"We gonna build a wall the Picts are gonna pay for"

[Magean]

Split from the OT's Ukraine thread.

tl;dr : @Yakman posted a picture likening Hadrian's Wall with Trump's.

I argued it's (one of) the worst and most counter-productive analogies one can raise to oppose Trump's wall and general immigration policies, given the fate of Britain after Rome left (a brutal "great replacement" if there was any in history, even if it came from across the sea and not the wall).

Yakman disagrees and argues the Picts weren't a threat, that Rome was afraid of commerce and sought to cut off Britons from trade opportunities that could have remembered them of better times.

I call that claim nonsense: if there was any benefit of Roman rule, then it was increasing trade integration to never-seen-before levels, and trade was in fact the carrot Rome used to buy the loyalty of the conquered. Meanwhile, Picts had nothing worth exporting but slaves and barely any food surplus to extract, so Rome didn't bother occupying their remote, hard to reach country. Dirt-poor Picts however had every incentive to loot from much richer Roman Britain, hence the wall.

As for claiming that times were better before the Roman conquest, that's highly debatable: the merry world of Astérix is no historically accurate depiction of Celtic societies, which were in fact highly hierarchic. On the one hand you would find princes, druids, a manorial aristocracy which owned the land (kinda like Roman villa landlords, feudal lords, Latin American latifundista, or plantation owners from the US South), and a horse-riding class playing the part of medieval knights or Japanese samurais. And at the very bottom, peasant masses and slaves. The Romans didn't change that, people simply swapped a master for another; or rather, their master took a master of his own and was rewarded for it.

The only reason life got worse for the median Briton in the Roman era, is that fiscal pressure on food producers had to be higher to support a much higher level or urbanization, albeit increased productivity due to trade integration could have offset that to some extent. Extrapolating evidence from remains found in Roman Gaul, living standards may have deteriorated to some extent for the peasantry, but that's a long shot from remembering the days before the invasion as days of freedom.

But overall, Hadrian and his praefecti were no better or worse than the average Brythonic or Pictish king or warlord. Hadrian simply commanded immense resources whereas our Brythonic "king" was but a bumpkin lord, ruling over a population in the tens of thousands, so all he could afford was a wooden watchtower on top of a hill and some border patrols to protect his domain from invaders. He wasn't a believer in trade and commercial integration and probably exacted protection money from whatever he could catch going through his rump of land.

Because that's in fact what it's about. In pre-modern times, open borders and no wall meant open raiding (one of the most common form of interaction between neighbors), not free trade or free migration. If need be, trade gets through any wall just fine, you just pay a tax (but you would pay anyway at some point). Walls were built to fend off invaders, reavers and looters, and justly so given what happened after Roman limes fell. If there was any difference to make between Picts and Anglo-Saxons, it's only with the benefit of hindsight.

View attachment 1123650

Someone tell Karen Johl the fate of Britain after Rome left it undefended. Really, why she chose history's biggest repository of right-wing compatible memes about "cultural enrichment" to make her point is a mystery to me.

Did Roman Britain fall to Pictish barbarism? I don’t recall reading that in any of my history books…

Way off topic at this point, but the Wall was a barrier to peaceful commerce and movement.

People were able to travel freely between north and south, and Roman Britain was never invaded by the Picts (poorer and less militarily capable than the Romans who had run Britain for a century and a half before the first stone was laid). And Roman Britain was not a paradise by any means.

The Muscovite invasion is predicated on the same fears that Hadrian had-fear of commerce, fear of the Britons remembering that life could be better… but also on the same greed that the Muscovite invaders have.

Go walk the Wall some time.

Ask yourself why the Romans stationed thousands of cavalry there. It’s not that long of a frontier. They did it so that they could raid into the north and steal.

Britain fell as a result of another line of defense failing, namely the coastal one, but 19 centuries ago there was no way to know coastal Germanic tribes would be more dangerous than Picts. Besides, there were Pictish raids, yes. Rome built a wall in Britain just like other places had their limes, the fall of which was bad news for the people on the Roman side. Not leaving in a paradise doesn't mean not being a prey for looters from the other side.

Rome didn't improve living standards for the average peasant, in the sense of calories or proteins per days, or life expectancy. Skeletons on average didn't get taller under Roman rule. There was no economic development in the modern sense.

What Rome did however, was capturing output from the countryside to support large cities of non-food-producers. Cities along with roads, as well as a single monopoly of violence suppressing banditry, piracy and local warlords, enabled trade, economic specialization and general improvements in craftsmanship. Urbanization increased massively under the Roman rule, then it collapsed when Rome went, and associated craftsmanship declined just as massively.

Meanwhile, a pronounced regional specialization took place: for instance, in Gaul, oxen and cows from the Roman era were much bigger than in the Celtic and Frankish periods. Which didn't mean farmers were better fed (in fact, remains show they consumed less beef proteins and more chicken after Rome took over, quite ironically), but simply that they were exporting meatbags to other parts of the empire, because Gaul had a competitive edge for the production of cattle over drier, less fertile Mediterranean regions; an edge that was fully tapped when Rome opened the way to long-distance trade. And after the fall of Rome, items produced on one side of the former empire show up increasingly rarely on the other side of it, suggesting trade shrunk and probably didn't recover till the late Middle Ages.

As for the peasants, did the benefits of specialization "trickle down" from their landlords so as to offset the increased fiscal pressure required to feed cities? Dubious. Again, there's no sign of an improvement in overall living standards. Rome didn't make life better for the median person, what it did was creating an early "urban petite bourgeoisie" from largely agricultural Iron Age cultures, along with technical advances in arts, craftsmanship and literacy.

Before Hadrian's Wall people could freely walk north and south, after the wall they no longer could, but in return they could safely walk and sail very far down south. Now of course, in practice not everyone could cross the empire, but in fact not everyone could walk freely north and south of Britain either: it's not like Brythonic princes were anarcho-communist village leaders to their peasants, or the road was safe to travel before the wall (it not being safe was actually a good reason to build the wall).

Anyway, claiming that Rome had fears of commerce is hilarious when it was, in fact, an early instance of a free-trade area and trade was a major "selling point" of the empire to native elites (who, unlike peasants, would likely reap a good chunk of the surplus enabled by Ricardian specialization): if you really wish to shoehorn modern narratives unto ancient events, then Rome is more likely to be in the stead of top-down liberal elites, supporting cross-border trade and global integration under a common law, when rebellious local chieftains would be the parochial, illiberal, populist rabble-rousers.

Back to the Picts, why did Rome build a wall? If the whole point of the empire is taxing farmers to feed towns, then conquering and holding onto areas with limited agricultural surplus doesn't make sense. Just sustaining the garrisons would cost more than could be extracted from the locals. Given Iron Age Caledonia was probably dirt-poor (being too cold, wet and sunlight-deprived for anything but low-productivity crops such as oat and barley) and had nothing worth extracting (the notoriously rich mines of Britain were located further south, the Romans didn't care about coal from around Glasgow in those days), there was no point actually occupying the Picts. They would be more trouble than benefits. Plus, in general, settled farmers are more peaceful and easier to control than uncouth mountain people.

