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.
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