Good day, I make maps for which I do quite a but of research. While making my last map on an alternate Gaul, something stood out to me. For some reason there was a tribe called the Belgae in Britain. Confused I looked it up and it is apparently correct.
Now, I'm working on a second map, this time of Britain, and this time I discovered more of these. There were two cities named Isca, a Gaulic and Britonnic tribe both named Atrebatus, Belgae being used both in gaul and in Britain, etcetera etcetera.
I was wondering if anybody knew why this is the case? Why did/did the Romans name them like this?
You might find elements of answer in these earlier posts,
but it could be summarized as being the result of contact between northern Gaul and southern-eastern Britain during most of the Late Iron Age, at least in commercial and military exchanges (especially by the IInd century BCE onward) but as well by probable migrations.
Possibly as early as the Vth century BCE, populations from northern Gaul might have settled in eastern British regions, especially in East Yorkshire where presence of linguistic doublets (Parisii of Yorshire/Parisii of Gaul; Eboracum-York/Eboracum-Evry) and the specificity of the local Arras Culture distinct enough (while not separated) from the broader British Iron Age while seemingly close to La Tene archeological horizon would attest to a significant migration. Not necessarily numerically important (probably not, in act) as much as having a lasting influence mixing with local traditions and population with a more of less continuous influx from the mainland (Celtic migrating groups, as Greek mediterranean colonizers, tending not to easily cut links with groups they came from).
Other limited movements of population might have happened over the Vth and IVth centuries during the transition Early/Late Iron Age from modern Champagne in the southern coast and in modern East-Anglia respectively, but I don’t know the current state of the proposition : British archeology significantly backtracked in attributing cultural or migrating characters to artifacts since the late XXth century.
Belgian migrations from the IIIrd to Ist centuries BCE are more easily argued for, especially with this statement by Caesar.
The interior parts of Britain are inhabited by tribes which by their own traditions are indigenous to the island, while on the coastal sections are tribes which had crossed over from the land of the Belgae [in Gaul] seeking booty. Nearly all these maritime tribes are called by the names of lands from which they immigrated when they came to Britain. After their arrival, they remained there and began to till the fields. (De Bello Gallico 5.12)
The realities of the Belgian migration, however, was firmly debated over since the early XXth in British academia (although much less of a problem in its continental counterparts where migration is presumed a priori) : material cultural changes seemingly similar or important to mainland developments (pottery and potter’s wheel, mainland-like urbanization, LaTenian artistic style, cremation burials, mainland-style weaponry, and “Gallo-Belgian coinage”) were in turn considered evidence (as the presence of cognates as Atrebates, Belgae, Catuvellauni, Novomagius,...) of Belgian migration in all “maritime Britain”, its relativization as being more limited geographically, or even the disregard of artifacts as having an ethnic marker and favouring an explanans trough commercial or diplomatic exchanges the continental influences.
Currently, a broad agreement (although not really a consensus per se) tends to overhaul the notion of a northern Gaulish migration to Britain, but no longer as one-way singular events : rather, the focus would be on how migrations should be understood not only as movement of populations, but as well how they integrate in local traditions, how their links with the mainland are preserved or transformed including political ties, commercial exchanges, and “re-migration” of southern British peoples in Gaul. Between the IIIrd and the Ist centuries, the Channel would have been thus a two-way street, on which a Belgae set of identities (geopolitically individualized already in a Gaulish context) would have echoed back and forth (probably, although this is far less evidenced, as much an Aremorican identity and network did on south-western Britain).
The relatively richer, more populated, socially stratified and politically developed Gaulish Belgae would have thus be an important factor in regional southern British cultural and political make-up, including in the wake of the Gallic Wars where refugees and mainland contact (especially with the intensification of exchanges with the Mediterranean market due to Roman presence) would have carried further development in the making of the “southern” and “eastern” kingdoms up to Cunobelinos’ hegemony in most of southern Britain at the eve of Roman conquest.