It’s the 5th century, and the Roman Empire has withdrawn from Britain.
In the West, we’re seeing the beginning of the kingdoms of Wales,
but in the East, all we have is confusion (for both the people at the time, and for historians today).
The historian Nora Chadwick says that during this period
a speaker of the Celtic language of Brythonic could travel from Edinburgh to Cornwall
and be understood for the entire journey.
But fast-forward 1,500 years,
and the descendants of this Celtic language: Welsh, Cornish, and Breton,
are largely restricted to the West.
And while pockets of Welsh speakers exist in England,
if you were to travel from Edinburgh to Cornwall speaking only Welsh today,
it is likely that no-one would understand you at all.
How did this happen? How was Brythonic erased across Great Britain?
Why doesn’t England speak a Celtic language?
Of course a topic like this is going to have a few interpretations,
so today we’re just going to look at the two most popular ones:
The first is probably one you have heard of before, and it involves a group of people we like to call the Anglo-Saxons.
Although it’s worth keeping in mind that they didn’t call themselves this for a long time,
and while later writers would make a big deal about their tribal distinctions,
dividing England into Angle, Saxon, and Jutish lands,
we don’t really know how distinct these peoples were from each other,
and it’s telling that the Britons, and later the Welsh, would almost always just call them “Saeson”, or “Saxon”.
These Germanic-speaking peoples collectively migrated into Britain in the 5th century,
and over time they would establish their own kingdoms in England,
and it is here that we encounter our first hypothesis.
That the reason why England stopped speaking a Celtic language is because these Germanic populations arrived
and replaced the Celts.
That the Saxons somehow swept away the Britons so thoroughly and rapidly
that, soon after their arrival, no traces of a Brythonic language or culture in England would remain.
Supporters of this theory generally cite the works of a Welsh monk named Gildas,
who wrote a religiously and politically charged sermon titled ‘On the Ruin and Conquest of Britain’
around 540 AD.
In this sermon, he would describe how the Saxons, as “enemies of both God and man”,
ravaged and destroyed the island of Britain, and its Celtic inhabitants.
If you couple this with the fact that the English language has borrowed very few words from Brythonic,
then it seems like a fairly compelling theory begins to take shape.
There are some problems, though.
Firstly, modern historians don’t consider Gildas’s work to be entirely factual.
His timeline is inaccurate in some places and impossible in others,
he claims to be writing 43 years after the Battle of Badon,
and during the reign of a king named Maelgwn of Gwynedd.
But according to medieval Welsh sources this would date his writings to 559 AD,
12 years AFTER the death of Maelgwn.
He describes how a “proud tyrant”, later named Vortigern,
invited the Saxons into Britain in order to defend it.
But we have evidence that the Saxon migrations had already begun during the time of the Romans,
and the existence of this supposed tyrant who had authority over all of Britain
has been in doubt for nearly a century.
Some historians do not consider this work to be a history at all,
instead interpreting it as merely the exaggerated feelings of an overly fervent monk.
But if Gildas’s description of a Celt-less England is so flawed,
then you’re probably wondering why it became popular at all.
The fault lies with a few Victorian historians,
who believed that the destruction of the Celts in England had led to a lack of Celtic ancestry,
which would prove the inherent “superiority” of the English upper class.
This description of England was also echoed by the medieval monk Bede,
(who used Gildas as his source) and again it even persists to this day,
but despite this we have a lot of evidence to disprove all of these groups.
In fact, we have a lot of evidence that a Celtic culture not only SURVIVED in England,
but that it survived for CENTURIES after the Anglo-Saxon migrations.
The most important piece of evidence that we have are two laws from 602 and 690 AD,
that refer to the rights of Celtic Britons living in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Wessex, and Kent.
This shows us first of all, that a substantial group of people who were called “Britons”
still existed by the late 7th Century,
which immediately disproves both Gildas, Bede,
and the Victorian historians.
They all claimed that the England was devoid of Britons by around the 6th century,
yet here we have at least two distinctly Brythonic-speaking populations in the late 7th.
But wait, how do we know that they were actually Brythonic speakers?
Well, that’s actually quite a complicated question.
Defining ethnicity in the Medieval era is difficult,
but the monk Bede (who I mentioned earlier) provides some helpful insight.
