What follows is our interpretation of what we read and learned, set down so we can carry it with us so we can review as needed as we travel across Britain.

This is a sequel to the peopling of Europe post (read it here), which told how the whole continent was built from four great waves. Britain is where those waves ran out of land, and the peoples who made it are the same ones met at the far edge of their journey, so it helps to have read that primer first. Here we will not re-explain who the hunter-gatherers or the farmers or the steppe herders were; we will follow them onto the island and say what they did once they got into Britain.

This primer crosses the threshold of writing. In most of Europe the peopling was finished before history began; in Britain the arrivals that shaped it, the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Norse, the Normans, all came inside recorded time, and each changed who the British are. So the full story runs past the threshold. Conflict and wars enter only as much as to explain who ended up where; the battles themselves and most of their consequences belong to the history primers.

The Island

For most of the last ice age Britain was not an island but a corner of the continent, joined to the mainland by a low plain where the North Sea now lies, a land bridge archaeologists call Doggerland. Across it the earliest peoples walked in from what we call now continental Europe. Then, as the ice age ended and the seas rose back with the melting of the ice, Doggerland drowned, and by about 6,200 BC Britain was cut off. After that, each later wave had to cross water to reach it.

This post covers the island of Great Britain: England, Wales, and Scotland. It does not cover the island of Ireland. The two islands share their early chapters, the hunter-gatherers, the first farmers, and the steppe wave reached both in much the same way, but from the Iron Age on their stories diverge: Ireland was never taken by Rome nor much touched by the Anglo-Saxons, and kept more of its older population and its Gaelic tongue. Ireland deserves a primer of its own.

I. The Old Stone Age

Humans reached Britain early, and left, and returned, many times. The oldest evidence is a set of footprints on a Norfolk beach at Happisburgh, pressed into estuary mud roughly nine hundred thousand years ago, the oldest human footprints known outside Africa, probably left by Homo antecessor. Half a million years ago, Homo heidelbergensis was butchering game at Boxgrove in Sussex. Then came the Neanderthals, through the Middle Palaeolithic. Britain lay at the northern limit of where people could live, and each time the ice advanced it drove everyone out; each time it drew back, people walked in again across the land bridge. The island was occupied, emptied, and reoccupied over and over, always by walking in from the continent. Modern humans, Homo sapiens, arrived around forty thousand years ago, and the ice pushed even them out at its worst. Occupation came and went with the ice.

II. The Middle Stone Age

When the ice released its grip, around eleven and a half thousand years ago, sapiens hunter-gatherers walked back into a warming, wooded Britain across Doggerland. These were the Western Hunter-Gatherers we met on the continent. Two archaeological finds confirm that. One is Cheddar Man, a skeleton about ten thousand years old from a Somerset gorge. His genome shows the same dark skin and pale eyes as his cousins across Europe. The other is Star Carr in Yorkshire, a lakeside camp of around 8,700 BC. There they left barbed antler points and headdresses made from deer skulls.

Then the sea took the land bridge. As the glaciers melted the waters rose, Doggerland shrank to marsh and island and estuary, and by about 6,200 BC it was gone, drowned in part by a great wave from an undersea landslide off Norway. Britain was an island. The hunter-gatherers already here became islanders, and from this point everyone who came arrived by boat.

III. The New Stone Age

Around 4,000 BC the farmers came, the same Anatolian-descended people whose walk across Europe we followed in the last account, now making the crossing by boat with their seed grain and their livestock. They largely replaced the hunter-gatherers who were here, as they had across the continent, and they brought the whole Neolithic package: the cleared field, the settled life, the polished axe, the pot.

What they left is the stone monuments. They raised Stonehenge and the great circle at Avebury in Wiltshire; the passage tombs and the stone village of Skara Brae in Orkney; long barrows and causewayed camps across the chalk. These were the people who built them, farmers, not the Celts or “druids” of later legend. The island held some of the largest megalithic monuments in Europe.

IV. The Bronze Age

Around 2,500 BC a new people reached Britain: the Bell Beaker folk, carrying the steppe ancestry that had spread west from the Yamnaya, the third of the continental waves. They came with their bell-shaped cups, their copper and then bronze, and their archery gear, one of them buried near Stonehenge with grave-goods rich enough that he is called the Amesbury Archer, a man whose teeth show he grew up in the Alps.

Within a few centuries of their arrival, the ancestry of the island’s population turned over almost completely, by some measures around ninety percent of the gene pool replaced. The people who built Stonehenge were, genetically, all but gone, succeeded by the newcomers who carried the steppe strand. The monuments stayed in use, but the population that had built them was replaced. It is among the sharpest population turnovers recorded anywhere in Europe.

