Names of the British Isles
The toponym "British Isles" refers to a European archipelago comprising Great Britain, Ireland and the smaller, adjacent islands. The word "British" has also become an adjective and demonym referring to the United Kingdom and more historically associated with the British Empire. For this reason, the name British Isles is avoided by some, as such usage could be interpreted to imply continued territorial claims or political overlordship of the Republic of Ireland by the United Kingdom.
Alternative names that have sometimes been coined for the British Isles include "Britain and Ireland", the "Atlantic Archipelago", the "Anglo-Celtic Isles", the "British-Irish Isles", and the Islands of the North Atlantic. In documents drawn up jointly between the British and Irish governments, the archipelago is referred to simply as "these islands".
To some, the reasons to use an alternate name is partly semantic, while, to others, it is a value-laden political one. The Channel Islands are normally included in the British Isles by tradition, though they are physically a separate archipelago from the rest of the isles. United Kingdom law uses the term British Islands to refer to the UK, Channel Islands, and Isle of Man as a single collective entity.
An early variant of the term British Isles dates back to Ancient Greek times, when they were known as the Pretanic or Britannic Islands. It was translated as the British Isles into English in the late 16th or early 17th centuries by English and Welsh writers. Whilst early works were straightforward translations of Classical geographies into English, later writings have been described as propaganda and politicised.
The term became controversial after the breakup of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1922. The names of the archipelago's two sovereign states were themselves the subject of a long dispute between the Irish and British governments.
History
Classical Antiquity
The earliest known names for the islands come from Greco-Roman writings. Sources included the Massaliote Periplus and the travel writings of the Greek, Pytheas, from around 320 BC. Although the earliest texts have been lost, excerpts were quoted or paraphrased by later authors. The main islands were called "Ierne", equal to the term Ériu for Ireland, and "Albion" for present-day Great Britain. The island group had long been known collectively as the Pretanic or Britanic isles.There is considerable confusion about early use of these terms and the extent to which similar terms were used as self-description by the inhabitants. Cognates of these terms are still in use.
According to T. F. O'Rahilly in 1946 "Early Greek geographers style Britain and Ireland 'the Pretanic islands', i.e. the islands of the Pritani or Priteni" and that "From this one may reasonably infer that the Priteni were the ruling population of Britain and Ireland at the time when these islands first became known to the Greeks". O'Rahilly identified the Preteni with the and the, whom he stated were the earliest of the "four groups of Celtic invaders of Ireland" and "after whom these islands were known to the Greeks as 'the Pretanic Islands'". Today O'Rahilly's historical views on the Preteni and the ethnic makeup of early Ireland are no longer accepted by academic archeologists and historians.
According to A. L. F. Rivet and Colin Smith in 1979 "the earliest instance of the name which is textually known to us" is in The Histories of Polybius, who referred to them. According to Rivet and Smith, this name encompassed "Britain with Ireland". Polybius wrote:
According to Christopher Snyder in 2003, the collective name "Brittanic Isles" was "a geographic rather than a cultural or political designation" including Ireland. According to Snyder, "Preteni", a word related to the and to the, was used by southern Britons to refer to the people north of the Antonine Wall, also known as the Picts. According to Snyder, "Preteni" was a probably from a Celtic term meaning "people of the forms", whereas the Latin name was probably derived from the Celtic practice of tattooing or painting the body before battle. According to Kenneth H. Jackson, the Pictish language was a Celtic language related to modern Welsh and to ancient Gaulish with influences from earlier non-Indo-European languages.
The fourth chapter of the first book of the of Diodorus Siculus describes Julius Caesar as having "advanced the Roman Empire as far as the British Isles" and in the 38th chapter of the third book Diodorus remarks that the region "about the British Isles" and other distant lands of the oecumene "have by no means come to be included in the common knowledge of men". According to Philip Freeman in 2001, "it seems reasonable, especially at this early point in classical knowledge of the Irish, for Diodorus or his sources to think of all inhabitants of the Brettanic Isles as Brettanoi".
According to Barry Cunliffe in 2002, "The earliest reasonably comprehensive description of the British Isles to survive from the classical authors is the account given by the Greek writer Diodorus Siculus in the first century B.C. Diodorus uses the word, which is probably the earliest Greek form of the name". Cunliffe argued that "the original inhabitants would probably have called themselves Pretani or Preteni", citing Jackson's argument that the form Pretani was used in the south of Britain and the form Preteni was used in the north. This form then remained in use in the Roman period to describe the Picts beyond the Antonine Wall. In Ireland, where Qu took the place of P, the form Quriteni was used. Cunliffe argued that "Since it is highly probable that Diodorus was basing his description on a text of Pytheas's, it would most likely have been Pytheas who first transliterated the local word for the islands into the Greek. Pytheas may have taken his name for the inhabitants from the name Pretani when he made landfall on the peninsula of Belerion, though in Cunliffe's view, because it is unusual for a self-description to describe appearance, this name may have been used by Armoricans, from whom Pytheas would have learnt what the inhabitants of Albion were called. According to Snyder, the derives from "a Gallo-Brittonic word which may have been introduced to Britain during the P-Celtic linguistic innovations of the sixth century BC".
