Ivanhoe again and Casey is mostly ignorant stream of consciousness
Ivanhoe again and Casey is mostly ignorant stream of consciousness
Cedric is all "true English this!" and "Saxon that!" and "Norman usurpers!" Wait, I think, Saxons have "only" been in England 600 years at this point. Aren't the Britons and other Celts the true English? Off to Google. Oh, England means Anglo-Saxon. Before that it's just a bunch of Romanized barbarian British, not English. Too many words for the same island/people/land/whatever. King Arthur turning into the "King of England" is weird. Insert sage thought about current anti-immigration idiocy here.
As I recall (and this is far from my area of expertise) the Welsh are the closest ethnic group to being the original inhabitants of Britain. Everybody else is descended from successive groups of Germanic invaders. (Even the Normans, as I recall, were germanic settlers within Frankia)
ReplyDeleteAlso, the closest match we can get for a historical Arthur was a Romanized (or possibly even Roman) Briton, who fought the invading Anglo Saxons.
Yeah, the French-Normans were fucking Vikings paid (in land and titles) to beat up other Vikings.
ReplyDeleteWales would be one of the only places where Norsemen dropped few ships and few dicks, and probably the last traces of Briton-genetics. Wales was also in perpetually in rebellion during the most of the medieval period. Not many Anglo-dicks dropped there either.
Germanic and Nordic folks just sort of fuck-murdered the rest of them out of existence.
If I ever write a history book, Dick History .
Yeah, England literally means land of the Angles (Angland). The Angles were far more dominant than the Saxons until the Vikings crushed Mercia and Northumbria and East Anglia.
ReplyDeleteSubsequently, Wessex under Alfred the Great carried the English banner against the Danes and the Saxons achieved dominance.
But Angland, land of the Angles stuck...Not the least of which because they were pretty much cousins anyway, coming from neighboring regions of Frisia (aka the Netherlands).
The Welsh were originally thought to be an iron-age migration of Indo-Europeans, but while the language and culture shifted to I-E, the DNA largely traces back to Stone Age Britons originally from Iberia (and closely related to the Basques).
So whatever cultural shift happened (perhaps an I-E ruling class) the bulk of ethnic Welsh have been in Briton since Paleolithic times.
Prior to the Romans these Brythonians resided throughout Britain south of the highlands. The Welsh are basically those Brythonians who didn't get as thoroughly Romanized.
Actually the Normans were big on immigrating into Wales. They established a ton of castles (several dozen) to keep the locals in line.
ReplyDeleteAll of southwest Wales became pretty much Norman aka English by the 12th C.
IIRC, the north of Wales saw them making little headway outside of thier keeps.
ReplyDelete