Cumbric is an extinct Celtic Brythonic language or dialect that was spoken during the Early Middle Ages in the Hen Ogledd or "Old North", in what is now Northern England and the southern Scottish Lowlands. Place-name evidence suggests Cumbric may also have been spoken as far south as Pendle and the Yorkshire Dales. The prevailing view is that it became extinct in the 12th century, around the incorporation of the Kingdom of Strathclyde into the Kingdom of Scotland.
Linguists are undecided as to whether to classify Cumbric as a dialect of Old Welsh or as a separate language. Koch calls it a dialect but goes on to say that some of the place names in the Cumbric region "clearly reflect a developed medieval language, much like Welsh, Cornish or Breton".
History
Date of extinction It is impossible to give an exact date of the extinction of Cumbric. However, there are some pointers which may give a reasonably accurate estimate. In the mid-11th century, some landowners still bore what appear to be Cumbric names. Examples of such landowners are Dunegal (Dyfnwal), lord of Strathnith or Nithsdale;Oram, R.(2000): The Lordship of Galloway, Edinburgh: John Donald Moryn (Morien), lord of Cardew and Cumdivock near Carlisle; and Eilifr (Eliffer), lord of Penrith.Phythian-Adams, Charles (1996): Land of the Cumbrians, Aldershot: Scolar Press
There is a village near Carlisle called Cumwhitton (earlier Cumquinton). This appears to contain the Norman name Quinton, affixed to a cognate of the Welsh cwm, meaning valley.Armstrong, A. M., Mawer, A., Stenton, F. M. and Dickens, B. (1952) The Place-Names of Cumberland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. There were no Normans in this area until 1069 at the earliest.
In the Battle of the Standard in 1138, the Cumbrians are noted as a separate ethnic group. Given that their material culture was very similar to their Gaelic and Anglian neighbours, it is arguable that what set them apart was still their language.Oram, Richard (2004), David: The King Who Made Scotland Also the castle at Castle Carrock – Castell Caerog – dates from around 1160–1170. Barmulloch, earlier Badermonoc (Cumbric "monk's dwelling"Taylor, Simon. "The Glasgow Story – Early Times to 1560". ), was given to the church by Malcolm IV of Scotland between 1153 and 1165.
A more controversial point is the surname Wallace. It means "Welshman". It is possible that all the Wallaces in the Clyde area were medieval immigrants from Wales, but given that the term was also used for local Cumbric-speaking Strathclyde Welsh, it seems equally, if not more, likely that the surname refers to people who were seen as being "Welsh" due to their Cumbric language.
Surnames in Scotland were not inherited before 1200 and not regularly until 1400. Sir William Wallace (known in Gaelic as Uilleam Breatnach – namely William the Briton or Welshman) came from the Renfrew area – itself a Cumbric name. Wallace slew the sheriff of Lanark (also a Cumbric name) in 1297. Even if he had inherited the surname from his father, it is possible that the family spoke Cumbric within memory in order to be thus named.
There are also some historical pointers to a continuing separate ethnic identity. Prior to being crowned king of Scotland in 1124, David I was invested with the title Prince of the Cumbrians. William the Lion between 1173 and 1180 made an address to his subjects, identifying the Cumbrians as a separate group. This does not prove that any of them still spoke Cumbric at this time.
The legal documents in the Lanercost Cartulary, dating from the late 12th century, show witnesses with Norman French or English names, and no obvious Cumbric names. Though these people represent the upper classes, it seems significant that by the late 12th century in the Lanercost area, Cumbric is not obvious in these personal names.Todd, J. M. (ed.) (1991) The Lanercost Cartulary, Carlisle: CWAAS In 1262 in Peebles, jurymen in a legal dispute over peat cutting also have names which mostly appear Norman French or English,Chambers, W. (1864) A History of Peebleshire, Edinburgh: W & M Chambers but possible exceptions are Gauri Pluchan, Cokin Smith and Robert Gladhoc, where Gladhoc has the look of an adjectival noun similar to Welsh "gwladog" = "countryman".Prifysgol Cymru. (2002) Geiriadur Prifysgol Cymru: Caerdydd: Gwasg Prifysgol Cymru In the charters of Wetherall Priory near Carlisle there is a monk called Robert Minnoc who appears as a witness to 8 charters dating from around 1260.Prescott, J. E. (ed.) (1897) Register of Wetheral Priory, Carlisle: CWAAS His name is variously spelled Minnoc/Minot/Mynoc and it is tempting to see an equivalent of the Welsh "mynach" – "Robert the Monk" here.
Given that in other areas which have given up speaking Celtic languages, the upper classes have generally become Anglicised before the peasantry, it is not implausible that the peasantry continued to speak Cumbric for at least a little while after. Around 1200 there is a list of the names of men living in the area of Peebles; Amongst them are Cumbric names such as Gospatrick: servant or follower of Saint Patrick, Gosmungo: servant of Saint Mungo, Guososwald: servant of Oswald of Northumbria and Goscubrycht: servant of Cuthbert. Two of the saints – Oswald and Cuthbert — are from Northumbria showing influence on Cumbric not found in Welsh.
In 1305 Edward I of England prohibited the Leges inter Brettos et Scottos.Barrow, G. W. S. (2005) Robert Bruce & the Community of the Realm of Scotland, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press The term Brets or Britons refers to the native, traditionally Cumbric speaking people of southern Scotland and northern England.
