"Vince Brannigan" wrote in message
...

"Whereas originally the name Cymry seems to have shared the same
British'/`Welsh' ambiguity of Britannia, Britones and so forth, by the
late eleventh century it is likely that Cymry was used solely to denote
the Welsh' and `Wales', being distinguished more clearly from the qually
long-established terms Brython and Prydain, which denoted `Britons' and
"Britain' respectively.(108) One could perhaps go further and argue that
the change in Latin terminology both reflected and helped to reinforce
an increasing assumption on the part of Welsh literati of a need to
distinguish more sharply between the twin elements in national identity,
namely, between a British dimension which defined the Welsh in relation
to the past and the future and, on the other hand, a Welsh dimension
which linked them to a specific territorial space in the present.(109)

British or Welsh? National Identity in Twelfth-Century Wales(*).

You're left with horribly complex ideas about the pre Roman natives of the
British archipelago and their relationship with a wider Western European
culture.

Did the 'British' tribes see themselves as part of a culture that extended
beyond their shores or did they see themselves as tribal where 'the people'
ended at the forest.

In reality the idea of the 'nation state' emerged in Western Europe in the
fifteenth century, a good illustration being the Hundred Years War which
started as a fight between feudal magnates and ended as a war between
England and France.

--
William Black
------------------
On time, on budget, or works;
Pick any two from three