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  Quote Brian J Checco Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Topic: Anglo Saxons
    Posted: 04-Dec-2007 at 17:55
I was under the impression that as successive waves of Saxons, Angles and Jutes landed on the Eastern and Southern shores, they pushed the Britons back by a slow yet largely successful series of campaigns that took place over around 60-70 years, and as they captured territories, either enslaved or drove off the British inhabitants, resettling the lands with their own families and forming their own settlements and towns. As time went on, the British found themselves holding lands in Wales, Cornwall, and Strathclyde, Rheged, and the other northern British kingdoms. Then again, I'm just an amateur historian.
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  Quote Reginmund Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 04-Dec-2007 at 17:58
Originally posted by beorna

There were definitely no mass invasion but no genocide as well.


Sigh.

I never said the theory was absolute, and neither is your theory; this is a disputed matter.

There is no definite case either way, and as such the word "definitely" doesn't belong in this debate. Many scholars do in fact support the notion that it was a genocide and widescale expulsion of Britons (see Campbell's book), which we must relate to if we are to do this properly. Even if one would rather believe the scholars who hold the opposing view (for whatever reason), a historian cannot dismiss conclusions with sourcless blanket statements just because he happens to find these theories unappealing. This is basic historical method.

Edited by Reginmund - 04-Dec-2007 at 17:58
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  Quote Paul Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 04-Dec-2007 at 22:41
I often wonder how the 3 big invading tribes, Angles, Saxons and Gepids got along with one another.

Edited by Paul - 04-Dec-2007 at 22:42
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  Quote Reginmund Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 04-Dec-2007 at 23:08
Gepids? Jutes you mean? The Gepids were the ones who crushed Hunnic supremacy in eastern Europe after Attila's death.

I once saw a map depicting the lands possessed by Saxons, Angles and Jutes respectively at the end of their migration. The Angles got the northern half of modern England more or less, (Mercia and Northumbria), while the Saxons got the southern half (East Anglia, Wessex, Sussex), and the Jutes were confined to some narrow fringe settlements. The amount of land most likely reflects the scale of their respective migrations. I can't say for sure with the Jutes and Saxons, but archaeological excavations show that the homeland of the Angles in what is now southern Denmark/northern Germany was massively depopulated in this period (source is "The Early Germans" by Malcolm Todd), which also speaks in favour of genocide and large-scale expulsion of the Britons, as there wouldn't be enough free land to acommodate these settlers elsewise.

If you want to examine the relationship between the different tribes you can look at the history of these settlements in the early Anglo-Saxon period. As for their relationship during the migrations, that's a bit tougher to say much about since the source material is scanty and what we do have is fraught with source critical ambiguities.
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  Quote Paul Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 05-Dec-2007 at 01:43
Gepids invaded a little after the Angles, killed all the Angles.
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  Quote Reginmund Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 05-Dec-2007 at 01:59
Originally posted by Paul

Gepids invaded a little after the Angles, killed all the Angles.


Yes, now I remember. The Gepids were then followed by the Goths, who mostly left the Gepids alone but killed all the Pauls.
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  Quote beorna Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 05-Dec-2007 at 10:38
Don't mess with me because of the word 'definitely'. Sure there was an expulsion of Britons but a mass expulsion? Do you have knowledge about material that can make it sure? Yes, there was an migritation/expulsion of Britons to Gaul, but why? Were it the common people or was it the elite of the Britons? You're right that in continental Anglia about 450 we won't find archaeological device for a population. But we don't know where they've gone to. We find Anglians at the Rhine, in Thuringia and in Bitain. So how many went to what region? In the coastal region of Lower Saxony there is a device of emigration too. And there are a lot of devices that people from wider parts of Germany moved to Britain, but there are also saxones who emigrated to the Dutch, Belgian and French channel coast or even the French Atlantic coast. There are even saxones eutii mentioned in Italy with the Langobards. So how many Saxons went to Britain? If there is no sure device for a mass expulsion, we should't expect that the celtic population just changed their ethnic status.
 
 
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  Quote beorna Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 05-Dec-2007 at 10:48
Brian, the saxons came as mercenaries. They were "working" for a lot of British kings. They fought for them against other British kings, against other germanic groups and sometimes they fought for their own interests. It took decades before the saxones became quite powerful. But it was not an easy road for them to conquer Britain. The Britons often stroke back. So Elmet, Brynneich and Rheged were very powerful in the North and even in Wessex there was a standstill for a decade and more. It was a long time from 410 to nearly 650 before the Britons (as political power) were expelled from later England.
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  Quote Paul Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 05-Dec-2007 at 11:29
Originally posted by Reginmund

Originally posted by Paul

Gepids invaded a little after the Angles, killed all the Angles.