V. The Iron Age

By around 800 BC Britain was in the Iron Age, and its people were Celts, the western branch of that Iron Age world we met around the Alps and the Danube, their Celtic tongue carried to the island and settled there. These same Celts spread across much of Europe, into Gaul (now France), across the Alps into northern Italy, through the Iberian peninsula, and as far east as Anatolia; Britain was one western edge of a Celtic world that stretched most of the way across the continent. They were never one nation but many peoples, each a tribe with its own land, leaders, and rivalries, and the tribe, not any wider nation, was the unit that mattered. By the time Rome arrived they fell into two broad groups:

• the Britons across the south and center, and
• the Picts in the north.

Both were Celts, divided by region and named differently by Rome.

The Britons. Across what is now England and Wales lived the Britons, split into dozens of tribes named by the Romans: the Iceni of the east, the Brigantes of the north, the Catuvellauni and Trinovantes near the Thames, the Silures and Ordovices in Wales, the Dumnonii in the southwest, and many more. They lived by farming grain and raising cattle, worked iron, and built in timber, their roundhouses grouped in farmsteads and, at the center of each tribe’s land, a hillfort, a hilltop ringed with banks and ditches, of which Maiden Castle in Dorset is the largest. Cattle were wealth, and raids over cattle and land were constant, which is part of why Rome could later take the tribes one at a time rather than all at once. Society was ranked: a warrior aristocracy over farmers and dependents, led by chieftains, and in the richer south by kings who by Rome’s day were minting coins with their names on them. Their tongue was Brittonic, the branch of Celtic that would survive, driven west by later arrivals, into Welsh and Cornish, and across the sea into Breton.

The Picts. North of the Forth, beyond where Rome would ever hold, lived the peoples the Romans later grouped together as the Picts, themselves a scatter of tribes, the Caledonii, the Maeatae, the Taexali, the Vacomagi, the Venicones. Power among them stayed looser than in the south, held by warrior nobles rather than coin-minting kings. They spoke a Celtic language of their own, close to Brittonic, but it left almost no record and did not survive: when the Picts were later absorbed into Gaelic-speaking Scotland, their tongue died out entirely, and Pictish is now a lost language, known from little more than place-names and the carved symbols on their stones.

The names of all these peoples are Roman spellings of real groups.

Of their beliefs we know only the outside, because they left no writing of their own; what survives comes from Roman observers, often hostile, and from what they buried in the ground. They worshipped many gods, often tied to particular places, to rivers, springs, and groves rather than to temples, and they gave offerings by casting fine metalwork into water, which is where much of the finest Celtic craft has been found. Their learned and priestly class, the druids, held religion, law, and memory in trust and taught by word of mouth, since nothing was written down. Their art, the flowing, curling La Tène style, ran across their shields, mirrors, and torcs. The fuller story of the druids and of Celtic religion requires a primer of its own.

In 55 BC a Roman general crossed the Channel, and the island began to pass from prehistory into the written record. That is where this first part ends. The second takes up Rome and the peoples who came after.

Where to see them: sites and museums

Almost every stage of this story can be visited, and unlike the mobile hunter-gatherers of the deep past, the later peoples left monuments that still stand. Here is where to meet each.

• The Old Stone Age
  • The Happisburgh footprints themselves are gone, washed away by the tide soon after they were found, but the story and the finds are told at the Natural History Museum, London, which holds the Happisburgh and Boxgrove material. Boxgrove itself is a quarry site in Sussex, not a visitor attraction; the museum holds what was found there.
• The Middle Stone Age
  • Cheddar Man, the dark-skinned, blue-eyed skeleton, is on display in the Human Evolution gallery of the Natural History Museum, London;
  • the Cheddar Gorge in Somerset, where he was found, has its own Museum of Prehistory and the caves.
  • The finds from Star Carr, the antler headdresses and the oldest known Middle Stone Age art in Britain, are in the Yorkshire Museum, York. Star Carr itself is a field near Scarborough with nothing to see; the museum holds what matters.
• The New Stone Age
  • Stonehenge and the far larger circle at Avebury (both in Wiltshire, both UNESCO, both with visitor centres) are the farmers’ monuments.
  • In Orkney, the Heart of Neolithic Orkney (also UNESCO) holds Skara Brae, the best-preserved Neolithic village in northern Europe, with the Ring of Brodgar and Maeshowe nearby. For the whole Neolithic in one place, Orkney has no equal in Britain.
• The Bronze Age
  • The Amesbury Archer, the richest Beaker burial found in Britain, is displayed at the Salisbury Museum, a short distance from Stonehenge, which he lived beside.
  • The great Bronze Age collections are also held at the British Museum, London.
• The Iron Age
  • Maiden Castle in Dorset, the largest hillfort in Britain, is open ground, free to walk.
  • The finest Iron Age Celtic metalwork, the shields, torcs, and mirrors, is in the British Museum, London (the Battersea Shield, the Waterloo Helmet, the Snettisham torcs).
  • For the Picts, the carved symbol stones survive across northeast Scotland. The best collections are at the Meffan Museum in Forfar and the Sculptured Stones Museum at St Vigeans, near Arbroath.