He divides the island of Britain into 4 “nations”
based on 4 languages: English, Pictish, Irish, and Brythonic.
The historian John Davies believes that if this statement by Bede is true,
then any “Britons” living in England at this time would have been defined solely by the language that they spoke.
As that was the only difference Bede gave us between these four peoples.
Which indicates to us that Brythonic speaking populations
must have still existed in eastern England by the late 7th century,
contrary to what Gildas, the Victorians, and even some people to day think.
Secondly, their Celtic culture was, to a certain degree, still appreciated.
Anglo-Saxon fashion would incorporate Celtic styles, like their brooches, and jewellery,
and many Anglo-Saxon kings would possess very Celtic sounding names,
like Cerdic, Cædwalla, and (possibly) Penda.
This is of course to also say nothing of the genetic evidence that we have.
According to the ‘People of the British Isles’ study conducted by Oxford University,
DNA originating from Denmark, North Germany and Northwestern Germany
makes up a maximum of only 40%,
and could make up as little as 10% of the DNA found in modern day England.
Which very clearly shows that, despite how much the Victorians wanted it,
the Anglo-Saxons clearly did not wipe out the Celtic Britons.
If they were gone soon after the Anglo-Saxons arrived,
then why are there laws referring to their existence in the late 7th century?
If their culture was erased, or discredited,
then why did Saxon kings take their names, and their clothing styles?
And if they were wiped out, then why doesn’t Germanic and Danish DNA
make up 100% of the English population?
This idea of the Anglo-Saxons arriving en masse and completely overrunning the Celts is a popular one,
but as we’ve seen it doesn’t hold up to much scrutiny.
I’ve shown you the evidence that Brythonic survived in eastern England until at least
690 AD, but by this time it had pretty clearly become the language of the minority.
In fact, the historian Nicholas Higham believes that by around 570-600 AD,
old English had already become the most common language in southeastern Britain.
So why then, did Brythonic disappear from England?
If it wasn’t rapidly replaced by an invading mass of Germanic-speakers,
why did it instead slowly decline and eventually go extinct?
And what about this?
Sure, Gildas and Bede’s description of a Celt-less England
may be wildly incorrect,
but it’s still a fact that English hasn’t adopted many words from Brythonic,
so what is the explanations for this?
For that, I’m going to have to introduce you to two new concepts:
High-Prestige, and Low-Prestige languages.
A high-prestige language is one spoken by the upper classes.
Law, governance and administration will generally be undertaken using the high-prestige language,
and anybody wishing to climb the social ladder
will typically endeavour to learn the high-prestige language of their country.
Conversely, a low-prestige language is one spoken by the lower classes,
the poor, the uneducated, and the non-ruling population.
These sort of situations do not HAVE to include two different languages,
the ruling class of a country could have a preferred dialect or even a preferred accent.
But some of the most significant examples in history have included two separate and distinct languages.
And the reason why a country would have an entirely separate language for the ruling class is generally due to conquest.
Before we return to the Saxons in Britain,
I think it is worth examining a pretty major example of what typically happens when
these two languages of different prestige interact.
During the Roman Conquest of the General Mediterranean Area
(winner of the Best Book Title of all Time),
many many languages would find themselves demoted to the lower classes,
and some of the biggest victims of this change were the Celtic languages.
By the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the Celtic languages found in modern day Spain and France
were most likely completely extinct.
Having been replaced by the now high-prestige language of Latin.
And in southern Britain, things were going much the same way.
We know that Gaulish, and especially Brythonic,
borrowed hundreds of words from Latin at this time,
even for concepts and items that they almost certainly
already had words for,
while Latin borrowed comparatively very few words from the Celtic language family.
Brythonic even went through some pretty major sound and grammar changes
while under the influence of the high-prestige Latin speaking Roman rulers,
meanwhile Latin again took almost nothing from Brythonic.
As we can see from these examples, high-prestige languages generally have a colossal influence over the low prestige ones.
And as the low-prestige speakers begin to learn the language of the ruling class,
they typically adopt hundreds of words from it, even for things they already have words for,
and may even begin to speak their original low-prestige [language] differently.
The Roman conquest, despite being so violent,
ultimately led to a gradual adoption of Latin
and a subsequent abandonment of Gaulish, Celtiberian, and (in some places) Brythonic.
