The name "Britain" comes from the word "Pretani",
the Greco-Roman word for the inhabitants of Britain. The Romans mispronounced
the word and called the island "Britannia".
The Romans had invaded because the Celts of Britain were working with
the Celts of Gaul against them. The British Celts were giving them food, and
allowing them to hide in Britain. There was another reason. The Celts used
cattle to pull their ploughs and this meant that richer, heavier land could be
farmed. Under the Celts Britain had become an important food producer because
of its mild climate. It now exported corn and animals, as well as hunting dogs
and slaves, to the European mainland. The Romans could make use of British food
for their own army fighting the Gauls.
The Romans brought the skills of reading and writing to Britain. The
written word was important for spreading ideas and also for establishing power.
As early as ad 80, as one Roman at
the time noted, the governor Agricola "trained the sons of chiefs in the
liberal arts . . . the result was that the people who used to reject Latin
began to use it in speech and writing. Further the wearing of our national
dress came to be valued and the toga [the Roman cloak] came into fashion."
While the Celtic peasantry remained illiterate and only Celtic-speaking, a
number of town dwellers spoke Latin and Greek with ease, and the richer
landowners in the country almost certainly used Latin. But Latin completely
disappeared both in its spoken and written forms when the Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain in the fifth century ad. Britain
was probably more literate under the Romans than it was to be again until the
fifteenth century.
