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Early Britain - Anglo-Saxon Britain
The Nature And Extent Of The English Settlement
by Allen, Grant (B.A.)
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It has been usual to represent the English conquest of South-eastern
Britain as an absolute change of race throughout the greater part of our
island. The Anglo-Saxons, it is commonly believed, came to England and
the Lowlands of Scotland in overpowering numbers, and actually
exterminated or drove into the rugged west the native Celts. The
population of the whole country south of Forth and Clyde is supposed to
be now, and to have been ever since the conquest, purely Teutonic or
Scandinavian in blood, save only in Wales, Cornwall, and, perhaps,
Cumberland and Galloway. But of late years this belief has met with
strenuous opposition from several able scholars; and though many of our
greatest historians still uphold the Teutonic theory, with certain
modifications and admissions, there are, nevertheless, good reasons
which may lead us to believe that a large proportion of the Celts were
spared as tillers of the soil, and that Celtic blood may yet be found
abundantly even in the most Teutonic portions of England.
In the first place, it must be remembered that, by common consent, only
the east and south coasts and the country as far as the central
dividing ridge can be accounted as to any overwhelming extent English in
blood. It is admitted that the population of the Scottish Highlands, of
Wales, and of Cornwall is certainly Celtic. It is also admitted that
there exists a large mixed population of Celts and Teutons in
Strathclyde and Cumbria, in Lancashire, in the Severn Valley, in Devon,
Somerset, and Dorset. The northern and western half of Britain is
acknowledged to be mainly Celtic. Thus the question really narrows
itself down to the ethnical peculiarities of the south and east.
Here, the surest evidence is that of anthropology. We know that the pure
Anglo-Saxons were a round-skulled, fair-haired, light-eyed,
blonde-complexioned race; and we know that wherever (if anywhere) we
find unmixed Germanic races at the present day, High Dutch, Low Dutch,
or Scandinavian, we always meet with some of these same personal
peculiarities in almost every individual of the community. But we also
know that the Celts, originally themselves a similar blonde Aryan race,
mixed largely in Britain with one or more long-skulled dark-haired,
black-eyed, and brown-complexioned races, generally identified with the
Basques or Euskarians, and with the Ligurians. The nation which resulted
from this mixture showed traces of both types, being sometimes blonde,
sometimes brunette; sometimes black-haired, sometimes red-haired, and
sometimes yellow-haired. Individuals of all these types are still found
in the undoubtedly Celtic portions of Britain, though the dark type
there unquestionably preponderates so far as numbers are concerned. It
is this mixed race of fair and dark people, of Aryan Celts with
non-Aryan Euskarians or Ligurians, which we usually describe as Celtic
in modern Britain, by contradistinction to the later wave of Teutonic
English.
Now, according to the evidence of the early historians, as interpreted
by Mr. Freeman and other authors (whose arguments we shall presently
examine), the English settlers in the greater part of South Britain
almost entirely exterminated the Celtic population. But if this be so,
how comes it that at the present day a large proportion of our people,
even in the east, belong to the dark and long-skulled type? The fact is
that upon this subject the historians are largely at variance with the
anthropologists; and as the historical evidence is weak and inferential,
while the anthropological evidence is strong and direct, there can be
very little doubt which we ought to accept. Professor Huxley [Essay "On
some Fixed Points in British Ethnography,"] has shown that the
melanochroic or dark type of Englishmen is identical in the shape of the
skull, the anatomical peculiarities, and the colour of skin, hair, and
eyes with that of the continent, which is undeniably Celtic in the wider
sense—that is to say, belonging to the primitive non-Teutonic race,
which spoke a Celtic language, and was composed of mixed Celtic,
Iberian, and Ligurian elements. Professor Phillips points out that in
Yorkshire, and especially in the plain of York, an essentially dark,
short, non-Teutonic type is common; while persons of the same
characteristics abound among the supposed pure Anglians of
Lincolnshire. They are found in great numbers in East Anglia, and they
are not rare even in Kent. In Sussex and Essex they occur less
frequently, and they are also comparatively scarce in the Lothians. Dr.