Once the Romans left, the language of the ruling class
seems to have reverted back to Brythonic in Britain,
while Latin soon became confined as the language of the church.
But in the regions where the Anglo-Saxons migrated to,
Old English would have almost certainly become the high-prestige ruling class language,
as these new Germanic settlers began to form kingdoms of their own.
And these consequences and interactions between two languages of different prestige
can help us understand the fate of Brythonic in England.
As I mentioned before, some people point to England’s lack of borrowed words from Brythonic
as evidence for its supposed violent destruction.
But as we’ve seen from the examples I’ve already shown you,
a high-prestige language generally adopts almost no new words from it’s low-prestige counterpart.
Latin adopted very few words from Gaulish,
Irish adopted very little from Pictish,
German seems to have adopted almost nothing from Polish,
and the vast colonial empires of England and France
did not lead to hundreds of borrowings from languages all over the world.
If anything, it would be extremely SURPRISING if Old English had adopted a large amount of words from Brythonic.
The other consequence of these interactions is the most important though,
that being how historians have found that low-prestige speakers
will usually switch to the high-prestige language,
typically leading to the extinction of the low-prestige, non-ruling language over a long period of time.
As I’ve shown you, this happened to Gaulish, Celtiberian, and Pictish just to name a few examples.
And this type of transition almost certainly took place across England
during the Anglo-Saxon migrations.
As I said before, in these new English kingdoms, the monarchs, the administrators, and the nobility
all would have spoken Old English,
making that the high-prestige language.
And if the Brythonic Celts wanted to advance the social ladder,
then they would have had to learn Old English.
If they wanted, or needed, to interact with the administration,
or the local landowners, or the nobility,
then they would have had to learn Old English.
Over time, their descendants would be raised speaking Old English, instead of Brythonic,
as that would be the language of trade, government and social advancement.
And, according Bede, these descendants very likely would have been considered to be English,
not Brythonic, as that was the language they spoke.
So eventually Brythonic, like Gaulish, Celtiberian and Pictish,
would cease to exist in favour of the new, high-prestige language.
Of course there was violence, and this violence went both ways,
but there is no evidence that the Anglo-Saxons wiped out
even a significant minority of the Celtic Britons.
Remember that the DNA of the people in England is made up of as little as 10% Germanic DNA in some places.
Remember that the adoption of Celtic names, clothing and jewellery
shows us that their culture was appreciated, or even influential to a certain degree.
And remember that we have historical evidence that there were substantial Brythonic populations
in Eastern England as late as 690 AD,
nearly 3 centuries after the initial Anglo-Saxon migrations.
If they didn’t wipe them out, then the transition must have been gradual.
And if it was gradual, then it was probably through this model of high-prestige and low-prestige languages.
So why then doesn’t England speak a Celtic language?
Well, the Victorian upper class believed that it was because the Anglo-Saxons
wiped out all of the celts.
They wanted to find a “historical” explanation
for their supposed "superiority",
and a purported lack of Celtic ancestry provided this scapegoat.
Throw in an ancient polemic describing how the Anglo-Saxons
destroyed all of the Celts in England, and then you have your justification.
But as I’ve shown you today, this Victorian “explanation”
doesn’t hold up to any scrutiny.
And the few Welsh people who repeat it to this day
are often unaware that it was dreamt up solely to “prove”
how they were inherently "inferior" to the English upper class.
In reality, we have plenty of evidence that several communities of Britons
survived in England for hundreds years.
And as we learnt from Bede, it is very likely that the only reason these people were identified as Britons
is because they were speaking Brythonic.
Over time, these Britons (and the ones before them)
adopted the language of the new ruling class,
Until eventually, there were practically no Brythonic speakers in England.
Of course, these Anglo Saxon kingdoms conquered huge portions of England,
no one is denying that, but the misconception that they wiped out
all of the Celts in England is completely false,
and I hope I’ve shown that to you today.
Languages all throughout history have suffered at the silent destruction
of simply being seen as inferior.
For Brythonic, and the rest of the Celtic languages,
that statement held true. And for many languages, that statement continues to be true, even to this day
In modern England, the Celtic languages survive mostly through pockets of Welsh speakers in some major cities,
and of course the Cornish language,
which did go extinct but is experiencing a bit of a revival,
but that subject deserves its own video.
Thank you very much for watching.