According to Cunliffe, Diodorus Siculus used the spelling, while Strabo used both and . Cunliffe argues the B spelling appears only in the first book of Strabo's Geography, so the P spelling reflects Strabo's original spelling and the changes to Book I are the result of a scribal error. According to Stefan Radt's 2006 commentary to his critical edition however, although the medieval manuscripts of Strabo's Geography vary in the spelling, the older epitome, which is often the only witness to preserve the correct reading, consistently uses the B spelling. According to Radt, "Where it is missing, one may confidently adopt the B found in secondary manuscripts, assuming it was also present in the Strabo text underlying the epitome".
In classical texts, the word Britain replaced the word Albion. An inhabitant was therefore called a "Briton", with the adjective becoming "British".
The Pseudo-Aristotelian text On the Universe mentions the British Isles, identifying the two largest islands, Albion and Ireland, and stating that they are "called British" when describing the ocean beyond the Mediterranean Basin:
Apuleius's Latin adaptation of the Aristotelian De Mundo calls the British Isles "the two Britains", naming Albion and Ireland :According to Philip Freeman in 2001, "The Latin version is a close translation of the Greek and adds no new information".
Strabo, in his Geographica, refers to the British Isles as "the Britains", citing Pytheas for his information on Britain, Ireland, and Thule. According to D. Graham J. Shipley, "Strabo probably consulted Pytheas' work only indirectly through other authors". Strabo was disapproving of Pytheas, whose work was used by Strabo's predecessor Eratosthenes. Strabo wrote:Around AD 70, Pliny the Elder, in Book 4 of his Naturalis Historia, describes the islands he considers to be "Britanniae" as including Great Britain, Ireland, Orkney, smaller islands such as the Hebrides, the Isle of Man, Anglesey, possibly one of the Frisian Islands, and islands which have been identified as Ushant and Sian. He refers to Great Britain as the island called "Britannia", noting that its former name was "Albion". The list also includes the island of Thule, most often identified as Iceland—although some express the view that it may have been the Faroe Islands—the coast of Norway or Denmark, or possibly Shetland. After describing the Rhine delta, Pliny begins his chapter on the British Isles, which he calls "the Britains" :
According to Thomas O'Loughlin in 2018, the British Isles was "a concept already present in the minds of those living in continental Europe since at least the 2nd–cent. CE".
In his, Dionysius Periegetes mentions the British Isles and describes their position opposite the Rhine delta, specifying that there are two islands and calling them the "Bretanides".
In Priscian's Latin adaptation of Dionysius's Greek, the British Isles are mentioned as "the twin ".
In his Ars tactica, Arrian referred to "people living in the islands called "Britannic" which belong to the Great Exterior sea" as being the only people in the world still to use war chariots.
In his Almagest '', Claudius Ptolemy referred to the larger island as Great Britain and to Ireland as Little Britain. According to Philip Freeman in 2001, Ptolemy "is the only ancient writer to use the name "Little Britain" for Ireland, though in doing so he is well within the tradition of earlier authors who pair a smaller Ireland with a larger Britain as the two Brettanic Isles". In the second book of Ptolemy's Geography, the second and third chapters are respectively titled in and.
In the fifth chapter of the seventh book of Geography, Ptolemy describes the British Isles as being at the northern limits of the oecumene: "in the north, the oecumene is limited by the continuation of the ocean which surrounds the British Isles and the northernmost parts of Europe". In the same chapter, he enumerates in order of size the ten largest islands or peninsulas known to him, listing both Great Britain and Ireland:
In the third chapter of the eighth book of Geography, Ptolemy summarizes the content of his maps, stating that "The first map of Europe includes the British Isles and the surrounding islands".
Ptolemy wrote around AD 150, although he used the now-lost work of Marinus of Tyre from about fifty years earlier. Ptolemy included Thule in the chapter on Albion; the coordinates he gives correlate with the location of Shetland, though the location given for Thule by Pytheas may have been further north, in Iceland or Norway. Geography generally reflects the situation c. 100 AD.
Following the conquest of AD 43 the Roman province of Britannia was established, and Roman Britain expanded to cover much of the island of Great Britain. An invasion of Ireland was considered but never undertaken, and Ireland remained outside the Roman Empire. The Romans failed to consolidate their hold on the Scottish Highlands; the northern extent of the area under their control stabilised at Hadrian's Wall across the north of England by about AD 210. Inhabitants of the province continued to refer to themselves as "Brittannus" or "Britto", and gave their patria as "Britannia" or as their tribe. The vernacular term "Priteni" came to be used for the barbarians north of the Antonine Wall, with the Romans using the tribal name "Caledonii" more generally for these peoples who they called Picts.
The post-conquest Romans used Britannia or Britannia Magna for Britain, and Hibernia or Britannia Parva for Ireland. The post-Roman era saw Brythonic kingdoms established in all areas of Great Britain except the Scottish Highlands, but coming under increasing attacks from Picts, Scotti and Anglo-Saxons. At this time Ireland was dominated by the Gaels or Scotti, who subsequently gave their names to Ireland and Scotland.
