History and Language in Oldbury, Worcestershire - Part One

Our very own Roving Reporter Dennis revisits the Black Country to find out what's still there and what has changed.

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History and Language in Oldbury, Worcestershire - Part One

Postby Dennis » Mon May 28, 2012 8:40 am

Talk given in Oldbury on 15 May 2012

My father had a keen interest in local words, and in 1974, when I bought David Wilson's very useful handbook Staffordshire Dialect Words: A Historical Survey (Moorland Publishing Company, 1974), we went through it together and he marked the Black Country words which he knew and sometimes used himself in Oldbury, Worcestershire. I am very happy to acknowledge my debt to David Wilson's book in what follows.

This is a talk about the way people speak and the things they say in and around Oldbury, and how all this came about historically. Although it may not be immediately obvious, I'm from Oldbury, and so were my parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, so the saying and words here are very familiar to me. Curiously, my wife, who is from Yorkshire, and her mother, also from Yorkshire, recognize a lot of Oldbury dialect words as also their own Yorkshire ones, so in some cases we're talking about a non-standard, regional or even obsolete, archaic English that overlaps with other areas.

I'll start with the historical context. We all speak Modern English, whether standard or non-standard. But it's useful to remember that English and English-speakers are only the most recent inhabitants of the Oldbury area. If we were to go back, say, 10,000 years, the inhabitants would have spoken a language of which there is no record and of which we know nothing. It might have been the ancestor of modern Basque in northern Spain and south western France, or it might not, we'll probably never know, Basque being one of the oldest languages in Europe and unrelated to any other that we know. So we probably wouldn't have understood a word they said hereabouts in 8,000 BC. If we were to go back just 3,000 years, say to 1,000 BC, this area would have been inhabited the Celts, the most recent wave of migrants to reach the marshy tributaries of the Tame, and they would be speaking a language that belonged to our own language family, a language family called Indo-European, and which includes all the Germanic and Celtic languages, and also Latin and its descendants – French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian. So you'd have heard a Celtic language spoken here and indeed all over Western Europe, in France (Gaul) and Ireland as well, before the Romans arrived, and you might have recognized the old Gaulish Celtic words for mother, matir, and daughter, duxtir, (modern Welsh mam and merch).

You could say that Oldbury was Celtic-speaking for many centuries – in fact in later years a form of Primitive Welsh – until somewhere between 500 and 600AD, and pockets of it may have survived even longer under Anglo-Saxon rule. There are a couple of local reminders of this ancestor of modern Welsh in place names. They are the name of the River Tame itself, which is linked to the other river names in Britain and Europe – Thames, Teme, Tamar, Taff, etc. also the Rivers Tone, Tain, Tean, as well as the Taw and Tay. The word Tame is based on either Indo-European *tam, ‘dark’, ‘the dark one’, ‘the dark river’, or more likely *ta-, *te- meaning ‘to flow’, so ‘the flowing one’, ‘river’.

But more intriguing is the place-name Penncricket, as in Penncricket Lane, which runs near the Halesowen – Oldbury boundary and climbs up onto the Rowley Hills, to be continued by Mincing Lane into Rowley Regis village. It seems to be the oldest place name in the Oldbury area. It was once thought to mean ‘the end of the boundary’ (with Halesowen), but it's much older than that and probably means ‘the top or end of the small hill, mound’ and is made up of three words, two of them from early Welsh : penn meaning ‘head, end, top’ and crug, modern Welsh crug, also meaning ‘hill, hump’ or even ‘burial mound, barrow’. The –et ending is a Norman French diminutive, ‘little hill’. (Pen has various meanings in modern Welsh, and I was reminded that it's still a living word when I was visiting Blaenavon Big Pit in South Wales last year and was being measured for a safety helmet. “Pen mawr!”, one miner shouted to another, “a big head!”) So perhaps Penncricket meant “the top of the hillock” or even “the chief mound”, perhaps a tribal fortification, a gathering point or burial place? Or a part of the Rowley Hills themselves, a bluff or outcrop? There is a Cricket St Thomas in Somerset, as you may know, where it means small hill. So the Welsh-speaking Celts were in Oldbury for many hundreds of years and Penncricket is the proof of it.

