Dixie
In DeBow’s Review, J. Quitman Moore on the racial differences between the Anglo-Saxon and Normans, Puritans and Cavaliers, Yankees and Southerners:
“But, when the eye was turned from the contemplation of these social phenomena to a survey of the political institutions of the country, it required no remarkable strength of observation to discover that there were two distinct nationalities existing on the soil of Great Britain; and of the two, the Norman was the ruler.
The Teutonic and the Latin – the Northern and the Southern – types of civilization, with their diverse social systems, their incompatibility of ideas, opinions, and institutions, and their ineradicable national prejudices, were brought into the presence of each other, under the exigencies of a compulsory political union; and so long as the dominant race maintained the principles and institutions that were the native outgrowth of its civilization, its ascendancy was complete.
Aristocracy, based on the feudal relation, is the natural expression of the political thought of the Norman – a social condition, resting on the principle of subordination, and recognizing the family as the primary basis of social union. Democracy, founded on the idea of an unlimited individualism, and without any reference to the conservative organism of institutions, is the fundamental conception of the political philosophy of the Teuton or Saxon.
The English constitution is the result of a compromise between these two hostile systems, with the Norman element always in the ascendant, save during the brief reign of Cromwell.
But the Roundhead, at once a religious fanatic and a political agitator and reformer, could conceive of no government but the rule of the Saints, and form no other idea of the principles of civil liberty than what the levelling philosophy of the covenant taught. A bigot in faith and an idealist in speculation, his sentiments were violent and his convictions impracticable. A visionary from principle and a revolutionist from interest, his prejudices allowed no compromise, while his passions fed equally the flame of his cupidity and ambition. Austere in his morals and inflexible in his principles, he set up his own conduct as the standard of right, and sought to dictate the opinions and control the convictions of others. Rude in his manners and morose in his disposition, he practiced the profoundest dissimulation, while attaining credit for sincerity, and concealed his real character and designs under the cloak of hypocrisy. . . .
Opposite under the banner of the king, stood the Cavalier – the builder, the social architect, the institutionalist, the conservator – the advocate of rational liberty and the supporter of authority, as against the licentiousness and morbid impulse of unregulated passion and unenlightened sentiment. No idealist, enthusiast or speculative system-builder, upheaving ancient landmarks and overthrowing venerable monuments; but a realist, a practical and enlightened utilitarian, bowing to the authority of experience and acknowledging the supremacy of ideas, forms and institutions that had received the hallowing sanction of time . An institutor by genius and a ruler by race, his pride was at once the sword of his most eminent virtues and greatest weaknesses, while honor was the touchstone of his character. Chivalrous in sentiment and magnanimous in deed, glory was his ambition, and loyalty the inspirer of his every thought, impulse and action. Elevated in his ideas and tolerant in his views, his selfishness was vicarious and his very faults wore the semblance of virtue. Unyielding in his principles, but compromising in his opinions, his conduct was governed more by sentiment than reflection, and more by association than either. Courtly in his manners and splendid in his tastes, a knightly generosity he practiced even toward his foes, and never lost his faculties in volumptuousness. Without being an abject advocate of passive obedience or a supporter of arbitrary power, he yet took ground against the revolutionary party, not as an enemy to liberal institutions or a well-regulated liberty: but, discovering in the doctrines and principles of the revolution a greater danger to the social and political system than from the alleged existing abuses, he preferred yielding his loyalty rather to institutions than abstractions, and felt it a duty to attempt to quench the lights of the incendiary philosophy, whose torch had been applied to the noblest monuments of civil wisdom yet erected by the genius of man …
The Cavalier doesn’t think or sound like the Puritan. We are not the same people. Never will be either.
Seems like Sir. Walter Scott has a different view than Moore, at least when we read Ivanhoe.
The Roundhead paragraph definitely rings a bell. The Cavalier paragraph describes the traditional Southern character. At least the English who were predominant in the lowlands. The Scots-Irish are a different people.
