British Latin
| British Romance | |
|---|---|
| Region | Roman Britain, Anglo-Saxon England |
| Extinct | Early Middle Ages |
| Language codes | |
| ISO 639-3 | – |
British Romance, British Vulgar Latin or British Latin are terms used for the Vulgar Latin spoken in southern Great Britain (what became England and Wales) in Late Antiquity (an era also known in Britain history as "Sub-Roman").
Evidence and development
Kenneth H. Jackson, who pointed out that "Latin was a living spoken language in Britain under the Empire", used the evidence of loan-words in Welsh and Old Irish to try to diagnose 12 distinct features of British Romance.[1] Jackson's account of this has been disputed by later writers, and the matter of the distinctiveness of British Vulgar Latin is currently unclear.[2]
If it did exist as a distinct dialect group, it has not survived extensively enough for diagnostic features to be detected, despite much new sub-literary Latin being discovered in England in the 20th century.[3]
Scholars such as Christopher Snyder believe that during the 5th and 6th centuries — approximately from 410 AD when Roman legions withdrew, to 597 AD when St. Augustine of Canterbury arrived — southern Britain preserved a sub-Roman society that was able to survive the attacks from the barbarian Anglo-Saxons and even use a vernacular Latin for an active culture.[4]
There is even the possibility that this vernacular Latin lasted to the late VII century in the area of Chester, where have been found amphorae and arqueological remnants of a local Romano-British culture at Deva Victrix [5]Probably the Roman city lasted until 650AD [6].
As late as the eighth century the Saxon inhabitants of St Albans nearby the Roman city of Verulamium were aware of their ancient neighbor, which they knew alternatively as Verulamacæstir (or, under what H. R. Loyn terms "their own hybrid", Vaeclingscæstir, "the fortress of the followers of Wæcla") interpretable as a pocket of Romano-Britons that remained within the Anglo-Saxon countryside, probably speaking their own local neo-latin[7]
Rutupiae did its work in the storms of the fourth century. Of its fate in the fifth century we as yet know little. The abundance of late coinage, if it be not due to a limited period of very exceptional congestion, suggests that Richborough may, like Verulamium, have sheltered a Romanized population well on into that dark century.[8]
Other evidences are related to Wroxeter (Roman Viroconium Cornoviorum) [9] and Kent's Rutupiae [10]
Evidence from the Arthur stone
The stone reveals that the inhabitants of Tintagel were continuing to read and write Latin and to lead a Romanised way of life long after the Romans had left England in 410AD. Charles Thomas[11]
At Tintagel has been found a stone with inscriptions that confirm the existence of the British Romance, as a language used after the Roman departure from the British isles in 410 AD.[12]
It was misnamed Arthur stone (it is more properly dubbed the Artognou stone) and was discovered in 1998 in securely dated sixth-century contexts among the ruins at Tintagel Castle in Cornwall, a secular, high status settlement of Sub-Roman Britain. Apparently originally a practice dedication stone for some building or other public structure, it was broken in two and re-used as part of a drain when the original structure was destroyed.
The dating of the stone has been arrived at by two methods: first, the stone came from a securely stratified context in association with imported pottery of known types dating to the fifth/sixth centuries; second, forms of certain letters noted on the slate appear in British inscribed stones from Scotland to Cornwall post-500 and are certainly known elsewhere from 6th century north Cornwall (part of the kingdom of Dumnonia).
At the top right-hand corner of the fragment is a deeply-cut motif consisting (as visible) of a letter A and another incomplete character on either side of a large diagonal cross; the whole may represent a common Christian symbol, a Christogram, the Greek alphabet letters Alpha and Omega flanking a large Roman X, the initial of Christos (Christ). Below this and to the left, but overlapping it slightly, is a smaller, more lightly incised inscription in Latin, reading: PATERN[--] COLI AVI FICIT ARTOGNOU . This seems to have been repeated lower down and to the right; only the letters COL[.] and FICIT, on two lines, can be seen on the fragment.
The inscription has been translated as "Artognou descendant of Patern[us] Colus made (this). Colus made (this)."[13]
Also found in the sixth-century fort at Tintagel were numerous remains of expensive pottery, glasswork, and coins from Visigothic Spain and the Byzantine Empire (when excavated in the 1930s by C. A. Ralegh Radford). It would have had to be a powerful state to have sustained trade with the Mediterranean.
Furthermore the inscription proves that Tintagel was something of a cultural centre, where Latin was still familiar enough to be used informally in a simple personal stone inscription.
See also
Notes
- ^ Jackson, Language and History, pp. 82–94
- ^ See Wollman, "Early Latin loan-words", p. 15 n. 52 for survey
- ^ Adams, Regional Diversification of Latin, pp. 577–623
- ^ Sub-Roman Britain
- ^ Amphorae of 616 AD found in Sub-Roman Chester
- ^ Sub-Roman Chester
- ^ Loyn, Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest, 2nd ed. 1991:11.
- ^ Rutupiae church
- ^ Carrington, P (ed.) (2002). Deva Victrix: Roman Chester Re-assessed. Chester: Chester Archaeological Society. ISBN 0-9507074-9-X.
- ^ Rutupiae
- ^ Tintagel and the stone
- ^ Letters and words like "ficit" are different from classical latin "fecit" (that means "did" in english)
- ^ "Tintagel Island". Celtic Inscribed Stones Project (UCL). Retrieved 5 December 2009.
References
- Adams, J. M., The Regional Diversification of Latin 200 BC - AD 600, (Cambridge, 2007)
- Jackson, Kenneth H., Language and History in Early Britain: A Chronological Survey of the Brittonic Languages, First to Twelfth Century A. D., (Edinburgh, 1953)
- Wollman, Alfred, "Early Latin loan-words in Old English", in Anglo-Saxon England 22 (2007), pp. 1–26
Further reading
- Charles-Edwards, Thomas, "Language and Society among the Insular Celts, AD 400-1000", in M. J. Green (ed.), The Celtic World, ed. (London, 1995), pp. 703–36
- Gratwick, A. S., "Latinitas Britannica: Was British Latin Archaic?", in N. Brooks (ed.) Latin and the Vernacular Languages in Early Medieval Britain, (Leicester 1982), pp. 1–79
- MacManus, D., "Linguarum Diversitas: Latin and the Vernaculars in Early Medieval Britain", Perita 3 (1987), pp. 151–88
- Mann, J. C., "Spoken Latin in Britain as evidenced by the Inscriptions", in Britannia 2 (1971), pp. 218–24
- Shiel, N., "The Coinage of Carausius as a Source of Vulgar Latin", in Britannia 6 (1975), pp. 146–8
- Smith, C., "Vulgar Latin in Roman Britain: Epigraphic and other Evidence", in Aufstieg und Niedergang der Römischen Welt 2.29.2 (1983), pp. 893–948
- Snyder, Christopher A. 1996. "Sub-Roman Britain (AD 400-600): A Gazetteer of Sites". British Archaeological Reports (BAR) British Series No. 247. Oxford: Tempvs Reparatvm.