The Romance of Early Britain

Abstract

Abstract This chapter considers the survival of Latin as a spoken language in Britain during the two centuries following the breakdown of Roman rule. Such material as survives to illustrate this obscure period is described and evaluated in two principal sections. One deals with the ‘British’ side of the equation, which comprises a few contemporary literary texts and a collection of (mostly short and formulaic) inscriptions, together with the evidence for early contact with Latin afforded by the later-recorded Celtic languages. The other addresses the ‘English’ dimension to the problem, seeking to examine linguistic traces that might have been passed to the Anglo-Saxons, whose own tongue came largely to replace whatever came before, whether it had been Celtic or Latin. Although the sum total of the two kinds of evidence is rather meagre, it is possible tentatively to conclude that a British variety of Late Latin, a nascent ‘British Romance’, was probably rather widely spoken, in bilingual situations if not as a preferred vernacular, across the fifth century and into the sixth.