Who were the Britons?
So who were the Britons?
As mentioned in Chapter 1, the Britons are the earliest known historical inhabitants of the island of Britain. This does not mean, though, that they were the first people ever to live there, which they certainly were not.
Pytheas’ use of the names ‘Pretaniké’ (to describe the island) and Pretani (to describe the people), would imply that they were present in the 4th century BC. However, the earliest human remains from what is now called Britain date from some 30000 years ago, and although devoid of people for large periods during the Ice Age, the land has been constantly inhabited for about 12000 years.
It did not become an island until about 6000 BC, and the Britons were not responsible for the construction of something as comparatively recent as Stonehenge around 3000 BC. Indeed, prior to about 500BC, it is doubtful whether the name Britain is appropriate at all.
In order to clarify exactly what is meant by the name ‘Briton’ in this account, it is important to stress that it will have an ethnolinguistic definition, not a geographical one, i.e. it will refer to people known or believed to have spoken the Brittonic language or one of the languages descended from it, and not to other peoples who may have happened to live on the island.
So who were the Britons?
They were, quite simply, the people who occupied the bulk, if not all, of the island of Britain before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons and Scots.
Having rejected the name ‘Celtic’ as inaccurate, it is equally important to distance the names Briton and British from another name commonly associated with them, namely ‘English’, a name which has no place in the history of Britain until the 5th century AD. The English language is linguistically closer via descent to Dutch, German and Swedish, and, via borrowing, to Romance languages such as French, Italian and Spanish, than it is to Brittonic or the languages descended from it.
Although it should be used with care, the most appropriate label that could be given in the English language to describe the Britons is the name ‘Welsh’. This, after all, was the name given to them by the Anglo-Saxons, who called them Walas. It can be seen in the Wal at the beginning of Wales and in the Wall at the end of Cornwall, as well as in the personal names Welsh, Walsh and Wallace, and names of towns such as Walton, Walcot, Walden and Wallasey.
Today, of course, the name ‘Welsh’ is restricted to natives of Wales, and would not necessarily be accepted by, say, a Cornishman. However, to the early English, all Britons, from Kent to Cornwall to Edinburgh, would have been ‘Welsh’, and it is this more general name which gives the clearest indication as to who the Britons were.
This Chapter will give a brief description of the Britons’ place-names and personal names. The personal names will be taken from the century or so between the raids of Julius Caesar in 55BC and Claudius’ invasion of the island in 43AD. The place-names are intended to show the geographical extent of the Britons across the island of Britain in the centuries before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons and Scots. The first recordings of most of these place-names do not date from the Iron Age (if anything, they show that the Britons remained in parts of what are now England and Scotland for a longer period than is usually recognised), but they have been included in this section as there is no doubt that the Britons predate the other groups.