Gone Medieval - The Picts and their Language

Episode Date: January 10, 2023

The Picts who lived in what is now northern and eastern Scotland in the Early Medieval period spoke the Pictish language. But for centuries, the origins of Pictish have been hotly debated.In this episode of Gone Medieval, Dr. Cat Jarman finds out all about the Picts and their language, and what insights are emerging from the latest research, with Dr. Guto Rhys.This episode was edited by Anisha Deva and produced by Rob Weinberg.If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to today's episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr Kat Jarman. The early medieval northerly people known to us as the Picts spoke what we refer to as the Pictish language. But for over 400 years the origins, affinities and features of this language have been hotly debated. The questions about its origins have been especially, important because of how this relates to ownership of a Scottish past. Did it belong to

immigrant Irish, conquering Germanic peoples, or native Britons? Now today, to find out all about the Pictish language and what answers we now how to some of these questions, I'm delighted to have a specialist in this precise topic with me today. So a very warm welcome to Dr. Gita Ries to gone medieval studio today. Thank you very much for inviting me. Greatly appreciated. So this is really, really fascinating because there are so many things I think that people are absolutely not aware of, well, I mean, Picts in general, but even more so with the language. So I'm really delighted that you're going to fill us in on some of these unknowns here. But I was hoping just to start, just to set the context a little bit. Can you give a sort of brief introductions to who the

picks were? And what do we mean when we talk about the Picts? That's an excellent question. I think previous generations would have labelled them as all the non-Gaelic people. And what? And what's a lot of to the north of the Antonine Wall. That would have been your simplistic earlier views, but views have changed dramatically in the past few decades. And we're getting to realise the Picts really is just a Latin label. And that most so-called Picts weren't even aware that they were Picts. They had other group names.

And what probably happened is that in the later early medieval period, let's say the 7th or 8th century, as Christianity was becoming deeply embedded in Christendom in Pictland, they became increasingly aware of the label PICTi in classical and English sources, and they sort of labelled, they adopted that word for themselves in Latin contexts. But it was very simply, we would think of the people speaking something like a Britonic language, more or less to the north of the Antenine Wall, and people who carved really genuinely mysterious symbols on stones.

It's very much an evolving, changing ethnicity between the third and the four and the 10th century. Fantastic. So let's get on to the language, though. which is really your specialism and your expertise. Now, I know that this is something that's changed the way people have thought about the language, the Pictish language, has changed quite a lot, and people have talked and discussed it and debated over the sort of past 400 years or so. Can you give us a little bit of an outline of how that understanding of it has changed over time in the last few hundred years?

I suppose the best place to start is the venerable Beads Commons published in 731. one. And there's one very, very clear comments he makes about the four spoken languages of Britain. One being what we would call old English. The other being Gaelic Irish that was spoken in the southern western Isles and the coastland of Scotland. The third was Britonic. That's the Welsh language that was spoken from Loch Lomond, all the way down to the Loire Valley in this period. And the fourth is Pictish. And he makes a very clear statement that they are different languages. but it doesn't really get into any serious detail. Now, this statement has been available to all since that time.

Anybody who's ever written about the language is aware of this statement because of the popularity and the presence of Bede. So people have grappled with what this means. And interestingly, Bede also states that the boundary was the well, the fourth Clyde Isthmus, which is more or less the Antenine Wall. So there's been this image that throughout history, there was a slightly strange, mysterious, disappeared people north of the Antonine Wall. That spoke one language.

What it was has been, as you say, a debate since the medieval period. And the Scottish historian, George Buchanan, in 1882, looked at the evidence. And he said, well, it's kind of Britonic. All the evidence points are something like Britonic. In 1586, William Camden said something more or less the same. And then things were quite quieter a bit. until the 18th century, it becomes part of the massive battle about the ownership of the Scottish past. So if Picts spoke Gaelic, that was a bit unnerving for these Scots speakers.

