Joined Feb 2009
7,422 Posts | 836+
Eastern PA
I came across this post on Quora and thought it interesting.
I asked the author, Mark Simon Hockey, (MA. Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, St Edmund Hall, Oxford) to post it here. Mr. Hockey granted permission for me to post it.
The greatest “dirty secret” of Scotland is that Lowland Scotland constitutes the second Anglo-Saxon State on the Island of Britain.
As Philip Brian Hall has observed in his excellent answer, Sassenach (or Saxon) referred originally to the ethnic and linguistic English inhabitants of that part of southern Caledonia, which later became Lowland Scotland, not to the ethnic English living in England. I would like to explain how this came about as it is a fascinating story, little known in England and entirely suppressed by Nationalists in Scotland. The Gaels (descendants of Irish invaders, concentrated in the Highlands and Islands) only learned English in the 19C, whereas for lowland Caledonia, English has been their mother tongue for the last 1,200 years.
Have you ever wondered why English was spoken at the Scottish Court even before the union with England, under James I? And why Wales, ruled by England off and on since Norman times, and with half the population of Scotland, has perhaps twenty times more native Welsh speakers than Scotland has Gaelic speakers? And why you can easily understand someone from Inverness, but sometimes barely make out a Glaswegian? I hope to reveal all.
Edinburgh is likely named after King Edwin of Northumbria, the overlord of all English kings (Bretwalda) born 586 AD, who made it his Capital. So Edinburgh was, in a way, for a time the Capital of England, before Scotland ever existed. The Northumbrian English conquered southern Caledonia from the Welsh, at a time when the Irish invaders (Scots) had not yet taken all of the more northerly Caledonia from the native Picts. Welsh was anyway the language originally spoken in Lowland Scotland, indeed spoken both sides of Hadrian’s Wall until it was replaced by English. Lowland Scotland has never much spoken Gaelic, it largely went straight from Welsh to English. Although Gaelic and Welsh are both Celtic languages, they are (and were) no more intelligible to each other than English and German today (both Teutonic languages).
The name given by the Teutonic conquerors for a Romanised Celt is “Walas”, from which we get the name for Wales, the Wallace clan (from SW Scotland- so yes, the greatest hero of Scottish Independence “Braveheart “, was a Welshman, certainly in ancestry and probably in speech). It also gives us the name for the Latin (now French) speaking part of Belgium (Wallonia), one of the Latin (now Romanian) speaking areas of the Balkans (Walachia), the second part of the name for the county of Cornwall, and even the nut introduced to Celtic Britain by the Romans (Walnut).
Before the arrival of the English and Scots, SW Caledonia was part of the kingdom of the Strathclyde Britons and SE Caledonia the kingdom of Gododdin, both spoke Brythonic Celtic (or Welsh). Strathclyde had never been conquered or occupied by any Gaelic-speaking Scots, all of whom came from Ireland. The very name for Strathclyde derives from the Welsh, “Ystrad Clud” (Ystrad means “vale”, “clud” means “sheltered”) it was conquered by the Scots in the 11C but remained Welsh-speaking until the 13C.
The other clue that English has been spoken in Lowland Scotland almost as long as it has been spoken in England is that it comes from an ancient branch of Northumbrian English called Lallans. And just look at all the clearly English Clan names, Anderson, Ayton, Aitkinhead, Armstrong, Crawford, Cunningham, Bannerman, Davidson, Elphinstone Edmonstone, etc, (and I haven’t even gone beyond “E” in the list!) In fact well over half the present SNP Westminster MPs bear “sassanach” surnames, eg Black, Blackman, Blackford,etc as well as the Party Leadership, Salmond and Sturgeon, of course. The clue to the ancient lineage of Lallans is that modern speakers of Received Pronunciation can barely understand Glaswegian. Yet, the English spoken in the Highlands and Islands is, like Irish English, perfectly intelligible to people from London. Is this not a paradox? And the explanation is that the longer a language follows its own separate development, the more different it becomes from the original (sort of the same thing to language as the genetic mutation rate is to the formation of new species in evolution) and the Gaelic areas adopted English only in the 19C, whereas it was the mother tongue of the English settlers in Lowland Caledonia from the 7C.
By way of illustrating this important point, the English had themselves arrived from Germany after 445AD and continental Saxons, Angles, Frisians and Franks could still understand the English until about 750–800 AD. This is why the Pope was able to use English missionaries like St Boniface (or Winfrith, born near Crediton in Devon) to convert continental Germans- indeed this English cleric is known as “The Apostle of Germany”. As he put it “for we are of one blood and one bone with you”. (Do look up St Boniface on Wikipedia, he is probably the most significant Englishman that no one has ever heard of, and hard to think of any Englishman before Churchill who played a greater role in the destiny of continental Europe). Much of N. W. Europe was evangelised by Anglo-Saxons. Even the patron saint of Finland is an Englishman.
