2400 year ago Britain was inhabited by the Celtic tribes who came across from Europe in 300 BC. So the first Britons were European.
The Angles and Saxons came across from Germany, Netherlands and Denmark to displace the Celts.
Then the Romans came across from Italy, the Vikings (mainly in the north) from Norway, Denmark and Sweden and the Normans from France.
Then there were the major mass immigrations – the Huguenots from France and Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe.
The trade links of the British Empire opened up trade routes and there was an influx of people from further afield – Arabs, Indians, Africans, Chinese and hosts of others.
In the 20th century we had further waves of immigration from Jamaica, Pakistan, India, Africa, Turkey, Greece and the Middle East.
The stand out thing about the British is that we are mongrels, full of hybrid vigour. All these people have contributed greatly to our culture. Our language is the best example. It is basically German/Danish but with much French, Italian, Indian, Jewish, Arabic and Dutch imports. This provides the richness of language that enables nuance and an array of subtleties that most other languages do not have. It is this richness that gives us writers like Shakespeare.
To be British is truly to be European in every sense of the word.
before being an european or british , i think you are a nice human who don’t believes in religion.
Thank you. That is nice of you to say.
That’s a rich heritage and quite a cultural melting pot !
Yes it is strange for people on an island to be so varied. It makes you think about what being British really is – or any nationality come to that. There is but one people, one world and one hope for the future.
You’re right about that !
Internet’s good isn’t it? It connects people.
What about the people that were here before the European invasion/travels by others?
Discovery of ancient homesteads surely indicate this?
Quite probably. But I don’t know too much about settlers from way back. I think there was a lot of coming and going with the herds migrations. Probably sparsely populated and very nomadic. They certainly produced some fairly substantial more permanent settlements.
Not true. We now know that most Britons living 4,000 years ago (which is a lot further back than your opening gambit) were farming with structured fields on a permanent homestead basis. They were not nomadic at all. Obviously there were others, the seafarers who would be doing all the coming and goings and were more than probably traders of some description.
You might need to rewrite you introduction as it is entirely mistaken.
Thank you Peter – the timing I gave was roughly for the Brythonic Celts who gave rise to the Scots and Welsh. There were the Goidelic Celts a couple of thousand years before that whose remnants are the Cornish and Irish who did establish themselves well before that.
I do not think I implied they were all nomadic in my article? Did I? They certainly established farms but I suspect there was a lot of nomadic hunting too.
The principle to which I was referring was unaltered though, wasn’t it? We are a European mongrel race.
I’m sorry but again you are mistaken. Both these Brythonic and Goidelic terms are subdivisions of the Celtic language family, and the ancient languages they originated from, not peoples. You must not confuse descriptive terms for language origins with that of peoples.
Both these terms were created in the 19th century as clarification against the use of older language terminology, such as British and Cymric.
Quite how you have arrived at the understanding of modernist literary terms to be appropriated to ancient peoples is somewhat unfathomable.
I suggest you engage in a thorough re-read of all your source materials with this as something went very badly wrong for you somewhere.
It might also be of interest to you that the term Brythonic was considered ill-appropriate by 1953 and has since been replaced by the more accurate preference of “Brittonic”. Personally, I don’t care as long as you don’t use these terms as descriptors towards peoples.
I also was somewhat stumped by your assumptions that those people living in Scotland – as witnessed by the remains of their homesteads and aerial photography of their land encampment farming territories weren’t around as early as you suggest.
What makes you think they were only as old as 2,400 years BC, when we know for a fact that they were building buildings 4,000 years BC?
We also know of cave carvings in Scotland aged 10,000 years BC.
I must take exception to your lax and thorough misappropriation of facts on this.
Some of us are more European mongrel than others. But any European mongrel mixtures were many, many centuries before what you opened with.
Obviously people have mixed together, but you opened with what you considered fact in 2,400, which is what I picked you up on.
Personally, I’m not interested in what happened post-Roman empire nearly as much.
In fact you opened your piece with this most puzzling of statements:
“2400 year ago Britain was inhabited by the Celtic tribes who came across from Europe in 300 BC. So the first Britons were European.”
I don’t think that came out in writing as quite how you might have intended.
Quite how 300 BC equates to 2400 is a feet of wonder only you can answer for.
Not a word of which makes any logical sense or carries a word of truth.
The truth of the matter is – we don’t actually know from where the first Britons came from. However, we do know from where they came at much later and more recent dates. That however, is not the same analogy.
We teach eight year olds of the Roman invasion, 1066 and the Norman invasion etc, so it doesn’t take much to imagine the consequences.
Isn’t it funny how some people insist on talking about our Europeaness, when in fact the UK lies as a land mass a lot closer to some African nations. But we really don’t want to associate our white selves that closely with black people, do we? That is far too uncomfortable and close to home an issue for some of our smug selves.
It doesn’t take any genius to work out that all the people in the north of Scotland with jet black hair (and it sure is) came from Spanish and Portuguese blood lines which in turn came from African.
