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Ancient Celtic people of Great Britain
The Britons, also known as Celtic Britons or ancient Britons, were the Celtic people who inhabited Great Britain from at least the British Iron Age until the High Middle Ages, at which point they diverged into the Welsh, Cornish, and Bretons. They spoke Common Brittonic, the ancestor of the modern Brittonic languages.
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Text from the Wikipedia article “Brythons”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
The Britons (reconstructed P-Celtic *Pritanī, Latin: Britanni, Welsh: Brythoniaid), also known as Celtic Britons or ancient Britons, were the Celtic people who inhabited Great Britain from at least the British Iron Age until the High Middle Ages, at which point they diverged into the Welsh, Cornish, and Bretons (among others). They spoke Common Brittonic, the ancestor of the modern Brittonic languages.
The oldest written evidence for the Britons is from Greco-Roman writers in the Iron Age. The earliest known mention is by Pytheas (c. 320 BC), who refers to the Pretanoi as being Keltoi (Celts). Although later Greco-Roman writers do not call them Celts, they spoke a Celtic language and had Celtic cultural traits. Ancient Britain was made up of many tribes and kingdoms, associated with various hillforts. The Britons followed an ancient Celtic religion overseen by druids. Some of the southern polities had strong links with mainland Europe, especially with Gaul and Belgica, and minted their own coins.
The Roman Empire conquered most of Britain in the 1st century AD, creating the province of Britannia. The Romans invaded northern Britain, but tribes such as the Caledonians (Picts) in the north remained unconquered, and Hadrian's Wall (which bisects the modern English counties of Northumberland and Cumbria) became the western edge of the empire. A Romano-British culture emerged, mainly in the southeast, and British Latin coexisted with Brittonic. It is unclear what relationship the Britons had with the Picts, who lived outside of the empire beyond the Firth of Forth in northern Britain; however, most scholars today accept that the Pictish language was related to Common Brittonic, being either itself a Brittonic language, or a related branch of P-Celtic, known as Pritenic.
Following the end of Roman rule in Britain during the 5th century, Anglo-Saxon settlement of eastern and southern Britain began. The culture and language of the Britons gradually fragmented, and much of their territory gradually became Anglo-Saxon, while the north and the Isle of Man became subject to a similar gradual settlement by Gaelic-speaking tribes from Ireland who eventually formed Scotland. The extent to which this cultural change was accompanied by wholesale population changes is still debated. During this time, Britons migrated to mainland Europe and established significant colonies in Brittany (now part of France), the Channel Islands, and Britonia (now part of Galicia, Spain). By the 11th century, Brittonic-speaking populations had split into distinct groups: the Welsh in Wales, the Cornish in Cornwall, the Bretons in Brittany, the Cumbrians of the Hen Ogledd ("Old North") in modern southern Scotland and northern England, and the remnants of the Pictish people in northern Scotland. Common Brittonic developed into the distinct Brittonic languages: Welsh, Cornish, Breton and Cumbric.
In Celtic studies, 'Britons' refers to native speakers of the Brittonic languages in the ancient and medieval periods, "from the first evidence of such speech in the pre-Roman Iron Age, until the central Middle Ages".
The earliest known reference to the inhabitants of Britain was made by Pytheas, a Greek geographer who made a voyage of exploration around the British Isles between 330 and 320 BC. Although none of his writings remain, writers during the following centuries make frequent reference to them. The ancient Greeks called the people of Britain the Pretanoí or Bretanoí. Pliny's Natural History (77 AD) says the older name for the island was Albion, and Avienius calls it insula Albionum, "island of the Albions". The name could have reached Pytheas from the Gauls.
The P-Celtic ethnonym has been reconstructed as *Pritanī, from Common Celtic *kʷritu, which became Old Irish cruth and Old Welsh pryd. This likely means "people of the forms, shapely people", and could be linked to the Latin name Picti (the Picts), which is usually explained as meaning "painted people". The Old Welsh name for the Picts was Prydyn. Linguist Kim McCone suggests the name became restricted to inhabitants of the far north after Cymry displaced it as the name for the Welsh and Cumbrians. The Welsh prydydd, "maker of forms", was also a term for the highest grade of a bard.
