The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain (62 page)

The key historical source that has led to the conviction that the English originated as recently as the Dark Ages is Gildas’ tract ‘On the Ruin of Britain’. The gory embellishments of this latter-day Job have led to the entrenched view that Angles and Saxons came over from the Continent, slaughtered the Celts in England and became the ‘English’. Few of his core claims hold water. Even Gildas’ Saxon Advent is contradicted by Bede, who implies it was Anglian. There is little evidence for genocide, but
it remains in schoolbooks. Genocide means the deliberate extermination of a nation. Now, if that means the death of over 50% of the people, I am certain, after studying the genetic story, that there was no genocide in Dark Ages England.

There is specific evidence of an invasion from the region of Schleswig-Holstein at the base of the Danish Peninsula, but on my estimation this amounts to only 4% of male gene types in the British Isles. This does not give enough genetic evidence for even a 10% cull (literally, a decimation), except in parts of Norfolk and the Fens, which reached about that level of intrusion (
Figure 11.5b
). This means there was not just substantial continuity of population, but a survival of around 95% of the indigenous lines. Even the Vikings achieved a higher estimated overall level of genetic invasion. Increasingly, this lack of ‘wipeout’ is what many archaeologists are inferring from their detailed cultural and burial evidence. In Francis Pryor’s words, ‘massive war graves, settlement dislocation and “knock-on” impacts … have not been found’. Rather, there is evidence of continuity in spite of cultural change: ‘if Anglo-Saxon people and culture displaced “native” practices, one would expect the latter to have vanished completely. They did not.’
³

One of the fascinating results of this matching of source gene types from the base of the Cimbrian (Danish) Peninsula to England is in the target distribution. As would be expected from Bede and all the Anglian cultural matches, including runes and cruciform brooches, the higher rates of intrusion (9 –17%) fell in Anglian regions of England. These were in Norfolk, the Fens and, to a lesser extent, north-eastern parts of Mercia and Lincoln (
Figure 11.5b
). By contrast, Saxon England in the South could only muster the background English rate of 5% invasion; and,
unlike further north, the south has no evidence for any specific genetic founding event dated to this period. So, why did Gildas, but not Bede, tell us that Saxons committed the slaughter? As may be clear by now, I think he had his own nation’s agenda.

I would go much further than doubting Gildas on the genetic and cultural evidence. The so-called Anglo-Saxons were not even the first English nation. They did not all arrive at the same time. The Saxons, in particular, were already in residence during Roman times. The Angles were not genetically, culturally or linguistically so close to the Saxons, nor for that matter to Frisians. The Angles and Jutes were more Scandinavian culturally and linguistically, with clear genetic and archaeological matches to the Danish Peninsula and Sweden. They were not even our first Scandinavian visitors, nor the last.

Nowadays, southerners and northerners talk about the north/south cultural, political and economic divide, much in the same terms as the Welsh and Scottish borders. One can find recent historical-economic reasons for the perception, but there is also a cultural-historical divide. Having paternal relatives living in the north and having lived on both sides, I am sure of it.

Angles and Saxons are usually hyphenated together with reference to early English history, but the disagreement between Bede and Gildas over which nation invaded our east coast is just one aspect of the many differences in the cultural and political history of the two English regions. The stronger genetic and archaeological trail for Anglians and Jutes supports Bede’s view that Saxons were not the main invaders, and raises the question of whether Saxons were already in residence before the Romans
left. Francis Pryor points to clear cultural evidence that this was the case, for instance in Mucking, Essex (see p. 363–4). He tends to discount the theory that these British Saxons were just visiting mercenaries, and questions the currently accepted view of what was implied by the Roman references to the ‘Saxon shore’, from Norfolk to Hampshire. A fresh view of the Saxon coast, unbiased by Gildas, might be that this term meant the shore of English Saxony – rather like New England in North America, but before the Dark Ages. In other words, these were not the shores being defended against the Saxons, but the shores of established Saxon colonies.

The Viking raiders, who contributed at least as much genetically as the ‘Anglo-Saxons’, also seemed to realize, in their choice of settlements, that there were two Englands. From the perspective of previous Neolithic gene flow, we can see that they settled specifically in their respective former haunts. Norwegian Vikings, like their Neolithic forebears, first concentrated in the far north of Scotland, and on Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles. Shortly after, the Vikings of the Cimbrian Peninsula (i.e. Danes from Jutland and others from Schleswig-Holstein) invaded England. However, they avoided Saxon England and settled extensively and exclusively in those northeastern regions that their recent ancestors, the Jutes and Angles, had invaded a few hundred years before. This exclusive pattern was replicated right down to the border between Anglian Suffolk and Saxon Essex.

Can these north/south divisions be traced further back in English ‘prehistory’, before the Dark Ages, in the same way as the east-coast/west-coast division? They certainly can be, genetically. As I described in
Part II
of this book, the separate
evolution of the genetic character of east-coast Britain from the west coast goes right back through the Neolithic to the Mesolithic and even the Late Upper Palaeolithic. It is paralleled repeatedly in two geographical sources and inputs of cultural influence from the Continent, one in the south the other in the north. England north-east of the Danelaw line, however, has a much greater overall genetic intrusion from the nearby Continent, at around 25–40%, than the south, at 15–18%. Furthermore, the majority of the gene lines making up this impact on eastern Britain arrived long before the Romans, mostly during the Neolithic, and some even before that.

