesting era of British history.
• As a matter of fact, the West, what is now northwest Wales, was arguably more important in that era than the East, because of the metal mining industry. London was smaller than Viroconium (Wroxeter) at that time, if my memory is correct.
• The language issue escapes me. The only solution I can suggest is that after 300 years of Roman rule, with a very Romanised populace, the Brythonic languages had already been supplanted by Latin & continental dialects.
• I can't remember now if it was the Picts or the Irish raiders who were the reason Vortigern got in the mercenaries.
• OK, I'll shutup now. It's your fault, Pleggers, for hitting on one of my Asperger's syndrome obsessions. ;)
• maybe i'm missing something, but if they're tracing along the y-chromosome, isn't the most plausible explanation that intermarriage was forbidden (or just didn't occur) between male brythons and female anglo-saxons. the slaying of all the brython men folk in battle would fit with this. > the Brythons just somehow disappeared (except in Wales) and cornwall? cornish is brythonic and persisted until the 18th century or so.
• Actually, Jack Whytes Camulod Series does a great job at explaining this part of english history. Abeit, it does not go into great detail about the Anglo-saxon replaceement of the Celts, but it does explain what Britan looked like after the Romans left.
• Most Britionic languages ha been mostly supplanted by Latin or Cletic-based languages at the time. Vortigen also brought over his mercanies because of the invaders from Scotland and invasions from the seas. This is an interesting period of British history..
• I thought the Brythonic languages did survive in South Scotland up until a time after the coming of the Anglo-Saxons. I understood that's where most of the Arturian cycle in the Mabinogion was supposed to have been written? The Gaelic-speaking Scots didn't arrive from Ireland till, what, the sixth century? The apartheid thing seems far-fetched. I thought it was kind of analogous with the Manchu trying to keep their line pure after founding the Qing dynasty in China, but then, as a minority, ultimately it was their genes which died out. Wouldn't you have to breed to spread?
• Man, I love you guys. *passes mead around*
• The Mabinogion was Welsh. It's more accurate to say they were Welsh, because there were several different bunches of tales that sort of coalesced & were later put together. They were composed much later than the time we here discuss, with fragments of earier stuff perhaps influencing them, or being distorted within them. The earliest written versions may only date to the 12th or 13th centuries, the language indicating composition maybe a century or two earlier.
• Thought I'd best show me working, and I see Chy has taken exception already :D. I was thinking of the the Gododdin, a British tribe around the Firth of Forth "The Gododdin were a Brythonic speaking people and it is among them that recorded Welsh literature began." The poem about them Y Gododdin, tells of them fighting the Angles at Catraeth. This seems to reckon they lasted until 638.
• History is often written by the winners in the DNA of the losers.
• an article on counting systems (that i think has been linked to on mofi before) as evidence for continued presence of britons in anglo-saxon england.
• Owain Ddantgwyn was the greatest.
• That's a good 'un grandma!
• This smells. If you posit that Anglo-Saxon men were advantaged in reproduction - not unlikely - then it doesn't take many generations for the Celtic Y to virtually disappear, without any need for a prohibition on interethnic mating. I'd want to see that study and the assumptions that underlie their models. I'd also want to see many successive runs, and some acknowledgement that the most probably thing among several probably things is not in fact certain to occur.
• Good point about the Y chromosome - maybe we need a parallel study of Anglo-Saxon mitochondrial DNA. The Gododdin are new to me, but 'except in Wales' was certainly understating the case. I believe many English place-names that begin with 'Wal' are thought to indicate continuing Celtic occupation.
• It looks as though the Brythions just somehow disappeared... The hounds of Annwn gathered them together and then they all went underground.
• Anglo-Celtic Relations in the Early Middle Ages - this looks like a motherlode of relevant reading. Not that I've done that meself yet, came across it looking for something else. One of the earlier issues is on the archaeology of the Arthurian cycle too.
• this looks cool, ab_c. nice find.
• Good stuff.
