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The great north south divide began right then with the
accents of Yorkshire, Northumbria, Cumbria and of
course the Geordies firmly rooted in the Viking
tongue. In his marvellous book
The Adventure of
English
, Melvyn Bragg cites the story of the young
Cumbrian soldier Harold Manning who spoke the
dialect of Bragg’s own youth. Manning was in
Iceland during the Allied Occupation in the 1940s
and found that he could understand and be understood
by the Icelanders. For my part I can vouch that a nice
chap called Cumbrian Chris (huge Viking of a man)
who was part of my social circle throughout the
1980s must have been the loneliest man in Deptford.
For, as I recall, every conversation with Chris was
followed by the whispered exchange:
Did you get any of that?
No me neither.
Nice bloke though ain’t he?
The Viking language coloured in the map of the
north, the –bys, -thorpes and –thwaites and in the
style of the late Norseman Magnus Magnusson the
Viking way of making family names also took hold.
To this day the North is full of Robsons, Hudsons,
Harrisons, Watsons etc. Old English though was
firmly bedded in by now and only some 150 Norse
words made it into the national vocabulary pool
including anger, awkward, cake, die, egg, freckle,
muggy, reindeer, silver, skirt and smile. The power
base for the country was with Alfred at Winchester
and it was from here that texts from all over the
the Midlands, West Saxon in the South-West and
Kentish in the South-East which included the
language spoken in the Kingdom of Sussex.
Northumbrian and Mercian are sometimes grouped
together and described as Anglian after the Angles.
The Vikings & The Danelaw
In 793 AD the Vikings began wreaking what would
turn out to be three hundred years of havoc on these
shores. First the Norwegians raided Scotland before
moving south to Cumbria. Then the Danes looted and
occupied large parts of the Midlands and the East.
In 865 AD they landed on the coast of East Anglia
with a vast Heathen army. In for the kill. they came to
conquer the four kingdoms of Anglo-Saxon England:
Northumbria, Mercia, East Anglia and Wessex. By
878 AD they had won what seemed to be a decisive
victory at Chippenham finishing off the last of the
four kingdoms to fall – Wessex.
Alfred, not-quite-yet-The Great, fled into the
Somerset Levels and from there mustered an army of
4000 men. They advanced against the Danish army,
2000 strong, on Salisbury Plain. Alfred the Great’s
army was victorious but Alfred knew he couldn’t
keep the defeated Danes subjugated and so he drew a
line diagonally across the country from the Thames to
the old Roman Watling Street. The land to the north
and east of the line would be known as The Danelaw
and it would be under Danish rule. To the south and
west would be West Saxon rule. No one would be
permitted to cross the line other than for trade.