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Monday, 7 November, 1910.

The Rev. Dr Stokes, President, in the Chair.

Mr Arthur Gray read the two following papers.

I. On the Late Survival of a Celtic Population in East Anglia.

It was once an axiomatic belief of historians of the English Conquest of Britain that that conquest resulted in the practical extirpation of the Celtic peoples whom the invaders found in occupation of the island, at least in its southern and eastern parts. For such a belief there are many natural grounds. Not least is that national pride in the name of Englishman, and that consequent conviction of the purity of English blood and the masterful qualities of the English race which very noticeably colour the writings of such otherwise trustworthy historians as Freeman and Green. And in this belief that the British race was practically exterminated throughout wide stretches of once British ground historians were supported by sounder and less sentimental considerations. On that race, if it survived under English dominion, a silence descended which is broken by no reference in the pages of that history which is most nearly contemporary with the age immediately succeeding the conquest. The wrecks of the material civilisation of Rome, the waste “chesters” and abandoned walls of its legionaries, were a perpetual reminder to Baeda and the Anglo-Saxon chroniclers that in the land which they called by their name and recognised as their own by conquest the English had been preceded by a race mightier in war and more skilled in the arts of peace than themselves. But of British arts, of British law, of British Christianity in the conquered lands they either know nothing or have nothing that they deem worth telling. The impression left by the silence of antiquity seemed to the historian to be confirmed by the lack of any evidence pointing to the {43} perpetuation of the Celtic language or Celtic civilisation in the English area after the English conquest. Anglo-Saxon craftsmanship owed something to ancient Rome, nothing to the Briton. The dialects of Eastern England have borrowed much from the Dane: the language of Wales has left them hardly a recognisable word. And the most overwhelming evidence of the practical obliteration of the Celt throughout Eastern England is to be found in its place names. The map shows an almost unbroken expanse of Teutonic names. Here and there an important Roman centre survived as a “chester” or a “coln” into Saxon times. Here and there a “vicus” passed on its name, as a “wick,” to the isolated home of an English settler. The rivers and the wastes, the deserted hill-fort and the burial mound of the earlier race might keep the name by which they were known to the Briton, and perhaps to the Briton’s predecessor in the land, but from the habitations of man the British name might seem wholly to have passed away.

Yet for evidence of such complete extirpation of the conquered we shall search in vain the records of those writers whose day most nearly approached the English invasions. Once only do we hear of the wholesale massacre of Britons. It was when, in the words of the Chronicle, “Aelle and Cissa beset Andredesceaster and slew all that dwelt therein: there was not one Briton left.” The horror of the event stands out of its bald context as something unique. What was possible within the walls of a captured stronghold was not possible in the field, the fen or the forest. Gildas the Wise, from whom alone we draw our knowledge of the fate of the Welsh people after the English conquest—for Baeda merely echoes his words—gives us indeed a grim picture of the savagery of the English, but he lays no such unredeemed blood-guiltliness to their charge. He says:

“Of the wretched survivors some were caught in mountains and butchered in heaps. Others, famine-stricken, came and gave themselves up to their enemies to be their slaves for ever: to be spared from slaughter was matter to them of deepest gratitude. Some, with loud laments, sought homes beyond the sea. Others in mountains and hills, {44} amid beetling crags or entrenched in deep forests and rocky isles, beset with terror and suspicion, yet persisted in their faith (credentes perstabant) in the land of their fathers.”

The picture is drawn in lurid colours, yet I hope to show that it accurately portrays the lot of the British survivors in our own East Anglia and its adjacent shires, and that not only in the times of which Gildas writes but for some five centuries afterwards. The materials which I have to offer you are necessarily slight, but the facts, such as they are, give us a definite and consistent picture. In that picture the Welshman, as he was called by his East Anglian or Mercian conqueror, appears as the prædial serf whose life is almost inestimably cheap in the sight of the thane who is his proprietor, as the brigand of the forest or the squalid savage of the fen. And, far down into the Saxon age, we shall find him retaining his Welsh speech, and, more wonderful still, retaining, as Gildas tells us, relics of British Christian faith, though that faith seemed to his converted conquerors little better than the heathenry from which they had themselves been redeemed by Augustine and his followers. And in legend and tradition I shall endeavour to show that he still joined hands with his brethren in Wales and Cornwall and even in distant Brittany. I need not tell you that I shall not find the evidence of this in record that deserves the name of History. The scattered fragments of the Welsh people in Eastern England have no place in History; politically they do not exist. The Christianised Saxon regarded his British co-religionist with simple abhorrence. His creed to Baeda [44.1] was “impiety,” and, as missionary effort was wasted on the Welsh survivors in English lands, he drops out of Ecclesiastical History. Nor will Welshmen be mentioned as owners or witnesses in land charters, for the essential condition of their survival was that they were landless and negligible. The witness to their existence as serfs or outlaws in the Eastern lands which had once been their own is to be gathered mainly from monkish story, from romance or the mythical borderland of History. I do not think that the value of the evidence is much diminished by the {45} circumstance that for the most part it is embedded in fiction. The gleeman and the monastic raconteur were bound by the same conditions as a modern novelist. They will not, as Horace says, paint a dolphin in the woods, nor will they introduce Welshmen into their tale in places and at times which their hearers cannot credit.