In the grammatical treatise he dedicated to the emperor Marcus Aurelius,, Aelius Herodianus notes the differences in spelling of the name of the British Isles, citing Ptolemy as one of the authorities who spelt the name with a pi : " islands in the Ocean; and some like this with pi,, such as Ptolemy". Herodianus repeated this information in : " islands in the ocean. They are called with pi,, such as by Ptolemy".
The chronicle attributed to Pope Hippolytus of Rome mentions the British Isles as part of the lands allotted to Japheth in the table of nations:
In the manuscript tradition of the Sibylline Oracles, two lines from the fifth book may refer to the British Isles:
In the editio princeps of this part of the Sibylline Oracles, published by Sixt Birck in 1545, the or is printed as in the manuscripts. In the Latin translation by Sebastian Castellio published alongside Birck's Greek text in 1555, these lines are translated as:
Castellio translated Βρύτεσσι as. The chronicler John Stow in 1580 cited the spelling of Βρύτεσσι in the Sibylline Oracles as evidence that the British Isles had been named after Brutus of Troy. William Camden quoted these Greek and Latin texts in his Britannia, published in Latin in 1586 and in English in 1610, following Castelio's translation identifying Βρύτεσσι with the Britains or Britons:
In Aloisius Rzach's 1891 critical edition, the manuscript reading of Βρύτεσσι is retained. Rzach suggested that Procopius of Caesarea referred to these lines when mentioning in his that the Sibylline Oracles "foretells the misfortunes of the Britons". Milton Terry's 1899 English translation followed Rzach's edition, translating Βρύτεσσι as "the Britons":
Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, however, suggested that the manuscript reading Βρύτεσσι should be emended to Βρύγεσσι,, in reference to the ancient Bryges. 1902 critical edition accepted Wilamowitz's emendation, printing Βρύγεσσι. John J. Collins's English text of the Sibylline Oracles in James H. Charlesworth's 1983 edition of translated Old Testament pseudepigrapha follows the manuscript tradition, translating Βρύτεσσι as "the Britains":
Ken Jones, preferring Wilamowitz's emendation, wrote in 2011: "This is not, so far as I can see, a usual translation, nor is this even a Greek word. The Brygi or Briges, on the other hand, are a known people."
The mentioned the British Isles as the Insulae Britannicae or Insulae Britanicae. The text refers to the archipelago together with Gallia Comata: "Gallia Comata, together with the Brittanic islands, is bounded on the east by the Rhine, …". According to the editor Paul Schnabel in 1935, the manuscript traditions spelt the name variously as: brittannicis, britannicis, or britanicis.
John Chrysostom's Biblical commentary on the Book of Isaiah, mentions the British Isles in a comment on Isaiah 2:4:
In the manuscript copy of the classical Armenian adaptation published in 1880 by the Mekhitarists of San Lazzaro degli Armeni, the British Isles are, which in the Latin translation of 1887 is Britannicae insulae.
In his, Prosper of Aquitaine mentioned the British Isles to which Pope Celestine I sent Palladius as "the Britains" including both Great Britain and Ireland –'' the "Roman island" and the "barbarian island". Prosper praised Celestine as thereby having dealt with Pelagianism in Great Britain and having established Christianity in Ireland:
The of Stephen of Byzantium mentions the British Isles and lists the Britons as their inhabitants' ethnonym. He comments on the name's variable spelling, noting that Dionysius Periegetes spelt the name with a single tau and that Ptolemy and Marcian of Heraclea had spelt it with a pi:The Chronographia of John Malalas mentions the British Isles as part of the lands allotted to Japheth in the table of nations.The anonymous Outline of Geography in Summary wrongly attributed to Agathemerus until the mid-19th century mentions "the two Britains", identifies both Ireland and Great Britain, and describes each:The of Jacob of Edessa twice mentions the British Isles, and in both cases identifies Ireland and Great Britain by name:
Middle Ages
At the Synod of Birr, the Cáin Adomnáin signed by clergymen and rulers from Ireland, Gaelic Scotland, and Pictland was binding. According to Kuno Meyer's 1905 edition, "That Alba here means Britain, not Scotland, is shown by the corresponding passage in the Latin text of § 33: 'te oportet legem in Hibernia Britaniaque perficere'". The text of the Cáin Adomnáin describes itself:. The extent of the Cáin Adomnáin's jurisdiction in Britain is unclear; some scholars argue that its British domain was restricted to Dál Riata and Pictland, while others write that it is simply unknown whether it was meant to apply to areas of Britain not under such strong Irish influence.Adomnán similarly refers to "Ireland and Britain" when commenting on the Plague of 664 in his Life of Columba, writing "oceani insulae per totum, videlicet Scotia et Britannia." He notes that only the people of Pictland and the Irish of Britain were spared the pestilence.
In the Cosmography of Aethicus Ister, the British Isles are mentioned as having been visited by the protagonist. In 1993, the editor Otto Prinz connected this name with the of Isidore of Seville, in which it is stated: "Some suspect that the Britons were so named in Latin because they are brutes".
