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 Guénolé 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 intercourse [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 confederation 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