Bingo.
The liberal fanatic is impervious to the authority of experience.
Truth.
Loyalty to an abstract principle is counterfeit loyalty. Which is why the insane notion of a “proposition nation” is so corrosive to rightly ordered society. Such fanatical ideas are harmful to the natural bonds of kinship and ultimately suicidal.
Witness our current state of affairs in the Yankee empire–disintegrating communities and cultural standards, corrupt and profligate public “servants” with no real loyalty to their constituents, alien invasion at home coupled with quixotic foreign debacles.
“They make a desert, and they call it peace.”–Tacitus
Deo Vindice
Complicated. The Puritans were East Anglians. Mainly seemed to be Scandinavian.
The Cavaliers were often from the West Country and Cornwall or Wales. It was in many ways a replay of the Briton v the Angle.
The Normans neither here nor there. Plenty of the Bastard’s followers had descendents in the Parliamentary ranks. I’d on balance as a Catholic have been a Cavalier type. I like art too. So I detest Puritanism. They were inhuman.
The Normans in their propaganda called the English voluptuaries and indulgers.
The English liked ostentacious parties, finery and art. The Normans were austere
ultra moralistic and they banned slavery in England and stripped the churches of silks gold and jewels to fund their wars in France and Ireland. Personally I think connecting the Norman to the Cavalier is a mistake. Most Royalists were Welsh, Cornish, Devonians, yorkshire, lancashire, Oxford, Somerset and indeed catholic. The Puritans were almost exclusively from the heavy Danish settled area of East Anglia.
Norman vs. Teuton? You mean in Britain, right?
Hmm, what am I missing here? Oh yes, that’s right, the indigenous Britons.
You know, the Brythonic Celts.
FAIL.
I’ll state right now, this is nothing more than the bloviations of the Second Europe, pretending to find a ‘difference’ among people whom geneticists have shown share over 50% of their Celtic Makeup, in common!
The English were never ‘NORMANS’. The Normans were Norse-men, and therefore just as ‘Teutonic’ as the rest of them. What with all of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales having more than half of the same genetics, what is DIFFERENT, is what is chronicled in the history of ORTHODOX ENGLAND, prior to the PAPAL (i.e., Norman) Conquest.
It is the dichotomy between First and Second Europe, as Fraser notes in his ‘The WASP Question’ in advertantly, and Fr. Phillips’ “Orthodox Christianity and the English Tradition.”
The only ‘difference’ between the two groups outlined above in this ideological pretense of division, is that the older Patristic, Conciliar (yet still aristocratic, and feudal) Christianity of the Orthodox monarchs up to Harold, and the subsequent Romanist Thomism, which ‘invented’ her first martyr with Thomas a Becket, was filioqust to the core (this includes all the Reformers as well). England has never really rescued herself from it, except for a little while from time to time, i.e., the Caroline Divines, and the post-Newman Anglo-catholic talks with the Orthodox.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Orthodox+England&x=0&y=0#/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Orthodox+Christian+England&rh= n%3A283155%2Ck%3AOrthodox+Christian+England
Pardon me for saying so, but this quoted author is induling in nothing more than obfuscating BS.
Harold is one of the last good ones. His family apparently cornered the North Sea slave trade though. Irony here obviously with a Confederate praising the uncannily Yankee Normanity. William muscled in and turned all English into surfs. Brought over a bunch of Italian and French carpetbaggers to run it. Had to wait
until John buggered up and the Freeman class was partially restored by implication in the Magna Carta.
England was orthodox catholic before William. Good christians but not in thrall to Papacy yet.
“The liberal fanatic is impervious to the authority of experience.”
Liberals only talk of the passage of time as force that somehow negates principles or traditions, ie “racism belongs to a bygone era”, or “in this day and age we are beyond…..”
