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the history of Leyton and Leytonstone
from . dot to … dots – with plenty of spaces
The Iron Age (continued)
There has been some rethinking recently about the inhabitants of England at the time it was brought into the Roman Empire. They spoke the same language as people on the other side of the Channel, or at least some of them did. Writing was not practised on either side and the nature of that language is unknown. The design of surviving objects from England differs somewhat from continental equivalents 1.
1 Stephen Oppenheimer in ‘The Origins of the British’ believes that over 2/3 of the ancestors of English people today were hunter-gatherer people, and that invasions and migrations by Anglo-Saxons, Vikings and Normans provide less than 5% each of English ancestors. Nor can the people of Britain at the time of the Roman Conquest be seen as ‘Celtic’ in the sense of being descended from continental invaders – though Oppenheimer does see a validity in the concept of Celts as a culture and language spreading out from southern France, Italy and Spain.