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

(#litres_trial_promo) Suffice it to say that while modern archaeology does still accept that some incomers helped establish farming in Britain, the so-called ‘Neolithic Revolution’ was far more an invasion of ideas than of people. The later invasions of Beaker folk are simply discounted, although personally I believe that something was going on in the Early Bronze Age, which may well have involved high-status individuals travelling to and from Britain. This is supported by a number of scientific tests and other archaeological indications which suggest that the population of prehistoric Britain and Europe was far more mobile than would have been supposed fifty years ago. But while mobility—where people travel hither and thither—is one thing, prehistorians today are reluctant to attribute most major changes to a single cause, such as mass migration.

In the accepted picture of early British history, Iron Age (by now ‘Celtic’) Britain was visited by Julius Caesar in 55 and 54 BC, and was finally conquered by the Romans in AD 43. There was a major revolt against Roman rule, led by the East Anglian queen of the Iceni, Boadicea (today Boudica) in AD 60—61. Christianity was made legal in the Roman Empire by the Emperor Constantine the Great in AD 324, with the Edict of Milan. The Roman period in Britain ended nominally in or just before the year AD 410. There was then a period of about four decades, sometimes known as the ‘sub-Roman’ period, when a sort of insular Roman rule continued; but Anglo-Saxon migration had started, and the Romanised British population in eastern England were powerless to resist it.

The following period, of two or so centuries, was known variously as the Pagan Saxon period or the Dark Ages (today most scholars prefer the term ‘Early Saxon’). It was characterised by waves of invasion by various people, including Angles, Saxons and Jutes. This was the age of the legendary King Arthur. Arthur was supposed to have been a Romanised Briton, based in the West Country, who led British/Celtic resistance to the Anglo-Saxons, who were expanding their domination of England westwards. He won a famous victory at the Battle of Mount Baddon or Badon, some time at the beginning of the sixth century, but was eventually defeated and slain at the Battle of Camlan in AD 539.

Missionaries under St Augustine reintroduced Christianity to Britain in AD 597, and the Pagan Saxon period was followed by the Christian Saxon period, which came to an end with the Norman Conquest of 1066. Differences between St Augustine’s Roman Church and the British or Celtic Churches were resolved, largely in favour of the Roman Church, at the Synod of Whitby in 664. The Christian Saxon period witnessed the birth of England; its first widely acknowledged king was Alfred, who ruled from his capital Winchester in Wessex from 871 to 899. Alfred’s reign was largely given over to wresting eastern England back from Viking domination. Viking raids had become a serious problem from the late eighth century: the famous abbey on Lindisfarne island was sacked in 793, and the ‘great raiding army’ of Viking warriors invaded East Anglia in 866.

It will be clear from this highly compressed synopsis of conventional British prehistory and early history that the Arthur stories are not the only examples of what one might term British origin myths. None of them attempts to explain British origins directly. In other words, they are not British equivalents of the biblical story of Creation. But they do nonetheless address themes that are closely bound up with a sense of emerging national identities. The problem is whether they are actually about the time in which they are supposed to have taken place, or the times in which they are told, retold or elaborated. My own view is that it’s the latter, if only because the real origins of British culture—whether or not it was ever perceived by prehistoric people as such—lie hidden in the mists of antiquity.

I do not believe that it is necessary to define a culture to be part of one; it would be absurd to suggest that the people who created Stonehenge five thousand years ago were without a developed culture—indeed, a highly developed culture. It probably had many points in common with similar cultures in Scotland, Ireland and Wales, but we do not know whether these communities saw themselves as either British or as part of a series of insular cultural traditions. I believe that the many parallels that can be observed in the layout of ceremonial and other ritual sites and monuments across Britain and Ireland reflect a shared cosmology or system of beliefs. That, however, is not to say that they shared a common culture. Take language. The people of the various tribal kingdoms of Britain would have understood the dialects of the kingdoms around them, but the leaders of, say, the Iceni in Norfolk would probably not have understood their equivalents in Wales, Northumberland or Devon.

It is unlikely that the Ancient Britons saw themselves as Britons. By the Later Iron Age, in the century or so prior to the Roman Conquest, the upper echelons of southern British tribal societies would have been aware of the Channel and of Gaul (France) beyond it. Some would probably have had relatives there. At what point did a sense of ‘Britishness’ develop? If we are to answer that, which is essential to a proper understanding of Arthur’s role, we must first tackle the vexed question of the Celts, who are often seen as being synonymous with the Ancient Britons. Arthur was a Romanised Briton, and it follows that he must also have been a Romanised Celt. Who were they, then, these romantic-sounding Celts?

