Celts in Britain

As the use of bronze and then iron in tool- and weapon-making became known, the transition comes from the Stone Ages to a period which marks the start of our own 'Common Era' or ad era. By this time, the inhabitants of England were speakers of a language known to be part of the Celtic group. At this time, the Celtic languages were spoken over a great extent of central and western Europe. The language of England has been given the name Brittonic, to correspond with the people's own name for the land which was Prydein, 'Britain'. The origins of the Celtic languages are still not fully understood. In other parts of the British Isles, a difterent branch of the same group was spoken: this was Goidelic, a precursor of present-day Gaelic in Ireland and Scotland. It is generally agreed among language scholars that the Brittonic speech reached Britain from the continent, probably in the fifth century bc. The means by which it reached and spread are uncertain, though various theories have been made at different times. The enforcement of a new language by invaders - often characterised as tall, red-haired, and 'aristocratic' - with iron weapons was a popular theory until the mid-twentieth century. Then most scholars dropped it in favour of the concept of a more subtle and slow advance, brought about by trading and social contacts with richer and more advanced cultures, perhaps including the transmission of religious beliefs and practices; and not related to large-scale invasion or compulsory change.

By the first century BC, Celtic languages were spoken by a wide range of European peoples, many of whom were descendants of the early inhabitants of the land, people whose original languages, with the exception of Basque, are almost completely unknown. It is likely that the majority of the inhabitants of Britain at that time were the direct descendants of Stone Age settlers, though undoubtedly there were also communities of more recent arrivals; and perhaps in some or many cases, these more recent settlers had established a political dominance over the 'aboriginal' inhabitants. This does not imply that their language also took over: a thousand years or so later, the Normans established political control, but their language failed to establish itself against that of the majority population. From around 1000 bc another significant change in the social order became apparent, with the building of hill-forts on many prominent sites. Pnor to that, the most imposing constructions were those made to house the dead or to enable religious rituals of which we know nothing, other that the stone circles and other megalithic monuments were raised by people who could measure the seasonal movements of the sun and had other quite precise astronomical knowledge.

The first known foreign explorers to reach the British archipelago were Greeks, from the western Greek colonial city of Massilia (now Marseilles). Around 330 bc the navigator, Pytheas, made his way into the North Sea, and reached what he referred to as Thule', possibly Norway. In the ancient world, the British Isles were known only for a single product, tin, which was mined from very early times in Cornwall, and an established trading route conveyed the rare and valuable ore across the south-western peninsula and over the sea to Gaul. When the Romans reached the north coast of Gaul, they already knew a lot about the great island and its inhabitants, from spies, informers, traders and tribes who wanted to have them as allies. Their own invasion of northern Gaul had been responsible for the movement into Britain of large numbers of refugees belonging to a big tribe, the Belgae, from their territory in what is now north-east France and Flanders.