They never use time-worn experience as an affirmation of THEIR ideas. Not surprising since experience with their ideology proves the same false time and time again.
Those from western England such as Cornwall, are they still mainly celtic?
And yet the Lees of Virginia were Norman, but still espoused the English (or Anglo-Saxon, if you will) radicalism of the palingenetic ideology, the belief in a rebirth of a utopian Anglo-Saxon era (Jefferson was an Anglo-Saxonist).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_yoke
My ancestors Norman name was Ogerus De Pugeys, a knight under Lord Mallet at the battle of Hastings, born about 1030.. And yet I am a hillbilly from Northeast Alabama…. and proud of it..
“Anglo-Saxon” is the older term with a far longer track record of consistent usage when referring to what greater civilization the South belongs.
“Anglo-Norman” is a term that only became popular in the South toward the middle of the 19th century as hostile tension began to build with the North. It was a way for people to try to distinguish the South from the North while still maintaining an Anglo identity. Southerners were portraying themselves as aristocrats while casting the Yankees as the descendants of peasants.
Still even toward the middle of the 19th century when the usage of Anglo-Norman was at it’s height it never completely displaced the term Anglo-Saxon in the South and after the war the use of Anglo-Norman almost completely disappeared with a return to the use of Anglo-Saxon.
For example Thomas Jefferson was a committed Anglo-Saxonist.
He studied the old Anglo-Saxon language his whole life, tried to develop a grammar and instituted the study of the language at the University of Virginia.
In August 1776 in the committee working on the Great Seal of the United States John Adams says Jefferson suggested the following for the design:
“The Children of Israel in the Wilderness, led by a cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night; and, on the other side, Hengist and Horsa, the Saxon chiefs, from whom we claim the honor of being descended, and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.”
Thomas Jefferson himself said:
“Has not every restitution of the ancient Saxon laws had happy effects? Is it not better now that we return at once into that happy system of our ancestors, the wisest and most perfect ever yet devised by the wit of man, as it stood before the eighth century”
goo.gl/hXm9c
http://dyneslines.blogspot.com/2007/05/jefferson-and-saxonism.html
In 1833 during the fight over the Bank of the United States John C Calhoun said the following in regards to President Andrew Jackson
“I am mortified, that, in this country, boasting of its Anglo-Saxon descent, any one of respectable standing, much less the President of the United States, should be found to entertain principles leading to such monstrous results. It is a proof of the wonderful degeneracy of the times—of the total loss of the true conception of constitutional liberty”
http://goo.gl/ZWuhY
In 1847 the same year as the DeBows’s Review article was published Robert E Lee while serving in the Mexican War made the following comment in a letter about the city of Tampico,
“In fact I was charmed with Tampico & if it depends upon my vote, it will never fall back to Mexico. It would not be characteristic of the Anglo Saxon race to permit it.”
http://home.wlu.edu/~stanleyv/LJ28feb4.7.htm
Even on this very website the quote from Governor George Wallace about the “Anglo-Saxon Southland” used to be on the right side where the Jefferson Davis quote is now.
Vanishing American had a good article on this awhile back.
http://vanishingamerican.blogspot.com/2011/08/nourse-on-south-and-anglo-saxons.html
In my opinion if one wishes to contrast the difference between the South and our practically extinct Anglo-Saxon brethren to the North the Caviler/Roundhead distinction is probably more accurate, though I feel even that is overblown in terms of explaining the differences that developed between the sections.