• MJ Harper apparently says the celtic languages were never spoken in England, or anywhere else, except the places where they still are. The Anglo-Saxons had virtually no influence on England or its language, and nor did the Romans: Old and Middle English are pretty much academic inventions, and Latin was just an upper-class affectation. The truth is that people have spoken something recognisably like modern English both in England and in Europe since time immemorial. All the other stuff is nationalist mythologising. The word origins given in the Oxford English Dictionary are nearly all utter nonsense. Has anybody read this remarkable effusion?
• I like Slaine
• Not me Plegmund, but it's going on the list of things to be read. Thanks.
• > The truth is that people have spoken something recognisably like modern English both in England and in Europe since time immemorial. yes, and they only speak germanic/romance languages in front of tourists. when your back is turned, they revert to proper english. it's the language of babel, wot?
• He apparently (have to be careful since everything I know about it is second-hand) says that the role of the Anglo-Saxons was exaggerated as part of a Victorian English nationalist myth. But I think Victorian English nationalists would have found his version even more congenial - it would have allowed them to reclaim Boadicea as a dauntless wop-biffing English gel, and King Arthur as a genuine hero of the race, instead of (as sober history suggests) its deadly enemy.
• Wow. That is just so...whacked. I'm sorry my housemate just went on vacation - she's an Anglo Saxonist, and I really want to show her this. Except, maybe she would just get very angry, because this frankly sounds like complete and utter crap, and will do a great disservice to public understanding of history. If I went around writing books saying that the sun is made of really hot Red Leicester, and all the astronomers have just been misunderstanding the evidence and backing each other up, I would hope that every thinking person had the decency to ignore me or to perhaps put me in the nuthouse. Not to grant me publishing to further put out pointless conspiracy theories and further muddy the very shaky understanding that the public has of its own history. The public really doesn't understand history. They think they do, because historians write in clear, everyday language, but they don't understand how evidence is found or used (because that tends to be hidden away in technical appendices and in theses). I only understand a small amount of the techniques developed by historians, and I've done 4 years of graduate study now. But they don't just make it up. For one thing, they have the rest of their peers and wannabe peers (aka grad students and young academics) slathering around like hyenas waiting for them to slip up, and to have something which can be proven wrong. I've seen the bloody Middle English and early modern English -- not just in literature pieces, but in old court records. Why is English full of Latin? Well, Old English wasn't, but ever since those pesky Normans showed up, it's had a lot of French (and thus a lot of Latin, which predates all known French by several hundred years). Notably, the French spoke French, because the Gauls were conquered by the Romans. They were later conquered by the Franks, but there weren't very many of them, so mostly the language stayed as Latin, with some Frankish words (but not so many, since the Franks didn't introduce many new ideas or technologies). So the A-S weren't the only conquerers to leave an impact on the language, contary to what Mr Harper would assert. Also, the Norse had a huge effect on English (many many words and ideas) - that's why we wear skirts with our shirts, and not just shirts and shirts. This is not a "fascinating book is a useful investigation into the ways in which history is constructed and the dangers of "unassailable" academic truths." -- this is a bloody work of hackery. Just the idea that the reviewer thinks that there are "unassailable academic truths" shows that they haven't ever been within 10 miles of a university with their eyes and ears open - academics agree with each just about as often as cats. If you want to read good stuff about how history is constructed, I can reccommend some. But god almighty, when trash like this makes it out of the crazy person photocopying their handwriting fanzine, the publishing world is in a sad state.
• If you want to read good stuff about how history is constructed, I can reccommend some. Please do!
