Empires of the Word - Nicholas Ostler [174]
Linguistically, the intermediate stages are obscure, but the triumph of Latin as a popular language, analogously to what always happened on the Continent, never even looked possible. There is never any sense of a takeover of British society by Saxons; it is more the classic story of alien invaders gradually establishing a bridgehead, then spreading out, and building a new order on their own terms, like European imperialists in the Americas. There are no records in British of the period, but the records left in Latin (notably Gildas’s De Excidio Britonum, ‘The Ruin of the British’, c.540, and Nennius’s compilation of Excerpta up to c.800) paint a hostile picture of the Saxons as destroyers. West Saxons were literate from the ninth century in their own language (itself a curiosity for Germanic invaders), the Norsemen from a little later. Neither pay much heed to their British predecessors.
How could this be? The Britons, after all, were heirs to four hundred years of Roman civilisation, just like the Gauls, and were if anything notorious for their military prowess; indeed, potentates from Britain (Maximus in 388, Constantine in 407) had twice led successful forces on to the Continent in the previous fifty years. Granted that the major forces had already been withdrawn to Italy, allowing the Saxons to make their bridgehead, in the generations that followed the Britons should still have had expertise in depth to regroup in the 90 per cent of the country they still controlled, and either drive back, or force a compromise with, the incomers.
* There is actually an implicit dispute in the sources on who these invaders were. Evidently they were speakers of a Low German dialect, but Gildas ( a Celt, writing before 550) calls them Saxons ( or more exactly Saxones ferocissimi illi nefandi nominis Saxones deo hominibusque invisi, ‘those ferocious Saxons of unspeakable name hateful to God and men’, xxiii.l), while Procopius (a Greek—less personally involved—writing also before 550, and probably using information from Angles on a Frankish mission to Byzantium) says they were Angles and Frisians (Gothic War, iv.20). It is the Venerable Bede, in his history published in 731, who calls them Angles, Saxons and Jutes ( i. 15 ). The Saxons and Franks (named for their favourite weapons, the seax or knife and the franca or javelin) were not among the tribes known to Tacitus, but would have lived where he places the Chauci and the Tungri, at the mouths of the Weser and Rhine respectively.
Instead we see a steady fall-back, and the unmixed spread across the country of English, a mixture of Angle, Saxon, Frisian and perhaps Jutish varieties of Low German. The only parallel, in fact, to this spread of a Germanic language is what happened when the Germanic invaders encountered virgin territory, in the islands of the North Sea and in Iceland. There of course the Vikings’ language, Old Norse, spread, because it had no competition. Could the Britons of the urbanised lowlands somehow have just melted away? Nothing less is needed to explain the complete walkover within Britain of those Germanic languages, and above all of English.
A recent theory, from David Keys, says that they may have.49 The mid-sixth century (close to 550) was the time when bubonic plague entered Britain, along trade routes from the Mediterranean. Significantly, it would have been Britain (the west and centre of the island) which it hit, rather than England (the south-east), because only Britain maintained trade links with the empire. And it would be less likely to spread to the Saxons since they did not consort with Britons and, living outside the established Roman towns and cities, may have lived at a lower density. It would have been virtually simultaneous with the mortālitās magna that hit Ireland, according to the Annals of