13% of Brits have red hair. We know they come from Scandic blood lines, as that’s the only place on Earth that they could come from.
Oh no, I just spotted your comment that our language (I take that to be English) is mostly German/Danish! Oh no it ain’t! Where the hell did you read that?
Feck… where do I have to start on this one?
Another time…maybe.
Well talk about a diatribe that becomes pedantic and well off the whole focus of the post – you get the prize!
As for the language – ‘English is a West Germanic language that originated from Anglo-Frisian dialects brought to Britain in the mid 5th to 7th centuries AD by Anglo-Saxon settlers from what is now northwest Germany, west Denmark and the Netherlands, displacing the Celtic languages that previously predominated.’
I’m sure you will elucidate us.
Pedantic? Well off the focus? But you cocked it up completely. It was you who expressed zero focus.
So why prey tell did you subject yourself into thinking both Brythonic and Goidelic would suffice as reasonable excursions away from focus of attention from your blatantly false representation of the facts in the first place?
Or are you under illusion that any readership (if any) aren’t too switched on and would never know any better? Actually, that does seem to be the case with the first three posts here.
You are terribly confused on this topic. But I’ve made some corrections. Let it be as they are irrefutable.
Did you have another read of your introduction?
You opened with this:-
“2400 year ago Britain was inhabited by the Celtic tribes who came across from Europe in 300 BC. So the first Britons were European.”
So, Celtic tribes came across in 300 BC?
Is that a fact? And I’m being pedantic? Lol. Away with you, man. Stop it. You’re busting my sides laughing here. Your sentence still makes not a word of sense.
I very much can elucidate for you on the origins of our language but judging from the level of confusion as expressed by yourself before, I fear that this maybe a complete waste of effort.
However, let me correct you on that language issue.
In fairness to you, you were just a little bit correct in these assumptions but I’m afraid it was your source material that failed to inform accurately enough
You have taken a very basic and not exacting phrase straight off Google and are now attempting to fob that off as complete factual basis here.
Sorry, matey, but I had what’s called an Edjewkayshun in English.
Your quote is three quarters inaccurate.
The vocabulary of Modern English is approximately a quarter Germanic (Old English, Scandinavian, Dutch, German) and two-thirds Italic or Romance (especially Latin, French, Spanish, Italian), with copious and increasing importations from Greek in science and technology and with considerable borrowings from more than 300 other languages and dialects.
English belongs to the Indo-European family of languages and is therefore related to most other languages spoken in Europe and western Asia from Iceland to India. The parent tongue, called Proto-Indo-European, was spoken about 5,000 years ago by nomads believed to have roamed the southeast European plains. Germanic, one of the language groups descended from this ancestral speech, is usually divided by scholars into three regional groups: East (Burgundian, Vandal, and Gothic, all extinct), North (Icelandic, Faroese, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish), and West (German, Dutch [and Flemish], Frisian, and English). Though closely related to English, German remains far more conservative than English in its retention of a fairly elaborate system of inflections. Frisian, spoken by the inhabitants of the Dutch province of Friesland and the islands off the west coast of Schleswig, is the language most nearly related to Modern English. Icelandic, which has changed little over the last thousand years, is the living language most nearly resembling Old English in grammatical structure.
Some of our language has seen influence from the “vocabulary” of other languages in terms of the importation of certain words. But the manner in which our language operates in technical form is a world away from any German. Our basic verb structures would tell you all you need to know, had you ever learned a word of German. The mechanics of English is nothing like German.
Besides that, the English language is also twice that of the German language. We have tons more descriptive words to use at our disposal.
You’ve simply read some simplistic Google post and hey-ho, you’ve got it sorted.
Wrong! It’s a heck of a lot more complicated that that.
Many, many parts of our language hail from our very own Isles, and Ireland. Of course, needless to say, Greek and Latin. Both Greek and Latin are a great deal older than the German language and we were also in case you forgot at some point in time visited by some Latin speakers who apparently outstayed their welcome.
This also includes the old Cornish and Welsh languages and native Scots. We have a derivative of countless numbers of these old words incorporated into our language as we know it today. We also picked up many more words from our Empire excursions in south-eastern Asia.
You also state that it displaced Celtic languages. It didn’t. That’s why they are still spoken in ever growing numbers. Many people living in rural areas throughout Britain from top to bottom still speak local dialects completely unrecognisable from English.
They’ve spoken Gaelic for thousands of years.
If you were to dissect the English language as used in the last two hundred years and compared to that as used say five hundred years ago, you would find a plethora of fundamental changes.
Peter – you are talking rubbish. Sidetracking and well off the whole thrust of the post. Didn’t you understand it?
Who cares exactly when the Celts first arrived, whether they were farmers or hunters? Of no importance. You are just being silly.
Opher, every one of my comments in reference to your woeful inaccuracies is completely irrefutable.
Here is some real rubbish. These are you words as written at the top of the page.
“2400 year ago Britain was inhabited by the Celtic tribes who came across from Europe in 300 BC. So the first Britons were European.”
