Language Contact in Early Medieval Britain: Settlement, Interaction, and Acculturation

This chapter explores language contact in early medieval Britain, focusing on the methodological problems involved in studying historical language contact in situations where records of the languages involved are sparse. Two case studies then look at linguistic evidence for contact situations, one addressing the uses of the term wealh in Old English and especially in the Laws of Ine, while the other explores the influence of Latin on the development of Old English spelling. The first case study argues that the term wealh in early Old English (as in Continental Germanic) usage identified groups and individuals as Roman, as distinct from the identification with Celtic languages that developed later in the period. The second case study shows how spellings of the reflex of pre-Old English *[ɡɡj] developed through the engagement of Old English speakers with Latin, demonstrating the interactions between developments in the spoken and written language.

Migration in Rural England in the Later Middle Ages

This chapter surveys research on rural migration in medieval England and investigates the frequency of migration, length of journeys, mechanisms which enabled migration, migrants’ motives for movement, and their reception in their new places of settlement. Evidence comes from tax and manorial record from the West Midlands. Migration seems to have been normal and commonplace, and mostly within 10 miles (15 km), but with a significant range of longer movements. Different types of migrant appear to have had as a common characteristic an aspiration to betterment, and tended to confine journeys to the landscapes with which they were familiar. Movements had positive social results such as exposing villages to external influence. The precise geographical knowledge of people in medieval England probably extended c. 50 miles (80 km), but they did not lead such narrow and ignorant lives as is sometimes imagined.

Personal Names as Evidence for Migrants and Migration in Medieval England

This chapter examines the extent to which given names (birth names) and second names (bynames and hereditary surnames) can reliably indicate the origins or ethnicity of individual migrants between the ninth and the fifteen centuries, and how such names may be used en masse to reveal migration patterns, whether they reflect military conquest, international trade or population movements within England itself. Particular attention is given to the names of Vikings, Normans, Flemings and Jews, among others, and to questions of social class and gender. A central theme is the sometimes complex, ambiguous or incomplete nature of the data and the need for a discriminating methodology in which onomastics(the study of names),historical linguistics and prosopography (the collective study of individuals’ lives) are seen as complementary disciplines, acting as checks and balances on each other’s conclusions.

The Migrant in English Art: Perspectives on Influence and Agency

This chapter addresses English medieval art and architecture in the long term and is of a basically methodological character. It argues for a view of immigrancy rooted in stylistic and (less urgently) iconographic influence, in favour of an approach through case studies of individual immigrant artists or particular works. In an extended introduction, the traditional, formalist nature of art history is presented as a justification of this point of view. This is followed by an object-focused section in which some of the main practical functions and ambiguities of the concept of influence are exposed, and the problems of ignoring these ambiguities suggested. A case study focused on English church architecture is then presented in order to clarify the theoretical points. The chapter concludes with a brief, essentially sceptical review of the usefulness of medieval documentation as a basis for understanding stylistic influence in art.

English Towns in the Later Middle Ages: The Rules and Realities of Population Mobility

This chapter argues that population mobility was central to the development of medieval urban society, environment and institutions. The first part provides an overview of the changing extent and nature of English urbanisation in the centuries between 600 and 1500, and addresses both mobility and migration within England, and beyond England. It outlines some of the multi-disciplinary and conceptual approaches underpinning this work and then focuses in greater depth on urban migration fields, and on the infrastructure, regulation, and experience of urban mobility. The chapter identifies competing cultural contexts within which values associated with urban mobility were conceived, and argues that both political language and developing social customs concerning the regulation of mobility were central to the experience of migrants.

Isotopic and Genetic Evidence for Migration in Medieval England

Two sources of evidence, ratios of stable isotopes and sequences of DNA molecules, can illuminate histories of human migration. Studies of skeletal remains from medieval cemeteries in England, using oxygen and strontium isotope analyses to investigate places of childhood residence, reveal more mobility than anticipated and sometimes migration from unexpected directions. Whole-genome sequencing of a few individuals provides new insights into Anglo-Saxon migration and the diversity of origins of individuals buried in Roman York. Analysis of DNA variation in modern samples provides only indirect evidence about the medieval period, and considerable uncertainty about the timing of any deduced past migration events. This chapter argues that an explicit modelling framework should be developed permitting combined interpretation of DNA data (modern and ancient) and isotope data which, when applied to the same samples, will provide new insights about migration and mobility, and about the reliability and interpretation of these two sources of evidence.

The Archaeology of Migrants in Viking-Age and Anglo-Norman England: Process, Practice, and Performance

This chapter discusses the manner in which early medieval archaeologists have attempted, with varying degrees of confidence, to trace migration. It argues that we need to do more than rely on scientific approaches, such as stable isotope analysis, not least because evidence for where a person spent their childhood addresses only one element of their experiences of migration. Through analysis of evidence of craftworking, settlements, diet and cuisine, and burials, the chapter demonstrates that there is ample archaeological evidence for early medieval migration on a variety of scales. It is argued that movement of people is best traced not by study of style and constructed identity, but through socially embedded traits, such as craftworking, animal husbandry, and culinary practices, which reflect a range of social identities, not simply, if at all, the ethnic identities with which debates about migration have routinely, and unsatisfactorily, become entangled.

The State and the Immigrant: Negotiating Nationalities in Later Medieval England

During the later Middle Ages, the presence of tens of thousands of people of foreign birth in England required royal government to consider issues of nationality and alien status. This study claims that the legal, administrative and fiscal framework for the rights and regulation of immigrants that was developed in response never created a straightforward binary between aliens (people born outside the kingdom) and denizens (those born in England). Drawing on the records of the alien subsidies and on chancery documents, it argues that the local agents of the English crown deployed national labels in very specific and purposeful ways, contingent on the vagaries of international politics and trade, rather than on a supposed generalised anti-alien sentiment.

Identifying Migrants in Medieval England: The Possibilities and Limitations of Place-name Evidence

This chapter asks what enquiries might reasonably be made of the place-name record in order to further our understanding (1) of movements to England in the medieval millennium, and (2) of the process by which incoming communities negotiated the process of acculturation, retaining or giving up identity traits—including language—which marked these groups as distinctive or coherent. A response to these broad questions is attempted through detailed methodological discussion and a focus on the place-names of Old Norse origin which arose as a result of Scandinavian activities in England, from the late ninth to eleventh centuries.

Moving People, Moving Forms: Narrating Migration in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles

This chapter considers how the Anglo-Saxon chronicles (ninth to twelfth century) depict three waves of migration: the coming of the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, the Viking invasions, and the Norman Conquest. By focusing on the form and language of the texts, the chapter shows that the chronicles were not only preoccupied by migration as one of its central themes but were themselves deeply shaped by the literary cultures brought to England by immigrants, whether they came as conquerors or as learned clerical advisors. The result is a set of texts whose account of the origins of the English reveals the wide European horizons of their literary culture.