chapter 2._

ENGLAND: End of the 6th. Century. The extent, the limits and the character of the Teutonic conquest.

"Before the end of the 6th century the Teutonic dominion stretched from the German ocean to the Severn, and from the English Channel to the Firth of Forth. The northern part of the island was still held by Picts and Scots, Celtic tribes, whose exact ethnical relation to each other hardly concerns us. And the whole west side of the island, including not only modern Wales, but the great Kingdom of Strathclyde, stretching from Dumbarton to Chester, and the great peninsula containing Cornwall, Devon and part of Somerset, was still in the hands of independent Britons. The struggle had been a long and severe one, and the natives often retained possession of a defensible district long after the surrounding country had been occupied by the invaders. It is therefore probable that, at the end of the 6th century and even later, there may have been within the English frontier inaccessible points where detached bodies of Welshmen still retained a precarious independence. It is probable also that, within the same frontier, there still were Roman towns, tributary to the conquerors rather than occupied by them. But by the end of the 6th century even these exceptions must have been few. The work of the Conquest, as a whole, was accomplished. The Teutonic settlers had occupied by far the greater part of the territory which they ever were, in the strictest sense, to occupy. The complete supremacy of the island was yet to be won; but that was to be won, when it was won, by quite another process. The English Conquest of Britain differed in several important respects from every other settlement of a Teutonic people within the limits of the Roman Empire. ... Though the literal extirpation of a nation is an impossibility, there is every reason to believe that the Celtic inhabitants of those parts of Britain which had become English at the 6th century had been as nearly extirpated as a nation can be. The women would doubtless be largely spared, but as far as the male sex is concerned, we may feel sure that death, emigration or personal slavery were the only alternatives which the vanquished found at the hands of our fathers. The nature of the small Celtic element in our language would of itself prove the fact. Nearly every Welsh word which has found its way into English expresses some small domestic matter, such as women and slaves would be concerned with."

_E. A. Freeman, History of the Norman Conquest of England, chapter 2, section 1._

"A glance at the map shows that the mass of the local nomenclature of England begins with the Teutonic conquest, while the mass of the local nomenclature of France is older than the Teutonic conquest. And, if we turn from the names on the map to the living speech of men, there is the most obvious, but the most important, of all facts, the fact that Englishmen speak English and that Frenchmen speak French.

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That is to say, in Gaul the speech of Rome lived through the Teutonic conquest, while in Britain it perished in the Teutonic conquest, if it had not passed away before. And behind this is the fact, very much less obvious, a good deal less important, but still very important, that in Gaul tongues older than Latin live on only in corners as mere survivals, while in Britain, while Latin has utterly vanished, a tongue older than Latin still lives on as the common speech of an appreciable part of the land. Here then is the final result open to our own eyes. And it is a final result which could not have come to pass unless the Teutonic conquest of Britain had been something of an utterly different character from the Teutonic conquest of Gaul--unless the amount of change, of destruction, of havoc of every kind, above all, of slaughter and driving out of the existing inhabitants, had been far greater in Britain than it was in Gaul. If the Angles and Saxons in Britain had been only as the Goths in Spain, or even as the Franks in Gaul, it is inconceivable that the final results should have been so utterly different in the two cases. There is the plain fact: Gaul remained a Latin-speaking land; England became a Teutonic-speaking land. The obvious inference is that, while in Gaul the Teutonic conquest led to no general displacement of the inhabitants, in England it did lead to such a general displacement. In Gaul the Franks simply settled among a subject people, among whom they themselves were gradually merged; in Britain the Angles and Saxons slew or drove out the people whom they found in the land, and settled it again as a new people."

_E. A. Freeman, The English People in its Three Homes (Lectures to American Audiences), pages 114-115._

"Almost to the close of the 6th century the English conquest of Britain was a sheer dispossession of the conquered people; and, so far as the English sword in these earlier days reached, Britain became England, a land, that is, not of Britons, but of Englishmen. There is no need to believe that the clearing of the land meant the general slaughter of the men who held it, or to account for such a slaughter by supposed differences between the temper of the English and those of other conquerors. ... The displacement of the conquered people was only made possible by their own stubborn resistance, and by the slow progress of the conquerors in the teeth of it. Slaughter no doubt there was on the battlefield or in towns like Anderida, whose long defence woke wrath in their besiegers. But for the most part the Britons cannot have been slaughtered; they were simply defeated and drew back."

_J. R. Green, The Making of England,