Well the villages in question all have English names, as of course do ninety-odd per cent of all the villages in England. So you can take your choice between these two scenarios
1. The orthodox view: the Ancient Brits didn't like living in villages for no apparent reason, and practically every village in England and lowland Scotland was founded by these Anglo-Saxon invaders.
2. The History of Britain Revealed's view which is that the Ancient Brits all lived in these villages with quintessentially English names. A few have Anglo-Saxon names...and Danish names...and French names... which no doubt were founded by the Anglo-Saxons, the Danes and the French. Just as lots of towns with Latin names were founded by the Romans. But the vast majority have just plain, ordinary English names. And were founded by the English. A long, long time ago.

Speaking from the Northumbrian point of view ,Harry's ignorance of the history of England north of the Tees may be dispelled by reference to the works of Mr V Bede.
Duncan might like to do the same and discover that it was King Ecgfrith who perished at Nechtanesmere(685) at the hands of his cousin Bridei, King of the Picts.(Edwin died c.632)

Perhaps I should have elaborated a little. Over the last couple of decades there has been great interest in the origins of the English village. It was recognised that the nucleated village went hand-in-hand with open-field agriculture. It replaced a pattern of scattered farmsteads. But when? Consensus has now settled on the late Saxon period, using archaeological evidence such as Mick Aston's 10-year project at Shapwick.

Cornwall retains the pattern of scattered hamlets to this day, though there has been an overlay of towns, which were planted in the post-Norman period. In Scotland villages only developed in the south-east.

By the way - since Bede has cropped up - Bede lists the five languages spoken in Britain in his day. They were English, British, Irish, Pictish and Latin.

So...the Anglo-Saxons burst out of the forests of Germany armed with tremendous agricultural skills and village-building expertise, sailed across the sea and found a country where everyone was living in scabrous hamlets tilling their tiny crofts. A bit surprising then that Britain was known as a great corn exporter.

And, by the way, Bede's comment about the races of Britain is now known to be a Tudor interpolation. Sorry and all.

quote:

Originally posted by Tommy Adds:
Duncan might like to do the same and discover that it was King Ecgfrith who perished at Nechtanesmere(685) at the hands of his cousin Bridei, King of the Picts.(Edwin died c.632)

Cheers Tommy lad. Good to see you're switched on. What's your angle on this great meeting of minds then?

quote:

So...the Anglo-Saxons burst out of the forests of Germany armed with tremendous agricultural skills and village-building expertise... A bit surprising then that Britain was known as a great corn exporter.

Britain was certainly a corn exporter during the Roman period, when there was a prosperous villa economy. The Anglo-Saxons did not bring to Britain the idea of open-field farming. Their early settlements were scattered farmsteads. The A-S agricultural revolution happened in the late Saxon period. It may have been initiated by the great estate owners.

quote:

And, by the way, Bede's comment about the races of Britain is now known to be a Tudor interpolation.

Languages, not races. And known by whom? Several copies of Bede's history survive from the Anglo-Saxon period, some of which were sent to the Continent in the mid-8th century and survived there. We are not dependant upon a single text.

I'll leave it to the neutrals to decide whether people using intensive arable farming (as Iron Age Britons certainly were) would live in villages,like everyone else in the world, or be miserable in isolated hamlets. As to the Open Field system...well, this is so ancient and so commonsensical that I would be amazed if it took some (I notice nameless) Late Saxon Bigwigs to introduce it.

The Beowulf matter is much more clear cut. You only have to produce an early attestation that Beowulf said these things and I'm blown clean out of the water.

Sorry, Freudian slip. That should read Bede.

Villages can develop for various reasons. Looked at world-wide and across all periods, villages are not tied to open-field agriculture. But neither are they the only possible settlement pattern. We are so used to villages that it may seem to us that our ancestors would always have lived in them, but that is far from the case.

The open field system is not particularly ancient. Nor was it universally adopted across the world. It came into use in lowland areas of North-West Europe in the Middle Ages (using the archaeological definition i.e. post-Roman period). See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_field_system . The evidence of Celtic field-systems pre-dating open fields is still to be seen in our countryside. (Much of the countryside has of course reverted to a similar system, which is evidence enough that open fields are not the only way to farm profitably. Open field agriculture had advantages at a particular time, under particular conditions.)

Since the lowlands were the very areas most heavily settled by Angles and Saxons, it is no surprise that we find a mass of nucleated villages appearing with A-S names. However it was an economic pattern rather than racial, and was not adopted across all of the lowlands.

As I have said already, we are fortunate in that Bede's history was widely circulated pretty well as soon as it was finished. We are not dependent on a single text. Scholars have carefully compared extant texts, which have survived on the Continent as well as in Britain. There is no possibility of a Tudor gloss being mistaken for Bede's own words.

You have the advantage of me then, Jean. As you say we have many extant early texts so it is usually quite straightforward for the relevant palaeographers to spot later interpolations. But obviously they've made a mistake in this instance. You will be doing scholarship a service if you would let them know.

LOL! Mr Harper I'm starting to suspect that your whole book is tongue-in-cheek.

