The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain (60 page)

In the spring he had more than enough to occupy him, with a great deal of seed to sow which he saw to carefully himself. Then when the job was done, he would go off plundering in the Hebrides and in Ireland on what he called his ‘spring-trip’, then back home just after midsummer where he stayed till the cornfields had been reaped and the grain was safely in. After that he would go off raiding again, and never come back till the first month of winter was ended. This he would call his ‘autumn trip’.
²⁴

The genetic picture in Shetland, Orkney and the Western Isles is consistent with the substantial Scandinavian Neolithic intrusions of male and female gene types, but at the same time a retention of around 60% of indigenous Ruisko male lines. The Ruisko lines have an identity and diversity which is different from the nearby mainland, denying the conventional story of recolonization
following the ‘Viking slaughter’.
²⁵
Sara Goodacre’s recent study specifically argues for a family-based Scandinavian settlement of Shetland, Orkney and the Scottish north-west coast, based on equal Scandinavian male and female intrusions of around 44%. She contrasts this with the lesser Norse influence in Skye and the Western Isles (Outer Hebrides), where male Scandinavian intrusions are twice those of females (22.5% vs 11%), and may reflect more lone Scandinavian males settling.
²⁶

All this goes against the Viking genocide story that some are keen to promote.
²⁷
And I should not forget to mention the Shetland and Highland ponies, which arrived long before the Vikings, but whose matching mitochondrial DNA has been identified in Viking burials in Scandinavia (see
Chapter 5
).

Would the Shetland and Orkney islanders have been speaking Norn, the extinct Norse dialect of Caithness and the Islands, or the celtic-Pictish language mentioned by Kenneth Jackson? There is no clear evidence of what was spoken before the Vikings in Shetland and Orkney, and all the place-names there are Norse or later. There are some Ogham inscriptions in both Shetland and Orkney – thought to be celtic, and one at least Gaelic – from between the sixth and the tenth century.
²⁸
The location is too far east for indigenous Gaelic, so these may derive from Gaelic-speaking monks from Ireland or Argyll. The rest of northern Scotland, particularly the Western Isles – another Scandinavian stronghold – is practically devoid of celtic inscriptions of any period, pre- or post-Viking Age. So, we are still left wondering what that other non-Indo-European Pictish language suggested by Kenneth Jackson in northern Scotland and the islands was.

When I turned to the level of male gene type matching in carefully sampled populations of small towns throughout the rest of the British Isles, I found a general ‘Norwegian’ admixture of varying rates (
Figure 12.4
). There was a higher male Norwegian admixture in island and west-coastal regions but, with the exception of Wales and west central Ireland, Shetland and Orkney show the highest Norwegian intrusion, followed by the Western Isles, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands.
²⁹
The Scottish west-coast ports of Oban and Durness also show over 10% Scandinavian intrusion.
³⁰
Further inland and on the east and south coasts, the Scandinavian male influence is less, but is still present (
Figures 11.5c
and
12.4
).

Overall, 6.2% of male gene type markers in the British Isles are identifiable as Norwegian in origin.
³¹
While their presence on the Western Isles, Orkney and Shetland, the east coast of Ireland and the Isle of Man is to be expected, their distribution elsewhere is surprisingly widespread and different in this respect from the more localized Danish matches. This, together with the high overall intrusion rate of 6.2%, further supports my view that Norwegian influence in northern Britain is older than generally assumed.

Given that only about one out of six of these intrusive Nor wegian clusters date to the last 2,000 years, an overall figure of about 1% for Norwegian Viking intrusion to the British Isles would be more realistic. Combined with the figure of 4.4% that I found for Danish Vikings, this would give about 5.5% for the overall Viking intrusion, which is similar to that of the Anglo-Saxons
and slightly higher than figures of 2–4% estimated by archaeologists.
³²

The Normans, being the most recent successful invaders of Britain a thousand years ago (
AD
1066), had a profound effect, which is still felt today, on culture, language, class structure and even our names. Dorset writer Thomas Hardy in
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
wove the last point into a moving but tragic tale of class by modifying the surname of Tess, the working-class poor relation, to Derbyfield. The physical, cultural and linguistic impact of that invasion is much better documented than the Dark Ages and Viking ones. Perhaps as a result the various estimates of the ratio of incoming Normans to indigenous people are relatively small and in the same modest range as my genetic estimates for Vikings and Anglo-Saxons.

The overall English population at the time of the Domesday Book has been estimated variously at 1.1–2.6 million. This is about half of estimates for the population of Roman England, and four to six times estimates given for the Dark Ages and the time of the ‘tribal hidage’ (see
Chapter 10
and discussion in
Chapter 11
).
³³
Total Norman immigration is unlikely to have been in six figures. Heinrich Härke suggests that it was more likely ‘in the low 10,000s’. An immigration on that scale would not have amounted to any more than 1–2% of the native population of England.
³⁴
A rather larger but unreferenced measure is confidently stated in Melvyn Bragg’s delightful biography of the English language: ‘It has been estimated that in the beginning the Norman French accounted for no more than three or five percent of the population.’
³⁵

From my own genetic analysis of Anglo-Saxons and Vikings in this book, 1–5% seems to be the going rate for a successful Medieval invasion, but the economic effects of the Norman invasion were profound, with the disinheritance of the entire Anglo-Saxon landowning class:

