Origines Britannicae

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I have just finished reading Stephen Oppenheimer’s Origins of the British, a book I have been intending to read since I heard Daphne Nash-Briggs’ paper at the ‘Land of the Iceni’ conference, in which she drew on one of the ideas in Oppenheimer’s book (that English was spoken in eastern Britain in the Iron Age) to claim that Icenian coin legends represent a primitive form of English. I was unconvinced by her argument, but curious to see where she had got it from.

I lack the scientific knowledge to criticise any of Oppenheimer’s genetic conclusions but I imagine that many people will consider that his book ranges too widely beyond his own specialism of ‘palaeogenetics.’ He claims, for instance, that native rulers issued their own coinage under Roman rule (the only possible example of this is the Iceni Esuprasto unit and this is far from certain) and he treats the Tuatha De Danaan as an actual people who were worshippers of the ‘goddess Dana’ (the nominative is Danu), completely missing the point that the Tuatha De are the euhemerised gods of Iron Age Ireland. His knowledge of numismatics and mythology is, then, a little too weak for him to be taken seriously in those fields. Nevertheless, I was intrigued by his observation that Irish mythology, taken at face value, is more accurate than most of the history attempted in the last 200 years.

My chief interest, however, was in what Oppenheimer had to say about eastern Britain and about the English language. I acknowledge that the apparent ancient branching of English is interesting, yet the fact remains that Occam’s Razor applies when someone tries to claim that the people in a part of Britain whose Iron Age rulers had Brythonic names, whose rivers have Brythonic names, and whose towns in the Antonine Itinerary and Ravenna Cosmography have Brythonic names actually spoke English…at the very most, I would be prepared to consider the possibility that a Brythonic-speaking elite ruled an English-speaking people, but on the other hand rivers and towns tend not to be named or renamed successfully by elites, no matter how hard they might try. Furthermore, the Roman east of Britain shows cultural conitinuity with the west (and indeed with Gaul) in such matters as temple construction, and the fact that the people of eastern Britain are genetically a different set of settlers from those who came to live in the Brythonic-speaking west does not mean that Brythonic culture and language could not dominate them. It probably dominated them at a very early period. Indeed, in religious terms it appears that Brythonic Anglesey dominated not just Britain but Gaul as well.

I find Oppenheimer’s criticism of Gildas and his suggestion that Saxon settlers were already present in Britain in the third century much more convincing. The rapid assimilation of eastern Britain and East Anglia in particular into the Anglo-Saxon world is suggestive of this. Oppenheimer is puzzled by the lack of a Brythonic substratum for Anglo-Saxon given the Saxon absorption of indigenous inhabitants, but the same could be said for French; why are there so few Gaulish words in it, and why is there so little Germanic Frankish influence? Linguistics is full of oddities and it is perhaps best for a geneticist to avoid speculation.

The overall message of Oppenheimer’s book is that Europe has been, on the whole, genetically conservative since the Palaeolithic recolonisation of northern Europe 15,000 years ago. Oppenheimer makes interesting observations about cultural change that challenge the orthodoxy of ‘progress’ from Mesolithic hunter-gathering to Neolithic farming. In Ireland, for instance, we have a Mesolithic culture that chose to adopt cattle ranching and beakers some time before it fully embraced agriculture. Where cultural change was once seen as evidence of conquest or at least some abstract idea of progress, the genetic conservatism of Europe suggests that change was more a matter of prestige and immitation; presumably the elites of Mesolithic Ireland traded with their Neolithic neighbours and admired them – consequently they copied their practices and, in the course of time, a ‘tipping point’ was reached where there had been so much cultural alteration as a result of imitation that the old ways became untenable, and the Mesolithic culture of Ireland became Neolithic less as a product of ‘progress’ than as the outcome of progressive elite assimilation. The same process could be seen among the elites of Britain and France in the last 200 years – a constant desire by the British to emulate the French that filtered down from the upper to the middle and eventually to the working class.

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