In the Excerpta Latina Barbari, the British Isles are the last of the lands allotted to Japheth in the table of nations:
In Arabic geography and cartography in the medieval Islamic world, the British Isles are known as or. England was known as,, or, Scotland as, and Ireland as or. According to Douglas Morton Dunlop, "Whether there was any Arab contact, except perhaps with Ireland, is, however, more than doubtful". Arabic geographies mention the British Isles as twelve islands. The ' of al-Battānī describes the British Isles as the "islands of Britain" :The ' of Ahmad ibn Rustah describes the British Isles as the "twelve islands called '". According to Dunlop, this "account of the British Isles follows al-Battāni's almost verbatim and is doubtless derived from it".
In the 9th century, the Irish monk Dicuil mentioned the British Isles together with Gallia Comata: "Gallia Comata, together with the Brittanic islands, is bounded on the east by the Rhine, …". He also describes the Faroe Islands as being two days' sailing from "the northernmost British Isles".
According to Irmeli Valtonen in 2008, on the so-called Cotton mappa mundi, an Anglo-Saxon mappa mundi based on the Old English Orosius, "The largest feature is the British Isles, which is indicated by the inscription ". The same codex, Codex Tiberius B.V.1, also contains a copy of Priscian's translation of Dionysius Periegetes's, and according to Sean Michael Ryan, "Britain is described, strikingly, as a pair of islands, comparatively vast in scale. For a monastic viewer of our mappa mundi these twin islands are identifiable as Britannia and Hibernia... although on the drawn map the former dwarfs the latter." Furthermore, according to Ryan, "The verse description of the Periēgēsis encourages the monastic reader to simultaneously locate the British isles with reference both to the continent of Europe – the mouth of the Rhine – and to the northern periphery of the encircling Ocean. The British isles are related to, yet distinct from, the continent of Europe as islands of the encircling Ocean." The codex therefore distinguishes Great Britain and Ireland from Thule: "The twin isles of the Britannides are distinguished from the ultimate peripheral territory of Thule, however, unlike in some of the Periēgēsiss own sources, notably Pytheas, which treat the British isles as a plurality of islands more closely associated with and perhaps even including Thule. Instead, Dionysius separates the isles of the Britains from Thule ". Ryan adds that through remarks on an island off the Loire estuary, "Dionysius's account, like the mappa mundi itself, connects the island of the Britains with Brittany ". According to Ryan therefore, the Anglo-Saxon reader of the Cotton Tiberius B.V.1 codex is given an impression that:
The anonymous describes the British Isles as the "twelve islands" which are "called '".
The ' of al-Masʿūdī describes the British Isles as "the so-called Isles of Britain, twelve in number".
In the Imago Mundi of Honorius Augustodunensis, the British Isles are all treated under the heading Britannia, the title of the twenty-ninth chapter:
Contra Hispaniam versus occasum sunt in oceano heę insulę, Britannia Anglia, Hibernia, Tanatos cuius terra quovis gentium portata serpentes perimit, Insole in qua fit solstitium, Orcades.xxxiii., Scotia, Thile cuius arbores numquam folia deponunt, et in qua vi. mensibus videlicet estivis est continuus dies,.vi. hibernis continua nox. Ultra hanc versus aquilonem est mare congelatum et frigus perpetuum.
John Tzetzes mentioned the British Isles in the eighth book of his Chiliades as, describing them as "two of the greatest of all" and naming them as and. According to Jane Lightfoot, John Tzetzes's conception of the British Isles was "two major islands plus thirty Orkneys and Thule near them".
According to the University of Michigan's Middle English Dictionary, the Middle English word Britlond, Brutlond or Brutlonde could mean either "ancient Britain" or "the British Isles," while a "Brit" was "A Celt: specif., Welshman, Breton". The noun Britoun meant "a native of the British Isles, a Celt". The same word was also an adjective meaning "Brittonic, British" or "Breton".
The English texts of the popular work Mandeville's Travels mention Great Britain in the context of the invention of the True Cross by Helena, mother of Constantine I, who was supposed to be a daughter of the legendary British king Coel of Colchester. The so-called "Defective" manuscript tradition – the most widespread English version – spelled the toponym "Britain" in various ways. In the 2002 critical edition by M. C. Seymour based on manuscript 283 in the library of Queen's College, Oxford, the text says of Helena, in. In the 2007 edition by Tamarah Kohanski and C. David Benson based on manuscript Royal 17 C in the British Library, the text is: … Ingelond that was that tyme called the Greet Brytayne …. The chronicler John Stow in 1575 and the poet William Slatyer in 1621 each cited the spelling of "Brutayne" or "Brytayne" in Mandeville's Travels as evidence that Brutus of Troy was the origin of the name of the British Isles.
