Britain. The island of Britain was Celtic when it became known to the Mediterranean world in the fifth century B.C. Many archaeologists claim Celtic settlement in Britain as dating back to the Urnfield civilisation of the Bronze Age (ca. 1200-750 B.C.), which is often called "Proto-Celtic." It has been argued that the first Celtic Ianguage spoken in Britain was Goidelic, regarded as the older form of Celtic. A speculated language shift took place around the sixth century B.C. It has been suggested that Albion was an early Celtic name for Britain, soon ousted by Britannia. In Old Irish, Albain was used as the name for the whole island before being confined to northern Britain (Scotland), where, in modern Gaelic, Alba is the name for Scotland and Albannaich the name for a Scotsman. In spite of Caesar's military expeditions in 55 B.C. and 54 B.C., Britain retained its independence to become a respected trading country .During the period of Cunobelinos ("Hound of Bel," who was to become Shakespeare's Cymbeline-A.D. 10-40), Britain was exporting wheat, cattle, gold, silver, iron, leather goods, hides, and hunting dogs to Europe. In fact Strabo argued that trade with Britain was producing more revenue for Rome than would accrue if the island were to be conquered by Rome and the treasury had to pay for a standing army and civil service to run the country . However, in A.D. 43 Rome did invade. It took forty years to create a fairly peaceful province in southern Britain. Northern Britain was a failure so far as military conquest went and the Romans contented themselves with walls (Hadrian and Antoninus) in attempts to hem in the Celtic tribes of the north. When Rome finally pulled out of Britain in A.O. 410, a Celtic Britain emerged again. This would be comparable to India emerg- ing again after nearly two centuries of English rule. While educated people spoke Latin as well as British Celtic, the vast majority of people were still Celtic-speaking. Britain was now suffering attack ftom the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes from the Jutland peninsula. Domestic problems, however, caused a ruler, known to us as Vortigern (overlord or High King),to invite some Jutish mercenaries to help him. These mercenaries turned on vortigen and established their own kingdom in Kent, the former land of the Cantii. Within a few years, groups of Angles and Saxons were landing on the southern and eastern coasts. The Britons, the indigenous Celtic population, were pushed slowly westward or simply annihilated. There is no evidence that the Celts were assimilated or intermarried to any extent with the invaders. Works that present the British Celtic view include De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae (The Ruin of Britain) by Gildas (ca. A.D. 500-570), Nennius' Historia Britonum (ca. A.D. 800), and Life of Winwaloe, about the sixth century abbot also known as Guenole and Gunwalloe, by Wrdistan, who lived during the ninth century. Gildas is an especially contemporary source arguing the wholesale slaughter of the Celts in southeastern Britain and the mass migration of survivors to Brittany, Spain, and into the western areas of Britain. There is also evidence of the migration of British Celts into Ireland. Dr. Mario Pei, in his study of Anglo-Saxon prior to the Norman Conquest, points out that any widespread intermarriage would have resulted in numerous loan words from Celtic into Anglo-Saxon. Such emphatically is not the case and leads him to believe that British Celts and invading Anglo-Saxons had little social inter-course [see The Story of the English Language, Mario Pei, George Allen & Unwin, London, 1968]. It was during this period, the early sixth century, that we hear of a Celtic chieftain named Arthur fighting the invading Anglo-Saxons and winning twelve major battles against them, halting their advance across Britain. The Annales Cambriae records the death of Arthur and Modred at the battle of Camluan (Camlann) in A.D. 537-539. Around this historical personage, the Celts began to build, with typical richness, allegory and legend. These legends were transported to other European cultures in the medieval period. For five centuries the British Celts and Anglo-Saxons contested the land of Britain until the defeat of the last serious Celtic confed- eration at Brunanburh in A.D. 937. It was here, at a point variously placed in Northumberland, that Athelstan defeated the Celts and their Danish allies in a two-day battle recorded in Icelandic saga and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It was in support of this confederation that the British Celtic poem Armes Prydain Vawr (Prophecy of Great Britain) was written in the early tenth century and found in the Book of Taliesin. Ironically, the "Great Britain" of the prophecy is a Celtic Britain again. Welsh, Irish, the Cymry of Cumbria, Strathclyde, and Cornwall, and the Manx as well as the Danes of Dublin will "banish the Saxon foe from the land," says the poet. After the British Celtic defeat at Brunanburh, the term "British" tended to be dropped as the Celts accepted the new boundaries enforced on them. They were now Welsh, Cornish, Scots, and, aIbeit briefly, Cumbrians.

Britan. [I] A Nemedian who, having fled from Ireland after the victory of Morca and the Fomorii over his people, settled in the island of Britain and gave his name to it.

Britannia. In modern times Britannia has come to mean the personification of what is called the "British Empire," which, in reality, has its foundations firmly in England. There is discussion whether it should be more realistically referred to as the "English Empire," for the Celtic populations of those nations that shared the island of Britain with the English were the first to be conquered and colonised by them. Having retained their national identity and continued to seek self-government from England into modern times, it can be argued that these nations were simply part of the English Empire and were never part of the imperial ethic except in a subservient role, usually as Anglicised functionaries of the empire, which was clearly English in culture and administration and in the economic exploitation of the empire. It could well be that the British (the original Celtic inhabitants of Britain, before the coming of the Anglo-Saxons) thought of Britain as being personified by a goddess figure, Britannia, in much the same way that Eire (Ireland) is a triune goddess with Banba and Fotla, representing the sovranty of the country. The earliest known representation of Britannia, given as a female figure sitting on a globe and leaning with one arm on a shield while grasping a spear in the other hand, occurs on a British coin issued during the Roman occupation at the time of Antoninus Pius (ca. A.D. 161). The motif did not reappear until it was placed on an English copper coin in 1665, during the reign of Charles II.

British. The Celtic inhabitants of Britain (more generally referred to as Britons) prior to the Anglo-Saxon invasions. Also their language. The term was actually used until the tenth century A.D., when the Britons lost hope of recoverng the island of Britain from the invading Anglo-Saxons (the ancestors of the English). They then began to call themselves Cymry (compatriots), for Welsh and Cumbrians, Kernewek for Cornish, and Breizhek for Bretons. The British language (now referred to as Brythonic Celtic) is the ancestor tongue of Welsh, Breton, and Cornish. It was similar and mutually intelligible with Gaulish on the European mainland. Its divergence into the three languages that have survived into more recent times began during the sixth and seventh centuries. At this time the Anglo-Saxon invasion had split the British Celts into isolated pockets, hence the language separation. Cumbrian became extinct in the fourteenth century.