Historical Review

THE ENGLISH Downloaded from HISTORICAL REVIEW http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ NO. LXVIIL—OCTOBER 1902 Dr. Guest and the English Conquest of South Britain at University of Iowa Libraries/Serials Acquisitions on March 17, 2015 T7BEEMAN, in a letter to the Spectator : upon the death of Dr. J. Guest, refers to ' the wonderful series of discourses—more than one, happily, but still too few—made before successive meet- ings of the Archaeological Institute, in which the progress of the English conquest in the southern part of Britain was first really set out' by that writer. His ' almost morbid' love of certainty and accuracy is mentioned, and he is said to have 'belonged to that class of revealers of truth who bring order out of chaos and light out of darkness, who do their work at the first blow, so that it needs not be done again,' and that what little he has left behind him ' is all of the purest gold.' Freeman had previously professed himself ' in all essential points an unreserved follower of that illustrious scholar.'2 Green was hardly less enthusiastic in his acceptance of the results of these essays, which largely appear in his maps in the ' Making of England.' The joint editors of the ' Origines Celticae,' in which these essays were republished in 1883, were Bishop Stubbs and Mr. Deedes, and the editorial intro- duction is almost as unbounded in its praise as Freeman. It is no wonder that these essays, thus endorsed by three great historians, should be received without question by local historians and other writers. Moreover their conclusions are accepted by Dr. William Bright in his ' Early English Church History.' As they 1 Reprinted in Origines Celticae, 1. p. xii. 1 History of tlie Norman Conquest, i. 9. n. 1. Compare also Life and Letters, i. 336. VOL. XVII.—NO. LXVIII. 8 S 626 DR. GUEST AND THE Oct. are thus becoming gradually woven into the fabric of our accepted history, it is time that they and the methods by which they were reached were submitted to critical examination. These papers are, briefly put, an attempt to write history without documents. Half a dozen words in the Chronicle recording a battle or two is sufficient material for Guest to draught a map showing the relative positions of the English and Britons in the Downloaded from sixth century. In order to do this he founds arguments upon the physical nature of the country, local names, and ancient fortifications, and the arguments are eked out by references to exceedingly late chroniclers. Great stretches of country are filled up with woodlands, and these are assumed to have been so impassable that http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ the English invaders were compelled to leave them in the hands of the Britons. But in fact we have no trustworthy evidence as to the extent of land under trees in the fifth and sixth centuries. Guest takes as his basis the forests of feudal times. It is not until the thirteenth century that we obtain perambulations of the boundaries of these forests, and even then it is impossible to say how much was woodland. Guest nowhere shows any appre- at University of Iowa Libraries/Serials Acquisitions on March 17, 2015 ciation of the fact that these feudal forests were not exclusively or even necessarily woodland. A forest was a district of land subject to the harsh forest laws, comprising within its bounds wood, heaths, and other wild or poor lands, towns, villages, and cultivated land. In many parts the woodlands were nothing more than the strips of wood belonging to the manors within the forest, and in such parts there was little or nothing to distinguish land within the forest from that outside. Guest, however, assumes that all the land within these forests was under trees, and he increases the area of the forests occasionally so as to fill in the space between rivers. Even if it were possible to believe that the outlines thus obtained represented the state of the country in the sixth century, it would still be difficult to believe that all these woodlands were such impassable barriers to semi-barbarous invaders as they are assumed to have been. Green, with his love of the picturesque, has greedily seized upon this theory of impassable woodland belts, and he has found a host of imitators. It has become common and indeed irksome to read how the English invader was kept at bay by a belt of woodland, until he finally did what he apparently might have done earlier—that is, he ' dashes through the brake' and surprises the too confiding Briton. Ancient fortifications are a still more uncertain foundation for the reconstruction of the lost history of the sixth century. It is impossible to establish the date of the erection of these works in the vast majority of cases, or even to feel any confidence in the ascription of them to Britons, Saxons, Danes, and so on, in which antiquaries have so much delighted. To illustrate the risk of writing 1902 ENGLISH CONQUEST OF SOUTH BRITAIN 627 history from early fortifications it is not necessary to go beyond the • Origines Celticae.' GueBt adopted the view of Stukeley that the Bokerly Dykes, part of the series of entrenchments upon which that credulous writer bestowed the name of Belgic Dykes, were the work of the Belgae before the invasion of the Eomans, and that they marked their boundaries. Guest builds largely upon this conclusion in his paper on the date of Stonehenge and on the Downloaded from West-Saxon conquest. Yet the patient excavations of General Pitt-Rivers have shown by the irrefragable evidence of Roman coins that these fortifications were not erected until the fifth century of the Christian era. Local names are scarcely more satisfactory. It is not until http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ centuries after the dates dealt with by Guest that we get any documentary proof of the existence of these name3, and the great majority of them are not recorded until after the Norman Conquest. This long interval of time leaves open the door for many possibilities in connexion with them. A great part is played in Guest's paperB by names apparently compounded of the names of the English and Welsh. But even if all these names had an ethnic reference it at University of Iowa Libraries/Serials Acquisitions on March 17, 2015 is obvious that they may refer to events of later date than those with which he unreservedly connected them. It may be doubted whether the West-Saxons called themselves English or Angles in the sixth century. Guest endeavours to meet this objection by drawing attention to the use of both names in the laws of King Ine.3 But these are of considerably later date, and, as they are known only through the medium of King Alfred's laws, there is a possibility that these denominations are not due to Ine. Of the names cited by Guest one only is an undoubted compound of the name of the Angles,4 whilst some of them have clearly no reference whatever to them. Guest does not seem to have realised that there was no genitive plural in -8 in Old English, and, as there is no proof that the singular of an ethnic name could be used for the plural, as it is in modern English by a sort of personification, we may erase from the list all names involving a genitive in -8. It is difficult to believe that the invaders distinguished trivial features or settlements on portions only of their temporary frontiers by their national name, and that such names survived after the frontier had advanced by many successive stages out of sight. Such names as English Bicknor and Welsh Bicknor are of later origin, and are not parallel to the uses assumed by Guest. It is possible that some of these names in Engle- are derived from men named Engel, for the word was in use for forming personal names among most of the Germanic peoples, although there is no instance except in local * Origines Celticae, ii. 190. 1 That is, Englefield, near Beading, which is mentioned in the chronicle under 871 as ' Englafeld,' and is translated by Florence of Worcester as ' Anglorom Campus.' s s 2 628 DR. GUEST AND THE Oct. names of its use in England before the Franco-Norman Ingelrams, Ingchics, and Ingelberts arrived. It is in non-Anglian districts that we should expect to meet with it, just as it is in Anglian districts that names compounded with Sexe (' Saxon') occur. The case is even less clear in regard to Wealh, ' Welshman,' for that was extensively used in Old English personal namea, as in continental Germanic names, and we have clear proofs of the use of the Downloaded from single-stem hypocoristic form Wealh in Old English names. This word also meant a ' serf,' and hence in some cases local names compounded with it may represent settlements of serfs, just as Charlton and Carlton derive their names from dwellings of ' churls.' But with Guest local names compounded with Wealh are made to http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/ refer to the Welsh, and the date of their imposition is restricted to the period with which he was dealing. Scarcely less important than these names in his scheme are words which he considers to mean ' boundary,' and in like manner all possibility of the boundaries being other than those of the expanding West-Saxon kingdom in the sixth century is ignored. It is not certain that any one of the names used by him does mean ' boundary.' Thus mere is taken by him to represent at University of Iowa Libraries/Serials Acquisitions on March 17, 2015 the O.E.

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