6 | The Tribes Of Britain. The One With The Pre-Roman Geography - A Pillock's Guide To British History

Pre Roman Britain is a bit like English football before the Premier League. Loads must have happened, but nobody talks about it. To be fair, for pre-Roman Britain, that’s mostly because we don’t know all that much about it. So here’s what 21st Century Pillock could find. Transcript – The Tribes Of Britain. The One With The Pre- Roman Geography We finally have Roman Britain. They are here and they are here to stay. For a bit anyway. Hopefully, that won’t come to a surprise to anyone who was under the impression that Britain was still part of the Roman Empire. As we have mentioned before it wasn’t as simple as that., you can’t just turn up and declared a province, it’s not like the Romans were involved into the day to day running of the people in Scotland. Before we go diving back into how the Romans went about getting stuck into the rest of Britain, we should pause and go over what the state of play was around 44 AD. We are quite aware that our history of Britain has so far mostly ignored the British. Which is impressive if you think about it. This episode we are going to ask the questions, Who was around before the Romans? What does a croissant taste like with gravy on it? And have the Scottish always been like that? The Britons were Celts, like a lot of Europe. They spoke a version of Celtic called insular Celtic, as opposed to continental Celtic. It’s interesting to know the people of Britain have never had any of ladeda European shit. Except as far as we can tell the whole Celtic thing is a bit of a red herring for modern folk. Yes, there was a common language, but a language doesn’t make a culture. Austrians are not the same as Germans. Americans speak what passes for English, but we are no Americans. As we have mentioned before Britain was split into tribes, and they did have different approaches to life. As with everything so far, we are basically relying on what’s left of the Roman sources and how proper historians have interpreted them over the years. We found quite a few conflicting bits of info, and it gave us a bit of a headache. We have narrowed it down to 26 tribes which were around in Britain when the Romans found an interest in the place, and here is a whistle-stop tour, with where they were and any interesting bits of info we could find. We can start around the South East where the first pitched up, in modern Kent, which is the Southeastern tip of England. Knocking about here were the Cantium aka the Cantiaci. Julius Caesar came across this lot, and had some fairly nice words to say about them, which can be translated as: “Of all these by far the most civilised are those who dwell in Kent – a district which is entirely maritime (which district is all maritime) – and do not differ much from Gallic custom.” They popped up in Julius’ second invasion when four kings of the Cantiaci tried to attack the Romans ships while Julius was busy further north. Julius even lists the four kings as Segovax, Carvilius, Taximagulus and Cingetorix. Which, we like because it’s still cool to us that we have the names of some Celtic folk living in Britain 2000 odd years ago.  It also shows how it’s even more complicated than just Britain being split into different tribes. This one tribe had four ‘kings’ or chieftains. Were they all equal kings of different groups within the tribe? Was one of the head king, with some sub-kings? We couldn’t find any answers on that, so it looks like there isn’t a record of it. Don’t worry though. This is going to get vaguer. To the west of Kent were a group called the Atrebates. These were a strange lot. We have come across a couple of notable members of the Atrebates already. The most recent was Verica, the bloke who got deposed as a king and went crying to the Romans to literally ask for an invasion of Britain. We bet he had no friends in school. The other Atrebates VIP we know was Verica’s dad,