> And I believe several successive Roman conquests, spanning over a century, also left a significant imprint on the indigenous populations of Britain. Well, th

> And I believe several successive Roman conquests, spanning over a century, also left a significant imprint on the indigenous populations of Britain. Well, they Christianised the Welsh and left a lot of Roman ruins and roads but that seems to have been the extent of the long term influence. As far as I’m aware there’s no real genetic imprint of four centuries of Roman rule in Britain and culturally the Anglo-Saxon invasion just wiped everything out. Roman elite culture was urban culture; the withdrawal of the Empire led to a rapid economic collapse and they were completely unable to defend themselves in the end. We have pretty strong evidence Vulgar Latin didn’t penetrate to the peasantry too. Brittany was settled by refugees from Roman Britain and that’s a Celtic language about as similar to Cornish as Irish Gaelic and Scots Gallic.