Tribal Names: The Venicones

When Julius Caesar conquered Gaul he also had to subdue the seaborne tribe of the Veneti.

The Romans bragged that they got them all, killing or enslaving them. This seems to be a very convenient piece of self-serving propaganda, and one which has to be disbelieved.

A tribe which specialised in ocean travel and the use of boats would be difficult, if not impossible, to bottle up. A good many of them would have been able to slip away in the face of an attempted capture by the Romans.

Name construction

A few centuries later the geographer Ptolemy notes that the Venicones lived in north-eastern Britain (in the region of Fife and on both banks of the Tay to the north). He also noted a tribe called the Venicnii which was located in the north of Ireland (Donnegal). This is clearly the same name: 'Venic' plus '-on' or '-n'.

The use of '-ion' is still used as a plural by the Welsh, and the Venet groups would probably have used something similar, making the name 'Venet-on'. The reconstructed suffix '-on' is a plural and is also in genitive case (see the Checklist of Proto-Celtic Lexical Items in the sidebar). The genitive case is the icing on the cake because genitive here means 'having its origin in'. So the suffix '-on' with a tribal name indicates 'the ones (plural) having their origin in [placename]'.

The name 'Venicones' was pronounced 'Wen-ichones', most likely due to a shift in the language. In the case of this tribe, it is 'Venet' (the 't' becoming a 'ch') plus '-on' (plural genitive) plus the later addition of '-es', which is another (and seemingly unnecessary) plural suffix.

The Romans would probably have mispronounced it, and apparently also added their plural suffix to the already-present plural genitive, giving us 'Venicones'.

Location

The Venicones were occupying the same region which the Romans needed to invade several times in order to quell attacks by Picts in the east of the Highlands, including from the 'Pictish navy' (see the Venicones list for more details in this regard).

A legionary fortress was built at Inchtuthill, Tayside (Pinnata Castra), which remained occupied during the late first century by the 20th Legion Valeria.

One has to suspect that the famed Pictish navy which gave the Romans some trouble was manned by people who traditionally hated Romans, as they went out of their way to attack Roman Britain. This and many other attacks seems to point towards a tribe of experienced seaborne warriors with the same name (given natural shifts in pronunciation) as the aforementioned earlier seaborne tribe in Armorica, the Veneti.

One could easily postulate that the survivors of the Roman conquest of the Veneti in Gaul climbed into their boats, sailed north, and settled in Fife and Donnegal. And the rebuilt tribe which occupied Fife continued the fight.

Once beaten in Fife by the renewed Roman attack on them, some of them apparently joined the Roman side. Much later - and presumably being descendants of the same people - they were later rewarded with the Deceangli/Gangani territory in what is now north-west Wales, which the new owners promptly named after their tribe ('Venedotia', modern Gwynedd).

Any of them which did not join the Romans and were not thereby enslaved were probably absorbed into the nearby unconquered Venicones area. This later went by the name of Verturiones (Fortriu), although the people here would likely have shared a common origin with the Venicones anyway (see the map below).

A map of Britain of AD 80, showing the Roman occupation of Scotland's eastern shores and the British client states of what is now southern Scotland