Duncan asked what my view is on this topic.I think the question should be approached from first principles and without the prejudice of the nomenclature of previous historians.
About 10,000 years ago, what is now the British Isles was a completely clean page.Uninhabited by man and probably covered in advancing forest, but crucially connected to mainland Europe by a land bridge covering the southern North sea.
For arguments sake lets say there were only 2 groups of humams in Europe at the time. One in western Europe, speaking "Western" and one in eastern Europe speaking "Eastern". Both were hunter gatherers who followed game as the ice sheet receded. It seems to be accepted that these people advanced along the safest and easiest routes ie the coastline and only struck inland along the river valleys. The Westerners followed the Atlantic coast occuppying every nook and cranny as they moved north and eventually entered the British Isles. The Easterners came along the Baltic coast occuppying northern Europe , Scandanavia and what is now the bottom of the North sea.
At some point these two peoples came into contact with each other .The question is where? Was it in what is now Britain or somewhere further east.
Can I now introduce the Howick question.
10,000 years ago people lived permanently at Howick on the Northumberland coast in what is considered the oldest house yet found in Britain.
Where did they come from?
Were they Westerners who had followed the Atlantic coast round the top of Scotland or took a short cut across the wooded interior and over the Pennines.
Or were they Easterners who had simply followed the Baltic coast via the top of the Jutland Peninsula and then along the northern coast of the land bridge.
My money is on the Easterners.
Their genes are probably still present in the population of Northumberland and Southern Scotland in the same way that the Cheddar gorge man's genes still live in that locality.It would be suprising if some remains of their Eastern language did not also survive today.

Tommy

quote:

Haven't we rather skated over why the present day Scots speak English? It's generally agreed that the Anglo-Saxons only ever ruled the far south-east quadrant of Scotland, and it's also generally agreed that there was precious little intercourse between Scotland and England (beyond cattle-raiding) so how were the presumed Celtic/Pictish Scottish population 'persuaded' to speak Inglis?

At the risk of drowning in this thread (it is pretty damn specialist).

I live in a place called Whittingehame, near Tyningehame close to Berwick and even Edinburgh all good Anglian (note not Anglo Saxon names) these names don't appear anywhere else apart from the SE. Coincidence? - the 'fact' (as if there is such a thing) that these villages first appear in teh archaeology record at teh same time as the Anglian advance.. tends to make me see it as surplanting a system rather than being remnant of a previous one. There are other 'older' names such as DunPendar, DunEdin, Pittendreich etc.. that form part of the previous settlement patterns of small family group farmsteads or defended farms. NOT villages.. seemingly a fairly alien concept. THe concept of teh nucleated settlement only appearing in the Early Historic Period AND surprise surprise being named with Anglian names. "English" cannot predate Gaelic language in Scotland, but appears only after the 1745 period.. and only then - is widespread as another language.... forced onto a local population. Some palces still don't speak English as a proper first language. (Skye for example). I see no Anglish there, so can only surmise (with Occams sharp razor) that English comes in much much later, rather than being there already.

Or am I wrong ??

Thanks for that. Harry asked for details on SE Scotland and I had nothing immediately to hand. I knew I had read of the Anglian link.

quote:

Or am I wrong ??

Hi BAJR,

Your argument is entirely along standard onomastic lines. In England, I don't know about Scottish place names, one sees various disputes about which anglian names came first, ~ham, tun, ingaham etc and I guess the same exists for Scotland. Dun~ type names are also problematic as they can have either a brittonic or an anglian etymology. Pittendreich looks typically Pictish to me.

However, much work has to be done in Scotland with finding early examples of the names and, in the absence of these, later names have to be matched with early archaeology. So, you see things like:

"Tarbolton Torboultoun,1177, Torboltona, 1335. These early forms suggests G. torr 'hill' + OE bopl-tun, 'settlement of the lord's hall'. Further evidence of Anglian settlement is found in a charter of 1335 when, 'John de Graham granted the patronage of the church of Torbolton, with the lands of Unzank, on which the church is built, to Robert de Graham.' (2) Unzank is OE unthanc, 'land held without consent', a common place-name element in Northumberland (cf. Onthank [KILMARNOCK]). Other Anglian names in Kyle include Previck 'pear-tree farm' [TARBOLTON] (8) , Prestwick 'priest's farm' [PRESTWICK] and Corsencon ( Corswintoun 1488) [NEW CUMNOCK] 'rounded-hill of the pig-farm' (see below). All these names in Kyle are likely to be associated with the annexation of 'the plain of Kyle' in 752 A.D by Eadbhert of Northumbria"

http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/institutes/sassi/spns

Edwina Proudfoot has a publication entitled:
"Place-names and other evidence for Anglian settlement in south-east Scotland" and also a paper published in Vol 9 of the ASSAH, "Towards an Interpretation of Anomalous Finds and Place-Names of Anglian Origin in North and East Scotland". You may be able to find some extracts on the web.