What is that supposed to mean? For post after post you still have not attended to this appallingly badly composed sentence introduction and keep referencing your “thrust of the post”.
Your thrust of the post is inaccurate.
You made a number of poorly considered statements.
1. Origins of peoples.
You also failed to take note of the custom and practice of indigenous Britons whose woman folk had been impregnated by marauding invaders, where they severed the head of the new born infants. This of course did not happen with those captured as slaves. However, it is also known that these infants were also slaughtered as they would require food reserves. Many pits have been found in areas known to have been habitats of Viking and Norman invaders, where they have found many tiny fragments of infants. It is also known that the women folk who were captured would kill themselves before falling under the mercy of their captors.
There appears to be many considerations to the history of Britain that you seem to have taken for granted and overlooked. The last thing British tribal women would be doing would be giving birth to the spawn of their enemies.
That’s a major oversight on your part.
In case you didn’t know, the same happened in Germany after the Russian invasion. There were countless hundreds of thousands of abortions, or new born’s drowned in pails of water. And this was in many cases women of Catholic faith doing this. An anathema were it not for their hatred towards these Russian rapists.
2. Alarming conjecture about “major mass immigrations of the Huguenots from France and Jews from Russia and Eastern Europe.”
Do you know of the numbers entailed?
Mass immigration it was nothing of the kind.
Concerning the Huguenots, it’s estimated that between 40,000 and 50,000 of them arrived over a forty year period. There was about a thousand of them arriving into Britain every year. That’s about 3 of them per day.
That is not major mass immigration by any standards.
Concerning the Jews. Jews first arrived in England following the Norman Conquest in 1070. For the next century, Jews flourished in England, forming settled communities in many towns and cities, including Norwich, Oxford, Hull, Lincoln and York. Highly literate and numerate, especially compared to the general population of medieval England, their opportunities for employment were nevertheless very restricted, but they played a vital part in the economic life of the country as financiers and moneylenders, the main occupations they were permitted to practise and which were forbidden to Christians.
The Jews did not breed with the general population and practised self-containment shut-off community living. They were expelled virtually en masse in 1290.
3. Origins of our language.
The fact that you couldn’t even get a basic time frame right speaks volumes about your preparation.
The fact that you made a number of exaggerations also indicates poor knowledge.
The fact that you completely misunderstood the origins of descriptors for the Celtic language family.
The fact that you misunderstood the origins of the basis of the English language.
What exactly was the “thrust of the post”?
Basically, no, we are not all quite as dolly-mixtured as you’ve been trying to make us all out to be. These recent DNA tracer testings have come up with the truth of the matter. Most of us who come from UK, or at least know our family has been here for some time and I don’t mean 50 years, 100 years or 200 hundred years, but some considerable time have much smaller amounts of trace elements of a few percent in our DNA. Obvious many have more, but it’is not as widespread as you are attempting to suggest.
In actual fact, in terms of external infiltration, the UK is one of the least affected areas in Europe. There are also many other parts of the world where external infiltration has been far greater. The spread of the Chinese peoples probably being the majority.
We in Britain have very insignificant evidence of Chinese DNA.
We know the reasons for the spread of African peoples, but that’s for entirely different reasons. That said, we weren’t exactly full on in-breeding with them either.
I completely disagree with your closing analogy as above, expressed as “To be British is truly to be European in every sense of the word.”
There’s an awful lot of garbage aspects of European culture that we thankfully took an instant dislike to. The Roman Catholic faith and Judaism being major examples.
To be British is truly to be a World citizen in every sense. We had the skill, knowledge, will and acumen to take the best of everything that was either brought here by others or found elsewhere by our outgoing adventures.
Not many other countries, if any managed to achieve that. The Romans did for several centuries but they eventually collapsed through greed and stupidity. The Spanish and Portuguese attempted but failed. The French hardly got started and failed. The Germans made an even worse attempt and failed. The Russians never bothered at all.
The Chinese didn’t get much further than next door.
For that very reason alone is good enough reason that Britain again raises its head with pride and in the knowledge that it does have a far greater and evolved cultural heritage than most of our European neighbours.
Very shortly we will be seeing a resurgence of the Commonwealth of Nations, representing 53 sovereign states. A quarter of the world sits at Britain’s feet.
A yet some of us seem a trifle bothered about us not being prepared to play baby-sitter anymore for a number of ex-Communist bloc shabby states.
A big wide world out there and we’re not playing host to it all?
We must have been crazy!
A terrific post. The US began as a melting pot, too. Though we seem to have forgotten this…
Thanks Cheryl. I try to keep my eye firmly on my dream of one world, one people, one planet. We are all voyagers on the same rock. We need to start getting together and taking care of it. That requires a global perspective not all this insular wrangling.
Despite the language barrier – this has been translated and he’s hilarious.
Click on – Spanish man destroys Muslim after reading ‘The People versus Mohammad’
or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rbzwVn0cUBM
That was hilarious!
Reblogged this on Opher's World and commented:
Always European but also from wider afield. We all came out of Africa! One people! One World!