More cool stuff from the History of English podcast
Monday, August 22nd, 2016 10:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lethargic_manAt school I was taught that the Angles, Saxons and Jutes invaded and conquered Britain, pushing the Britons to the extreme west of the country and settling the rest themselves.
Later, I learned this was simplistic: The genetic evidence points to a mixed Celtic/Saxon population in England, so the Britons were still around there (though they may have been slaves).
Now I've learned another couple of interesting twists from the History of English podcast: First, there's documentary evidence that twenty years after the Roman legions left Britain to defend Rome, the Britons were successfully holding the Saxons at bay: they weren't the pampered civilians reliant on the Romans for defence we thought they had by then become. It was only later that the sheer weight of invading Saxons overwhelmed British defences.
And secondly, when William Duke of Normandy conquered England in 1066, reducing the Saxons themselves to a conquered people, one third of his army was not Norman but Breton. That's to say, descendants of the Britons who fled the Saxon advance by crossing the channel, lending their name to their area of France, and taking their Brythonic language and culture with them. So, for one third of William's army, they weren't invading a foreign country; they were coming back to the land of their ancestors and avenging their unjust displacement from it—and their bringing with them the Arthurian mythos in its most fully developed form suggests they themselves were aware of this.
That's pretty cool, I thought.
Later, I learned this was simplistic: The genetic evidence points to a mixed Celtic/Saxon population in England, so the Britons were still around there (though they may have been slaves).
Now I've learned another couple of interesting twists from the History of English podcast: First, there's documentary evidence that twenty years after the Roman legions left Britain to defend Rome, the Britons were successfully holding the Saxons at bay: they weren't the pampered civilians reliant on the Romans for defence we thought they had by then become. It was only later that the sheer weight of invading Saxons overwhelmed British defences.
And secondly, when William Duke of Normandy conquered England in 1066, reducing the Saxons themselves to a conquered people, one third of his army was not Norman but Breton. That's to say, descendants of the Britons who fled the Saxon advance by crossing the channel, lending their name to their area of France, and taking their Brythonic language and culture with them. So, for one third of William's army, they weren't invading a foreign country; they were coming back to the land of their ancestors and avenging their unjust displacement from it—and their bringing with them the Arthurian mythos in its most fully developed form suggests they themselves were aware of this.
That's pretty cool, I thought.