Getting back to Lallans, or Lowland Scots English (the language of Robbie Burns), this developed separately from mainstream English. It may derive from an old English word meaning something like “unclear or hard to understand”. The Dutch word “lollen”means to mumble, “Lollards” (those proto Protestant English, who “muttered” (perhaps the closest word in modern English) against the Roman Church derive from the same root. It has also simply been said to derive from the area of Scotland where it was spoken, “the lowlands”. Lallans began it’s separate development from mainstream English after the Vikings took most of Northumbria, from around 800AD, and cut off the unconquered English in what is now SE Scotland, Lothian, and Bamburgh, from the rest of the English speakers of Britain, to the South of what had become Viking territory.
So Wessex was NOT “The Last Kingdom”, to survive, both Bamburgh and Anglo-Saxon Scotland also successfully retained their independence from the Vikings, but only Bamburgh and the rest of what became modern Northumbria was later reincorporated into the English State after 927 when Athelstan (grandson of Alfred the Great of Wessex) united all of England by defeating the Viking kingdom of York, and his successors deposing Eric Bloodaxe, the last Viking king of York, ally of Thorfinn Skullsplitter of Orkney (another Norse charmer, they don’t make names like that anymore).
In the intervening 200 years between the fall of most of Northumbria to the Vikings and the West Saxon reconquest of the whole of England, which established the modern English State, the English who had been cut off in Lowland Scotland had, in order to survive, allied themselves with their fellow Christians, the Scots, who had come from Ireland to invade northern Caledonia (inhabited originally by the Picts) at about the same time as the English had invaded Southern Caledonia. And given the choice of heathen Viking rule (by kings with names like Eric Bloodaxe) or incorporating yourself into a single State with the Christian Scots from Ireland, the Caledonian English of course chose to become part of Scotland, and they were natural allies, both Scots and English were Christian and both were being attacked by the same horrific enemy, the Vikings, who had actually seized Dublin and the Hebrides. Thus, by the time the West Saxon liberators reached the Tweed, after AD 927, those ancient English subjects of what had once been Northern Northumbria were now part of the new Kingdom of Scotland, so the Northern part of what had been Northumbria, including its old Capital, “Edwin’s Burgh”, was permanently lost to England, and its people became the only Anglo-Saxons never to become part of the English Unitary State. But they were, in blood, language and culture, Northumbrian English, and Gaelic was never much spoken in their part of Southern Scotland, which today includes both the largest city (Glasgow) and the Capital. They adopted tartans, bagpipes etc. A great Anglo-Gaelic cultural fusion took place in which the Gaels ultimately adopted English (but only in the 18C and 19C) and the Sassenachs (or English-speaking inhabitants of Southern Caledonia) accepted the Irish Clan system and tartan dress, etc.
This is why modern English ears understand Highland Scots and Irish English infinitely better than they understand Lowland Scots, spoken by the descendants of the original English invaders of Britain. The Gaels of the Highlands only adopted English in the 18-19C, so the English they adopted was essentially modern English, whereas in Glasgow they speak the descendant of ancient Lallans, a form of English with a thousand years of separate development from Southern English. Southern English people also struggle to understand Ulster English for the same reason, many of the 17C Protestant colonists to Ulster came from Lowland Scotland and spoke the ancient Lallans variety of English.
And do you know that you also speak Lallans, if only once a year?
If you want to consider some Lallans that even the southern English will know, look over the words of “Auld Lang Syne”, we all sing it at New Year. It is at the heart of Scots culture, yet also at the heart of the English, and it includes pure Lallans, ancient English. It is one of those rare moments when Scotland, old Northumbria and all of the rest of England express in song, every New Year, their shared heritage.
Wikipedia it and you can see the modern translation of the old words, ancient even when Robbie Burns copied it down for the first time from an old man, around 1788. And what could be more appropriate to have set to an ancient tongue, than words which remind us that ancient friendships should be remembered, and made central to our present lives.
[edit 29.1.20] Rather moving that today this was the song, with arms joined across the chamber, that not only British MEPs, but many from other Countries sang immediately after the European Parliament had voted for the Brexit agreement. The words had been printed off and widely circulated within the chamber. MEPs from the Irish Republic were especially warm, joining in, being of course more familiar with Auld Lang Syne than most Europeans.
