4. THE FIRST THOUSAND YEARS

In the country inns of a small corner of northern Germany, in the spur of land

connecting Schleswig-Holstein to Denmark, you can sometimes hear people

talking in what sounds eerily like a lost dialect of English. Occasional snatches

of it even make sense, as when they say that the "veather ist cold" or inquire of

the time by asking, "What ist de clock?" According to Professor Hubertus

Menke, head of the German Department at Kiel University, the language is "very

close to the way people spoke in Britain more than 1,000 years ago."

[ Quoted in The Independent, July 6, 1987. This shouldn't entirely surprise us.

This area of Germany, called Angeln, was once the seat of the Angles, one of the

Germanic tribes that 1,500 years ago crossed the North Sea to Britain, where

they displaced the native Celts and gave the world what would one day become

its most prominent language.

Not far away, in the marshy headlands of northern Holland and western

Germany, and on the long chain of wind-battered islands strung out along their

coasts, lives a group of people whose dialect is even more closely related to

English. These are the 300,000

Frisians, whose Germanic tongue has been so little altered by time that many of

them can, according to the linguistic historian Charlton Laird, still read the

medieval epic Beowulf "almost at sight."

They also share many striking similarities of vocabulary: The Frisian for boat is

boat (as compared to the Dutch and German boot), rain is rein ( German and

Dutch regen), and goose is goes ( Dutch and German gans).

In about A.D. 450, following the withdrawal of Roman troops from Britain,

these two groups of people and two other related groups from the same corner of

northern Europe, the Saxons and Jutes, began a long exodus to Britain. It was

not so much an invasion as a series of opportunistic encroachments taking place

over several generations. The tribes settled in different parts of Britain, each

bringing its own variations in speech, some of which persist in Britain to this day

—and may even have been carried onward to America centuries later. The broad

a of New England, for instance, may arise from the fact that the first pilgrimswere from the old Anglian strongholds of Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex, while the

pronounced r of the mid-Atlantic states could be a lingering consequence of the

Saxon domination of the Midlands and North. In any case, once in Britain, the

tribes variously merged and subdivided until they had established seven small

kingdoms and dominated most of the island, except for Wales, Scotland, and

Cornwall, which remained Celtic strongholds.

That is about as much as we know—and much of that is supposition. We don't

know exactly when or where the invasion began or how many people were

involved. We don't know why the invaders gave up secure homes to chance their

luck in hostile territory.

Above all, we are not sure how well—or even if—the conquering tribes could

understand each other. What is known is that although the Saxons continued to

flourish on the continent, the Angles and Jutes are heard of there no more. They

simply disappeared…although the Saxons were the dominant group, the new

nation gradually came to be known as England and its language as English, after

the rather more obscure Angles. Again, no one knows quite why this should be.

The early Anglo-Saxons left no account of these events for the simple reason

that they were, to use the modern phrase, functionally illiterate. They possessed

a runic alphabet, which they used to scratch inscriptions on ceremonial stones

called runes (hence the term runic) or occasionally as a means of identifying

valued items, but they never saw their alphabet's potential as a way of

communicating thoughts across time. In 1982, a gold medallion about the size of

an American fifty-cent piece was found in a field in Suffolk.

It had been dropped or buried by one of the very earliest of the intruders,

sometime between A.D. 450 and 480. The medallion bears a runic inscription

which says (or at least is thought to say): "This she-wolf is a reward to my

kinsman." Not perhaps the most profound of statements, but it is the earliest

surviving example of Anglo-Saxon writing in Britain. Is is, in other words, the

first sentence in English.

Not only were the Anglo-Saxons relatively uncultured, they were also pagan, a

fact rather quaintly presereved in the names of four of our weekdays, Tuesday,

Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, which respectively commemorate the gods

Tiw, Woden, and Thor, and Woden's wide, Frig. (Saturday, Sunday, and Monday,to complete the picture, take their names from Saturn, the sun, and the moon.)

It is difficult to conceive of the sense of indignity that the Celts must havefelt at

fining themselves overrun by primitive, unlettered warriors from the barbaric

fringes of the Roman empire. For the Celts, without any doubt, were a

sophisticated people. As Laird notes: "The native Celts had become Civilized,

law-abiding people, accustomed to government and reliable police, nearly as

helpless before an invading host as most modern civilian populations would be."

Most of them enjoyed aspects of civilization – running water, central heating –

that were quite unknown to the conquering hordes and indeed would not become

common again in Britain for nearly 1,500 years. For almost four centuries they

had been part of the greatest civilization the world had known, and enjoyed the

privileges and comforts that went with it. A tantalizing glimpse into the daily life

and cosmopolitan nature of Roman Britain surfaced in 1987 with the discovery

of a hoard of curse tablets in Bath near a spring once dedicated to the goddess

Suli Minerva. It was the practice of aggrieved citizens at that time to scratch a

curse on a lead tablet and toss it with a muttered plea for vengeance into the

spring. The curses were nothing if not heartfelt. A typical one went: "Docimedes

has lost two gloves and asks that person who has stolen them should lose his

minds and his eyes." The tablets are interesting in that they show that people of

Roman Britain were just as troubled by petty thievery (and, not incidentally, just

as prone to misspellings and lapses of grammar) as we are today, but also they

underline the diversity of the culture. One outstandingly suspicious victim of

some minor pilferage meticulously listed the eighteen people he thought most

likely to have perpetrated the deed. Of these eighteen names, two are Greek,

eight Latin, and eight celtic. It is clear that after nearly four centuries of living

side by side, and often intermarrying, relations between the Romans and the

Celts had become so close as to be, in many respects, indistinguishable.

In 410, with their empire crumbling, the Roman legions withdrew from Britain

and left the Celts to theur fate. Under the slow pagan onslaught, many Celts were

absorbed or slaughtered. Others fled to the westernmost fringes of the British

Isles or across the Channel to France, where they founded the colony of Brittany

and reintroduced Celtic to mainland Europe. Some Celts – among them the

semilegendary King Arthur – stayed and fought and there is evidence from place

names to suppose that pockets of Celtic culture survived for some time in

England (around Shaftesbury in northeast Dorset, for example). But little isknown for sure. This was the darkest of the dark ages, a period when history

blends with myth and proof grows scant.