The English and the Celts - no genocide?

[Robert Vermaat]

This is from Keith J Fitzpatrick-Matthews from the BritArch list:

Although the idea is interesting, I think that there are a number of things that need to be explained before taking it seriously.

First, there's the contemporary onomastic evidence. We have coinage from the later first century BC/early first century AD that gives the names of rulers and occasional placenames. These come from the area suggested as Germanic-speaking, yet all of them are Brittonic Celtic. Why would supposedly Germanic-speaking peoples take Celtic names for their rulers?

Secondly, there are the placenames recorded for eastern Britain in Classical sources. While some of them could be interpreted as germanic, the majority could not and many have direct cognates in Gaulish placenames (such as Camulodunum). If the placenames that are typical of early medieval England (those with elements such as leag/leah, eg or ing(a)) were already present in late prehistoric and Roman Britain, why do we not see any of them in contemporary sources?

Thirdly, there is the evidence from inscriptions that show people with Latinised but otherwise recognisably Celtic names (such as Ti Claudius Togidubnus), worshipping gods and goddesses with Celtic names (such as Senuna or Toutatis) in places with Celtic names. A quick search of RIB reveals almost no Germanic names and of those rare examples which are plausibly Germanic, it is clear from the bizarre spellings that those who composed the inscriptions were dealing with unfamiliar names that they found barbarous, hardly likely in an area in which Germanic was supposedly the indigenous language.

Fourthly, although the work of geneticists such as Stephen Oppenheimer is challenging, I continue to be worried by inferences made from DNA samples taken from living populations. We need a much stronger data set based on archaeologically derived DNA before reading contemporary data back into the distant past. I am also concerned by the way in which each new study seems to contradict the previous study (the debate seems to swing between the two extremes of virtually complete DNA replacement in England during the 'migration period' to virtually complete DNA stability since the Mesolithic). This surely indicates that the science of human population genetics is still in its infancy and is struggling to find ways of interpreting the data.

Fifthly, the idea that the English language arrived during the migration period was not a sixteenth-century hypothesis, but was already present in the early medieval period. Bede, writing in 731, is quite explicit about it. In Book One, Chapter One of the _Historia Ecclesiastic_ he states that there are five languages in Britain - English, British, Irish, Pictish and Latin - and he describes how the British speakers were the first settlers, followed by the Picts and then the Irish. Chapter Two describes the arrival of the Romans, bringing Latin with them. Chapter Fifteen is then the well known and contentious description of the origins of the English in Germany and their arrival during the joint reigns of Marcian and Valentinian III. Bede equates 'peoples' with languages as his view of history is framed very specifically along Old Testament lines. Nor was he alone in this interpretation. Gildas, writing any time between the 470s and the 550s, places the arrival of the English some time in the fifth century and is quite clear that the Britons were the indigenous inhabitants. The early ninth-century _Historia Brittonum_ follows Bede and is even more explicit in the identity of the newcomers as the bringers of a new language (in Chapter 46, the author introduces a snippet of garbled Old English - eu saxones eniminit saxas - in a context that implies that members of the ruling council of Britain will not be able to understand it).

The final problem, as I see it, is that the idea that languages are somehow linked to genes has long been discredited. So what if we have long-term DNA continuity among the population in lowland Britain? So what if the ancestors of this population can be hypothesised as arriving via the (then dry) North Sea basin during the Mesolithic? Do the origins of these people via Germany mean that they had to be speaking a Germanic language ten thousand years ago? Surely not, if linguists' ideas about the development of the Indo-European language family has any validity (not that I'm a believer in glottochronology or Urnfield People - I'm more concerned with the interrelationships between languages).

So, those are the challenges, Win. If you can answer them, it will remove what I see as the main objections to your hypothesis and make it more robust; if you can't, I think you need to look seriously at what your data (about English placenames and landscape) actually tells us. I have an idea, but I'm saving it!

Keith J Fitzpatrick-Matthews
http://www.kmatthews.org.uk