If they spoke Britonic, that wasn't very good. I mean, Gaelic also had the Catholic connotations as well, which didn't go down too well. And then some would argue that they spoke a Germanic language, Teutonic, as they called it. And there were very, very fierce battles here, which reflected, not a really objective, informed investigation of the evidence, but rather the views and the prejudices of the scholars or the antiquarians involved. And then in 1891, I think Sir John Reyes, Professor Celtic Oxford looked at the Ogham inscriptions. It's an alphabet borrowed from Ireland in about late to sixth century, probably adopted by Picts. It's a series of notches along a line,

four groups of five notches, either below, above or across a line. And we've got some 18-ish, fairly long inscriptions which nobody can fully interpret still. And this form the basis of the notion that picked spoke a non-Indo European language, John who has retracted this, but the idea is still going. And the consensus since about 1955 has been, it was a sort of Britonic Welsh language, but there might have also been a non-Indoeuvian language surviving as well. Okay, so is that quite a good sort of general consensus now? Do we have a good understanding, or is it still up for debate? Well, we thought we had a consensus until recently.

Okay. I mean, the consensus amongst those working in Scotland who were familiar with the place name evidence, the inscriptions, the personal names, and the like, is that it was very closely related to Britonic. Brothonic is another word for that. Perhaps even a sort of dialect extension of it, or perhaps in a linguistic continuum. But the spanner in the works here are the Owen inscriptions mainly, because they're very, very bizarre. And many of them have quite long. They come from the North, Northern Ireland, and the foremost experts in Celtic linguistics can't interpret them satisfactorily.

So that's come up recently as evidence for a non-Ind European language spoken. Another element of that that's fallen off the radar is that some of the early place names couldn't really be interpreted totally confidently as Celtic. But then again, the evidence of Ptolemy, but they're in 12th century manuscripts which are copies of copies of copies in Greek, copied from a Latin taken from Celtic speakers. Yeah, so that's quite a very random way of actually trying to get to the core of the evidence then, isn't it, to be a little bit careful, I suppose. So you mentioned these four languages that Bede mentioned.

Is that thought to be a sort of realistic view of the language spoken in Britain and the surrounding regions in, say, the sort of six and seven centuries? Or what is the sort of wider linguistic situation in that time? That's a core question here. Now, if you're sort of familiar with Bede and the history of post-Roman Britain, you'll know that there were fairly antagonistic relationships we've seen Christian Britons and non-Christian Anglo-Saxons as these identities formed in the island. Bede himself was exceptionally hostile to Britons. It's likely than his Northumbria, even at the end of his life, that his Northumbria was primarily a Britonic-speaking kingdom. The Anglo-Saxons or the old

English Northumbrians were probably still, perhaps even a significant minority, ruling elite in this kingdom. Certain scholars think of there was a great anxiety there that the whole Northumbrian enterprise and Beed's Christianity could fail. It had almost failed in 634 when a Welsh prothonic king called Cadwallon, son of Cadvan had almost overthrown Northumbria and taking the land back for Britons. So people have speculated the Beed perhaps was much more favourable towards Picts, because their kingdom by the end of his life. Northumbria was on very good terms with Picts,

but they still had problems with independent Britonic kingdoms. So people have said, perhaps he's exaggerating the differences between Britonic and Pictish for political reasons. And perhaps more recently, Dr. Alan James has looked at the place name evidence, looking at Fife and Northern Britain. And from the place name evidence, he's argued very strongly, and very convincingly that you can't place any linguistic isoglosses along the Antenine Wall. The place name evidence seems to suggest a much more complex changing interaction between Pictish and Britonic, at least along the area of the Antenine Wall. So you mean that that's not a sort of clear boundary between one language and the other?

