The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain Read Online Free PDF

known as the Arras Culture, characterized by chariots and square burial barrows, lasted for four hundred years until the Roman invasion and showed cultural links with northern Gaul. The fact that the Romans would call the inhabitants of East Yorkshire ‘Parisii’, a name also given to the tribe who went on to found Paris, has led some to speculate that these people were immigrants from northern France.
    So, one might surmise that the ‘common language’ referred to by Tacitus as being spoken on both sides of the Channel was not Celtic, but was similar to that spoken by the Belgae. From present linguistic geography, and from numerous hints dropped in Caesar’s
Gallic Wars
about languages spoken in northern (Belgic) Gaul, the language shared across the Channel is more likely to have been of the Germanic group (see Part 3 ). If so, it might have been a member of the West Germanic branch of Indo-European (i.e. something like Dutch, Flemish or, more likely, Frisian) rather than Atlantic Celtic (Gaulish). In other words, a Germanic-type language or languages could already have been indigenous to England at the time of the Roman invasion. In support of this inference there is some recent linguistic analytic evidence, which I shall discuss, that the date of the split between Old English and Continental Germanic languages goes much further back than the Dark Ages, and that English may owe more to Scandinavian languages. But such speculation merely adds to the confusion that standard comparativelinguistic analysis
already
places Old English (the language of
Beowulf
) on its own separate branch, and closer to Frisian than to Saxon. The last observation is clearly inconsistent with the orthodoxy of Angles and Saxons replacing Celts, quite apart from the near-complete absence of Celtic words in either Old or Modern English.
    Modern popular images of the sort of English people the Romans met on their arrival, and left on their departure, vary. They range from the dark, feral, woad-painted savages, gibbering a version of Cornish, depicted in the recent Hollywood movie version of King Arthur’s story, to the more honest admission of ignorance shown by French cartoonists René Uderzo and Albert Goscinny in their famous
Asterix
comic-strip adventures of Celtic-speaking tribes in Brittany (Plate 3). In
Asterix Goes to Britain
, the cross-Channel connection is caricatured in the form of a moustachioed, spindly-legged toff in plus-fours, a fraffly polite British cousin of the Gaulish Asterix. Named Anticlimax, he comes over from England to Asterix’s village in Armorica to ask for help fighting the Romans. In sketching the latter portrait they create their hallmark mixture of slapstick and modern contemporary lampoon, underwritten by a canny reading of the classics.
    Uderzo and Goscinny incidentally come much nearer the mark than Hollywood. In one frame, Asterix echoes Tacitus’ comparison in telling his friend, the huge, dull Obelix (who has just violently misunderstood the purpose of a handshake with Anticlimax), that ‘
they
don’t talk quite the same as us’. If the cousinship and the people and language links had been Belgic rather than Gaulish, the sketch would, in my view, have been very close to reality. The first coins struck in Britain, around 40 BC , bear the name Commios. It is believed that this might well be Commius, a king of the Belgic Atrebates, who fled to Britain in 51 BC after rebelling against Julius Caesar.
    My unorthodox view of English roots does not deny the historical significance of the imposition on the indigenous population of an Anglo-Saxon ruling elite. There are ample historical records for the establishment of Saxon kingdoms in England – Wessex, Essex, Kent, Sussex, East Anglia, Northumbria and Mercia – and of violent internecine warfare, but that may have been carried on against a pre-existing English cultural and genetic background.
    The English maternal genetic record (mtDNA) denies the