The Element Encyclopedia of the Celts. Rodney Castleden

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СКАЧАТЬ had their roots in several pasts. We are perhaps too accustomed to reading about peoples in books, where the neatness and clarity of chapter headings can give too sharp a focus.

      In nineteenth-century school history books, centuries, periods, and reigns were separated off from one another in just this way; it made history simpler for pupils to learn, simpler for teachers to test.

      There was a leftover of this approach in a recent TV history program. The writer and presenter, a distinguished historian, compellingly described the Battle of Hastings and its climax with the death of the last Saxon king of England, King Harold. “That was the end of Saxon England” made a dramatic and memorable conclusion to the program. The battle was certainly a major landmark in English history. The Saxon king was dead, hacked to pieces on the battlefield, and there would never be another Saxon monarch, but 99 percent of the “Anglo-Saxon” population of England lived on, and they passed on their genes, their language, and many of their customs to their children and grandchildren, whereas only a small number of Norman French people arrived in England in 1066. In a very real way, England went on being as “Saxon” as it was before, in spite of being ruled by Normans.

      But this raises another question: were the people living in England Anglo-Saxon when Duke William conquered it in 1066? Had the Celtic population of England really been wiped out and replaced by the Anglo-Saxon colonists who had arrived in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries?

      To take one area as an example, when the Jutes arrived from Jutland on the European mainland, they landed in Kent and established a base on the Isle of Thanet in 449. From there they were able to take over the old kingdom of Kent by military force. They did this by murdering or driving out the British (Celtic) ruling class. The conquering Jutish chief, Hengist, ruled Kent from about 455 to 488. Hengist was succeeded by Aesc, who reigned from 488 to 512. His family and descendants, the new Kentish ruling class, became known as Aescings. This was to distinguish them from all the other people living in Kent, the Kentings, who were descendants of the Cantii, the Iron Age tribe living there before both the Jutish and Roman occupations. The Kentings were the Britons who were doing the manual work and producing the food. They were the the slave class. They were Celts. In the nineteenth century there was an assumption that the invaders had massacred all the existing inhabitants, but this would not have been pragmatic. It was more useful to keep the Kentings, who knew the land and how to work it.

      Throughout the country, the Anglo-Saxon conquest was a process of replacing the ruling class, but underneath that there was continuity of community: continuity of bloodline, continuity of genetic material, and continuity of custom. Again, as far as the nineteenthcentury historians are concerned, it is a case of a chapter boundary that has been drawn too sharply.

      Many people living in southeast England today are less English than they imagine. In terms of ancestry, they are more Celt than Saxon. According to Professor Stephen Oppenheimer, a leading DNA expert, as few as 5 percent of the people now living in England are of Anglo-Saxon stock; most people who think of themselves as English are genetically of a much more ancient native stock—not Germanic incomers at all.

      This discovery, a result of the DNA revolution, raises many questions about ethnic identity. Often when the issue of devolution has been discussed in relation to Wales or Scotland, journalists and politicians have spoken of the views of “the Welsh” or “the Scots,” as if the Welsh and the Scots are distinct and recognizable populations. But, in the terms envisaged in any referendum that has been conducted or planned, they are simply those with Welsh or Scottish addresses who are entitled to vote. Many people of Welsh and Scottish origin have moved to England in search of work; are they no longer Welsh or Scottish? There are also many people raised in England who have gone to Wales or Scotland to live; have they ceased to be English? Did they become Welsh or Scottish by moving house? Defining the Welsh and the Scots turns out to be much harder than anyone imagined.

      Professor Norman Davies dedicated his excellent 1999 book The Isles: A History to “the memory of Richard Samson Davies: English by birth, Welsh by conviction, Lancastrian by choice, British by chance.”

      Simon James, who wrote The Atlantic Celts (also 1999), makes the interesting point that each of us possesses more than one ethnic identity, because several identities nest inside one another. Simon James himself is a Westerner, a European, a British citizen, an Englishman, a Southerner, and a Londoner. He also has more than one ethnic identity because of his mixed ancestry. Among his recent forebears (he is not specific, but by implication his grandparents and great-grandparents) he can identify Welsh or Cornish, Norman-French, and English people, which gives him the mixed genes of Celtic, Latin, and Germanic bloodlines.

      I worked for three years in London, but that did not make me a Londoner. I lived for 12 years in Northamptonshire, but that did not turn me into a Mercian. I was born in Sussex of Kentish parents, Kentish grandparents, and Kentish great-grandparents: Kentish farm laborer stock. That ought to make me thoroughly English. I was brought up to believe that I was English and I feel as though I am English, yet my bone structure tells a different story: I am of pre-Anglo-Saxon British stock—Celtic. That unique British expert on the archeology of feet, Phyllis Jackson, tells me I have trademark Celtic feet. And if you are wondering what Celtic feet look like, they are long and narrow, with toes almost in a straight line, and a long longitudinal arch. My descent is therefore (probably) from that necessary Kenting slave class kept on by the Jutes when they colonized Kent in the fifth century. In fact a great many people born and bred in England are Celtic, as Professor Oppenheimer’s research has shown.

      It works the other way too. A great many people living in Scotland and Wales are Anglo-Saxon in origin. It is not what one might have expected. DNA test results turn up more and more problems for claimed or perceived ethnicity.

      The words “Celts” and “Celtic” have themselves been used differently over time, especially over the last 200 years, as perceptions of the past and perceptions of the present have shifted. The Celtic revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries identified two kinds of Celt (the Celt according to race or language), and the twentieth century produced three further kinds (the Celt according to culture, politics, or preference). We tend to use the name “Celts” to include people from a continent-wide area, right across Europe, and across quite a long period too, from the Iron Age to the present day. But a lot of those people would never have thought of calling themselves by that name. A monk living on Iona in the eighth century AD would probably have thought of himself as an Irishman in exile. A man in a plaid driving cattle down a Scottish glen in the sixteenth century would have seen himself as a Highlander and a Campbell. A woman living at the Maiden Castle hillfort in the fourth century BC would have thought of herself as a member of the Durotriges tribe, possibly with kin across the water in Brittany. Each of these people would have been startled to hear themselves called Celts: as far as they were concerned, that was not their identity.

      THE ATLANTIC CELTS

      We have to set aside the long-held assumption that the Celts were a pan-European Iron Age race. This means rethinking European prehistory. Modern archeological and anthropological evidence is pointing toward a reality that is far more exciting.

      Instead of the Celts of the west being relative newcomers, arriving in the Atlantic coastlands between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago, they are emerging as an indigenous people with a very ancient ancestry indeed. Ten thousand years ago, the last cold stage of the Ice Age was ending and the ice that had covered much of Britain and Ireland was melting back. After the long glacial episode, the islands were becoming habitable again. What happened then was that people living in refuges in northern Spain began to migrate northward, bay-hopping along the coast, to colonize the lands that were thawing out. These early migrants spread through exactly the areas that we now think of as Celtic—Galicia, Brittany, Cornwall, СКАЧАТЬ