Naming Patterns of Britons in 4th Century

Question

While researching medieval and earlier Welsh nobility my attention has been drawn to the half-legendary Vortigern, King of the Britons who lived in the time space 350-450.  There are many questions about him that bear research, but the first to strike me is his most appropriate LNAB.

The Britons were ancestors of the Welsh and (to over-simplify) occupied the whole island until the Saxons and Normans drove them into the mountains.  If the Cymru naming convention applied, his name would be Gwrtheyrn ap Gwidol, with possibly Vortigern as the preferred name.  (Preferred by us, anyway).  

But is the Welsh assumption valid?  Are there other assumptions that are more appropriate?  I'd love for others who know something about this time and place to weigh in while I'm still beginning to ponder Vortigern!

Comments

Nobody was driven back into any mountains.  Most of the Welsh became English by finding it advantageous to speak English all the time, same way that Texicans became Americans.  But it took longer in the more isolated corners.

---

I hope you tread very carefully if you are ever in Wales and call them English, or in Scotland and call them English, or in Ireland and call them English.

Chan eil mi am Beurla

---

I was talking about the Welsh who occupied the whole island.  Most of their descendants are English.  But the ones up north, insultingly called Picts by the Romans, became Scottish.

When the Pictish Nationalist Party reclaims its heritage, the Clyde will become the Lloyd.

---

I agree with RJ. In fact it is likely that many of the original British people in what became England had ceased speaking British because their region was more Romanized. The English were brought in to the most civilized parts of this corner of the Roman empire as Roman soldiers, whereas the highlands where Welsh continued to be spoken were less Romanized for obvious geographical reasons. (England is the part of Britain where you can farm.) The Anglo Saxon belt buckles etc by which we identify them were Roman.

A good cure to some of the nonsense around are the books of historian Guy Halsall. He has even done a book about the period when Arthur and Vortigern were supposed to have lived.

If you want to see an attempt at a serious Welsh royal family tree how about this one: http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~medieval/llywelyn.htm

---

"The Britons were ancestors of the Welsh, and (to over-simplify) occupied the whole island until the Saxons and Normans drove them into the mountains". I agree with Jack, this is an over-simplification. I agree with RJ, there was no general driving back to the mountains - but then just as in Texas before it became part of the USA, the resident communities in the island of Great Britain at the time of the withdrawal of the Roman legions were not an homogenous group.

Their predecessors in the so-called Iron Age were not an homogenous group either.

The problem underlying so much of the 'history' that is related about this time is that it is based on written accounts that were neither contemporaneous nor themselves based on earlier accurate accounts. The problem is not new, Bede's histories, like some of the Roman contemporary histories, and most of the more recent ones (including Shakespeare's) they are erroneous for many reasons. They are not only lacking any archaeological or DNA evidence, they are also heavily influenced by the politics of their day.

Eighteenth and nineteenth century antiquarians added many of the 'facts' that have been absorbed into the collective historical memory, despite their work being based on very little evidence, if any.

The original question was "Naming patterns of Britons in the 4th century". Then Jack tells us that a chap called Vortigern was 'king of the Britons' at some point within the period 350 to 450 (I assume CE). He then expounds upon possible language variants.

As I have already stated, there was no one cultural or ethnic group that might have been defined as a 'Briton', and certainly no Welsh or English. Why would there have been a King of the Briton's anyway at that time? There was a Count of the Saxon Shore, a Roman military commander who had considerable powers until the legions were withdrawn early in the fifth century.

Modern DNA evidence shows that the DNA profile of indigenous peoples of the eastern and south-central counties of England are indistinguishable from those of the homelands of the Anglo-Saxons. The profiles indicate the dominance of the people with these DNA characteristics having been present since before the Roman occupation.

The DNA linked with many of the so-called Celtic cultures are more dominant in the west, including in Wales and in Ireland.. The most likely explanation, since these DNA lines can be traced back to between 10 and 12 thousand years ago, is that they are a legacy of the incoming populations following the retreating ice after the last glacial maximum.

The three most important groups arrived over a period of several thousands of years from relatively ice free refuges on the continent of Europe. One was near the Pyrenees near the modern borders of France and Spain - the likely origins of the so-called Celtic peoples. Then another refuge near the Baltic and a third near to the Black sea, provided the sources for those who eventually populated much of northern Europe including Scandinavia. Many will have arrived when the land-bridge still joined Britain to the rest of the continent, The eastern groups arriving via the Low Countries and up to Denmark into the south-east, with other groups coming via modern Sweden and Norway into modern Scotland and north-eastern England.