Beddoe, Dr. Thurnam, and other anthropologists have collected much
evidence to the same effect. Hence we may conclude with great
probability that large numbers of the descendants of the dark Britons
still survive even on the Teutonic coast. As to the descendants of the
light Britons, we cannot, of course, separate them from those of the
like-complexioned English invaders. But in truth, even in the east
itself, save only perhaps in Sussex and Essex, the dark and fair types
have long since so largely coalesced by marriage that there are probably
few or no real Teutons or real Celts individually distinguishable at
all. Absolutely fair people, of the Scandinavian or true German sort,
with very light hair and very pale blue eyes, are almost unknown among
us; and when they do occur, they occur side by side with relations of
every other shade. As a rule, our people vary infinitely in complexion
and anatomical type, from the quite squat, long-headed, swarthy peasants
whom we sometimes meet with in rural Yorkshire, to the tall,
flaxen-haired, red-cheeked men whom we occasionally find not only in
Danish Derbyshire, but even in mainly Celtic Wales and Cornwall. As to
the west, Professor Huxley declares, on purely anthropological grounds,
that it is probably, on the whole, more deeply Celtic than Ireland
itself.
These anthropological opinions are fully borne out by those scientific
archæologists who have done most in the way of exploring the tombs and
other remains of the early Anglo-Saxon invaders. Professor Rolleston,
who has probably examined more skulls of this period than any other
investigator, sums up his consideration of those obtained from
Romano-British and Anglo-Saxon interments by saying, "I should be
inclined to think that wholesale massacres of the conquered
Romano-Britons were rare, and that wholesale importations of Anglo-Saxon
women were not much more frequent." He points out that "we have
anatomical evidence for saying that two or more distinct varieties of
men existed in England both previously to and during the period of the
Teutonic invasion and domination." The interments show us that the races
which inhabited Britain before the English conquest continued in part to
inhabit it after that conquest. The dolichocephali, or long-skulled type
of men, who, in part, preceded the English, "have been found abundantly
in the Suffolk region of the Littus Saxonicum, where the Celt and Saxon
[Englishman] are not known to have met as enemies when East Anglia
became a kingdom." Thus we see that just where people of the dark type
occur abundantly at the present day, skulls of the corresponding sort
are met with abundantly in interments of the Anglo-Saxon period.
Similarly, Mr. Akerman, after explorations in tombs, observes, "The
total expulsion or extinction of the Romano-British population by the
invaders will scarcely be insisted upon in this age of enquiry." Nay,
even in Teutonic Kent, Jute and Briton still lie side by side in the
same sepulchres. Most modern Englishmen have somewhat long rather than
round skulls. The evidence of archæology supports the evidence of
anthropology in favour of the belief that some, at least, of the native
Britons were spared by the invading host.
On the other hand, against these unequivocal testimonies of modern
research we have to set the testimony of the early historical
authorities, on which the Teutonic theory mainly relies. The authorities
in question are three, Gildas, Bæda, and the English Chronicle. Gildas
was, or professes to be, a British monk, who wrote in the very midst of
the English conquest, when the invaders were still confined, for the
most part, to the south-eastern region. Objections have been raised to
the authenticity of his work, a small rhetorical Latin pamphlet,
entitled, "The History of the Britons;" but these objections have,
perhaps, been set at rest for many minds by Dr. Guest and Mr. Green.
Nevertheless, what little Gildas has to tell us is of slight historical
importance. His book is a disappointing Jeremiad, couched in the florid
and inflated Latin rhetoric so common during the decadence of the Roman
empire, intermingled with a strong flavour of hyperbolical Celtic
imagination; and it teaches us practically nothing as to the state of
the conquered districts. It is wholly occupied with fierce diatribes
against the Saxons, and complaints as to the weakness, wickedness, and
apathy of the British chieftains. It says little that can throw any
light on the question as to whether the Welsh were largely spared,
though it abounds with wild and vague declamation about the
extermination of the natives. Even Gildas, however, mentions that some
of his countrymen, "constrained by famine, came and yielded themselves
up to their enemies as slaves for ever;" while others, "committing the
safeguard of their lives to mountains, crags, thick forests, and rocky
isles, though with trembling hearts, remained in their fatherland."
