Conquest of Chester in 616: Worth its Salt

THE FRONTIER IN ANGLO-SAXON PRE-HISTORY

Why did the Anglo-Saxons suddenly expand westwards around 600 AD to overrun the remaining ‘Welsh’ parts of England?

Well, the usual explanations involved dynastic skullduggery, megalomaniac thuggery by forceful leaders, clashes within the Catholic Church, and a more general sense among the Anglo-Saxons of their Manifest Destiny to rule England from shining sea to shining sea.

Indeed, the English still like to believe (as taught by Frederick Jackson Turner about the Taming of the American West) that ‘the forging of a unique and rugged identity occurred at the juncture between the civilization of settlement and the savagery of wilderness.

This produced a new type of citizen - one with the power to tame the wild and one upon whom the wild had conferred strength and individuality’.

Alas the poor Welsh – who were literate and Christian long before the usurpers.

The blood-thirsty tribal thugs were Æthelfrith and Edwin, it being observed that the routine of kingship at this time involved regular - probably annual - wars with neighbours to obtain tribute, submission and slaves.

What seems to have been left out in all this is the economic dimension – issues that still concern us of comparative advantage and trade deficits.

FIRST OF ALL SOME DATES (I am not a date man so don’t take them too seriously)

593 Æthelfrith becomes king of Bernicia (in the northeastern 'Anglo-Saxon' part of England)

[Æthelfrith, son of Æthelric ruled two Northern English kingdoms in the 7th Century - Bernicia and Deira in the period 592 to 616. The 20th century historian Frank Stenton has written that "the continuous history of Northumbria, and indeed of England, begins with the reign of Æthelfrith".]

597 Battle of Catterick – weakening of Celtic Kingdoms of Rheged and Goddoddin

603 Battle of Degsastan – subjugation of Dal Riata

616 Battle of Chester – ‘Welsh’ of the Old North (Yr Hen Ogledd) cut off from Wales proper

616 Edwin become king

616 Collapse of North Reged

617 Subjugation of Elmet

626 Wessex defeated temporarily

624 Isle of Man taken

624 Isle of Anglesey taken – Anglo-Saxons start to dominate the Irish Sea

[From about 627 onwards, Edwin was the most powerful king among the Anglo-Saxons, ruling Bernicia, Deira and much of eastern Mercia, the Isle of Man and Anglesey. His alliance with Kent, the subjection of Wessex, and his string of successes added to his power and authority.

The imperium (as Bede calls it) that Edwin possessed was later equated with the idea of a Bretwalda or High King of Britain, a later concept invented by West Saxon kings in the 9th century.]

632 Penda of Mercia defeats and kills Edwin.

THE CAPTURE OF CHESTER

Æthelfrith attacked the Welsh Kingdom of Powys and defeated its army in a battle at Chester around 616. In this battle, the Powysian king Selyf Sarffgadau was killed.

Apparently:

'Æthelfrith king of Northumbria, at the instigation of Augustine, forthwith poured 50,000 men into the Vale Royal of Chester, the territory of Prince of Powys, under whose auspices the conference had been held.

Twelve hundred British priests of the Monastery of Bangor having come out to view the battle, Æthelfrith directed his forces against them as they stood clothed in their white vestments and totally unarmed, watching the progress of the battle - they were massacred to a man'.

According to the Raphael Hollinshead, the Tudor Chronicler:

"The Britains that dwelt about Chester, through their stoutnesse prouoked the aforesaid Edelferd king of the Northumbers vnto warre: wherevpon to tame their loftie stomachs, he assembled an armie & came forward to besiege the citie, then called of the Britains Chester.

The citizens coueting rather to suffer all things than a siege, and hauing a trust in their great multitude of people, came foorth to giue batell abroad in the fields, whome he compassing about with ambushes, got within his danger, and easilie discomfited."

So Æthelfrith put together an enormous army to subdue the city of Chester at the extreme southernmost corner of his growing ‘imperium’ of conquests – Why?

TRADE & TRADE RELATIONS

If you look at the map of England prior to Æthelfrith’s conquests, it is striking how far the Anglo-Saxon petty kings had succeeded in subduing the drier, eastern agrarian part of England before 600 AD. However, this left the western pastoral areas of England under the control of the ‘Welsh’.

