User:Dave souza/Sandbox

Suggested redrafting / reorganisation of British Isles#Names of the islands through the ages. References generally as before, additional points from Snyder's The Britons and from the sources in footnotes here. Feel free to make changes or add tags.

Names of the islands through the ages

Todo – Brief intro saying names changed, oldest known, Roman/post roman period, then rediscovery and introduction of BI in English reflecting changing political dimension.

Pretanic Islands and Britanniae

The earliest known collective terms for the islands were used by ancient Greek geographers from the first century BC onwards, who recorded fragments of the travel writings of the Greek Pytheas from around 320 BC and described the islands collectively as αι Πρετανικαι νησοι (Pretanic Islands) or αι Βρεττανιαι (Brittanic Isles). The inhabitants were referred to as the Ρρεττανοι, Priteni or Pretani, probably from a Celtic languages term meaning "people of the forms", which could refer to the people painting or tattooing their skin. The name may have come from the Gaels of Armorica rather than being a self-description by the inhabitants. The main islands were called Ierne, inhabited by the race the Romans called Hiberni equating to the term Ériu for Ireland, and the island of the Albions for modern-day Great Britain.

Around 54 BC Caesar introduced the Latin term Britannia, and the Roman province of Britannia was established after the conquest of AD 43. The Roman geographer Pliny the Elder writing around AD 70 described the islands collectively as Britanniae, while referring to Great Britain as the island called Britannia and noting that its former name was Albion. His grouping also included Ireland, The Orkneys, the Hebrides, the Isle of Man and Anglesey, possibly one of the Friesan Islands, Ushant, Sian, and the island of Thule, most often identified as Iceland though it may have been the Faroe Islands, the coast of Norway or Denmark or even Shetland. Similarly Ptolemy, writing around AD 150 but referring to the now lost work of Marinus of Tyre from around AD 100, described Ireland as Hibernia, Island of Britannia, and Great Britain as Albion, Island of Britannia. He included Thule in the chapter on Albion, giving coordinates which have been mapped to western Norway.

Following sporadic attempts to consolidate control over most of the island, after AD 210 Roman Britannia was consolidated south of Hadrian's Wall. The people of the province described themselves as Brittannus or Britto, and the vernacular term Priteni came to be used for barbarians north of the Antonine Wall. After 300 the Romans adapted the term as the Picts. After Roman forces withdrew in 410, Brittonic kingdoms formed across Britain, including the Scottish Lowlands, facing increasing attacks from the Scotti of Ireland and Western Scotland, the Picts, and Anglo Saxons. By the late 6th century Britannia also became the standard Latin term for the Armorican peninsula in western France, occupied by Britons who may have been fleeing invasions, and later named Brittany with the main island becoming known as Great Britain.

Oceani insulae

In classical geography. the world of the Mediterranean was thought to be surrounded by a fast flowing river, personified as the Titan Oceanus. As a result, islands off the north and west shores of continental Europe were termed (in Latin) the Oceani Insulae or Islands of the Ocean. In AD 43 Pomponius Mela, one of the earliest Roman geographers, described various islands including Britain, Ireland and Thule, as "Septemtrionalis Oceani Insulae" meaning Islands of the Northern Ocean.

This description of the islands was used in indigenous sources of the post-Roman period, which also used the phrase "Oceani Insulae" or "Islands of the Ocean" to describe other islands in the Atlantic and elsewhere. One example is the Life of Saint Columba, written in the late seventh century by Adomnán of Iona, an Irish monk living on the Inner Hebridean island. Jordanes writing in Getica (AD 551) also describes the various islands, particularly in the western Ocean as "islands of the ocean", naming various islands in the North Atlantic, and believing Scandinavia to be one of them. Jordanes subsequently gives a description of Britain, but does not mention Ireland. Isidore of Seville's Etymology, written in the early seventh century and one of the most used textbooks in Europe throughout the Middle Ages,[80] similarly lists Britain (Britannia), Ireland (called Scotia or Hibernia), Thule, and many other islands simply as "islands" or "islands of the Ocean" and uses no collective term.

The Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum of Bede written in the early eighth century describes the islands from a Northumbrian Anglo-Saxon viewpoint and does not give a collective term for the archipelago. It refers to "Brittania Oceani insula, cui quondam Albion nomen fuit" – "Britain, an island in the ocean, formerly called Albion". It treats Hibernia (Ireland) separately, and describes it as "properly the country of the Scots, who, migrating from thence, as has been said, added a third nation in Britain to the Britons and the Picts."