That conquest resulted in an unparalleled enrichment of an alien aristocracy … Their numbers were small … [A]t the time of the Domesday survey over 50 per cent of the recorded landed wealth of England was in the hands of less than 190 lay tenants-in-chief, but nearly half of this wealth was held by just eleven men.
³⁶

As I have suggested for earlier invasions, pre-existing cultural links were a great advantage to prospective elite invaders. Whatever the rights or wrongs of Duke William of Normandy’s claims to legitimacy, his pretext was a statement of familial and cultural relationship. A study of the Domesday Book, now available in cheap popular form,
³⁷
illustrates a number of points of cultural continuity. Not only did the Saxons determine the English place-name landscape for the Norman clerks, but also the bulk of those names have survived until today, with relatively much less vigorous Norman influence. The measure of land, a
hide
, remained in the Norman Domesday Book as in the previous Anglo-Saxon ‘tribal hidage’. The Domesday Book, informative as it is, was not, however, a national census as we understand the term today.
³⁸

It might be thought that personal and family names would be useful in determining the male Norman contribution to modern British populations. The answer is, only up to a point. Many of the French family names that persist today and festoon
Debrett’s
Peerage
can be traced back to the Norman conquest, and titles such as baron and marquess are from Norman times. But such titles continued to be bestowed by later monarchs, thus diluting measurable numbers.

We might also look at non-titled family names, which in England are overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon in derivation rather than French. There are several problems with this approach to detecting a small French admixture. First, the practice of surname use started in England in the century following the aftermath of the conquest itself, tending to confound attempts to use surnames as an ethnic marker. Then many French names became anglicized among English-speaking communities, such as ‘Carteret’ to ‘Cartwright’ and – fictionally, in Hardy’s novel – ‘D’Urberville’ to ‘Derbyfield’.

Ethnic relabelling is worldwide. One of my father’s cousins changed his family name from Oppenheimer to his mother’s name, Newton, to avoid anti-German feeling in the First World War. The original name referred to Jews living in the Medieval town of Oppenheim who could, if they paid their taxes, obtain this as a valid census name. My near neighbour, an economist who carries the same name – and is almost certainly not closely related – told me this titbit. The practices of relabelling and name imposition also create difficulties in using personal names to determine celtic affiliation in Roman England.

English surnames, as elsewhere in Europe, are of four main types:
place names
(John London),
patronyms
(John Robertson or Williams),
occupational
names (John Smith) and
descriptive names
(John Little). Patronyms ought to be the most useful, but even in former celtic-speaking parts of the British Isles, where they have longer and more consistent usage, they still account for only 70%
of the total. In any case, when the Late Medieval English revolution in the use of surnames started, patronyms would not have meant much. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the increasing use of patronyms may have been partly in response to the poverty of first names. For instance, at the time half of all male first names were of Norman regal derivation, namely Robert, William, Henry and Richard.

The Normans had a devastating initial effect on written English. Documents tended to be in French or Latin, although this bias towards the landed literate classes did not mean that English died out as a writ ten language, only that it was not generally used for official purposes. The masking effect lasted until its re-appearance as Middle English in the fourteenth century. Nearly 30% of the 2,650 words in the epic English poem
Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight
are of French origin. Later, although the French component steadily decayed, romance words in the shape of Latin borrowings were still seeping into the language and so romance words now make up the larger part of our non-core vocabulary. Melvyn Bragg charts the changes in a very accessible way.
³⁹

My favourite piece of linguistic archaeology is evidence of a Norman pidgin surviving today in the English words for live domestic animals and French ones for dead meat. Presumably, the Norman lord would ask his steward to arrange roasts of
boeuf
,
porc
and
poulet
, and the latter would round up cows, swine and hens from the Saxon serfs. A thousand years later, we now have beef, pork and poultry as meat on the butcher’s tray and the Saxon animals still alive in the fields.

Unfortunately, I am not in the same position as with previous invasions to use knowledge of source markers to determine the genetic effect of the Norman invasion. This is because I do not know in sufficient detail which markers identified the Norman elite – at least not yet.

Some say that the Norman nobles who invaded England in 1066 were actually descended from a Viking southern expansion in the ninth and tenth centuries.
⁴⁰
If so, and if they had been a substantial rather than a small elite intrusion, their genes might have included some similar to those of the Danes – but even that might not be the case. In the early tenth century, Vikings turned their attention again to the rivers Seine and the Loire in north-west France. One chieftain, Rollo the Ganger, established himself and gained lands in the Rouen region up the Seine. Rollo was descended from a Jarl (earl or chieftain) of Moere, north of Bergen in Norway, and was reputed to have been a Jarl of Orkney. By treaty with King Charles III of France, he was recognized as a count of Rouen. His descendants, who intermarried extensively, called themselves Dukes of Normandy (derived from ‘Nor(d)mannia’ or northmen). However, place-name evidence shows that at least some of the new settlers in Normandy came from farther west, perhaps from Viking settlements in Ireland.
⁴¹
From this evidence of a mixed source, and the fact that the main Norman migrants to Britain were an elite and related group, it would be difficult, but not impossible, to identify any representative genetic sample from people in Normandy today that could be used to trace an elite migration a thousand years ago.

The genetic story could also add another dimension to the still tense relationships between the descendants of the Norman invaders and those of the former English serfs, and between the English and the various internally divided regional populations of Scotland, Wales and Ireland.