From: nick@cs.hw.ac.uk (Nick Taylor)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british
Subject: Re: Celtic History in England
Date: 29 Sep 92 12:31:13 GMT
Organization: Dept of Computing and Electrical Engineering, Heriot-Watt University, Scotland

In article <1992Sep28.092157.10214@dcs.qmw.ac.uk> mmh@cs.qmw.ac.uk (Matthew Huntbach) writes:

>However I have seen suggestions (maybe from the author who Andy
>mentions, I forget) that settlements of Welsh-speaking people
>remained in England after the Ango-Saxon conquest ("Welsh"
>originally being used by the Anglo-Saxons to describe their
>Celtic predecessors, who were later pushed into Wales according
>to tradition). Arguments for this include references to
>"Welshmen" in law books of areas remote from Wales itself - the
>suggestion is that these were the Celts who remained in place
>rather than people from Wales. It was suggested that they
>remained recognised as a distinct group of people right up to
>the Norman conquest, though by then they had adopted the
>English language.

I think this theory is more than just a suggestion these days. Much
archaeological evidence has accumulated pointing to the Anglo-Saxons and Celts
(Romano-Britons) living side by side. It seems that the A-S did not take over
Celtic towns and villages but created their own, often nearby, but separate.
Hence the inordinate number of place names of Celtic origin in modern-day
England. [Inordinate given that the A-S tongues rapidly became supreme].

In much reading of the history of Dark Age Britain I have never come across
any hint of a mass exodus of Celts from the main body of England to the
`Celtic fringe'. Even the migration to Brittany does not seem to have involved
vast numbers of emigrants. Any wholesale massacres of the Celts would almost
certainly have been immortalised in A-S songs and passed into chronicles or,
at the very least, would have been picked up by Gildas (that A-S loathing
monk). The lack of such references makes it pretty clear to me that the Celts
were neither driven nor wiped out of England. They stayed put.

By and large, the way of life in the Dark Ages would have made it quite
possible for Angles, Saxons, Celts, etc. to sustain themselves in small
communities with very little contact if that was what they wanted. Of course,
different groups would have had different "tolerance levels" and in some parts
of England the Celts would have been treated very badly whilst in others they
would have been left alone. In this respect I think it only fair to point out
that the Anglo-Saxons were a bunch of different peoples (Angles, Saxons,
Jutes, Franks, Frisians, any more?) and it would be wrong to tar them all with
the same brush. The Saxons (who migrated across the South and West) had a much
more feudal society than the Angles (who permeated the East and North) so the
latter might have integrated more readily with the native Celts. The Danes,
who moved into the same parts of England as the Angles also showed more
respect for the individual than the Saxons. The "Norman yoke" would have been
nothing new to the people of the South and West of England whilst it would have
been much less acceptable to the folk in the East and North. Perhaps this is
why such characters as Hereward the Wake, Robin Hood, dare I say Cromwell?,
all came from the East? [Put that in a North-South Divide pipe and smoke
it].

Nick Taylor,
Sou'Westerner.
Newsgroups: soc.culture.british