After the Romans invaded Britain in 43AD there was probably very little change linguistically around here. It remained as it were the ‘empty quarter’ of the country with some roads but very few villas or major settlements, and was probably under the sway of the Cornovii tribe at Wroxeter, Viroconium Cornoviorum, near the Wrekin. Latin was the official language of the Empire, of the army and of administration, but this sparsely populated area would have remained predominantly Celtic-speaking. Some Celtic Britons will have learned a few words of Latin to get by with officialdom, some were perhaps even educated in the language, and after nearly four hundred years of occupation and contact a large number of Latin words were borrowed into early Welsh – I’m sure that in Wales you’ve noticed eglwys, ‘church’, a word borrowed directly from the Roman occupiers’ Greek-derived Latin word ecclesia, as was pont, y bont, ‘bridge’ from pons, pontis. There are many others Latin loan words in Modern Welsh. And English place-names like Eccles and Eccleshall preserve that early Welsh word for church.

After four hundred years Britain ceased to be part of the Roman Empire. And this of course is where we come in, the English. Germanic tribes crossed the North Sea, the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, and settled in what subsequently became known not as Britannia (place of the *Pretani, perhaps ‘tattooed folk’, because ancient Britons had once painted themselves blue with a plant dye, woad), but as Englaland, ‘the land of the Angles’. The Germanic colonization was not immediate, it took many decades and a lot of fighting for the Germanic warrior bands to inch their way northwards and westwards from the east coast.

What became of the Welsh-speakers is not clear. Some presumably fled south and west, some became the serfs or slaves of the Anglo-Saxon rulers of the future kingdom of Mercia. The late Margaret Gelling, doyenne of English place name studies, whom I knew at the University of Birmingham, wondered aloud in one of her maps in Signposts to the Past (1978), whether the name Warley, which has an established etymology, might not preserve the word wealh, wealas, the Anglo-Saxons’ word for the non-Saxon slave or serf group, the Welsh, which we still use today. (The Welsh call themselves Cymry, ‘the people who live together in the same country’.) Interestingly even today in Switerland German speakers sometimes refer disparagingly to Romance language speakers as die Welschen, that is,‘foreigners, people we don't understand’. It's certain that the wealh, ‘Welsh’ element is there in a lot of English Midland place-names like Walsall, Walton, Walcot, and the Cymry bit is there in Comberton and Comberford, suggesting the possibility of continuing pockets of Welsh speakers. A lot of West Midland place names are Celtic, such as Penn near Wolverhampton, Pensnett, Penkridge (which is possibly the same word as Penncricket…) or the Barr bit of Great Barr, barr being Celtic for hill. The Anglo-Saxons learnt these place-names at some point from Welsh speakers. A bit further west there's the completely Celtic place-name Malvern, which in modern Welsh would be Moel fryn, ‘bald mountain’ – which indeed of course it looks like when seen from a distance, absolutely bald, no trees on the top !

So Welsh words, or words referring to Welsh people, live on in local place-names. The language of the people here, after being early Welsh (with perhaps a dash of Latin), became Anglo-Saxon, or Old English as it's sometimes called, and the majority of Oldbury place names are Germanic and Anglo-Saxon and in some cases still understandable – obvious Langley, ‘long lea, long meadow’, and Rood End where presumably a wayside cross once stood as you see on the Continent and Ireland even now, a rood, from Anglo-Saxon rōd, ‘pole’, specifically a crucifix, (linked to our modern word rod). The Anglo-Saxon name Oldbury itself, originally Aldan-byriġ, old + dative singular of burh, (as in borough, burgus) ‘fortified place’, mysteriously suggests an Iron Age fortification somewhere in the vicinity, perhaps a hill fort on Bury Hill, as has occasionally been suggested.