These passages certainly suggest that a Welsh remnant survived in two
ways within the English pale, first as slaves, and secondly as isolated
outlaws.
Bæda stands on a very different footing. His authenticity is undoubted;
his language is simple and straightforward. He was born in or about the
year 672, only two hundred years after the landing of the first English
colonists in Thanet. Scarcely more than a century separated him from the
days of Ida. The constant lingering warfare with the Welsh on the
western frontier was still for him a living fact. The Celt still held
half of Britain. At the date of his birth the northern Welsh still
retained their independence in Strathclyde; the Welsh proper still
spread to the banks of the Severn; and the West Welsh of Cornwall still
owned all the peninsula south of the Bristol Channel as far eastward as
the Somersetshire marshes. Beyond Forth and Clyde, the Picts yet ruled
over the greater part of the Highlands, while the Scots, who have now
given the name of Scotland to the whole of Britain beyond the Cheviots,
were a mere intrusive Irish colony in Argyllshire and the Western Isles.
He lived, in short, at the very period when Britain was still in the
act of becoming England; and no historical doubts of any sort hang over
the authenticity of his great work, "The Ecclesiastical History of the
English people." But Bæda unfortunately knows little more about the
first settlement than he could learn from Gildas, whom he quotes almost
verbatim. He tells us, however, nothing of extermination of the Welsh.
"Some," he says, "were slaughtered; some gave themselves up to undergo
slavery: some retreated beyond the sea: and some, remaining in their own
land, lived a miserable life in the mountains and forests." In all this,
he is merely transcribing Gildas, but he saw no improbability in the
words. At a later date, Æthelfrith, of Northumbria, he tells us,
"rendered more of their lands either tributary to or an integral part of
the English territory, whether by subjugating or
expatriating[1] the
natives," than any previous king. Eadwine, before his conversion,
"subdued to the empire of the English the Mevanian islands," Man and
Anglesey; but we know that the population of both islands is still
mainly Celtic in blood and speech. These examples sufficiently show us,
that even before the introduction of Christianity, the English did not
always utterly destroy the Welsh inhabitants of conquered districts. And
it is universally admitted that, after their conversion, they fought
with the Welsh in a milder manner, sparing their lives as
fellow-Christians, and permitting them to retain their lands as
tributary proprietors.
The English Chronicle, our third authority, was first compiled at the
court of Ælfred, four and a-half centuries after the Conquest; and so
its value as original testimony is very slight. Its earlier portions are
mainly condensed from Bæda; but it contains a few fragments of
traditional information from some other unknown sources. These
fragments, however, refer chiefly to Kent, Sussex, and the older parts
of Wessex, where we have reason to believe that the Teutonic
colonisation was exceptionally thorough; and they tell us nothing about
Yorkshire, Lincolnshire, and East Anglia, where we find at the present
day so large a proportion of the population possessing an unmistakably
Celtic physique. The Chronicle undoubtedly describes the conflict in the
south as sharp and bloody; and in spite of the mythical character of the
names and events, it is probable that in this respect it rightly
preserves the popular memory of the conquest, and its general nature. In
Kent, "the Welsh fled the English like fire;" and Hengest and Æsc, in a
single battle, slew 4,000 men. In Sussex, Ælle and Cissa killed or drove
out the natives in the western rapes on their first landing, and
afterwards massacred every Briton at Anderida. In Wessex, in the first
struggle, "Cerdic and Cynric offslew a British king whose name was
Natanleod, and 5,000 men with him." And so the dismal annals of rapine
and slaughter run on from year to year, with simple, unquestioning
conciseness, showing us, at least, the manner in which the later
English believed their forefathers had acquired the land. Moreover,
these frightful details accord well enough with the vague generalities
of Gildas, from which, however, they may very possibly have been
manufactured. Yet even the Chronicle nowhere speaks of absolute
extermination: that idea has been wholly read into its words, not
directly inferred from them. A great deal has been made of the massacre
at Pevensey; but we hear nothing of similar massacres at the great Roman
cities—at London, at York, at Verulam, at Bath, at Cirencester, which
would surely have attracted more attention than a small outlying
fortress like Anderida. Even the Teutonic champions themselves admit
that some, at least, of the Celts were incorporated into the English
community. "The women," says Mr. Freeman, "would, doubtless, be largely
spared;" while as to the men, he observes, "we may be sure that death,
emigration, or personal slavery were the only alternatives which the
vanquished found at the hands of our fathers." But there is a vast gulf,
from the ethnological point of view, between exterminating a nation and
enslaving it.[2]
In the cities, indeed, it would seem that the Britons remained in great
numbers. The Welsh bards complain that the urban race of Romanised
natives known as Loegrians, "became as Saxons." Mr. Kemble has shown
that the English did not by any means always massacre the inhabitants of
the cities. Mr. Freeman observes, "It is probable that within the
[English] frontier there still were Roman towns tributary to the
conquerors rather than occupied by them;" and Canon Stubbs himself
remarks, that "in some of the cities there were probably elements of
continuous life: London, the mart of the merchants, York, the capital of
the north, and some others, have a continuous political existence."