The Annals of Ulster describe Viking raids against what it refers to as "Islands of Britain" under the Latin entry for the year 793:. The surviving Early Modern English translation by Conall Mag Eochagáin of the since-lost Gaelic Annals of Clonmacnoise also describes this attack on "Islands of Britain", but under the year 791: "All the Islands of Brittaine were wasted & much troubled by the Danes; this was thiere first footing in England." According to Alex Woolf in 2007, the report in the Annals of Ulster "has been interpreted as a very generalised account of small-scale raids all over Britain" but that argues that "Such generalised notices … are not common in the Irish chronicles". Woolf compares the Annals of Ulsters "islands of Britain" with the "islands of Alba" mentioned by the Chronicon Scotorum. The Chronicon describes Muirchertach mac Néill's attack on the "islands of Alba" under the entry for the year 940 or 941: According to Woolf, "This latter entry undoubtedly refers to the Hebrides". Woolf argues that "It seems likely that the islands of Alba/Britain was the term used in Ireland specifically for the Hebrides ". The Annals of the Four Masters'' report on the death of Fothad I under the year 961 describes him as. John O'Donovan's 1856 edition glossed "Insi-Alban" as "the islands of Scotland". According to Woolf in 2007, this "is the latest use of the term 'Islands of Alba' for the Hebrides ". According to Alasdair Ross in 2011, the "islands of Alba" are "presumably the Western Isles".
Early Modern Period
Michael Critobulus, in his Historys dedicatory letter to Mehmed II, expressed his hope that by writing in Greek his work would have a wide audience, including "those who inhabit the British Isles". According to Charles T. Riggs in 1954, Critobulus "distinctly states that he hopes to influence the Philhellenes in the British Isles by this story of a Turkish sultan".Francesco Berlinghieri's 1482 Italian verse adaptation of Ptolemy's Geographia describes both Ireland and Great Britain as British islands in the fourth and fifth chapters of the second book. The, begins:
Berlinghieri's, begins:
John Skelton's English translation of Poggio Bracciolini's Latin translation of Diodorus Siculus's preface to his, written in the middle 1480s, mentions the British Isles as the yles of Bretayne.Andronikos Noukios, a Greek writing under the pen name Nikandros Noukios, visited Great Britain in the reign of Henry VIII as part of an embassy. In his account, he describes the British Isles as having taken their name from colonists from Brittany, rather than the other way around. He wrote:
The term "British Isles" entered the English language in the late 16th century to refer to Great Britain, Ireland and the surrounding islands. In general, the modern notion of "Britishness" evolved after the 1707 Act of Union. Gerardus Mercator, on his 1538 world map on a double cordiform projection, labelled the British Isles.
By the middle of the 16th century, the term appears on maps made by geographers including Sebastian Münster. Münster in uses the heading .
Mercator, in the legend to the map of the British Isles he published as at Duisburg in 1564, refers to the work as. On the map itself, a cartouche in the Irish Sea contains the statement.
Abraham Ortelius, in his atlas of 1570, uses the title. According to Philip Schwyzer, "This is among the very first early modern references to the 'British Isles', a term used anciently by Pliny but rarely in the medieval period or earlier in the sixteenth century".
Thomas Twyne's English translation of Dionysius Periegetes's, published in 1572, mentions the British Isles as the Iles of Britannia.
John Stow, citing Aethicus Ister, Mandeville's Travels, and Geoffrey of Monmouth, described the naming of Great Britain and the British Isles by Brutus of Troy in his 1575 work A Summarie of the Chronicles of England. According to Stow's second chapter, Brutus:
The 1580 edition of Stow's work spelled the Latin name Insulas Brutannicas and the English names Brutan and the Brytaines, and additionally cited the authority of the Sibylline Oracles for the conflation of the Latin letter Y with the or Υ :
Schwyzer states that Raphael Holinshed's 1577 Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland is the first work of historiography to deal with the British Isles in particular; "To the best of my knowledge, no book published in England before 1577 specified in its title a scope at once inclusive of and restricted to England, Scotland, and Ireland". According to Holinshed himself in the second chapter of the first book of the first volume of the Chronicles, Brutus had both renamed Albion after himself and given his name to the British Isles as a whole:
The geographer and occultist John Dee was an adviser to Elizabeth I and prepared maps for several explorers. He helped to develop legal justifications for colonisation by Protestant England, breaking the duopoly the Pope had granted to the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. Dee coined the term "British Empire" and built his case, in part, on the claim of a "British Ocean"; including Britain, Ireland, Iceland, Greenland and North America, he used alleged Saxon precedent to claim territorial and trading rights. According to Ken MacMillan, "his imperial vision was simply propaganda and antiquarianism, without much practical value and of limited interest to the English crown and state."
