Issue no 48, October 1999

LETTERS

Sheep counting

From Mr Chris Hare

Sir: In his article, `Rural dialects and surviving Britons', (July), Tim Gay argued that Welsh-related sheep-counting systems in many parts of England and Scotland indicate the survival of large numbers of Britons there after the Anglo-Saxon invasions.

In Sussex, the nature of the Saxon settlement has long been a subject of controversy. Were the native Britons massacred or harried from the county, or was there a process of assimilation? In recent years the latter argument has been in the ascendant, but I have never been convinced - the almost total absence of Romano-British place-names in Sussex being the most ominous circumstantial evidence.

The traditional form of sheep-counting in Sussex was very different from the five variants mentioned in Mr Gay's article. Firstly, Sussex shepherd counted their sheep in pairs, not singly, as they ran them into the fold. They then counted the pairs in the following manner (from one to ten): one-erum, two-erum, cock-erum, shuerum, sith-erum, sath-erum, wineberry, wagtail, tarry diddle, den.

Yours faithfully,
CHRIS HARE
Worthing
22 July

From Mr Quentin Hawkins

Sir: I have long been sceptical of the traditional view of the end of Celtic Britain, and was therefore pleased to read Tim Gay's article. I recall when I was at school in Cumbria that many boys used the word `yan' to mean `one'. I would also mention Cynthia Harnett's novel The Wool-Pack (1951). Set in the Cotswolds in the late 15th century, it contains the following shepherd's rhyme:

Eggum, peggum, penny leggum
Popsolorum Jig:
Eeny, meeny, ficcaty fee
Dil dol domini
Alla beranti, middle di danti
Ficcaty forni a rusticus.

This appears to owe as much to Latin as to any Celtic dialect, but Cynthia Hawkins always researched her books thoroughly, and I imagine she was recording faithfully a traditional rhyme from that part of England.

Yours faithfully,
QUENTIN HAWKINS
London SE25
16 July

From Dr Margaret Faull

Sir: A considerable body of evidence exists for the survival of a substantial British element in the Anglo-Saxon population of northern England, but the Celtic numerals employed until recently by shepherds in the area cannot be included in that corpus.

The Brythonic branch of Celtic spoken in Britain at the time of the Anglo-Saxon settlement subsequently divided into three branches - Breton, Cornish and Welsh. Had the sheep-counting numerals been an independent survival from the P-Celtic speech of northern Britain, they might be expected to retain aspects of the original system. The inclusion in the sheep-counting scores of features which, although occurring in Modern Welsh, are not found in the cognate Celtic languages, and which can be shown in fact to have developed only in Middle Welsh, shows that the scores must share a common ancestor with Modern Welsh but not with Cornish and Breton.

The strongest evidence for this comes from the second decade of the scores listed by Mr Gay. Welsh numerals of the second decade are formed by adding to the two fixed points of `deg' (ten), and `pymtheg' (fifteen), and this is the method also employed by the sheep-counting scores. It is not, however, the system found in Cornish and Breton, whose only fixed point is `ten', and it appears that this was also the case in Old Welsh. Moreover, the use in Welsh of the preposition ar in the formation of the second-decade numeral is a later innovation which again is echoed in the sheep-counting numerals.

Various dialects in northern England do retain hints of the British language, but these traces are confined to a few individual words in the vocabulary, such as the use in Yorkshire of the term `brat' for a rough working apron, derived from the British term bratt (cloak). The sheep scores must be attributed to more recent contacts with Celtic speakers, such as the Welsh lead miners of Yorkshire.

Yours sincerely,
M L FAULL
Director, National Coal Mining Museum
Wakefield
10 August

From Mr David Orme

Sir: Since the subject of sheep scoring first aroused interest in the 19th century, academics divided into two groups, those suggesting the phenomenon was a survival of the Brittonic of the pre-Anglo-Saxon period, and those suggesting it was introduced in relatively modern times by the likes of Welsh lead miners.

Margaret Faull, writing in The Local Historian in 1982, pointed out that while Modern Welsh had abandoned the `teen' nomenclature, Cornish and Breton had retained it. Cumbrian would also have retained it, as the area was isolated from mainstream Brittonic in what became Wales as a result of the Anglian incursions. Although these arguments undermine Mr Gay's views, it nonetheless seems improbable to me that such a widespread phenomenon was based on a single infusion of Welsh workers. The evidence of examples passed to North American Indians, perhaps as joke numbers, again points to the broadness of the base in England.

This linguistic archaeology may hint at relations between Britons and Angles, but raises more questions about the development of Old, Middle and Modern Welsh than we have answers.

Yours sincerely,
D R ORME
Llangefni, Anglesey
1 August

Paganism

Sir: Evidence for the survival of Celtic pagan practices is often minimised, as Martin Henig states in his letter (Letters, July). However, Classical elements are often over-emphasised - for example, his linking of Ad-Gefrin (the Hill of the Goats) in Northumbria to Pan or Faunus. Given its location, I would have thought a Norse or Saxon connection more likely. Thor's chariot was drawn by goats, which suggests a possible explanation.

Yours sincerely,
GRAHAM MOGFORD
Wolverhampton
16 July

London bridge

Sir: The artefacts found between the piles of the structure at Vauxhall (`First `London Bridge' in River Thames at Vauxhall,' July) were not palstaves - as I originally thought - but side-looped spearheads. Palstaves would not be contemporary with the structure, whereas side-looped spearheads could well be.

Yours sincerely,
MIKE WEBBER
Museum of London
5 July

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