Yes, now I remember. The Gepids were then followed by the Goths, who mostly left the Gepids alone but killed all the Pauls.
 
No the Paul's just migrated to France, expelled all the French from France, they moved to Germany pushing the Germans into Poland. This is why the Germans are French.
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  Quote Reginmund Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 05-Dec-2007 at 12:17
Originally posted by beorna

Don't mess with me because of the word 'definitely'.


I'm just debating, I'm not trying to insult you or pick a fight. I was merely pointing out how you shouldn't make such bombastic claims about something which is highly disputed and uncertain.

Originally posted by beorna

Sure there was an expulsion of Britons but a mass expulsion? Do you have knowledge about material that can make it sure?


I mentioned the books by James Campbell and Malcolm Todd.

Originally posted by beorna

Yes, there was an migritation/expulsion of Britons to Gaul, but why? Were it the common people or was itthe elite of the Britons?


That's one the things we don't have sources enough to say for sure, hence the debate.

Originally posted by beorna

You're right thatin continental Anglia about 450 we won't find archaeological device for a population. But we don't know where they've gone to. We find Anglians at the Rhine, in Thuringia and in Bitain. So how many went to what region?


Well, you could put two and two together here.

Originally posted by beorna

If there is no sure device for a mass expulsion, we should't expect that the celtic population just changed their ethnic status.


Might very well be. Make no mistake; I'm not saying the genocide/expulsion theory is correct, merely that is a theory, and one that I personally find the most reasonable. If I said for sure there was genocide and expulsion, or that for sure there wasn't, that's when I'd be on thin ice (or no ice at all if we are to be strict with historical method here).
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  Quote beorna Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 05-Dec-2007 at 13:33
If terms like genocide or mass expulsion are given in a discussion, then I fear this is a very modern way of thinking. I know this kind of debate from Cesar's war in Gaul. No known germanic tribe or gens did ever commit such genocide. Well, I agree with you when you say there are facts that say the Britons left their lands in the east. But it is the question whether they left it or were expelled. We clearly have semi-desertion of the cities. But one cause of it was the destruction of the infrastructure. Not only in Britannia but also in Gaul (Visigoth, Franks, Alamanni) and even in Italy the times were unsafe. That gave influence to the trade and so on.
 
Sorry, I don't understand your "put two and two together". The Anglian region on the continent is very small, even if all of them emmigrated to Britain they weren't enough. But I don't want to be unfair. Of course nobody knows what gentes moved to Britain with the Anglians. If the Anglians were just the leading group there could be enough invaders for the theory of expelling the Britons.
 
You mentioned that a higher developed nation wouldn't speak the language of its invaders or non or less-developed invaders would start to speak the language of the higher developed population. I asked you why Turks, Slavs (and Britains) don't follow these theory. I also told you my opinion and the connection with the British-Saxon history. What do you think about it?
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  Quote Reginmund Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 05-Dec-2007 at 15:40
Originally posted by beorna

If terms like genocide or mass expulsion are given in a discussion, then I fear this is a very modern way of thinking.


Yes, we probably aren't dealing with a systematic genocide in the modern sense, but a genocide can happen nonetheless.

Originally posted by beorna

You mentioned that a higher developed nation wouldn't speak the language of its invaders or non or less-developed invaders would start to speak the language of the higher developed population. I asked you why Turks, Slavs (and Britains) don't follow these theory. I also told you my opinion and the connection with the British-Saxon history. What do you think about it?


Turks and Slavs? That's a bit unspecific, those are umbrella terms which refer to a great many peoples across many regions and periods.

The Slavs did however generally retain their mother tongue wherever they went, most likely because there were a great many of them, enough for them to settle in an area without being assimilated culturally. The Slavs mainly settled in primitive regions as well (Russia, Poland, Bohemia). An exception would be their settlement in Byzantine lands, but their linguistic impact here was limited to the more primitive northern Balkans, where Byzantine influence was weak and Slavonic languages are still spoken today (Bulgaria, Macedonia, Croatia, Serbia and so on), and I presume not the settlers in Greece and Thrace, where Slavonic languages are not spoken today (this is way out of my field of expertise though).

If you look at peoples who subjugated Slavs and ruled them as minority elites; the Bulgarians (believed to be Turkic) and Scandinavians f.ex. were assimilated linguistically and culturally, while the Magyars and Germans (Teutonic Knights) kept their own tongue. It's hard to keep track of the myriad of variables in play that brough these developments about, but the latter at least tended to see the Slavs as pagans and sub-humans. The Magyars' language is too shrouded in mystery to say much about.

As for the Turks, they generally assimilated in the civilised regions they conquered. The Turks in the west assimilated into the Islamic-Iranian culture (Seljuks), the ones in the Balkans assimilated into Slavonic culture (Bulgarians), the Turks in the east assimilated into Chinese culture, and so did the Mongols when they conquered China. The Ottomans however did retain their language, one could argue this was because they did not see themselves as culturally inferior to the European kingdoms in the 1300s or Mamluk Egypt in the 1500s.

