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Early Invasions of Britain: A Historical Overview

The document summarizes the early invasions and settlers of Britain from around 2400 BC onwards. It describes the arrival of the first farmers from the Mediterranean around 2400 BC who built long barrows to bury their dead. Around 1700 BC, a more powerful group called the Beaker Folk arrived from Holland and Germany, bringing knowledge of bronze and transporting standing stones from Pembrokeshire to Stonehenge. Later Celtic tribes began arriving around 800 BC from France and Germany, becoming the dominant cultural group through the Iron Age and imposing their Gaelic and Brythonic languages. The Britons at the time of Julius Caesar's invasions in 55 BC were predominantly Celtic.

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62 views1 page

Early Invasions of Britain: A Historical Overview

The document summarizes the early invasions and settlers of Britain from around 2400 BC onwards. It describes the arrival of the first farmers from the Mediterranean around 2400 BC who built long barrows to bury their dead. Around 1700 BC, a more powerful group called the Beaker Folk arrived from Holland and Germany, bringing knowledge of bronze and transporting standing stones from Pembrokeshire to Stonehenge. Later Celtic tribes began arriving around 800 BC from France and Germany, becoming the dominant cultural group through the Iron Age and imposing their Gaelic and Brythonic languages. The Britons at the time of Julius Caesar's invasions in 55 BC were predominantly Celtic.

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1.

Early Invaders

England had long been thinly peopled by wandering Stone Age hunters, when, about 2400 BC, a
short, dark Mediterranean people arrived and settled on the chalk hills at Cotswolds, where they
buried their dead in long burrows. They were the first farmers. A few centuries later, a similar
southern people landed in the west, bringing with them the custom of building great stone tombs,
commonest along the coast from Cornwall to the Orkneys. It was they who began the building of
Stonehenge, the outer bank and ditch, apparently a sanctuary connected with a sun cult.

About 1700 BC, these Neolithic people were subdued by invaders from Holland and the Rhineland,
the powerful, stocky Beaker Folk, so called for their characteristic dinking-vessel. They brought a
knowledge of bronze, apparently traded with Ireland, and from Pembrokeshire transported some
eighty great bluestones which they erected in a double circle at the centre of the Stonehenge
sanctuary. Trade and metal tools brought prosperity, gradually immigrants and natives became one
people, and their memorial is the huge stone circle and central horseshoe of trilithons, the ruins of
which we see today.

The builders of Stonehenge were already a mixed people, and this mixture was to be enriched by
successive invaders of the country for another two thousand years and more. As the complex geology
of Britain makes its scenery more varied than that of any other small country, so the fusion of peoples,
from south, east and north produced a variety, richness and vigour that must partly account for their
astonishing expansion after medieval times. Perhaps it also accounts for their greatest glory, their
literature, for no language is so rich in words as English, in which freedom is also liberty and
independence, and red is scarlet, vermilion, crimson, cardinal and gules.

There were other minor invasions before the coming of the Celts, who from about 800 BC pressed
into Britain from France and Germany. They too were a mixed people, though taller and fairer than
the natives, farmers skilled in the working of bronze, and later of iron, but in the third century,
peaceful infiltration became predatory invasion by warrior bands armed with weapons of iron. These
Celts struck north into East Anglia, Lincolnshire and Yorkshire, they occupied Cornwall for its tin,
overran Ireland and Scotland, and everywhere established themselves as a conquering aristocracy. It
was in this early Iron Age that the hilltop fortresses were built, some by the defenders, like Maiden
Castle in Dorset, others by the conquering chieftains as strongholds from which to overawe the
countryside. The conquerors imposed their language on the natives, its Gaelic form in Ireland and
Scotland, the Brythonic in England and Wales; and it as the Brythonic tribe that gave its name to the
whole country, though the most powerful was that of the Belgae in the south-east.

It was an Age of Iron, though not altogether barbaric. The Celts imposed the luxuries of the
Mediterranean, their priests, the Druids, were the teachers and administrators of the age, and their
craftsmen developed an abstract, curvilinear art that is one of the glories of western civilisation.

These then were the Britons, now predominantly Celtic, who in their war chariots opposed the landing
of Julius Caesar and his legions in 55 and 54 BC. But Caesar’s summer expeditions were a failure, and
it was almost another hundred years before the Romans came again.

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