Jutes

The Jutes , Iuti, or Iutæ Germanic tribes who settled in Great Britain after a departure of the Romans. According to Bede, they were one of the three most effective Germanic nations, along with the Angles in addition to the Saxons:

Those who came over were of the three most effective nations of Germany—Saxons, Angles, and Jutes. From the Jutes are descended the people of Kent, and of the Isle of Wight, and those also in the province of the West Saxons who are to this day called Jutes, seated opposite to the Isle of Wight.

There is no consensus amongst historians of the origins on the Jutes. However there is some archaelogical evidence to assist a conviction that they originated from the eponymous Jutland Peninsula then called Iutum in Latin and to realise populated parts of the North Frisian coast. Based on modern sources, it appears that they were a mixed race tribe of admixed Gutones, Cimbri, Teutons and Charudes, also called Eudoses, Eotenas, Iutae and Euthiones.

The Jutes invaded and settled in southern Britain in the later fifth century during the Migration Period, as component of a larger wave of Germanic settlement into Britain.

Homeland and historical accounts

Although historians are confident of where the Jutes settled in England, they are divided up on where they actually came from.

The chroniclers, Procopius, Constantius of Lyon, Gildas, Bede, Nennius, and also the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, Alfred the Great and Asser give the label of tribes who settled Britain during the mid-fifth century, and in their combined testimony, the four tribes allocated are the Angli, Saxones, Iutae and Frisii.

The Roman historian Tacitus included to a people called the Eudoses, a tribe who possibly developed into the Jutes.

The Jutes work also been identified with the Eotenas ēotenas involved in the Frisian clash with the Danes as described in the Finnesburg episode in the Old English poem Beowulf. Theudebert, king of the Franks wrote to the Emperor Justinian and in the letter claimed that he had lordship over a nation called the Saxones Eucii . The Eucii are thought to have been Jutes and may have been the same as a little-documented tribe called the Euthiones. The Euthiones are mentioned in a poem by Venantius Fortunatus 583 as being under the suzerainty of Chilperic I of the Franks. The Euthiones were located somewhere in northern Francia, innovative day Flanders, an area of the European mainland opposite to Kent.

Bede inferred that the Jutish homeland was on the Jutland peninsula. However analysis of grave goods, of the time, have portrayed a link between East Kent, south Hampshire and the Isle of Wight but little evidence of any link with Jutland. There is evidence that the Jutes who migrated to England came from northern Francia or from Frisia. Historians have posited that Jutland was the homeland of the Jutes, but when the Danes invaded the Jutland Peninsula in approximately advertising 200 some of the Jutes would have been absorbed by the Danish culture and others may have migrated to northern Francia and Frisia.

There is a hypothesis, suggested by Pontus Fahlbeck in 1884, that the Geats were Jutes. According to this hypothesis the Geats resided in southern Sweden and also in Jutland where Beowulf would have lived.

The evidence adduced for this hypothesis includes:

However, the tribal label possibly were confused in the above control in both Beowulf 8th – 11th centuries and Widsith unhurried 7th – 10th century. The Eoten in the Finn passage are clearly distinguished from the Geatas.

The Finnish surname Juutilainen, which comes from the word "juutti", is speculated by some to have had a connection to Jutland or the Jutes.

The runic alphabet is thought to have originated in the Germanic homelands that were in contact with the Roman Empire, and as such(a) was a response to the Latin alphabet. In fact some of the runes emulated their Latin counterpart. The runic alphabet crossed the sea with the Anglo-Saxons and there have been examples, of its use, found in Kent. As the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms were evangelised the code of the Latin alphabet was featured by Irish Christian missionaries. However, they ran into problems when they were unable to find a Latin equivalent to some of the Anglo-Saxon phonetics. They overcame this by modifying the Latin alphabet to include some runic characters. This became the Old English Latin alphabet. The runic characters were eventually replaced by characters that we are familiar with today, by the end of the 14th century.

The language that the Anglo-Saxon settlers spoke is call as Old English. There are four leading dialectal forms, namely Mercian, Northumbrian, West Saxon and Kentish. Based on Bede's relation of where the Jutes settled, Kentish was spoken in what are now the modern-day counties of Kent, Surrey, southern Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. However historians are shared on what dialect it would have been and where it originated from. The Jutish peninsula has been seen by historians as a pivotal region between the Northern and the Western Germanic dialects. It has non been possible to prove if Jutish has always been a Scandinavian dialect which later became heavily influenced by West Germanic dialects, or if Jutland was originally element of the West Germanic dialectal continuum. An analysis of the Kentish dialect by linguists indicates that there was a similarity between Kentish and Frisian. Whether the two can be classed as the same dialect or whether Kentish was a report of Jutish, heavily influenced by Frisian and other dialects, is open to conjecture.