Yes, this is a political boundary because the core event we should always have in our background here is a battle fought on the 22nd of May, 685. It's called the Battle of Nechden's Meir. And this is when a Pictish king called Brithé defeats and kills the Northumbian king Edgefrit. We now think this battle probably took place up somewhere around Loch Inch in the Highlands. Now, this Brithae, son of Bely, was half Welsh. His father was Bely, who was a king of the Kingdom of Dumbarton, the Northern Britons. we don't know to what extent he was Pictish or to what extent he, we don't know if the rest of his

ancestry was where his mother's side was, whether he was Pictish, whether he was Welsh, or he could even even brought up as an exile in Northumbria. We don't know. But he wins this great battle, and people are often tempted to see this battle on the Abbelemno stone. Do Google that, the rare depictions of a battle on any stone. Stylistically, it's significantly later than the battle in 685. But what we might have here is that this is when a northerly kingdom of the Wirtteras, as the English call them, takes control of other northerly kingdoms. It's an overlordship in some degrees, and this moves southwards. Bede actually tells us the Anglo-Saxons vacated a bishopric they'd set up to control certain picts. Now, it may be in the wake of this battle that the

political boundary becomes fixed more or less around the fourth. And then when people talk about languages, they often generalise. They'll say, oh, Breton is spoken in Britain. But something is spoken in a part or Britain speaks English. Well, actually, there's Gaelic and Welsh, and there was Cornish and so on. So people might be generalising here. The one thing I know that you've also looked at is how Pictish relates to Indo-European languages, if it does or doesn't. Can you say something a little bit about that as well?

Well, yes, we can take it a lot, lot further than that, because we have a fair amount of evidence for the language, but it's all onomastics. It's all names of things, really, and everything is based on that. And there's very little doubt. It was closely related to Britonic, the ancestor of Welsh, Breton, Cornish, and Cumbric. The evidence is very short. It's only single words. Therefore, we don't get access to its grammar or the verbal morphology, how it made verbs in the past or the future or the conditional. So we just don't know things like that, so we really can't tell how close it was. The most important and influential article on this was the Pictish language by Professor Kenneth Jackson of Edinburgh, an extremely important historical linguist and historian. And he was at the origin of the two Pictish's theory. Now, what he believed is that Pictish was still spoken in the north and the west of Scotland, so all the islands and adjacent coastlands. To put it simply, there are no Pictish place names here. Now, the works of Jennings and Cruise recently have looked at all these areas, and what they've shown is the reason there are no Pictish place names there

is because the area was densely norcified in this of the Viking period. So they more or less faced all the previous toponomy from Orkney, Shetland, the Western Isle, Sky, Lewis and the like. Whatever was there before is all gone. and that these areas became north, very north speaking, are very much a part of the north speaking world. And that's why we don't have any Pictish place names in these regions. That leads really nicely, doesn't it, onto what happens?

Because obviously you've got the Norse, or the kind of names, or Vikings, whatever you would have called them, coming in, that's one thing. But that's not the only reason why this language disappears. I mean, so what happens when? It's in this time period, isn't it, the sort of eighth to the 10th century, that Pictish disappears. What does actually happen to the language?

Well, we don't really know because we don't have any good sources, but what basically happens is that the terms of Picts more or less fall off the radar. In the 9th century, the Agro-Saxons ceased to refer to Piotas Picts, and they start to refer to the Kingdom of Scotland or Alaba in gate. We now use the term. Similarly, Irish texts in the 9th, 10th century, also cease to talk about Khrushnik, their word for Britons, but they've limited to the Britons that hadn't become Romanised later on. Now, these fall off the radar, and by the time we get to the 11th, 12th century,

all the kings of Scotland, are Alapha, they have Gaelic names, and they start referring to the kingdom in the north, not in any sort of Pictish way, but there's Alapur or Scotland. So there were competing theories about the disappearance of the language. In the medieval period, a myth grew up that either the intermarriage of Kenneth Macalpin and a Pictish princess, but this is a medieval myth, or that the gale slaughtered the Picts, you know, in a feast. It's a motive. Now, for a long time, people thought that the Scots, the Gael, the Gaelic speakers, conquered the Picts. You know, this small little kingdom of Dalrya, places like the Mel of Kintyre, Moll, those islands in the south here and the valleys leading up to central Scotland, that it conquered. Pictland. Now, it seems to be something rather different because during the 7th and 8th century,

