Young, 'In gentibus dispersisti nos'

Celts, Romans, Britons: Classical and Celtic influence in the Construction of British Identities, 2020

This chapter will deal with the origin of the people known as the Britons as defined under the headword 'Briton, n.1. A member of one of the Brittonic-speaking peoples originally inhabiting all of Britain south of the Firth of Forth, and in later times spec. Strathclyde, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany' in the OED, rather than the neologistic sense which has gradually displaced it and become more common since the late seventeenth century as applied to inhabitants or citizens of Great Britain or the United Kingdom. The principal argument here will be that this identity came into being in the course of Late Antiquity (i.e. c.  300-700). Parts of this argument will contest the essentialist view that medieval British culture represents a direct continuity from pre-Roman identity on the island, which, it is suggested, would have been far from homogenous. Equally, however, this argument will contest the view that the medieval Britons were the direct cultural heirs of the Romano-British population. Britishness, like Englishness, was a product of the fragmentation of the Western Roman Empire. : It has long been recognized that medieval Britons derived their culture from a mixture of Roman and Celtic heritage. Whilst Welsh, for example, is classed as a Celtic language it contains more than 900 words borrowed from Latin during Antiquity, including terms for quite prosaic items such as 'fish', in sharp contrast to the mere dozen or so words borrowed from Celtic into Old English. The British language also displayed a greatly simplified morphosyntactical structure, as compared to its contemporary Celtic cousin Old Irish, which was probably brought about by a degree of creolization between Latin and the Celtic dialects it encountered in Britain.¹ In this chapter I will look at both the way in which British identity was constructed out of Roman and Celtic elements, and the way in which the Late Antique Britons understood that relationship. I will argue, inter alia, that from as early as the mid-sixth century, when Gildas, writing in Latin, attempted to reconstruct recent history from fragmentary sources, the relationship between Romano-British of the imperial era and the people who self-identified as Britons ¹ Charles-Edwards (2013) 75-115.

Nature

The history of the British Isles and Ireland is characterized by multiple periods of major cultural change, including the influential transformation after the end of Roman rule, which precipitated shifts in language, settlement patterns and material culture1. The extent to which migration from continental Europe mediated these transitions is a matter of long-standing debate2–4. Here we study genome-wide ancient DNA from 460 medieval northwestern Europeans—including 278 individuals from England—alongside archaeological data, to infer contemporary population dynamics. We identify a substantial increase of continental northern European ancestry in early medieval England, which is closely related to the early medieval and present-day inhabitants of Germany and Denmark, implying large-scale substantial migration across the North Sea into Britain during the Early Middle Ages. As a result, the individuals who we analysed from eastern England derived up to 76% of their ancestry from the con...

Renaissance and Reformation

Professor Kenneth Wachter’s seminal paper (Wachter, 1978) estimated how many English ancestors an indigenous English person had at the time of the Norman Conquest. As far as I can ascertain, there has been limited further progress on the core question of numbers of ancestors since then, perhaps due the apparent intractability of this problem. This paper introduces new methods, a spreadsheet and a NetLogo model for estimating ancestors and related numbers. The results greatly undercut Wachter’s estimates. Using these ancestor estimates for the average Briton (whom we call “Brit”), novel methods are used to estimate: 1. The number of 1st, 2nd, 3rd, …, 29th degree cousins of Brit 2. The Coefficient of Inbreeding of Brit

Medieval Worlds

Late medieval English chronicles contain several puzzling references to the idea of people ›becoming English‹ by changing allegiance, usually in the context of war. How does this fit in with the predominantly ›racial‹ understanding of nationhood that permeated late-medieval English literary texts and official rhetoric, based on well-established ideas about birth, blood and heredity? These assumptions provided a powerfully persistent backdrop to late-medieval English writers' constructions of national identity and culture, which had an impact not only in literary spheres but also on government rhetoric and policy. Was it possible for a person to change nationality by changing sides? It is argued that these scattered re ferences by certain chroniclers to ›becoming‹ English, French or Scottish refer not to an actual change in nationality as a legal and political status but act as a shorthand way of describing an anomalous change of political allegiance. Such instances of changing sides went against the grain of the political behaviour expected from a person born into a certain nationality but they did not change that nationality, which was associated with blood and birth. The essay goes on to examine the language of denization, by which foreigners were granted the legal rights and privileges of a native-born English person. From a close examination of the range of Latin vocabulary used in official documents, it is argued that even denization did not effect a change in the perceived nationality of the recipient, but only allowed for them to be treated as if they were English, in certain circumstances. Moreover, this new legal status did not automatically remove the alien social and cultural identity of recipients in the eyes of local political society, particularly at times of political tension such as the Glyn Dŵr revolt in Wales or outbreaks of war with France. By teasing out the implications of these puzzling uses of language and terminology, it is possible to refine and complicate our understanding of the intersection of ideas about race, subject-hood, allegiance, and nationality in both the texts and the politics of late medieval England.

Antiquity, 2010