Reference on Numbers of Saxons

[JoatSimeon at aol.com]

Any theory dealing with the Saxon migrations to Britain has to deal with the
differences in linguistic results.

On the continent, Germanic migrants into the Roman provinces were generally
linguistically assimilated within a few generations -- beyond some loanwords,
little trace of Gothic remains in Iberian Romance, for instance.  In fact, it
was probably extinct or moribund by the time of the 8th-century Muslim
invasions.  It lasted much better in the Crimea!

In Britain not only did the local Celtic and Romance speeches disappear, but
the Anglo-Saxon that emerged after the conversion to Christianity was
singularly lacking in both Romance and Celtic vocabulary.  About 14 Celtic
loan-words in all, and no more Latin loans than the continental Germanic of
the period.

In fact, when it emerges into the light of documentary day, Old English is a
remarkably conservative West Germanic language still mutually comprehensible
with the ancestors of Netherlandish, Frisian, and Low German, not to mention
the nascent Scandinavian tongues.  Which is why English missionaries were so
important in the conversion of the continental Germans.

And this despite the fact that we're talking about the Wessex dialect of Old
English, which emerged on the western fringe of the English-speaking zone and
which we know _was_ in contact with proto-Welsh speakers, since the laws of
Wessex recognize a separate (and legally inferior) Welsh-speaking social
group within the kingdom.

The linguistic evidence alone strongly militates against any prolonged period
of mass bilingualism in the areas of Anglo-Saxon speech.  Since Anglo-Saxon
in its early phase was the speech of an illiterate people divided into a
multiplicity of small, unstable kingdoms with no standard court or chancery
language, it should have been very open to influence from any substrate.  In
fact, in such situations linguistic influence occurrs without the speakers of
either language being conscious of it.

Yet there's less Celtic influence on Old English than there is Algonquian
Indian influence on the English of New England!  Indian place-names and
loan-words are more common there, despite what we know was an extremely
brusque dispossession of the previous population and very limited contact
between the incomers and the indigenous people.

The place-names tell the same story.  They become common only in the western
fringes of England, which we know from historical sources remained in
British/Welsh hands until the 6th-7th centuries.  And even there, they're
often misunderstood -- rivers called "river" and hills called "hill".

We also know that there was a very substantial drop in the population of
post-Roman Britain.  Estimates for Britannia in the late Roman period -- 4th
century CE -- range as high as 3.5 million or more.

By the time of the Norman conquest (a period for which we have unusually good
historical-demographic documentation) England had about 1.5 million people;
and that was after several centuries of what's generally agreed upon to be
steady expansion.

Other lines of evidence also testify to widespread depopulation in the
transitional Romano-British and early Anglo-Saxon periods.  For example, as
late as the 11th century, London buildings were drawing on domestic sources
of long, thick, straight oak timbers, the type that can only been drawn from
closed-canopy forest at least 300 years old.

These disappear from the domestic record not long after, and only the curved
timber characteristic of coppice- and field-edge oaks is found -- at
precisely the time when population, and forest clearance, again reach the
Romano-British level.