"Wherever the cities were spared," he adds, "a portion, at least, of the
city population must have continued also. In the country, too,
especially towards the west and the debateable border, great numbers of
Britons may have survived in a servile or half-servile condition." But
we must remember that in only two cases, Anderida and Chester, do we
actually hear of massacres; in all the other towns, Bæda and the
Chronicle tell us nothing about them. It is a significant fact that
Sussex, the one kingdom in which we hear of a complete annihilation, is
the very one where the Teutonic type of physique still remains the
purest. But there are nowhere any traces of English clan nomenclature in
any of the cities. They all retain their Celtic or Roman names. At
Cambridge itself, in the heart of the true English country, the charter
of the thegn's guild, a late document, mentions a special distinction of
penalties for killing a Welshman, "if the slain be a ceorl, 2 ores, if
he be a Welshman, one ore." "The large Romanised towns," says Professor
Rolleston, "no doubt made terms with the Saxons, who abhorred city
life, and would probably be content to leave the unwarlike burghers in a
condition of heavily-taxed submissiveness."
Thus, even in the east it is admitted that a Celtic element probably
entered into the population in three ways,—by sparing the women, by
making rural slaves of the men, and by preserving some, at least, of the
inhabitants of cities. The skulls of these Anglicised Welshmen are found
in ancient interments; their descendants are still to be recognised by
their physical type in modern England. "It is quite possible," says Mr.
Freeman, "that even at the end of the sixth century there may have been
within the English frontier inaccessible points where detached bodies of
Welshmen still retained a precarious independence." Sir F. Palgrave has
collected passages tending to show that parties of independent Welshmen
held out in the Fens till a very late period; and this conclusion is
admitted by Mr. Freeman to be probably correct. But more important is
the general survival of scattered Britons within the English communities
themselves. Traces of this we find even in Anglo-Saxon documents. The
signatures to very early
charters,[3] collected
by Thorpe and Kemble,
supply us with names some of which are assuredly not Teutonic, while
others are demonstrably Celtic; and these names are borne by people
occupying high positions at the court of English kings. Names of this
class occur even in Kent itself; while others are borne by members of
the royal family of Wessex. The local dialect of the West Riding of
Yorkshire still contains many Celtic words; and the shepherds of
Northumberland and the Lothians still reckon their sheep by what is
known as "the rhyming score," which is really a corrupt form of the
Welsh numerals from one to twenty. The laws of Northumbria mention the
Welshmen who pay rent to the king. Indeed, it is clear that even in the
east itself the English were from the first a body of rural colonists
and landowners, holding in subjection a class of native serfs, with whom
they did not intermingle, but who gradually became Anglicised, and
finally coalesced with their former masters, under the stress of the
Danish and Norman supremacies.
