English squirrel Formby
The first people to arrive on the island we now call Britain were the Celts (also called the Britons). They were soon joined by Scots, Picts, and some Latin dudes who wandered over from the Roman Empire. Then, round about the fifth century, the Germanic Angles, Saxons, and Jutes arrived from the continent, through what are now known as Holland, Germany, and Denmark.
These barbarous tribes brought with them the seax (a terrifying blade from which the Saxons got their name) and a language that had been mixing it up with Latin for centuries. As linguist David Crystal points out in The Stories of English, the vocabulary of English “has never been purely Anglo-Saxon, even in its Anglo-Saxon period”!
Anglo-Saxon did eventually form the basic stock of Old English, enlivened with a smattering of Celtic and Latin words. St. Augustine brought new ingredients from Rome, Danes added some sustenance of their own, and then the Normans spiced things up with French and more Latin. By the time of Shakespeare, English was a rich verbal stew—then the Bard added all kinds of coinages to the pot.
How my heart sings 