Outdated English Names: Cæd, Bæd and Harmful to Know
In the Lifetime of Saint Guthlac, the writer, Felix of Crowland, describes how the early English saint obtained his title:
For, as those that are accustomed to that race relate, the title within the tongue of the English is proven to include two particular person phrases, specifically ‘Guth’ and ‘lac’, which within the elegant Latin tongue is ‘belli munus’ (the reward of conflict), as a result of by warring in opposition to vices he was to obtain the reward of everlasting bliss [and] eternal life.
By the point Guthlac obtained his title in 673, it’s doubtless that almost all English individuals would have borne names fashioned on this manner – by combining two phrases taken from Outdated English. How such names got here to dominate, and the way the individuals who bore them got here to be seen as ‘English’, is much less clear. These are questions that tie right into a wider debate across the occasions of fifth- and sixth-century Britain. Because the Roman Empire disintegrated across the starting of the fourth century, the individuals of the previous province of Britannia had been left to fend for themselves. Inside a few centuries, whereas reminiscences of Britannia remained, the individuals who inhabited it had been not Roman or British, however spoke new languages, occupied new boundaries and possessed new identities. These individuals had been Mercian, Saxon, Anglian or Northumbrian – the ancestors of the English.
Adventus saxonum
For a very long time, it was assumed that it was the individuals that had been new. The closest issues we have now to eyewitness accounts painting the transformation as a brutal one. Bede, writing within the 730s, explains how:
The Angles or Saxons got here to Britain on the invitation of King Vortigern … and had been granted lands within the jap a part of the island given that they protected the nation; however, their actual intention was to subdue it. It was not lengthy earlier than such hordes of those alien peoples vied collectively to crowd into the island that the natives who had invited them started to stay in terror.
That terror was described by Gildas, a Romano-British poet writing within the mid-sixth century, who lamented that:
All the foremost cities had been laid low by the repeated battering of enemy rams … Church leaders, monks and other people alike, because the swords glinted throughout and the flames crackled. Plenty of the wretched survivors had been caught within the mountains and butchered wholesale. Others went to give up to the enemy: they had been fated to be slaves for ever, in the event that they weren’t certainly killed immediately. Others made for lands past the ocean.
The story advised by Bede and Gildas is certainly one of a conflict of peoples, wherein native British inhabitants had been swamped by hordes of violent invaders from throughout the North Sea. The Britons had been both killed or pressured to flee, each westwards, inside Britain itself, in addition to overseas to locations similar to Brittany, the place Gildas himself finally emigrated. Because the Britons moved out, they had been changed by massive numbers of settlers from continental Europe.
This view of the adventus saxonum (the ‘coming of the English’) was largely adhered to by historians for hundreds of years; nevertheless, for the reason that second half of the twentieth century, it has been known as into query, notably by archaeologists. Though there was clearly a major transformation within the materials tradition of post-Roman Britain, in addition to the best way wherein they buried their useless, it grew to become obvious that there isn’t a manner of figuring out whether or not these had been proof of latest individuals, or simply new methods of doing issues. As a substitute of mass migration, the transformation was more and more seen as a means of ‘elite emulation’, the place a comparatively small variety of newcomers arrived from northern Germany, bringing their methods with them. Progressively, the native Britons got here to undertake the languages, customs and identities of the brand new ruling elites.
In relation to the English language – one of many greatest legacies of the early medieval transformation of Britain – the issue is that the proof nonetheless appears to level within the different path. In most conditions the place language shifts have taken place we are able to see the impression of the previous language on the brand new one: the borrowing of phrases, for instance, or an affect on grammatical construction that displays ongoing interplay between audio system of each languages, or massive numbers of individuals studying a brand new language in a brief time period. The British language (Brittonic) appears to have little or no impression on English in both of those methods. Linguistics factors to minimal interplay between Britons and Saxons.
What’s in a reputation?
Private names might supply us a manner of bridging this divide – or a minimum of bringing the 2 sides nearer collectively. Names are linguistic objects, forming a part of a spoken and written language. However they’re additionally objects of ‘immaterial tradition’. They are often chosen, used and handed down from technology to technology, or discarded once they grow to be retro. Inspecting the non-public names of the individuals of early medieval Britain can shed some mild on how the completely different peoples of the island interacted.
Names present with out a lot doubt that migration was an element – each into and away from Britain. Not solely will we see the looks of Outdated English names in massive numbers, predominantly into southern and jap Britain, however we see proof of the flight of the Britons throughout the Channel to Brittany within the type of an enormous inflow of Brittonic names there. We additionally see vital numbers of Irish names, notably in Wales, but additionally in lots of areas of Britain, displaying that migration got here from west in addition to east.
The broad sample of private names appears to tie in effectively with the image painted by Bede and Gildas: Saxon arrival, British flight. However inside this, small particulars inform a extra nuanced story. We all know for sure that a few of the names borne by outstanding figures within the historical past of the early ‘English’ kingdoms had been, the truth is, British. The Anglo Saxon Chronicle tells us that Cerdic (d.534), the primary king of Wessex, ancestor of Alfred and the primary dynasty to rule the dominion of England, arrived in Britain by boat. However he had a British title. Cerdic nearly actually comes from a Brittonic title Caraticos (or Coroticus), which by the sixth century was normally written as Ceretic.
