- Chapter Thirty-Six -
British as a language was, therefore, losing speakers in the post-Roman period on
a scale not to be matched until the twentieth century. By the same token, the nascent
English formed from the various Germanic dialects introduced by the settlers was
showing a remarkable capacity to assimilate large numbers of Britons without any
appreciable influence from British on its grammar or vocabulary.155 The problem is
all the greater since one explanation of the uniformity of the earliest English depends
on the role of the Britons who abandoned British for English. Koine Greek offers
a parallel. The relatively uniform Greek learned by non-Greeks in the empire
of Alexander and its successor states became the standard form of the language.
The numerical preponderance of the koine eventually ensured that it superseded even
the dialects of Greece itself. So, one might suggest in Britain: the language of Angles
may have differed from that of Jutes, the language of Frisians from that of Saxons,
but what survived to become English was the koine learnt by the Britons under
English rule. Yet if this explanation is to have any chance of being accepted, it will
be necessary to explain why Old English is so lacking in any symptoms of British
influence.
Bede shows in his Ecclesiastical History that two things were common knowledge
about the English of his day. It was well known that English differed according to
region and according to social status. He remarks in passing that the West Saxon king
Ca:lin was known to his own people as Ceaulin.^156 The story he tells about the
wounding of the Northumbrian noble Imma at the battle of the Trent in 679, and
his subsequent fate at the hands of his Mercian captors, is one of the most important
passages of the entire work for anyone wishing to understand early English
society.157 Imma, once in the hands of the Mercians, pretended to be a rusticus; he
was, however, revealed to be a noble by, among other things, his language. We do not
know whether the nobility of his language consisted in its phonology, grammar or
vocabulary or a mixture of more than one of these, but we do know that a man's
status could be indicated by the way he spoke. Indeed we know rather more since
Imma's status was recognized across the boundary of a kingdom and of a dialect.
A Mercian could tell the status of a Northumbrian from the way he talked. From
this hard information some modest speculation may proceed. To judge by the
archaeological, and indeed the historical, evidence, N orthumbria was, of all the
major Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, the least widely and heavily settled by Anglo-
Saxons.15S Major segments of Northumbrian territory had been British in political
155 If similarities between Welsh and English syntax, for example in the use of auxiliary verbs,
are to be attributed to British influence on English, as claimed by H. Wagner, Das Verbum
in den Sprachen der Britischen Inseln (Tiibingen, 1959), 143-51, nevertheless the similarity
did not emerge until the later Middle Ages. Moreover, they may well be examples of
phenomena affecting neighbouring languages without the direction of influence being at
all clear.
156 Historia Ecclesiastica, 11.5 (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, p. 148).
157 Historia Ecclesiastica, IV.22 (20) (ed. Colgrave and Mynors, pp. 400-4).
158 L. Alcock, Economy, Society and Warfare among the Britons and the Anglo-Saxons
(Cardiff, 1987), ch. 17.732