Meanwhile, urbanization in Britain coupled with trade expansion created alluring pockets of wealth that dirt-poor Picts would be very interested in acquiring. So here we are with neighbors we don't really want to conquer, and we have things they desire. Now the wall makes more sense, does it? Just like the cavalry. Sustaining very expensive cavalry batallions just to steal from the Picts makes as much sense as deploying armors and special forces (modern equivalents of cavalry) to steal from hobbos. Sure, teaching them a lesson from time to time is fun, it keeps them in their place - but the gain is very limited. At best you leave with some slaves, but even then, population density is so low you won't get many slaves per week spent venturing north of the wall. Meanwhile, the Picts had much to gain from raiding Roman Britain, and cavalry does make sense as a "raid police" because it's mobile.

As for the Picts being too poor to be a threat - that's just not how history works. In pre-industrial areas, rich countries were invaded by poor barbarians more often than the converse. You don't need factories to mass-produce tanks, ships and planes, you need sturdy warriors who can make an impression over disarmed peasants and soft literati.

That's how many empires were born, as observed by Ibn Khaldun: unclean barbarian leaders from the inaccessible peripheries - remote deserts, mountains - crossing the border, conquering fertile areas, bustling metropolises and their settled masses in spite of a shocking numeric inferiority, and establishing their new dynasty, to be replaced by other barbarians after forgetting their barbaric ways. His "warlike asabiyya vs populous civilized core" theory, while inspired by the cycle of Islamic dynasties, fits ancient and classical Europe quite well, as well as the rest of the world. Persian asabiyya vs Mesopotomian and Egyptian cores, Macedonian asabiyya taking over the same cores from the weakened Persian asabiyya, Roman asabiyya vs Hellenistic core, a softening Rome enlisting Gauls (the dominant ethnicity in the legions but a century after the Roman invasion) to sustain its asabiyya until Gaul urbanized too much and joined the new Mediterranean core, Germanic asabiyya taking over, etc.

Rome conquering Gauls and Britons is the exception not the rule, and even then, Rome didn't conquer the "most barbaric" of barbarians, but only the ones who had all but adopted a "civilized" (as in : peaceful and agricultural) way of life, which was only feasible with high enough agricultural productivity to incentivize farming over looting, and making it possible to feed towns. The deserts of Europe would be the Caledonian highlands and Germanic forests. Ultimately, if (quite poor) Anglo-Saxons were able to conquer Britain in spite of the natural border created by the North Sea, then Picts might as well have been.

End of the derail.

 

[loup99]

I argued it's (one of) the worst and most counter-productive analogies one can raise to oppose Trump's wall and general immigration policies, given the fate of Britain after Rome left (a brutal "great replacement" if there was any in history, even if it came from across the sea and not the wall).

It is indeed a poor analogy, but for very different reasons. We should be careful with the words here. The idea that the Saxons "replaced" the Romans "brutally" or that there was a massive killing should rather be abandonned to be seen in the light of acculturation. First of all remember the plurality of tribes at this time, not just Angles and Saxons, but also Jutes and other tribes. Furthermore, identity could fluctuate and be the subject of constant recomposition. National or ethnic identities as we see them today, with Romans or Britons on one side and Saxons and Angles on the other simply doesn't correspond to Late Antiquity. On top of that, remember that the Romans themselves relied on Germanic and other allied "barbarian" tribes to fight back ennemies. No invasion across the sea when you have merchants, cultural exchange and what we today would call "mercenary recruitment". Piratry or raids do not compare to any of that either, and we are not talking about Viking pillaging when we comment Saxon raids in Late Antiquity.

Now, instead of suggesting everyone was killed or that there was a brutal elimination, we can look at how some of the British elites made the conscious choice of adopting Germanic material culture for social status and prestige. We are talking about malleable groups with shifting loyalties. The end of the Roman model of villa settlement due to cultural shift and economic decline, with a more sparse population, does not mean that everyone who left the villas were killed or violently replaced. It means one system ended and was replaced by another. And already during the end of the Roman rule this decline had begun progressively, meaning the Anglo-Saxons found Britons with a smiliar social structure to their own. Britain benefited from trade with the Roman world and integration in the Roman economic circuit, but it was always on the periphery and never the most prosperous provinces. This peripheral and secondary position can also partially justify retreat in a period of new challenges and reconfiguration of Roman imperial power in the early 5th century.

The reason for why it is a poor analogy is because you compare a military wall (Hadrian's Wall), with a migratory barrier. The two have completely different purposes, you don't stop armies in the same way you stop people that migrate due to wars, political repression and wealth disparities on the American continent. Trump's wall could have stopped a foreign army in antique times, but it can not stop a migratory flow today because beyond it being inhumane it doesn't adress any of the underlying causes as to why people migrate. In fact it worsens them since it is done at the expense of Mexcico, a key neighbour in the necessary regional cooperation.

 

[Abdul Goatherd]

I thought Hadrian's wall was about cattle, not people?

 

[Acheron]

When we talk about Picts and such, I believe we tend to think of them as rivaling nations to Rome. Correct me if I am wrong, but this was hardly the case, wasn't the norm different tribes and clans fighting each other, basically the brutal civil wars that so devastated Rome at times being the norm?

 

[loup99]

When we talk about Picts and such, I believe we tend to think of them as rivaling nations to Rome. Correct me if I am wrong, but this was hardly the case, wasn't the norm different tribes and clans fighting each other, basically the brutal civil wars that so devastated Rome at times being the norm?

First of all the idea of a "nation" in Antiquity is completely anachronical and should not be used. Neither the Roman Empire nor the Picts were nations. Secondly, the Picts were by no means an united ennemy with a political structure on the Greco-Roman model or with a centralised monarchy. We are indeed talking about smaller groups. That being said describing it as constant "brutal civil wars" and comparing it to Roman civil wars is wrong as well, because since the Pictish political model of government was so distinct to the Roman one you can not compare the two. In our modern eyes the Picts can be seen as "less stable" than Rome, even if that is a debatable statement since it compares so distinct polities, but no, they did not fight century-long "civil wars".

 

[Grandpa Maur]

I am leaning towards brutal ethnic cleansing/genocide, given the compatative absence of linguistic influence of natives.

 

[Magean]

We should be careful with the words here. The idea that the Saxons replaced the Romans or that there was a massive killing should rather be relativised and seen in the light of acculturation. First of all remember the plurality of tribes at this time, not just Angles and Saxons, but also Jutes and other tribes. Furthermore, identity could fluctuate and be the subject of constant recomposition. On top of that, remember that the Romans themselves relied on Germanic and other allied "barbarian" tribes to fight back ennemies. No invasion across the sea when you have merchants, cultural exchange and what we today would call "mercenary recruitmen"t. Now, instead of suggesting everyone was killed or that there was a brutal elimination, we can look at how some of the British elites made the conscious choice of adopting Germanic material culture for social status and prestige. We are talking about malleable groups with shifting loyalties. The end of Roman city life due to economic decline, with less dense population, does not mean that everyone who left the cities were killed or violently replaced. And already during the end of the Roman rule this decline had begun progressively.