True, but Moore is not talking about race in a biological sense but in the sense of a discourse the evolved from a struggle of race marked by the Conquest. It’s the Robin Hood story. It is a product of the historical shift in discourse regarding how the Conquest is viewed. Thus Robin and his band of merry Saxon men claim a right to the deer, wild boar and hare of Sherwood Forest by the fruits of their labour. However, that behaviour is declared criminal because the Norman’s enclosed the Anglo-Saxon common by claiming right of conquest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_forest
It is a revolutionary historical-political discourse that challenged the theory of Sovereignty. In other words Coke and Locke (and Jefferson and Paine) et al, are challenging the continuity of sovereignty by reasserting the pre-eminence of the original Anglo-Saxon common law. The prevailing belief, set down by those like Geoffrey of Monmouth, that provided continuity to the Norman conquest, was challenged. The discourse shifted, in the Middle Ages, from conquest continuity to one of victor and vanquished, enslaver and enslaved, invader and invaded and thus became a source of a revolutionary doctrine to reassert the rightful place of Anglo-Saxon common law over the claims of the sovereign as outlined by Hobbes and more strictly Filmer. Locke’s notion of terra nullius, outlined, if memory serves, in the constitution he wrote for the Carolinas states that a man, (whether originally indentured or not) by his labour, encloses the land he is able to work, cultivate and use the product of, from the commons. In other words the Carolinas were established, based upon a radical English premise of property ownership. Compare this to the Spanish in South America and the radical approach is clearly evident.
I’ve never seen such outdated, unscientific, and ahistorical crap quite as bad as this ignorant blathering from 1862. The actual racial and ethnic makeup of Great Britain is quite a bit different in actuality. From Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland http://www.amazon.com/Saxons-Vikings-Celts-Genetic-Britain/dp/0393062686 by Bryan Sykes:
“The DNA of modern occupants clearly shows that most of them are descended from folk long on the islands (especially on the maternal side) and much of the ebb and flow of paternal lines of DNA reflects the mere shifting of relative percentages in the population. There was no wholesale replacement. More a patchwork quilt that roughly parallels our understanding of wider European genetic history. There’s little in the way of a specifically Roman influence, just a few possible Mediterranean or African markers. Barely a statistical blip. The Normans come and go almost unseen in the genetic record (largely because they were essentially transplanted Vikings already widely represented in the British and Irish gene pool). Where dramatic imports of genetic lines is noticeable (the so-called “Genghis Khan effect” seen in Viking advances in the north or Irish migrations during war with the Picts of Scotland), it was moderated by the fact that the Scandinavians and Irish themselves shared many genetic families with the occupants of the British Isles. And in the case of the northern islands (Shetlands, Orkneys), it’s clear that conquest was by Viking families as much by individual bloodthirsty warriors. Uniformity of genetic stock seems largely absent everywhere in Europe, within the scope of the “super-families” identified by Sykes and his professional colleagues.”
I’d advise all of you to get your haplotypes tested at 23andMe.
Done, Y-DNA- I1, Known as the Viking gene, mt-DNA- H, Norman English.
@ Fr. John: “What with all of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales having more than half of the same genetics, what is DIFFERENT, is what is chronicled in the history of ORTHODOX ENGLAND, prior to the PAPAL (i.e., Norman) Conquest.” I agree what is different is not so much genetics (though there IS more Scandinavian and low German ancestry along the North Sea and channel coasts, yet East Anglians, Kent, Yorkshire, etc. are still overwhelmingly genetically British Celtic last I checked) as differences and changes in religious teaching and practice. The Welsh Revivals of the nineteenth century for example did not create a new people, but religious teaching created, or revealed a new potential of Welsh nature.
The continental (Scandinavian and low German) TRACE element might not have been completely harmful since average IQ still declines across the isle from east to west.
Oscar, yes, the predominant Britons aren’t mentioned at all.
Hunter, I agree the western, Scots-Irish Celts are a different people, though. English saying that I remember: “The Gaels are the people that God made mad, for all their wars are merry and all their songs are sad.” English folk music is distinct from Gaelic and there are many other differences
This “institutor by genius and a ruler by race, his pride was at once the sword of his most eminent virtues and greatest weaknesses, while honor was the touchstone of his character. Chivalrous in sentiment and magnanimous in deed, glory was his ambition, and loyalty the inspirer of his every thought, impulse and action. Elevated in his ideas and tolerant in his views, his selfishness was vicarious and his very faults wore the semblance of virtue” and so forth is rhetorical overstatement at least, even purpureus (purple prose) by today’s standards.
