Cumbric Language - The "Cumbric Region"

The "Cumbric Region"

The term "Cumbric" is strictly a geographical one, used by linguists to refer to the evidence for a Brythonic language within a particular area of northern England and Southern Scotland. The definition of that area is therefore essential to any further study of Cumbric, though there has been no scholarly consensus as to exactly what constitutes the Cumbric region.

Koch defines the region roughly as "the area approximately between the line of the river Mersey and the Forth-Clyde isthmus", but goes on to include evidence from the Wirral peninsula in his discussion and gives no real indication of the easterly extent of the region. Others have been more restricting in their definitions. Jackson describes Cumbric as "the Brittonic dialect of Cumberland, Westmorland, northern Lancashire, and south-west Scotland..." and goes on to define the region further as being bound in the north by the Firth of Clyde, in the south by the river Ribble and in the east by the Southern Scottish Uplands and the Pennine ridge.

Charles Phythian-Adams goes further in defining the "Land of the Cumbrians", though his primary interest is historical rather than linguistic. He defines the southern part of this region essentially as the historic county of Cumberland with the northern part of Westmorland as far south as Rere Cross, the highest point on Stainmore, bound in the east by the crest of the Pennine chain. The modern area of Cumbria and Lancashire south of that zone are emphatically omitted from the region as, he asserts, they have no historic claim to be called Cumbrian. Phythian-Adams includes the region bound by the watershed of the Solway Firth (the modern council area of Dumfries and Galloway) as part of his historic Cumbria and goes on to say that "This entire region..., together with its neighbours to the north in what became Strathclyde and Lothian long comprised a last northerly bastion of the Brythonic branch of the Celtic language (which has been dubbed 'Cumbric')...".

There is, then, some agreement that the region of western Britain roughly between the Firth of Clyde and the Lakeland Dome comprises the central bloc in which the Cumbric language was spoken, though how far south and east the language continued to function is debatable. The definitions given above are based partly on a historical understanding of the relationship between Britons, Angles and Gaels (and later, Norse and Normans) which was more complex than a simple process of invasion and settlement, and partly on geography which becomes less well defined as we move north.