With time for only a few: Cheddar Man and the Star Carr finds for the hunter-gatherers, Orkney or Stonehenge and Avebury for the farmers, the Amesbury Archer at Salisbury for the Beaker replacement, and the British Museum’s Iron Age gallery for the Celts. Together they carry the whole of this first part, from the drowned land bridge to the eve of Rome.

VI. Rome

Pre-history ended with a Roman general crossing the Channel. That was Julius Caesar, in 55 and again in 54 BC, and both times he came, fought, and left. These were raids, not conquest. Nearly a hundred years passed before Rome came to stay. In 43 AD the Emperor Claudius sent an army of forty thousand under Aulus Plautius; it landed in Kent, crossed the Thames, and took the Catuvellauni capital at Colchester. This time Rome did not leave. Over the next forty years it fought its way across what is now England and Wales and made the island a province, Britannia, held from 43 to about 410 AD, some three hundred and sixty-seven years.

That is a long time, longer than it feels. To put it in a scale we know, Europeans have been present in the Americas for about 500 years, since Columbus. Rome held Britain for about 367 years, about two thirds as long. A child born the year the legions came could have had grandchildren who never knew a Britain that was not Roman, and the same held true, generation after generation, for a dozen lifetimes. Rome was not a passing visit. It was the world the Britons lived in for as long as anyone could remember.

Why Rome came. The conquest of 43 AD owed much to one man’s politics. Claudius was a new and insecure emperor who needed a victory, and Britain, the island beyond the ocean that even Caesar had not taken, was a prize that would strengthen him at home. Behind the politics was wealth. Britain had metals Rome wanted, tin, lead, silver, and gold; its lowlands grew grain that fed the armies on the Rhine; and it sent slaves, cattle, hides, and hunting dogs to the wider empire.

How Rome ruled. Rome did not remake the population, and it did not erase the tribes. It governed through them. Two methods sat side by side. Some tribes were left, at first, as client kingdoms, allowed to keep their own kings and rule themselves, so long as they stayed loyal to Rome, a cheap way to hold a new province without soldiers in every valley. The Iceni of Norfolk and the Brigantes of the north were the largest of these. The rest of the tribes were taken under direct rule and reorganized into administrative districts the Romans called civitates, each one built on an existing tribe and run from a Roman town that served as its capital: the Catuvellauni were governed from St Albans, the Dobunni from Cirencester, the Silures from Caerwent. Either way, the old tribal map did not vanish. It survived inside the Roman one, the same Celtic peoples, now governed as Roman units.

On top of it Rome laid its own world: roads, coins, the Latin language, and towns that still stand as cities today, London (Londinium), York (Eboracum), Colchester (Camulodunum), Bath (Aquae Sulis). And for the first time, the island was written down. The Britons became Romano-British, Celtic people living Roman lives, still divided along the old tribal lines beneath the Roman surface.

Resistance. The conquest was not quiet, and the province was never wholly at peace. The southern tribes fell quickly, but the Silures and Ordovices of Wales fought Rome for a generation. The largest revolt came in 60 AD, and it turned on the client-kingdom system. Rome had left the Iceni under their own royal house, but when their king died, Rome seized the kingdom and abused his family, and his widow, Queen Boudica, raised the Iceni and the neighbouring Trinovantes. They burned Colchester, London, and St Albans before Rome destroyed them. After Boudica, Rome stopped trusting tribes to rule themselves and governed them directly. Her story is told in the museum at Norwich Castle, in the old Iceni land.

The frontier and the north. Rome never held the whole island. It took the south and center but not the far north; its armies marched deep into Scotland and won battles there, but could not hold the ground, and the frontier settled at a wall. Around 122 AD the Emperor Hadrian ordered a stone wall built from coast to coast across the narrow neck of the island, Hadrian’s Wall, to divide the province from the free peoples beyond. A later emperor, Antoninus Pius, pushed the line further north and built a second wall, of turf, the Antonine Wall, but it was soon given up, and Hadrian’s Wall became the lasting boundary. North of it lived the peoples Rome never conquered, and from around 297 AD Rome began to call them all, together, the Picts. So the island was split in two: a Roman, Latin-speaking south, and a free, un-Romanised north. From this point the peopling of England and of Scotland ran differently.