These were waves of immigration, which means that the population was dynamic. There is no reason why there would not have been mixing of these two cultural groups where they met up as the populations grew and expanded across the islands.

I have no evidence to offer about the Picts. These may, or may not, have been Brythonic language speakers (Modern Welsh, Breton and Cornish are all members of the Brythonic family of languages). There is simply not enough evidence, but the Scots were originally a tribal group that had formed in the north of the island of Ireland and had, during the Iron age and through into the post-Roman period, had a great deal of cultural exchange with the islands and highlands of what became Scotland. The Scots spoke a language that would have been in the Goidelic family (along with modern Irish, and Manx) - cousins of the Brythonic family but different.

Andrew Lancaster tells us that "many of the original British people in what became England had ceased speaking British because their region was more Romanized." I am sorry Andrew, but that is simply wrong. There is no reason to believe that the majority of the people who served in the Roman occupying forces spoke Latin as their daily language in private, much less the indigenous population. I am sure that the administration of the provinces in Britain was conducted in Latin, but why would a Brythonic speaker in a village that was rarely visited by a Latin speaker even need to learn that language? Equally, I am sure that the soldiers in the Roman Empire who served here, but who were not from a Latin speaking homeland would have been discussing the world over a tankard in their native tongue (we know for example that men serving for decades on Hadrian's wall were originally from the area now occupied by modern Romania).

---

John I think you might misunderstand the latest DNA evidence a bit (because SE English people are closer to English than they are to their continental cousins), and you have mis-quoted me by removing the word "likely". Indeed there is little or not evidence either way, and that is the point. It means I can not be "simply wrong" because there is uncertainty about what language people were speaking in the parts of English which were first speaking English. That was my point. There are too many stories dressed up as certain. Vortigern and his contemporaries are the subject, and are also examples.

But we do know those parts where English was first spoken were the same parts which were most Romanized, and that the later Romans had Germanic speaking soldiers and even military rulers (as in northern France and many other places).

I mentioned Guy Halsall as an interesting author to looking into on this subject. I do not think we can do it justice on this forum.

---

Andrew, I understand the points you make, and I want you to know that I was not trying to be rude about your contribution. However, the expression 'likely', in the context of that sentence, suggests a probability which simply does not exist. As for evidence - I am a practising historical geographer with long experience in the history of the area that came to be known in modern history as the Danelaw. That term, like so many that come down to us is, of course, of much more recent origins. However, my point is that my studies have necessarily included the etymology of place-names that appear in documents.

Unlike in my native Wessex, the evidence of post-Roman language is reasonably well-documented through the interpretation of place-names and their linguistic heritage. We know, for example that in areas of West Yorkshire, that a new kingdom seems to have emerged around what is now the city of Leeds, and it did so within two hundred years of the removal of the Legions.

This kingdom of Elmet, which lasted around two hundred years, was clearly of Brythonic speaking people since their place-names were of that language group. The later inclusion of references to places from the Anglo-Saxon period before the Danish incursions such as Burton, Bretton and similar all recognise the fact that some people established and settled in the area were what the newly dominant group referred to as Britons, or Welsh (Welisc) meaning foreigners.

I have no issues with Guy Halsall. I agree with him entirely about Arthurian legend, and I have to say that there are others mentioned in this thread that I would place within the same bracket of myth - including Vortigern. I agree with many of his criticisms of 'histories' being handed down to us drawn from sources which are, at best, spurious. The etymology of the name is Germanic not Brythonic, but that is beside the point.

When I research a place-name I always seek out the earliest reference and try to infer from the context whether it was already an established name or had already evolved from earlier incarnations. It is obviously not always possible, but there are sometimes clues. Vortigern may have been recorded in documents with a Brythonic patronymic as Jack Day suggests, but that is not evidence of his existence nor, if he did exist, that he ever had a Brythonic patronymic. Neither does it mean that he had to be Anglo-Saxon.

I say that you were wrong for your assertion that the people of the Romanized areas of the island ceased to speak British. I reiterate that comment for two reasons of simple accuracy. First, there was no 'British' language. Brythonic was certainly a dominant group, but whereas many describe the Brythonic language widely spoken then as Welsh, there is no evidence that it was a single language, Modern Welsh, Cornish and Breton are all Brythonic and may have evolved through more than one offshoot of the common parent language. Secondly, Romanized is, I believe, a misleading term. Certainly the Romans were absolutely in control of the South, particularly towards the South-east, but they seem to have had looser control over the areas moving north and west. That is not to say that they were not in evidence, or that they did not collect taxes, but the primary urban settlements (which had the most intensely Romanized aspects of normal daily life) are found more often in the south and east. My point being that the number of 'Romans' in Britain was never great, and their influence on the vast swathes of rural Britain away from their centres of population was likely to have been minimal. The method of building in villages was more or less unchanged from the Iron Age, the farming methods varied little and the diet was probably the same.  This probably goes some way to explain why the pre-1974 counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland were not considered within England at the time of the Norman Conquest. I suspect that the Roman influence here was at its slightest.

