Little England revisited

On holiday in South-West Wales, I became interested in how southern Pembrokeshire became English-speaking, so much so that it is referred to as Little England or England beyond Wales.

The Normans invaded Wales already in 1081, not to long after the Norman conquest, attracted both by the fertile coastal regions and the easy access to Ireland. It seems feasible that the Welsh were not enthusiastic about working as serfs on land they once owned especially as (unlike most of the Anglo-Saxons), they could easily flee into Welsh-controlled areas. Also feasible that the Norman were not enthusiastic about having large number of hostile Welsh on their farms.

The question then remains, which I have not yet been able to answer of who the serfs on the Norman farms were and what language did they speak?  Were they English.speaking Anglo-Saxons and, if so how did they get there. In this case, the process of transition from French to English would have been similar to that in England.

William the Conqueror granted his fellow invaders plots of confiscated land. It’s possible that the Norman knights in southern Pembrokeshire also owned land in England, which would facilitate immigration of English-speakers. Another possibility is that English speakers arrived much later after the turbulence of the Black Death in the fourteenth century.

The language situation is complicated by the presence of Flemings. According to one story, a natural disaster on the Flemish coast later led to large numbers of refugees coming to England although there is some dispute about the cause of their arrival in the literature.Some of William’s fellow invaders came from Flanders and William was married to Matilda of Flanders so there was already a Flemish connection.They presumably spoke Dutch. I don’t yet have a statistic for the number of Flemings, nor do I know what their role in the economy was, only that some number were concentrated around Haverfordwest and that Wiston castle was originally owned by a Flemish lord called Wizo, It’s hard, however, to see how this limited number of refugees could have pushed the area towards being English-speaking especially as they weren’t English-speaking themselves.

There are, of course, other possible causes that may be better at explaining the language development than conventional narratives of kings and battles. The Norman lords and their Flemish or French wives might well have employed Old English speaking staff to look after their children who in this way became speakers of English. I’ve no evidence to support this but I suspect something similar may have happened in Normandy where the Normans became French-speaking within a couple of centuries from the arrival of the Scandinavian Viking Rollo, so adept that they could spread the French language in England.

I haven’t yet seen much impact from the later Flemish immigration. A few place names and some architectural details.

As can be seen from this short summary, I lack detailed information, which may be available. It’s necessary to understand the Norman feudal mode of production and how Welsh agriculture diverged from this.  But also to have a grasp of what has been written and thought about Pembrokeshiere before in order to be able to ask the right questions.

And it’s not just what we don’t know that causes problems but what we already know or think we know.  It seems that later on after the initial confiscation of land from the Welsh that there were areas where the Welsh and Normans (English) lived close by. We have farms and plots of land which operated under Welsh law (as regards inheritance, for example, where property would be divided between the children rather than the oldest getting the lion’s share as under English law. And these legal systems seem to have co-existed side by side, despite the dominance of the Anglo-Normans.

There’s a lot to read and I am hampered by not knowing Welsh and not being familiar with Welsh attempts to explain their own history. And there is so much more happening in the world that I want to get to grips with but I shall try to pursue this project at least for relaxation.