New blood. Rome also brought a thin scattering of new people, and they came from peoples we have already met. The army that held Britain was raised from across the empire, not from Italy, and Rome named its units after the peoples they came from. On Hadrian’s Wall stood cohorts of Batavians, Germanic men from the mouth of the Rhine, the same stock as the Saxons who would come later, and Tungrians from what is now Belgium. They garrisoned Vindolanda, and it is their letters, about socks and beer and duty rosters, that survive as some of the oldest handwriting in Britain. There were Gauls and Belgae from across the Channel, Celts, cousins of the Britons they were sent to watch. There were Thracians from the Balkans, and at Ribchester in Lancashire a whole unit of Sarmatians, the Iranian horse-people of the steppe. Behind the Roman names were the peoples of the last account, Germanic, Celtic, Thracian, Sarmatian. Many served their years, married local women, and stayed, so a little of the blood of Europe reached Britain a second time.

A famous tale, retold in novels and films, has the Ninth Legion march into Caledonia and vanish without trace, destroyed by the northern tribes. The evidence does not support it: the Ninth turns up in the records on the continent after it was supposed to have disappeared, and was most likely lost far away in the east. Rome’s failure in the north was real, but it was a failure to hold ground, not a legion swallowed whole.

By the fourth century the province was pressed from three directions, and the three raiders would each return in the chapters ahead. From the north came the Picts, over and around the Wall. From Ireland came the Scoti, the Gaels, raiding the western coasts. From across the North Sea came the Saxons, Germanic sea-raiders, against whom Rome built a chain of coastal forts it called the Saxon Shore. These were the peoples who would later come to stay.

How Rome left. Rome did not leave Britain in a single act; the province was drained slowly and then abandoned. Through the late fourth century, commanders based in Britain kept declaring themselves emperor and taking the garrison across the Channel to press their claims in Gaul. Magnus Maximus stripped out much of the army in 383 and never brought it back; Constantine III took the rest in 407. Each departure left the island thinner of defenders, and none was replaced. By 410, when the Romano-British appealed to the emperor Honorius against the raiders, there was little left to send, and he told them to see to their own defence. That letter is taken as the end, though the province had been draining away for a generation before it.

What followed was a collapse, not a handover. Within a few decades the towns emptied and decayed, the coins stopped coming, the villas were abandoned, and the Latin learning of the province faded almost to nothing. Central authority broke apart, and the island fell back into a patchwork of local British rulers, petty kings and warlords quarrelling among themselves, much as it had been before Rome came, but poorer and undefended. Into that fragmenting, leaderless land the raiders pressed harder, and one of the British rulers, to hold off the Picts and Scots, is said to have hired Saxon warriors from across the sea. Out of this fought-over century grew the legend of a British war-leader who held the line against the Saxon newcomers, the figure later ages would call King Arthur. No such king can be found in the record, and the stories were written down centuries later, but the legend has a real root: in the ruins of Roman Britain, British rulers did fight to hold their land against the incomers, and lost it in the end.

What Rome left behind. Rome left the peoples of Britain much as it had found them. The Britons still filled the south, the center, and Wales, Celtic as ever beneath their fading Roman veneer; the Picts still held the north beyond the Wall; and across the western sea the Gaels were still in Ireland. Four centuries of Rome had changed how the Britons lived, but not who they were or where. The map of peoples was still the Iron Age map, only poorer and leaderless.

One of those peoples now steps forward. The Gaels carried two names. They were the Celtic people of Ireland, but of a different branch from the Britons: their tongue was Goidelic, the ancestor of Irish and Scottish Gaelic, while the Britons and Picts spoke Brittonic. The Romans called them the Scoti, and from that Latin name a country would one day be named, Scotland, though the land was Pictish first and the Gaels came from Ireland. In Rome’s last century they had begun to raid the western coasts of Britain, and soon after Rome was gone some of them crossed for good, to settle Argyll, the “coast of the Gaels,” in the kingdom the Irish called Dál Riata. That crossing belongs to the next section. Rome came and went and left the population in place; what changed the map was the peoples now crossing the sea.

VII. The Settlement Age

Rome left a fragmenting, undefended island, and within a century and a half new peoples moved into it. Out of their movements came the beginnings of England, Wales, and Scotland. This is the age in which the island divided into the three nations, and each can be tracked, as before, by what it left.

The Anglo-Saxons, and the making of England

Across the North Sea, in the lands of the last account’s Germanic peoples, lived those who would become the English. They did not come as three tidy nations but as many small war-bands, each under its own leader, from a stretch of coast running from the Rhine mouth up into Denmark. The Jutes, from Jutland at the top of the Danish peninsula, took the southeastern corner, Kent and the Isle of Wight. The Saxons, from the north German plain around the Elbe, took the southern band, the lands that still carry their name, the South Saxons in Sussex, the East Saxons in Essex, the West Saxons in Wessex. The Angles, from Angeln on the neck of Denmark, took the largest share, the east and the north, East Anglia, the midland country that became Mercia, and the north as Northumbria; they spread so widely that the whole land came to be called England, after them. Frisians came too, from the coast between the Saxon and Anglian homelands, but they founded no kingdom and settled no single region; so close were they to the Angles and Saxons in speech and origin that they blended into the rest.