Despite being south of the Roman Walls, these two counties seem to have been readily absorbed into the post-Roman emergent kingdom of Strathclyde (in all its recorded forms) and remained in it until the start of the twelfth century. The linguistic influences in Strathclyde are even more considerable than that of Yorkshire, but it seems clear that the original language for the kingdom was Brythonic, but not necessarily Old Welsh.

You will understand that I do not argue with your general thesis that many of the 'stories dressed up as history' continue to unduly influence those who venture into the extremely complex subject of British history, or even English history. I support that idea 100% and my purpose in writing these notes is to highlight that very notion.

I do worry that the WikiTree ideal of building trees that will ultimately link everyone has the potential for enhancing these dubious 'histories'. The debate on this and other threads lends support to that worry. When I see sources such as Bede, or Geoffrey of Monmouth being cited in support of people who were dead four or five hundred years before their own births, and given the paucity of documentary evidence from that period of post-Roman history - then I despair!

---

As for the DNA, have you read Oppenheimer? Stephen Oppenheimer, The origins of the British' 2006, Constable and Robinson, London.

 

---

John northern England does indeed have evidence of a British language, but is not SE England, which is easier to cultivate and historically had different population histories. The point about the gap in our knowledge was about the SE. Oppenheimer is a terrible source. Very out of date and he was not a population geneticist.

---

OK Andrew, tell me where your evidence is of a British language in northern England. I guess if you dismiss Oppenheimer because he was not a population geneticist then you will need to dismiss many other academics who gather data from other disciplines, and with the assistance of the people in those disciplines interprets them in the context of his own field - all of which he discusses without candour. Most works these days ae out of date the moment that they are published, but the point of his work is that it undermined the understanding of immigration flows into the island of Great Britain - which was my general point.

In the case of language, my sources are colleagues that I have worked with heading up the English place-names society and department in the  at the University of Nottingham and a retired English born former head of the equivalent department in the University of Copenhagen whose seminal works include extensive work on the influence of Old Scandinavian language in Yorkshire and northern England.

The South-east of England has had fewer language intrusions, largely because it was more heavily influenced because of proximity to mainland Europe. This proximity also meant that it was the gateway from the continent. There is rich evidence of interchange before the Roman period with the nearest neighbours who were probably related - the history of Silchester is quite enlightening on that score, as are the archaeological records of several ports along the south coast, not least at Christchurch and Hengistbury

You assert that "The English were brought in to the most civilized parts of this corner of the Roman empire as Roman soldiers". Where is your evidence? The evidence that I have seen is that the Auxiliaries brought in came from right around the Empire and since it was policy not to employ men in their native country, I would be surprised to find men of Gaul being used in the auxiliary forces here, because they may have been in extended families with the Brits. The Roman Empire did not extend very far into the regions from whence the Anglo-Saxons were to come from, which might preclude them from service in the Roman forces, but it did not prevent trade, or indeed population exchanges.

---

John you brought up northern England (Elmet etc). It is easy to look up the fact that there were British kingdoms there, and into southern Scotland in the post Roman period. If your point is that I should say Brythonic instead of British then fine by me. 

You twist my words concerning Oppenheimer. I did not put his problems all down to his lack of qualifications, and this is a field where being out of date is a much bigger problem than usual because the key research is very recent and after his books (and indeed still going). 

Concerning the Anglo Saxons and England I already referred you to Halsall. The Roman empire did not have to extend fully into areas from which it drew its soldiers. (Again consider the Franks who were running armies all over the place long before big parts of their people were actually withing the empire. Or go back even further and consider the use of Germanic soldiers even in the first generations of the empire.) Inscriptions at Hadrian's wall, just to take an example, include reference to the Tubantes, and the archaeology of Germany shows us a lot about where German military metalwork was distributed.

It is unclear what you mean concerning "fewer language intrusions". Again I would say that there is very little evidence either way. But it has long been remarked that early English shows almost no Brythonic loan words despite having lots of loan words from other languages it came into contact with. (And that is about the only type of linguistic evidence we have.)

 

---

I can see that we will not agree on this. However, besides telling me about how my sources are out of date, you have failed to explain how or why, or even to suggest alternative courses.

