The Britons in Southern Scotland

Abstract

The archaeological background of the people of what is now Scotland south of the Forth and Clyde in the Roman period was a La Téne one, and specifically chiefly Iron Age B. This links them intimately with the Britons of southern Britain in the conglomeration of Celtic tribes who called themselves Brittones and spoke what we call the Brittonic or Ancient British form of Celtic, from which are descended the three modern languages of Welsh, Cornish and Breton. To the north of the Forth was a different people, the Picts. They too were Celts or partly Celts; probably not Brittones however, but a different branch of the Celtic race, though more closely related to the Brittones than to the Goidels of Ireland and (in later times) of the west of Scotland. Not being Brittonic, the Picts may be ignored here. Our southern Scottish Brittones are nothing but the northern portion of a common Brittonic population, from the southern portion of which come the people of Wales and Cornwall. Some historians speak of the northern Brittones as Welsh, following good Anglo-Saxon precedent, but this is apt to lead to confusion. The best term for them, in the Dark Ages and early Medieval period, as long as they survived, is ‘Cumbrians’, and for their language, ‘Cumbric’. They called themselves in Latin Cumbri and Cumbrenses, which is a Latinization of the native word Cymry, meaning ‘fellow-countrymen’, which both they and the Welsh used of themselves in common, and is still the Welsh name for the Welsh to the present day. The centre of their power was Strathclyde, the Clyde valley, with their capital at Dumbarton.