How they first came is debated. The old story is that one of the British warlords, whom later writers call Vortigern, hired Germanic fighters to hold off the Picts and Scots, gave them land in Kent, and watched them turn on him and send home for more of their people. The tradition names two brothers, Hengist and Horsa, as the first to land, the Jutes who would found Kent; their names mean “stallion” and “horse,” which marks them as figures of legend more than history. Whether it happened so cannot be known, for the sources are late and half-legendary. What the ground and the genes show is slower and less dramatic: Germanic soldiers already in Britain in late Roman days, then raiders, then settlers, arriving over generations. However it began, over the fifth and sixth centuries these peoples took the east and south of the island and pushed the Britons before them.

They settled not as three kingdoms but as a scatter of small territories, dozens of them, far more than the histories usually name. An early tax list, the Tribal Hidage, counts more than thirty peoples south of the Humber alone, most of them small and half-forgotten: the Hwicce around Worcester, the Magonsæte in Herefordshire, the Middle Angles of Leicestershire, the men of Lindsey in Lincolnshire, the Wihtwara of the Isle of Wight, and others whose lands can no longer even be placed. Over the sixth and seventh centuries the stronger kingdoms absorbed the weaker, and the patchwork drew together into a handful of larger ones. Even Northumbria was two before it was one, the northern kingdom of Bernicia and the southern kingdom of Deira, joined only later. The seven that came out on top, Kent, Sussex, Essex, East Anglia, Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria, are together called the Heptarchy, though the “seven” is a tidy label laid over a messier reality, and the real number rose and fell for centuries. Kent stayed Jutish, the southern kingdoms Saxon, the eastern and northern ones Anglian.

In the east and south, ancient DNA shows a heavy Germanic input, in places the settlers came in numbers to match the people already there, though how far they replaced the Britons and how far they absorbed them is still argued, and it varied from place to place. They left a language, Old English, a Germanic tongue that drove out both the Latin of Rome and the Brittonic of the Britons across everything they held, and became English. And they left the name of the country itself.

The Britons, pushed west

The Britons did not vanish; they were driven to the western edges of the island, and there they held. By around 600 they kept Wales, itself divided into kingdoms, Gwynedd in the northwest, Powys in the east, Dyfed in the southwest, Gwent and Glywysing in the southeast; Cornwall and the southwest peninsula, the old kingdom of Dumnonia; Cumbria; and a string of British kingdoms across the north the Welsh remember as Yr Hen Ogledd, the Old North, among them Rheged on the Solway, Gododdin in the Lothians, Strathclyde on the Clyde, and Elmet in the Pennines. In these lands the older British population largely stayed, and the Anglo-Saxon input is lightest, which is why the pre-Saxon Britons persist most in the west.

What survived with them was their tongue. Brittonic, driven into these corners, became Welsh in Wales and Cornish in the southwest, and, carried across the sea by Britons who fled to Gaul, Breton in Brittany. The Old North was later swallowed, its kingdoms absorbed by Anglo-Saxons and Scots and its British speech lost, but Wales and Cornwall kept the old language alive, and Welsh is spoken still.

The Scots and the Picts

North of the old Roman line, four peoples now shared the land that would become Scotland. The Picts held the north and east, as they had through the Roman centuries, gathered now from the old tribes into a single people the writers called the Picts, sometimes split between a northern and a southern Pictland. In the southwest were Britons of the Old North, the kingdom of Strathclyde. Up from the southeast pressed the Angles of Northumbria, into the Lothians. And around the year 500 a fourth people arrived: the Gaels, the Scoti, crossing from Ireland to settle Argyll, where they founded the kingdom of Dál Riata, the crossing the last section left them beginning. They brought their Goidelic tongue, the ancestor of Scottish Gaelic, into a land that had spoken Brittonic and Pictish.

So early Scotland was made of four peoples, Picts, Scots, Britons, and Angles, where England was becoming one and Wales holding as another. In time the Picts and the Scots would merge under one crown, and the country would take the name of the incomers, but that lay centuries ahead.

What the settlement age left

By around 600 the island was three-way. An English east and south, Germanic in speech and ancestry, divided into the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms. A British west, Wales and Cornwall, holding the old language and the older population. And a mixed north, Picts, Scots, Britons, and Angles, out of which Scotland would be built. The rough shape of that division survives in the genes today: more Germanic ancestry in the east and south, more of the old British stock in the west and north. The peoples were also being drawn into Christianity in these years, from Ireland and Iona in the north and west, from Rome in the south, but that belongs to the history of the church rather than the peopling.

