British Romance - Evidence and Development

Evidence and Development

Kenneth H. Jackson, who pointed out that "Latin was a living spoken language in Britain under the Empire", used the evidence of loan-words in Welsh and Old Irish to try to diagnose 12 distinct features of British Romance. Jackson's account of this has been disputed by later writers, and the matter of the distinctiveness of British Vulgar Latin is currently unclear.

If it did exist as a distinct dialect group, it has not survived extensively enough for diagnostic features to be detected, despite much new sub-literary Latin being discovered in England in the 20th century.

As late as the 8th century the Saxon inhabitants of St Albans near the Roman city of Verulamium were aware of their ancient neighbour, which they knew alternatively as Verulamacæstir (or, under what H. R. Loyn terms "their own hybrid", Vaeclingscæstir, "the fortress of the followers of Wæcla") interpretable as a pocket of Romano-Britons that remained within the Anglo-Saxon countryside, probably speaking their own local neo-Latin

Rutupiae did its work in the storms of the fourth century. Of its fate in the fifth century we as yet know little. The abundance of late coinage, if it be not due to a limited period of very exceptional congestion, suggests that Richborough may, like Verulamium, have sheltered a Romanized population well on into that dark century.

Other evidences are related to Wroxeter (Roman Viroconium Cornoviorum) and Kent's Rutupiae

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