The medieval Welsh form of Latin Britanni was Brython (singular and plural). Brython was introduced into English usage by John Rhys in 1884 as a term unambiguously referring to the P-Celtic speakers of Great Britain, to complement Goidel; hence the adjective Brythonic refers to the group of languages. "Brittonic languages" is a more recent coinage (first attested in 1923 according to the Oxford English Dictionary).
In the early Middle Ages, following the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, the Anglo-Saxons called all Britons Bryttas or Wealas (Welsh), while they continued to be called Britanni or Brittones in Medieval Latin. From the 11th century, they are more often referred to separately as the Welsh, Cumbrians, Cornish, and Bretons, as they had separate political histories from then. From the early 16th century, and especially after the Acts of Union 1707, the terms British and Briton could be applied to all inhabitants of the Kingdom of Great Britain, including the English, Scottish, and some Irish, or the subjects of the British Empire generally.
The Britons spoke an Insular Celtic language known as Common Brittonic. Brittonic was spoken throughout the island of Britain (in modern terms, England, Wales, and Scotland) and the Isle of Man. According to early medieval historical tradition, such as The Dream of Macsen Wledig, the post-Roman Celtic speakers of Armorica were colonists from Britain, resulting in the Breton language, a language related to Welsh and identical to Cornish in the early period, which is still used today. Thus, the area today is called Brittany (Br. Breizh, Fr. Bretagne, derived from Britannia).
Common Brittonic developed from the Insular branch of the Proto-Celtic language that developed in the British Isles after arriving from the continent at some point between the 10th and the 7th century BC. The language eventually began to diverge; some linguists have grouped subsequent developments as Western and Southwestern Brittonic languages. Western Brittonic developed into Welsh in Wales and the Cumbric language in the Hen Ogledd or "Old North" of Britain (modern northern England and southern Scotland), while the Southwestern dialect became Cornish in Cornwall and South West England and Breton in Armorica. Pictish is now generally accepted to descend from Common Brittonic rather than being a separate Celtic language. Welsh and Breton survive today; Cumbric and Pictish became extinct in the 12th century. Cornish had become extinct by the 19th century but has been the subject of language revitalization since the 20th century.
The La Tène style, which covers British Celtic art, was late arriving in Britain, but after 300 BC the ancient British seem to have had generally similar cultural practices to the Celtic cultures nearest to them on the continent. There are significant differences in artistic styles, and the greatest period of what is known as the "Insular La Tène" style, surviving mostly in metalwork, was in the century or so before the Roman conquest, and perhaps the decades after it.
The carnyx, a trumpet with an animal-headed bell, was used by Celtic Britons during war and ceremony.
Archaeological evidence suggests that the pre-Roman Britons did not eat chicken or hares. During the late Iron Age and early Roman period, humans were often buried with chickens, thus suggesting a holy veneration to the animal. It is thought that chickens and hares may have been treated as sacred, and were believed to guide souls to the afterlife. Julius Caesar once wrote in Commentarii de Bello Gallico that the Britons considered it "contrary to divine law to eat the chicken, the hare, or the goose." In some parts of Britain, chickens weren't widely consumed until the 3rd century CE, and they were primarily eaten in heavily Romanised urban areas. Another view suggests that hares and chicken weren't in fact considered sacred, rather as rare and exotic animals, since their consumption increased with their number even without Romanisation.
Celtic Britain was made up of many territories controlled by Brittonic tribes. They are generally believed to have dwelt throughout the whole island of Great Britain, at least as far north as the Clyde–Forth isthmus. The territory north of this was largely inhabited by the Picts; little direct evidence has been left of the Pictish language, but place names and Pictish personal names recorded in the later Irish annals suggest it was indeed related to the Common Brittonic language. Their Goidelic (Gaelic) name, Cruithne, is cognate with Pritenī.
The following is a list of the major Brittonic tribes, in both the Latin and Brittonic languages, as well as their capitals during the Roman period.