They have had an excellent press. In 1970 the historian Nora Chadwick wrote, in a best-selling paperback on the subject:

Celtic culture is the fine flower of the Iron Age, the last phase of European material and intellectual development before the Mediterranean world spread northwards over the Continent and linked it to the world of today…Common political institutions gave them a unity bordering on nationality, a concept which the Mediterranean peoples could understand. They realised that the Celts were a powerful people with a certain ethnic unity, occupying wide and clearly defined territories, in process of expansion, and that they were possessed of internal political organisation and formidable military strength.

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At this point I should say a few words about culture and ethnicity, as they are understood in archaeology. ‘Culture’ is the harder of the two to pin down. At times I will use the word in its accepted contemporary sense: as a description of a given group of people with shared outlooks and values. At other times it will be clear from the context that I am using it in its narrower, archaeological sense. An archaeological ‘culture’ is one represented by a recurring assemblage of artefacts which are believed by archaeologists (although not necessarily by the people who made and used them) to represent a particular set of activities, or a particular group of people. For example, the widespread occurrence in Early Bronze Age Europe of highly decorated drinking vessels, together with bronze and copper daggers, was believed to represent people of the distinctive ‘Beaker Culture’. Today the word ‘culture’ is finding less favour; most archaeologists try to avoid it, as it carries so many other meanings. This has led to unhappy-sounding terms such as the ‘Beaker phenomenon’ or the ‘Beaker presence’, neither of which has any meaning at all.

The term ‘ethnicity’ is less vague, and does not have a specialised archaeological definition. Nonetheless, the one I prefer is taken from the Oxford Dictionary of Archaeology: ‘The ascription, or claim, to belong to a particular cultural group on the basis of genetics, language or other cultural manifestations.’

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The Celts were seen as an ethnically distinct group of people whose origins lay around the upper Danube and Alpine regions. There are passing references to them by the great classical Greek historian Herodotus, writing in the fifth century bc. Their presence was also noted near the Greek colony atMassilia (Marseilles) by a slightly earlier writer, Hecataeus.

(#litres_trial_promo) From Greek colony at Massilia approximately the fifth century BC it was believed that they spread north, east, south and west from their central European heartland.

(#litres_trial_promo) By the end of the third century BC the process of expansion was drawing to a close. Then the Roman Empire came and went, and in post-Roman times Celtic culture continued to flourish mainly in western Britain and in neighbouring parts of north-western France.

(#litres_trial_promo) Given this view of history we can only assume that elsewhere in Europe Celtic culture simply vanished in the centuries following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire (the Eastern or Byzantine Roman Empire continued until the fall of Constantinople in 1453).

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The identification of the Celts as a distinct entity was largely based on a wonderful art style that came into existence in Early Iron Age Europe.

(#litres_trial_promo) Celtic art, as it is generally known, did indeed begin in Continental Europe—as, centuries later, did Impressionism—but the spread of neither style of art involved the migration of people. Art is, after all, about ideas which can be communicated both by example and by word of mouth. The term ‘Celtic art’ has, however, stuck, and I do not think it can easily be dislodged. Personally, I would prefer a less culturally loaded term, like ‘Iron Age art’. But whatever one calls it, it is superb: it features vigorous, swirling plant and animal figures that possess an extraordinary grace and energy. The standards of design and craftsmanship are outstanding. Some of the finest examples of Celtic art were produced in Britain in the decades prior to the Roman Conquest of AD 43.

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The art was both very distinctive and widespread throughout Europe, but there is little evidence for the spread of an actual people. This fact first came to prominence in 1962, when Professor Roy Hodson published a paper in the learned journal the Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society. Two years later he wrote another in the same journal. In essence his argument was simple: the numerous invasions of Iron Age Britain that had been suggested by leading scholars such as Professor Christopher Hawkes of Oxford simply hadn’t happened. Hodson proposed that the changes in, for example, pottery styles that are evident in the British Iron Age merely reflect changes in style, taste and sometimes in technology (for example the introduction of the potter’s wheel in the first century BC). He argued persuasively that an invasion of new people from abroad would have brought with it widespread changes: in house shape, in burial customs, in farming practices and so forth—but that had not happened. British Iron Age houses remained resolutely round, whereas their counterparts on the Continent, where the invaders were supposed to have originated, were rectangular. It wasn’t enough to base the existence of hypothetical migrations on such slight evidence. Today Roy Hodson’s reinterpretation of the British Iron Age as a largely insular phenomenon is universally accepted by prehistorians. It has become the new orthodoxy.