There was therefore both a natural trade synergy and a source of friction between the more densely settled farming communities of the east which led themselves to more conventional forms of authority and the wilder westerners who were happy to trade livestock but who were also happy to embark on mounted raids on settled territory.

The settled lands of the east had granaries, and access to the iron of Sussex and Kent to keep their tool and weapon-smiths employed. However, they lacked resources of non-ferrous metals like lead (from Yorkshire and North Wales), tin (from Cornwall), and gold (from Wales and Ireland).

And, as the economists would say, as they grew richer and consumption increased, they developed a balance of trade and payments problem.

Perhaps most importantly, they lacked their own sources of another limited supply / high value commodity that was in universal demand as a food additive and preservative – salt.

[In the South West of England, the Anglo-Saxon intruders had reached the western shores of England well before 600 AD, having seized a major source of salt at Droitwich and set up the petty kindom of the Hwicce - see lower map].

WORTH THEIR SALT

It has been observed that the Romans seem to have focused a good deal of the infrastructure of their Empire near salt sources or on salt routes between those sites and Rome [Via Salaria].

The Roman word salarium links employment, salt and soldiers, but the exact link is unclear. The least common theory is that the word soldier itself comes from the Latin sal dare (to give salt).

Alternatively, the Roman historian Pliny the Elder stated as an aside in his Natural History's discussion of sea water, that "[I]n Rome. . .the soldier's pay was originally salt and the word salary derives from it. . ." Plinius Naturalis Historia XXXI.

Others note that soldier more likely derives from the gold solidus, with which soldiers were known to have been paid, and maintain instead that the salarium was either an allowance for the purchase of salt or the price of having soldiers conquer salt supplies and guard the Salt Roads (Via Salarium) that led to Rome.

THE ANCIENT SALT TOWNS IN CHESHIRE

Salt extraction was one of the most profitable industries of the Cornovii tribe and was carried out at several sites in Cheshire, notably at Middlewich, known in Roman times as Salinae 'the Salt Pans'. In addition to these main works there is evidence of considerable Romano-British salt production here in Northwich and also at the recently-discovered salt-working settlement at Nantwich.

Condate (Northwich) was so important that is recorded in two separate itinera of the Antonine Itinerary, a the late-second century document which records all of the major road-routes within the Roman Empire.

The second itinerary in the British section of this document is entitled "the route from the Vallum to the port of Rutupiae" and details the road-stations between Hadrian's Wall in the far north of England and Richborough on the Kentish coast.

Towards the middle of this itinerary the station Condate is listed 18 miles from Mamucium (Manchester, Greater Manchester) and 20 miles from Deva (Chester, Cheshire).

Another classical geography which mentions the Northwich settlement is the 7th century Ravenna Cosmology, wherein the name is again listed as Condate, this time between the entries for Salinae (Middlewich, Cheshire) and the capital of the Coritani tribe at Ratae (Leicester, Leicestershire).

In Cheshire, recent archaeology at both Nantwich and Middlewich has confirmed that the Romans established new salt works on green field sites which were then abandoned and returned to agriculture. This was either with their departure in the 5th century or possibly even during the occupation.

One explanation is that these were Roman Army saltworks, providing salt for their own needs, while Romano-British salt makers occupied long established Celtic salt making sites nearby and continued to supply the traditional needs of the local population and the itinerant traders who travelled into Wales and to the North.

Salt making continued in post Roman Cheshire, at first through a period of Welsh control and then as part of the Anglo-Saxon Mercia. The same pattern of trade will have continued and later this attracted Viking influence from the North. The first documentary account of Anglo-Saxon salt making in Cheshire is found in the Doomsday Book of 1086.

[It is also noting that the Cheshire salt towns were detached from Northumbria in the 7th Century, as part of the Wreocansaete to become part of the thriving central English kingdom of Mercia.

As Mercia also acquired the salt facilities of the Hwicce at Droitwich, it then had a full salt monopoly - which led in turn to it becoming the paramount state before the Danish invasions and to the banishment of the 'Welsh' to west of Offa's Dyke, close to the existing boundary between England and Wales].

THE BATTLE FOR SALT & THE IRISH SEA TRADE

So I argue that Æthelfrith conquered Chester mainly because it was the centre of a lucrative trade in salt from Cheshire across the Irish Sea – one that brought Irish gold into England in payment.