VIII. The Norse

Then, in 793, raiders came out of the sea and fell on the monastery at Lindisfarne, off the Northumbrian coast, killing the monks and carrying off its treasure. The raid on Lindisfarne is taken as the start of the Viking Age. For the next three hundred years the Norse came to Britain, first to plunder, then to stay.

They were Scandinavians, the northern branch of the Germanic peoples. They were not one people acting together but two broad streams.

• The Danes turned toward the rich, settled lands of eastern England.
• The Norwegians turned north and west, to the islands and coasts of Scotland and the Irish Sea.

They came in the same long ships and spoke the same Old Norse, but they went to different places and left different marks.

The Danes came in force in 865, when a great army, remembered as the Great Heathen Army, landed in East Anglia. This was no raid for plunder and away; it came to conquer and stay. It marched north and took York, which the Danes made their own and called Jorvik, and within a few years it had overrun three of the four great English kingdoms, Northumbria, East Anglia, and much of Mercia. Only Wessex, in the south, held out under Alfred, and it was Alfred who, unable to drive the Danes out, drew a line with them instead. The land to the north and east of that line, roughly from London up to Chester, became the Danelaw, the region where Danish law and custom ruled rather than English.

The name says what it was: the “law of the Danes.” Within it, disputes were settled by Danish custom, land was measured and taxed the Danish way, and the towns were governed from Danish strongholds, above all the Five Boroughs, Leicester, Nottingham, Derby, Stamford, and Lincoln, each a fortified centre under its own Danish lord, and Jorvik, the richest of them, a trading city under its own Norse kings. This was not a thin layer of warlords over an English population. Danish farmers came in numbers and settled the land, so thickly in places that the whole texture of local life, the words people used, the names they gave their villages, the way they held their fields, became Danish. For the better part of a century a traveller crossing from Wessex into the Danelaw crossed, in effect, from one country into another.

The Danelaw did not last as a separate realm. Over the tenth century Alfred’s heirs pushed the boundary back, kingdom by kingdom, until the Danelaw was taken into a single England, and the Norse kingdom of Jorvik ended in 954. But taking the land back did not remove the people. The Danes were not driven out; they stayed, English subjects now, and their mark stayed with them, in the law, the speech, and the names of the north and east.

The Norwegians took the north and west. They settled Orkney and Shetland so thoroughly that the islands became Norse lands, held from Norway, not from any Scottish king, and they stayed Norse for six hundred years, passing to Scotland only in 1468 and 1469. Norwegians held Caithness and Sutherland on the Scottish mainland, settled the Hebrides and the western sea-roads, and made the Isle of Man a Norse kingdom. Across the Irish Sea they founded Dublin and the other coastal trading towns of Ireland. For a time the Norse ringed the whole Irish Sea.

What the Norse left splits in the same way the settlement did, heavy in some places, faint in others, but their deepest mark is not in the blood at all. In the Northern Isles the genetic input is very high; Orkney and Shetland carry a large Norse ancestry to this day, and it is strong down the western seaboard and through the Danelaw of the north and east. In the south of England it is light. But everywhere they settled the Norse left their words. Old Norse mixed so closely with Old English, the two being kindred Germanic tongues, that it entered the very grammar of the language: the everyday words sky, egg, knife, window, take, and even the pronouns they, them, and their are Norse. And they left their names on the land. The map of the north and east of England is written in Norse: every town ending in -by, like Whitby and Grimsby, every -thorpe and -thwaite, and the -gate streets of York itself, marks a place the Norse named. The boundary of the old Danelaw can still be traced today by where those names begin.

The Norse were the second great Germanic tide to reach Britain, cousins of the Anglo-Saxons who had come before them, and where the two met, in the Danelaw, they blended easily. They changed the north and the isles, deepened the Germanic weight of the east, and left the language and the map marked with their speech. And one branch of them, the Norse who had settled in France, would return within a few generations under another name, to make the last conquest of all.

IX. The Normans

The last conquest was, in a sense, the Norse returning. In 911 a band of Vikings under their leader Rollo had been granted land in northern France, on the condition that they guard the coast against other Vikings. They settled, took Christianity, took the French tongue, and married into the local people, and within a few generations they were no longer Norsemen but Normans, the land of the Northmen, Normandy. They kept the drive of their Viking ancestors but had become something new: French-speaking, Christian, and among the most formidable warriors in Europe. In 1066 their duke, William, crossed the Channel, defeated the English king Harold at Hastings, and took the crown of England. The Norse who had raided Britain two centuries before had come back, changed past recognition, to rule it.

William took England, and he held it by force. When the north rose against him in 1069, he answered with the Harrying of the North, laying the country waste between York and Durham, burning villages and killing livestock so that famine would finish what the sword began. It broke the north for a generation. The English landholding class was stripped away and replaced: within twenty years almost no Englishman of rank held land, and the country was parceled out among a few thousand Norman lords. Over the land they raised castles, hundreds of them, and great cathedrals, Durham among the first, the stone architecture of conquest, built to hold a country down and to last.

