The Mother Tongue by Bill Bryson Page B

discovery of a hoard of curse tablets in Bath near a spring once dedicated to the goddess Sulis Minerva. It was the practice of aggrieved citizens at that time to scratch a curse on a lead tablet and toss it with a muttered plea for vengeance into the spring. The curses were nothing if not heartfelt. A typical one went: “Docimedes has lost two gloves and asks that person who has stolen them should lose his minds and his eyes.” The tablets are interesting in that they show that people of Roman Britain were just as troubled by petty thievery (and, not incidentally, just as prone to misspellings and lapses of grammar) as we are today, but also they underline the diversity of the culture. One outstandingly suspicious victim of some minor pilferage meticulously listed the eighteen people he thought most likely to have perpetrated the deed. Of these eighteen names, two are Greek, eight Latin, and eight Celtic. It is clear that after nearly four centuries of living side by side, and often intermarrying, * relations between the Romans and Celts had become so close as to be, in many respects, indistinguishable.
    In 410, with their empire crumbling, the Roman legions withdrew from Britain and left the Celts to their fate. Under the slow pagan onslaught, many Celts were absorbed or slaughtered. Others fled to the westernmost fringes of the British Isles or across the Channel to France, where they founded the colony of Brittany and reintroduced Celtic to mainland Europe. Some Celts—among them the semilegendary King Arthur—stayed and fought and there is evidence from place-names to suppose that pockets of Celtic culture survived for some time in England (around Shaftesbury in northeast Dorset, for example). But little is known for sure. This was the darkest of the dark ages, a period when history blends with myth and proof grows scant.
    The first comprehensive account of the period is The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, written in Latin by the Venerable Bede, a monk at Jarrow in Northumbria. Although it is thought to be broadly accurate, Bede’s history was written almost 300 years after the events it describes—which is rather like us writing a history of Elizabethan England based on hearsay.
    Despite their long existence on the island—the Romans for 367 years, the Celts for at least 1,000—they left precious little behind. Many English place-names are Celtic in origin (Avon and Thames, for instance) or Roman (the -chester in Manchester and the -caster in Lancaster both come from the Roman word for camp), but in terms of everyday vocabulary it is almost as if they had never been. In Spain and Gaul the Roman occupation resulted in entirely new languages, Spanish and French, but in Britain they left barely five words [according to Baugh and Cable, page 80], while the Celts left no more than twenty—mostly geographical terms to describe the more hilly and varied British landscape.
    This singular lack of linguistic influence is all the more surprising when you consider that the Anglo-Saxons had freely, and indeed gratefully, borrowed vocabulary from the Romans on the continent before coming to the British Isles, taking such words as street, pillow, wine, inch, mile, table, and chest, among many others. The list of mundane items for which they lacked native terms underlines the poverty of their culture.
    And yet for all their shortcomings, the Anglo-Saxons possessed a language that was, in the phrase of Otto Jespersen, “rich in possibilities,” and once literacy was brought to them, it flowered with astonishing speed. The main bringer of literacy, and of Christianity, was St. Augustine, who traveled to Britain with forty missionaries in 597 and within a year had converted King Ethelbert of Kent at his small provincial capital, Canterbury (which explains why the head of the English church is called the Archbishop of Canterbury, even though he resides in London). With that initial