And once Æthelfrith had subdued Rheged, the local fishermen and traders on the Fylde coast of Lancashire would have put forward a proposal to use their maritime resources to help wrest back the trade from the Welsh kings of Powys – to the mutual benefit of Rheged and Northumbria.

Remember, the forerunners of Rheged, the territory of the Brigantes (Brigantia) had a pre-Roman presence in both England and Ireland, with colonies around Wexford, Kilkenny and Waterford.

Not surprising then that only a few years after the fall of Chester, the Isle of Man and the Isle of Angesley were both conquered (the latter being a stepping stone to Ireland through Holyhead).

Nor should it be so amazing that, as discussed by Frank Kilfeather, Irish Times, Friday Feb 26 1999, an archaeological has uncovered a "strange" pre-Viking house built in the Anglo-Saxon style in West Temple Bar, Dublin.

The director of the dig, Ms Linzi Simpson, told The Irish Times the find was "very exciting". While working on a Viking dig they knew immediately the house was not Scandinavian, and a comb found in it could only have come from Roman-Britain.

The house was also found at the very lowest level, under Viking buildings. These three factors convinced them of habitation in the area before the Vikings arrived.

The Irish Times asks ‘If it is true that there was Anglo Saxon settlement in Dublin prior to the Viking arrival, it completely changes our understanding of the history of Dublin and Ireland. It also poses so many other questions - if they were Anglo-Saxons, where did they go?’

Well, they probably didn’t go anywhere – at least as long as they were able to exploit their newly established trade monopoly in salt across the Irish Sea.

In search of the the Old North - Yr Hen Ogledd

My map of ‘Keith Johnsons’ in the USA in my previous posting, nudged me into reporting on some of the interesting work on surname distributions that has been undertaken for England by Kevin Schürer.

The whole paper ‘Surnames and the search for regions’, Local Population Studies, 72 (2004) by K. Schürer can be found at:

http://www.casa.ucl.ac.uk/surnames/papers/schurer.pdf

Kevin is the Director of both the UK Data Archive and Economic and Social Data Service and also Professor of History at the University of Essex.

His paper analyses the geographical distribution of surnames in England in 1881 in an attempt to identify ‘cultural provinces’ or local ‘countries’ (i.e. ‘pays’ in French), following the 19th Century search for districts ‘to which people felt that they belonged’.

That is distinct areas ‘which could evoke sentimental feelings amongst those who had moved away – and which people felt were inhabited by their relations, friends and fellow workers, having a character all of their own’ (see my post on the French human geographer Paul Vidal de la Blache).

While 396,776 unique surnames were recorded in the 1881 Census of England and Wales, there were only 41,203 surnames with a frequency of 25 individuals or more. Schürer uses these surnames as the basis of his study. This equates to an average of one additional surname for every 630 persons across the whole population.

The distribution of surnames was, as is still typical, very skewed. One fifth of the population shared just under 60 surnames; a half of the population were accounted for by some 600 surnames; while the top 10,000 surnames covered 90 per cent of the population.

Conversely, ten per cent of the population, those with the rarest surnames, jointly accounted for some 30,000 surnames, more if those with frequencies of less than 25 are also considered.

So what does the data covering some 26 million people with some 41,000 different surnames reveal about regional diversity?

I have taken the Northern England as my area of interest – drawing on the comments made in Schürer’s paper.

Looking first at the density (i.e. the average number of persons per surname), not surprisingly Wales stands out as having a low surname density (or a high number of people per surname) - but one which is matched in an area consisting of south Lancashire and the south-western parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire.

The low density of surnames in south Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire seems to be associated with a greater propensity towards toponymic (place descriptive) originating surnames (e.g. Grimshaw, Greenhalgh, Ramsbottom, Sykes, Scargill) at the expense of the ‘son’ ending patronymics which are elsewhere typically northern. The latter dilute the toponymics to a greater degree in the areas of Norse (Cumbria) and Danish (east Yorkshire and Lincolnshire) settlement.

Across England, the patronymic and metronymic surnames (those ending in –son, for example, Johnson, Richardson, Jackson, Mallinson) are relatively frequent in proportional terms north and east of the line drawn from Chester to London (i.e. the old Danelaw), excluding Rutland and East Anglia.

It is interesting to note that this nineteenth-century distribution of patronymic and metronymic surnames is very similar to that depicted by the Lay Subsidy Rolls some 500 to 600 years earlier. The processes of industrialisation and migration, even over half a millennium apparently did had fundamentally change the pattern.