I am not being pedantic when I speak about Brythonic rather than British. Firstly, as we have discussed Brythonic is not unique to the British Isles, the language of Brittany is also Brythonic, as is Cornish. It is probable that there were others also, but taking the language of Strathclyde you will find that what has come down as Cumbric, (hence Cumberland, Cumbria etc.) is not Cymraeg or its older predecessor languages, but a variant.

 I accept that some may argue this is more of a dialect change than a truly separate language. We have no knowledge of the language of the Picts, except culturally we know they wrote things down in a way that the rest of Britain's peoples never did. So it is very likely that they did speak a different language, but also, most likely it was a Brythonic tongue. Much like as in the Islands off the coast of The Netherlands and the North Sea coast of Germany, there were three separately recorded languages contemporaneously spoken. Closely related , but linguistically different. The same is true of the Scandinavian languages and indeed the Germanic languages.

 The close geographic  proximity of these different languages being spoken at the same points in time suggest that languages with common roots developed separately over small geographies simultaneously.

You say "it has long been remarked that early English shows almost no Brythonic loan words despite having lots of loan words from other languages it came into contact with. ", yet in my native Wiltshire we have place-names that certainly owe their roots to Brythonic. The Anglo-Saxon Kennet for example (places and river) are derived from the Latinized version of the local names for these geographic features. How many rivers are there in England and Scotland that bear the name Avon - you might accept that as a key loan word? There are others!

---

Not sure what your point really is John. You keep finding things to disagree with, and dropping subjects and bringing in new ones, but:

Cornwall is in fact British, obviously.

Britanny, as per the name, is understood to be "British" in a way, even if not part of the British Isles. Certainly it's special language is understood to be British.

Place names are not part of a language normally speaking, and no one doubts that there are Brythonic place names in England such as London. (Although the number of these which are definitely Celtic are I think often over-estimated in the 19th and 20th century, because Celtic is "in".) The Romans clearly kept many old place names, but this does not tell us what happened next.

On the other hand, the subject here is genealogy? What do you think about Vortigern?

Answer 1

You are probably well acquainted with this site:

http://www.vortigernstudies.org.uk/artwho/who.htm

My husband was an old English Major in College.  He talked to me because I was carrying Le Morte d'Arthur.   Our sons have names of Macsen and Emrys as middle names.  So we have the "king" and the "wizard" of legend.  It was a time when history was not necessarily a factual accounting but a bardic tradition of creating something memorable and heroic.  The site above leans to the Welsh name, it says:

"The name, which has been anglicized as Vortigern, appears in the oldest Welsh records as Guorthigirn and later as Gwrtheyrn. Bede, writing in Latin, uses the very early forms Vertigernus and Uurtigernus; in the later Anglo-Saxon transmission these are rendered as Wyrtgeorn. The meaning is explained as ' High Lord' or 'Overlord'. Tigern- does not quite have the meaning of 'King', which is usually represented in names with the form 'Rex', as in Ri(othamus) or (Vortime)Rix, though a more loose translation with 'king' may not be totally incorrect. Incorrect would be a translation of 'Vortigern' with 'High King'."  And the site lists its sources.  

 

Comments

Awesome.  Thanks, Laura.  A related issue is that we have a category for Legends:  https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Category:Legends.  As written up at the moment, the category description assumes that the person behind the legend never existed, and uses King Arthur as an example.  With Vortigern, while no one fact seems provable, the authors of the site you named suggest that there was a real person behind the legend, and give an outline of what the real person was "probably" like.  Is there a better word than "legend" for this, and should King Arthur be treated similarly?  Notice that under legends we also have some subcategories for mythological early Scandanavian royal lines!

---

I believe there is a difference between a myth and a legend.  Jesse James can be called a legend but he was a real person.  There are people who believe Arthur was real or an amalgam of several strong local rulers who forged a single governmental entity we have come to call Britain.

Merriam Webster defines legend as:Define legend: a story from the past that is believed by many people but cannot be proved to be true

It does not say it is a story 

Myth:  a traditional or legendary story, usually concerning some being or hero or event, with or without a determinable basis of fact or a natural explanation, especially one that is concerned with deities or demigods and explains some practice, rite, or phenomenon of nature.

3.any invented story, idea, or concept: 

4.an imaginary or fictitious thing or person.

5.an unproved or false collective belief that is used to justify a social institution.

So I think you can safely keep him under a Legend rather than a total myth. 

Answer 2

Sorry, my answer was off subject!

Answer 3

Interesting information from someone I think is a knowledgeable source on Ancestry. 