The first evidence which I shall offer you of this survival of a Welsh-speaking population in Eastern England relates to Crowland, which is in the Lincolnshire fens, and it comes from the life of Saint Guthlac, told by Felix of Crowland, who lived in the first quarter of the eighth century [45.1]. Felix tells us that Guthlac retired to an anchorite’s hold at Crowland soon after the year 700, and there made his abode in a tumulus which had been excavated by treasure-seekers. His settlement in the heart of the Fens was much resented by the indigenous population, who happened to be devils, and, to show their displeasure, they practised on him such practical jokes as suggested themselves to their devilish natures. To a saintly man, who knew both and liked neither, the distinction between a Welshman and a devil was not very appreciable. Even to less pious characters such as Dame Quickly and Sir John Falstaff the affinity was obvious: a “Welsh devil” was an expression familiar to the one, and the other thought it the most natural thing in the world for a fairy to talk in the dialect of Sir Hugh Evans. But the devils of Crowland had none of the usual characteristics of devils—horns, tails, talons and goat-feet. On the contrary, they had all the appearance of degraded savages—great heads, lean necks, blubber lips, {46} ragged hair and beards, bow legs and teeth like horses’ teeth. One of the exploits of these devil-savages is told thus by Felix:

“Now it happened in the days of Coenred, king of Mercia, when the Britons, the deadly foes of the Saxon race, were disturbing the English people by their raids and widespread devastations, that one night, about cock-crow, Guthlac of blessed memory was applying himself to prayers and vigils, and was overcome by a dreamy slumber, when he fancied that he heard cries of some disorderly mob. In a moment he awoke from his light sleep, and went out of the cell where he was sitting. There he stood listening intently and caught words of the common people, and saw some bands of Britons approaching his dwelling. For in the course of his former life he had been in exile among the Britons so long that he was able to understand their strident speech. He hastened over the marshes towards his abode, and almost at the same instant saw all his house enveloped in flames, and the Britons, intercepting his approach, began to poise in the air their sharp-pointed darts. Then the man of God, perceiving the craft of the Fiend in assuming a thousand artful shapes, as with a prophetic voice struck up the first verse of the sixty-seventh psalm, ‘Let God arise.’ On hearing which in a moment the troops of demons vanished from his face like smoke [46.1].”

From saintly legend I pass to the gleeman’s Lay of Havelok, and again the scene is in Lincolnshire. Professor Skeat, in the preface to his edition of the English poem on the subject (published by the Early English Text Society) remarks that there can be little doubt that the story of Havelok has come down from Anglo-Saxon times. It exists in various versions, French and English, which differ in respect of the names and incidents introduced in them. All are unhistoric but introduce personages purporting to be historical, and in all the scene is laid in Anglo-Saxon England. Professor Skeat says (Preface, p. xxxiv.) “My theory is that the Lay of Havelok is the general result of various narratives connected with the history of Northumbria and Lindsey (Lincs.) at the close, or possibly at the beginning, of the sixth century, gathered round some favourite Lincolnshire tradition as a nucleus.” According to a French version of the tale, told by Gaimar about the year 1135, Havelok was son of Gunter, king of Denmark, who was slain by his rival, Hodulf. Hodulf then usurped the throne and ordered a fisherman, named Grim, to murder Havelok. {47} Instead of obeying his orders Grim escaped with Havelok, sailed to England, and landed at the place called after him Grimsby. There Havelok was brought up in the belief that he was Grim’s son, and together they followed the calling of fishermen. After twelve years Havelok goes out to seek his fortune and becomes a scullion in the kitchen of king Alsi, who held his court at Lincoln and ruled over Lincoln, Lindsey, Rutland and Stamford. King Alsi, though his name is unquestionably Saxon, is represented as a Briton by race [47.1]. Havelok was treated with derision by his fellow servants. As Gaimar says:

“For a fool they all took him,
And sport they made of him.
Cuaran they called him;
For thus call the Britons
A cook in their language.”

