In regards to British history, who are the Celts, Britons, Picts and Anglo-Saxons?
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**Celt** is a very very general term for all of the peoples West of Germany in antiquity, and this included countless different tribes and groups that all shared a very general language, religion, and culture ranging from Spain to Ireland. The word Celt itself comes from Greek and the origin of this term is not super clear. **Britons** is the term often used to talk about the Celts that lived specifically in Great Britain — namely England and Wales. **Picts** were a Celtic tribe in what is now Scotland. The Picts were around in Roman times and eventually had a fairly sizable kingdom in Scotland in the early Middle Ages.
After the Romans invaded Britain and set up colonies, you had a long period where the local Celts (mostly in England) mixed with the Roman settlers and created what are called Romano-British. After the Roman Empire abandoned the island, the local Romano-British and Celts soon found themselves at war with a bunch of invading German tribes, mostly from modern day Netherlands, Northern Germany, and Denmark.
The two main tribes that invaded England were the Angles and the Saxons, and that’s where the term **Anglo-Saxon** comes from. England and English come from Angles-land and Angles-ish. The invading Germans eventually conquered the Romano-British territory and fought wars against the remaining Celts for centuries. This combination of Celts, Romano-British, and Germans form the basis of the (white) population of Great Britain.
The Celts are a large collection of European peoples united by a common language family and some cultural similarities. They once lived across the British Isles, western and central Europe, and Anatolia but by the 1st century AD they had mostly been absorbed by Roman or Germanic culture in mainland Europe and were restricted to the British Isles and northwest France.
The Britons were the subgroup of Celts living in modern-day England, Wales, and southern Scotland. Their language and culture survived Roman conquest between the 1st and 5th centuries. The Picts were a related Celtic culture occupying northeastern Scotland. However, their language was gradually subsumed by the Gaelic language, a different Celtic language more closely related to Irish.
The Anglo-Saxons were Germanic tribes from Saxony (now in modern-day Germany) and Anglia (now modern-day Denmark) who began migrating to and settling in modern-day England in the 5th century. They converted to Christianity and founded their own kingdoms, and gradually displaced the native Britons to modern-day Wales, Cornwall, and Cumbria. Their language also became the foundation for the modern English language.
Britons and Picts are two groups of Celts, with Picts primarily living in modern day Scotland and Britons living in modern day England and Wales.
The Celts are an ancient group of people with a similar language and culture. They were not a country, like England and Scotland today. The Celtic culture was once prominent across almost all of Western Europe. However, with the rise of the Roman Republic, and later the Roman Empire, the Celtic languages and culture began to be replaced with Roman culture. In places that the Romans did not conquer, like Ireland and Scotland, the culture and language survived.
Britain was part of the Roman empire for hundreds of years, and they founded important cities, like London (founded around the year 50). However, it was not a core part of the empire, and frequently faced invasion from the Picts, and rebellions. Eventually, around the year 400, the Romans began to give up on Britain. Around this same time, the Angles and Saxons were groups of people living in Norther Germany (near the present-day border with Denmark). They were neither Celtic nor Roman. When Roman rule began to collapse in Britain, they migrated to the island in large numbers. Large enough that the region became known as England (modified from Angle-Land, i.e. Land of the Angles). This new culture, which is a mix of the old Roman culture and the new German culture, is called Anglo-Saxon.
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