Whenever reading a book with a story located in early England I get inundated with various tribe names: Picts, Celts, Britons, Angles, Saxons, Normans... leaving out some whose names escape me.

Is anyone familiar with these tribes? Who is linked to Who....

I've read that Britons were Celts. And that the Saxons displaced them.
It seems that the Saxons had a more orderly community while the Britons were converted to Christianity first.

I know that the Normans came onto the scene later (from northern France) and made the Saxons subservient to their rule.

It's fascinating history... most of which is well outside my ken.

Anyone a pro at this? Suggest a book?

Angles, Saxons and Jutes came from Denmark, and No. Germany.
Picts were northern Celts.
Celts were from Central Europe.

Thanks for the info.
Are Angles the “Anglo” part of “Anglo-Saxon”?

Here is a quick and very generalized summary.

The Celts were a variety of peoples who inhabited much of Europe, and even parts of what is now Turkey, at the time that the Roman empire was growing in the 200 years or so before the birth of Christ. The inhabitants of the British Isles were Celts of different kinds, including the Britons (who would eventually be conquered by the Romans) in what is now England, and the Picts, whose subjugation by the Romans was attempted at various times, but never completed, and for the most part what is now Scotland remained outside the Roman Empire.

The culture of Roman Britain was like that in other provinces, and as was the case with the rest of the Empire, Christianity spread slowly but steadily. However, by the beginning of the 400s, there appears to have been cultural decay in Britain. Roman troops were withdrawn from Britain to protect Rome itself from barbarian invasions, and the Britons were largely left to their own devices. In order to fight invading Picts and Gaels on their northern border, local British warlords sought help from Germanic warriors across the North Sea. One such ruler, whose name St. Bede tells us was Vortigern, made the unhappy decision to invite members of the Saxon tribe to come to Britain as warriors, and to give them land for a bse. They came, but soon decided that they would prefer to conquer the country for themselves. The Saxons were soon followed by their neighbors the Angles and the Jutes. (The Jutes came from what is now Denmark, the Angles from what is now the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, and the Saxons from the German state of Lower Saxony.) As these Germanic tribes conquered British lands, they created little kingdoms, such as Kent for the Jutes, the Saxon lands of Essex (East Saxons), Sussex (South Saxons), Middlesex (you get the idea...) and East Anglia for the Angles. The former inhabitants (the Celtic Britons) were either conquered, or pushed west into what is now Wales. The Anglo-Saxons were pagan, but they did encounter Christianity in Britain, and in AD 595 Pope Gregory I (St. Gregory the Great) sent a mission to Kent under the future St. Augustine of Canterbury.

For more details of what happened then, read St. Bede's work The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, which you can find translated online. For a readable modern account of this complicated period, you might consider The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginning of England, by Marc Morris.

Many thanks for taking the time to post all of this. Incredibly interesting. I’m going to seek out those books.

I wonder if the Welsh ever claim to be the true ‘Britain’s’.

They do, indeed. And Cymric, the language of Wales is still spoken there.

Britons.

More or less, yes. But the term Anglo-Saxon morphed in its meaning as time went on.

Custos has provided solid insight. There is some question, particularly in my mind, what the Picts actually were ... culturally and historically. I have some doubt that they were Celts. Again, I think that the definition of Pict changed over time ... the Picts of the Romans dealt were not, entirely, the later Celts that became, in one branch, the Scots.

To further complicate the movement of peoples and cultures in the British Isles, the name "Scot" means "Irish" -- as the Irish Celts moved and mixed through and around the Western Isles and lent their name to Scotland -- or the land of the Irish.

Cracking good fun.

Fergus Mac Earc, a flaherty (prince) of the Dal Reada Scots (Irish) captured the western isles of Scotland around 360 AD. To this day, those islands are called Argyle (meaning the Eastern Gail, or Irish). From that foothold, the Gail expanded into Alba (Scotland). In the 800s, Kenneth McAlpin admitted the Pict clans into the Gaelic society.