it seems that Dalreda, the Gaelic-speaking kingdom, was for a long time under the control, or tributary to the Picts. Now, up until 716 also, the Pictish church was a very Irish church. It's more or less been founded by the Irish. Things change, and the Picts then adopt a much more Northumbrian Catholic type of Christianity after 716. But what we might imagine is that in the 7th and 8th centuries, there were increasing Gaelic influences. So, for example, they adopt the OEM inscription for writing on stones and presume probably on wood or perishables as well. Their church is highly Gaelic. Their priests, ecclesiasts are going to Irish centres of learning to be trained in biblical studies, priesthood, pastoral care, etc, etc. There's evidence of intermarriage as well

between Picts and Gales. And you've got to remember, this isn't a conflict or a contrast between little Dalreida in the south-west, Gaelic Dalreida and Big Picketland. Gaeldom in this period was very, very large. It's all of Ireland, and the adjoining parts of, well, just over the sea in what we now label Scotland. So the real contrast has been a fairly small Pictland with only smallish fertile areas, lots of mountains perhaps,

and very large fertile Gaeldom. There are different scenarios here, an increasingly gaelicised Pictland in the 8th, 9th, 10th centuries, it may be that the north in the 10th century didn't knock out the ruling dynasty, perhaps in the north. And that this does create a bit of a power vacuum, and the people who sort of survive perhaps best are the gales who may even be controlling some areas as implanted elites.

And now what emerges after this is a Pictland increasingly dominated by people who speak Gaelic in all power. That is why a new name comes along, alibi, just meaning Britain really. So it's the same kingdom, sort of under a new linguistic rule, but probably many Picts still survived. And the Pictish language could have still been spoken in the 11th century. I guess that's part of the, as you already mentioned, with the sources, that we have such few sources and just remaining names. We don't have any of that time period really to sort of properly understand how that development's happened. So it's quite a challenging area of research, I suppose.

It is. We're lucky we've got some very good historians working in this field. Hi there. I'm Don Wildman, the host of the brand new podcast, American History Hit. Join me twice a week as I explore the past to help us understand the United States today. You'll hear how codebreakers uncovered secret Japanese plans for the Battle of Midway. Visit Chief Poetan as he prepares for war with the British. See Walt Disney accuse his former colleagues of being communists. and uncover the hidden history that lies beneath Central Park.

From pre-colonial America to independence, slavery to civil rights, the gold rush to the space race. I'll be speaking to leading experts to delve into America's past. New episodes dropping every Monday and Thursday. So join me on American History Hit, a podcast by History Hit. Talking about sources, when you said to me some notes that we talked about this before they're recording, You talk about the enigmatic symbol stones. Do you already talk about some other inscriptions? I'm very intrigued by these.

Can you tell me more about those? I think everybody's intrigued by the symbol stones. I mean, they are baffling. So what are they, really? Right. Well, what we have is on a stone and a few other objects. Almost always symbols which occur in pairs do Google Pictish symbol stones. Some of them are clearly referencing known objects like a wall.

or there's a thing called a Pictish beast, something like a cross between an elephant and a dolphin and something. We don't know what these mean, but they almost always occur in pairs, and there are a few hundred of them spread throughout Pictland. And if anything corresponds to Beads Pictland, then it is these symbol stones, because they are found on the northern, all the sort of fertile areas of our Pictland. They occur in pairs. Some of them are quite abstract. They're called double disc, and Z-rod. We do not yet know what they mean. I think there's about 50 core symbols and a few that occur additionally. Sometimes, occasionally, we have a third symbol, a mirror and a comb. But we don't know how this is modifying the other two. We haven't been able to establish any regional patterns or any temporal patterns. Most people would think that they are name statements

of some form. People are suggested that they're someone the son of someone, but that leaves, Do you really have enough names with maximum 50 symbols? Others have thought they might refer to name elements. Think of Anglo-Saxon names Adel Frith, Adelburg. You might have one meaning an Adel, or something like that in Pichish. There are no confident interpretations at present. So definitely enigmatic. Where do we find them?

