The Last Celts in England
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Published 2023-04-23
In this video, we're going to examine some stories telling us about the lives of the Celtic speakers in eastern England, from around the 4th century, when the Anglo-Saxons were first beginning to arrive, all the way to the 11th century, hundreds of years after the Anglo-Saxons first began to arrive.
The subject of a Celtic England is often controversial, and marked down by centuries of a total denial of the presence of Britons in England practically anytime after the 6th century. But today, we will examine plenty of evidence to counter that, from Britons in the Swamps of the Fens, to Welsh kings in the East, Celtic-named kings such as Cerdic and Caedwalla in the south, alongside Celtic Christians in the north. We will examine the troublesome Brythonic marauders that plagued eastern England in the 11th century, and the servile population from Wales that lived in Kent, Wessex, and 10th century Cambridgeshire.
The History of Wales, and Welsh history in general, is often seen as a counterbalance to the Germanic history of England, but as you will see today, English history is just as Celtic as they come.
Chapters:
0:00 - Introduction
0:45 - Britons in the Swamp
5:12 - Welsh Kings in the East
8:11 - Celtic Christians in the North
10:18 - Brythonic Marauders in England
12:44 - Bands of Celts in the Forests
14:36 - The Serviles from Wales
15:50 - The Last Celts in England
Sources (turn on captions):
[1] Capelli, C. et al. (2003). A Y Chromosome Census of the British Isles. Current Biology, 13(11), pp.979–984. doi:doi.org/10.1016/s0960-9822(03)00373-7.
[2] Colgrave, B. (1956). Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac. Cambridge University Press.
[3] Davies, John. (2007). A History of Wales. London: Penguin, pp.64-67, 44-45, 48, 37.
[4] Gray, A. (1911). On the late survival of a Celtic population in East Anglia. Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 15(1).
[5] Gretzinger, J., et al. (2022). The Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool. Nature, 610, pp.1–8. doi: doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05247-2.
[6] Harvard University (2023). The Man of Law’s Tale. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website. chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/man-laws-tale.
[7] Higham, N. and Ryan, M.J. (2013). The Anglo-Saxon World. Yale University Press, pp.95–103, 29–30.
[8] Leslie, S. et al. (2015). The fine-scale genetic structure of the British population. Nature, 519, pp.309-314. doi.org/10.1038/nature14230
[9] Morris, M. (2021). The Anglo-Saxons. Penguin, Chapters 1-5.
[10] Skeat, W. W. (1868). The Lay of Havelok the Dane. Early English Text Society.
[11] Skeat, W. W. (1902). The Lay of Havelok the Dane (Introduction). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
[12] Stellar, A.M. (1907). Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England. London: George Bell and Sons.
[13] The British Library (2023). Felix’s Life of Guthlac. www.bl.uk/collection-items/felixs-life-of-guthlac.
[14] Thomas, M.G. et al. (2006). Evidence for an apartheid-like social structure in early Anglo-Saxon England. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 273(1601), pp.2651–2657. doi:doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2006.3627.
Maps:
© OpenStreetMap contributors, licensed under CC BY-SA: www.openstreetmap.org/copyright
www.floodmap.net/
Music:
'Is That You, or Are You You?', 'Wonder Cycle', 'Everybody's Got Problems That Aren't Mine', 'Direct to Video', 'Out of the Skies, Under the Earth' by Chris Zabriskie are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Source: chriszabriskie.com/dtv/
Artist: chriszabriskie.com/
and 'Kawaii!' - Bad Snacks
Images of, and from:
Europe, Britain and Ireland, Crowland, Demons, Danes, Cerdic, Chaucer, Monk, Ramsey Monastery, Vikings: CC0, via the British Library
St Guthlac: CC0, via the Wellcome Collection
Man with a Beard, Caernarfon Castle, Conwy Castle, Lincoln Cathedral, Crickhowell, Lambeth, Ely Cathedral, Carnedd Llywelyn: CC0, via the Yale Center for British Art
Welsh Dragon: Tobias Jakobs, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Vortigern, Paper Background, the Flame Bearers of Welsh History: CC0, via the National Library of Wales
Seax, Gold Beads, Ethelred II Coin, Cnut Coin: CC BY 2.0, via the Portable Antiquities Scheme
All Comments (21)
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Get 25% off Blinkist premium and enjoy 2 memberships for the price of 1! Start your 7-day free trial by clicking here: blinkist.com/cambrianchronicles Thanks for watching, here’s to making more backups of my videos in the future to stop a chunk of it from corrupting again.
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Recent discoveries have shown that Cornish was still spoken amongst some folk into the early 1900's when the 'revival' of the language started. Indeed I can remember my great grandmother talking to her brother in a mixture of Cornish and English in the 1970's. Neither were revivalists, both born in the 1890's.