“That
Desmond and Rudel, good posts. So is the difference of Gaels from Brythons (“Scots-Irish are a different people”) not significant genetically, but mostly cultural then? Patchwork genetic non-uniformity across the isles and northwestern Europe, interesting. Lee’s noble Norman background and un-“Cavalier” views, interesting.
My Maternal line is exclusively from Gloucester and Oxfordshire, some Cornish and some Hugenots from the Loire valley.
The other side is Irish. From Galway. Might be the occassional Viking in there. I can go back 1,000 years with a handful of the names.
There’s really not much difference between the groups from the Northwest of Europe or Scandinavia. But the culture they developed has nuances. Exquisite ones.
You must be careful with the IQ thing from East to West. Lots of Welsh and Scots settle in London. This is an easterly city. It’s a brain magnet and a wealth magnet. It gets to cream off the top people
from the provinces.
In purely genetic terms what Rudel is saying is very accurate.
According to Stephen Oppenheimer both “Celtic” and “Anglo-Saxon” are cultural ethnic identity overlays on top of the much older population of the British Isles the majority of whose ancestry there goes back between 7,500 and 15,000 years.
When checking the Y-DNA of English males he found only roughly 5 percent were specific matches to people living in the continental place of origin for the Anglo-Saxons.
Even in Norfolk in East Anglia the specific Anglo-Saxon Y-DNA matches only rise to 15 percent.
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2006/10/mythsofbritishancestry/
So does this make the identity of Anglo-Saxon or Celt invalid?
No it doesn’t all anymore than the identity of “American” or “Southerner” are invalid. English, Irish Scot, are all cultural identities that gradually developed just like American and Southerner.
At some point a majority of people in what we now know as England started to identity culturally as English or Anglo-Saxons.
The people who founded the South were descended genetically for the most part from this group of people who culturally assumed an English identity hundreds of years in the past.
Race is purely genetic. When we enter the realm of ethnicity we have a mix of ancestry and culture that is hard to untangle.
One more thing. The Saxons had enormous colonies all over northern France. Looking at place names there are a huge number of English place names. Also the English court
was in exile there for 100 years on and off Aethelred thru Edward confessor. Anyone who opposed Canute settled there. Thousands of them. Also the Vikings sold English slaves in the Cherbourg and Le Havre markets. So the actual people there were often English already. Then there are the Bretons.
Normandy was considered to be the Southern Danelaw as well.
The Norman theory is an early stab at ethnogenesis. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that racial, cultural, and ethnic differences between various peoples became a subject of intense study.
The two types presented here are certainly true. They still exist. If you are derived from the Cavalier group, that is how you tend to approach the world.
Compare Brooks D. Simpson to Jared Taylor.
HW, I linked the article on SNN and posted some comments there about it. I like how you describe it: ‘an early stab at ethnogenesis.’ There are obvious problems with it but I like the direction it is going.
http://southernnationalist.com/blog/2012/03/23/the-normans-in-dixie/
He’s talking here about the Southern gentry of the Deep South and Tidewater, not the Scots-Irish who lived in the Southern backcountry. We have already seen how “Southerners” are a composite of three or four ethnic groups from the British Isles and continental Europe.
The founders of Virginia and South Carolina came to North America with a totally different set of cultural practices than the founders of New England. That was indeed the ultimate cause of the war.
There are Southerners with surnames that trace back through Britain and Ireland to Normandy.
I am one of those.But the Norman name became an English name after the Norman invasion in 1066. How long after I couldn’t tell you. As an Alabaman, You might recognize the name ,outside of the south and surprisingly, New Zealand, it is rare. I was born and raised in DeKalb county Alabama, a lot of Scots -Irish, but mostly English people, even though it is in Appalachia.
