Britain AD: A Quest for Arthur, England and the Anglo-Saxons. Francis Pryor

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ headaches.¹⁶ What cannot be denied, however, is that while the reinvention of Welsh identity represented by Morganwg and his followers was very popular, it was an essentially middle-class phenomenon. The bulk of the Welsh population were English-speakers, and they expressed their identity and shared values through the chapel, choirs and active involvement in Labour politics.

      What are we to make of the modern invention and reinvention of a Celtic identity? The first point is that it owes little or nothing to the ancient Celts, who, as we have seen, did not exist as a single cultural or ethnic entity. So is it still valid? I believe it is, but only time will tell how long it will last. I would agree with Simon James that the modern concept of Celticness matters because it is an expression of self-identity. It is also a shared sense of difference from the English/ British who were (and are) seen as a threat. And it cannot be denied that the people concerned share, or more usually shared, languages whose ancient roots were related. Maybe their view of a common early history is flawed, but then so is that of the English. Simon James would go further: ‘That this tradition [of the ancient Celts] is now under attack does not invalidate modern Celtic identity, because to some degree all modern ethnic and national identities create essentially propagandist histories.’ Writing about the people of the British Isles, he notes:

      Ethnicity and nationhood depend on self-identity, on being aware of larger groupings and their interactions, and feeling involved in one of them. I would argue that, until the rise of the four historic nations in the medieval period, and even long after, a clear sense of large-scale ethnic or national identity—of belonging to an imagined community like the Scots, Welsh, Irish or English—was usually weakly developed among the mass of the people, who rarely had to deal with such issues.¹⁷

      If the concepts of Britain and Britishness are seen by many Welsh, Scottish and Irish people as no more than ways of referring to England and Englishness, what of the English? Even if they wanted to, they could not identify themselves with the Celts, as they themselves are the Other, the forces of opposition, which played a key role in the birth of the modern Celtic identity. They have had to look somewhere else. The Vikings and Normans are already spoken for by the Danes and the French, which leaves only the Germanic presence of the Anglo-Saxons—a choice which was made very much easier, in Georgian and Victorian times, by the presence on the English throne of a German royal family.

      The idea that the origins of the English nation could be found in a massive influx of Anglo-Saxon people first became popular around AD 700—1100.¹⁸ Its widespread acceptance was due to a number of contemporary accounts, including those of Gildas (sixth century), the Venerable Bede (c.731) and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles (from c.890).¹⁹ Then, some time around 1136, the highly influential author and creator of the principal Arthurian stories, Geoffrey of Monmouth, wrote in his Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) an origin myth which traced the foundation of Britain back to the Trojans—of all people.²⁰ This wonderful flight of fantasy described how Brutus, great-grandson of Aeneas of Troy, landed at Totnes, subdued the race of giants who lived there, and gave his name to the country he had pacified (Britain = Brutus). During his visit he founded London, calling it New Troy. Even the creation of the Arthur stories seems drab by comparison with the Brutus myth, but both were widely accepted throughout the medieval period, during which Geoffrey’s history was held in high regard as an accurate historical source.

      After about 1600 the Brutus myth fell from favour, to be replaced by a new set of semi-mythic principal characters, including Hengist, Horsa and Alfred the Great.²¹ Alfred is of course a known historical figure, whose achievements are well documented. Perhaps it is sad that today he is better known for burning cakes than for his administration or government. The brothers Hengist and Horsa are indeed semi-mythic. They make their first appearance in that magnificent work of early propagandist history, Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (c.731), where they are portrayed as the founders of the royal house of Kent. Bede tells us they were leaders of Germanic forces invited to Britain by Vortigern, a Romanised southern British king, in the year 449. According to Bede, their arrival signalled the adventus Saxonum, or coming of the Saxons, who originally appeared as mercenaries, or foederati.

      During the 450s we learn that the mercenaries turned against their client, Vortigern, to establish their own rule. It seems a straightforward enough story, and it was later taken up and elaborated by other sources, including the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles; but Bede, like all subsequent historians, had his own motives for writing in the way he did. He did not see himself as writing ‘pure’ or unbiased history in the sense that we would understand it today. In writing his great work he was also delivering a message; and the invasion of the Anglo-Saxons was part of that message.

      In the early eighteenth century the Anglo-Saxonist view of history was strongly influential. It was widely believed, for example, that institutions such as Parliament and trial by jury were ultimately Germanic. But this view changed as the political scene itself altered in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. We have seen in the case of the Celts how issues to do with nationalism and self-identity came to the fore at this time, but it was by no means a straightforward picture. France was perceived as the great enemy, not just as another powerful nation, but one with the potential to subvert the entire structure of British government, as witnessed by French attitudes to the American colonies, the Revolution of 1789 and of course the subsequent Napoleonic Wars. There were pleas for British unity. The great Whig politician and conservative thinker Edmund Burke, in his highly influential Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, did not play down national differences within Britain, but placed great emphasis on the antiquity of the British system of government. A few years earlier, in 1756, the antiquarian and pioneering archaeologist of the Old Stone Age, John Frere, also worried about contemporary political developments; he ‘called for the English, Lowland Scots and the Hanoverian Kings, all of whom were descendants of the Saxons, to live in harmony with the Ancient Britons (the Welsh)’.²² Ancient history was being brought into contemporary affairs in a way that we would find extraordinary today.

      We have already seen that archaeological and historical research is affected by the climate of thought prevailing at the time, and I cannot avoid a brief discussion of the two World Wars, both of which saw Britain pitted against Germany: in theory, at least, Anglo-Saxon versus Teuton. The First World War did not have a major impact on Anglo-Saxon research in Britain. Before it, opinion was divided as to whether the Anglo-Saxons were large-scale military invaders or true immigrants, and in the 1920s and thirties an essentially similar debate continued. However, after the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis in the Second World War, the English began to feel uncomfortable with their supposed Germanic roots.

      The end of the war also saw the effective end of the British Empire, for a number of reasons. This led to a change in historical attitude: a world view centred on Anglo-Britishness was no longer possible. Nicholas Higham has described the effects of the post-war/post-Empire situation well:

      One result was the final overthrow of the old certainties provided by a belief in the inherent superiority of English social and political institutions and Germanic ancestry, by which the British establishment had been sustained for generations. This provided opportunities for the revival or construction of alternative visions of the past. Historically, insular Germanism was rooted in the enterprise of legitimising the early and unique rise of the English Parliament to supremacy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but its fragility was now revealed.²³

      We will discuss the problems inherent in ‘insular Germanism’ later; СКАЧАТЬ