https://news.sky.com/story/dna-from-skeletons-reveals-where-first-people-to-call-themselves-english-came-from-12713175

https://news.sky.com/story/dna-from-skeletons-reveals-where-first-people-to-call-themselves-english-came-from-12713175

Forgive me but I'm not sure where you're looking. There's tremendous historical as well as archeological evidence for many migrations to the British Isles. Within recorded history there's been the Norman invasion and the introduction of early French to the indigenous language and the Vikings with King Cnut before that. From an archeological perspective, you may find the below interesting...it's an article I literally came across just today during lunch. Through the work of modern DNA research, the British Isles were visited and settled literally countless times by any number of peoples and cultures.

https://news.sky.com/story/dna-from-skeletons-reveals-where-first-people-to-call-themselves-english-came-from-12713175

Even in Iberia you still have the Basques, and there's Galicia Belgica with Flemish and German. The claim your disputing seems like one of those claims that only really works at a very general level and as you point out, the non elites kind of could do their own thing and are often over looked at that level.

Your point about the eastern side of the empire is another good one. The Greek situation is complicated b/c of it's role as a language of high culture and the Semitic languages were in a state of flux anyway and going through all sorts of changes.

Skilled forensic anthropologists usually can, but the issue is that most of the graves we're talking about here have never been studied this way, and never will be, because the bones do not exist anymore. In some, the bones disintegrated naturally before the grave was even excavated. There were no surviving bones found in the Sutton Hoo grave, for example. For many though, the bones were simply discarded because the artifacts were all that people paid attention to. This was pretty common practice up until pretty recently, and definitely was during the Victorian antiquarian boom. They dug up the grave, found a sword, wrote the skeleton down as male and Germanic, and then threw the bones in the trash. We are still operating off of that data today.

But it wouldn't even help you to have the bones in this case. A skeleton can't tell you what language someone spoke, or what terms they would use to describe their own background. Not even their DNA can tell you that. Identity is not biological.

As an aside, just because someone had a skeleton we might describe as biologically male does not mean that that person or their society saw them as a man.

You so realise you can tell the difference between male and female skeletons?

"Women weren't buried with weapons."

"How do you know?"

"Because all the people buried with weapons were men."

"How do you know they were men?"

"Because they were buried with weapons!"

This same pattern plays out to an extent with material culture. We don't actually know that someone who was buried with a Quoit brooch, for example, spoke primarily Old English or saw themselves as ethnically Germanic. It is just traditional to assume that, and so the assumption becomes its own evidence.

>What's strange though is that if it was a trade language, why did it only emerge and gain traction in Britain, and not across the entire North Sea?

This is a really good question, and as far as I know it isn't one that migration-skeptical scholars have a good answer for.

You could also ask it in the other direction though. If Old English came from continental Europe, why didn't any remnant of it survive there? It can't really be that all the people who spoke Old English migrated from the continent to Britain, can it?

Early Medieval Britain is fascinating for the same reason that it can be so incredibly frustrating. There are so many mysteries.

There are a number of theories regarding the Neolithic decline and subsequent Beaker replacement, but most of them revolve around a plague and/or famine wiping out the Neolithic peoples (maybe even the predecessor to the black plague), so it wasn't as much a deliberate replacement but more of a "oh look, free real estate" situation.

Here's a couple sources on that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neolithic_decline

https://www.technologynetworks.com/genomics/news/earliest-strain-of-bubonic-plague-bacteria-identified-in-neolithic-site-350328

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-07673-7

Population replacements just don't happen without some outside force killing a bunch of people beforehand, or a level of genocide that would make Pol Pot blush. If you have any other examples, I would love to hear them. And I don't mean that to be snarky, I legitimately want to know if there are other historical precedents of a non-disease, non-genocidal population replacement so I can wrap my head around this. Because your earlier point was right. For all intents and purposes, it's as if the Celts never lived in England in the first place. How can that be?

Thanks, I'll check it out!

No, I was actually trying to bolster your point. If Celtic names (and genes) are largely missing even while Latin ones managed to make it through, it doesn’t bode well for the idea that the Celts were integrated in the area. I don’t think genocide or “replacement” are great leaps in logic to come to. I think genetic and archaeological evidence are showing more and more that older populations all over the planet were replaced by successive waves of migration and technology. The genes of the oldest human remains almost never suggest a common lineage with present day populations.

There a few cities sure, anything with -cester on the end of them especially i.e. Chichester, Leicester, Worcester, Gloucester. But even these are the exception to the rule and notable because of it.

Of course there are thousands more villages and towns than cities, and these are the ones with with nearly all Anglo Saxon derivations.

"Crackpot" theory is a little harsh. It was a thing for a while when history did one of its "everything is wrong, let's start from scratch" things a few years ago. It was always at the extreme, iconoclastic end of history/archaeology (and some archaeological theories have always been a little "out there") but it was a school of thought for a while. Never a good theory, but definitely a theory and it helped to reset the debate a little bit.