You know that I know there were other tribes. There were Frisians, too, and other lesser known ones. Anglo-Saxons is simply a consensual way to lump them together, you can call them "coastal West Germans" if you want, it's just nobody does that.

And, no, there was no complete genocide (I never said that), but there was a subjugation of the natives and a quite thorough linguistic shift. Very thorough, in fact, so much so that it suggests a merciless debasement of everything Brythonic after the conquest. There's barely any word left in English from either the Brythonic substrate or Latin. Most Celtic words in English were later borrowed from Welsh, Scottish or Irish, and I'd even be willing to bet English inherited more words from Gaulish through French, than it did from Brythonic.

When you think about it, that English inherited fewer words from its Celtic substrate than French did from its own should be quite surprising. You would think Latin had more efficient tools to replace preexisting languages, given its extensive written material, standardization, use in administration, a well-organized state apparatus, written law, trade, a school system for the elite, etc. Anglo-Saxons didn't have that. So you would think Old English should have been the more "creole" language compared to "proto-French" or whatever it could be called at the time, but that is not so. Old English is almost 100% Germanic whereas French is "pidgin Latin" even if you discount later Germanic influence. If you didn't know there once were Celts in England, you couldn't guess from odd English words.

Names, likewise; aside from Penda which sounds very Celtic (in Breton, penn=head, du=black, so Penda probably meant black of hair) and was around in Dark Age England, I don't see anything left from before the invasion.

Genetically, there was a substantial shift as well, the invasion wasn't just about a relatively small number of Anglo-Saxons replacing or mingling with the local elite, like Franks or Wisigoths did in the continent.

Overall, while there's no evidence of a methodical, fully carried-out genocide, a merciless subjugation and extreme social imbalance between the invading culture and the native culture, causing the latter to all but disappear (as opposed to resulting in a creole culture), seems likely.

My (entirely personal) interpretation is that native Britons were subjected to an abject status similar to Indian lower castes or natives in Spanish America, but with the possibility to ascend socially by assimilating, or letting their children assimilate. It could be, for instance, that Saxons took over most of the land, forcing Briton women to marry or become concubine to (polygamous) Saxons in order to achieve some measure of economic security, having children who would be raised as Saxons, while Briton men were gradually excluded from the matrimonial "market". That would explain the thorough linguistic shift and substantial genetic one.

As for the part about mercenaries, sure that was the case, though less in Britain than in the continent. In continental Europe, Germanic foederati garrisoned across the empire took over, and that was it (as a crude summary, of course); more putsch than invasion, like the Mamluks in Egypt. In Britain, the bulk of the invasion happened after the Romans left; Brythonic elites made again the mistake of hiring Germanic mercenaries, but there appears to have been a constant influx of people, not just a couple thousand warriors showing up and seizing the crown from their employer.

 

[loup99]

I am leaning towards brutal ethnic cleansing/genocide, given the compatative absence of linguistic influence of natives.

See above for why those theories are not very credible:

We should be careful with the words here. The idea that the Saxons "replaced" the Romans "brutally" or that there was a massive killing should rather be abandonned to be seen in the light of acculturation. First of all remember the plurality of tribes at this time, not just Angles and Saxons, but also Jutes and other tribes. Furthermore, identity could fluctuate and be the subject of constant recomposition. National or ethnic identities as we see them today, with Romans or Britons on one side and Saxons and Angles on the other simply doesn't correspond to Late Antiquity. On top of that, remember that the Romans themselves relied on Germanic and other allied "barbarian" tribes to fight back ennemies. No invasion across the sea when you have merchants, cultural exchange and what we today would call "mercenary recruitment". Piratry or raids do not compare to any of that either, and we are not talking about Viking pillaging when we comment Saxon raids in Late Antiquity.

Now, instead of suggesting everyone was killed or that there was a brutal elimination, we can look at how some of the British elites made the conscious choice of adopting Germanic material culture for social status and prestige. We are talking about malleable groups with shifting loyalties. The end of the Roman model of villa settlement due to cultural shift and economic decline, with a more sparse population, does not mean that everyone who left the villas were killed or violently replaced. It means one system ended and was replaced by another. And already during the end of the Roman rule this decline had begun progressively, meaning the Anglo-Saxons found Britons with a smiliar social structure to their own. Britain benefited from trade with the Roman world and integration in the Roman economic circuit, but it was always on the periphery and never the most prosperous provinces. This peripheral and secondary position can also partially justify retreat in a period of new challenges and reconfiguration of Roman imperial power in the early 5th century.

No ethnic cleansing and certainly not any genocide. Were there raids and piratry? Yes. Was there military conquest? Yes. Was it combined with cultural and social shift? Certainly. The study of material culture and historical sources have to be combined with your embryonic linguistic analysis, otherwise you are ignoring most of the evidence to project modern concepts on a very remote and different environment.

 

[Magean]

When we talk about Picts and such, I believe we tend to think of them as rivaling nations to Rome. Correct me if I am wrong, but this was hardly the case, wasn't the norm different tribes and clans fighting each other, basically the brutal civil wars that so devastated Rome at times being the norm?

No, we don't really think of them as such... They weren't unified, or rarely so. They were more like a culture group lacking political unity.

 

[loup99]

And, no, there was no complete genocide (I never said that)

You used the wording "great replacement" and referred to brutality, which is what I reacted to. I know you do not adhere to that narrative, but this modern conspiracy theory is as far removed from 5th century Britain as it is from 21st century France, hence my reaction even to a post using it with quotation marks. You triggered me with a red flag, if you prefer.

You know that I know there were other tribes. There were Frisians, too, and other lesser known ones. Anglo-Saxons is simply a consensual way to lump them together, you can call them "coastal West Germans" if you want, it's just nobody does that.

I have no problems with using the simpler name for the purpose of this thread, I just wanted to underline the definition problem to be able to use it myself without excessive shortcuts.

but there was a subjugation of the natives and a quite thorough linguistic shift. Very thorough, in fact, so much so that it suggests a merciless debasement of everything Brythonic after the conquest. There's barely any word left in English from either the Brythonic substrate or Latin. Most Celtic words in English were later borrowed from Welsh, Scottish or Irish, and I'd even be willing to bet English inherited more words from Gaulish through French, than it did from Brythonic.

When you think about it, that English inherited fewer words from its Celtic substrate than French did from its own should be quite surprising. You would think Latin had more efficient tools to replace preexisting languages, given its extensive written material, standardization, use in administration, a well-organized state apparatus, written law, trade, a school system for the elite, etc. Anglo-Saxons didn't have that. So you would think Old English should have been the more "creole" language compared to "proto-French" or whatever it could be called at the time, but that is not so. Old English is almost 100% Germanic whereas French is "pidgin Latin" even if you discount later Germanic influence. If you didn't know there once were Celts in England, you couldn't guess from odd English words.

