No Anglo-Saxon-Jute etc Invasions of Britain

I know that a thread on this was done in 2007 but that was a long time ago so I presume that everone is ok with me doing a new thread on the same topic?
Topic: What do you think would have happened to Britain if there had been no Anglo-Saxons-Jute invasions of Britain, thereby leaving OTL England Brythonic in the Early Middle Ages?
My Opinion: I see OTL England and Wales (what are we going to call it) be ruled by an evolving patchwork of different warlords, perhaps whose lands slowly amalgamate into larger Kingdoms, not unlike OTL saxon England. How much would the Viking invasions be different? My idea is that the Norse will the North, though how Norsefied it will become, I don't know. Perhaps OTL Southern England, Dumnonia and everywhere West of the Seven will remain brythonic. They will probably regain the land from the Norse.
Beyond then: no idea

What do you think?
 
Topic: What do you think would have happened to Britain if there had been no Anglo-Saxons-Jute invasions of Britain, thereby leaving OTL England Brythonic in the Early Middle Ages?
It would require a very early PoD, probably as soon as the III century. Basically, you need Saxon establishment to be more or less as minor than they were in Gaul.
A good bet would be that western germanic leagues never form as OTL, disrupted by a possible modification of migrations in Germany (by exemple, but it's not that well tought trough, Vandals taking over along the Rhine).

What does it means? That western germanic leagues are more powerful and that they take over Gaul as OTL, under different names. At this point it would be very unlikely that some doesn't cross the Channel.

Jutes and Anglii, chased by Danes, would be still likely try to migrate and invade either Frisia or England.

Still, assuming that they don't take over for some reason the whole island, Britons would still have to deal with Picts and Gael. You would probably see three great groups of kingdoms in Britannia : Picto-Gaëls, Britto-Roman, Germanic.

How much would the Viking invasions be different?
With such a PoD, they would have been likely butterflied, as Frisians could have as well held North Sea trade, Arabs could have never boosted Atlantic and Volga trade, or Franks disrupted the northern trade roads.
 
IIRC, Gildas says that the Saxons were first invited because a great plague meant that the Britons were no longer able to defend themselves. Butterfly this plague away (assuming, of course, that it actually happened) and the Saxons would probably be limited to raiding the coastline without taking land permanently.

Alternatively, it was a British custom to divide land between all a ruler's sons on his death, which meant that the map of Britain becomes more and more fragmented over time. Butterflying away this custom in favour of (say) primogeniture would result in fewer, more powerful British kingdoms, which would in turn be better able to defend themselves against the Saxons.

As for butterflies, it's all so long in the past that it's difficult to say. Linguistically the country would probably be speaking a language similar to modern Welsh, although it might be interesting to speculate as to what impact the Viking invasion (assuming it wasn't butterflied) might have on this. Old Norse and Old English were quite similar, certainly far more similar than Old Norse and Old Welsh, so we might see less linguistic mixing between the native and Viking languages compared to OTL. Culturally speaking too the Anglo-Saxon invasion oriented England towards the Scandinavian/North Sea cultural sphere; since this wouldn't be a factor for a Welsh-ruled Britain, we might expect to see the island look south across the Channel instead, and perhaps join the European cultural mainstream earlier than IOTL.

Later history would depend a lot on whether a strong kingdom was able to unite (most of) the isles. A united Celtic Britain would be equally well-placed as its real-life counterpart for colonisation, so expect to see large parts of the Americas speaking Welsh. A disunited Celtic Britain would be in a much worse position, and like Germany and Italy might well find itself divided between the spheres of competing foreign powers. We might however see a British equivalent of the Risorgimento uniting the peoples of the island into one country during the second half of the nineteenth century. Since such a country would be late to the colonisation game, their language almost certainly wouldn't be the world's lingua franca by 2014; most likely French would be filling that role.
 
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