I asked the author, Mark Simon Hockey, (MA. Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, St Edmund Hall, Oxford) to post it here. Mr. Hockey granted permission for me to post it.
The greatest “dirty secret” of Scotland is that Lowland Scotland constitutes the second Anglo-Saxon State on the Island of Britain.
As Philip Brian Hall has observed in his excellent answer, Sassenach (or Saxon) referred originally to the ethnic and linguistic English inhabitants of that part of southern Caledonia, which later became Lowland Scotland, not to the ethnic English living in England. I would like to explain how this came about as it is a fascinating story, little known in England and entirely suppressed by Nationalists in Scotland. The Gaels (descendants of Irish invaders, concentrated in the Highlands and Islands) only learned English in the 19C, whereas for lowland Caledonia, English has been their mother tongue for the last 1,200 years.
Have you ever wondered why English was spoken at the Scottish Court even before the union with England, under James I? And why Wales, ruled by England off and on since Norman times, and with half the population of Scotland, has perhaps twenty times more native Welsh speakers than Scotland has Gaelic speakers? And why you can easily understand someone from Inverness, but sometimes barely make out a Glaswegian? I hope to reveal all.
Edinburgh is likely named after King Edwin of Northumbria, the overlord of all English kings (Bretwalda) born 586 AD, who made it his Capital. So Edinburgh was, in a way, for a time the Capital of England, before Scotland ever existed. The Northumbrian English conquered southern Caledonia from the Welsh, at a time when the Irish invaders (Scots) had not yet taken all of the more northerly Caledonia from the native Picts. Welsh was anyway the language originally spoken in Lowland Scotland, indeed spoken both sides of Hadrian’s Wall until it was replaced by English. Lowland Scotland has never much spoken Gaelic, it largely went straight from Welsh to English. Although Gaelic and Welsh are both Celtic languages, they are (and were) no more intelligible to each other than English and German today (both Teutonic languages).
The name given by the Teutonic conquerors for a Romanised Celt is “Walas”, from which we get the name for Wales, the Wallace clan (from SW Scotland- so yes, the greatest hero of Scottish Independence “Braveheart “, was a Welshman, certainly in ancestry and probably in speech). It also gives us the name for the Latin (now French) speaking part of Belgium (Wallonia), one of the Latin (now Romanian) speaking areas of the Balkans (Walachia), the second part of the name for the county of Cornwall, and even the nut introduced to Celtic Britain by the Romans (Walnut).
Before the arrival of the English and Scots, SW Caledonia was part of the kingdom of the Strathclyde Britons and SE Caledonia the kingdom of Gododdin, both spoke Brythonic Celtic (or Welsh). Strathclyde had never been conquered or occupied by any Gaelic-speaking Scots, all of whom came from Ireland. The very name for Strathclyde derives from the Welsh, “Ystrad Clud” (Ystrad means “vale”, “clud” means “sheltered”) it was conquered by the Scots in the 11C but remained Welsh-speaking until the 13C.
The other clue that English has been spoken in Lowland Scotland almost as long as it has been spoken in England is that it comes from an ancient branch of Northumbrian English called Lallans. And just look at all the clearly English Clan names, Anderson, Ayton, Aitkinhead, Armstrong, Crawford, Cunningham, Bannerman, Davidson, Elphinstone Edmonstone, etc, (and I haven’t even gone beyond “E” in the list!) In fact well over half the present SNP Westminster MPs bear “sassanach” surnames, eg Black, Blackman, Blackford,etc as well as the Party Leadership, Salmond and Sturgeon, of course. The clue to the ancient lineage of Lallans is that modern speakers of Received Pronunciation can barely understand Glaswegian. Yet, the English spoken in the Highlands and Islands is, like Irish English, perfectly intelligible to people from London. Is this not a paradox? And the explanation is that the longer a language follows its own separate development, the more different it becomes from the original (sort of the same thing to language as the genetic mutation rate is to the formation of new species in evolution) and the Gaelic areas adopted English only in the 19C, whereas it was the mother tongue of the English settlers in Lowland Caledonia from the 7C.
By way of illustrating this important point, the English had themselves arrived from Germany after 445AD and continental Saxons, Angles, Frisians and Franks could still understand the English until about 750–800 AD. This is why the Pope was able to use English missionaries like St Boniface (or Winfrith, born near Crediton in Devon) to convert continental Germans- indeed this English cleric is known as “The Apostle of Germany”. As he put it “for we are of one blood and one bone with you”. (Do look up St Boniface on Wikipedia, he is probably the most significant Englishman that no one has ever heard of, and hard to think of any Englishman before Churchill who played a greater role in the destiny of continental Europe). Much of N. W. Europe was evangelised by Anglo-Saxons. Even the patron saint of Finland is an Englishman.
