Why do the British speak English and not a variety of Welsh?  Philip Jenkins, having fallen under the sway of a Harvard medieval historian, Michael McCormick, believes it is because the invading Germans of the fifth and sixth centuries killed all the Celtic-speaking male Britons in what is now England.  (See “Once There Was a War,” Breaking Glass, November 2009.)  The evidence offered for this hypothesis is the rhetoric of a sixth-century Welsh cleric, Gildas, backed up by a similarity in the Y-chromosomes of Englishmen and Frisians.  And why is this recondite argument being aired in the pages of Chronicles?  Because Mr. Jenkins thinks that softy, left-liberal historians “invent comfortable fictions to justify their political ideologies,” and that it is time someone told the unpleasant truth, not just about the English, but about war, barbarians in general, and their influence on culture.

Mr. Jenkins (whose name, I notice, is Welsh) has opted for an uncomfortable fiction from Harvard, but it is a fiction nonetheless.

First, Gildas does not tell us that “a million Romano-British men alive in 400 vanished without genetic trace.”  He tells us that towns were wrecked, that some people were killed and others emigrated, but there is no evidence in Gildas’s vague and overheated rhetoric for what we would describe as a genocidal massacre.  As for the genetic evidence, the real story is a much more interesting one.  If Stephen Oppenheimer, a geneticist at Oxford, is right—and the consensus seems to be that he is—the population of the British Isles (English, Irish, Scots, Welsh, Cornish, Manx, und so weiter) is, genetically speaking, remarkably homogeneous.  It consists mostly of a basic, resident population overlaid by a small minority of invading Celts, Romans, Saxons, Vikings, and Normans; and, as one would expect, the invaders’ presence is smallest in Ireland and Wales, 12 percent and 20 percent, respectively.

There was a dramatic illustration of the basic truth of this finding a decade or so ago when another Oxford geneticist, having extracted the DNA of Cheddar Man, the oldest complete human remains found in Britain, went looking for it in the modern population of Cheddar.  To everyone’s surprise and amusement, he found it, too, coming up with three matches.  One of them was a history teacher in a nearby grammar school, who had the interesting experience of being told that he came of 10,000-year-old Neolithic stock.  His wife is reported as saying, “Maybe this explains why he likes his steaks rare.”

The implication is that most of us modern Brits, though we like to think of ourselves as Anglo-Saxons, Normans, Welsh, Irish, etc., are actually descended from the Neolithic people who built such places as Avebury, Stonehenge, and Brú na Bóinne.  This fact explains the otherwise puzzling behavior of the villagers of Uffington, Oxfordshire (formerly Berkshire), who, every seven years or so until the 20th century, held a special holiday, the “Scouring of the White Horse,” to clean up a great white horse carved into the hill above them.  In the rest of England, no one knew how old the monument was, nor exactly what it represented.  Was it a horse?  A dragon?  A dog?  A deer?  Meanwhile, the Uffingtonians, who knew exactly what it was—if anyone in Oxford or London had bothered to ask them—had been “scouring the horse” time out of mind, as one would expect if their ancestors had made it.  Carbon dating now gives the horse an age of at least 3,000 years, putting it well before the arrival of the Celts, let alone Mr. Jenkins’ murdering Saxons.

These findings have changed completely not only Mr. Jenkins’ tale of genocide but the whole story of the British people as we Brits were taught it in school.  Instead of a tale of waves of burly, progressive immigrants driving the backward indigenes into the western fringes of Cornwall and Wales, we have an emerging, but so far unwritten, story of a long-suffering, stationary native population acquiring well-armed new overlords from time to time.  What the invading Germans drove out of southern Britain wasn’t the native population but their Celtic warrior-aristocrat overlords, whose first representatives had begun to arrive about 800 years earlier.  As for the scale of such invasions: Only the Romans invaded with large professional armies whom they proceeded to install in purpose-built garrison towns to police their new province—princes, peasants, and all.  Other invasions were more modest affairs.  After all, what do we think of when we imagine an Anglo-Saxon invasion?  Something like D-Day with long ships?  In a rare moment of precision, Gildas tells us that the Anglo-Saxons initially came in three boatloads.  How many warriors is that?  About 150 at most?  In any case, Germanic people were not newcomers to Britain in the mid-fifth century.  Their raids along the east coast began in Roman times, and it is pretty certain, too, that Germanic settlers from the European mainland—Frisians, in particular—had begun arriving in eastern Britain long before the first shiploads of warriors came.  There was already a Germanic presence in the eastern part of England in the time of the British warrior-kings.

So why are we speaking English?  For that matter, why is anyone speaking Welsh?  What happened to the language of the people who built Stonehenge, whose posterity are still milling about the malls of Britain?  The answer is that no one really knows.  Conquest can certainly be a contributory cause of linguistic change, but it is not the determining one, as we know from later history.  A couple of hundred years after the Anglo-Saxons had established themselves in what is now England and southern Scotland, the Viking raids began.  The Vikings, who really were a spectacularly violent crowd of people, established kingdoms in Ireland, western Scotland, eastern England, and Normandy, yet in no case did their language take hold.  The great clan of MacDonald, lords of the isles until the 16th century, came of partly Viking ancestry; but they spoke Gaelic, like their cousins in Ireland.  In England, the Vikings governed much of the country for 200 years, and all of it for 25 years.  They left their linguistic signature upon place names ending in -by instead of -burgh, but otherwise had almost no effect on English except for the odd fact that their pronouns displaced the Anglo-Saxons’.  Then in 1066 the Normans came, took over the country, and expropriated the Anglo-Saxons just as the Anglo-Saxons had expropriated the Celts, now called the Welsh.  For nearly 300 years Norman French was the language of the court and of government.  If conquest and governance determine language, we should now be speaking French.  But for reasons no one can explain satisfactorily, by about 1360 English had come back, not just as the language of a dispossessed, enslaved, and illiterate peasantry, but as the language of government, the law courts, and literature.

Philologists have scratched their heads over this problem, and the best explanation they can come up with is that English, for some reason, is a “killer” language, which is to say that wherever it goes, it drives out other languages.  There is no apparent reason why the Anglo-Saxons—who, like the Vikings in Normandy, were a relatively small group of warriors who married the female kin of the resident proprietors whom they dispossessed—should not have adopted the language of their wives, tenants, children, and children’s nurses.  Instead, the wives, tenants, children, and nurses adopted the Anglo-Saxons’ language, in the process importing some distinctively Brythonic syntax into English, so that we now say such peculiar things—by Germanic standards—as “Did you see what she’s doing to the cat?”

Only on the western fringes, where there were no English speakers, could Welsh and Gaelic hold on; and once the Welsh, the Cornish, the Manx, and the Scottish highlanders began to mingle with the English, their own local languages began to fade.  Cornish went in the 18th century.  The last Manx speaker died 35 years ago.  Gaelic is still spoken in the Western Isles of Scotland, but it is very much a local tongue.

So notorious is the tendency of English to take over that the Irish, the Welsh, the Scots, and the Manx—as well as the French Canadians—have all resorted to various kinds of legal compulsion in the attempt, so far vain, to maintain or restore their vanquished languages as languages of choice for all transactions.  A similar battle is being fought in the United States between English and Spanish, and it will be interesting to see whether, with the weight of the federal government’s Anglophobia (or autophobia?) behind it, Spanish will hold its own.

Certainly, people died in the Anglo-Saxon conquest of southern England.  They also died in the Celtic, Roman, Viking, and Norman conquests; they died in the intra-Celtic, intra-Anglo-Saxon battles, as well.  But we have no reason to believe that those deaths had a determining influence on the way people spoke.