Isn't that Keith Moon?

Cannot recommend this podcast enough. It is fascinating. And it makes you realize just how interconnected our world has always been.

>dun means forified hill

I knew there was some use to be had out of reading Katherine Kerr!

I've been teaching English as a second language for 20 years. I speak English, French, German, and I know a ton of Latin (thanks to English).

It is blatantly obvious to me that English is German people incorporating an enormous amount of French and Latin words into their vocabulary. I think what people overlook is how influential French was during the late Middle Ages. It was considered the language of the learned and as such anyone who could read learned French. It wasn't a result of French migration, but rather the English admiration and obsession with everything French. It is through them that we learned everything, from the alphabet to the classics.

As an example, I will re-write the paragraph above, but take out all the French/Latin words and you'll see how English is a German language at heart.

It is grossly clear to me that English is German folk bringing in an very big sum of French and Latin words into their word list. I think what folk overlook is how stark French was when the late Middle Ages was. It was thought the language of the learned and as such everyone who could read learned French. It wasn't an outcome of French wandering, but rather the English wonder and worship with everything French. It is through them that we learned everything, from the alphabet to the classics.

English sounds weird without all the French and Latin, but it's still English, which is a German dialect. No doubt.

Source?

Some people probably say it as another word for white British (or of that ancestry), so it's probably because of who is or isn't using that terminology.

There was a huge new genetic study out a couple of weeks ago that proved that the Anglo Saxons did invade. The academic consensus that it was just a small elite has been disproven

Is that different from the multi part documentary series back on the day? I just remember two men shaking hands for like 10 minutes while haggling over a sheep

The far right has adopted the term, but it was used for years by racists. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/anglo-saxon-what-you-say-when-whites-only-too-inclusive/618646/

King of the WHO?

Thanks for the recommendation! :)

It's why my predominantly English heritage shows up primarily as ... French and German, with some Scandinavian, DNA.

I think most people view "Anglo-Saxon Invasion" as some kind of reverse D-Day, with ships filled with people scaling the White Cliffs of Dover.

Nope.

Until maybe two years ago, I hadn’t heard of it either (I live in the UK). It seems that it has mostly been a problem in the US, where the term “Anglo Saxon” came to gain white supremacist meanings, along with nationalism and racial purity, etc. Abhorrent, of course. But in the UK (and I suppose parts of Europe?) “Anglo Saxon” broadly refers to the time period between the end of the Roman period and the beginning of the Viking Age, and doesn’t have the same horrible meaning that it does in the US. It was news to me when I first heard about that, but I’ve since read more. In her recent book Buried, Dr. Alice Roberts has a whole postscript section about the use of the term and how its meaning has changed over time across the world.

I can definitely vouch for the Welsh names, because I grew up there. In Wales Aber means the mouth of, as in, the mouth of a river. So Abertawe (Swansea) means the mouth of the river Tawe.

I lived in Scotland for a while and never made the Dun connection, but that makes so much sense now you’ve said it!

I find all this stuff really interesting. I did a degree in history and I’ve got lots of books on words and the history of words, sayings, and place names. Fascinating!

I am not English, but why would Anglo-Saxon have negative connotations? I am fairly interested in European historian and like to watch ie Dan Davis and “survive the jive” but have never heard anyone mention this.

I didn't even know this was a theory until a few days ago when something auto loaded into my YouTube feed discussing it... but whatever I was watching only made the case that there wasn't a military invasion or evidence of fighting; they never said there was no evidence of large peaceful migration. Has that been rolled out by some other source?

>the idea that there was never an Anglo-Saxon invasion, or even a migration, has become increasingly popular.

And the DNA analysis work recently published by the Max Planck Institite stakes that idea through the heart, decapitates it, stuffs garlic down its neck and buries it at a crossroads.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05247-2?fbclid=IwAR1xzaPW6lfvdfr8LNxrGb4qo0o-euaRkiUaDQikbCl-4yhvzklRhmM4wY0

"Work based on present-day Y chromosomes inferred 50–100% replacement of male lineages during the Early Middle Ages in eastern England" is just one of the lines inthe summary. That study was only published a few months ago, so the ripples have yet to filter through, but it resolutely puts the idea that there was no AS migration in the coffin for good.

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I don't think anyone claims there was no migration, just that there appears to be no definite identifiable point at which a mass migration or large scale invasion happened. Michael Pye's The Edge of the World is an interesting read relating to this topic. "Frisian" trade networks spanning the North Sea coasts may be a big part of the (hypothetical) answer. There are lots of references to the Frisian sea, Frisian trading posts on all North Sea coasts, and Procopius (from a vantage point in Byzantium) writes that Brittia is inhabited by Angles, Frisians, and Brits.

"Frisian" as used by Latin writers in the Dark Ages should be understood as a purely geographic label: the oldest written history of the Counts of Holland mentions that the Low Countries are inhabited by Saxons, but are traditionally called Frisians by the Romans and Franks (after a tribe that used to live there in Caesar's time that gave the area its Latin name). So for practical purposes Frisians = Saxons. One is an endonym, and the other an exonym for ethnically the same people in a specific area.