Getting back to Lallans, or Lowland Scots English (the language of Robbie Burns), this developed separately from mainstream English. It may derive from an old English word meaning something like “unclear or hard to understand”. The Dutch word “lollen”means to mumble, “Lollards” (those proto Protestant English, who “muttered” (perhaps the closest word in modern English) against the Roman Church derive from the same root. It has also simply been said to derive from the area of Scotland where it was spoken, “the lowlands”. Lallans began it’s separate development from mainstream English after the Vikings took most of Northumbria, from around 800AD, and cut off the unconquered English in what is now SE Scotland, Lothian, and Bamburgh, from the rest of the English speakers of Britain, to the South of what had become Viking territory.
So Wessex was NOT “The Last Kingdom”, to survive, both Bamburgh and Anglo-Saxon Scotland also successfully retained their independence from the Vikings, but only Bamburgh and the rest of what became modern Northumbria was later reincorporated into the English State after 927 when Athelstan (grandson of Alfred the Great of Wessex) united all of England by defeating the Viking kingdom of York, and his successors deposing Eric Bloodaxe, the last Viking king of York, ally of Thorfinn Skullsplitter of Orkney (another Norse charmer, they don’t make names like that anymore).
In the intervening 200 years between the fall of most of Northumbria to the Vikings and the West Saxon reconquest of the whole of England, which established the modern English State, the English who had been cut off in Lowland Scotland had, in order to survive, allied themselves with their fellow Christians, the Scots, who had come from Ireland to invade northern Caledonia (inhabited originally by the Picts) at about the same time as the English had invaded Southern Caledonia. And given the choice of heathen Viking rule (by kings with names like Eric Bloodaxe) or incorporating yourself into a single State with the Christian Scots from Ireland, the Caledonian English of course chose to become part of Scotland, and they were natural allies, both Scots and English were Christian and both were being attacked by the same horrific enemy, the Vikings, who had actually seized Dublin and the Hebrides. Thus, by the time the West Saxon liberators reached the Tweed, after AD 927, those ancient English subjects of what had once been Northern Northumbria were now part of the new Kingdom of Scotland, so the Northern part of what had been Northumbria, including its old Capital, “Edwin’s Burgh”, was permanently lost to England, and its people became the only Anglo-Saxons never to become part of the English Unitary State. But they were, in blood, language and culture, Northumbrian English, and Gaelic was never much spoken in their part of Southern Scotland, which today includes both the largest city (Glasgow) and the Capital. They adopted tartans, bagpipes etc. A great Anglo-Gaelic cultural fusion took place in which the Gaels ultimately adopted English (but only in the 18C and 19C) and the Sassenachs (or English-speaking inhabitants of Southern Caledonia) accepted the Irish Clan system and tartan dress, etc.
This is why modern English ears understand Highland Scots and Irish English infinitely better than they understand Lowland Scots, spoken by the descendants of the original English invaders of Britain. The Gaels of the Highlands only adopted English in the 18-19C, so the English they adopted was essentially modern English, whereas in Glasgow they speak the descendant of ancient Lallans, a form of English with a thousand years of separate development from Southern English. Southern English people also struggle to understand Ulster English for the same reason, many of the 17C Protestant colonists to Ulster came from Lowland Scotland and spoke the ancient Lallans variety of English.
And do you know that you also speak Lallans, if only once a year?
If you want to consider some Lallans that even the southern English will know, look over the words of “Auld Lang Syne”, we all sing it at New Year. It is at the heart of Scots culture, yet also at the heart of the English, and it includes pure Lallans, ancient English. It is one of those rare moments when Scotland, old Northumbria and all of the rest of England express in song, every New Year, their shared heritage.
Wikipedia it and you can see the modern translation of the old words, ancient even when Robbie Burns copied it down for the first time from an old man, around 1788. And what could be more appropriate to have set to an ancient tongue, than words which remind us that ancient friendships should be remembered, and made central to our present lives.
[edit 29.1.20] Rather moving that today this was the song, with arms joined across the chamber, that not only British MEPs, but many from other Countries sang immediately after the European Parliament had voted for the Brexit agreement. The words had been printed off and widely circulated within the chamber. MEPs from the Irish Republic were especially warm, joining in, being of course more familiar with Auld Lang Syne than most Europeans.