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As someone from Grimsby you are correct that it is a terrible fate
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as someone who lives and grew up in Ely. There are fairly well known stories of the fen tigers. which are stories of the indigenous native peoples whom lived on islands in the fen. And is kind of accepted that the fen was one of the last strongholds of the Britons, due to its natural difficulty to navigate and it’s dangers, until it was drained. It’s why I think our local fen accent is unusual and so similar to one’s found in Cornwall or the West Country. It’s so cool someone shining a light on my local history that im so fascinated by. Thank you! I often discuss our local history and theories with my father and there is still so much to be discovered here.
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there is an area in west yorkshire where several villages are called "-- in Elmet', and they are named after a supposed celtic kingdom which survived in west yorkshire when all around was settled by Anglo Saxons
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It was a really nice touch using older (contemporary?) Maps as a background in this video. Even if they aren't as accurate they're a nice tone setter and it was fun looking at the place names of where I'm from and trying to see which towns and villages existed back then!
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They’ve calculated from Domesday Book that the number of Norman households moving to England after 1066 was about 4000. Say five per household and you have about 20,000. Some were of course elderly parents, some monks. But the population of England then was about a million and 20k is just 2%. So to change a language you don’t need number, you need power.
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As an English person with Celtic heritage, I've always found this extremely interesting. It's a shame how many people think the Anglo-Saxons completely wiped out all of the native Britons in a short space of time, which would've been impossible anyway. They lived alongside them or mixed with them, although admittedly there was a lot of murder and brutal oppression too. The more west you travel into England, the more Celtic roots you'll fine. I need to pick up Welsh again (I was learning it but got distracted by university) as part of my "journey" to bring it back to England lol. But in all seriousness, even looking at modern Welsh and place named in England is interesting. Welsh is a direct descendent of Common Brythonic and many place names in England come from that, which also explains how many places, even simple rivers, have names in Welsh too or at least originate from Brythonic. My hometown of Manchester is called Manceinion in Welsh and comes from a Brythonic word for the area.
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We can use Irish as as example of what can happen to a language, the English didn't arrive in huge numbers to Ireland, but now the vast majority of human interactions there are done in English. It took no population replacement to replace the language.
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Great video! I've always found it implausible that the Britons would have just disappeared in such a short space of time after the Anglo-Saxons coming over.
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As far as genetics is confirmed, at max, 52% of English dna is Germanic, which 47% traced to the Anglo-Saxons and 5% to the Swedes, possibly Wulfingas Geats. And at common most for a population, 25% at the least Germanic in parts of England and 76% Germanic in the middle ages. That means somewhere between 25-75% of English dna is Celtic, by the logic of the study mix of Brythonic or indigenous Bell-beaker Celts and French looking dna easily interpretable as Hallstatt continental Celtic dna that brought the culture over to Britain as well as later Gaulish French immigrants. This is all a September 2022 study. Conclusively lacks a 100% population displacement.
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Genetic evidence shows that the majority of English people are only 25% Anglo-Saxon or less. Most were Britons who were assimilated in the same way most turks in turkey were formerly Greeks who were assimilated.
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There was a similar phenomenon on the Flemish coastal areas in Belgium, on the other side of the Channel. Dutch historian and linguist Lauran Toorians has demonstrated that a coastal Brythonic language existed there up until the 4th-5th century AD, when the region was already thoroughly Germanic for 3 centuries with the establishment of the Franks. It is likely linked to the seafaring Belgic tribes of an earlier time (Menapii and Morini, Atlantic Celts like the Britons) that lived there on the arrival of Caesar in the 1st century BC. In those days the Flemish coastline was notorious for their pirate dens, both native and from neighbouring Germanic tribes, notably the Saxons. In fact the names of coastal settlements Koksijde (-yde small harbour, Koks- of the Chauci), Lombardsijde (of the Longobardi) and Walravensijde (of the "foreign raven") point back to that era of local history.
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I once worked for a company in South Cambridgeshire. One day, I overheard two female colleagues saying (of some forgotten problem of that day) “it’s just like when the Saxons came up the rivers”. Maybe it’s a tiny fragment of Brythonic culture surviving to the present day?
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The first “Saxon” kings of Wessex (Cerdic, Cynric, Ceawlin) had suspiciously Brythonic sounding names. I think the people integrated and carried names and blood into what became the English
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Wake up babe, new Cambrian Chronicles video just dropped
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Fascinating. How good to hear this, a more reasoned and far less melodramatic version of history. That the Celts and Anglo-Saxons blended over time makes more sense than that there was constant warfare, though some degree of conflict was inevitable. Fine job, Cambrian Chronicles. Keep up the good (and rigorous) work.
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Absolutely fascinating, thanks for this video. I've often considered that it was the Normans who gave Wales such grief, not the Anglo Saxons. No wonder that so many English people love to learn Welsh and Cornish these days - it is, after all, part of their heritage. Wonderful stuff !
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I love this channel mate. You’re doing a fantastic job! Thank you for all your hard work in producing this great content for us all ❤
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Yet another very interesting video. Thanks for all the work you put in - diolch yn fawr iawn!
