The Anglo-Saxons were worse than the Vikings

[Still Waters]

The Vikings invaded England in the 9th and 10th centuries. They plundered, raped and burned towns to the ground. Or at least, this is the story we know from school and popular culture.

Nevertheless, the reported plundering and ethnic cleansing are probably overrated. The Vikings simply had worse 'press coverage' by frustrated English monks, who bemoaned their attacks.

In recent decades, groundbreaking research in DNA, archaeology, history and linguistics has provided nuance to these written records and painted a much clearer picture. This research indicates that the Vikings were not the worst invaders to land on English shores at that time. That title goes to the Anglo-Saxons, 400 years earlier.

https://phys.org/news/2018-12-anglo-saxons-worse-vikings.html

[SHaYap]

Ha ha Harold !!!
 

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['Walt' E. Kurtz]

Sort of knew this since the Vikings also traded.

[zep73]

6 minutes ago, Avalanche said:

Sort of knew this since the Vikings also traded.

Ya, they traded when they weren't starving. But when they had bad harvests, they brought the axes instead.

[MindfulInquirer]

Interesting stuff. The part about language is possibly a bit ambiguous. The French Norse did modify the English language to a great extent, an estimated 25-30% of words in english are of french/latin origin. It's perhaps not so much the anglosaxons wiped out celtic languages, as much as their own language was more practical to speak, they don't mention that in the article.

[Unusual Tournament]

This makes sense since the Vikings were farmers first and foremost. Also they were very much in demand as mercenaries in the Middle Ages. Due to their fighting spirit and loyalty to their paid lord. 

[Peter B]

On 12/19/2018 at 9:27 AM, MindfulInquirer said:

Interesting stuff. The part about language is possibly a bit ambiguous. The French Norse did modify the English language to a great extent, an estimated 25-30% of words in english are of french/latin origin. It's perhaps not so much the anglosaxons wiped out celtic languages, as much as their own language was more practical to speak, they don't mention that in the article.

I agree that the part about language is ambiguous, and I disagree with quite a few of the conclusions in the article.

Regarding the Anglo-Saxon invasion of Britain in the 5th-6th centuries, they were greatly outnumbered by the native Romano-British population. However this was also the case for the other Germanic tribes which overran the Western Roman Empire (the total population of German invaders was likely no more than a million or so, while the population of the Western Roman Empire was in the region of 10-20 million).

In both cases the key to the success of the invaders was that they were tribal societies in which every adult male was required to fight, while the Roman/Romano-British societies supported full-time soldiers who would have numbered around 1% of the population. In other words, although the tribes were outnumbered by the total population, they themselves outnumbered the soldiers they had to fight against.

So when the Anglo-Saxons defeated the Romano-British armies of lowland Britain (at the Battles of Catterick and Dyrham) in the late 6th centuries the native populations were essentially leaderless and defenceless, and the A-S were able to settle down as the ruling class of a much larger population.

Now one interesting point is that everywhere else in the former Western Roman Empire, the German conquerors adopted Latin, while in Britain the A-S kept their language. This is comparable to the way Arabic gradually replaced Aramaic in Syria and Coptic in Egypt in the centuries following the Muslim conquests of the 7th centuries. How did this come to happen in Britain?

My theory is that the conquests of the rest of the Western Roman Empire were comparatively quick and bloodless, and that a lot of the old (non-military) Roman ruling class were therefore left alive. This allowed them to preserve their culture when they inter-married with the conquerors. By contrast, post-Roman Britain held the A-S at bay for more than a century, but they were sufficiently isolated from the rest of the Empire's old lands that the non-military aspects of Roman culture withered away - the last of the Romano-British ruling class were solely fighters. And when they were defeated in battle the Romano-British ruling class and Roman culture were essentially wiped out.

So what were the British-speaking peasants to do? If they wanted to get ahead in the world they had to learn the conquerors' language. I assume there was inter-marriage between British and A-S, but as the British were a permanent underclass I assume the vast majority of inter-marriages would be between A-S men and British women. Their children might be bilingual, but the only language of any practical use would be that of the conquerors, and their children would speak only A-S.

This would have resulted in a slow shift from speaking British to A-S that would take centuries (apparently there were still villages of British speakers in England at the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066). The same process applied in places like Syria and Egypt, where Arabic didn't become the majority language until after the Crusades.

Now, compare all that to the Viking invasions of the 9th century and later...the Vikings came closest to wiping out the A-S ruling class only in the north - the region which became the Danelaw. But even so, the kingdom of Wessex had conquered the Danelaw within a century, and on top of that, the languages were very similar. Together this meant there wasn't really any break in cultural continuity in A-S Britain as a result of the Viking invasion, compared with the rather more complete and permanent cultural extinction achieved by the A-S over the Romano-British.

(BTW, the French-Latin words in English came about as a result of the Norman Conquest in 1066, not the Viking invasions of the 9th century.)

[MindfulInquirer]

5 minutes ago, Peter B said:

(BTW, the French-Latin words in English came about as a result of the Norman Conquest in 1066, not the Viking invasions of the 9th century.

I know, William the Conqueror. Thought maybe they had that conflated or sth, but my point is the English took in a TON of latin/french words, simply because they were more technical and they didn't themselves have them and served a purpose. There are many examples of languages (or even beliefs/religions) dying out not necessarily through brutal repression but often because they were weaker, or somehow no longer relevant during the time of occupation with another culture now dominating.

Edited December 21, 2018 by MindfulInquirer

[Peter B]

From the linked article:

Ethnic cleansing by the Anglo-Saxons is a likely alternative scenario [to apartheid], as suggested by the fact that Celtic culture and language did not survive outside of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.

Well, I strongly disagree, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, as I pointed out in my long-winded ramble a couple of posts earlier, we have other examples of a minority conquering population imposing their language on the native majority, in a process which took centuries. The problem is that we see the outcome centuries later, but it's very hard to find evidence of it underway. In the case of Arabic replacing native languages in Egypt and Syria there is more contemporary evidence. I'm fairly sure something similar happened in England, as the use of English gradually filtered down through the classes of the lowly British natives, but in a process which was still in its final stages at the time of the Norman Conquest.

Secondly, there's simply physical practicality. The British outnumbered their Anglo-Saxon conquerors by likely at least 5 to 1 and possibly as much as 10 to 1. That's a very large number of people to simply "ethnically cleanse" - that is, kill on a genocidal scale - without leaving any evidence of large-scale massacres. It wouldn't surprise me that there were local massacres, but I think the idea of wiping out nearly the entire native population (even nearly the entire male native population) is unlikely. Even the Roman conquest of Gaul in the 1st century BC left around a third of the native population, who then moved to speaking Latin in subsequent centuries. In any case, I'm fairly sure there's strong DNA evidence of a surviving British population in English people today.

Third, there's social practicality. As with the Arab conquests and, for that matter, the Norman Conquest of England in 1066, the conquerors became the gentry and nobility of the land. With the A-Ss ruling a large native population, every free A-S man, no matter how lowly, had a higher social status than the entire surviving native population. If you killed the native population, then you'd have to farm the land yourself. Much better to sit back as the leading man of some village, ruling that village and all the farm land around it, and leave the physical drudgery of farm work to the natives.