Are there specific places that they turn up? They're usually on stones. They are sometimes on unsculpted stones. sometimes they are on Christian crosses and they form an integral part of the Christian crosses. So we know that these symbols were not just an afterthought added later. Also, Gordon Noble, the tireless archaeologist, has recently dated Earth from the fine spot

of one of these symbol stones to the third century, I believe, or somewhere around 300. So the interesting thing is that these symbols seem to have been used in pre-Christian and Christian contexts, probably going up to the 8th and 9th centuries. So they're not in conflict with Christianity. They're not pagan symbols in any intrinsic way. And these go all the way up into Orkney and Shetland.

And it does seem to be a common means of communicating something. They occur on some other objects as well, like in caves or on some silver torques. It really is. It's really intriguing, actually. So we just need to try and work out what they're trying to communicate and how. I mean, you've already said that there is not that many sources, there's not that much left of it, but what actually is left behind? What's the sort of legacy of the Pictish language that we can encounter today? Well, let's start at the beginning for ones, rather than in the middle. Now,

our earliest evidence is the geography of Ptolemy. This was a Greek polymath working in the Greek Egyptian town of Alexandria in around 140 AD. Now, he compiles a huge atlas of the known world, and he puts place names on it, and then he does grid references for everything. And we've still got the books of grid references, which allow us to recreate these maps. And he's got quite a number of places and group and river names from what later became Pictland. And some of these superficially, they don't appear to be Celtic. And this is one of the things that contributed to Professor Kenneth Jackson's view of a non-European picked. However, as I mentioned briefly before, what probably happened with these is that,

Tacitus mentions a fleet being sent around Scotland, while Northern Britain to collect information, a Roman fleet. It may be that these names were collated. Some of the names were collated during that voyage. They probably had interpreters with them on these boats that were going around. Ptolemy writes these down about the 140. Some of his material, however, is coming from Maronis of Tyre. A slightly earlier Greek scholar. Ptolemy is writing in Greek, but he's getting them written in Latin forms. and there are things that don't quite translate linguistically. And all our copies of Ptolemy's work, I think the earliest is around 1,200 or so.

They're all copies of copies, so errors are crept in, and we can see errors, we can correct errors in other places. So if you take a literal approach to Ptolemy's work, then you are going to come up with, or this doesn't look Celtic. However, if you're more realistic into what the manuscript evidence is, then I think they look unproblematically Celtic. But then if we move forward, we've then got a massive gap with only a few things, a few names occurring in Roman sources. Do Google the Colchester inscription. There's a Caledonian on a bronze plaque in Roman Colchester. But we don't get any evidence then until we get Irish annals and bead. And what we have with those rarely are few personal names, contemporaneous ones.

But if we look at these names and we've got one really good document, which the Durham Liberwita, the book, which you enter names or monks to pray for. And we've got Pictish names there, and these must be coming, we believe, from the actual court of the Picts. And they have names like Eunus, UN-U-S-T. These are exactly, as later Welsh would be spelling them. And that, again, is strong evidence

of these are the sanctioned forms of the Pictish elite, because they're in a very elite book. And the names we have in Irish, the Irish unfortunately tend to galicise the names, and they can do it, because the languages are similar enough for you to work, out which names correspond. But here and there we've got other little bits of evidence. Perhaps our most important bit of evidence is a thing called the Pictish King lists. It's in a manuscript in the

