Effects On Language & Place Names

You are going to see this diagram on each of these pages that deal with our language. Let’s look at the subsequent effects of:  Celts

SLHS: Migrations Into Britain1: Before The Romans

British Early History

Britain has been invaded many times and each of those invasions has had a significant effect both on it’s customs and technology and in terms of its languages and the development of towns and villages.

● These items have aspects that uniquely contribute to national or world history.

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It is known that the polar ice sheets extended as far south as what is now the River Thames. Being hundreds of meters thick their weight would grind the rocks and surface of the earth literally to a powder producing fine grained mineral rich soils and clays that we take for granted today. As they receded the melt water would channel great swathes of sediment wherever the surface was softest. The whole of the British Isles and Ireland were fully joined to Europe. We can see from the map (right) that until 16,000BC less than one third of Scotland was habitable.

River Severn Changes Direction Southward

This relatively modern map belies evidence found in 1900 in Cheshire and Shropshire that the River Severn actually had once flowed northwards, through Cheshire and emptied into what is now the Irish Sea via the Mersey. Geologists explain that during the Ice Age encroachment of ice from the north must have blocked its flow, flooding out the whole of what is now Shropshire, producing what they call Lake Lapworth. Some suggest that this then built up and burst out in the the only direction that it could go: southwards past the volcanic Wrekin causing what is now the Ironbridge Gorge. Yet other geologists think that some flow could have been below the glacier at that time. Either way, such was this erosion that the Severn and Avon Rivers remain flowing in that southerly direction to this day.

Looking further afield other geologist have found that until about 7,000BC England was still joined to Europe -confer with the fact that the three great Egyptian pyramids had been built for 500 years by then !

Very little Migration

Thus we can conclude that until this latter date humans and animals could freely move about a single land mass. However it is suspected that numbers were small. The making of shelters, gathering of food, farming, hunting, tool making etc were still in their infancy. With no dentistry, no combat for injuries or disease save fragile herbal remedies if a human lived to 40 years old they were considered to have had a full life. Life was so hard in those days, especially in the post ice age winters, it’s unlikely that many moved on mass.

A. British Not Isles Yet

Language

As ice sheets came and went Britain remained a single amorphous peninsula and it was not divided into nations as we see now. Since the Iron Age languages across Europe had been developing particularly Celtic but it was by no means uniform. The version that become dominant here is known as British Celtic or sometimes described as Brythonic. Remnants of it remain in Welsh, Cornish and Breton. Warwick Uni go into the effect on Warwickshire very well: Iron Age Tribes in Britain.

Examples of Celtic words in our language that have been traced and their meanings are:

1. coomb
   

2. dun
   

3. hog
   

4. doe
   

5. ass
   

6. brock
   

7. crag

Looking at the influences that invaders made on Britain and Stratford:  7000BC - AD43

meaning valley

meaning brown

meaning pig

meaning female deer

meaning donkey

meaning badger

meaning rock