There are competing hypotheses for when Celtic peoples, and the Celtic languages, first arrived in Britain, none of which have gained consensus. The traditional view during most of the twentieth century was that Celtic culture grew out of the central European Hallstatt culture, from which the Celts and their languages reached Britain in the first millennium BC. More recently, John Koch and Barry Cunliffe have challenged that with their 'Celtic from the West' theory, which has the Celtic languages developing as a maritime lingua franca or language of trade in the Atlantic Bronze Age cultural zone, which included Britain, before it spread eastward. Alternatively, Patrick Sims-Williams criticizes both of these hypotheses to propose 'Celtic from the Centre', which suggests Celtic originated in Gaul and spread during the first millennium BC, reaching Britain towards the end of this period.
A 2018 archaeogenetics study found that the spread of the Bell Beaker culture to Britain in the early Bronze Age was linked with the Indo-European migrations and a massive genetic shift. It resulted in about 90% of Britain's gene pool being replaced within a few hundred years (from 2400 BC to 2000 BC), as people with Early European Farmer ancestry were mostly replaced by people with Western Steppe Herder ancestry. The authors of the study said that the spread of the Bell Beaker culture and this population turnover could be linked with the spread of Celtic language to Britain.
In 2021, another archaeogenetics study uncovered a migration into southern Britain during the late Bronze Age, over a 500-year period from 1300 BC to 800 BC. The newcomers were genetically most similar to ancient individuals from Gaul and had higher levels of Early European Farmer ancestry. From 1000 to 875 BC, their genetic marker swiftly spread through southern Britain (roughly England and Wales), making up around half the ancestry of subsequent Iron Age people in this area, but not in northern Britain. The "evidence suggests that rather than a violent invasion or a single migratory event, the genetic structure of the population changed through sustained contacts between mainland Britain and Europe over several centuries, such as the movement of traders, intermarriage, and small-scale movements of family groups". The authors describe this as a "plausible vector for the spread of early Celtic languages into Britain". There was much less migration into Britain during the subsequent Iron Age, so it is more likely that Celtic language reached Britain before then. Barry Cunliffe suggests that a branch of Celtic was already being spoken in Britain and that the late Bronze Age migration introduced the Brittonic branch.
In 43 AD, the Roman Empire invaded Britain. The British tribes opposed the Roman legions for many decades, but by 84 the Romans had decisively conquered southern Britain and had pushed into Brittonic areas of what is now northern England and southern Scotland. During the same period, Belgic tribes from the Gallic-Germanic borderlands settled in southern Britain. Caesar asserts the Belgae had first crossed the channel as raiders, only later establishing themselves on the island. In 122 the Romans fortified the northern border with Hadrian's Wall, which spanned what is now Northern England. In 142 Roman forces pushed north again and began construction of the Antonine Wall, which ran between the Forth–Clyde isthmus, but they retreated back to Hadrian's Wall after 20 years. Although the native Britons south of Hadrian's Wall mostly kept their land, they were subject to the Roman governors, whilst the Brittonic-Pictish Britons north of the wall probably remained fully independent and unconquered. The Roman Empire retained control of "Britannia" until its departure about 410, although parts of Britain had effectively shrugged off Roman rule decades earlier.
Fifty years or so after the time of the Roman departure, the Germanic-speaking Anglo-Saxons began a migration to the south-eastern coast of Britain, where they began to establish their own kingdoms, and Old Irish-speaking Scoti migrated from Dál nAraidi (modern Northern Ireland) to the west coast of Scotland and the Isle of Man. At the same time, Britons established themselves in what is now called Brittany and the Channel Islands. There they set up their own small kingdoms and the Breton language developed from Brittonic Insular Celtic rather than Gaulish or Frankish. A further Brittonic colony, Britonia, was also set up at this time in Gallaecia in northwestern Spain.
Many of the old Brittonic kingdoms began to gradually disappear in the centuries after the Anglo-Saxon and Scottish Gaelic invasions; Parts of the regions of modern East Anglia, East Midlands, North East England, Argyll, and South East England were the first to fall to the Germanic and Gaelic Scots invasions. The kingdom of Ceint (modern Kent) fell in 456 AD. Linnuis (which stood astride modern Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire) was subsumed as early as 500 AD and became the English Kingdom of Lindsey.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Celtic Britons”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.