Extract from Norman Davies

(Here, Davies compares two former Roman provinces – Britannia (present-day Britain) and Gaul (present-day France). In addition to a common Roman history, both provinces were also invaded by the Germanics, but what is interesting is that whereas the Germanics in Britannia held on to their language, the Germanics in Gaul gave it up for the local version of Latin, eventually called French. There was language shift in the Gaul situation.)

[T]he net product in the former Britannia was very different from that, for instance, in the former Gaul. In Gaul, the political triumph of the invading Germanics did not save them from assimilation into the language and the culture of the native Gallo-Romans. The language which emerged, first called Romain and later Français, i.e., Frankish, was in effect the Frankish variant of neo-Latin. In the former Britannia, in contrast, the invading Germanics avoided cultural assimilation; and the language which eventually emerged was not a fusion of Latin, Celtic, and Germanic, but a new, original idiom of an almost purely Germanic character. How was it that the culture of the Gallo-Romans triumphed whereas the culture of the Romano-British went under?

The simplest answer is extermination. Celtophiles love to relate how the murderous Saxons massacred the defenceless Britons and supposedly wiped them out. The word genocide is used. It is completely out of place. Though atrocious massacres did occur, both of civilians and of churchmen, as at Anderida in Sussex in 491 or on the even of the Battle of Chester in 616, there is plentiful evidence that the bulk of the British population continued to live on under Germanic rule, and to speak their own language. The law code of Ine, King of Wessex, from the late seventh century, for instance, makes special provision for the British still living in his domain.

A second answer invokes numbers. The native Celts were supposedly swamped by the overwhelming tide of Germanics. This too, is unlikely. Though fifth-century boat convoys might bring in enough migrants to fill the initial colonies, it is unthinkable that they could have repopulated the entire country. Apart from that, there is every indication that repopulation did not take place. Modern generic research is showing quite convincingly that the Germanic invasions, like the Celtic invasions before them, were insufficient to transform the existing gene pool to any major degree.

A third answer concerns the prevailing linguistic patterns in late Roman Britannia. The Germanics were moving into the most heavily Romanised regions of the south-east where Latin, not Brythonic [a Celtic language], was the main language. Celtic survivals there would naturally be less marked than in other regions where Brythonic had not been so seriously undermined. This makes sense.

Two further factors may have had some impact. The bubonic plague which devastated Western Europe in the mid-sixth century is thought by some commentators to have hit the Celts harder than the Germanics. And physical displacement had its effect. The advance of the Germanics from the east undoubtedly drove some of the British Celts westwards from the former civilian zone whilst forcing others to flee to the Continent.

(Norman Davies, The Isles: A History [Oxford University Press, 2000], pp. 195–196)

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