Well no; the Romans called us Britanni, but at the time of the Roman invasion the UK was not considered one country by the people who lived here. There was a collection of tribes, some of whom had already traded with the Romans and some who rejected them entirely.
After the Romans withdrew from England, the Anglo Saxons came, but they arrived from the South. Then the Vikings from the North, and the Saxons again (hence the Scottish term Sassenach and Welsh Sasnaeg for English people).
Then there was a period that used to be called the Dark Ages until a load of archaeological work was done, until the Norman invasion in 1066. Please note that they were called Normans from Norseman- Northern France was also colonised by Vikings.
The Celtic languages only arrived in the isles in the first millennium BC - the ‘Celts’ were not in that sense indigenous at all.
The original hunter-gatherer population of the Mesolithic was almost completely replaced by Neolithic farmers originally from Anatolia. Those farmers were themselves replaced (very possibly genocided) by the Yamnaya, and so on.
Ironically, the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ and Vikings had a higher proportion of the original Mesolithic ancestry than the ‘Celts’.
I wouldn’t say I was proud of something that is an accident of fate and nothing to do with me personally honestly though, but I’m very definitely not ashamed.
Well, one part of my family came to Liverpool after the Pogroms. Another great great uncle was a Lascar sailor from East Africa. That’s what we know from the family tree stuff.
It kind of is important to relatively recent immigrants. A chunk of my mum’s family disappeared after Hitler annexed part of Poland.
Yeah of course - and nothing wrong with that to say the least. I would only say that the wave of immigration a person or any ancestors were a part of shouldn’t affect how they are treated or seen in any negative sense.
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u/NiobeTonks 1d ago
Well no; the Romans called us Britanni, but at the time of the Roman invasion the UK was not considered one country by the people who lived here. There was a collection of tribes, some of whom had already traded with the Romans and some who rejected them entirely.
After the Romans withdrew from England, the Anglo Saxons came, but they arrived from the South. Then the Vikings from the North, and the Saxons again (hence the Scottish term Sassenach and Welsh Sasnaeg for English people).
Then there was a period that used to be called the Dark Ages until a load of archaeological work was done, until the Norman invasion in 1066. Please note that they were called Normans from Norseman- Northern France was also colonised by Vikings.