Around 700 BC another
group of people began to arrive. Many of them were tall, and had fair or red
hair and blue eyes. These were the Celts, who probably came from central Europe
or further east, from southern Russia, and had moved slowly westwards in
earlier centuries. The Celts were technically advanced. They knew how to work
with iron, and could make better weapons than the people who used bronze. It
is possible that they drove many of the older inhabitants westwards into Wales,
Scotland and Ireland. The Celts began to control all the lowland areas of
Britain, and were joined by new arrivals from the European mainland. They
continued to arrive in one wave after another over the next seven hundred
years.
The Celts are important in British history because they are the
ancestors of many of the people in Highland Scotland, Wales, Ireland, and
Cornwall today. The Iberian people of Wales and Cornwall took on the new Celtic
culture.Celtic languages, which have been continuously used in some areas since
that time, are still spoken. The British today are often described as
Anglo-Saxon. It would be better to call them Anglo-Celt.
Our knowledge of the Celts is slight. As with previous groups of
settlers, we do not even know for certain whether the Celts invaded Britain or
came peacefully as a result of the lively trade with Europe from about 750 bc onwards. At first most of Celtic
Britain seems to have developed in a generally similar way. But from about 500 bc trade contact with Europe declined,
and regional differences between northwest and southeast Britain increased. The
Celts were organised into different tribes, and tribal chiefs were chosen from
each family or tribe, sometimes as the result of fighting matches between
individuals, and sometimes by election.
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