And so it happens that in some versions the Havelok story became the Lay of Curan, and from the 16th century English ballad of Curan and Argentille the name descended to Curan whom Shakespeare introduces as a servant about the court of the British king Lear. I am not concerned with the derivation of the name, which Professor Skeat regards as genuinely Celtic. I may note however that Chaucer in The House of Fame (1208i.e. line 1208) introduces “the Bret (i.e. Welsh) Glascurion,” as a harper, in the distinguished company of Orpheus and Arion; also that a Danish chief, Anlaf Cwiran, is mentioned in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, anno 949, and is probably identical with the Northman Anlaf who fought against king Athelstan at Brunanburh and then returned to Dublin. The whole tale of Havelok from the historical standpoint is a welter of confusion, but the names which it brings in are Anglo-Saxon or Danish, not British, and historical fact is so far respected that a Dane is found at Grimsby and a Danish king in Norfolk. So there may be a genuine historical significance in the appearance at Lincoln among Teutonic surroundings of a British speaking people and a British king.

{48} My next evidence is from a story which is most familiar to us in the version of it which Chaucer makes his Man of Lawes Tale. Chaucer drew the story from the French chronicle of Nicholas Trivet [48.1], written about 1384, and Trivet says that he got it from “the ancient chronicles of the Saxons.” Of course there is nothing about it in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but I take it that Trivet’s source, so far as the story connects itself with England, is not the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, but some old tale dating from Anglo-Saxon times: indeed there is hardly equivocal evidence in his story that such was the fact [48.2]. The scene of the English part of Trivet’s tale is laid on the shore of the Humber—whether on the Yorkshire or Lincolnshire side does not appear—where Elda, a Saxon, is warder of a castle belonging to Alle, the king of Northumberland. King Alle is evidently to be identified with Aelle, who, according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, was king of Northumbria from 560 to 588, and is familiar to us in Baeda’s story of St Gregory and the English slaves in the market-place of Rome. According to the story of Trivet and Chaucer, Constance, daughter of the Emperor of Rome, is set afloat by herself in a ship which at last is driven ashore close to Elda’s castle. There she converts to the Christian faith Hermengild, wife of Elda. By her prayers Hermengild is enabled to restore sight to a blind Christian Briton, who lives near the castle among pagan Saxons. Chaucer’s development of the story is interesting. He says that “the christianitee” of the old Britons had taken refuge from the heathen conquerors in Wales, but that some still remained who privily honoured Christ, and three of these dwelt near the castle, the blind man being one {49} of them. In the sequel the blind man brings a Welsh bishop, Lucius, from Bangor, who converts the Saxons.

My next tale takes us to the Huntingdonshire border of the Fens. In the year 1002 a peasant belonging to the town of Slepe discovered a buried chest. It was revealed to the abbot of the neighbouring monastery of Ramsey that it contained the bones of St Ivo, a Persian bishop, who, with three companions, had wandered to Britain, and there had died “in a muddy province.” Slepe, as Professor Skeat [49.1] informs us, is the A.S. slǽp, a slippery or miry place. The abbot transported the bones to Ramsey, where they proved as efficacious as was to be expected in producing miracles and money. Of the miracles an ample advertisement was written, about the year 1090, by a certain Ramsey monk, named Goscelin. The story which I quote from him relates to the town of Slepe, or, as it was afterwards called, St Ive’s [49.2].

“Once upon a time, when the savage and untamable race of the Britons was ravaging far and wide in the province of Huntingdon, the country-folk of Slepe took their property to the church of St Ivo, and committed it to his keeping. When the aforesaid wolfish people learnt this they hastened thither with truculent intent, burst open the church doors, and carried off everything deposited within. One of them, looking up, saw two bells hanging from beams, and, coveting them, climbed up to take them away. But just as he was setting hands on them, in order to lower them, he suddenly fell to the ground, broke all his bones, and was killed. The rest, when they saw this, were horribly afraid that a like fate would befall them. So, seeing that the place was sacred and rendering honour to God and St Ivo, they humbly restored all that they had so haughtily carried off.”