Looking at the distribution and source of the eastern intrusive Neolithic lines, we can see a north/south separation. The extreme north of Scotland and its neighbouring islands, Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles, show both male and female Neolithic genetic connections with Norway (
Figures 5.3a,
5.3b
and
5.7a
). Orkney even seems to have acted as a source of ‘British Viking’ raiders. Eastern England, on the other hand, has strong Neolithic genetic connections that point more to southern Scandinavia and Denmark (
Figure 5.7b
).

What about the possibility that English was spoken as some form closer to Norse or even a separate Germanic branch in one or both of these two Englands before the Anglo-Saxons arrived? I am sure this will be the most contentious aspect of my argument, but that does not deter me from suggesting it. The various academics I have quoted or cited on this issue are united on one aspect of the oldest recorded English, whether written in runes or Roman script. This is the strong, unexplained Norse
influence, both culturally and linguistically, before the Vikings came on the scene. But the evidence against a Dark Ages root of English goes deeper than that. In terms of vocabulary, English is nowhere near any of the West Germanic languages it has traditionally been associated with. It actually roots closer to Scandinavian than to
Beowulf
, the earliest ‘Old English’ poem and probably written in the elite court of the Swedish Wuffing dynasty of East Anglia. One study suggests that, on this lexical evidence, English forms a fourth Germanic branch dating ‘to before
AD
350 and probably after 3600
BC
’.
⁴

There is inadequate evidence for the current view that celtic languages were spoken
universally
in England in Roman times. Caesar, corroborated by Tacitus, tells us that an aboriginal population occupied the south-east English hinterland, while extensive Belgic settlements replaced them on the coast, with languages shared across the Channel. Place-name evidence confirms this. Caesar tells us that most of the Belgae were more closely related to the Germani, a view again supported by place-names. There is also much negative evidence against the orthodoxy of universal celtic languages in Roman England, for instance the near-total absence of Celtic inscriptions at any time.

Why should the question of when people started speaking Germanic tongues in Britain matter to more than a few linguists? They would have been unintelligible today, in any case. I think that, along with the rest of Gildas’ poison and the genocide myth, the historical perspective matters to the Welsh and Cornish. But English history should matter to the English as well. A
real
issue about English ethnicity is found in their own ideas of historic
identity. I was talking to two television executives when one of them, a psychologist, casually asked, ‘Who is really concerned about ethnic identity here in the United Kingdom?’ My jaw dropped, and I ventured that, at the very least, people in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, among others, might be. He acknowledged that with a nod, and then without a pause went on, ‘Well, yes of course it is something we should put to the regional networks.’ I realized it would have been a mistake for me to pick up on this and ask whether he felt that English and British identity were one and the same thing. Maybe he thought that the various British minorities, including the Celtic nations were, well, just quaint – different and ‘not like us’.

There is no doubt in my mind that the English, individually and collectively, do have a sense of identity even though they may need to be nudged just a little. You only have to open a newspaper to realize that. One problem, as suggested by another television figure, Jeremy Paxman, in his book
English: A Portrait of a People
, may be that in the post-Empire era they are a little unsure of their identity. Maybe, they have lost some of their sense of cultural superiority. Which implies that, whether at the family or community level, identity depends on historical context as well as the rest of the cultural and linguistic baggage.

I was idly watching a ‘reality’ television show recently, which brought this point home to me. Well-known personalities were being helped to trace their ancestry. The process began with nearest relatives, then to older and more distant ones; the producers used standard documentary methods and civil records. Jeremy Paxman could hardly be regarded as a typical
victim. His genealogical trail went back through comfortable middle-class settings to grinding poverty and indentured labour transports, and to an ancestral couple who had both died of tuberculosis. Paxman was completely unaware of these ancestors until he saw the certificates. The female death certificate recorded death ‘from consumption and exhaustion’.

Then something small but surprising happened. The steely anchorman, who could face down a prime minister or worse, any day of the week in front of millions, sat staring at the scraps of paper in the council office, for a while repeating the cause of death to himself. Then he subsided into tears. By the end of the programme, Paxo was back to his old self, chiding the producer for asking a final, fatuous question. The cynic might say that pressing such buttons was the ‘reality’ pay-off for the programme, the equivalent of fisticuffs on Jerry Springer, and this man of peace was a willing victim. That may well be, but what large buttons they were. Not being Paxman or a psychologist, I can only assume that the emotion was about family, identity and bleak, anonymous tragedy, but the trigger was unambiguous
historical context
.

My two-pennyworth for another problem with English identity is that, thanks to Gildas, our English ancestry was orphaned and stripped of any historical context beyond the Dark Ages threshold. According to Gildas, there were no English before the Saxons arrived in their three keels. The genocide of the fifth and sixth centuries as inferred from his account validates Gildas’ view of the Saxons in England as ‘bastard-born’. Six hundred years after his ‘Saxon Advent’, new invasions of Vikings and Normans had dis possessed first the Anglians in the north, and then the Saxons in the south, and for a time even English stopped being written.

Unlike with all earlier migrations, we cannot precisely determine the impact of the last successful invasion of Britain by the Normans from the genetic trail, mainly because the genetic make-up of those founding noblemen is as yet unknown, and it is impossible to measure impact without a source. Documentary evidence suggests perhaps a 3% intrusion, although this figure may still be biased towards the landowning class if the French names in
Debrett’s Peerage
mean anything.

England has, however, benefited from considerably more recent immigration. As transport improved, passenger ships began to cross the oceans between continents, with vessels from the
Empire Windrush
onwards bringing immigrants from Jamaica. With the advent of regular intercontinental air travel, immigrants now fly to the British Isles from all over the world. These islands have as on numerous occasions before, changed from a multicultural to an even more multicultural society.