| Page 50 | |
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, albeit briefly, Cumbrians.
[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.
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 Éire (Ireland) is a triune goddess with Banba and Fótla, 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.
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 recovering the island of Britain from the invading Anglo-Saxons (the ancestors of the English). They then
| |