It's certainly not unheard of. The beaker people essentially wiped out the Neolithic British down to the last man in an even less advanced time. In about 200 years after the beaker people's arrival the Neolithic British only made up 10% of the population.

There of course also was a degree of intermixing with the Celts that 25% of their DNA was still there. I can only assume that the remnants that once lived in England were forced back or fled to the extremities of the Island.

We know there were Celtic 'nations' and communities in Cornwall, Wales, Cumbria and Scotland well into the Anglo Saxon period.

Thanks for writing all that up, I really appreciate it. I remember reading some other theory (I wish I could remember the author) that stated a similar theory to Oosthuizen, which is that some form of embryonic precursor to Old English was introduced to Britain by the Belgae before the Romans even arrived, and that it followed a similar trajectory to the one you suggest. It lied in wait, evolved as a trade language, and then erupted across Britain as North Sea trade overtook Channel trade, eventually becoming the primary language of the mercantile class before spreading both upwards and downwards to the elites and the peasants, respectively. What's strange though is that if it was a trade language, why did it only emerge and gain traction in Britain, and not across the entire North Sea?

Oh, aren’t there even good examples of Latin place names? Londonum…

One small point about your excellent reply... As I understand it, we don't really know why the coin hoards were deposited. It might not be "hiding" as much as some kind of religious tribute, or even a more prosaic reason such as putting it somewhere for safe keeping and forgetting where.

And the unfortunate fact is that if there IS any archaeological evidence of violence or general disruption, it is probably not going to be found except by accident as it will either be under a major city and inaccessible, or in the middle of nowhere (like West Heslerton) and only found through a combination of luck and hard work.

Maybe you're right. I just don't understand how that level of replacement could take place at that time period. It just doesn't happen elsewhere in history like it appears to in Britain. The Persians, the Macedonians, the Romans, the Mongols, the Turks, the Magyars, the Vikings, the Arabs, the Normans, the Visigoths, the Lombards, the Franks, none of them so completely and totally wiped out every last genetic, cultural, and linguistic remnant of those that came before them. We don't see this level of population replacement until the European settlement of the New World, and that can mostly be attributed to disease wiping out most of the Native Americans. As far as I know, nobody is suggesting a plague wiped out the Britons, paving the way for Anglo Saxon resettlement, so for the DNA to suggest upwards of 75% replacement just feels unfathomable to me. If it was a genocide, it would have been one of the most successful ones ever conducted in history, which would require a level of organization that the Anglo Saxons probably weren't capable of, and there would almost certainly be more evidence of it. If it wasn't a genocide, then how on earth did they achieve that high of a replacement rate? Maybe we'll get a clearer answer in coming years/decades as they do more studies and have more data to analyze.

East Anglia, Wessex, Sussex, Essex are all Anglo-Saxon names. Wessex literally means land of the West Saxons, Essex (East), Sussex (South) follow similar naming conventions.

The name “English” is derived from the name “Angles”.

Native Britons wouldn’t have names these kingdoms what they named them just because it was en vogue. It’s because they were invaded and gradually conquered through war or cultural domination. These places were known by different names before the Anglo-Saxons arrived.

So whether they all came at once, or in waves, or conquered or peacefully settled and intermingled with the locals (doubtful since there is plenty of evidence the Britons fought the Anglo-Saxons, and the legendary Arthur may have been a Britonic warlord who fought Anglo-Saxons), there was definitely an “invasion” of sorts, probably a centuries long migration.

You might dig The 12 Who Ruled by Palmer. It's about the Committee for Public Safety. It's an older book, but very readable.

Mike Duncan's got a bibliography for his sources on the French Revolution section of his Revolutions podcast that's worth checking out as well.

https://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/revolutions_podcast/bibliography.html

Wawro's book, A Mad Catastrophe was really fascinating.

https://newbooksnetwork.com/geoffrey-wawro-a-mad-catastrophe-the-outbreak-of-world-war-i-and-the-collapse-of-the-habsburg-empire-basic-books-2014-3

Thanks for the recommendations! I read Hero of Two worlds and enjoyed that, so I will definitely check out those other 2!

Let me put it this way.

After the 'supposed' Anglo-Saxon invasion, Celtic DNA, material culture, language, Christian religion, and settlements basically completely vanish.

Within a relatively short amount of time it was like they were never there at all. This suggests they were largely displaced by the incoming germanics

I wasn't suggesting genocide as the primary factor, but people don't just give up their land without a fight, there were certainly many battles fought and the chronicles attest to this.

In terms of settlements, there is perfect evidence for this. There are almost no place names in England with a Celtic etymology. A vast vast majority are from Anglo-Saxon derivation, the only other influence is a handful of Norse derivations in certain parts of the country.