This is a mini-article exploring the question of what we know about the names of people living in the Brythonic-speaking kingdoms in the north of Britain between the end of the Roman period and the final political absorption of those kingdoms by non-Brythonic-speaking dynasties.
(Throughout this article I have used the word "Brythonic" to refer to the language family as a whole, and "Brittonic" to refer to the language that was, loosely speaking, the common ancestor of that family. "Brittonic" was spoken roughly contemporarily with the Roman period in Britain, while "Brythonic" languages cover that time to the present. The Brythonic language spoken in the north of Britain is often called "Cumbric" after the point when it has diverged from the other branches, but because much of my linguistic evidence and discussion has come to us via Welsh, it seems misleading in this context to speak of particular linguistic forms as "Cumbric".)
In principle, the scope of this article would cover the period from ca. 400 (when direct Roman rule and support officially ended in Britain) until the absorption of Strathclyde around the early 11th century, but for practical purposes the data is drawn from the first three centuries of that period and dips slightly earlier in two cases. The chief political entities involved here are the kingdoms of Elmet (the southernmost of the group, roughly centering around modern Leeds) which maintained independent existence until 617; Rheged (roughly equivalent to modern Dumfries) whose absorption by Northumbria may coincide with the marriage of Rhieinfellt to Oswy ca. 635; Strathclyde (roughly equivalent to the modern region of that name) which may have retained independent political existence until the early 11th century; and Gododdin (extending roughly south from its capital at Edinburgh) which fell to the Anglians around 638, a generation after the defeat commemorated in the Aneirin's poem Y Gododdin. (For general historical background, see e.g. Jarman 1990, Snyder 1998, Duncan 1975.)
Our information sources for this period focus on two classes of people: the ruling nobility, and prominent religious figures. And contemporary evidence, in the strongest sense of the term, is virtually non-existent. For the most part, we must rely on materials composed centuries after the lives of the individuals in question and surviving only in manuscripts of even later date -- often after multiple layers of transmission, at each of which errors, modernizations, or even deliberate alterations may be introduced. The following are the major types of sources:
In the following discussions, I've provided all the known (to me) mentions of the women by name (at least in medieval material), as well as contextual information about who they are and how they were related. If there is significant doubt about the historic existence of the woman (or about the accuracy of the name as recorded) I have discussed that. On a much more speculative level, I have then attempted to offer linguistic reconstructions of how these women's names might have been written and pronounced during their own lifetimes. For these reconstructions I have been forced to treat the names as if they followed Welsh practice for the same period, as the independent evidence for Cumbric at the same period is too scanty to be useful. I have also taken the (lazy) short-cut of relying almost entirely on Jackson's Language and History in Early Britain for these reconstructions, even knowing that a number of his conclusions have been debated and revised by more recent work. (When John Koch's forthcoming book on Old Welsh comes out, I'll cheerfully switch to over-relying on him instead!) The reconstructed pronunciations are given in a common version of "ASCII-IPA" and also using a more English-based system with annotations.
I would like to emphasize that the reconstructions (both