Dee used the term "Brytish Iles" in his General and Rare Memorials Pertaining to Perfecte Arte of Navigation of 1577. Dee also referred to the Imperiall Crown of these Brytish Ilandes, which he called an Ilandish Monarchy, and to the Brytish Ilandish Monarchy. According to Frances Yates, Dee argued that the advice given by the Byzantine Neoplatonist philosopher Gemistos Plethon in two orations addressed to the emperor Manuel II Palaiologos and his son Theodore II Palaiologos "on the affairs of the Peloponnesus and on ways and means both of improving the economy of the Greek islands and of defending them" should inform Elizabeth I's claims to territorial waters and adjacent territories. Dee described these orations as "now published" – they had been translated into Latin by Willem Canter from a manuscript owned by János Zsámboky and published at Antwerp in 1575 by Christophe Plantin. Dee wrote:
According to Yates, "In spite of the difficulties of Dee's style and punctuation his meaning is clear" – Dee argued "that the advice given to the Byzantine Emperor by Pletho is good advice for Elizabeth, the Empress of Britain". Dee believed that the British Isles had originally been called the "Brutish Isles", a name he had read in Aethicus Ister's Cosmography, which he thought was written in Classical Antiquity. Invoking the Cosmography of Aethicus and its supposed translator Jerome, Dee argued that the British Isles had been misnamed, noting:
According to Peter J. French, "Like Leland, Lhuyd and other antiquarians, Dee believed that it was mistakes in orthography and pronunciation that had confused the spelling of the name", which had come from the name of Brutus. The supposed alteration in spelling had caused:
In his copy of John Bale's, at Bale's passage on Gildas, Dee had added an annotation on Brutus, stating: "Note this authority of Gildas concerning Brutus and Brytus, and remember that from the most ancient authority of the astronomer Aethicus, they were called the Brutish Islands" ". He underlined Bale's words: "up to the entrance of Brutus, or rather Brytus".
In his Britannia, published in Latin in 1586, William Camden cited the Sibylline Oracles for evidence of the antiquity of Britain's toponym and of its origin in the name of the Britons, quoting both the Greek text published by Birck and the Latin translation by Castellio. Camden and Philemon Holland's 1610 English language edition of the work included the same arguments:
According to John Morrill, at the time of the Union of the Crowns under the Stuart dynasty in the early 17th century, the historic and mythological relationship of Ireland and Great Britain was conceptualised differently to the relationship between the kingdoms of England and Scotland. While the British Isles was considered a geographic unit, the political debate on the Union involved the English and Scottish kingdoms, but not Ireland. James VI and I promoted political unity between Scotland and England, introducing the Union Flag and the title "King of Great Britain", but the same was not true of Ireland. Since the Middle Ages, Britain had been understood to be a historical unit once ruled by the legendary kings of Britain, of whom the first had been Brutus of Troy – as described in the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth. Unlike Wales, England, and Scotland, Ireland did not form part of this mythological concept, which was itself in decline by 1600.
The Latin expression was used by some panegyrists of James VI and I after his accession to the Anglo-Irish throne and his proclamation as "king of Great Britain". Andrew Melville used the title for his 1603 Latin poem. Isaac Wake used the same title in his Latin poem on the king's August 1605 visit to Oxford:. For James's assumption of the triune British monarchy, Hugo Grotius composed his, which extolled the historic naval powers of English kings and which was cited approvingly by John Selden in his 1635 work : Of the Dominion, or, Ownership of the Sea. Stanley Bindoff noted that the same title was formally adopted in 1801.
In John Speed's 1611 Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine, the cartographer refers to the islands as Britannish. Before the first chapter, Speed introduces his map of the British Isles as "The British Ilands, proposed in one view in the ensuing map".
Speed describes the position of "the Iland of Great Britaine" as being north and east of Brittany, Normandy, and the other parts of the coast of Continental Europe:
In his 1621 verse work Palæ-Albion: The history of Great Britanie from the first peopling of this island to this present raigne of or happy and peacefull monarke K: James, William Slatyer described the British Isles as named "the Brutus Iles in Greeke Dialect". Slatyer explained this spelling of the name in a marginal note that, like Stow, cited Aethicus and Mandeville's Travels and the confusion between the Latin letter u and the Greek letter upsilon :
One of the Oxford English Dictionary citations of "British Isles" was in 1621 by Peter Heylin in his Microcosmus: a little description of the great world. Writing from his English political perspective, he grouped Ireland with Great Britain and the minor islands with these three arguments:
- The inhabitants of Ireland must have come from Britain as it was the nearest land
- He notes that ancient writers called Ireland a Brttish Iland
- He cites the observation of the first-century Roman writer Tacitus that the habits and disposition of the people in Ireland were not much unlike the Brittaines
Geoffrey Keating, in his Foras Feasa ar Éirinn, discussed the mention of druids from the British Isles in Gaul in Julius Caesar's Commentarii de Bello Gallico, suggesting that the island Caesar had in mind was Ireland or Manainn – Anglesey or the Isle of Man. John O'Mahony's 1866 translation was "from the British Isles", as were the translations of John Barlow in 1811 and of Dermod O'Connor in 1723. Patrick S. Dinneen's 1908 edition translates Keating's as "from the islands of Britain".Robert Morden, in his 1680 Geography Rectified, introduced his map and chapter detailing the British Isles by noting their political unity under a single monarch but their continued separation into three kingdoms, with each of the British Isles beyond Great Britain and Ireland belonging to one of the three mainland kingdoms.
Christopher Irvine, in his 1682, defined Britannice Insulæ as "The British Islands; which comprehended under them both Albin, Erin, and all the other small islands that are scattered about them".
