French block airlift of British troops to Basra

Stephen Harding wrote:
William Black wrote:


"Stephen Harding" wrote in message


Just like both sides of the
English civil war never doubted they were British.

I would doubt that any of them, with the possible exception of the king,
considered themselves anything but English, Scottish or Irish.

The idea of 'Britain' as a nation wasn't actually around to any extent then.


Yes of course you are correct.

I'm displaying my lack of conciseness in reference to a blur of references
available to people who live in "The British Isles" and Britain in particular.

So many terms to choose from, yet so many mistakes to be made in historical
and geographic context.



This is actually a matter of quite some debate among scholars.

"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(*).

Author/s: Huw Pryce
Issue: Sept, 2001

http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m02...?term=medieval

Vince