My friend and I were arguing about the legitimacy of using the word 'Briton' to refer to modern day British people. He says that all the native Britons either died in the Anglo-Saxon and Norman invasions or were pushed back to what is now Wales, Cornwall and Brittany. I am pretty sure he's wrong, but I don't have any evidence to back myself up with.
So my questions are:
Thanks for taking the time to read this, and I hope for some good responses so I can educate both myself and my friend better. :P
Your friend has no idea what he's talking about. Well, almost none--he's right that the Celtic fringe (Wales, Cornwall, and so on) preserved more of the original British culture, but there was by no means any sort of genocide of Britons, even unintentionally. In fact, native Britons and their descendants have always been the majority in the British Isles.
David Miles, research fellow at the Institute of Archaeology in Oxford, England, says "80 percent of Britons' genes come from hunter-gatherers who came in immediately after the Ice Age."
Many historians now believe subsequent invaders from mainland Europe had little genetic impact on the British.
The notion that large-scale migrations caused drastic change in early Britain has been widely discredited, according to Simon James, an archaeologist at Leicester University, England.
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/07/0719_050719_britishgene.html
The Peoples of the British Isles evidence points firmly to a large influx of Anglo-Saxon DNA but also the presence in modern descendants of a substantial amount of an ‘ancient British’ DNA which most closely matches the DNA of modern inhabitants of France and Ireland. This led the researchers to conclude that there had been an intermingling between the existing Romano-British population and the newcomer Anglo- Saxons, rather than a full-scale population wipe-out.
Just a minor but interesting anecdote: Caedmon's Hymn, one of the more famous Anglo-Saxon poems (for no reason I can discern, as it's not particularly riveting reading) concerns a man who is too ashamed to sing to take part in the boozy parties that were the style at the time, until an angel visits him one night and he finds his poetic voice. The man's name, Caedmon, is British, not Anglo-Saxon, and it's often assumed by modern scholars that Caedmon is embarrassed at not having a particularly good grasp of English.