Hunter writes:
The Cavalier doesn’t think or sound like the Puritan. We are not the same people. Never will be either.
More accurate is that the Cavalier doesn’t think or sound like the Celt Scots-Irish Appalachian mountaineer whom the plantation elite always considered nothing but escaped indentured servants. Poor white trash if you will who can never belong to the golf club. They are not the same people. Never will be either.
In any case, the point of posting this here is that Southerners had begun to entertain ethnonationalist and romantic nationalist ideas by the 1860s. It changed the intellectual landscape in the South and featured prominently in Confederate propaganda.
Instead of there being an “American people,” the Yankee was identified as a separate people, the Other or the non-Southerner, who was contrasted unfavorably with the Cavalier. The implicit claim here is that the Cavalier ought to be identified with the state.
This is ethnonationalism.
Rhett identified with the English aristocracy.
John, the east to west IQ decline was across both Isles, with the most eastern, North Sea coast population testing about 10 points higher on average than Irish in the far west. For England and Wales as a whole versus Ireland as a whole the difference was much less. Yes, London would be a powerful factor if it was carelessly included in the statistics (I don’t know if it was), and “brain drain” emigration from Ireland and relatively poor areas in western Britain might be involved. Germany leads in average IQ in Europe, and the “Teutonic trace element” marking the “different people” of Puritan New England and eastern England might not be entirely harmful.
Actually, the “indentured servants” were typically English and Irish from the major cities of Britain, and they came over in the seventeenth century. The Scots-Irish came over in the eighteenth century and immediately settled in the backcountry.
How exactly were they oppressed in Appalachia? They weren’t oppressed. In fact, their major resentment was that conscription intruded into their clannish, almost purely autonomous existence in the upcountry.
Good informative post, Hunter, and the point of your post is clear, showing how “Southerners had begun to entertain ethnonationalist and romantic nationalist ideas…Yankee was identified as a separate people, the Other or the non-Southerner, who was contrasted unfavorably with the Cavalier.” Sometimes comments are just tangents.
“African immigrants” in the U.S. have higher IQs because of selective U.S. immigration laws. If you go to a place like Sierra Leone, you will find the professional classes have abandoned their own country.
It is much the same way with Indians. You have people like Razib who toot their horn about cognitive elites. The average Indian and Bangladeshi has a low IQ. The ones we have here are unrepresentative of subcons in general.
I also knew this article would provoke a better than usual comment thread.
Thomas’s findings contradict Oppenheimer. Linguists also find Oppenheimer’s analysis wanting.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/07/060720112040.htm
http://www.grsampson.net/QOppenheimer.html
Comments stuck in the filter have been approved.
In Pennsyltuckian coal mining regions they were sometimes oppressed a little. You’re right I think, that “their major resentment was…conscription” and it was mostly draft resistance that hanged the Molly Maguires.
The Scots-Irish came from Lothian and the Riding. They were Reivers. More or less the same bunch as Washington. Scots-Irish in their Reiver guise were also the best light cavalry in Europe. They were recruited as raiders all over Europe. They were sent to Ireland to kill Paddy. However Westminster (London) attacked them too so they got on ships and became hillbillies. And they got revenge in New Orleans and at Kings Mountain.
The Cavaliers In the civil war were for the most part the Scottish retainers of the
Stuarts. Some Welsh lords and Cornish Infantry. The English Civil war is one of my favorites.
The Sectary Cavalry of the New Model Army came from East Anglia, Huntingdonshire and Essex. Very specific people. Same people who founded New England.
However the Cavaliers were West Country, Cornish, Lancastrian, Yorkies and Welsh.
They were going to recruit Irish Catholics and bring them to England to fight. That’s when the wheels fell off the monarchy. No Squire would tolerate Paddy fighting in his Manor.
Christ at the Alamo 15 of the Texan volunteers were Scottish lowlanders!
