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Edward Lhwyd's ambitious Archaeologia Britannica project, for which he undertook an extensive tour of the Celtic-speaking regions of Britain and Brittany from 1697 to 1701, was to include “A Comparison of the Customes and Traditions of the Britains with those of other Nations.” Though this part of the Archaeologia was not written, some of the data that were collected survive. Lhwyd's comments on the material reveal that as an antiquary his primary interests were historical and lay in customs and rites as survivals, rather than in narrative; as an experimental scientist he was consistently sceptical of traditional or popular explanations of phenomena. Edward Lhwyd was the first systematically to record Welsh folklore, and the geographical breadth of his collecting, his structured approach, and his critical responses make him the foremost pioneer in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The stronghold of Iudeu, which Bede called urbs Giudi, appears to have been a royal centre held by the seventh-century kings of the Bernician English, and sufficiently prominent to lend its name to the Firth of Forth in the British and Gaelic languages. The name appears not to have survived in any modern place -name, leaving us reliant on Bede's vague description of the site in Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum, as well as a few other scraps of circumstantial evidence, in seeking to locate it. The situation naturally encouraged debate among scholars until, in 1959, identification with Stirling was proposed. This article reviews both that hypothesis and the primary evidence relating to Iudeu, and argues that the Stirling identification is far from satisfactory. Two new alternatives – and a third one, discarded in 1947 – are put forward as sites most in keeping with the crucial evidence provided by Bede, but no firm decision between them seems possible in our present state of knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2022 a survey of the languages research community in the UK was undertaken, with 536 responses (150 PhD students, 386 post-PhD researchers), complemented by 29 interviews across all career stages, as part of a Future of Languages Research Fellowship funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). This article reports findings from that survey, presenting data on research expertise, funding applications and successes, engagement with government and other stakeholders, and future directions and areas for development. Presenting the perspective of researchers themselves, our study adds to our understanding of the current state of languages research in UK Higher Education, complementing other sources including the 2021 Research Excellence Framework and the British Academy & University Council of Modern Languages (UCML) 2022 report on trends in language learning in Higher Education, and providing useful data for international comparisons. The article concludes with recommendations for action. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the colonial origins of the movement to standardize and nationalize American English. The central fact of colonials' experience is that they act as agents of an expansionist imperial society. As users of the koine nativize their common tongue, they continuously render normative judgments about alternative usages. Colonials' adoption of the metropolitan standard of English and their manner of applying it appear in three kinds of evidence: contemporary observers' evaluations of colonial speech, higher-status colonials' descriptions of British immigrants' non-standard English speech, and colonials' formal efforts to educate themselves in metropolitan standard English. That metropolitan speech was the measure of good English is confirmed in part by negative evidence. The alertness of masters to servants' regional accents, to their bad and broken English and their occasional good or plain speech, complemented British observers' praise of colonial speech as pure and perfect, accurate and elegant. Over several centuries, state policies gradually encouraged national language rationalization. The English Crown launched standardization of the English language during the late Middle Ages. Throughout the seventeenth century, both colonization and culture expressed the emerging English national consciousness. In the mid-eighteenth century, the movement entered a new phase by developing an explicit ideology of standardization. Like their Scottish counterparts, members of the British North American elites, along with educated ambitious people in the middling ranks, enlisted in an eighteenth-century colonial crusade to shape English usage.

Summary. A theory is developed to measure the quality of applicants into UK higher education. It is based on the principle that more able applicants will self-select into more difficult subject choices. The advantage is that it gives a unidimensional measure whereby different groups can easily be compared across any dimension of interest, e.g. men, women and the various ethnic groups. Here the relative quality of applicants and acceptances across 170 separate subject groups is calculated and discussed by using a data set with over 2 million observations. It, therefore, offers a way of achieving a more refined measure of the quality of human capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract Aim To investigate the information content of place-names regarding the habits, habitat and biogeography of ravens in Britain over the past millennium. Location England, Scotland and Wales. Methods Linguistic and ecological analysis of over 400 British place-names that have a putative ‘raven’ derivation. Results Most of the ‘raven’ place-names are Old English in origin. Some of these (a minority), however, derive from personal names. The derivations of most names reflect landscape rather than man-made features; the majority relating to high, craggy ground or coastal features, a minority to wooded situations or human habitations. In lowland Scotland and the Scottish borders the colloquial name corbie dominates ‘raven’ place-names, perhaps reflecting French influence. In the Highlands and the Western Isles the Gaelic fitheach and its derivatives are predominant. Relatively fewer place-names that have ‘raven’ roots have been educed in other parts of the Celtic West, i.e. Wales and Cornwall (only one traced in the latter). Main conclusions Comparison of the geographical distribution of ‘raven’-derived place-names with the present-day distribution of the species in Britain reveals the extent of the contraction in the raven's range to the West over historical time, most notably during theprevious two centuries, associated with changed land-management practices in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyzes the book `Faerie Queene,' by 16th century English author Edmund Spenser. Sources for histories and accounts of early Britain; Characteristics of the book's character, the Giant Coulin.

Discusses the sources of former ILP councilor Charles Stanton's campaign funds during the Merthyr Boroughs by-election of 1915. Conservatives; Demise of the Trade Union Tariff Reform Association (TUTRA); Suspension of partisan political activity during the war; Revival of National Service League activities in mid-1915; Absence of direct access institutional funding for Stanton.

Discusses the importance and difference of enlightenment between Ireland and Scotland in relation to Gaelic antiquity and national identity in the eighteenth-century. Ideological link in Irish political culture between ethnic identity and issue of civility; Ancient constitution of the Irish; Dimension of the claim of Irish cultural patriotism; Gaeldom's role in Scottish political culture.

Present-day people from England and Wales have more ancestry derived from early European farmers (EEF) than did people of the Early Bronze Age 1 . To understand this, here we generated genome-wide data from 793 individuals, increasing data from the Middle to the Late Bronze Age and Iron Age in Britain by 12-fold, and western and central Europe by 3.5-fold. Between 1000 and 875 BC, EEF ancestry increased in southern Britain (England and Wales) but not northern Britain (Scotland) due to incorporation of migrants who arrived at this time and over previous centuries, and who were genetically most similar to ancient individuals from France. These migrants contributed about half the ancestry of people of England and Wales from the Iron Age, thereby creating a plausible vector for the spread of early Celtic languages into Britain. These patterns are part of a broader trend of EEF ancestry becoming more similar across central and western Europe in the Middle to the Late Bronze Age, coincident with archaeological evidence of intensified cultural exchange 2-6 . There was comparatively less gene flow from continental Europe during the Iron Age, and the independent genetic trajectory in Britain is also reflected in the rise of the allele conferring lactase persistence to approximately 50% by this time compared to approximately 7% in central Europe where it rose rapidly in frequency only a millennium later. This suggests that dairy products were used in qualitatively different ways in Britain and in central Europe over this period., (© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Limited.)