Analogije treba uzeti uz veliku rezervu, ali nije na odmet porostudirati istoriju drugih regiona koji su imali slicne "probleme".
At an earlier date, however, before the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons
to Christianity, many Britons, in becoming Anglo-Saxon and in
abandoning their ancestral identity, may well have changed not only
their ancient language, but also their religion. There were undoubtedly
Christians, who are presumed to be Britons, within the pagan Anglo-
Saxon kingdoms of the fifth and sixth centuries. The survival of the cult
of the Romano-British martyr Alban in the heavily anglo-saxonized
south-east of Britain proves this beyond any doubt.4 But, on the basis of
the available evidence, it is reasonable to presume that by 597 Germanic
paganism was the religion of the majority of the population of pagan.1 Scholars have occasionally wondered whether, before the arrival
of the missionaries, die hold of Germanic paganism over Anglo-Saxon
Britain was in decline. Rather, the sixth century may well have been a
period in which paganism was spreading rapidly, as part of the process of
anglo-saxonization of the native British population.2
To understand and appreciate this remarkable cultural and ethnic
change more fully, we need to look overseas. Here many other examples
show that in the early Middle Ages, as in other periods,
ethnic identities
were not immutable, but could change, given the right encouragement
and enough time.
The Anglo-Saxon
invasion may well have been violent and brutal, and Anglo-Saxon texts
certainly occasionally celebrate the massacre of Britons;3 but even brutal
invasion is most likely to have left the vast majority of the native peasant
population physically unharmed, if only in order to exploit them and
their land more effectively. Perhaps, at the very least, 800,000 Britons
survived to become subjects of the new Anglo-Saxon rulers. How many
of these there were is even more difficult to guess at; but 200,000
immigrants in all may be a generous estimate, given rough (and
admittedly scarcely reliable) figures that we have for invading Germanicpeoples on the continent.1 So, even taking a fairly high Anglo-Saxon
figure (200,000) and a low British one (800,000),
Britons are likely to
have outnumbered Anglo-Saxons by at least four to one. In parts of
Anglo-Saxon Britain they almost certainly outnumbered them by very
much more.
A key text that helps explain why the native Britons, once conquered,
chose to abandon their Britishness, is the law code of Ine of Wessex, of
the end of the seventh century. Ine set down wergilds (blood-money) and
requirements to prove guilt or innocence, both for his
own people and
for '
foreigners/K/ftz£w' (also termed 'Welshmen/myliscmeri). These
wealas must have been people under Ine's rule in Wessex (perhaps
mainly in the west, where his kingdom was expanding at this period)
who still identified themselves as Britons, and who were therefore still
seen as 'foreigners' by the West Saxons.1 Ine gives wergilds to these
wealas, and differentiates diem by wealth and status in the same way that
he does for the Saxons. Some of them indeed are wealthy, with landed
possessions of five and more hides, and one category has even secured
privileged status and a privileged wergild by entering royal service.2 But,
and this is the crucial point, the wergilds set by Ine for the wealas under
his rule, and the burden of proof required to incriminate them, are both
considerably lower than those for Saxons of comparable status. In these
circumstances,
it is perhaps not surprising that the Britons of Wessex
chose to abandon their Britishness and become Anglo-Saxon. To do so,
they probably had to adopt, not only the name, but also the speech of the
invading Saxons. As Thomas Charles-Edwards has pointed out, the
binary ethnic distinction that appears in Ine's Laws seems to be between
' Englisc/En^isW ('us') and 'WyliscfWelsh' ('them'). Since Ine's people
were Saxons/Seaxe, this very early use of the word 'English' (unless it
is a later introduction into the text) suggests that it was the speaking
of a particular language (already recognized as a single language, and
already called 'English'), that, for Ine's Saxon Wessex, was the crucial
determinant in ethnic identity.
BRYAN WARD-PERKINS
http://ehr.oxfordjournals.org/content/115/462/513.full.pdf
Meni se čini da se Tibor polako priklanja stavovima da je Slovena daleko manje došlo nego je i sam pisao u prethodnim knjigama, a prihvata koncept koji zastupa dr Daniel Džino da su malobrojni Sloveni zapravo izvršili slavizaciju starosjedilaca? 
