Were there Old English speaking enclaves within the Danelaw?
Upvote:4
Danelaw in Northumbria and eastern Mercia did not result in a h*m*genous society, neither was it truly bi-lingual. The result was two speech communities in Danelaw living beside each other, one speaking Old Norse and the other, Old English. The real question is: could these co-inhabitants of the Danelaw region understand each other (i.e. mutually intelligible).
I am not sure if it's now a settled matter by historical linguists and historians.
As I am not up-to-date on the latest research, I will provide an older reference. From Language and History in Viking Age England - Linguistic Relations between Speakers of Old Norse and Old English (Brepols, 2002). pp 2-3:
... it is also clear that the native Anglo-Saxon population in the areas of Scandinavian settlement was by no means driven out or otherwise suppressed; and so in the tenth and eleventh centuries Anglo-Saxon England is more properly to be regarded as Anglo-Scandinavian England, with the two peoples, similar but distinctive, in close and persistent contact. Sir Frank Stenton, in his classic review of Anglo-Scandinavian relations and the settlement of what he termed 'the essential Danelaw' (that is, between the Tees and the Weiland), concluded as follows (1927, 241, 246: 'The Danes in England', Raleigh Lecture on History, Proceedings of the British Academy, 13, 203-46):
[W]e begin to discern two races in pre-Conquest England, differing in language, law, and social order, held together by little more than common acquiescence in the role ofa king whose authority was narrowly limited by custom. We are driven, in fact, towards the conclusion that the superficial unity of the Old English state concealed a racial cleavage which was none the less real because it was taken for granted by contemporaries. [...] All lines of investigation - linguistic, legal, and economic - point to the reality of the difference between Danes and English in the tenth century.
Further down, still at page 3:
The crucial concept here is that of the 'speech community': speech communities may or may not correlate with other types of social community, but at the very least one can easily distinguish the Old Norse and Old English speech communities in Viking Age England, and it is for this reason that linguists have been more hesitant than, say, archaeologists and historians to embrace those contemporary ideas about 'ethnicity' which substantially downplay the importance of linguistic factors in the creation and maintenance of group identities. There is no need for a full rehearsal of the issues at this preliminary stage; but as will become clear, one of the outcomes of this book will be to uphold broadly Stentonian perspectives on the reality of the English/Danish distinction in Viking Age England.
More recent books on this topic:
- Viking Age England (History Press, 2004)
- Everyday Life in Viking-Age Towns - Social Approaches to Towns in England and Ireland, c. 800-1100 (Oxbow, 2013)
- Viking Age Yorkshire (Blackthorn Press, 2014)
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