England not Britain

Dan Snow's TV programme How the Celts Saved Britain is driving me crazy. Peter Snow's boy maintains that St Patrick saved the British (ie English) from wild fiercesome Picts (Scots) and pagan godless chaos after the retreat of the nice orderly Romans .

England -- clearly delineated as England on the BBC4 map -- is so often described as Britain I can hardly watch this otherwise interesting programme. Anyone else having the same problem? Talking about heritage, 20 fellas did indeed turn up this week in Wick to give DNA samples so Dr Jim Wilson can determine if Caithness folk are as strongly descended from Norwegians as people in neighbouring Orkney and Shetland. Here's part of the posse and many thanks to Mackays Hotel. We'll have some results by August, hopefully.

Comments

[Tricia Barnett (nee MORE)]

I am a MORE from Caithness back to 1700 and have had our male line Y-dna tested. The answer - not Norwegian etc.
Part Quote from Ethnoancestry on the results: "Your Y chromosome is inferred to be I2b2. Your ancestor probably outwintered the last great ice age (18,000 years ago) in the northern Balkans where an ‘epi-Gravettian’ culture is attested archaeologically. From here your group spread northwards to repopulate northern Europe.
Different subgroups of I2b2 are common in continental Europe today including one that is indigenous to the British Isles but your WESER subgroup was carried to the British Isles much later by the Anglo-Saxons and Danes.
Your subgroup is the most divergent branch within that group and one of the rarest, It indicates male line descent from proto-germanic peoples in Northern Europe.It is still most common there, accounting for up to 4% of all chromosomes in Northern Germany and around, but declining sharply in all directions. It is nevertheless found across Europe at low frequencies, spread in the migration period and before."
I would certainly be interested in the results from the above folk in Caithness.
Tricia

[Hendre]

A view from Wales ...

I was curious as to what others thought of Dan Snow’s two-part series. The trouble with Dan’s thesis of the ‘Celts’ saving ‘Britain’ is that Christianity was not eradicated in post-Roman Britain. There were many missionary monks in the areas which would later become Wales and Cornwall. He completely ignored the existence of early British Christianity as opposed to English Christianity - hence his muddle of England/Britain.