Where to put your Saxons?

[Gluteus Maximus]

Arising from the generally-agreed point about Vortigern, Hengist and Horsa being associated with Kent, it seems pertinent to emphasise my other point about 50 per cent of the place names in Kent being Celtic, or having Celtic elements. This would seem to reinforce the Hengist and Horsa legend in that, if they came to Kent by invitation rather than as conquerors, there would have been a greater degree of Romano-British continuity in that part of Britannia than might otherwise have been the case.

According to Stephen Oppenheimer (The Origins of the British) Anglo - Saxon influx into Britain was very small. The genetic makeup of the pre - 1950's British population shows that the Anglo-saxon/Jutish contribution accounts for only 3% of the total. When one considers that this represents the whole of the Anglo Saxon influx, from the fifth century to some point in the seventh when the migration stopped, then the actual numbers of Saxon foederatii in the time under discussion must have been very tiny indeed.

As Euryalus states on an earlier post, the Saxon nobility in some way mixed with the British, and the kingdom of Kent became a mixed British/saxon entity. It is also interesting that Kent retained its British name (Cantii - Kent).

Given place name and genetic evidence, it is clear that the Brits did not abandon 'England' after all - they stayed put. As oppenheimer states, what we call Celtic and what the Romans called Celtic were not the same. Tacitus describes lowland Brits as resembling Germans, and speaking a different language to the people of the west, who are described as looking very different (Black hair, short and mediterranean looking). Caesar also makes the same observations.

The current theory all this throws up is that eastern part of the area we now call England may have been Germanic speaking far earlier, indeed - even from pre-Roman times. Linguistic studies have shown that the degree of separation of English from other western Germanic languages indicates a separation of some 3'500 years, NOT the 1600 years one would assume from the conventional viewpoint. The pre-Saxon 'Celtic' place names here are significantly different from Welsh-sounding place names further west (River Avon, for example), and may be remnants of an earlier Germanic tongue distantly related to Saxon, rather than a Celtic substratum. The continuity of place names in an area said to have been swamped by Saxons also lends weight to this theory.This could explain why the British (I hesitate to call them Celts for reasons stated above) appeared so cosy with the Saxons - at least at first, and why the saxons appear to have submerged the indigenous culture so thoroughly, with so few numbers.

The British who put up resistance to the Saxons further west at Badon and Dyrham probably were Celts in the modern meaning of the word, but the current thinking by a lot of prominent names now seems to hint that the Lowland Britons in the area drawn from the Isle of Wight northeast to the Humber were actually Germanic all along.

This could explain all the infighting amongst the British in pre-Roman times, a situation which once more raised its head once the blanket of Roman stability had been withdrawn. What Gildas describes is a return to business as usual, rather than a new and sudden phenomenon.