Other examples are the Franks in Gaul, who were assimilated, the Goths in Iberia were as well, and the Lombards in Italy; all of these conquered areas that were culturally superior, that were Roman. The Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain proved an exception to the rule, and this needs to be explained.

Also, if you look at regions conquered by the Romans, the ones that assumed Latin as their language were invariably the culturally inferior ones (Gaul, Iberia), while the more advanced cultures in the east retained Greek as the lingua franca, which replaced Latin as the official language in the 7th century AD.

The Arabs make for a curious case, as even though they were not extremely primitive, they were still culturally inferior to the Romans. Here the unique factor of Arabic as the language of the Prophet and the Quran is believed to have had a profound impact on the spread of the Arabic language.

In Latin America Spanish and Portuguese largely replaced the languages of the natives, who were undeniably seen as culturally inferior to the Europeans. The same goes for northern America, where English and French replaced native tongues in the same way.

Edited by Reginmund - 05-Dec-2007 at 15:40
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  Quote Tyranos Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 05-Dec-2007 at 15:59
Calling the English language "Germanic" is an over simplification I think, as it has many Latin, Briton, Italian, French, Gallo-Norman and even Arabic/and Persian words in its vocab. English also has been written using the Latin Alphabet  since around the ninth century.

The Celts of course didnt come from Southern Germany, after all, the Celts were first identified by classical writers in Southwestern, not Central Europe, and that is where their languages survived to this day.
There is  though a current controversy over if the British National idenity, with them being  Natives or replaced by "Viking" conquerors.

According to geneticist Brion Sykes(among some other authors), says that the British were left largely untouched genetically by the Germanics, and were peopled from either France or Iberia some 6,000 years ago. 
 
 While the author Stephen Oppenheimer(along with some others) suggests that the Anglo-Saxons imposed apartheid  in Britain, and thus exterminated the native Celts and Romano-Britons.



PS

Oppenheimer also suggests that the Celts originaly came from the Eastern Mediterranean, which I think lends more support the Proto-Indo-European origins in Anatolia/Asia Minor and the IE origins in Southern Europe.

The idea that the Celts were drawn from the same dispersal out of the Euro-Mediterranean Basin explains the commonalities between Celtic/Gallic and Italic languages; it also harmonizes with the relative lack of DNA "signals" that would link the inhabitants of Western Europe with those of Central Europe. It fits quite well into the emerging picture of Indo-European dispersals out of Southern Europe, with Italo-Celts being responsible for maritime pioneer colonization across the northern Mediterranean, Germanics being responsible for northward movements from Central European descendants of the Linearbandkeramik, and Balto-Slavs derived from northeastern movements of the Bronze Age which brought Corded Ware type people into contact with the Finno-Ugric substratum of eastern Europe.

The Book of the Irish also claims that the people that arrived from to Britain and Ireland by originally coming from Asia Minor, Greece, Italy and Iberia...one tribe even North Africa.
 



Edited by Tyranos - 05-Dec-2007 at 16:00
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  Quote beorna Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 05-Dec-2007 at 16:14

sorry, my fault. I meant the Slavs on the Balkans and the Turks in Turkey. I we look first at the Balkans. I don't think the Balkans were less Romanized/Hellenized than Britannia. So the cultural level was there higher than those of the Slavs. They even went to Greece where then Greek was spoken only in little parts and the cities. A Re-Hellenisation stroke back later. So to say it was just only an invasion into a more primitive northern area doesn't seem correct.

The same we have in Asia minor. You say one could argue that they didn't see themselves inferior. Perhaps. But one can argue that way anyway. There are enough reason to argue that the Roman-Greek culture was higher than those of the Turks.

Than you mentioned the Arabs. Their culture wasn't higher, their population wasn't bigger but they succeeded. You're right. This was  the islam, I have no doubt.  And something like this is what I believe happened in Britannia. The Britons weren't completely Romanized. Perhaps only the upper classes were. The rest was more or less celtic. When the Romans left Britannia great parts of the upper classes left the land with them. The rest of the Britons had no identification point. So they just changed their ethnicity after the invasion. This is the same effect as in the Balkans or in Asia minor.
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  Quote Reginmund Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 05-Dec-2007 at 20:46
Originally posted by beorna

sorry, my fault. I meant the Slavs on the Balkans and the Turks in Turkey. I we look first at the Balkans. I don't think the Balkans were less Romanized/Hellenized than Britannia. So the cultural level was there higher than those of the Slavs.