National Library in Paris now. We have long lists of Pictish kings here. And there are several variants, but the one that's in Paris is called the Poplton manuscript. It's a copy of a copy of a copy. But it's probably something that was compiled around the late 9th century. And it has lists of Pictish kings in very, very Welsh, Britonic, Latin orthography, only slightly gaelic-sized, because it was been copied somewhere along the line by Gale. And the fact that these are so sort of Welsh in appearance does confirm the evidence of place names. The only thing is, the best copy we have comes along with the Abernethy Foundation Legend, a Foundation Legend from Monastery. And Abernethy is very, very close to Britonic-speaking areas. You become a little bit

cautious, you know, were the monks here rarely writing exactly what they were saying up in Inverness? So there are problems all our evidence, and what people tend to do is to chuck everything from north of them Antonine Wall into the big bowl and say, oh, this must be present pick a dish, but rather uncritically, perhaps the most important source of evidence of place names. Now, these were fortunately that the work of Dr. Simon Taylor, a renowned toponymist, has thrown great light on this. It was W.J. Watson in 1926, so this history, of the Celtic place names of Scotland, who really showed that there was a wealth of Britonic, Welshish-like place names in Pickland. In his great work, he discussed Pictish and

Britonic in one chapter. But we'll give you some examples. You'd be familiar with Aberdeen, where you can think of Aberystwis in Wales and so on, meaning Estuary. Now, we have about 30 Aber names, we think. Some of them might be something else. Estuary confluence. So that's one piece of evidence. The only thing is that if you look at the specific, of how these Aber names are qualified like Dean, they're all Gaelic. So what probably happened is that Aber itself was survive the language shift into Gaelic. So they're not unqualified evidence, but there's still strong evidence of a Britonic-like language there. If you go up to Strath Pether, the north of Inverness, well, Pether is a river name, and it corresponds to Welsh Pever.

It means glistening. It's the glistening, nice, clean, shiny river. these words have got totally different forms in Scottish Gaelic, Irish. So they can't be Irish-Gaelic, they must be Britonic. If you look around, we have many, many dozens of these. We have things like Pitt Ponte. The Pontia probably is Welsh pan, say hollow, a small valley. You might be aware of the mounth, the big mountainous area in the middle of Scotland.

And it's a Gaelic word. This corresponds to Manit in Welsh mountain, high ground. So there's a place name evidence, but perhaps very interestingly is that in Scotland, Scottish Gaelic are a number of words that don't occur in Irish, and they are phonetically incompatible with an Irish origin, and they have correspondences in Welsh. Now, there's no real reason for the Gales when they're controlling all of Alapin, Northern Scotland, to adopt words from the Britons of Dumbarton. But in that language shift from Pictish to Gaelic, which is happening in the 9th, 10th centuries, it's probable that a number of words survived. Most of them have

sort of fiscal nature, the administrative, and it may be that certainly some aspects of Pictish administration survived, and they kept on using useful words, like one would be peck. Now, that means a share of an estate or something. I've got about 300 examples of them, pit lochery, usually pit in modern place names. It means that a part of an estate, we think. But again, this is a word that entered Gaelic. We've got Prith, meaning a small wood. We've got GELUP, which means inheritance.

And all of these, we see correspondence in Britonic. So you're putting all of this together, and you can sort of come up with a fairly clear notion that Pictish is rather similar and evolving rather similar to the Brythonic languages. I love that. And I love this idea that you can tell perhaps something about, as you said, administration or how things were used

and what these languages and words meant to people, I suppose. I suppose that gives you a tiny bit of an insight into those people behind it, which is what's so difficult with something like this. Absolutely. Now, the final thing I wanted to talk to you a little bit about was, how are the Picts thought of really and the Pictish language in more modern portrayals and in media and films and things? Do people have a sort of realistic sense of it?