King Vortigern Vorteneu
(c.AD 370-459)
(Welsh: Gwrtheyrn; Latin: Wurtigernus; English: Vortigern)

Vortigern the Very Thin (or more properly Gwrtheyrn Gwrtheneu) appears to have been the son of a certain Gwidol, probably a man of some importance from the Gloucester area if his supposed ancestry it to be believed. However, the lands of Vortigern's sons indicate that, while his power-base eventually stretched across Gwent, Powys, Buellt and Gwrtheyrnion (in north-west Radnorshire), the latter area, being named after him, may show his original homeland.

According to the inscription on the famous 'Pillar of Eliseg', Vortigern married a daughter of the Emperor Magnus Maximus named Severa and it was probably this imperial link which enabled him to take control of Britain as some kind of high-king, probably around AD 425. The unreliableGeoffrey of Monmouth first tells the story, but we have no way of knowing whether there is any truth in it. When the High-King Constantinewas murdered by Pictish assassins, Vortigern urged that the late king's eldest son, Constans, be raised to the throne, despite the fact that he was a monk. Vortigern became the young boy's chief advisor, but this was not enough for him and he soon plotted Constans' death. Vortigern then seized the Crown, while Constans' younger brothers, Aurelius Ambrosius (the historical Ambrosius Aurelianus) and Uther fled to Brittany.

However, Vortigern had not chosen a good time to take on the governance of Britain, for, as the earlier Nennius, put it, "during his rule in Britain he was under pressure, from fear of the Picts and the Irish ... and, not least, from dread of Ambrosius." The latter did not return until 437 when he fought a man named Guidolin (alias Vitalinus) at the Battle of Wallop. He was probably a relative of Vortigern whose grandfather bore the same name. Ambrosius was victorious and was "given all the kingdoms of the western side of Britain"to keep him quiet. The raids from the Picts over Hadrian's Wall and the Irish on the west coast grew in frequency throughout Vortigern's reign. Surprisingly, Nennius did not mention the still more famous Germanic peoples raiding the east and south coast. However, he does add details of subsequent events, based on Bede and, ultimately, Gildas (who however only refers to the 'Superbus Tyrannus' not Vortigern). By around 440, the organised defence of the nation had more or less completely collapsed. Vortigern, however, came up with a cunning plan to thwart the invaders. He decided to set a thief to catch a thief by employing a Jutish and/or Anglian element of the Germanic enemy as mercenaries in particular to repel the Picts and their fellow Northern Europeans. In return, they were given land. According to Geoffrey, this was in Lincolnshire around Caer-Correi (Caistor). While employing such foederati was a well used Roman practice, it was one which was to go horribly wrong for Vortigern and gain him a reputation as the man who handed Britain to the Anglo-Saxons on a plate.

In 447 St. Germanus of Auxerre visited Britain for a second time,  accompanied by Bishop Severus of Trier. His motives appear to have been both religious and secular. Nennius tells how a holyman called Germanus encountered Irish pirates in both Powys and Cheshire and also visited the Royal court of King Vortigern. This may have been at Caer-Guricon (Wroxeter in Shropshire), in the middle of Vortigern's power-base, where the 'palace' of a rich and powerful 5th century lord has been excavated. Germanus accused Vortigern of fathering a child by his own daughter. Such a story may have been invented to further blacken Vortigern's name, while the Germanus in question may have the Breton St. Garmon who was active in adjoining North Wales rather than the Bishop of Auxerre.

Duplication of dates makes the exact path of events difficult to disentangle. However, it may be that further foreign invasions obliged Vortigern to once more to ask for Anglo-Jutish help around 451. The exiled Jutish leaders, Hengest and Horsa, and their men arrived in Ceint (Kent) and were welcomed by the King of Britain. He agreed to clothe and house them in return for their mercenary services. Eventually, however, Vortigern was unable to uphold his side of the bargain, so the Jutes sent for reinforcements to prevent their expulsion. Plying Vortigern with drink, they persuaded him to hand over the Kingdom of Ceint (Kent) to them in return for the hand of Hengest's beautiful young daughter, Rhonwen. At the same time, her brother, Octha, was sent north to settle the region and hold back the Picts.  

 

Answer 4

I'm so grateful for this discussion with the many superb insights and references.

Of course, my original question on LNAB is still not answered.  It would appear that the distinction between legend and myth would be important here.  If the individual is legendary, and beneath the many tales there is a core of truth about a real person waiting to be found, then it is proper to ask what that real person would have considered his or her LNAB.  If the individual is a myth and never existed in any form, then a person who never existed could not have a preference about a name, and we should be free to assign whatever name best suits us, I would think!