Is The Anglo-Saxon Invasion Of England A Myth? | King Arthur's Britain | Chronicle

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Waited 35 minutes for you to get to the most glaring evidence: language. And what a complete let down. You said native Britons just started to decide to speak Anglo-Saxon because it was trendy? You mean, these people were literally dominated by Latin-speaking Romans for centuries without giving up their language. But then a few Frisians show up in their village and the whole country immediately adopts their language? But only as far as the borders of Scotland, Wales and Cornwall. Yeah. Right.

I'm sorry, but the idea that the native Early Britons just said to the Saxons "Yeah, sure,you take what you want, we'll just bugger off to Wales and the north, help yourselves" is rubbish. Knowing how warlike these early people were,and how precious territory was, I'm sure they would have fought tooth and nail for it! Absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence, just because we haven't found those battlefields, doesn't mean they aren't there,and let's not forget, those early post Roman battlefields would be small, sometimes less than fifty men a side,not the great armies of old,so a lot harder to find. ⚔ But no less important.

I think the problem in this case is also a semantic one. When people see the word 'invasion' they tend to picture D-Day in their minds: millions of invaders met by millions of defenders on the beach in an epic decisive clash for the future of the continent.....Invasion in this particular context could well be a much more gradual process of peaceful yet sizeable migration over a longer period of time, punctuated here and there by conflict and flaring tempers over who gets what, resulting in small scale bouts of violence. If D-Day is what you imagine the Anglo-Saxon invasion to be, then indeed there wasn't an invasion. If you however see the gradual-but-not-quite-voluntary displacement of Celtic Britons as an invasion, then there was......

He says that the Germanic DNA could be from the Vikings. But the Vikings didn't leave their language and the Anglo-Saxons did, as well as their DNA. I have also seen evidence of extensive defensive earthworks throughout southern and eastern England. There is also documentary evidence for invasion. Although this hypothesis is conceivably accurate, it seems this presenter has reached his conclusions first, and then selects evidence in support of that hypothesis. That is not the way to do proper research.

So if there was no measurable immigration from modern day Germany before the arrival of the Vikings, then how the hell did a Germanic language become dominant in what is now England? If the population remained Celtic throughout all this time, why did they call their Kingdoms „Wessex“ or „Sussex“?

Like a few other posters, I find the language aspect the most troubling part of Pryor's theory. People are going to keep speaking the language of the people around them unless they have a very strong incentive to change, and I don't think Pryor provided anywhere a strong enough explanation for why the native British adopted English. If you look at the old Western Roman Empire today, there are three places where locals don't speak a Latin-descended language: North Africa (conquered by the Arabs in the 7th century), the Rhineland (occupied by Germanic-speaking tribes in the 5th century) and Britain. The rest of the Western Roman Empire was conquered by Germanic-speaking tribes, yet within a couple of centuries the invaders had ditched their own language and spoke the local version of Latin. That's a pretty good example of language inertia. The fact that this didn't happen in post-Roman Britain must be in some way significant. The sort of linguistic shift that happened in Britain from the 5th to the 10th centuries only happens where a large but leaderless native population is conquered by an invading population which becomes the new ruling class. The ruling class have no incentive to change their language, while the only hope of advancement in the native population is to adopt the invaders' language. Thus the invaders' language gradually replaces the native language, slowly spreading down through the remaining social classes. Post-Roman Britain had organised kingdoms, but they appear to have been defeated by the Germanic invaders in the late 6th century within the space of a generation (see the Battles of Catraeth and Dyrham). Whatever exactly happened in those battles, the nobility of the British kingdoms disappeared within a very short period of time, in a way that the post-Roman nobility of Gaul, Spain and Italy didn't. This would then set up the scenario described above - the Germanic invaders keep speaking their language, and any native British who want to advance are going to have to learn to speak the invaders' language.

I doubt the Celts just 'learnt a new language', there had to be a reason they adopted this new language, I don't think any language is just cast off.

I am from Bulgaria. In the 7th century lands in modern northern Bulgaria were occupied by slavic tribes.About 675-680 in these lands crossing river Danube have come the protoBulgarians.They were tribe from the lands of modern Ukraine. And the slavic tribes and protoBulgarians made an alliance without single fight.They together fought with Byzantium and found country called Bulgaria. This is an evidence that is not necessary invaders and local people to fight each other. Not to forget that in the 6th century there was a plague all over Europe which decreased dramatically population. And probably the Anglo-Saxon invaded England after the plague.The local population was small and there were no battles between invaders and locals.

There is some great research and data here, BUT ironically (as this attempts to deconstruct the English identity myth) is it ignores the indigenous Celtic data ENTIRELY - the only contemporary writer who has survived is the Welsh monk Gildas who describes a massive Celtic-Saxon conflict. What follows is a rich Celtic written tradition - none of which gets a mention here. Why does Pryor not mention this? I urge him to get rid of his ignorance of the Celts and move beyond his Anglo-centric focus. Kernow bys vyken!

You don't just adopt a new language out of fashion. Changing language is a dramatic change. Not many people would want to adopt a foreign language just for fashion's sake. It's not like an exotic food you can just pickup. From observing other places in the world, dramatic linguistic changes happen from either conquest/colonisation or mass migration. This is why different flavours of vulgar Latin developed in different areas of Europe. I would expect Brittonic language influence to be a lot more dominant in Britain.