Is it portrayed properly at all? Well, that's quite a complex question. There are informed circles which are less influenced by popular images, but you'll need to Google Picts, and you'll see all the tropes of naked, blue-painted warriors or warrior babes with woed on them, successfully fighting off the Romans and anyone else who dared to attack them. One thing you need to remember about this is that someone who was labelled a Pict when the word first appears in 297 or so, and the lacks mentioned around 900. is that the so-called picks at either end of this would have had nothing in common with each other. They would have spoken entirely different languages. They would have different religions, different clothes, different world outlooks, different buildings. So we really need to deconstruct the notion of picks here.

But what we tend to do is you do get these eagle of the ninth, which is actually rather good. What they've done is they've used Gaelic speakers for the Picts and Irish for the Britain, I think, or the other way around. And this is actually, people have criticised this, but probably, Irish and Gaelic were more similar to ancient Pictish of the first second centuries than modern Welsh is. So it's not a bad decision. But you will see that the film Centurion with your fighting warrior bay beating Romans and the like, and there are a lot of popular Facebook groups and the like which promote the idea of Pictors of our ancestors. And what they are is reflection of modern wishes as so often. You'll know that from Vikings yourself as a very close analogy

between the use of Viking in modern culture and Pictus as well, but they tell us about what people want today rather than what the evidence actually tells us. Absolutely. And I think that brings me back a little bit to the beginning, is one of the things you mentioned at the first, you know, the question of why is it important? Why should we care about the Pictish language?

I mean, why is the point? What is the sort of importance of understanding it? One of the things for me is to understand the present. And it's by manipulating or, or misusing the past that we control people's views in the present. We'll all be aware of that. And one of the interesting things for me about, if you tell people, I mean, I'd make occasional posts on the internet,

well, the pigs spoke Welsh. It can be actually very shocking to people. Of course they didn't. They must have been up in Scotland. How can that be? But what people then start to do is to start to question. And if they look a bit further, they start to understand. And by having the skills to deconstruct or to understand,

These types of historical processes, you can apply that all over the world. But modern conflict, you can start to use this to make your approaches to all sorts of issues in the modern world more objective. And I come to this from as a Welsh background. And the interesting thing for me is our understanding of post-Roman Britain. We've got two identities forming on the island. In the southeast, we've got Old English emerging. and in the island, from Isle of White, up to, and in Brittany, up to Loch Lomond,

we've got a Britonic, a Christian, brothonic image, language, identity, culture emerging, a huge one. The biggest language in the ruins of Western Roman Empire is Welsh. And Welsh emerges because Romans, well, speaking something more like Spanish in the 5th century, that they have to learn Celtic and they do it very badly. And that's what Welsh is, a highly Latinised form of Celtic. But the picked up in the north are probably speaking a more conservative, less Latinized form of this. So when you start to realize that the past is very complex and intricate, and you actually start to challenge one's own preconceptions about the past, this becomes very useful. And you can use it in all sorts of modern contexts.

Fantastic. Well, I think that's a brilliant summary of why you should be looking at it in the first place. So I think we're going to leave it. Thank you. Gita, that was absolutely fantastic, a sort of whirlwind tour through so many different topics. I know that you have some of your papers and some of your publications out online on academia. com, I believe. So people can giggle your name, look in the episode, notes for how to spell it properly, and look on academia and find out more, can they? Yep, if you Google my name and pickdish, you'll come up with articles and I can do feel free to question them.

Excellent, yeah. So we should always question these things, shouldn't we? With a bit of knowledge, obviously. Wonderful. Thank you again so much for joining me today. It's been absolutely brilliant. Brilliant. Thanks for the time. I'm delighted to have the opportunity to discuss this. And that brings us to the end of this episode of Gone Medieval from History Hit. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast and to our Medieval Monday's newsletter. Just look in the episode notes for how to do that.

If you want to leave us a review, it really helps other people find us. So wherever you've got this podcast, if you want to go into the review button, that would really, really help. and we would very much appreciate it. I'm Dr. Kat Jarman, and I will join you again next Tuesday. Before that, you can join Matt Lewis on Saturday for one of his episodes. Thank you again so much for listening, and I hope to have you join us again soon.