Yet for all that, the Normans changed the blood of Britain less than any arrival before them. They came not as a people but as an elite, a king, his barons, their knights, and their households, a few thousand at the top of a nation of two million. They replaced the rulers, not the ruled. The farmers in the fields were the same Anglo-Saxon and Norse-descended English as before; only their lords had changed. Modern genetics bears this out: the Norman contribution to the English gene pool is so small that it can barely be found. This was the most complete political conquest in English history and the slightest in the blood. What it changed was who held power, not who lived there.

Its deepest mark was on the language. For three centuries after 1066, French was the tongue of the court, the law, and the nobility, while English remained the speech of the common people. When the two eventually merged, English came out transformed: it kept its Germanic grammar and its everyday words, but took in thousands of French ones, a doubled vocabulary in which the animal in the field is Old English (cow, sheep, pig) and the meat on the table is French (beef, mutton, pork), the words of those who raised the beasts and those who ate them. The English spoken today is the settlement, still, of that division.

The conquest of 1066 took England, but not Britain, and the difference shaped the three nations that were forming. Wales was not taken in a single blow. The Normans pressed in slowly from the border, the lords of the March building castles and seizing land valley by valley, and the Welsh, in Gwynedd and Powys, resisted for two hundred years, until Edward I completed the conquest in 1282 and ringed the country with the great stone castles that still stand. Scotland was never conquered at all. It remained an independent kingdom, but it took in the Normans by another door: from the reign of David I, the Scottish kings themselves invited Norman lords north, granting them land and office, so that Norman blood and Norman ways entered Scotland peacefully, by welcome rather than by war. The same people arrived in all three lands, but as conquerors in England, as slow invaders in Wales, and as invited guests in Scotland, and the manner of their coming marked each nation differently.

The Normans were the last to come and stay. After them no army from outside ever again conquered the island. The layers were complete: the ancient British base, the Anglo-Saxon and Norse over the east and north, the Norman crust of lords and castles on top. What followed was not new peoples but the long working-together of these, into the nations of Britain.

X. Where everyone stands

The peopling was done. Every wave that would make Britain had come: the hunter-gatherers who walked in over the land bridge, the farmers who crossed by sea, the steppe people who all but replaced them, the Britons and Picts of the Iron Age, and then, in written time, the Romans, the Anglo-Saxons, the Norse, and the Normans. No later army ever conquered the island again. What remained was for these layers to settle into the three nations they had built.

The making of Scotland. The four peoples of the north were the last to become one. Through the eighth and ninth centuries the Picts and the Scots had lived side by side, sometimes at war, until around 843 a king of the Scots of Dál Riata, Kenneth MacAlpin, came to rule the Picts as well and joined the two under a single crown. The new kingdom came to be called Alba. The Norse pressing on both peoples from the sea had helped force them together, and the joining held. What happened next is one of the strangest disappearances in this whole account. The Picts, the older and more numerous people, did not die out; they were still there, the bulk of the population. But their kings were now Gaelic, their court spoke Gaelic, and over a few generations the Pictish tongue and the Pictish name simply faded and were gone, overlaid by the language and culture of the Scots. A people who had held the north through the whole of Roman and post-Roman time vanished from history, not by slaughter but by absorption, leaving little behind but their carved stones and a scatter of place-names. Scotland took its name, in the end, from the incomers who arrived last and smallest, the Scoti out of Ireland.

The three nations. By the time the layering was finished, the island held three peoples-become-nations, each a different sum of the same arrivals. England was the most mixed: a British base overlaid heavily by Anglo-Saxons in the east and centre, by the Norse in the north and east, and topped by the thin Norman crust of lords and castles. Wales was the Britons who never yielded, holding the western mountains and keeping the old Brittonic tongue alive as Welsh. Scotland was the fusion of the north: Picts, Gaels, the Britons of Strathclyde, the Angles of the Lothians, and the Norse of the isles, welded into one kingdom under a Gaelic crown. Three nations, one shared stock of peoples, combined in different measures.

Leaving Britain

The peopling of Britain ended with the Normans. After that, the bigger story was people leaving. From the 1600s on, millions sailed away and settled across the world.

The first to go were colonists. From the 1600s English settlers founded colonies in North America. Scots and northern English crossed the short sea to Ulster, in Ireland. That story belongs to Ireland, and we tell it in our post The Peopling of Ireland.