It seems that Cumbric could well have survived into the middle of the 12th century as a community language and even lasted into the 13th on the tongues of the last remaining speakers. Certain areas seem to be particularly dense in Cumbric place-names even down to very minor features. The two most striking of these are around Lanercost east of Carlisle and around Torquhan south of Edinburgh. If the 1262 names from Peebles do contain traces of Cumbric personal names, then it is plausible that Cumbric died out between 1250 and 1300 at the very latest.
Problems with terminology Dauvit Broun sets out the problems with the various terms used to describe the Cumbric language and its speakers.Broun, Dauvit (2004): 'The Welsh identity of the kingdom of Strathclyde, ca 900-ca 1200', Innes Review 55, pp 111–80. The people seem to have called themselves the same way that the Welsh called themselves Cymry (most likely from reconstructed Brittonic meaning "fellow countrymen") and their land . The Welsh and the Cumbric-speaking people of what are now southern Scotland and northern England probably felt they were actually one ethnic group. Old Gaelic speakers called them "Britons", , or .Dictionary of the Irish Language, Royal Irish Academy, 1983. Online The Norse called them . The terms and were rendered in Latin as Cambria and Cumbria, respectively. In Medieval Latin, the English term Welsh became ("of Wales"), while the term referred to Cumbrians ("of Cumbria").Forbes, A. P. (1874) Lives of St. Ninian and St. Kentigern: compiled in the twelfth century However, in Scots, a Cumbric speaker seems to have been called – from the Scots "Welsh".
The Latinate term Cambria is often used for Wales; nevertheless, the Life of St Kentigern ( 1200) by Jocelin of Furness has the following passage:
John T. Koch defined the specifically Cumbric region as "the area approximately between the line of the River Mersey and the Forth-Clyde Isthmus", but went on to include evidence from the Wirral Peninsula in his discussion and did not define its easterly extent. Kenneth H. Jackson described Cumbric as "the Brittonic dialect of Cumberland, Westmorland, northern Lancashire, and south-west Scotland" and went 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. The study Brittonic Language in the Old North by Alan G. James, concerned with documenting place- and river-names as evidence for Cumbric and the pre-Cumbric Brittonic dialects of the region Yr Hen Ogledd, considered Loch Lomond the northernmost limit of the study with the southernmost limits being Liverpool Bay and the Humber, although a few more southerly place-names in Cheshire and, to a lesser extent, Derbyshire and Staffordshire were also included.
Available evidence
The evidence from Cumbric comes almost entirely through secondary sources, since no known contemporary written records of the language survive. The majority of evidence comes from place names of the north of England and the south of Scotland. Other sources include the personal names of Strathclyde Britons in Scottish, Irish, and Anglo-Saxon sources, and a few Cumbric words surviving into the High Middle Ages in southwest Scotland as legal terms. Although the language is long extinct, traces of its vocabulary arguably have persisted into the modern era in the form of "counting scores" and in a handful of dialectal words.
From this scant evidence, little can be deduced about the singular characteristics of Cumbric, not even the name by which its speakers referred to it. However, linguists generally agree that Cumbric was a Western Brittonic language closely related to Welsh and, more distantly, to Cornish and Breton.Koch, John T. (ed.), Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia, ABC-CLIO, 2006, p. 516.Ball, Martin J.; Fife, James (eds.), The Celtic Languages, Taylor & Francis, 2002, p. 6.Jackson, Kenneth H. Language and History in Early Britain, Edinburgh University press, 1953, p. 10.
Around the time of the battle described in the poem Y Gododdin, c. 600, Common Brittonic is believed to have been transitioning into its daughter languages: Cumbric in North Britain, Old Welsh in Wales, and Southwestern Brittonic, the ancestor of Cornish and Breton.Davies (2005), p. 232. Kenneth Jackson concludes that the majority of changes that transformed British into Primitive Welsh belong to the period from the middle of the fifth to the end of the sixth century.Jackson (1953), pp 3–11; 690. This involved syncope and the loss of final syllables. If the poem ultimately dates to this time, it would have originally been written in an early form of Cumbric, the usual name for the Brythonic speech of the Hen Ogledd;Elliott (2005), p. 583. Jackson suggested the name "Primitive Cumbric" for the dialect spoken at the time.Jackson (1969), pp. 86, 90. However, scholars date the poem to between the 7th and the early 11th centuries, and the earliest surviving manuscript of it dates to the 13th, written in Old Welsh and Middle Welsh.
Place names Cumbric place-names occur in Scotland south of the firths of Forth and Clyde. Brittonic-looking names north of this line are Pictish. Cumbric names are also found commonly in the historic county of Cumberland and in bordering areas of Northumberland. They are less common in Westmorland, east Northumberland, and Durham, with some in Lancashire and the adjoining areas of North and West Yorkshire. Approaching Cheshire, late Brittonic placenames are probably better characterised as Welsh rather than as Cumbric. As noted below, however, any clear distinction between Cumbric and Welsh is difficult to prove. Many Brittonic place-names remain in these regions which should not be described as Cumbric, such as Leeds, Manchester, Wigan and York, because they were coined in a period before Brittonic split into Cumbric and its sister dialects.
Some of the principal towns and cities of the region have names of Cumbric origin, including: Bathgate, West Lothian: meaning 'boar wood' (Welsh 'wild boar' + 'forest, wood'). Bryn, Metropolitan Borough of Wigan: from the word meaning "hill" (W. bryn).