Names, likewise; aside from Penda which sounds very Celtic (in Breton, penn=head, du=black, so Penda probably meant black of hair) and was around in Dark Age England, I don't see anything left from before the invasion.

Genetically, there was a substantial shift as well, the invasion wasn't just about a relatively small number of Anglo-Saxons replacing or mingling with the local elite, like Franks or Wisigoths did in the continent.

Overall, while there's no evidence of a methodical, fully carried-out genocide, a merciless subjugation and extreme social imbalance between the invading culture and the native culture, causing the latter to all but disappear (as opposed to resulting in a creole culture), seems likely.

The use of genetics here is unconvincing. It can be tempting to focus on genetics and language analysis, it is simple and spectacular compared to Spain and Gaul, as you and other highlight. Now, it is true that we don't know exactly how many Anglo-Saxons migrated. We do know it wasn't an elite transfer like the Norman conquest. It is rather an intermediate model, Peter Heather in Empires and Barbarians suggests it was a relatively small groups of Saxons (1:4 ratio at highest) replacing an even smaller group of Roman elites.

My (entirely personal) interpretation is that native Britons were subjected to an abject status similar to Indian lower castes or natives in Spanish America, but with the possibility to ascend socially by assimilating, or letting their children assimilate. It could be, for instance, that Saxons took over most of the land, forcing Briton women to marry or become concubine to (polygamous) Saxons in order to achieve some measure of economic security, having children who would be raised as Saxons, while Briton men were gradually excluded from the matrimonial "market". That would explain the thorough linguistic shift and substantial genetic one.

This is too extreme when you see how elites adopted Germanic material culture and customs in other parts of the Western Roman world without needing any such statuses or violence. So why was it more extreme in Britain than elsewhere? The comparison with Gaul that Chris Wickham offers when analysing the archaeological evidence and constrasting it with the historical sources is instructive and allows us to exclude castes or latifundia to instead see what was actually distinct in Britain compared to the other post-Roman patterns. As Chris Wickham convincingly shows in Framing the Early Middle Ages, a key difference is that by "450 it is close to impossible to track any villa as surviving in a recognizably Roman form", while "in Gaul, the Roman network of cities survived as political foci". Clearly, since the villas had already been largely abandonned when they arrived to settle, the Britons the Anglo-Saxons met were much more similar to them than the Britons compared to the Romans before their conquest. That facilitated a quicker acculturation in a region without cities as focal points, with systemic economic change and lowered population numbers.

 

[Magean]

The use of genetics here is a bit sketchy. It is true that we don't know exactly how many Anglo-Saxons migrated. It can be tempting to focus on genetics and language analysis, it is simple and spectacular compared to Spain and Gaul, as you and other highlight. We do know it wasn't an elite transfer like the Norman conquest. It is rather an intermediate model, Peter Heather in Empires and Barbarians suggests it was a relatively small groups of Saxons (1:4 ratio at highest) replacing an even smaller group of Roman elites.

1:4 ratio compared to what ? The pre-existing elite or the pre-existing population ? In the latter case, that would be absolutely massive.

This is far too extreme when you see how elites adopted Germanic material culture and customs in other parts of the Roman world without needing any such statuses or violence. So why was it more extreme in Britain than elsewhere? The comparison with Gaul that Chris Wickham offers when analysing the archaeological evidence and constrasting it with the historical sources is instructive and allows us to exclude castes or latifundia to instead see what was actually distinct in Britain compared to the other post-Roman patterns. As Chris Wickham convincingly shows in Framing the Early Middle Ages, a key difference is that by "450 it is close to impossible to track any villa as surviving in a recognizably Roman form", while "in Gaul, the Roman network of cities survived as political foci". Clearly, since the villas had already been largely abandonned when they arrived to settle, the Britons they met were much more similar to them than the Britons compared to the Romans before their conquest. That facilitated a quicker acculturation in a region without cities as focal points, with systemic economic change and lowered population numbers.

I absolutely take it that Britain by the late Vth century had "downgraded" substantially to a rural Iron Age culture similar to Ancient Germany. Also I get the point about Germanic material culture being adopted by Roman elites elsewhere but... still it doesn't explain the thorough and historically quite unique shift. Material culture often travels further than languages, and is obviously easier to adopt anyway.

Regarding linguistics however, in nearly every other situation, there's a modicum of "creolization" taking place. But in Britain, it looks more like someone did a ctrl+A over most of the island, pressed Del, then copy-pasted various German languages.

Ditto for religion. You could have expected some form of syncretism, but Celtic deities and myth left no influence over pagan England, nor did Christianity.

The extent of that change has fascinated me since I was a teenager, and I never found a satisfactory explanation other than Brythonic culture being actively repressed to the point of being fully wiped-out. Native elites merely aping newcomers is insufficient and unconvincing on its own.

 

[Grandpa Maur]

I am by no means expert in it, but my reasoning is following: where population intermingled, linguistic evidence shows it. For example, Romanian and Hungarian had up to 40% words of Slavic origin up until they were mostly purged in XIX century. Other places, like Carribean, despite pretty severe oppression, saw pidgins develop (Jamaica), not to mention England later on.

The most close example to such replacement is Mexico valley, where native culture was thoroughly replaced, and it included:

1) almost wholesale replacement of males while sparing females (as shown by dna)

2) actual native elites being spared, assimilating instead

Or maybe cases like Prussia would be better example. In any case i suppose Anglosaxon conquest saw wholesale slaughter of native men, enslavement of survivors, and enslavement, 'taking' (as in continual sexual and labor exploitation) and suppression of native women.

 

[Abdul Goatherd]

1:4 ratio compared to what ? The pre-existing elite or the pre-existing population ? In the latter case, that would be absolutely massive.



I absolutely take it that Britain by the late Vth century had "downgraded" substantially to a rural Iron Age culture similar to Ancient Germany. Also I get the point about Germanic material culture being adopted by Roman elites elsewhere but... still it doesn't explain the thorough and historically quite unique shift. Material culture often travels further than languages, and is obviously easier to adopt anyway.

Regarding linguistics however, in nearly every other situation, there's a modicum of "creolization" taking place. But in Britain, it looks more like someone did a ctrl+A over most of the island, pressed Del, then copy-pasted various German languages.

Ditto for religion. You could have expected some form of syncretism, but Celtic deities and myth left no influence over pagan England, nor did Christianity.

The extent of that change has fascinated me since I was a teenager, and I never found a satisfactory explanation other than Brythonic culture being actively repressed to the point of being fully wiped-out. Native elites merely aping newcomers is insufficient and unconvincing on its own.

Language replacement is not elites, nor repression nor genocide. It's determined by the composition of rural communities.

Language dominance is determined by the rural, countryside, not urban centers nor military garrisons. The language spoken by peasants in the countryside is the language that will eventually prevail for the whole.

