About History: ancient Albion

Periodically we come across “Albion” as an early name for Britain but was that the name used by the islands’ inhabitants?

From Britannica.com, Albion is the earliest-known name for the island of Britain. It was used by ancient Greek geographers from the 4th-century BC and even earlier, who distinguished Albion from Ierne (Ireland) and from smaller members of the British Isles. Describing the ocean beyond the Mediterranean Basin for example, the Pseudo-Aristotelian text “On the Universe” mentions the British Isles and names the two largest islands Albion and Ierne:

ἐν τούτῳ γε μὴν νῆσοι μέγισται τυγχάνουσιν οὖσαι δύο, Βρεττανικαὶ λεγόμεναι, Ἀλβίων καὶ Ἰέρνη, τῶν προϊστορημένων μείζους, ὑπὲρ τοὺς Κελτοὺς κείμεναι.

“There are two very large islands in it, called the British Isles, Albion and Ierne; they are larger than those already mentioned, and lie beyond the land of the Celts.”

It seems the Greeks and Romans probably heard the name Albion from the Gauls or the Celts [1]. The name itself has been translated as “white land”, but this seems incorrect. From an altar dedicated to the god Vulcan by the civilians living there [2], we know the Romans called their Auxiliary fort at Bardon Mill in Northumbria, just south of Hadrian’s Wall, “Vindolanda”. Translated, Vindolanda means “white lawns” or “white fields”. The Romans explained Albion as referring to the distinctively white chalk cliffs at Dover (Latin: albus, “white”) in the southeast of Britain. These cliffs are visible from mainland Europe and a landmark at the narrowest crossing point of the English Channel.

The name Albion was used by Isidore of Charax, a Greco-Roman geographer of the 1st-century BC and 1st-century AD about whom nothing is known other than his name and that he wrote at least one work. Isidore’s usage of the name, however, was subsequently adopted by many classical writers such that, by the 1st-century AD, Albion referred unequivocally to Great Britain. Yet this enigmatic name did not remain popular among Greek writers. It was soon replaced by Πρεττανία (Prettanía) and Βρεττανία (Brettanía “Britain”), Βρεττανός (Brettanós “Briton”), and Βρεττανικός (Brettanikós, meaning the adjective British). From these words the Romans derived the Latin forms Britannia, Britannus, and Britannicus respectively.

Albion is Alba, right? Albion should not be confused with “Alba”, the kingdom formed by the union of the Picts and Scots under Kenneth I MacAlpin in AD 843. Their territory, ranging from modern Argyll and Bute to Caithness, across much of southern and central Scotland, was one of the few areas in the British Isles to withstand the invasions of the Vikings [3]. Indeed, the ancient link with Ireland from where the Scotii (Scots) had emigrated was only broken by a cordon of Scandinavian settlements established in the Western Isles and Ireland. With large parts of England also conquered by the Norse (mostly Danes who created the “Danelaw” [4]), Alba was left isolated.

Incursions by Northumbrians into Alba were eventually halted by King Malcolm II at the Battle of Carham (c. 1016) thereby securing a Scottish hold over the land between the rivers Forth and Tweed. Malcolm also secured Strathclyde about the same time, but it was his grandson and successor Duncan I who, after becoming king in 1034, united Alba with Strathclyde, Cumbria, and Lothian. The name Alba began to fade away as every king thereafter, and retrospectively, was styled “king of Scots”. Bon appétit!

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Endnotes:

1. The name “Celt” applied to the various tribes of Iron Age Europe is derived from Latin Celta, (pl. Celtae), an adaptation of Greek Κελτοί (Keltoí) used to denote an ethnic group of the La Tène culture. The first recorded use of the name was by the Greek geographer Hecataeus of Miletus in 517 BC when writing about a people living near Massilia (modern Marseille). In the 5th-century BC, the Greek historian and geographer Herodotus referred to Keltoi living around the head of the Danube and also in the far west of Europe. Herodotus uses the same word for the Gauls (who also were called Galatai). The Romans used Celtae as the generic name for continental Gallic tribespeople but apparently not for British tribes. In current usage, the terms “Celt” and “Celtic” take several senses depending on context: the Celts of the European Iron Age, the group of Celtic-speaking peoples in historical linguistics, and the modern Celtic identity derived from the Romanticist Celtic Revival. ▲

2. The altar was found during drainage works in 1914. It is on display in the Vindolanda Museum. ▲

3. The Norwegians and Danes were referred to as the Norse or Norsemen by the Anglo-Saxons. The term “Viking” appears in use from the 12th- to the 14th-century AD, but its etymology is far from certain. The name may derive from the Old Norse word víkingr in contemporary use by the Scandinavians themselves and usually taken to mean “pirate” or “raider”. ▲

4. The northern, central, and eastern region of Anglo-Saxon England colonized by invading Danish armies in the late 9th-century AD was called the Danelaw. In the 11th- and 12th-centuries, it was recognized that all of eastern England between the Rivers Tees and Thames formed a region in which a distinctive form of customary law prevailed in the local courts, differing from West Saxon law to the south and Mercian law to the west. The region derived its name from the Old English Dena lagu (“Danes’ law”) under the assumption that its unique legal practices were of Danish origin, an assumption borne out by modern scholarship. ▲