The pious chronicler proceeds to compare the fate of the sacrilegious Briton with the punishment of Heliodorus, recorded in the second book of Maccabees, but adds that the Briton, as a nominal Christian, was the worse offender. The incident belongs to the years between 1002 and 1090. It is likely that the raiders were emboldened by a time of national disorder, such as the Danish wars of Aethelred II or the troubles in the Isle of Ely after the Norman Conquest. That there were {50} Welsh brigands in England who availed themselves of the license of such times is shown by the terms of the treaty which Aethelred made with the Danes in 991, in which each party undertook not to abet the Welshmen, thieves or foes of the other [50.1]. We gather from the story that the Fen outlaws of the eleventh century still professed the ancient British type of Christianity, and their actions fully bear out the description given of the Britons four centuries earlier by Baeda, that, though they bore the name and professed the faith of Christians, it was their custom in his day not to pay any respect to the faith and religion of the English, nor to correspond with them any more than with pagans.

Here is another story from a Ramsey source, a story which takes us from the Fen to the Forest [50.2]. On the high Royston downs, looking down on Icknield Way, lies the little Hertfordshire village of Therfield. The Ramsey monks had an estate there, and the Abbey Chronicler tells us how they became possessed of it. Aetheric, bishop of Dorchester, in his boyhood had been a novice of the Abbey. Once a week the novices had a holiday, and were allowed to play outside the cloister, and, on one such occasion, he and three other lads amused themselves by ringing the bells, which hung in the western tower of the church: and they rang them with such vigour that they cracked one of the bells, thereby incurring the grave displeasure of the abbot and brethren. When he became a bishop he set himself seriously to make amends for his youthful misdemeanour by procuring endowments in land for the Abbey, which was in his diocese. Among the properties so acquired was that at Therfield, and it was on this wise that he obtained it. King Cnut had bestowed it on a certain Danish follower, who was so unpopular with his English neighbours that he lived in daily fear of being murdered. Every night his house was guarded by four villagers in turn. One night the Dane lay awake, and heard the four watchers talking outside, and what they said was this: “What’s the good of this? How long are we going to put up with this tiresome job? How long are we going to {51} keep nightly watch for this foreign fellow, who deserves to be handed over to the Britons to murder? We are wretchedly poor, and he has piles of money, and bothers us to protect his abominable existence. Let’s take heart of grace and stick a knife in his bowels. The village shan’t be troubled with him any more.” The Dane was so much frightened that he went off to consult his nearest friends before daybreak. They told him that it was out of the question to evict the whole village, and that it was not safe to punish the guilty four, for fear of retaliation. So the Dane went off to London, and, happening to find the bishop talking with King Cnut, sold him the property on easy terms, and returned to Denmark. From the story we gather that there were British bandits not far from Royston in the tenth century.

Next we come to our own county of Cambridge and to the famous Gild of the Thanes at Grantabrycge [51.1]. The terms of the Gild regulations show that the members were country-gentlemen, who probably met at Cambridge but did not reside there. The Gild and its rules probably belong to the tenth century. It was a friendly society the aim of which was mutual support and assistance. One of the regulations relates to the contributions of the members in aid of a gild-brother who has rendered himself liable to a wergild, or compensation to the relatives of a man whom he has slain. It runs thus:

“If any of the gild slay a man, and he be an avenger by compulsion (neadwraca) and compensate for his violence, and the slain man be a twelfhynde man, let each of the gild give half a mark for his aid: if the slain man be a ceorl, two oras: if he be Welsh (Wylisc) one ora.”

Now I think that there can be no doubt that a Wylisc man was a Briton, not a Saxon theow; the name was exclusively applied to men of Celtic race. The Welshman for whom compensation was paid was of course not an outlaw, but a serf attached to a lord. It is noticeable that the wergild for a Welshman in Wessex law varied from one-tenth to one-fifth of the compensation for a twelfhynde man, the man whose wergild value was highest, viz. 1200 shillings: in the Cambridge {52} scale it is one-fourth. The higher relative value attached to the life of the lowest class in Cambridgeshire corresponds with the fact revealed by Domesday that the proportion of serfs to the whole population was lowest in East Anglia and increased steadily in a westerly direction, becoming highest in Cornwall and the counties near the Welsh border. We may infer that, though a Welsh servile population existed in Cambridgeshire in the tenth century, it was not so numerous as elsewhere, and that there the Welshman’s life was more respected.