An alternative line of analysis is to consider the degree of clustering of surnames (or the extent to which the surnames in a particular place do or do not overlap or correspond with those of another place).

Centring the analysis on Lancaster, there is a high degree of correspondence with adjoining areas. But correspondence is also high with parishes extending through the North and East Ridings of Yorkshire, Lincolnshire and also parts of north Wales.

Conversely, the degree of correspondence is relatively weak with much of the southern part of the county and the West Riding of Yorkshire.

It would appear that there are echoes here of the regional pattern displayed in toponymic surnames.

Refocusing the central point on the city of York, the parishes with the highest degree of surname correspondence are located in the North and East Ridings of the county, but relatively high levels of correspondence are also displayed by parishes in Cumberland, and to a lesser degree Lincolnshire, Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Leicestershire.

Equally, most parishes in the west of the country (except Cumbria) record relatively low levels of surname correspondence with York. It may not suit Yorkshire loyalists to learn that the North and East Ridings of ‘God’s own county’ have more in common, using this measure, with north Lancashire and Cumberland than they do with the West Riding - which, in turn, seems bound at the hip with south Lancashire.

Looking more specifically at the degree to which individuals with the same surname were scattered by distance, amongst those regions with the lowest separation distances (with the darkest shading in the map) were south Lancashire and the southern parts of the West Riding of Yorkshire – which again stand out as a common area.

A second belt of low separation distances takes in Cheshire, north Staffordshire and north-east Derbyshire, while a ‘middling belt’ encompasses Shropshire, south Staffordshire, south Derbyshire, stretching over to east Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire, with Lincolnshire being joined by Cambridgeshire.

So what does this tell us about the North, as a region, and its distinct cultural districts or 'pays'?

Well, nothing for certain that's for sure - but it is fascinating that the surname evidence supports the common observation that the South Lancashire and West Yorkshire dialects are very close, in spite of their separation by the bleak Pennine hills.

So, could there be a faint outline still sketched on the palimpsest of the ancient Celtic / Brigantian kingdoms of Yr Hen Ogledd (the old 'Welsh North')?

This would certainly fit with the historical references to the relatively longstanding survival of a Celtic kingdom in West Yorkshire (Elmet - and its likely capital 'Leeds') and the presence of a cluster of 'Welsh' placenames in South Lancashire (including 'Wigan').

