Celtic Language

The first point that I think should be considered is this: the antiquity in Britain of Celtic language. Part of Britain we now call England, the land of the Angles; and yet all the days of the English in it, from Hengest to Elizabeth II, are short on an archaeological scale, short even on a Celtic scale. When our speech-ancestors began their effective linguistic conquests - no doubt much later than their first tentative settlements in such regions as the Sussex coast - in the fifth century A.D. the Celtic occupation had probably some thousand years behind it: a length of time as long as that which separates us from King Alfred.

The English adventure was interrupted and modified, after hardly more than 300 years, by the intrusion of a new element, a different though related variety of Germanic coming from Scandinavia. This is a complication which occurred in historically documented times, and we know a good deal about it. But similar things, historically and linguistically undocumented, though conjectured by archaeology, must have occurred in the course of the celticizing of Britain. The result may be capable of a fairly simple generalization: that the whole of Britain south of the Forth-Clyde line by the first century A.D. shared a British or 'Brittonic' civilization, 'which so far as language goes formed a single linguistic province from Dumbarton and Edinburgh to Cornwall and Kent'.5 But the processes by which this linguistic state was achieved were no doubt as complicated, differing in pace, mode, and effect, in different areas, as were those of the subsequent process, which has at length achieved a result which 2,000 years hence might be generalized in almost the same terms, though referring to the spread not of 'Brittonic' but of English. (But parts of Wales would have still to be excepted.)

For instance, I do not know what linguistic complications were introduced, or may be thought to have been introduced, by the' Belgic' invasion, interrupted by Julius Caesar's ill-considered and deservedly ill-fated incursion; but they could, I suppose, have involved dialectal differences within Celtic as considerable as those which divided ninth-century Norse from the older Germanic layer which we now call 'Anglo-Saxon'6 But 2, 000 years hence those differences which now appear marked and important to English philologists may be insignificant or unrecognizable.

None the less, far off and now obscure as the Celtic adventures may seem, their surviving linguistic traces should be to us, who live here in this coveted and much-contested island, of deep interest, as long as antiquity continues to attract the minds of men. Through them we may catch a glimpse or echo of the past which archaeology alone cannot supply, the past of the land which we call our home.

Of this I may perhaps give an illustration, though it is well known. There stands still in what is now England the