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Showing posts from January, 2016

Happy Donkey Hill or Faerdre Fach

Update:  Quimper-Vannes has moved to a new site:  https://quimpervannes.substack.com/ This Blogger site is now an archive. New articles, extracts and launch news for the English edition and French translation will appear on Substack. BBC News Video :  Campaigners call for law to protect Welsh place-names Stories are what make toponymy interesting and the two names featured in this video tell two simple stories. The old name,  Faerdre Fach,  is medieval - dating back to the 14th century. Faerdref or  maerdref , indicates a dairy hamlet on demesne land (feudal land owned and managed by the lord for his own purposes).    These dairy-houses were kept at a little distance from the castles and courts of noblemen and the bonded tenants who lived there supplied dairy and other food products to their feudal lords.  There were two farmhouses here and they were called  Faerdre F awr , ‘great’ and  Faerdre F ach , ‘litt...

Did the English kill off the Britons? Part 2

Update:  Quimper-Vannes has moved to a new site:  https://quimpervannes.substack.com/ This Blogger site is now an archive. New articles, extracts and launch news for the English edition and French translation will appear on Substack. Iron Age and Anglo-Saxon genomes from East England reveal British migration history   [ Nature Communications] English DNA 'one-third' Anglo-Saxon   [ BBC News  19/1/2016] Were one million or more Britons wiped out by the English in a Dark Ages holocaust? The research cited (and summarised) above estimates that on average people in modern Eastern England get 38% of their genes from Anglo-Saxon immigrants dating from the 5th century onwards. They also suggest that this 38% has a particularly strong correlation with modern Dutch and Danish populations. The evidence has been gathered from three burial sites near Cambridge: Linton for the Late Iron /Early Romano-British period; Oakington for the...