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Europe by the start of the Iron Age (c.800 bc) was seeing the emergence of a linguistic divide between the various branches of Indo-European. One of two such branches, possibly the older, was the proto-Celtic that has been traced to the shores of the western Mediterranean. Another was the proto-Germanic of Scandinavia and northern Europe. These two language groups appear to have met somewhere across the great European plains of the Danube and the Rhine. That meeting was to divide peoples down the ages of Europe’s subsequent history.
Whether such a linguistic watershed reflected any great genetic or tribal difference we cannot as yet tell, though prehistorians are dying for a massive pan-European DNA census. What we do know is that, at least by the first millennium ad and almost certainly earlier, some version of this linguistic divide was to run down the spine of the British Isles. This would not have been surprising, given that both sides were occupied by people close to opposing seas, some to the Atlantic and others to the North Sea. But while those to the west have now been given a plausibly coherent narrative – ‘Celtic from the west’ – those to the east are revealed as having a more complex and indeed frequently changing background. Amid a fog of conflicting theories, all that does appear to be the case is that their ancestry does in large part reflect the so-called steppe origins of the peoples of the North Sea.
These peoples remain a mystery. The Iron Age settlements down the coast of East Anglia and round Kent to Sussex were known by the Romans as the ‘Saxon Shore’. Once assumed to imply a shore threatened by Saxons, it is now taken possibly to mean the opposite, a shore inhabited by ‘Saxons’. The television archaeologist Francis Pryor has identified Saxon forts from Brancaster in Norfolk round to Roman Porchester near Portsmouth, ‘with all the hallmarks of civilian settlements’. This supports the theory that many would have been settled, possibly for a very long time, by Germanic-speaking migrants across the North Sea from the continent.
It must be significant that all Celtic languages have cognates of ‘Saxon’ for their neighbouring, usually hostile, Britons to the east: Sassenach, Sasanach, Sowsnek, Saison and Saozon. It would be odd if all referred simply to one small German tribe across the North Sea. More likely is that it was the name given by Brythonic speakers, for whatever reason, to the peoples who had long occupied lands down the east coast of Britain. As such, it would indeed be the case that a Germanic tongue, a precursor to the Anglo-Saxon language sometimes called Old English, might go back deep into the Iron Age and possibly before.
Since this was before the age of writing, linguists must grasp at straws. They have established that the earliest traces tend to lie in the names of natural features, especially rivers. Crucial markers for trade and travel, rivers rarely change their names. Exhaustive research has revealed that very few rivers in the east of England have Brythonic names, possibly some using aber as mouth of, tame as dark water and ouse for swamp. In 1953 British Celtic-languages expert, Kenneth Jackson, divided England into two areas. One, roughly east of a line from Southampton to Yorkshire, has rivers almost all of whose names have Germanic roots. Moving west, his second area finds Celtic-named rivers more common.
The same roughly goes for place names. The language scholar Richard Coates has found just thirty-five names he regards as Brythonic down the eastern side of Britain among hundreds that are Germanic. When Londoners vacated their city on Rome’s departure in the fifth century, it was not in some Celtic suburb that they settled but in the ancient Auld Wych, or old port in Anglo-Saxon. I find it hard to believe London’s Aldwych was ever ‘Celtic’.
The search for an eastern tongue that might have preceded Anglo-Saxon has been a major academic undertaking. It was called by another scholar of this subject, Margaret Gelling, ‘the obscurest question in the whole of English history’. The geneticist Peter Forster, basing his research on the Anglo-Saxon saga Beowulf (c.700), proposed a Germanic language, possibly unique to eastern Britain, with an ‘English’ vocabulary related to Norse as well as German. The Dutch linguist Peter Schrijver has likewise championed an ancient English lingua franca, perhaps related to Old Frisian across the North Sea. This can only be called work in progress.
Amid this uncertainty we can offer at best a tentative picture of the people of Britain at the time of the Roman invasion. Those to the west and north of a line roughly up the central limestone ridge were mostly long-established, predominantly of ancient Iberian extraction. On most of the island of Britain their speech was Brythonic Celtic, from the south-west up through Wales and the valley of the Severn to the Midlands, Lancashire, Cumbria and the borders, and to the Clyde and the Forth. Goidelic Celtic took hold in Ireland, Man and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland.
The peoples of Britain’s east and south-east, however, had long been subject to Belgic, Germanic and Scandinavian spheres of influence and settlement. They probably spoke some long-lost predecessor of Old English, though they may have been familiar with Brythonic as a language for trade – indicated in the scatter of Brythonic river names. This, I have to stress, is a conjectural but to me plausible resolution of the ‘Celtic Britain conundrum’.