De nostris landimeris. Populations scandinaves et frontière linguistique en Angleterre aux IXe -XIe siècles

Arnaud Lestremau (1, 2, 3)

1 CRAHAM - Centre Michel de Boüard - Centre de recherches archéologiques et historiques anciennes et médiévales
2 LAMOP - Laboratoire de Médiévistique Occidentale de Paris
3 THEMAM - Textes, Histoire et Monuments de l'Antiquité au Moyen Age

De nostris landimeris. Linguistic boundaries in late Anglo-Saxon England In Anglo-Saxon England, the building of a united kingdom was a complex process. After 954, the Danish kingdoms north of the Thames had all been defeated and annexed by the West Saxons. By their dismissal as a group, the Danes were the ferment of the Anglo-Saxon unity, but their integration as individuals was also necessary. Then, in the late 10 th century, many laws were written whose concern seems to have been to set the identities of people so that everybody got a specific role. As such, the authorities insisted on the cultural aspects of the border to strengthen the unity of the kingdom, by blurring the political and military dimensions of that border. However, language and culture are highly flexible identity markers, that can be manipulated when the actors have an interest in building or removing a border. As a consequence, we will question the use of the names in the Anglo-Scandinavian context. Was there any boundary between ethnolinguistic groups, made visible by the names? Was there comments on ethnicity when migrants with a heterogeneous onomastic capital crossed it? Conversely, could names be used to blur threshold effects between groups, if used as masks by populations of distinct origins?

Mots clés: Vikings; England; high Middle Ages; Danelaw; Wessex; onomastics

Domaines: Histoire

Arnaud Lestremau. De nostris landimeris. Populations scandinaves et frontière linguistique en Angleterre aux IXe -XIe siècles. Suttor, Marc. Les espaces frontaliers de l’Antiquité au XVIe siècle, Artois Presses Université, pp.109-132, 2020, Coll. Histoire, 978-2-84832-386-2. ⟨10.4000/books.apu.22490⟩. ⟨hal-03628608⟩