This is a perfect example of bad history, take a pre-determined view and try to make the evidence fit. Nothing wrong with the production quality etc. but its just really not worth sitting through

After watching documentaries on the roman invasion of Gaul, I find it unthinkable what I heard. Some of the estimates i've seen suggest that over 1/2 of all celts were killed and another 1/3 enslaved(over the entire geography of modern day France). If this was the case, the thought that something similar happened in the UK wouldn't be so unbelievable. Essentially mass genocide with whatever percentage, that wasn't killed or couldn't migrate away, integrated and their genetic % small or diluted over time. This documentary didn't even mention Celts untill over 32min in.

The Germanic cultural and linguistic predominance in Britain is unmistakable and beyond question.

FWIW, this is quite an old documentary. One clue is that Robin Cook died in 2005. I slowed down the credits to try to read the copyright date. Either 2004 or 2005 (it was hard to see whether it was MMIV or MMV). So, there has probably been a lot more research done since then, especially on the genetics side. FWIW**2 I think that most of us who are not of relatively recent incomer stock, are some sort of mixture of Celtic ("Ancient British"), "Anglo-Saxon" (probably "German", "Dutch", "Belgian", "Dane"), "Viking" ("Norwegian", "Swedish", and "Danish" again), with a trace of Norman, and some remnants of "Roman" (could have come from any part of the Empire, so not necessarily "Italian" Roman). Those whose ancestors come from the north are probably more Viking influenced, and those from the south & south-east, more "Anglo-Saxon", with those from the west & west-midlands more "Celtic".

It may not have been a violent takeover but it was a takeover nonetheless. We cannot ignore the arrival of 6 varieties of a Germanic language not native to the island (and their closest relative being Friesian and not Brythonic), nor the creation of kingdoms based upon either a “Saxon” or Angle hegemony, nor Roman sources stating regions of the island were deeded to Germanic tribes as the Romans pulled out.

When new facts resurface, history needs to be revised. That is how science works. However, the opinions promoted in this video are just that - a minority voice which cherry picks a few fact and then declares blithely that certain well established genetic studies should simply be disregarded without giving a good reason, why. This is not very useful for developing a completely new theory. I am German - and I can tell you that German and English are really very similar languages. Learning English is fairly easy for us, while Romanic languages like French, Italian and Spanish are far more difficult for us. Since these languages have either developed from Latin, or are heavily influenced by Latin, it helps to have learned Latin. If the Anglo-Saxons had never entered the British isles in great numbers, it is very hard to explain why the English language hasn't a much more pronounced Romanic structure and vocabulary. Maybe, the Anglo-Saxons were not so much violent invaders, but a population which mass migrated into the English realm - although there are a number of contemporary reports which tell about violent raids. There is no sound reason to ignore these eyewitness accounts.

"Absolutely no evidence..." he says in English

As a linguist, I found this explanation to be without linguistic foundation. The language of the British (Celtic) was completely replaced by the language of the English (Germanic) in the 5th and 6th centuries. If the transition was a peaceful intermixing, then one would expect to find abundant evidence in English vocabulary and grammar of Celtic influence, as there is clear and indisputable evidence in Zulu and Xhosa of the earlier Khoisan languages in terms of click consonants and other features as mothers (presumably Khoisan women captured by Zulu warriors) taught their children Zulu with imperfect Khoisan-influenced accents and as surviving Khoisan villages used their languages in trade with their Zulu neighbors. However, in English there is virtually no evidence of a Celtic substrate. That means that the Celtic British suddenly decided en masse to switch entirely to speaking the Germanic English language if this video's thesis were true. The linguistic situation is crystal clear--there was a mass replacement of a Celtic-speaking population with a fluent Germanic-speaking population over a relatively short period of time. When the video finally comes to linguistics, the argument for Celtic influence on the language is seriously flawed. The argument is made that Celtic influenced Middle and Modern English, but in order to support the video's argument, then the influence must have been on Old English and not lain like some dormant seed for hundreds of years before suddenly emerging in Late Middle and Early Modern English. It's a linguistically untenable argument. Also, the linguistic comment that Modern English word order has nothing to do with "the other Germanic languages" is seriously flawed since every aspect of Old English and Middle English word order has a clear and indisputable origin in common Germanic. Indeed, the linguistic argument highlights case endings in Modern German and their absence in Modern English, but ignores the fact that the Germanic languages were losing case endings (eight in Proto-Indo-European to six in Proto-Germanic to four in Old English) from their first separation from Proto-Indo-European and that the Scandinavian languages have lost even more case marking than English has. Indeed, the full range of Germanic case endings are only present in the Germanic languages in the most common masculine nouns and feminine and neuter nouns have only about half the number of masculine cases. So using case reduction in English as an argument for the influence of Celtic has no real basis in historical fact.

I had thought Angle and Saxon mercenaries had been invited in. Accustomed to having the Romans to protect them the Britons found the Scots and Picts to be troublesome. So they hired mercs to help out. Have others heard this idea? HAs it gone out of fashion?