Remembered Cheshire Dialect

Some South Cheshire Dialect - mostly dairy farming terms

Adland – headland – uncultivated area left at the end of a furrow where the mower / plough turns
Aind - hound - as in 'up comes 52 bloody ainds' in Blaster Bates' well-quoted monologue 'A Shower of Shit over Cheshire'
Atchen – acorn (nickname for Keith at primary school ‘atchen yed’)
Asker – newt (small amphibian like a damp torpid skink)
Avarous - avaricious
Backend – Autumn – hence ‘backender’ – a heifer or cow that will calve late in the year when feed is scarce but milk prices are high
Bear - no bears in Cheshire when I grew up either wild or for baiting - but a memory in the saying 'as brown as a bear's arse'
Beast - the first milk let down after calving - colostrum
Bletch - the dirty oil on a machine (e.g. bike chain), from Crewe Railway Workshops -originally in complaint about the state of locos sent up from the linked North Western Railway workshop in Northamptonshire at Bletchley
Bonk – bank – frequently used to describe farms, as raised areas were better drained sites for farm houses
Boozy – trough at the head of each cattle stall or tying
Bowk – bucket
Bread and cheese - local term for the earliest green shoots of the hawthorn in the Springtime - widely eaten by children (probably a good source of vitamen C)
Brook - stream
Bugger - omnipresent in conversation - same in rural New Zealand as illustrated by a recent Toyota light truck / utility / ute advertisement where the ute pulls out a tree stump that destroys the chook house and the cockie rubs his head and says 'Bugger Me'. I personally believe that use of the the word in rural areas has nothing do do with buggery or the 'Bulgarian Atrocities' of the late 19th Century. Much more likley, it seems to me, is that it is related to 'beg', as in 'Begger me' or 'begger my neighbour'.
Bull - verbally abuse - to give someone a 'good bulling' about a problem or issue - not always polite or to be used a tea with the vicar as it can refer to mating cattle - probably related to standard English 'bully' / 'bullying'
Byng – corridor at the head of tyings in the shippon from which stock are fothered
Chimbley – chimney - 'the owd dog shot up bloody chimbley' - dog seeking warmth and catching the fire's smoke
Clem - starve
Conna – cannot (my nickname for Pete)
Cowd – cold
Cratch – side of a wagon (‘a good cratched ‘un’ – someone who can eat a lot)
Cut – canal (Cheshire is intersected by canals linking the industrial Midlands and industrial North of England – a great way to see the countryside)
Dabber – inhabitant of Nantwich (from leatherworking, stemming from the local abundance of salt and hides – hence Dab-town)
Diggly – sex, as in ‘having a bit of diggly’
Dunna – do not (my nickname for Matt)
Ess ole rooter - someone who hugs the fire (i.e. the ash-hole) and baulks from work
Feggy – rank and overgrown
Five gallon a day beast – good milking heifer (or well-endowed young lady)
Fother – fodder (often used as a verb)
Gradely – fine – as in ‘oos a gradely little wench’ (i.e. she is a fine young woman)
Gur – diarrhea
Jed – dead
Kench – wedge of hay or silage – also scrunched up, as in being ‘kenched wi cowd’ (doubled up with cold)
Korves - calves - see below - cry to get calves to come for bucket-feeding, 'cub, cub korv'
Kyat - cat - typical of the distorted pronounciation of standard English words
Ligger - liar
Lommer - another word sometimes used in relationship to hard physical labour - if the Inuits have 32 words for snow, Cheshire farmers had a raft of words for punishing work - this one though most frequently referred to 'on-heat' heifers mounting or lommering each other
Look up – check stock by walking among them in the fields or walking down the byng in the shippon
Mard – spoilt – i.e. ‘marred’ – schoolyard taunt ‘mardy custard’
Maul – strain in doing something / make a nuisance of oneself (e.g. maul one’s gorbey [guts])
Miss Muffet - not strictly dialect but a 'dirty' version of the rhyme that I have never heard elsewhere - 'Little Miss Muffet sat on her tuffet, her nickers all ragged and torn. It wasn't the spider that sat down beside her but Little Boy Blue with his horn'
Mither – be a nuisance
Mixen – midden (‘better to marry over the mixen than over the moor’ i.e. marry all girl from Cheshire whose dad has lots of cows and cow shit, rather than marry into the poor sheep farmers of Derbyshire)
Mizzle – half-way between drizzle and mist
Mow'd - mowed - widely used in regard to sufficiency and relating to the importance of restricting mowing to the amount that can be dried and harvested successfully as hay - 'mowd up wi work' (overstretched), 'oer mowd' (over-mowed - too much on to be able to cope)
Munna – must not (nickname for Sam?)
Muxt - mess - as in 'tha's made a muxt on it lad' (you have made a mess of it)
Nesh – unable to stand cold or pain
Nowt - naughty child - naught / nothing, as in 'tha's a reet nowt'
Oawa up - morning cry to cows to 'come up' from the fields for milking (How up?)
Oo - she - as in 'Oo inna jed is oo - noeweh, oos corbelsed - ah a mun get vet' (i.e. she is not dead is she - no, she's collapsed - I must get the vetinerary surgeon - referring to treating a 'downer' cow that is suffering from 'milk fever' / calcium deficiency)
Owd – old –e.g. as in someone being decrepit and ‘owd an feggy’
Pit – pond – a vital part of the old cheese-making economy, providing water for the stalled cattle in the winter and the means for swilling out the shippons
Pather – bring wet and mud into the house by not cleaning one’s shoes
Pikel - pitchfork
Poll Evil - infection of horses / cows head
Pommer – attractive girl, as in ‘a reet (right) pommer’
Practical - handy, dextrous - the ultimate accolade
Rawnge – sprain / strain – ‘rawnge, maul and mither’ – the actions of particularly troublesome children (probably variant of standard English 'wrench' i.e. 'wrawnge')
Reens and bawks – the corrugations – about 3 metres apart that were dug to drain boggy fields in the 18th century) – hence ‘reen-warted’ – like a sheep or cow that has sunk down on its back in the reen and cannot get up – colloquially, someone who has eaten too much or who is getting too fat
Rit – runt – e.g. the rit of the litter
Scrag – grab and beat up (schoolyard term)
Scrumping - stealing apples - a common sport for kids in Autumn
Seg – callous (on the hand)
Shippon – cow shed
Snap - snack (used particularly for the lunch that farm labourers took to work with them in their 'snap tins' - along with their dry tea for a 'brew'. After work, they cycled home with their brew can on their handlebars filled with 'free' milk from the farm for their families)
Snig - Eel - 'as fat as a snig'
Spadger – sparrow (‘Like a Northwich spadger – all twitter and shit’, i.e. garrulous)
Stirk - type of 'cattle-beast' - steer?
Straighten – tidy up something or oneself - as in 'yeah lads mun get tha'sens straightened an go skoo' (you boys must get dressed and go to school)
Strap - extra licence / credit (presumably from lightening the straps on cart / carriage horses)
Yarn – heron
Tha - 'you' singular - universal in conversation - as in 'tha's a bugger to coo' (innocent report in 1930s of kid to his female schoolteacher of his father's opinion of the singing capabilities of his recently purchased parrot - received strong condemnation for the use of the 'b' word)
Thripper – gate on the end of a cart to hold on the load
Thrutch – squirm
Tice - to actively seek involvement in mischief (i.e. 'entice')
Tight – drunk, also miserly e.g. ‘as tight as a duck’s arse – and that’s water tight’
Tine - prong (as in the 'tines on a pikel')
Tying - chain at cattle stall
Underdone – not looking well (as opposed to ‘prosperous’ = looking well)
Wid – duck (from Welsh ‘hwaed’ = duck – presumably because the junior cheese-maids from Wales generally called up the ducks off the pit – “wid, wid ..wid”)
Wom – home – as in wom bonk (as in the saying ‘a cock feets (i.e. fights) best on (h)is wom bonk’)
Wunna - will not (nickname for Theo?)
Yed - head