Because transport over land was much slower, harder, and more dangerous than transport over sea, this trade network would have had a major impact on linguistic transmission (creating perhaps a sort of creole Lingua Franca of the markets on the coast), and migration from coast to coast was simply a matter of individuals, families, small bands of adventurers, or small villages booking passage over the course of centuries. If migration happened this way, the migrants would easily all pick up the same language (closely related to their own). And diplomats traveling between the kingdoms in England would have depended on that same trade network for their travels. Travel itineraries of missionaries for instance do suggest that hopping from port to port on the North Sea was greatly preferred over inland travels.

Kingdoms that formed may have picked this trade language as their official language merely as a matter of convenience. It was the language of wealth and power, and of interaction with the other kingdoms and foreign bands of cheap mercenaries. Like the US picked English, over for instance Dutch, French, Spanish, or Navajo, etc. Including some kingdoms that were, by historical accident, dominated by clans of Angles.

This account leaves open the question of what happened with the trade network if it was already so well-developed. How did English become isolated from the mainland Germanic languages? Another hypothetical: The Franks caused it to collapse when they conquered the Frisian and adjacent Saxon kingdoms on the mainland, temporarily isolating Britannia and the Scandinavian coasts from access to the trade network, and making it give way to an era of North Sea raiding (the "Viking" era) that pushed people away from the coasts and increasingly turned inland travel into the preferred method, and reduced shipping to short distance crossings of the English Channel.

I haven't read either of the authors you mention but I know those that argue against any form of migration often use straw man arguments by using a mass invasion as the opposing argument they are refuting. They also heavily refer to Bede's explanation & argue against that. The problem with this approach is we know both the mass invasion hypothesis & Bede's description are untrue, refuting them doesn't refute migration.

Here are a few things we know:

1. Bede lived in a world of defined Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, he tried to explain how they came to be using mass migrations so his theory of Jutes south east, Saxons in the South, Angles in the mid & North is him working backwards rather than actual historical research. This is both proveably false & totally implausible that it's easy to take shots at. Just because migrations definitely didn't happen how Bede describes doesn't mean they didn't happen.

2. We know the late Roman Empire used Germanic tribes to supplement it's military forces & that towards the very end significant military towns in the Empire were drawing their troop requirements repeatedly from specific Germanic areas. It is believed Britania was doing the same with the region that contained Saxon tribes & this would likely have continued when Britain was cut off from the empire. As the military latin used by troops in Gaul created French the military Germanic language used by Saxon tribes could have had the same effect in England. The question here would be why the tribes would keep Germanic language than learning Latin & the answer is probably explained by the fact Britain was cut off from the Empire & so Latin wasn't as significant for all soldiers to learn.

3. Though Bede's explanation of how can be debunked what we cannot ignore is that Bede of many cultural touch points that refer to a migration of some sort. Of Germanic ppl's coming over to Britain. There is something in living memory of that experience both in the Anglo-Saxon culture & in the Welsh & Cumbrian cultures.

4. We know through studies of the fall of the Roman Empire & of colonialism that languages & cultural identity don't need a population displacement to change root & branch. In a society where military might equals total power & those with it were the minority it actually wouldn't take a large number of people to migrate to see a cultural change if these dominated the military class. The more dangerous & fractious society the more this is the case. So if it's a period of lack of central authority, there are small petty kingdoms everywhere, villages are fighting villages. Then a member of a Saxon warrior band sets up farm in your village. You can bet your bottom dollar every villager is kissing his ass & learning his language to both avoid being his victim & to use his warrior influence to ensure their farms are also defended. Just like that he's the feudal lord there. Individual ppl are chameleons who will copy others culturally if it improves survival or offers advancement.

5. The best Roman coin hoards we have found in Britain come from this period. Though it's not uncommon for coins to be buried for safety in normal times it isn't common for large coin hoards to then be forgotten about. These are instances where a person has buried a hoard of coins & then never been able to go back & claim them. This is signs of fleeing suddenly.

As a result of these facts the historical consensus at present was that there were small warrior bands & traders migrating & settling in England. These were usual of mixed tribal background, warrior bands tended not to be ethnocentric. These bands were military elite & drove immitation. It was a violent time of which these bands were part of that drove large scale uprooting of population - note not necessarily driven away by invading migration but by the violence of the time of which the warrior bands took part. Though some must have been displaced by settling bands. What emerges from the violence is a society that has homogenised around the Saxon warrior elite.

They’re also peddling fringe theories that are laughable to most

I’m in Scotland so we have a lot of original brittonic/celtic names. Load of places called DunSomehting, Dundee, Dunbar, Dumbarton, dun means forified hill. Dumbarton means fortified hill of the brittons. Also Aber is common, like Aberdeen, but even in Wales you can find places called AberSomething. Then theres the buroughs/burgh, loads of places called burg or berg in germany/scandinavia. Really fascinating!

Yes, I find it fascinating! The names of places in the UK is also very interesting when you start picking them apart. There are a lot of places near where I currently live that date from the Anglo-Saxon period. It ties into the whole language thing quite nicely and just adds to the richness of the landscape for me. I’m sure the same is true of the rest of the world too, and I’d love to hear those stories, but I see these place names every day so they’re more in my mind.

"The Mother Tongue : English and How It Got That Way" by Bill Bryson is quite entertaining and informative on the subject.

For a better picture, I did a little googling and came up with this one:

https://www.ripleys.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/pigeon-vest.jpg