If you had Germanic elites over Brythonic peasants, then Brythonic should have become the dominant language.

The simple mechanics is that you speak the language of your constant immediate neighbors. If they speak Czech, you're going to become a Czech-speaker. You don't adopt a strange language that your neighbors don't speak. You interact with your neighbors 99% of the time, and only 1% of the time do you need to interact with your lord. So if you're a peasant, you need to know the peasant language to live your daily life, but you don't really need to know the elite language except for a few basic barking commands.

So, in rural communities, the rural language persists regardless of the occupier.

But not so in urban communities.

That is because towns don't have persistent permanent populations. Through most of pre-modern history, the vast bulk of town residents are temporary rural migrants, usually relatively young men & women from the countryside who migrate in and out of towns periodically for employment. So they bring their rural language with them, and often live in urban neighborhoods among fellow-speakers from their old villages. They only need to learn enough of the urban language to receive commands.

Urban employers in towns do better learning the rural language of their workers (or using interpreters), than wasting time trying to teach these temporary workers to speak his language.

The small number of permanent urban folk (elites, military garrisons) don't migrate in and out the other way and influence rural language..

So language doesn't emanate from an urban center outwards to the countryside, but rather from the surrounding countryside inwards into the urban center.

So if you have Germanic elites or garrisons sitting on top of Brythonic rural communities, then Brythonic would persist in the countryside, and the Germans occupiers would eventually speak Brythonic too, and the German language disappear except perhaps as a tiny official language of state written only by scribes and spoken by nobody.

We see this pattern in many places.

But the dynamics change if the rural community is ethnically mixed. That is, if there are poor German peasants interspersed among poor Brythonic peasants, on small land-holdings in the countryside. Then rural composition is mixed, and rural life is not exclusively one or the other. But to make village life functional on a daily basis, one language must prevail among both villagers, who have to deal with each other all the time - and it is not necessarily a creole or mixed language. But could be the language of the stronger or more favored ethnicity.

So Germanic language will take over the countryside, and becomes the rural language, while Brythonic loses that space. And once Germanic is the rural language, then it will dominate the whole.

We see this pattern repeated everywhere.

The language of conquered peoples persists even after long foreign occupation, not the language of elites. Anglo-Saxon persists under Norman occupation, Persian persists under Arabic occupation, French Quebecois and Boer Afrikaner persists under English occupation, etc. because these are the rural folk, and the ethnic composition of the countryside didn't change during the occupation. The conqueror didn't settle his own small Norman, Arabic or English peasants in the rural countryside among them.

The language changed in Gaul because the Romans did settle large numbers of poor Latin-speaking migrants from Italy (esp. veterans) on small landholdings throughout Gaul. So too with Arab-occupied Egypt, settled by poor rural Bedouin tribes migrated in from Arabia. So too with Anatolia, occupied by Turkic-speaking herdsmen. So the conquering language (Latin, Arabic, Turkish) became the rural language, and from there, became the dominant language of the whole.

So the "victory" of Anglo-Saxon over Brythonic language is that there was a lot of poor Germanic communities (not elites or military garrisons) settled as small farmers in the British countryside.

 

[Magean]

Language replacement is not elites, nor repression nor genocide. It's determined by the composition of rural communities.

Language dominance is determined by the rural, countryside, not urban centers nor military garrisons. The language spoken by peasants in the countryside is the language that will eventually prevail for the whole.

If you had Germanic elites over Brythonic peasants, then Brythonic should have become the dominant language.

The simple mechanics is that you speak the language of your constant immediate neighbors. If they speak Czech, you're going to become a Czech-speaker. You don't adopt a strange language that your neighbors don't speak. You interact with your neighbors 99% of the time, and only 1% of the time do you need to interact with your lord. So if you're a peasant, you need to know the peasant language to live your daily life, but you don't really need to know the elite language except for a few basic barking commands.

So, in rural communities, the rural language persists regardless of the occupier.

But not so in urban communities.

That is because towns don't have persistent permanent populations. Through most of pre-modern history, the vast bulk of town residents are temporary rural migrants, usually relatively young men & women from the countryside who migrate in and out of towns periodically for employment. So they bring their rural language with them, and often live in urban neighborhoods among fellow-speakers from their old villages. They only need to learn enough of the urban language to receive commands.

Urban employers in towns do better learning the rural language of their workers (or using interpreters), than wasting time trying to teach these temporary workers to speak his language.

The small number of permanent urban folk (elites, military garrisons) don't migrate in and out the other way and influence rural language..

So the rural language (a necessity for village life) persists as a language, while the urban language becomes increasingly unnecessary and dwindles. Eventually rural language wins out over urban language.

So if you have Germanic elites or garrisons sitting on top of Brythonic rural communities, then Brythonic would persist in the countryside, and the Germans occupiers would eventually speak Brythonic too, and the German language disappear except perhaps as a tiny official language of state written only by scribes and spoken by nobody.

We see this pattern eveywhere.

But the dynamics change if the rural community is ethnically mixed. That is, if there are poor German peasants interspersed among poor Brythonic peasants, on small land-holdings in the countryside. Then rural composition is mixed, and rural life is not exclusively one or the other. But to make village life functional on a daily basis, [one language must prevail among both villagers, who have to deal with each other all the time - and it is not necessarily a creole or mixed language. But could be the language of the stronger or more favored ethnicity.

So Germanic language will take over the countryside, and becomes the rural language, while Brythonic loses that space. And once Germanic is the rural language, then it will dominate the whole.

We see this pattern repeated everywhere.

The language of conquered peoples persists even after long foreign occupation, not the language of elites. Anglo-Saxon persists under Norman occupation, Persian persists under Arabic occupation, French Quebecois and Boer Afrikaner persists under English occupation, etc. because these are the rural folk, and the ethnic composition of the countryside didn't change during the occupation. The conqueror didn't settle his own small Norman, Arabic or English peasants in the rural countryside among them.

The language changed in Gaul because the Romans did settle large numbers of poor Latin-speaking migrants from Italy (esp. veterans) on small landholdings throughout Gaul. So too with Arab-occupied Egypt, settled by poor rural Bedouin tribes migrated in from Arabia. So too with Anatolia, occupied by Turkic-speaking herdsmen. So the conquering language (Latin, Arabic, Turkish) became the rural language, and from there, became the dominant language of the whole.

So the "victory" of Anglo-Saxon over Brythonic language is that there was a lot of poor Germanic communities (not elites or military garrisons) settled as small farmers in the British countryside.

Great post, and quite convincing.

I still have a hard time believing there wouldn't be at least a little bit of linguistic influence taking place - though not necessarily an outright creole - if it happened the way you describe... The Brythonic farming underclass wouldn't learn flawless Old English by studying Beowulf; they would likely speak a functional, intelligible but dodgy and heavily accented version of it to interact with their somewhat wealthier Saxon neighbors.

