- Chapter Thirty-Six -
Teudisca is derived from the word for a people, Old English theod, Old High
German diot, thiot. Teudisca is thus the language of the people, but it is not easy to
say which people was the thiot that spoke teudisca. The Franks were on both sides
of this linguistic divide, speaking romana lingua as well as teudisca lingua: teudisca
lingua was not just Frankish. Moreover, we have already seen that someone coming
from Francia could use the word without hesitation of English. Teudisca, therefore,
does not define the thiot of the Franks; Frankishness, quite simply, was not a matter
of language. In the letter of George of Ostia to Hadrian, the context of the word
is public reading of the decrees both in Latin and in theodisc. Deutsch, then, is in
origin the language of the people in the sense of the local population, whether
English or East Frankish, as opposed to Latin. It is not applied to Old French
because of the still evident relationship between lingua romana and lingua Latina
and because, to Germanic speakers, Romance was known as walhisk (cognate with
'Welsh' but applied to Romans)Y East of the Rhine, and in a context in which west-
ern Franks were not involved, matters were different. Here the local language could
be characteristic of a people. Thus Old High German glosses on Latin texts could be
marked by the letter .f. standing for franciske, (East) Frankish.^58
Cymraeg has a similar origin. It was not necessarily the language of every bro in
Roman Britain, but only of those districts whose principal language was not Latin
(just as theodisc was not the language of every theod in Britain or in the Frankish
empire). In those districts it was 'the local language', Cymraeg, as opposed to Latin.
It so happened, however, that only one language, apart from Latin, was widely
spoken in Roman Britain, namely British. This identity of British with the native
language of Roman Britain explains the equivalence for Bede of the Britons with
speakers of British, and for Cormac of Bretnas and Combrec. The notion of Cymraeg
derives, therefore, from a Romano-British contrast between the language of govern-
ment, of the church and of the aristocracy - the language of the empire as a whole
- and the language spoken locally. By the dominant side this contrast would have
been seen as one between lingua Latina and lingua vulgaris, but by the locals, the
Cymry, as one between Latin and Cymraeg.
The roots of a sense of nationality among the Cymry were then largely linguistic
and cultural and depended on a contrast between 'us' and the Romans. This contrast
we find already taken for granted in the sixth century in Gildas: the Romani came
from overseas to subdue the Britanni to good laws;59 the Romans are one gens, the
Britons another.^60 Cives, 'fellow-citizens', in this island can be contrasted with those
subject to 'the kings across the sea', transmarini reges.^61 What then made the Cymry,
the locals, into one people, was the plain fact that whether they lived in Penwith in
Cornwall or by the banks of the Clyde, their local language, when contrasted with
57 L. Weisgerber, 'Walhisk: die geschichtliche Leistung des Wortes Welsch', Rheinische
Vierteljahrbliitter 13 (1948): 87-146; id., Deutch als Volksname, 115-251.
58 W. Braune, K. Helm and W. Mitzka, Althochdeutsche Grammatip2 (Tiibingen, 1967),
p. II, § 6 d, n. I.
59 Gildas, De Excidio Britanniae, 5.
60 Ibid., c. 25.
61 Ibid., c. 4-