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That's really interesting. I wonder why the papacy would do that? How did that benefit them?

Me too honestly, I’d love to be able to know for certain but unfortunately a high level of certainty is very unlikely to ever surface.

But who knows, each subsequent study on the Anglo-Saxon migrations have shed more and more light and offered more and more concrete and well-evidenced hypotheses on this era

Because Blue Ball and Bird-In-Hand, PA (neighboring towns) were lonely. Please keep in mind that once you go through Intercourse, you end up in Paradise, PA.

I'll check it out, thanks!

The only point you made that I disagree with is point 3. All of the archaeological evidence suggests that the early medieval period of Britain was not dangerous, violent, or even unstable. Quite the contrary in fact. It all seems to suggest that people just kept on living their lives just as they had under the Romans. Not much really changed. All of their civic structures that they inherited from the Romans remained intact, and there was no interruption or change in how the land was occupied or used. There is nothing in the archaeology to indicate marauding bands of Saxons dominating the locals by force or intimidation.

You do make a good point though, just because the migration didn't happen the way Bede describes it doesn't mean it didn't happen at all. It very well may have, but unfortunately we just don't know for certain. All we can do is speculate until new discoveries are made.

This might help some:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZV1BOcGiV0

That was a good read, thank you! I hope I live long enough to see these questions definitively answered because it's clear that as of right now, SOMETHING is missing. Whether it's a breakthrough in genetic technology, a massive archaeological discovery, a hidden vault of early medieval scrolls unearthed from some church vault, or a revolutionary new way of categorizing and studying languages, I just hope I'm still alive to see it.

I think it's just people who speak English only and think it's a uniquely crazy language lol, anyone who speaks anything can tell you about loan words, language families, weird grammar rules and all that

Thanks for sharing that. Small bone of contention - the word 'replaced'. It is not clear from this article that this was indeed an invasion replacing the location population. Rather, we could imagine large populations creating trade posts on the east coast, settling, and co-mingling with a smaller local population. Hence, 3/4ths European, 1/4th Celtic-Roman.

I'd be interested to see more specifics as to where they obtained their genetic samples as well. They provide no detail in this article beyond 'east coast' and it doesn't explain the widespread adoption of Old English.

Just thinking - I personally believe there probably was an invasion, especially since we see these Germanic speaking people ascend to positions of power so quickly in the annals, etc, but evidence evidence evidence.

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I've never come across this theory, and I don't give it much credence. Even if there was no large scale migration to Britain, there absolutely was an Anglo-Saxon invasion that at least affected the upper classes/rulers & warriors. After that there was probably heavy anglicisation of local Brittonic celts, but the idea that they'd adopt an entire language and culture because of trade and admiration alone seems weird. Likely however there was more large migration than previously thought, not less.

He follows the language paths from Sanskrit through the Russian steppes to the Balkans, through Europe and on. English turns out to have more than one thread of descent, especially once you reach Europe, since we have contributions from other child languages such as French, German, Greek, and so on.

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I just saw that it has 161 episodes dating back to June 2012. I'll absolutely give it a listen, but this could take a while. Thanks for the recommendation!

I hadn't heard about this, but I definitely want to check it out

There is, but it doesn't seem to be conclusive. Oosthuizen mentions a genetic study that indicates the vast majority of English DNA comes from France rather than around the North Sea, but I do know there are others that support the conventional Germanic migrant theory. Someone else mentioned a new study that just came out a couple weeks ago that I hadn't heard about yet, so I'll have to check that out as well.

Although I do agree with you, that study claimed a continental North Sea ancestry was as high as 76% in the skeletons they analysed.

The 50-100% example is an example of an older and relatively lower quality study that can’t be used as well to analyse the DNA of groups from so long ago, as the paragraph just below it says:
>”However, populations change over time through drift and gene flow, so present-day populations may be poor proxies for ancient groups of unknown genetic makeup”.

Honestly English having very little Celtic influence is to be expected and isn’t considered all that unusual, at least not by historians such as N. Higham and J. Davies.

This video goes into more detail on the subject but in short, elite, “high-prestige” and (typically) conquering languages generally do not borrow all that much from the low-level conquered ones. There are exceptions of course, such as French and Gaulish, but for the vast majority of conquering languages it does seem to be the case.

The theory that there was NO Anglo-Saxon migration is extremely fringe, and doesn’t appear to have any sort of wide level of support.

I answered a question on AskHistorians earlier today about why the Anglo-Saxon migrations are so controversial, and what the various theories have been over the decades, which might be useful to you (although I am by no means an expert) https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/xwkhb8/can_someone_why_new_evidence_of_a_large_scale/ir9cskt/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3

To summarise, the most modern study of Anglo-Saxon remains concluded that there was a large-scale migration from the continental North Sea, however unlike previous theories (and the very dubious primary sources of Gildas and Bede) it doesn’t posit that this took place as a singular event, but rather that it took place from sometime during Roman rule in Britain to as late as the 8th century.

In addition, this video goes into detail over why the evolution of English is not all that unusual. In short, most elite-level (or “high prestige”) languages do not borrow heavily from the lower languages. There are exceptions of course, such as French having quite a lot of Gaulish influence, but the vast majority of the time the conquering language takes very little from the conquered.

Yes. I guess just because it happened more recently than other languages it’s more interesting.

>In no other former province of the Roman Empire did the invading language take over the native language aside from England,

North Africa? Latin died out wherever it had only penetrated into urban environments. In North Africa, Berber was still spoken in most rural environments and Latin was mainly spoken in coastal cities (Punic was also around). Similarly, in Roman Britain, Latin was spoken in cities and fortresses, but Celtic languages were still dominant.

In both situations, Latin was a language for primarily elites, and when the elites became Germanic or Arabic speakers, it died out.

In Gaul, Iberia, and the Italian peninsula, Latin was spoken in the countryside and wasn't so easily displaced.

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Thanks!