CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
LANGUAGE AND SOCIETY
AMONG THE INSULAR CELTS
AD 400-1000
--.... --
Thomas Charles-Edwards
I
n this chapter I shall discuss three relationships in the world of the Insular Celts:
of language to nationality; of language to status; of language to the connections
between the Insular Celts and the wider world, first of the Roman Empire and then
of Latin Christendom.! The three relationships cannot be separated. This is obvious
enough for the first and the third, for they are two sides of a single issue: how far did
language convey a sense of difference, or of community, between the peoples within
the British Isles and even within western Europe? The second relationship is also
directly germane, for a crucial question both in the late Roman period and afterwards
is how far elites, political, religious and intellectual, were distinguished by their
linguistic behaviour. Under the Roman Empire a British noble was far more likely
to speak Latin than a British peasant.^2 Our understanding of the shape of British
society after the Romans will be considerably aided by finding an answer to the
question of when a British noble ceased to speak Latin. A related question is why
the Britons who settled in Gaul in the fifth century were not accepted as fellow
citizens of the empire. Was language something which divided them from their Gallic
neighbours? If one judges only by the languages their medieval descendants spoke
- French and Breton -then of course it was. But the distinction may not have been
that clear, especially if it is true that many Welsh continued to speak Latin at the very
time when their fellow Britons were settling in Armorica.^3 Or, again, if we cross
the Irish Sea, what sustained the existence of Old Irish as a standard language
almost without dialect variation? In an island notorious for its many small kingdoms
one would expect numerous dialects. Was Old Irish the form of the language spoken,
or just written, by religious and intellectual elites? Was it also used by the secular
nobility?
I am much indebted to Oliver Padel and Paul Russell for their comments on a draft of this
chapter.
2 This was already happening within a generation or two of the Claudian conquest: Tacitus,
Agricola c. 21; d. E. Hamp, 'Social gradience in British spoken Latin', Britannia 6 (1975):
150-61.
3 I shall occasionally, as here, use 'Welsh' for British inhabitants of what later became Wales.
This is anachronistic but convenient.