They are NOT Irish.
PP,
Great article.
I also agree that Southern culture was an adaptation to the environment and the plantation system. If you study the history of Saint-Domingue, you will find that a similar culture evolved among the French creoles which put them at odds with metropolitan France.
It is hard to discern whether there ever really was a Southern culture as opposed a generic Caribbean slave culture that had spread into the Lower South. How different was the culture of South Carolina from Barbados or Louisiana from Saint-Domingue?
The major difference would be fewer blacks and the influence of the Scots-Irish which produced the individualistic and egalitarian strain in Southern culture.
Well, Saxon or Cavalier or whatever, it scarcely matters. If those fools don’t stop their insane practices, and stop them now, then in two more generations there’ll be nothing left in those isles but a bunch of miserable Nigerians and Pakistani dogs.
The general thrust of this article remains true: the Yankee was distinct before he became an American, and was at odds with the Southerner before he became an American.
The differences go way back into British history. Virginia and Massachusetts were on opposite sides of the English Civil War. The first colonists implanted rival cultures from different parts of England that gestated into the regional cultures of America.
No one said they were oppressed, but simply that the ideological basis of, for example, the Constitution written for the Carolinas, by Locke, arose from the discourse that painted the Norman Conquest as oppressive. English radicalism arose because it viewed the Conquest, not as a continuation of the Anglo-Saxon era, as writers like Monmouth had portrayed it, but as an aberration of Anglo-Saxon common law. Sine qua non the Norman Conquest represented oppression by an oppressor, enslavement by an enslaver and a victory over a vanquished people.
This was Jefferson’s vision. America founded as a palingenetic ideology, a myth of rebirth that sought to resurrect an Anglo-Saxon utopia.
James C. Bennett
““The DNA of modern occupants clearly shows that most of them are descended from folk long on the islands (especially on the maternal side) and much of the ebb and flow of paternal lines of DNA reflects the mere shifting of relative percentages in the population. There was no wholesale replacement. More a patchwork quilt that roughly parallels our understanding of wider European genetic history. There’s little in the way of a specifically Roman influence, just a few possible Mediterranean or African markers. Barely a statistical blip. The Normans come and go almost unseen in the genetic record (largely because they were essentially transplanted Vikings already widely represented in the British and Irish gene pool). Where dramatic imports of genetic lines is noticeable (the so-called “Genghis Khan effect” seen in Viking advances in the north or Irish migrations during war with the Picts of Scotland), it was moderated by the fact that the Scandinavians and Irish themselves shared many genetic families with the occupants of the British Isles. And in the case of the northern islands (Shetlands, Orkneys), it’s clear that conquest was by Viking families as much by individual bloodthirsty warriors. Uniformity of genetic stock seems largely absent everywhere in Europe, within the scope of the “super-families” identified by Sykes and his professional colleagues.””
This is so very typical of virtually every report on genetic research one sees. Nearly every sentence seems to or implies a contradiction to the one preceding it.
“The DNA of modern occupants clearly shows that most of them are descended from folk long on the islands (especially on the maternal side) and much of the ebb and flow of paternal lines of DNA reflects the mere shifting of relative percentages in the population. There was no wholesale replacement.”
He seems here to be suggesting the gene pool is pretty much uniform.
“More a patchwork quilt that roughly parallels our understanding of wider European genetic history.”
But this implies, by using the word “patchwork,” that the gene pool is more mixed.
“There’s little in the way of a specifically Roman influence, just a few possible Mediterranean or African markers. Barely a statistical blip.”
But this next sentence is back to more homogenity.
“The Normans come and go almost unseen in the genetic record.”
Ok, so there is little Norman genetics in the population.
“(largely because they were essentially transplanted Vikings already widely represented in the British and Irish gene pool). ”
Or is there plenty? Which is it?
“Where dramatic imports of genetic lines is noticeable”
Implies not much admixture with the population but in a few “noticeable” areas.