Reception
Perspectives in Great Britain
In general, the use of the term British Isles to refer to the archipelago is common and uncontroversial within Great Britain, at least since the concept of "Britishness" was gradually accepted in Britain. In Britain it is commonly understood as being a politically neutral geographical term, although it is sometimes used to refer to the United Kingdom or Great Britain alone. In the 2016 Oxford Dictionary Plus Social Sciences, Howard Sargeant describes the British Isles as "A geographical rather than a political designation".In 2003, Irish newspapers reported a British Government internal briefing that advised against the use of "British Isles". There is evidence that its use has been increasingly avoided in recent years in fields like cartography and in some academic work, such as Norman Daviess history of Britain and Ireland The Isles: A History. As a purely geographical term in technical contexts, there is less evidence of alternative terms being chosen.
According to Jane Dawson, "Finding an acceptable shorthand geographical description for the countries which formed the UK before the creation of Eire has proved difficult" and in her 2002 work on Mary, Queen of Scots and Archibald Campbell, 5th Earl of Argyll, she wrote: "for convenience, I have used the following as virtual synonyms: the islands of Britain; these islands; the British Isles, and the adjective, British. Without intending to imply any hidden imperial or other agenda, they describe the kingdoms of Ireland, Scotland, and England and Wales as they existed in the sixteenth century".
In the 2005 Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Place Names, John Everett-Heath defined the British Isles as "Until 1949 a collective title... In 1949 the Republic of Ireland left the British Commonwealth and so could no longer be included in the title". Everett-Heath used the name in a "general note" and in the introduction to the same work.
In the 2005 preface to the second edition of Hugh Kearney's The British Isles: A History of Four Nations, published in 2006, the historian noted that "The title of this book is 'The British Isles', not 'Britain', in order to emphasise the multi-ethnic character of our intertwined histories. Almost inevitably many within the Irish Republic find it objectionable, much as Basques or Catalans resent the use of the term 'Spain'." and illustrated this by quoting the objection of Irish poet Seamus Heaney to being included in an anthology of British poems. Kearney also wrote: "But what is the alternative to 'The British Isles?' Attempts to encourage the use of such terms as 'The Atlantic Archipelago' and 'The Isles' have met with criticism because of their vagueness. Perhaps one solution is to use 'the British Isles' in inverted commas".
Recognition of issues with the term was discussed by the columnist Marcel Berlins, writing in The Guardian in 2006. Beginning with "At last, someone has had the sense to abolish the British Isles", he opines that "although purely a geographical definition, it is frequently mixed up with the political entities Great Britain, or the United Kingdom. Even when used geographically, its exact scope is widely misunderstood". He also acknowledges that some view the term as representing Britain's imperial past, when it ruled the whole of Ireland.
Perspectives in Ireland
Republic of Ireland
From the Irish perspective, some consider "The British Isles" as a political term rather than a geographical name for the archipelago because of the Tudor conquest of Ireland, the subsequent Cromwellian activities in Ireland, the Williamite accession in Britain and the Williamite War in Ireland—all of which resulted in severe impact on the Irish people, landowners and native aristocracy. From that perspective, the term "British Isles" is not a neutral geographical term but an unavoidably political one. Use of the name "British Isles" is sometimes rejected in the Republic of Ireland, while claiming its use implies a primacy of British identity over all the islands outside the United Kingdom, including the Irish state and the Crown dependencies of the Isle of Man and Channel Islands.J. G. A. Pocock, in a lecture at the University of Canterbury in 1973 and published in 1974: "the term 'British Isles' is one which Irishmen reject and Englishmen decline to take quite seriously". Nicholas Canny, professor of history at the National University of Ireland, Galway between 1979 and 2009, in 2001 described the term as "politically loaded" and stated that he avoided the term in discussion of the reigns following the Union of the Crowns under James VI and I and Charles I "not least because this was not a normal usage in the political discourse of the time". Steven G. Ellis, however, Canny's successor as professor of history at the same university from 2009, wrote in 1996: "with regard to terminology, 'the British Isles', as any perusal of contemporary maps will show, was a widely accepted description of the archipelago long before the Union of the Crowns and the completion of the Tudor conquest of Ireland". In the 2004 Brewer's Dictionary of Irish Phrase and Fable, Seán McMahon described "British Isles" as "A geographer's collective description of the islands of Britain and Ireland, but one that is no longer acceptable in the latter country" and "once acceptable" but "seen as politically inflammatory as well as historically inaccurate". The same work describes Powerscourt Waterfall as "the highest in Ireland, and the second highest in the British Isles after Eas a' Chual Aluinn".
Many political bodies, including the Irish government, avoid describing Ireland as being part of the British Isles. The journalist John Gunther, recollecting a meeting in 1936 or 1937 with Éamon de Valera, the president of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State, wrote that the Irish statesman queried his use of the term:
However, the term "British Isles" has been used by individual ministers, as did cabinet minister Síle de Valera when delivering a speech including the term at the opening of a drama festival in 2002, and is used by government departments in relation to geographic topics. In September 2005, Dermot Ahern, minister for foreign affairs, stated in a written answer to a parliamentary question from Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin in the Dáil Éireann: "The British Isles is not an officially recognised term in any legal or inter-governmental sense. It is without any official status. The Government, including the Department of Foreign Affairs, does not use this term." Ahern himself continued to use the term, at a conference in April 2015 calling the 2004 Northern Bank robbery "The biggest bank raid in history of the British Isles".
