- Chapter Thirty-Six -
more rare - a mere ten in Max Forster's list.^148 Yet Welsh showed no inhibitions in
borrowing from English.^149 The exiguous traffic the other way, from British into
English, cannot be explained by any paucity of contacts between the two peoples
or by any mass extermination or migration of Britons. This is demonstrated very
simply by considering the character of Old English both within and without the
areas of the country settled by the English in any numbers. To judge by cemetery
evidence, relatively few English settled west of a line running from Dorset along the
Cotswolds north to the Pennines. Yet the English language west of this line was no
less English than the language east of the line. There are very few Anglo-Saxon graves
north of the Tees. The bulk of the inhabitants of Bernicia therefore appear to have
been Britons by descent, yet Lothian became as English in language as Kent. The
direct implication is that English showed an ability to assimilate tens of thousands of
Britons so thoroughly that hardly a trace of British remained in the English
they spoke. The relationship of English to both the cognate Scandinavian language
of the Vikings and the much more distant French of the Normans was to be utterly
different. The English dialects of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire betray Scandinavian
influence to an even greater extent than does standard English. French had a wide
impact on English from the Channel to northern Scotland. These examples suggest
that what determined relations between English and the languages with which it
came in contact was the social and political status of the languages concerned.
Probably the number of Scandinavians settling in England was greatly inferior to
the number of Britons who had earlier passed under English rule. Scandinavian
linguistic influence was vastly greater because the political power and social status of
the settlers were high.
The Britons were wealas, foreigners; and because they were foreigners they had
lower status. The treatment of the wealh in Wessex in the late seventh century was
essentially the same as that which the Salian Franks offered to their Roman subjects
in the early sixth century. ISO This makes it likely that, give or take the odd detail, we
have here a common approach adopted by the Germanic settlers within the empire
on either side of the Channel. For the Franks the Gallo-Romans were walas just as
the Britons were wealas to the English. They had a legal status, but their wergilds
were around half those enjoyed by the corresponding Frankish or English rank.
A Frank who entered the trustis or war-band of his king had a wergild of 600
solidi.151 The corresponding Gallo-Roman was the conviva regis, the man admitted
148 M. Forster, 'Keltisches Wortgut im Englischen', in H. Boehmer et al., Texte und
Forschungen zur englischen Kulturgeschichte. Festgabe fur Felix Liebermann (Halle,
1921),119-41; also published separately (Halle, 1921); the list has hardly changed in D.
Kastorsky's chapter, 'Semantics and vocabulary', in R.M. Hogg (ed.) The Cambridge
History of the English Language, I The Beginnings to [066 (Cambridge, 1992), 318-19.
149 T.H. Parry-Williams, The English Element in Welsh: a study of English loan-words in
Welsh (Cymmrodorion Record Series X; London, 1923), ch. 2.
150Ine, 23.3, 24.2, 32, 46.1, 74 (ed. F. Liebermann, Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen (Halle,
1903-16),1.100-20) compared with Pactus Legis Salicae, ed. K.A. Eckhardt (MGH, Leges
Nationum Germanicarum, IV. i Hanover, 1962), XLI.8-10 (note the Malberg glosses,
uualaleodi, versus the simple leodi of XLI. 1 and 5), XLII.4.
Ip Pactus Legis Salicae, XLI.5.730