“(the so-called “Genghis Khan effect” seen in Viking advances in the north or Irish migrations during war with the Picts of Scotland),”
Back to fairly heavy admixture.
“it was moderated by the fact that the Scandinavians and Irish themselves shared many genetic families with the occupants of the British Isles. ”
But it is “moderated” and the gene pool is homogeneous anyway.
“And in the case of the northern islands (Shetlands, Orkneys), it’s clear that conquest was by Viking families as much by individual bloodthirsty warriors. ”
But it is “clear” the gene pool is not homogeneous.
“Uniformity of genetic stock seems largely absent everywhere in Europe,”
In fact, it can be asserted Europe is not homogeneous. No doubt the rest of the book is the same way. One sentence, paragraph or page says one thing, the next says something else.
This is the same with all reports and books. We are all the same; their are clear differences; we are all closely related; it is just as a KKK member says; it is close; it is far apart; it is fairly homogeneous; it is heavily admixed…
Thanks, Desmond. I had seen that Thomas study (computer modelling) and Y chromosome data also confirms what I grew up reading and thinking, that the Britons were so soundly defeated, and enslaved or pushed back to Wales and Cornwall, that there were few fathers, and even their language died in Saxon controlled areas. Nevertheless the original, Celtic or native genetic heritance is still proven predominant. I’ve always thought there was a native population of some kind before relatively small groups of “Celts” and their culture arrived from the continent, from the east and south, but Oppenheimer clashes with most of that.
Brutus, nice one.
It’s important to discuss history as history in such a small Island, Not history as genetics.
The Islands were only occupied by humans 12,000 years ago when the ice shelf fell back. That means that the people who initially colonized would have been been from a fairly distinct sort of pioneer. That the matrileal “mother country” right there. Get in a time machine 5,000 years ago the women would have the same faces. The men bugger knows.
Thing is the last time the English faced the real possibility of extinction must have been under William. Today the Pakistanis and Nigerians threaten the same thing. They will be stopped eventually.
Not neccesarily. They both saw the” vindication of the freedom-loving Saxon against the Norman crown and aristocracy ” in the U.S. in 1776. They both saw secession in the same light. States rights were a further vindication of the Saxon love of freedom. Richard Henry Lee, preportedly the Federal Farmer, warned “that the plan of the Constitution, while claim[ing] to be a federal system and seeming to be so in some respects, will in the end annihilate the states by consolidating them into one national government.”
s/b “purportedly”
The Normans brought Jews over aparently. Which is another irony. Luckily Edward Longshanks booted them out til Cromwell openly invited them back. The civil war was in many ways London v the Provinces too.
There were also “clubmen” who refused to take sides and fought in large enough groups to prevent Roundhead and Cavalier to enter their counties. Sorta like the white areas in New Orleans during Katrina.
The fighting also continued with the Stuarts v the Williamites and was finished at the Boyne. This was fought out in Ireland. The whole thing started there when the Paddy’s killed 3,000 baptists. Cromwell sided strenuously with the Protestants and
was determined for years to wipe out the Irish for the effrontery. He got his wish and sent many to Barbados as slaves. My Irish ancestors were high church and played both sides. One of them was a favourite of Elizabeth at court. He was a clever survivor.
Just read the related article in Southern Nationalist Network http://southernnationalist.com/blog/2012/03/23/the-normans-in-dixie/ and recommend it as well as the first comment by the29thtn that is more my thinking.
I’ve read elsewhere that the South Carolina colonists who came from Barbados made all sorts of modifications to Locke’s constitution. There may have been a colonial constitution, which facilitated the settlement of the Carolinas, but the real constitution was the culture that the colonists brought with them from the West Indies.
Georgia was founded as a philanthropic colony for the English poor. Slavery was even banned there. It didn’t stop the Carolinians from settling Georgia, taking the colony over, and recreating Georgia in heir own image.