In the west, however, the English occupation took even less the form of
a regular colonisation. The laws of Ine, a West Saxon king, show us that
in his territories, bordering on yet unconquered British lands, the
Welshman often occupied the position of a rent-paying inferior, as well
as that of a slave. The so-called Nennius tells us that Elmet in
Yorkshire, long an intrusive Welsh principality, was not subdued by the
English till the reign of Eadwine of Northumbria; when, we learn, the
Northumbrian prince "seized Elmet, and expelled Cerdic its king:" but
nothing is said as to any extermination of its people. As Bæda
incidentally mentions this Cerdic, "king of the Britons," Nennius may
probably be trusted upon the point. As late as the beginning of the
tenth century, King Ælfred in his will describes the people of Devon,
Dorset, Somerset, and Wilts, as "Welsh kin." The physical appearance of
the peasantry in the Severn valley, and especially in Shropshire,
Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, and Herefordshire, indicates that the
western parts of Mercia were equally Celtic in blood. The dialect of
Lancashire contains a large Celtic infusion. Similarly, the English
clan-villages decrease gradually in numbers as we move westward, till
they almost disappear beyond the central dividing ridge. We learn from
Domesday Book that at the date of the Norman conquest the number of
serfs was greater from east to west, and largest on the Welsh border.
Mr. Isaac Taylor points out that a similar argument may be derived from
the area of the hundreds in various counties. The hundred was originally
a body of one hundred English families (more or less), bound together by
mutual pledge, and answerable for one another's conduct. In Sussex, the
average number of square miles in each hundred is only twenty-three; in
Kent, twenty-four; in Surrey, fifty-eight; and in Herts, seventy-nine:
but in Gloucester it is ninety-seven; in Derby, one hundred and
sixty-two; in Warwick, one hundred and seventy-nine; and in Lancashire,
three hundred and two. These facts imply that the English population
clustered thickest in the old settled east, but grew thinner and thinner
towards the Welsh and Cumbrian border. Altogether, the historical
evidence regarding the western slopes of England bears out Professor
Huxley's dictum as to the thoroughly Celtic character of their
population.
On the other hand, it is impossible to deny that Mr. Freeman and Canon
Stubbs have proved their point as to the thorough Teutonisation of
Southern Britain by the English invaders. Though it may be true that
much Welsh blood survived in England, especially amongst the servile
class, yet it is none the less true that the nation which rose upon the
ruins of Roman Britain was, in form and organisation, almost purely
English. The language spoken by the whole country was the same which had
been spoken in Sleswick. Only a few words of Welsh origin relating to
agriculture, household service, and smithcraft, were introduced by the
serfs into the tongue of their masters. The dialects of the Yorkshire
moors, of the Lake District, and of Dorset or Devon, spoken only by wild
herdsmen in the least cultivated tracts, retained a few more evident
traces of the Welsh vocabulary: but in York, in London, in Winchester,
and in all the large towns, the pure Anglo-Saxon of the old England by
the shores of the Baltic was alone spoken. The Celtic serfs and their
descendants quickly assumed English names, talked English to one
another, and soon forgot, in a few generations, that they had not always
been Englishmen in blood and tongue. The whole organisation of the
state, the whole social life of the people, was entirely Teutonic. "The
historical civilisation," as Canon Stubbs admirably puts it, "is English
and not Celtic." Though there may have been much Welsh blood left, it
ran in the veins of serfs and rent-paying churls, who were of no
political or social importance. These two aspects of the case should be
kept carefully distinct. Had they always been separated, much of the
discussion which has arisen on the subject would doubtless have been
avoided; for the strongest advocates of the Teutonic theory are
generally ready to allow that Celtic women, children, and slaves may
have been largely spared: while the Celtic enthusiasts have thought
incumbent upon them to derive English words from Welsh roots, and to
trace the origin of English social institutions to Celtic models. The
facts seem to indicate that while the modern English nation is largely
Welsh in blood, it is wholly Teutonic in form and language. Each of us
probably traces back his descent to mixed Celtic and Germanic ancestry:
but while the Celts have contributed the material alone, the Teutons
have contributed both the material and the form.
[1] The
word in the original is exterminatis, but of
course exterminare then bore its etymological sense of
expatriation or expulsion, if not merely of confiscation,
while it certainly did not imply the idea of slaughter,
connoted by the modern word.
[2] In
this and a few other cases, modern authorities are
quoted merely to show that the essential facts of a large
Welsh survival are really admitted even by those who most
strongly argue in favour of the general Teutonic origin of
Englishmen.
[3] Kemble
"On Anglo-Saxon Names." Proc. Arch. Inst., 1845.
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