The Scottish Highlands lost people over the following two centuries. Landlords turned farms into sheep runs and pushed tenants off the land. This is known as the Highland Clearances. Some people went willingly and some were forced to go. In 1773 the ship Hector brought Highlanders to Pictou, in Nova Scotia. By 1855 about fifty thousand Gaels had settled there and on Cape Breton Island. They brought their Gaelic language with them. At Baile nan Gàidheal, the Highland Village in Iona, this way of life is kept alive. We visited it in 2024. In all, over two million Scots left for North America, Australia and other colonies in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Others left in chains. Between 1788 and 1868 Britain sent more than one hundred and sixty two thousand convicts to Australia. The last convict ship arrived in Western Australia in 1868.

The great wave came in the 19th century. Most emigrants went to the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Some groups left a clear mark. About two hundred and fifty thousand people left Cornwall between 1815 and 1920. Many were miners who took their skills to mines in America, Australia and South Africa. In 1865 one hundred and fifty three Welsh people sailed to Patagonia, in Argentina. They wanted a place where their language could survive. Welsh is still spoken there today.

Leaving did not stop in the 20th century. Between 1945 and 1972 more than one million people from the British Isles moved to Australia. Their fare was only ten pounds, so they became known as the Ten Pound Poms.

The map in the blood, and on the tongue. The old divisions did not vanish; they faded into a gradient that the genes still show. Ancestry from the Anglo-Saxons and the Norse lies heaviest in the east and the north; the older British stock runs strongest in the west and the far north, in Wales, in Cornwall, in the Highlands and the isles, where each incoming wave arrived last and thinnest. The languages map the same divide. English, Germanic at its core and loaded with French, covers the land the Anglo-Saxons and Normans shaped. The older Celtic tongues survive where the older population did: Welsh in Wales, Cornish revived in Cornwall, Scottish Gaelic in the Highlands and islands, the last living voices of the Britons and the Gaels.

That is where everyone stands. The peopling of Britain was the work of ten thousand years and a dozen arrivals, and it produced not one people but three nations sharing a common inheritance, mixed in different proportions, edge to edge across a small island. What those peoples did once they were here, the kingdoms they built, the wars they fought, the union and the empire that followed, is no longer the story of how they came to be. It is history, and it belongs to the accounts that take up where this one ends.

Where to see them: sites and museums

The four historical arrivals left more standing than the peoples of prehistory did, walls, ships, treasure, and above all stone, so most of this can be visited on the ground.

• The Romans.
  • The greatest Roman site in Britain is Hadrian’s Wall, running across the north of England. Vindolanda, the fort below the Wall, is the richest of all: its museum holds the Vindolanda tablets, the everyday letters of the garrison, among the oldest handwriting in Britain, and the dig is still working. Housesteads nearby is the best-preserved fort on the Wall. For Roman towns, Bath keeps the great bath-house and temple; York and Chester preserve Roman walls beneath their medieval ones; and the finds of Roman Britain fill the British Museum in London.
    
• The Anglo-Saxons.
  • Sutton Hoo, in Suffolk, is the place: the royal ship-burial mounds where the famous helmet was found, with a visitor centre, a reconstruction of the burial chamber, and replicas of the treasure, the site made famous by the film The Dig. The original finds, the helmet, the gold and garnet jewellery, are held at the British Museum in London.
  • The other great Anglo-Saxon treasure, the Staffordshire Hoard, the largest hoard of Anglo-Saxon gold ever found, is displayed at the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery and the Potteries Museum in Stoke-on-Trent.
    
• The Norse.
  • Jorvik, in York, is built on the actual Viking dig at Coppergate: a ride through the reconstructed Norse street with the excavated objects, and the Yorkshire Museum nearby holds more of Viking York. In the far north, where the Norse settled most heavily, the ruins are the thing:
  • Jarlshof in Shetland, layer on layer of settlement from Bronze Age to Norse longhouse,
  • and the Norse remains across Orkney. The map itself is a Norse monument, the -by and -thorpe town-names of the Danelaw, read from the road.
    
• The Normans.
  • The Normans built to last, and their buildings are everywhere. Durham Cathedral, begun 1093, is the finest Norman building in Britain, and its castle stands beside it; the two together, with Bede and Cuthbert in the cathedral, make the greatest Norman-and-earlier site in the north.
  • The Tower of London, William’s fortress on the Thames, is the Norman conquest in stone at the heart of the capital.
  • The great castles of the Welsh March, and later Edward I’s ring of castles in Wales, Caernarfon, Conwy, Harlech, are the conquest of Wales made visible.
  • The record of the conquest, the Domesday Book, is held at the National Archives.
  • And the story of 1066 itself is told on the Bayeux Tapestry, embroidered within a generation of the events, kept in Normandy, but on loan to the British Museum in London for the first time in nearly a thousand years, until summer 2027.

With time for only a few: Vindolanda on Hadrian’s Wall for the Romans, Sutton Hoo for the Anglo-Saxons (with the treasure itself at the British Museum), Jorvik in York for the Norse, and Durham for the Normans. Between them they carry the whole of Part Two, from the Roman frontier to the last conquest.