given the Scriptures to his Gothic countrymen in their own tongue.[1]
The island of Britain was now no longer to be left in the hands of degenerate Celts; happier than Crete or Sicily, it was to become the cradle where a great people might be compounded of more than one blood. Bede, writing many years later, tells us how the Jutes settled themselves in Kent and Wight; how the Saxons fastened upon Essex, Sussex, and Wessex; how the Angles, coming from Anglen (the true Old England), founded the three mighty kingdoms of East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria, holding the whole of the coast between Stirling and Ipswich. It is with this last tribe that I am mainly concerned in this work. Fearful must have been the woes undergone by the Celts at the hands of the ruthless English heathen, men of blood and iron with a vengeance. So thoroughly was the work of extermination done, that but few Celtic words have been admitted to the right of English citizenship. The few that we have seem to show that the Celtic women were kept as slaves, while their husbands, the old owners of the land, were slaughtered in heaps.
Garnett gives a list of nearly two hundred of these words, many of which belong to household management; and others, such as spree, bam, whop, balderdash, &c., can scarcely be reckoned classical English.[2]
- ↑ I do not quote in my Appendix any specimen of English before 680, as we cannot be sure that we have any such English exactly as it was written.
- ↑ Philological Essays, p. 161. Some Celtic words, like gallop and travail, were brought back to England by our Norman conquerors. Bother, a favourite oath of the ladies in our time, comes to us from the Irish; it means mente affligere. — Garnett, p. 161.
