The Auldest Tung

People

However, just as places exist it is axiomatic that people not only made them but also named them. The ubiquitous “-ings” are a case-in-point. And people, despite the fifteen hundred years, sixty generations or so that have passed since the early Middle Ages with the changes in every-day life and therefore outward behaviour that have taken place in the interim, must surely also be assumed to have altered very little in terms of fundamental drives. If there is pressure and somewhere to go, indeed, sometimes seemingly nowhere to go, people move but they do so with baggage, part of which is from where they have come.

How many London’s are there in this World, each and every one named in memory of a former life or lives, despite not just change of location but sometimes also culture and even language. It is not coincidence that in southern Brazil there is the city of Londrina in a formally forested part of the country where a century ago the land was bought by a British company and the process of clearing and opening up was begun by Britons, Londoners prominent amongst them.

Nor is it by by chance that the biggest city in the most Scottish part of New Zealand has for two centuries recalled Edinburgh yet does so as Dunedin, the Scots Gaelic for the auld country’s capital. So it should not come as much of a surprise that the same human behaviours existed fifteen hundred year’s ago in what is now Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium and were applied, when decisions were taken that onward moves, whether life-saving, purely opportunistic or life-enhancing, were to be made and roots put down in new places, where nevertheless old labels could be and were reused.

So if Scots, indeed Gaelic-speaking Scots, left Alba and sailed half-way across the World to the east coast of the South Island of New Zealand in the middle of the 19^th Century and Londoners after the Great War journeyed by steamer and train to where the Brazilian state of Parana meets Paraguay, what long before had been the “who”, the “from where”, the “how”, the “when” and the “to where” of their equally Northern European equivalents from the middle of the first millennium AD?

Of the “when” we know something. Firstly it probably had two parts, firstly generically-Germanic so including Saxon and lasting about twenty generations and secondly Saxon-only for another eight to ten. Secondly the beginnings, and here I deliberately use “beginnings” in the plural because, as already shown, they were both multiple and applicable to both parts, were somewhere between the middles of the 4^th and 5^th Centuries. And finally the first end was, in non-Saxon part at least, no later than invasion of England by the Great Heathen Army of 865 AD, it being a signal that the clearances of Denmark or if not yet full assimilations then the subjections of the remnants of its previous peoples were complete with in the latter scenario the non-Danish remnants then perhaps still in touch with their cousins in England but joining them neither possible or sensible. Otherwise the second end was 1066 on the basis that from emigration during the almost twenty-five years to that date Edward the Confessor had been on the throne there might have been the expectation of improvement but after that date it made no sense at all for a Continental Saxon to cross straight into Norman servitude.

Then of the “who” there is even some certainty, they were tribal Jutes, Frisians, Angles, Saxons and assorted others, whilst of the “from where” there are also indications, be they only as generalities. The tribes themselves seem to have come from a number of lands in a mainly coastal area on the immediate, far side of the North Sea but they, both lands and therefore people, in terms of place-names, towns and villages, hamlets and farms, remain frustratingly ill-definable in any meaningful detail. There is frankly little in the way of discernible pattern or groupings to connect them either territorially or tribally and this largely continues across the water to Britain and the “to where”.

Yet there too there are difficulties. Whilst place-names clearly exist on both sides of the North Sea that are in similar and even in a few cases duplicate forms once more groupings are missing. However, that is not to say all is lost. In Britain in contrast patterns appear to exist and not only with respect to Germanic, albeit generic indicators of settlement but remnant British ones too with their “avon”s, Wallington, Walmer, i.e. Welshpool, and the almost ubiquitous “combe”.  In south-eastern and eastern Britannia the former are to found almost everywhere, largely but not quite entirely overwriting the latter. In the south-west they are extensive but sparser and with the Celtic names increasingly preserved. Then in middle Britannia they predominate in the east becoming more interspersed with movement westward but with especially in the former an almost new phenomenon, the cluster, smaller than a grouping, more localised and consisting of either places or features with a name-element repeated. The "wold", found but only very sparingly in the south is one example, and another is "tone" at the end of name, more of which later. 

And in Brittia, specifically in south-west Brittia, i.e. what it now East Yorkshire, the clusters become more defined, “wolds” are distinct to “ton”s and "tone"s hinting at different sources, even different people but who lived not together but side-by-side. Meanwhile, in coastal, east Brittia, so England’s main North-West, the indicators are blanket, possibly clustered but not obviously so, whilst in today’s south-eastern Scotland and the England that abuts it they are there once more as coastal but less dense and in the west Scotland still in Brittia determinable but patchy. And almost everywhere too in their various iterations they are interspaced to a greater of lesser degree with what had been already there, Britons, Picts and importantly perhaps others, or have been sometimes almost enveloped, even overwritten by what has followed right up to the present day, Norse and perhaps some Danish in southern and central Brittia, Brythonic in its North-West, Gaelic plus Norse in Caledonia and, post the 17th Century, English everywhere.

Yet it is hardly a surprise as again I stress, just how few people are being considered. Farms were family clearings in the woods. Villages were tens not hundreds, towns hundreds not thousand, related grouping and tribes thousands not tens of thousands. Land, even settlements were certainly in places grabbed by force and there were what look like strategically motivated plantations. However, territory was also seemingly given away, presumably at times because it was poor and therefore empty, the Unthank lands, and equally, and I suggest most frequently, new settlements were fitted in the spaces, space being then the operative word, between not just existing native-British settlements but also by Germanic later-comers between earlier but differently-Germanic ones, at which point the inevitable process at all social levels of people-intermingling began as did that of settlement-coalescence into larger but still very much local, political rather than tribal formations.

Even by 865 AD and a generation of Danish disruption England, and to a degree wild Scotland, were no longer places where self-determination was always the order of the day. Apart from daily life control had already moved elsewhere and lay to an ever larger degree in the hands of self-nobled and -nobling elites, Germanic and Native, mixed ever-increasingly by intermarriage and with their own agenda’s, in which the ordinary folk, for good or worse and with one notable but almost ignored exception, were decided for rather than doing the deciding. Democratic it was largely not yet feudal not quite yet. Indeed, in the interim there was a period, as certainly Britannia and Brittia were territorially rearranged, of expansion, of frontier-ism that seemingly was random but, when a closer look is taken, can be seen to have had patterns that bypass human activity. They are those of waves but topographical ones, of which Wessex is probably the best exemplar. From its heartland to its outer limits and as already in passing noticed in Sussex, one feature, the “down”, clearly the Saxon and by extension its peoples’ synonym, indeed, apparently preferred word for hill, is, with the old alongside the new, like the Celtic “cwm”, ubiquitous.