Just like French inherited a couple hundred words from Gaulish, as well as phonetic elements you don't find elsewhere in Romance languages, but you would in Celtic ones. Or think of modern or contemporary immigrants everywhere, mixing their native tongue with that of the host country until a sort of slang has formed after a couple generations.

Btw, regarding the influx of Latin-speaking migrants from Italy elsewhere in the Roman empire, AFAIK it's largely overestimated (veterans getting plots of land is one thing, large amounts of them is another), but I can't point to any source right now.

I'm not qualified at all to assess the influence exerted by local substrates over regional variants of Arabic or Turkic languages. Arabic dialects can differ quite a bit, but I don't know much of that is due to a differing substrate and how much is simply due to later divergence.

As for the Turks, another problem with your theory is the difference in lifestyle between Turkic herdsmen and Anatolian farmers. I get it, village life needs a lingua franca to be functional. But farmers and herdsmen don't share a common village life. The latter are likely to exact tribute from the former and go on their way. The same could be said of nomadic Bedouins and the various sedentary Middle Eastern people they subjugated.

EDIT: not saying it didn't happen at least in part the way you describe, but that we still need something more in addition to "Anglo-Saxon as the rural lingua franca". Something explaining the "purity" of said lingua franca (when a lingua franca usually has trouble staying pure). That's why I believe the "status differential" between the prestige, dominant rural language (and by extension its speakers) and the dominated one, seems to have been unusually high (compared to similar situations elsewhere), so as to coerce Britons to only speak pure, proper Anglo-Saxon (or let their children be tutored by Anglo-Saxons to achieve that result).

EDIT 2: also, religion. That part was copy-pasted too. The natives didn't just learn the more convenient, higher prestige language, or rename their gods, they also abandoned their traditions and customs. It's the whole Brythonic culture that was replaced.

 

[IsadorBG]

One interesting bit is the memory of the Britons themselves. One of the reasons the displacement theory was popular for long was because the Britons chroniclers themselves supported this notion. A fight for their very survival in their ancestral lands which contrast heavily with their depictions of their Romans overlords who were just there to exploit them but not replace them.

Also Britons society started to decline before the Anglo-Saxons invasions. Sub Roman Britain shows signs of urban decline even before the Roman officialy left. Difficult to judge how it affected the rural side of things but if other Roman regions that suffered a similar fate are anything to go by; then most likely the Urban decline was primarily caused by a rural and trade decline caused by the fragmentation and rising insecurities in the falling empire.

So rather than the Anglo-Saxons being the primary cause of the decline of Britain, they may have merely been the consequence. Britain was weakened enough to be conquered by a butch of disparate germanic tribes, and that's what happened.

Finally, it's worth noting how fast Anglo-saxons languages supplanted Britons speak in England. There's no real equivalent in the real world. Even Romans and Arabic conquests has cited here took centuries if not millenias to displace the local language. Indeed Berbers languages, Coptic, Syriac, and others pre-Arabic languages are still spoken to this day even if merely reduced to liturgic languages.

And we have evidence of many local languages such as Gaulish and iberian celtic surviving trough the fall of the Roman Empire.

Meanwhile celtic britons seems to have been supplemented in a span of one or two generations top. Which is mind bogglingly fast if true.

 

[Abdul Goatherd]

Great post, and quite convincing.

I still have a hard time believing there wouldn't be at least a little bit of linguistic influence taking place - though not necessarily an outright creole - if it happened the way you describe... The Brythonic farming underclass wouldn't learn flawless Old English by studying Beowulf; they would likely speak a functional, intelligible but dodgy and heavily accented version of it to interact with their somewhat wealthier Saxon neighbors.

Just like French inherited a couple hundred words from Gaulish, as well as phonetic elements you don't find elsewhere in Romance languages, but you would in Celtic ones. Or think of modern or contemporary immigrants everywhere, mixing their native tongue with that of the host country until a sort of slang has formed after a couple generations.

Btw, regarding the influx of Latin-speaking migrants from Italy elsewhere in the Roman empire, AFAIK it's largely overestimated (veterans getting plots of land is one thing, large amounts of them is another), but I can't point to any source right now.

I'm not qualified at all to assess the influence exerted by local substrates over regional variants of Arabic or Turkic languages. Arabic dialects can differ quite a bit, but I don't know much of that is due to a differing substrate and how much is simply due to later divergence.

As for the Turks, another problem with your theory is the difference in lifestyle between Turkic herdsmen and Anatolian farmers. I get it, village life needs a lingua franca to be functional. But farmers and herdsmen don't share a common village life. The latter are likely to exact tribute from the former and go on their way. The same could be said of nomadic Bedouins and the various sedentary Middle Eastern people they subjugated.

EDIT: not saying it didn't happen at least in part the way you describe, but that we still need something more in addition to "Anglo-Saxon as the rural lingua franca". Something explaining the "purity" of said lingua franca (when a lingua franca usually has trouble staying pure). That's why I believe the "status differential" between the prestige, dominant rural language (and by extension its speakers) and the dominated one, seems to have been unusually high (compared to similar situations elsewhere), so as to coerce Britons to only speak pure, proper Anglo-Saxon (or let their children be tutored by Anglo-Saxons to achieve that result).

EDIT 2: also, religion. That part was copy-pasted too. The natives didn't just learn the more convenient, higher prestige language, or rename their gods, they also abandoned their traditions and customs. It's the whole Brythonic culture that was replaced.

Thanks. I have been playing with this idea for a while. It is not an airtight model, but just deciphering the general dynamics. There are enormous caveats and adjustments that must be undertaken for particular cases.

The main point is that the critical difference of whether a conqueror's language succeeds or fails to replace the local language depends on where the occupiers settle. Specifically whether the occupiers bring along small rural peasants of their own ethnicity to settle in conquered countryside. Living merely as elites or huddled in garrison towns is not enough for language replacement.

All your suggestions make a lot of sense to me as adjustments to this general tendency.

If there is a persistent farmer/herder difference in the countryside, then it would make sense to be slower as you suggest. And indeed Arabization was slow to take hold - Coptic and Berber languages still persisted for a long time in Egypt and the Maghreb. But where Arabization took hold was precisely where rural Bedouin tribes (Banu Hillal, etc.) migrated.

There was a very significant migration of poor Italian settlers already from the 2nd Century BCE. Settlement of Roman army veterans is the marquee topic. But not the only source. There were many small Italian peasants pushed off their smalholds in Italy by wealth accumulation of large landowners of the senatorial class in Italy. This was the cause celebre of the Gracchi brothers in the 130s. Many of the new landless Italian peasants migrated to cities like Rome, swelling urban centers as proletariat. But many landless peasants also left Italy altogether, to seek out new land plots in newly-conquered Spain, Provence and later Gaul.

I think the rate and volume of Italian out-migration during the Roman empire is probably underestimated. The land hunger problem in Italy was never "resolved" internally, so the faucet was never turned off. The ability of two-bit generals to quickly raise armies in the provinces attests to a significant local Italian presence. It doesn't have to be overwhelming, just significant enough small Italian farmers to affect language locally among neighboring Celtic Gauls and Iberians.