Cerdic of Wessex was not the one post-Roman British ruler with this title. Within the fifth century, Saint Patrick wrote a letter to the troopers of a tyrannical ruler in northern Britain, Coroticus, admonishing him for his vicious remedy of a just lately baptised group of Irish converts. Patrick was most probably referring to Ceretic Guletic, king of Alt Clut. In the meantime, Bede refers to a sixth-century ‘king of the Britons’ named Cerdic – most likely Ceretic of Elmet, or Ceredig ap Gwallog. This Cerdic sheltered Hereric, the daddy of Abbess Hild of Whitby, after he was exiled by king Æthelfrith (not so efficiently; Hereric was poisoned and killed). So, whereas the Chronicle claims that Cerdic of Wessex was an English arrival, his British title suggests in any other case. It’s extra doubtless that he was, the truth is, a neighborhood British chief – or probably a product of an early union between Saxon newcomers and a strong British household.
Amongst Cerdic’s successors there are a number of whose names look suspiciously British, together with Ceawlin, Cerdic’s grandson, who reigned between 560 and 590, and king Cenwalh, who dominated 50 years later. The second component of Cenwalh’s title, walh, was an English time period used to confer with British individuals, and is the origin of the English title for Wales. Its look in Cenwalh’s title might effectively replicate a component of British identification, both as a reputation given at delivery, or one which was given to him in some unspecified time in the future by English audio system.
British names for English individuals?
These names level to a British component among the many rulers of the Saxon kingdom of Wessex for a while after its preliminary basis. Wessex was, in any case, bordered by lands nonetheless dominated by Britons, and phone between Saxons and Britons was inevitable. Certainly, the West Saxon kings should have dominated over a major variety of Britons. In 685, the throne was seized by a ‘younger and vigorous prince’ of the West Saxons named Cædwalla. His title was unequivocally British, coming from the Brittonic Cadwallon, that means ‘one who leads in battle’, and was in widespread use in Wales on the time. Simply 50 years earlier, his namesake Cadwallon ap Cadfan, king of Gwynedd, defeated Penda of Mercia, earlier than allying with him to assault – and quickly subdue – massive parts of Northumbria.
By the tip of the seventh century, the legal guidelines of Ine – handed by the king of Wessex (whose title was English) round 694 – recommend that the Walas (Britons) had been handled extra harshly than their Englisc equivalents. However the names of Ine’s predecessors replicate a state of affairs the place ethnic divisions had been much less stark, and Britons and Saxons combined freely, even on the highest ranges of society.
It was not simply in Wessex that British names persevered. Cædmon, the ‘Father of English Sacred Music’, and the primary named poet to have written in English, additionally had a British title, most probably an anglicised type of the Brittonic Cadfan, from Catamanus, which was shared with the influential Breton saint, Saint Cadfan, in addition to Cadfan ap Iago, a seventh-century king of Gwynedd. Bede tells us that the Northumbrian Cædmon had been a lay brother at Whitby Abbey for a lot of his life, till at some point he woke with the power to show the holy scriptures into ‘pleasant and transferring poetry, in English’. Bede goes out of his solution to level out that English was Cædmon’s ‘personal tongue’.
It might be that he was a local English speaker, however this clarification looks like a tacit acknowledgement that not solely was Cædmon’s title British, however that there should have been individuals round whose first language was not English, and that a few of them had been bilingual.
Such bilingualism is likely to be seen within the title of a person named Cædbæd, an ancestor of Ealdfrith of Northumbria. His title seems to be a hybrid, utilizing the identical Brittonic first component utilized in Cædwalla, Cæd-, and mixing it with an Outdated English component -beadu – each of which meant ‘battle’. It might be that Cædbæd’s title was created to exhibit a combined heritage.
Alternatively, his title might have initially been a Brittonic one, Cadbodu, wherein the second component referred to a conflict goddess, the ‘battle crow’. In that case, this can be an instance of a Brittonic title altered by English audio system to include a extra recognisable English component.
We are able to see an analogous course of within the names of two early English saints, the brothers Chad and Cedd, who had been bishops of the Mercians and East Saxons respectively. Each these seventh-century churchmen bore shortened types of names starting with Cæd-, a minimum of initially. Chad’s title was typically recorded as Ceadda, combining the preliminary British component of his title with an English suffix. This means that, regardless of its British origin, it was getting used and reworked by English audio system.
Taking names
These names and their incorporation – if solely quickly – into the title inventory of early English peoples recommend that the Romano-Britons can not all have been annihilated or marginalised. We can not say for sure that any of those individuals noticed themselves, or their names, as being British. Names will be indicators of ethnic and linguistic identities, however it’s by no means clear-cut. And it doesn’t take lengthy for a reputation that was as soon as international to grow to be accepted as native. A few of these names might have been seen as being as English as some other. However for this to have occurred, there should have been a interval of contact and interplay between Britons and Saxons that noticed British names – and nearly actually some British individuals – purchase a brand new English identification.
James Chetwood is a Authorities of Eire Postdoctoral Fellow at College Faculty Cork.