We don’t know this. What we know is that British culture survived in those regions. But that doesn’t mean that the Britons moved to those places from other parts of Britain.
A common pattern in history is that a relatively small number of invaders arrives, conquers, and rules over the people who were already there. In some cases the natives, over time, adopt the language and customs of the new arrivals (e.g. the Romans in Iberia), and in other cases the other way around (e.g. the Normans in England). After some centuries of acculturation and intermarriage, the two populations are no longer distinct.
Whether this is the case in the Saxon invasion of Britain (as opposed to the older theory where the Saxons were thought to have displaced the existing population) is nowadays amenable to study using population genetics (with care as to how the results are interpreted).
My understanding is that one of the linguistic factors indicating that the Britons retreated is the dearth of Brythonic borrowings in English, compared to the rich borrowings from Old Norse after the Danes invaded, and from French that occurred after the Normans invaded.
If the Britons hung around and were inter-acting with the Anglo-Sacons, wouldn’t there be more linguistic borrowings?
I thought I read a news article some years ago that a great store of British writings was discovered in Wales … did anything come of this?
Geoffrey of Monmouth claimed to have a British manuscript as source material, which has never been found … are we absolutely sure he didn’t have this? … If there really existed a King Arthur, then it makes sense for the Anglo-Saxons to destroy every reference to him, and his culture … assimilation hasn’t been a thing for humans since Roman times …
The Frisians, who lived on islands and the coast stretching from The Netherlands to Denmark, had control of the North Sea when the Romans left. I surmise that the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes were Frisians. They set up trading posts in Eastern and South-Eastern England from where they spread their culture, their language, and their genes. In the 530s and 540s there was a collapse of agriculture and a spread of disease throughout Europe caused by a massive volcanic eruption (or series of eruptions?) that disrupted the world’s weather. The Frisians, as a sea-going people, were less dependent on agriculture and better able to survive and, in England, were able to assert their political dominance over the impoverished local populace.
The Jutes were from Jutland in present day Denmark, Angles were from Anglia and the Saxons were from Saxony in present day North Germany … very close to Frisia but all four are generally considered separate tribes within the Germanic peoples …
As long as we are arguing and confusing each other, I thought that the deal with the English-who ever lived in England at the time-assimilated invaders and conquerors. Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe is inaccurate because it shows friction between the Saxons and Normans in the 12th century when they had already become united as English.
Fire away.
SeniorCitizen’s point about disease following volcanic weather disturbances has been made in the British context - that this substantially weakened the successor British kingdoms and made it easier for invaders to take advantage. But I think this has been disputed.
I’ve also seen it argued that while the ruling classes may have been removed, the ordinary peasantry remained and adapted (or, as with Saxons under the Normans, former landowners just became peasants) - including with their language. I’ve seen it noted (Norman Davies’s The Isles - or was it Vanished Kingdoms?) that William Wallace, as late as the turn of the 13th/14th century was referred to by Gaelic-speakers as William the Briton.
The name “Wallace” comes from the old English name “Welshman”. Wallace’s family probably came from the area around Cumbria/Strathclyde, which had a core of speakers of the language Cumbric, which was a Brittonic language. The family probably was originally Cumbric speaking, but there’s no evidence Wallace knew the language.
Not sure what SeniorCitizen007 is basing his surmise on, but the Frisian dialect is the closest of the non-English Germanish dialects to English. So there is definitely some relationship there. Anglish and Frisian were either the same way back when or only recently diverged.
Note that applies to the Angles - Saxons and Jutes were related but different people. I have no idea of the relationship of their dialects to Anglish or Frisian.
What we call Friesland today was invaded by the Angles and Saxons about the same time England was. They brought the language there, not the other way around. However, as already noted, these were all fairly closely related Germanic peoples, and there was probably some mixing of the groups before the Anglo-Saxon invasions anyway.