The depopulation of towns during the Dark Ages Europe also helped the spread of Latin. In areas where Latin was limited to isolated urban colonies surrounded by Celtic oceans, things changed dramatically with city breakdowns in the 5th-6th Century. As the urban economy collapsed, most of the former urban Latin-speakers abandoned towns to eke out a living in the surrounding countryside. So the "Latin element" in the Gaulish countryside increased rather than reduced with the fall of the Roman empire. So it is not a mere matter of sheer numbers, but how those numbers are distributed or redistributed later.

The dynamic you suggest of the Latin-Celtic mongrelization of language, rather than outright replacement, among neighboring peasants seems quite sensible to me. It is certainly a valuable addendum to the model, and reinforces the underlying thrust: it is the "peasant language", regardless of its purity, that ultimately prevails. Elite officials and scholars may still learn and write classical Latin or Sanskrit, but what succeeds is the mongrelized French or Prakrits of the peasantry.

20th Century screws up this model because it brings other factors that affect this (higher urbanization, mass mobilization, mass education, mass media). But for the pre-modern era, it seems to hold.

I'd be a lot more cautious on connecting religion to any of this. I don't think copy-paste is accurate. The primitive religion of the countryside is often much more persistent and heterodox than priests or imams pretend. Rural religions must meet immediate rural needs. Meaning, screw the spiritual stuff, scripture, correctness or moral self-reflection, we need to manipulate the gods into delivering practical results - good weather, good harvests, good husbands and good health. That's what matters in the countryside. And if that means resorting to old time paganism, magic and amulets to make it happen, so be it. Even under the chastisement of the parish priests, or by sneakily concealing pagan deities behind Christian saints (or Sufi saints, or whatever), rural folks in the countryside are still stealthily beseeching assistance from the ancient forces of nature like they always have.

Urban religion changes a lot faster and easier than rural religion,. Cities are the main focal points for dissemination of new religions (Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, etc.), and they leap from city to city along merchant routes. But the countryside is often barely permeated.

It takes a more concerted and heavy effort, by the clerical class and legions of missionaries, to change religion. Indeed, they may never succeed in the countryside, beyond cosmetic or superficial appearances.

 

[Grandpa Maur]

Thanks. I have been playing with this idea for a while. It is not an airtight model, but just deciphering the general dynamics. There are enormous caveats and adjustments that must be undertaken for particular cases.

I generally agree and always though countryside to be important in that aspect (up to relentlessly arguing from that position in all these EU2 culture threads, perhaps too much), but still, i am curious how do you square it with things like Mexico, which did not see much of a migration at all, much less rural settlement, yet the language vanished.

Or Prussia? Though i am not sure what happened there.

 

[Magean]

One interesting bit is the memory of the Britons themselves. One of the reasons the displacement theory was popular for long was because the Britons chroniclers themselves supported this notion. A fight for their very survival in their ancestral lands which contrast heavily with their depictions of their Romans overlords who were just there to exploit them but not replace them.

Also Britons society started to decline before the Anglo-Saxons invasions. Sub Roman Britain shows signs of urban decline even before the Roman officialy left. Difficult to judge how it affected the rural side of things but if other Roman regions that suffered a similar fate are anything to go by; then most likely the Urban decline was primarily caused by a rural and trade decline caused by the fragmentation and rising insecurities in the falling empire.

So rather than the Anglo-Saxons being the primary cause of the decline of Britain, they may have merely been the consequence. Britain was weakened enough to be conquered by a butch of disparate germanic tribes, and that's what happened.

Finally, it's worth noting how fast Anglo-saxons languages supplanted Britons speak in England. There's no real equivalent in the real world. Even Romans and Arabic conquests has cited here took centuries if not millenias to displace the local language. Indeed Berbers languages, Coptic, Syriac, and others pre-Arabic languages are still spoken to this day even if merely reduced to liturgic languages.

And we have evidence of many local languages such as Gaulish and iberian celtic surviving trough the fall of the Roman Empire.

Meanwhile celtic britons seems to have been supplemented in a span of one or two generations top. Which is mind bogglingly fast if true.

Absolutely, sub-Roman Britain had already gone through a massive economic collapse with drastic social and political consequences. The Roman province was unsustainable on its own, it depended too much on foreign trade and government expenditures, in the form of salaries paid to garrisons and civil servants. When Rome began pulling the plug, trade became insufficient, towns lost their purpose, urban elites as well as rural elites producing export-oriented goods lost a lot in income and status, as well as the ability to redistribute wealth to their patronage network. Essentially, what happened was a fledgling colony being abandoned by the "motherland". By contrast, Gaul was more resilient, with a larger population, probably more diverse economy, and a less remote location (with the beating heart of European trade still being the Mediterranean sea), so it didn't collapse as hard.

This certainly "softened" Britain for Anglo-Saxons to take over. In the same vein that the Justinian Plague softened the Middle East for the Arabs. Or that the apocalypse brought about by Old World diseases to the New World facilitated the Spanish hold - natives were in shock as, not only had they been conquered by strange foreigners, but everyone was dying around them, and their gods had probably died and abandoned them as well. Whatever social and economic equilibria existed before the Spanish conquest couldn't resist the vast majority of the population dying.

But it doesn't explain the highly unusual depth of the linguistic, cultural and religious change in Britain, nor its highly unusual pace, as you do well to mention.

Truly, a fascinating topic and one of my top-priorities had I access to a time-traveling camera.

Thanks. I have been playing with this idea for a while. It is not an airtight model, but just deciphering the general dynamics. There are enormous caveats and adjustments that must be undertaken for particular cases.

The main point is that the critical difference of whether a conqueror's language succeeds or fails to replace the local language depends on where the occupiers settle. Specifically whether the occupiers bring along small rural peasants of their own ethnicity to settle in conquered countryside. Living merely as elites or huddled in garrison towns is not enough for language replacement.

All your suggestions make a lot of sense to me as adjustments to this general tendency.

If there is a persistent farmer/herder difference in the countryside, then it would make sense to be slower as you suggest. And indeed Arabization was slow to take hold - Coptic and Berber languages still persisted for a long time in Egypt and the Maghreb. But where Arabization took hold was precisely where rural Bedouin tribes (Banu Hillal, etc.) migrated.

There was a very significant migration of poor Italian settlers already from the 2nd Century BCE. Settlement of Roman army veterans is the marquee topic. But not the only source. There were many small Italian peasants pushed off their smalholds in Italy by wealth accumulation of large landowners of the senatorial class in Italy. This was the cause celebre of the Gracchi brothers in the 130s. Many of the new landless Italian peasants migrated to cities like Rome, swelling urban centers as proletariat. But many landless peasants also left Italy altogether, to seek out new land plots in newly-conquered Spain, Provence and later Gaul.