You might also be interested in another of proudfoot's publications:

"Excavations at the long cist cemetery on the Hallow Hill, St Andrews, Fife, 1975-7," which contains references to Whittingehame and Tyningehame.

best

Harry A

Soory, link for the latter is:

http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/adsdata/PSAS_2002/pdf/vol_126/126_387_454.pdf

Thanks for these links and references

(I have recently had the pleasure of helping out Edwina Proudfoot with my BAJR hat on - and what would/should have been a short phone call, ended in a long and fascinating discussion! I bow at her feet!)

That said, I am always one to be wary of name evidence alone - from the amusing - Lasswade is certainly not from a fat 18th century lord who told his wife when crossing a river.. "Wade Lass, Wade ! " to the just plain wrong.. where Traprain was often looked at as the name of a 'tree steading’ until you not the name does not appear until much much later and the "original" - well as far back as can be known, it was the Brythonic "Dinpaladyr" Fortress of the spearshafts. etc.

My point is hopefully that archaeologically (as far as we know so far... the settlemetns with Anglish sounding names all appear around this 6-8th century period.. the places with 'Celtic' sounding names seem to be earlier.

Once again I am flapping in the deep waters - but I hope I am flapping and making sense at the same time.

Once again... thanks for the refs... will have to study!

quote:

Originally posted by Tommy Adds:
Their genes are probably still present in the population of Northumberland and Southern Scotland in the same way that the Cheddar gorge man's genes still live in that locality.It would be suprising if some remains of their Eastern language did not also survive today.

Hi Tommy. Thanks for the input, which I would certainly echo. This is also Oppenheimer's view in Origins of the British. Have you had a chance to read through it yet?

Duncan.

quote:

Originally posted by BAJR:
"English" cannot predate Gaelic language in Scotland, but appears only after the 1745 period.. and only then - is widespread as another language.... forced onto a local population. Some palces still don't speak English as a proper first language. (Skye for example).

Hi BAJR,

If English has appeared only after 1745 and in the space of a few years converted almost the entire Scottish nation from Gaelic I think you need to propose a mechanism through which it could have happened. You said English was forced on the Scots but how and by whom? If it was after 1745 then it should be very easy to find evidence.

The problem really is intractable. We have Anglian settlement in what was called 'Lothian', a northern extension of the Kingdom of Northumbria. We know that an Anglian victory over Welsh speakers at the Battle of Catraeth, as recorded by the poet Aneurin, probably opened up the conquest of Scotland as far as Edinburgh. Nonetheless, Anglian expansion stalled completely following the defeat at Nechtanesmere in 685. Expansion westwards was also halted by the Kingdom of Strathclyde centred on Dumbarton rock.

This Anglian kingdom could account for the village patterns that you have documented. But the real problem is how English then spread throughout lowland Scotland and along the Fife and Mearns coasts. The Angles were in the descendency in Lothian from 685 onwards whereas the ascendency was with Kenneth McAlpin and the Scotti based at Dunoon.

Therefore, we have an aggressively expansionist Gaelic speaking people from the west who managed to unite the Britons, Picts and Angles under their yoke to form the Kingdom of Scotland. The big question is why did they all start speaking English? Its kind of like we English suddenly deciding to start speaking Cornish because that is also a marginal language in a marginal place that really has very little to do with the cut and thrust of political power and economic reality.

Duncan.

Duncan - This might help: http://www.rampantscotland.com/know/blknow6.htm

Thanks Jean

and also Duncan

The point about teh 1745.. is not that suddenly everyone spoke english (far from it) - as I point out.. people still don't speak it as a first language.. in harsh reality it was beaten out of people (like in wales) where gaeilic speakers were seen as backward and made to stand in the corner.. (both in reality and metaphoricaly in the world) -

quote:

If it was after 1745 then it should be very easy to find evidence.

very easy

however you are falling into the trap that I did so often before..

I am not Scottish .. I am from the Lothians.. the lothians are British.. the Scotti are Irish, but not Pictish, however I may be a bit Angle, but my ancestory (well my name points me to Irish) is Celtic.. but probably not the same as the Britons of the Votadini/Goddodin of the Lothian area.
Kenneth McAlpin was a ruler from 843-858 - a bit after 685... like trying to relate the present day to the Georgian Period ( ps... much as I love Dunoon... it is Dumbarton)

quote:

Therefore, we have an aggressively expansionist Gaelic speaking people from the west who managed to unite the Britons, Picts and Angles under their yoke to form the Kingdom of Scotland.

ouch... that as I think Jean is trying to point out - is so wrong...

'We' did not.. if you look at the Gaelic tribes , the Lords of the Isles, the Dumfries and Galloway clans, the Orkadians, the Shetlanders etc etc.. it is a ong long time before everyone in 'Scotland' spoke 'English' or even something related to it... In reality... it is still not complete.

Do I feel a huge torpedo heading towards the Pre Romans spoke english?

quote:

Its kind of like we English suddenly deciding to start speaking Cornish because that is also a marginal language in a marginal place that really has very little to do with the cut and thrust of political power and economic reality.

double ouch.. as english is not 'adopted' by anyone other than Angle dominated Lothians until the 16th century, and then 1745 starts on the rest of what we now call scotland.

Funny how a scottish question gets me going!



ps... Duncan... a good 'Scottish' name