Atrebates

The Atrebates (singular Atrebas) were a Belgic tribe of Gaul and Britain before the Roman conquests. However it is possible that the Atrebates were a family of rulers (dynasty), as there is no evidence for a major migration from Belgium to England.

Name of the tribe

Cognate with Old Irish aittrebaid meaning 'inhabitant',Atrebates comes from proto-Celtic *ad-treb-a-t-es, 'inhabitants'. The Celtic root is treb- 'building', 'home' (cf. Old Irish treb 'building', 'farm', Welsh tref 'town', Middle Breton treff 'city', toponyms in Tre-, Provençal trevar 'to live in a house or in a village'), which has been linked to the root of English thorpe, ‘village’. Edith Wightman suggested that their name may be intended to mean the people of the (inland) earth to contrast with that of the neighbouring coastal Morini, "people of the sea".

The Atrebates in Gaul

The Gaulish Atrebates lived in or around modern Artois in northern France. Their capital, Nemetocenna (later called Nemetacum or Nemetacon too. See Nemeton), is now the city of Arras, Pas-de-Calais. The place-name Arras is the result of a phonetic evolution from Atrebates and replaced the original name in the Late Empire, according to a well-known tradition in Gaul (compare Paris, Amiens, Lisieux, Bayeux, etc.). The name Artois is the result of a different phonetic evolution from Atrebates.