I think the rate and volume of Italian out-migration during the Roman empire is probably underestimated. The land hunger problem in Italy was never "resolved" internally, so the faucet was never turned off. The ability of two-bit generals to quickly raise armies in the provinces attests to a significant local Italian presence. It doesn't have to be overwhelming, just significant enough small Italian farmers to affect language locally among neighboring Celtic Gauls and Iberians.

The depopulation of towns during the Dark Ages Europe also helped the spread of Latin. In areas where Latin was limited to isolated urban colonies surrounded by Celtic oceans, things changed dramatically with city breakdowns in the 5th-6th Century. Most of the former urban Latin-speakers abandoned towns to eke out a living in the countryside. So the "Latin element" in the Gaulish countryside increased rather than reduced with the fall of the Roman empire. So it is not a mere matter of sheer numbers, but how those numbers are distributed or redistributed later.

The dynamic you suggest of the Latin-Celtic mongrelization of language, rather than outright replacement, among neighboring peasants seems quite sensible to me. It is certainly a valuable addendum to the model, and reinforces the underlying thrust: it is the "peasant language", regardless of its purity, that ultimately prevails. Elite officials and scholars may still learn and write classical Latin or Sanskrit, but what succeeds is the mongrelized French or Prakrits of the peasantry.

20th Century screws up this model because it brings other factors that affect this (higher urbanization, mass mobilization, mass education, mass media). But for the pre-modern era, it seems to hold.

I'd be a lot more cautious on connecting religion to any of this. I don't think copy-paste is accurate. The primitive religion of the countryside is often much more persistent and heterodox than priests pretend. Rural religions must meet immediate rural needs. Meaning, screw the spiritual stuff, scripture, correctness or moral self-reflection, we need to manipulate the gods into delivering practical results - good weather, good harvests, good husbands and good health. That's what matters in the countryside. And if that means resorting to old time paganism, magic and amulets to make it happen, so be it. Even under the chastisement of the parish priests, or by sneakily concealing pagan deities behind Christian saints, rural folks in the countryside are still stealthily beseeching assistance from the ancient forces of nature like they always have.

Urban religion changes a lot faster and easier than rural religion,. Cities are the main focal points for dissemination of new religions (Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, etc.), and they leap from city to city along merchant routes. But the countryside is often barely permeated.

It takes a more concerted and heavy effort, by the clerical class and legions of missionaries, to change religion. Indeed, they may never succeed in the countryside, beyond cosmetic or superficial appearances.

Regarding linguistic mongrelization and Italian emigrants, the "landlessness" crisis in Rome coincided with it absorbing Southern Gaul indeed, but by the time the rest of it was firmly under control, how much of a demographic surplus was left? If anything, it's the population of conquered areas that grew (and not just due to Italian immigration), not Italy's. But, overall, that would explain why Occitan dialects are essentially "lower-class Latin that simplified over time" (much like Italian) whereas Northern French dialects were more like a creole: there would be more Latin speakers to the previously conquered South. But, even in Occitan areas, Celtic place names and even personal surnames survived, to a much greater extent than in England, aside from its Western shore.

I mentioned religion as that's another area where you would have expected some mongrelization in Britain. While pagan customs definitely survived longer in the countryside, why didn't Celtic paganism leave a mark?

I generally agree and always though countryside to be important in that aspect (up to relentlessly arguing from that position in all these EU2 culture threads, perhaps too much), but still, i am curious how do you square it with things like Mexico, which did not see much of a migration at all, much less rural settlement, yet the language vanished.

Or Prussia? Though i am not sure what happened there.

Prussia is definitely a case of settlement colonization so it fits Abdul's model.

 

[IsadorBG]

An interesting comparison you made with the Spanish conquest of America. And yet, despite the brutality of the conquests and the monumental loss in life and culture suffered by the natives... their languages and religion survived. Clearly heavily damaged by centuries of European oppression but they haven't vanished either which is interesting.

On the subject of the Anglo-Saxon; I have heard an interesting theory by pro-Anglo-Saxons historians that reframes Bedes depiction of the initial invasion. This theory says that rather than coming as Mercenary in service of Britons lords, the first Anglo-Saxons were invited to rule on the onset as Anglia was in such a chaotic state that only a foreign force could pacify the region.

This created an incentive for the surviving local elites to integrate smoothly into the new emerging kingdoms and so did the peasant as well as this theory fall under the massive anglo-saxon migration although in mostly peaceful waves following the start of Germanic rule rather than a violent and sudden invasion.

Those who support this argue that this is why there is so little depiction of the initial invasion because it was mostly peaceful and desired by the local Britons whereas subsequent expansion of Anglia was much more forceful and met with far more resilient Brittonic kingdoms the further away you get from the old Romans center.

Perhaps a tad too rosy retailing of the invasions; but there is some evidence of intermingling and fluidity between Celts and Germanics in those early stages, so perhaps there is some truth to be found here.

 

[Magean]

An interesting comparison you made with the Spanish conquest of America. And yet, despite the brutality of the conquests and the monumental loss in life and culture suffered by the natives... their languages and religion survived. Clearly heavily damaged by centuries of European oppression but they haven't vanished either which is interesting.

Yes, it's interesting but not entirely surprising given that, again, you will usually find surviving pockets of native languages. Mesoamerica and the Andes have that, Turkey had various Greek and Armenian pockets dotted across the landscape before the ethnic cleansings from a century ago, North Africa has Berber pockets, etc. Given that prehispanic Mesoamerica was very densily populated - corn being the insanely productive crop that is is, particularly in its native environment - and even after losing 90% of its population, Mesoamerica still had a population in the lower millions, you would indeed expect areas where native languages survived. There just wouldn't be enough Spaniards to efficiently "dot" the entire countryside. Or Spanish-speaking Mestizos.

On the subject of the Anglo-Saxon; I have heard an interesting theory by pro-Anglo-Saxons historians that reframes Bedes depiction of the initial invasion. This theory says that rather than coming as Mercenary in service of Britons lords, the first Anglo-Saxons were invited to rule on the onset as Anglia was in such a chaotic state that only a foreign force could pacify the region.

This created an incentive for the surviving local elites to integrate smoothly into the new emerging kingdoms and so did the peasant as well as this theory fall under the massive anglo-saxon migration although in mostly peaceful waves following the start of Germanic rule rather than a violent and sudden invasion.

Those who support this argue that this is why there is so little depiction of the initial invasion because it was mostly peaceful and desired by the local Britons whereas subsequent expansion of Anglia was much more forceful and met with far more resilient Brittonic kingdoms the further away you get from the old Romans center.

Perhaps a tad too rosy retailing of the invasions; but there is some evidence of intermingling and fluidity between Celts and Germanics in those early stages, so perhaps there is some truth to be found here.

I'm somewhat skeptical... inviting a foreign king with no stake in local quarrels isn't unheard of, but inviting foreign settlers along with the foreign king when you're in the weak position - that's unusual and begging for an invasion. "We give you the crown, our lands and basically everything else if you can stop our infightings". When and where else did that happen?