So on to Anglo-Saxon, then. When I was at school, those of us who disliked standing around shivering on windswept sports fields on winter afternoons managed to persuade a couple of sympathetic English masters to teach a group of us Sixth Formers Anglo-Saxon. We began with the Parker Chronicle, which describes year by year the Viking invasion of Anglo-Saxon England; we studied some of King Alfred's writings, and some superb but very difficult poems such as The Wanderer and The Battle of Maldon. The Anglo-Saxon language came as a revelation. I felt what you might call ‘a sudden shock of deep recognition’, to quote the critic George Steiner, when I first heard it. Try this for example – bear with me, it won't be long before you recognize what it is you're hearing :

Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum;
Si þin nama gehalgod.
To becume þin rice,
gewurþe ðin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofonum.
urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us todæg,
and forgyf us ure gyltas, swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum.
And ne gelæd þu us on costnunge, ac alys us of yfele.
Soþlice.


It's the Lord's Prayer, of course, as it would have sounded here in Oldbury a thousand years ago. Our modern English is fundamentally still the same language, but it has a huge number of words substituted or added from Norman French and from the learned Latin of the educated class. We still almost say heofon, heaven and eorð, earth, but instead of gyltas, guilts, guiltinesses, we say trespasses, which is from Norman French; we say daily bread, using the term which originally meant ‘a bit, crumb, or morsel’ (perhaps from the verb break) which had replaced the specific word hlaf, loaf, by about 1200 AD; and we use the Hebrew amen at the end, meaning ‘truth’, ‘truly’, ‘so be it’ instead of that final soþlice, ‘truly, in very sooth’, as in Modern English, soothsayer, originally a ‘truth-teller’.

Before the Normans arrived here in 1066 after their victory at the Battle of Hastings, they had been preceded by their even more violent Scandinavian ancestors the Vikings – pirates, warriors and merchants from Norway and Denmark, whose first raid was on Lindisfarne in 793 AD. For two hundred years, from 800 to 1000 AD, there was sporadic warfare between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings, who spoke a related Germanic language of their own called Old Norse. It's fashionable these days to say that the Vikings have had a bad press, that they were harmless farming and fishing folk. They may have been that later, but it's clear from the Anglo-Saxon chronicles that, wherever they made landfall, they were an implacable foe to confront: fearless, ruthless fighters who took whatever they wanted, plundering, destroying, killing, and selling their hapless prisoners into slavery. Whether Viking warbands passed through the Oldbury area we don't know, but many of them later settled not far away, to the north and east of the Roman road, Watling Street, in an area of England called the Danelaw. The Vikings’ language Old Norse had a significant impact on the early English language and they left us many basic words – sky, law, and window among others – and some Old Norse words also remain in our Black Country dialect, as we'll see...

© Dennis Wood 2012
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Re: History and Language in Oldbury, Worcestershire - Part O

Postby Northern Lass » Mon May 28, 2012 9:22 am

Thank you Dennis I really enjoyed reading that

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Re: History and Language in Oldbury, Worcestershire - Part O

Postby sparkstopper » Mon May 28, 2012 11:41 am

Most interesting Dennis: perhaps we could have a thread for words we heard as
youngsters, but do not hear now...an old aunt of mine in the late 30s early 40s always
referred to the drain outside from the kitchen sink, as a 'sough'...I had not heard that
word again until last nights 'Countryfile' on TV. When an item looking for an old river
the expert referred to where the river disappeared under ground as a 'sough'.
There must be many old words now not used,which the younger generation would not
understand..as they have many words and prefixes I certainly don't understand.
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Re: History and Language in Oldbury, Worcestershire - Part O

Postby Dennis » Mon May 28, 2012 1:58 pm

Many thanks, sparkstopper and NL! A sough is an underground channel for draining water out of a mine, but also an underground drain in general in our area, pronounced 'suff'. It can also mean a marshy area, and there is apparently a Dutch dialect word zoeg meaning a little ditch. I think it's also still part of Standard English but rather specialized!
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Re: History and Language in Oldbury, Worcestershire - Part O

Postby mallosa » Mon May 15, 2017 11:52 pm

Please note!

Since the recent changeover, we seem to have aquired a lot of 'gobbledegook' within Dennis's initial post.
Please bear with us, we'll get it sorted asap

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