One of the few surviving accounts by the Britons of what the Anglo-Saxons did to them is Y Gododdin. It tells the story of what may have been the last stand in England of the Gododdin – the tribes of the Hen Ogledd, or Old North – in 598AD. A force of 300 warriors – the British version of the defenders of Thermopylae – took on a far greater army of Angles at a town named in Brittonic as Catraeth, which was probably Catterick in North Yorkshire. Like the Spartan 300, they fought for three days, during which all but four were killed.
The Anglo-Saxon conquest appears to have crushed the preceding cultures much more decisively than the later suppression of the Anglo-Saxons by the Normans. One indication is the remarkable paucity of Brittonic words in the English language. Even if you accept the most generous derivations, there appear to be no more than a couple of dozen, of which only four are used in daily conversation: dad, gob, beak and basket. It was an obliteration almost as complete as that of the Native American cultures in the United States.
Y Gododdin was written by one of the four survivors of the battle, the poet Aneirin. He tells how the last warriors of the Gododdin gathered in Din Eidyn, the town we now call Edinburgh. (Several Scottish cities, including Glasgow, Aberdeen and Dundee, have Welsh – or, more precisely, Cumbric – names.) They feasted there for a year before marching south, towards certain death in Catraeth. In the middle of Aneirin’s gory saga is something incongruous: a sad and beautiful lullaby called “Pais Dinogad” (Dinogad’s Smock), in which a mother tells her son of his dead father’s mastery of hunting. It names the animals he killed. Most were easy for scholars to-READ MORE
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