Invasions. The pre-Celtic periodWhat makes the Scottish, Welsh, English and Northern Irish different from each other? About 2,000 years ago the British Isles were inhabited by the Celts who originally came from continental Europe. During 1,000 years there were many invasions. The Romans came from Italy in 43 A.D. and, in calling the country ‘Britannia’, gave Britain its name. The Angles and Saxons came from Germany, Denmark and the Netherlands in the 5th century and England got its name from this invasion (Angle-lands). The Vikings (Scandinavians) arrived from Denmark and Norway throughout the 9th century and in 1066 the Normans invaded from France. These invasions drove the Celts into what is now Wales and Scotland, and they remained, of course, in Ireland. The English, on the other hand, are the descendants of all the invaders, but are more Anglo-Saxons than anything else. The various origins explain many of the differences found between England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland – differences in education, religion and the legal systems, but most obviously, in language. As far as historical research could establish, the first inhabitants of the British Isles were nomadic Stone Age hunters. Those newcomers must have been a Mediterranean people. Their burial places in Cornwall, in Ireland, in the coastal regions of Wales and Scotland are found to be either long barrows that is manmade hills or huge mounds covering hutlike structures of stone slabs. These people are thought to be settled on the chalk hills of the Cotswolds, the Sussex and Dorset downs and the Chilterns. They were joined after a few centuries by some similar southern people who settled along the whole of the western coast, so that the modern inhabitants of Western England and Wales and Ireland have good archaeological reasons to claim them for their forefathers (the time is usually given as around 2400 BC.
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