"British Isles" has been used in a geographical sense in Irish parliamentary debates by government ministers, although it is often used in a way that defines the British Isles as excluding the Republic of Ireland.
In October 2006, Irish educational publisher Folens announced that it was removing the term from its popular school atlas effective in January 2007. The decision was made after the issue was raised by a geography teacher. Folens stated that no parent had complained directly to them over the use of "British Isles" and that they had a policy of acting proactively, upon the appearance of a "potential problem". This attracted press attention in the UK and Ireland, during which a spokesman for the Irish Embassy in London said, "'The British Isles' has a dated ring to it, as if we are still part of the Empire". Writing in The Irish Times in 2016, Donald Clarke described the term as "anachronistically named".
A bilingual dictionary website maintained by Foras na Gaeilge translates "British Isles" into Irish as Éire agus an Bhreatain Mhór "Ireland and Great Britain". As the Irish translation of "British Isles", the 1995 Collins Gem Irish Dictionary edited by Séamus Mac Mathúna and Ailbhe Ó Corráin lists.
Northern Ireland
Different views on terminology are probably most clearly seen in Northern Ireland, where the political situation is difficult and national identity contested. In December 1999 at a meeting of the Irish cabinet and Northern Ireland Executive in Armagh. The first minister of Northern Ireland, David Trimble, told the meeting:At a gathering of the British–Irish Inter-Parliamentary Body in 1998, sensitivity about the term became an issue. Referring to plans for the proposed British–Irish Council, the British member of parliament Dennis Canavan, was paraphrased by official note-takers as having said in a caveat:
In a series of documents issued by the United Kingdom and Ireland, from the Downing Street Declaration to the Good Friday Agreement, relations in the British Isles were referred to as the "East–West strand" of the tripartite relationship.
Alternative terms
There is no single accepted replacement of the term British Isles. However, the terms Great Britain and Ireland, British Isles and Ireland, Islands of the North Atlantic etc. are suggested.British Isles and Ireland
The term British Isles and Ireland has been used in a variety of contexts—among others religious, medical, zoologic, academic and others. This form is also used in some book titles and legal publications.Islands of the North Atlantic (or IONA)
In the context of the Northern Ireland peace process, the term "Islands of the North Atlantic" was a term created by the British MP John Biggs-Davison. It has been used as a term to denote either all the islands, or the two main islands, without referring to the two states.IONA has been used by the former Irish Taoiseach, Bertie Ahern:
Others have interpreted the term more narrowly to mean the "Council of the Isles" or "British-Irish Council". British MP Peter Luff told the House of Commons in 1998 that
His interpretation is not widely shared, particularly in Ireland. In 1997 the leader of the Irish Green Party Trevor Sargent, discussing the Strand Three talks between the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom, commented in the Dáil Éireann:
His comments were echoed by Proinsias De Rossa, then leader of the Democratic Left and later President of the Irish Labour Party, who told the Dáil, "The acronym IONA is a useful way of addressing the coming together of these two islands."
Criticism
The neologism has been criticised on the grounds that it excludes most of the islands in the North Atlantic.The name is also ambiguous, because of the other islands in the North Atlantic which have never been considered part of the British Isles.
West European Isles
The name "West European Isles" is one translation of the islands' name in the Gaelic languages of Irish and Manx, with equivalent terms for "British Isles".In Old Icelandic, the name of the British Isles was. The name of a person from the British Isles was a.
Other terms
Alternative names include "Britain and Ireland", the "Atlantic Archipelago", the "Anglo-Celtic Isles", and the "British-Irish Isles".These islands
Common among Irish public officials, although as a deictic label it cannot be used outside the islands in question. Charles Haughey referred to his 1980 discussions with Margaret Thatcher on "the totality of relationships in these islands"; the 1998 Good Friday Agreement also uses "these islands" and not "British Isles". In Brewer's Dictionary of Irish Phrase and Fable, McMahon writes that this is "cumbersome but neutral" and "the phrase in most frequent use" but that it is "cute and unsatisfactory". In documents drawn up jointly between the British and Irish governments, the archipelago is referred to simply as "these islands".Insular
An adjective, meaning "island based", used as a qualifier in cultural history up to the early medieval period, as for example insular art, insular script, Insular Celtic, Insular Christianity.Atlantic Archipelago
J. G. A. Pocock, in his lecture of 1973 entitled "British history: a Plea for a new subject" and published in 1974, introduced the historiographical concept of the "Atlantic archipelago – since the term 'British Isles' is one which Irishmen reject and Englishmen decline to take quite seriously". It has been adopted by some historians. According to Steven G. Ellis, in 1996 professor of history at the National University of Ireland, Galway, "to rename the British Isles as 'the Atlantic archipelago' in deference to Irish nationalist sensibilities seems an extraordinary price to pay, particularly when many Irish historians have no difficulty with the more historical term." According to Jane Dawson in 2002, "Whilst accurate, the term 'Atlantic archipelago' is rather cumbersome".The name Atlantic Isles is used in some works, for example, Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Reformation: A History.