• Monkeyfilter: this frankly sounds like complete and utter crap, and will do a great disservice to public understanding of history
• Off the top of my head (and looking online to confirm the title and author): Discovering History in China, by Paul A. Cohen, which is all about American historical writing on China is the main example I can think of for a specifically historiographical book (historiography being, of course, the study of the writing of history -- if you search for historiography, you'll find lots. Most books have a fair bit of historiography in their first chapter). But Cohen focuses more on bias than on the use of difficult evidence. I read some very interesting books on the problems of evidence for a term paper on using Inquisitional material -- from that, I remember Robert Lerner's The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages as being an excellent introduction to the difficulties of medieval history, relying as it does so often on literary evidence. He looks critically at previous accounts of the "Heresy of the Free Spirit" (drawn almost entirely from the propraganda against them), and looks at the evidence with a much more critical eye. Extracts from Lerner. Carlo Ginzburg discusses his evidence pretty thoroughly in his Night Battles and The Cheese and the Worms, but I would point out that Ginzburg is himself controversial and stretches his argument past the point which his evidence would support. (I personally think that 80% of what he says in brilliant, but disagree with the 20% that wants to connect these fascinating folk traditions to some unknown European pagan underground.) Those articles that Abeizer linked to look good - I just started reading the one on what to call the period between Roman Britain and Anglo Saxon Britain - c400 to 600ad. I will definitely show those articles to my housemate, who is interested Dark Ages history of all kinds (though she does resent the Anglo Saxons always being the bad guys in Arthur-industry literature and movies). --- in short: searching for "historiography" will turn up many good books and articles on the nature of history writing. and anything that claims to be upsetting "agreed upon academic truths" is probably a load of horse-hooey, since there are never any agreed upon academic truths in history. I mean, they do agree when stuff happened (except when they disagree), but not on the details. Otherwise there would be no academic history publishing industry.
• Thanks!
• "A major genetic study of the population of Britain appears to have put an end to the idea of the 'Celtic fringe' of Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Instead, a research team at Oxford University has found the majority of Britons are Celts descended from Spanish tribes who began arriving about 7,000 years ago."
• Ooh. Latinos.
• Ay Caramba!
• Lebor Gabála Érenn mentions two migrations (The Settlement of Partholón, The Milesian Invasion) from spain to ireland.
• Petebest has an interesting link over here, if you haven't seen it already. Intriguing. So the only question left is why the Basque population all started speaking Belgic...
• At the risk of annoying jb, this seems to clarify some of the addities in the Harper theory and make it relatively plausible...
• it seems they think I woz a Basquing bee somewhere in dim antiquity spoken language can change its Fs and Ps in just the course of a few centuries and though people have tongues, they learn to speak whatever the folks around them use, whether Roman or Greek or Hittite or Manx, and one reason this study will get little thanks is that history's muddy about who spoke what or was where seven thousand years ago so it's all just guesswork, as I think Basquing Sassenachs may already know
• Maybe they put all their Basque in one exit.
• Heh! Is it better to Basque in the sun?
• *creaks open door, peeks in* So *this* is what you've been on about in here! is there pie?
• A United Kingdom? Maybe
• I have been a blue salmon, I have been a dog, a stag, a roebuck on the mountain, A stock, a spade, an axe in the hand, A stallion, a bull, a buck, I was reaped and placed in an oven; I fell to the ground when I was being roasted And a hen swallowed me. For nine nights was I in her crop. I have been dead, I have been alive. I am Taliesin. --Anon., from the Mabinogion, trans Ifor Williams
• Basqueland Liilia Morrison The hillside brims with chalk white houses; Deep red shutters contain cow's blood. Basque rouge, say the neighboring French. Dark woolen berets on weathered, long nosed faces, Talk of whaling and cod and pil-pil. Ancient language, ancient people Gather around the old oak, its leaves now turning. This land without a place on any map, Waits in green gold patience. It's autumn in Basqueland.
• The salmon lying in the depths of Llyn Llifon Secretly as a thought in a dark mind, Is not so old as the owl of Cwm Cowlyd Who tells her sorrow nightly on the wind. The ousel singing in the woods of Cilgwri, Tirelessly as a stream over the mossed stones, Is not so old as the toad of Cors Fochno Who feels the cold skin sagging round his bones. The toad and the ousel and the stag of Rhedynfre, That has cropped each leaf from the tree of life, Are not so old as the owl of Cwm Cowlyd, That the proud eagle would have to wife. -- R.S. Thomas, "The Ancients of the World"