WORD ORIGINS - THE INFLUENCE OF BRYTHONIC / CUMBRIC

The Reverend William Gaskell (husband of Elizabeth Gaskell, author of 'North and South', 'Mary Barton' etc) contributed a fascinating appendix to 'Mary Barton' on the Lancashire Dialect (based on 2 lectures that he gave in Manchester in 1848). He makes a strong case for deriving many dialect words from a Brythonic / Cumbric / Welsh-variant vocabulary substratum. This in turn being related to the fact that Lancashire (& Cheshire)once formed part of Celtic-speaking Yr Hen Ogledd (the Old North).

Among the examples that he discusses are:

Camming – wearing out of shape – Welsh ‘cam’ = bent, awry. Gammy is a variant
Cob – lump – Welsh ‘co’ = mass; to cob = break into small pieces , Welsh ‘cobiaw’ = strike, thump
Bragget – drink of malt and meat – Welsh ‘bragawd’
Pobs – bread soaked in milk – Welsh ‘pob’ = baking
Sad – stiff, dry – Welsh ‘sad’ = firm
Kecks – stems of wild hemlock – Welsh ‘cecys’ = hollow stalked
Griddle – bakestone – Welsh ‘greidyl’
Tad and Mam – Dad and Mum (Welsh equivalents).

These certainly seem very familiar to me. Horace used to have (and I still tell my boys about him having) 'pobs' (stale bread, with hot milk and sugar) for breakfast.

Gaskell also makes the point that:

'As Celtic and Gothic (the ancestor of Anglo-Saxon) are stocks of the same tribe of languages (i.e. Indo-European), they have many words in common, scarcely if at all, different in form, and this sometimes renders it difficult to say which may claim the immediate parentage of a current term.'

I am reminded here also that Caesar could not send messages written in Latin to his commanders in the field as the Gauls could easily read them if they captured the message-bearers (no doubt one reason that modern French is not quite as 'Latin' say as Spanish, as it is a mutation rather than the product of colonization).

It seems to me that many modern commentators, like Stephen Oppenheimer in his 'Origins of the British', completely lose sight of the overlap issue. This leads Oppenheimer to insist on the likelihood of widespread pre-Roman use of a Germanic language in South Eastern England - even though no words have ever been recoverd.

That is not to deny though that, for example, there may well have been some Friesian coastal settlers in the area controlled by the Iceni - or that late-Roman London and Middlesex may have been dominated by demobilised Roman soldiers / colonists from Batavia, the Rhineland and northern Belgium.