Indeed. Which leads me to believe the Slavs settled in great numbers. The Byzantines did not try to impose Greek on them but on the contrary invented a new alphabet that was more suited for expressing the phonology of the Slavonic langugaes, for the purpose of giving them a Bible in Slavonic. Surely the Byzantines would not have bothered with this had the Slavs been but a small elite.

Originally posted by beorna

The same we have in Asia minor. You say one could argue that they didn't see themselves inferior. Perhaps. But one can argue that way anyway. There are enough reason to argue that the Roman-Greek culture was higher than those of the Turks.



Controversial, especially in the late middle ages when there wasn't much left of Byzantine empire.

Originally posted by beorna

The Britons weren't completely Romanized. Perhaps only the upper classes were. The rest was more or less celtic. When the Romans left Britannia great parts of the upper classes left the land with them. The rest of the Britons had no identification point. So they just changed their ethnicity after the invasion. This is the same effect as in the Balkans or in Asia minor.


I agree that this is what happened in Asia Minor. It's also possible that Roman culture did not penetrate very deep in British society, and that by the time of the Anglo-Saxon invasions the average Briton was not much different from when Claudius first conquered the island. This does not however mean that the Anglo-Saxons represented a higher level of civilisation to the British, indeed it still remains to be explained why Old English supplanted the British tongue if the Anglo-Saxons were but a small elite.

Edited by Reginmund - 05-Dec-2007 at 20:46
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  Quote beorna Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 06-Dec-2007 at 08:54

Suddenly there is coming a question to me. I don't know if anybody can answer it. I know that on the Balkans islands of Roman language were assimilated very late and even in Germany there were such islands of slavian language and one is still alive. Does anybody know if in England Brytonic was alive till the late medieval or later?

But now to your last question, Reginmund. How can we explain why Old English supplanted the British tongue if the Anglo-Saxons were but a small elite? I think it is very difficult to know how many saxones came to Britain. We don't know how many lived before the invasion in Germania. If we look on other gentes we see that there mostly didn't move more than 100.000. I do believe that it was a great group of saxones that came to Britannia and not only a small elite, but the cause for the supplanting was not a "genocide". It was the breakdown of the Romano-British elite and it's migration to Gaul that weakend the Britons identity and wiped out then the Romano-Briton world in Endland..

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  Quote Temujin Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 06-Dec-2007 at 22:45
Originally posted by Tyranos


The Celts of course didnt come from Southern Germany, after all, the Celts were first identified by classical writers in Southwestern, not Central Europe, and that is where their languages survived to this day.



what do you mean with "of course"? it is a well-established fact. do you question the existence of the Hallstatt and La Tene cultures? also, where in "southwest europe" (iberian peninsula??) are there still celtic language speakers? Confused
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  Quote beorna Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 11-Apr-2008 at 23:33
Originally posted by Tyranos

Calling the English language "Germanic" is an over simplification I think, as it has many Latin, Briton, Italian, French, Gallo-Norman and even Arabic/and Persian words in its vocab. English also has been written using the Latin Alphabet  since around the ninth century.
In German there are a lot of Roman words too. There are Greek words, Franch words, there are even Arabian, Iranian, Indonesian and Inuit words in German. Nevertheless is German a Germanic language. It's the same with English.

The Celts of course didnt come from Southern Germany, after all, the Celts were first identified by classical writers in Southwestern, not Central Europe, and that is where their languages survived to this day.
There is  though a current controversy over if the British National idenity, with them being  Natives or replaced by "Viking" conquerors.
Temujin told you, that the Celts are connected with the La-Tene and from some with Hallstatt.

According to geneticist Brion Sykes(among some other authors), says that the British were left largely untouched genetically by the Germanics, and were peopled from either France or Iberia some 6,000 years ago. 
 
 While the author Stephen Oppenheimer(along with some others) suggests that the Anglo-Saxons imposed apartheid  in Britain, and thus exterminated the native Celts and Romano-Britons.
And for what we decided now? Both can't be right.


 
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  Quote Odin Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 16-Jun-2008 at 05:07
There certainly was no mass genocide or expulsion of Britons, a fact confirmed by genetics. According to Brian Sykes only Y chromosome samples from Kent and parts of East Anglia show have genetic markers similar to those in NW Germany, Frisia, and Jutland in large numbers. The Britons weren't exterminated, they were absorbed.
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  Quote pebbles Quote  Post ReplyReply Direct Link To This Post Posted: 17-Feb-2009 at 04:45
Originally posted by Odin

 
The Britons weren't exterminated, they were absorbed.
 
 
Agree wholeheartedly,it's most likely scenario. 
 
Otherwise how do you explain Old English ( used by Anglo-Saxons ) diverged to a language unintelligible to modern German speakers except for a few words like " father " & " land " that sound close to Germanic pronunuciation.
 
 
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