The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

The Anglo-Saxon Mystery

Once upon a time, two thousand years ago, the British Isles were inhabited by Celts, who, as you might expect, spoke Celtic languages. They also had tattoos. The ancient Greeks called the inhabitants of these foggy islands Prittanoi (from where we get the name Britain), meaning tattooed people, although this may just have been down to the Celtic habit of painting themselves with woad, which the Greeks thought rather odd.

The important thing for the moment is that Boadicea (died 61 AD) wasn’t English, even though she lived in what is now England. England didn’t exist at the time. Boadicea was a Celtic Briton.

England started to exist only when the Angles began arriving from Denmark in about 400 AD. They referred to their new country as Angle-land or England. Along with the Angles came the Saxons (from Saxony) and the Jutes (from Jutland) and between them they started to speak Old English.

Soon they had kings and one of these was called Alfred the Great, who was originally the King of the West Saxons but decided to call himself Rex Angul-Saxonum, or King of the Anglo-Saxons.

So what happened to the Celts? What happened to all the people who had swanned around the island before, covered in woad?

The answer is that nobody’s quite sure. There are two arguments: the linguistic one and the historical one.

Whenever one bunch of people conquers another, they pick up a bit of the conquered people’s language. You can’t help it. Try as you might, the native language is all around you. You may have enslaved the natives, but you still need to be able to order your slaves around. You may not want to learn the language, but there are always new things in a new country that you don’t have any words of your own to describe.

Take the example of the British in India. The Brits were there only for a couple of hundred years and yet in that time they picked up shampoo, bungalow, juggernaut, mongoose, khaki, chutney, bangle, cushy, pundit, bandana, dinghy etc., etc., etc. And those were only the words that they brought home with them.

So what words did the Angles and Saxons pick up from the Celts?

Next to nothing.

There’s combe, meaning valley, which comes from cym. There’s tor, meaning rock, which comes from torr, the Celtic word for hill. There’s cross, which we seem to have got from Irish missionaries in the tenth century, rather than from the native Celts. And there’s …

Well, there’s not much else. It depends on how you count things, really, and it’s always possible that words were there but not noted down. The Anglo-Saxons managed to occupy an island for hundreds of years and take almost no words from the people they defeated.

In fact, linguistically, this doesn’t look like an occupation, it looks like a massacre. On the surface it would appear to be a pretty crazy massacre as well. Of course, massacres are always pretty bad things, but you’d still expect a few more words to have crept into Old English, even if they were only the words for ouch, no and stop it. In English there’s a terrifying absence.

And the historians say that this is absolute hogwash. Where, they ask quite reasonably, are the bodies? There aren’t any. No mass graves, no accounts of epic battles. No slaughter recorded. Nothing archaeological. Zero. Zilch. Nil.

So where linguists see a slaughter, archaeologists see peaceful co-existence. It’s all rather odd. Although there’s a third possibility, which is illustrated by a hill in Herefordshire called Pensax, and a town in Essex called Saffron Walden.

Pensax means hill (pen) of the Saxons, and very importantly the pen there is a Celtic word. So it would seem that, for a while at least, there were Saxons on the hill and Celts down in the valley. The same goes for the charmingly named Dorset village of Sixpenny Handley. Sixpenny is a corruption of Sex Pen and is just Pensax with the elements swapped around.

Meanwhile, Saffron Walden is obviously a place where they grew saffron, but the Walden is odd. It’s an Anglo-Saxon term meaning, literally, valley of the foreigners, but wealh was a word that was always used to refer to Celts (and, indeed, it gave us the name Wales).

So, if you work from the place-name evidence you get a third and very odd picture of a country filled with settlements of Anglo-Saxons and Celts living side by side, but never talking. That would mean that they weren’t trading, weren’t marrying, weren’t doing anything at all except naming each other’s settlements, presumably as places to avoid.

You might theorise that each people understood the other’s language and merely chose to speak their own pure dialect, but it would appear that this wasn’t the case. Again it comes down to place-names.

As we have seen, pen was a Celtic word for hill. Yet when the Old English came across a hill called Pen, they decided to name it Pen hul, hul being the Old English word for hill.

The same process was repeated all across England. Names were doubled up, such as Bredon (hill hill) or the River Esk (river river). This would seem to point to a linguistic exchange that didn’t go much further than finding out a place-name before driving out anybody who knew what the place-name meant.

It also makes for some very amusing etymologies. Penhul became Pendle and then a few hundred years later somebody again noticed that it was a hill and changed the name to Pendle Hill, which means Hill-Hill Hill. This was not a one-off. Bredon Hill in Worcestershire is also Hill-Hill Hill on exactly the same pattern of Celtic (bre), Old English (don) and modern English (hill).

We will never know how the Anglo-Saxons and the Celts really got on. Maybe it was a massacre, maybe it was a jolly party. The ages were too dark and history is too forgetful. Nor is it wise to be consumed by sorrow or anger. If you look back far enough everything is stolen and every country invaded. The Celts themselves had conquered the previous people of Britain in around 600 BC, and the Anglo-Saxons were about to get hit by the vicious Vikings, who would bring with them their own language and their own place-names. For example, one Viking found a sedge-covered stream in Yorkshire and decided to name it Sedge-Stream, thus spawning one of the world’s largest corporations.