Romans viewed everyone with condescending contempt who lived outside the frontiers of the empire -- they called such people "barbari", meaning "strangers" or "foreigners". When they acquired their territory, they tried to turn them, for their own good, into Romans.

The province of Britannia comprised effectively only what is now England and Wales. Scotland remained true to its Celtic roots, bolstered by considerable Irish influence, until the seventh century. In the second quarter of the fifth century, there had been a mass migration of the Votadini of Manau (roughly equating to Stirlingshire) to north Wales.

For some time before the arrival of the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes, Britannia was subjected to incursions by Celtic tribes and raiding parties from Caledonia and Hibernia, which contributed to the loss of Romanised identity.

Latin, however, largely because, as Professor Charles Thomas (in "Christian Celts", 2003, p. 37) reminds us, "Christianity was first and foremost a faith whose induction, practice, sacraments and manuals were ONLY in Latin," did survive. Its influence was strengthened in the seventh century as more English kingdoms were converted to Christianity.

Gildas (6th century), and Bede and Nennius (8th century) wrote histories of Britain in Latin, and Aldhelm (7th century) and Alcuin (8th century) secular verses. A tradition of Anglo-Latin secular literature continued at least until the end of the 15th century, after which Latin remained for some time the international language of scholarship. It is for this reason that early histories of Scotland, such as those by Bower, Boece, and Buchanan, were written in Latin, for by the beginning of the 11th century Gaelic, encouraged by the spread of the Celtic Church from Ireland, had become, except in the far north and south-east, the first language of Scotland.