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In this video, we're going to examine some stories telling us about the lives of the Celtic speakers in eastern England, from around the 4th century, when the Anglo-Saxons were first beginning to arrive, all the way to the 11th century, hundreds of years after the Anglo-Saxons first began to arrive.
The subject of a Celtic England is often controversial, and marked down by centuries of a total denial of the presence of Britons in England practically anytime after the 6th century. But today, we will examine plenty of evidence to counter that, from Britons in the Swamps of the Fens, to Welsh kings in the East, Celtic-named kings such as Cerdic and Caedwalla in the south, alongside Celtic Christians in the north. We will examine the troublesome Brythonic marauders that plagued eastern England in the 11th century, and the servile population from Wales that lived in Kent, Wessex, and 10th century Cambridgeshire.
The History of Wales, and Welsh history in general, is often seen as a counterbalance to the Germanic history of England, but as you will see today, English history is just as Celtic as they come.
Chapters:
0:00 - Introduction
0:45 - Britons in the Swamp
5:12 - Welsh Kings in the East
8:11 - Celtic Christians in the North
10:18 - Brythonic Marauders in England
12:44 - Bands of Celts in the Forests
14:36 - The Serviles from Wales
15:50 - The Last Celts in England
Sources (turn on captions):
[1] Capelli, C. et al. (2003). A Y Chromosome Census of the British Isles. Current Biology, 13(11), pp.979-984. doi:doi.org/10.1016/s0960-9822(03....
[2] Colgrave, B. (1956). Felix’s Life of Saint Guthlac. Cambridge University Press.
[3] Davies, John. (2007). A History of Wales. London: Penguin, pp.64-67, 44-45, 48, 37.
[4] Gray, A. (1911). On the late survival of a Celtic population in East Anglia. Proceedings of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 15(1).
[5] Gretzinger, J., et al. (2022). The Anglo-Saxon migration and the formation of the early English gene pool. Nature, 610, pp.1-8. doi: doi.org/10.1038/s41586-022-05....
[6] Harvard University (2023). The Man of Law’s Tale. Harvard’s Geoffrey Chaucer Website. chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages....
[7] Higham, N. and Ryan, M.J. (2013). The Anglo-Saxon World. Yale University Press, pp.95-103, 29-30.
[8] Leslie, S. et al. (2015). The fine-scale genetic structure of the British population. Nature, 519, pp.309-314. doi.org/10.1038/nature14230
[9] Morris, M. (2021). The Anglo-Saxons. Penguin, Chapters 1-5.
[10] Skeat, W. W. (1868). The Lay of Havelok the Dane. Early English Text Society.
[11] Skeat, W. W. (1902). The Lay of Havelok the Dane (Introduction). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
[12] Stellar, A.M. (1907). Bede’s Ecclesiastical History of England. London: George Bell and Sons.
[13] The British Library (2023). Felix’s Life of Guthlac. www.bl.uk/collection-items/fe....
[14] Thomas, M.G. et al. (2006). Evidence for an apartheid-like social structure in early Anglo-Saxon England. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 273(1601), pp.2651-2657. doi:doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2006.3627.
Maps:
© OpenStreetMap contributors, licensed under CC BY-SA: www.openstreetmap.org/copyright
www.floodmap.net/
Music:
'Is That You, or Are You You?', 'Wonder Cycle', 'Everybody's Got Problems That Aren't Mine', 'Direct to Video', 'Out of the Skies, Under the Earth' by Chris Zabriskie are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. creativecommons.org/licenses/...
Source: chriszabriskie.com/dtv/
Artist: chriszabriskie.com/
and 'Kawaii!' - Bad Snacks
Images of, and from:
Europe, Britain and Ireland, Crowland, Demons, Danes, Cerdic, Chaucer, Monk, Ramsey Monastery, Vikings: CC0, via the British Library
St Guthlac: CC0, via the Wellcome Collection
Man with a Beard, Caernarfon Castle, Conwy Castle, Lincoln Cathedral, Crickhowell, Lambeth, Ely Cathedral, Carnedd Llywelyn: CC0, via the Yale Center for British Art
Welsh Dragon: Tobias Jakobs, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
Vortigern, Paper Background, the Flame Bearers of Welsh History: CC0, via the National Library of Wales
Seax, Gold Beads, Ethelred II Coin, Cnut Coin: CC BY 2.0, via the Portable Antiquities Scheme