Class 1, Question 11

Long Story p21 - By 410 Roman legionnaires had been recalled to the continent to
defend a collapsing Roman Empire. This left the British Celts — those who
had lived under the Roman occupation as a conquered people — without any
protection from the marauding Picts and Scots, other Celts whom the Roman
occupiers had forced back into the hills and highlands. Once the Romans
had gone, the unconquered Celts of the north and west began to attack the
British Celts. It is at this point that another legend is born. According to the
first historian to write about the period, a man known as the Venerable Bede
(pronounced "bead"), the British Celts "invited" the Germanic peoples to
come to England to help fend off the attacking northern and western Celts.
Since Bede wrote some three hundred years after the fact and had no written
records on which to base his claim, his version of history is rather
questionable at best. In all likelihood, no invitation was ever extended to the
Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians. They probably noticed that the Roman
army had withdrawn from the British Isles, leaving the door open to any
military force that could step in and win a place for itself, and so decided to
try their luck in the west.
Invited or not, the Germanic peoples started to arrive in the British
Isles around the middle of the fifth century. Bede wrote that the Germanic
influx started in 449 and historians and linguists alike have come to adopt
this date, whatever its real accuracy, as the beginning of the Old English
period.

With the Celts on the sidelines, the Germanic invaders spread out over
much of what is present-day England. They established seven small
kingdoms to rule their new territory. The Jutes were the first to set up shop.
They moved into the south-east part of the island and took over the area
corresponding roughly to present-day Kent. The Saxons came next,
colonising the south and south-west. The Angles tended to settle on the east
coast of England. They subsequently moved inland and northwards. Frisian
influence is harder to pinpoint, probably because the Frisians were fewer in
number than the other Germanic peoples and because they may have
blended in early on with the Jutes in the area of Kent.
Two kingdoms, Sussex and Wessex, were established on Saxon-held
lands. The Jutes controlled the kingdom of Kent. North of the Thames in
the territory colonised by the Angles were the remaining kingdoms of Essex,
which took in London, East Anglia, Mercia and Northumbria, which, as its
name suggests, was established north of the Humber River. The extreme
south-west point of England, the region of Cornwall, remained under Celtic
control, as did Wales and Scotland. The linguistic traces of this continued
Celtic influence can still be felt today. In all three regions, Celtic languages
have been preserved and a high percentage of Celtic place-names and words
have been maintained. The dialectal English spoken today in these regions
is coloured by Celtic influence, and is for this reason often incomprehensible
to the outsider. It'S a long story p.22

Planning an invasion

In the British Isles, birthplace of the English language, one would
expect to find more speakers of Germanic languages, but such was not the
case at the beginning of our era. The British Isles were inhabited instead by
the Celts (yes, the ones who gave their name to the Boston basketball team!).
The Celts (pronounced "Kelts" ... unlike the basketball team) were not
however the original inhabitants of the Isles. They probably followed a
Neolithic* race whose language has been lost. Some people speculate that
the mysterious Basque language mentioned above is a descendant of this
lost language, but there is a lack of proof backing up this claim at the
present time.

It’s all Greek to me

By 55 BC, the British Isles had attracted the attention of a new
conqueror. Julius Caesar began to launch a series of offensives across the
English Channel. It took him three tries and the loss of a lot of men and
equipment due to storms at sea, but he finally managed to establish a base
in the south-eastern corner of what is today England. In 43 AD Emperor
Claudius took up where Caesar had left off and launched a military assault
which finally brought much of England under Roman control. The Roman
advance stopped at the edge of the Welsh and Scottish highlands. In these
mountainous regions the Romans could no longer launch massive attacks
against the Celts and their offensive stalled. The Romans, under Hadrian,
contented themselves with building a wall across the north of England to
keep out the Scots. Vestiges of this wall, known rather fittingly as Hadrian's
Wall, can still be seen today. It's a long story p.20