Medieval interlude, Renaissance revival of De insulis Britannicis

As the medieval era developed, the Brittonic people became known by their Anglo Saxon name as the Welsh, with their culture and language mainly surviving in Wales. Terms relating to Britons and British were now only in historical use, relating to ancient Britons. In the same way as Irish historians had collected legends to assert their historical identity, Welsh historians drew on history and legends to assert a national history portraying a once unified Britannia defended against Anglo-Saxon invasion by King Arthur of the Britons. The legends were enormously popular in England and France as exemplifying chivalry, and English monarchs adopted them to lay claim to Arthur's heritage. Welsh rebels claimed to be heirs of the Britons, and on occasion the Scots referred to the legends as making them and the Welsh one "kin and nation" in driving the English out of Britain.

Ptolemy's Geographia was rediscovered by Maximus Planudes in 1300, and its translation into Latin in 1409 spread Ptolemy's naming of Hibernia and Albion as Island[s] of Britannia. From the mid sixteenth century onwards mapmakers began to use Latin terms which would translate as "British Isles", for example Sebastian Münster in Geographia Universalis, a 1550 re-issue of Ptolemy's Geography, uses the heading De insulis Britannicis, Albione, quæ est Anglia, & Hibernia, & de cuiutatibus carum in genere. Ortelius, in his atlas of 1570, uses the title Angliae, Scotiae et Hiberniae, sive Britannicar. insularum descriptio. This translates as "A Representation of England, Scotland and Ireland, or Britannica's islands".

British Isles

Claims to the heritage of the ancient Britons were continued by the Tudor monarchs, including Elizabeth I of England. Her adviser, the geographer and occultist John Dee, was involved in developing legal justifications for colonisation by Protestant England. He coined the term British Empire and built his case in part on the claim of a British Ocean including Britain and Ireland as well as Iceland, Greenland and possibly extending to North America, combining propaganda and antiquarianism. In his writings of 1577 developing these arguments Dee apparently used the term Brytish Iles. Elizabeth was succeeded by her cousin king James VI of Scotland, who brought the English throne under his personal rule as king James I of England, and proclaimed himself as 'King of Great Brittaine, France and Ireland', though the states remained separate. He ruled until 1625.

The Oxford English Dictionary states that the first published use in English of "British Isles" was in 1621, by Peter Heylin (or Heylyn) in his Microcosmus: a little description of the great world, a collection of his lectures on historical geography. Writing from his English political perspective, he grouped Ireland with Great Britain and surrouding minor islands by three asserting points:

1. The inhabitants of Ireland must have come from Britain as it was the nearest land.
2. He noted that ancient writers, such as Ptolemy, called Ireland a "Brttiʃh Iland".
3. He cited the observation of the first century Roman writer Tacitus that the habits and disposition of the people in Ireland were not much unlike the "Brittaines".

Microcosmus also described the Classical conception of the Ocean and included in the Iles of the Ocean all of the classically known offshore islands, that is Zeeland, Denmark, the British Isles, and those in the Northerne Sea.

Heylyn's geographical work was a political expression concerned with dynastic legitimacy, representation, and the Constitution. These were all overturned in the following thirty years with the turmoil of the civil wars of the Three Kingdoms then the republican Commonwealth of England briefly ruling all four countries and leaving a lasting legacy of bitterness in Ireland. Protestant plantations in Ireland established what became a British community there, and the restoration of the monarchy led to religious tensions.

With a reluctant coming together of the governments of England and Scotland under the Acts of Union of 1707 forming the Kingdom of Great Britain the term Briton was made official. A century of conflict with France and the development of the British Empire brought a new popular enthusiasm for Britishness across Britain, and the term British Isles came into common use. The Act of Union in 1800 forming the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland did not bring a similar enthusiasm in Ireland, where the aristocratic class identified themselves as Anglo-Irish rather than British. The secession of what became the Republic of Ireland made the term British Isles anomalous, and it was avoided by Unionist historians as much as it was by Nationalist ones.

Alternative names

With rising tensions in Northern Ireland leading to the troubles in the 1980s and new negotiations between governments, there was a search for a non-controversial name for the group including Britain and Ireland. At the same time there was a greatly increased self-identification as British within the Protestant community in Northern Ireland.