Introduction 1

This is Chysauster, Cornwall, but it could equally be a Castro in Galicia or Asturias in the Northwest of Spain

Wikipedia has the following entry:-
"Britonia is the historical name of a settlement established in Gallaecia, northwestern Hispania, in the late 5th and early 6th centuries AD by Romano-Britons escaping the Anglo-Saxons, who were conquering Britain. Britonia is therefore similar to Brittany in Gaul in that it was settled by expatriate Britons at roughly the same time."

I have a number of questions regarding this bald statement:-

"What links were there between Britain and the North -West of Spain before the 5th Century Romano-British diaspora ?"

"Who were the Romano-Britons escaping from the Anglo-Saxons ?".

"What reasons had they for so doing?"

"What traces, if any, are there today of the Romano-British settlements in Spain?"

Legend and Language
Legend (and history according to  Gildas [1]) has the British Isles inhabited by a Celtic speaking peoples at the end of the Roman period. The "fierce and impious Saxons" are invited in as soldiers by king Vortigern to counter the invasions of the Picts and Scots. Gildas then goes on to describe  a genocide leading to the ethnic cleansing of the 'Celts' from England; remnants remaining in the mountain fastnesses of Wales and Cornwall. This version of the history of Britain is perpetuated in the book "Britonia: Camino nuevos" by Simon Young [2].
However, as we shall see later, there is little evidence apart from that of Gildas, for a destruction on the scale that he propounded.

Early Links along the Atlantic Fringe of Europe and the British Isles
Barry Cunliffe [3] suggests that the Celtic language developed along the Atlantic fringe some 4,400 years ago. This coincided with the movement of early metal prospectors at the beginning of the Bronze Age. The linguist Peter Forster[4] speculates that the fragmentation of the Celtic languages from their most recent common ancestor was in the Neolithic. Somewhat earlier than Cuncliffe's dating.

Until recently the Celtic homeland was held to be in central Europe - "near the source of the Danube". Herodotus, writing in the sixth century B.C. is the main origin of this theory. However, careful reading of his Histories [5] shows that his "source of the Ister (Danube)" was given as being in the Pyrenees and not in central Europe. This mis-information by Herodotus led to a school of thought which placed the "Keltoi" at the source of the Danube in central Europe and not on the borders of France and Spain.
again we will return to this discussion at a later point.




[1] Gildas, De excidio Britanniae (Various translations)
[2] Young, Simon (2004), Britonia: Caminos Nuevos ( Serie Keltia)
[3] Cunliffe, Barry (2004) Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples (Oxford University Press)
[4] Forster, Peter and Toth, Alfred (2003), "Toward a phylogenetic chronology of ancient Gaulish, Celtic, and Indo-European" Proceedings ofthe National Academy of Sciences of the USA, 100:9079-84
[5] Herodotus, Histories (440 - 430 B.C): Macaulay's translation is available on Project Gutenberg, etext 2131