If there were no Iron Age invasions, then how did the Celts reach Britain? The answer can only be that they didn’t come from outside. In other words, they were always there. In that case, what was happening on the Continental mainland? What about the art? What about classical references to Celts in, for example, the area around Marseilles? How one answers these questions depends on one’s point of view. If you believe in an ancient people that shared a common ethnicity, and perhaps similar Indo-European languages and culture, it doesn’t really matter what you call them. ‘Celts’ will do nicely. ‘Prehistoric Europeans’ would be even better—or worse. The point is that retrospectively applied labels that are believed to have cultural or ethnic validity are pointless.

In common with most of my colleagues, I take a position which acknowledges, for example, that there may indeed have been a tribal group living near Marseilles who called themselves Celts, but that the evidence for a vast pan-European Celtic culture simply isn’t there. Certainly people were moving around, as they have always done and will continue to do, but there is no evidence for large-scale, concerted folk movements in the fifth to third centuries BC. If you examine a given tract of landscape, as I have done in the Peterborough area over the past thirty years, there is no sign whatsoever that the population changed some time in the mid-first millennium BC with the arrival of the Celts. It simply did not happen. Everything, from the location and arrangement of fields, settlements and religious sites to ceremonial rites, bespeaks continuity. In Chapter 3 I will look at another, very different, Iron Age landscape in Hampshire, and again there is no evidence for a change of population.

Today most prehistorians take the view that changes in the archaeological record are a reflection of technological advance, population growth and evolving social organisation. Societies were becoming more hierarchical and their leaders were becoming more powerful. These élites maintained contacts with each other by various means, such as the exchange, often over long distances, of high-status objects, many of which were examples of the best Celtic art. In short, one can substitute the words ‘Iron Age culture’ for ‘Celtic culture’. The big difference is that Iron Age culture was actually Iron Age cultures—plural. That applied in Britain as much as anywhere else. Archaeologically speaking, it would be misleading to talk about pre-Roman Celtic Britain as if it was a unified society. In fact the reverse was true, as we will see in Chapter 3.

A side-effect of the debunking of the ancient Celts has been to deprive us of a species of archaeological book that was often very well-written and coherent. As the authors of Celtic histories believed they were describing a lost people, they were quite happy to draw together disparate strands of evidence to paint a vivid picture in a way we would hesitate to do today.

(#litres_trial_promo) The origins and consequences of the Celtic myth have recently been reviewed by the archaeologist Simon James. He takes a decidedly minimalist view of the Celts, with which I am in complete agreement:

The term ‘Celtic’ has accumulated so much baggage, so many confusing meanings and associations, that it is too compromised even to be useful as a more general label for the culture of these periods. The peoples in question organised themselves in a diversity of ways…and, it seems, spoke a variety of languages and dialects, which were not all mutually intelligible. The undoubted similarities and relations between them are best explained in terms of parallel development of many societies in intimate contact, rather than of radiation from a recent single common origin.

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James considers that the notion of British identity is remarkably recent, and did not develop until the later Middle Ages.

(#litres_trial_promo) It is an idea that might be thought to have its roots in the Act of Union between England and Scotland in 1707, as that was the time when it became politically important to start thinking in terms of a broader British nation. But in fact there was little public enthusiasm for the idea until the 1770s, following the loss of the American colonies. Unsuccessful foreign wars can have unifying effects at home. The emergence of a broader British identity was given further impetus by the late eighteenth-century development of the second British Empire, based on India, which was beneficial to the interests of both Scotland and England. So any differences between the two countries were placed on hold.

Archaeologists are part of modern society, and reflect the norms of that society; that is how the Celtic myth came into existence. It was then given intellectual substance by prehistorians, who have since been the first to debunk it. The modern notion of ‘Celticity’ or ‘Celticness’ has its origins in British insular independence movements. Many people in Ireland and Wales did not feel part of a Britain that was dominated by England. The situation in Scotland was more complex, because regional differences and traditional frictions between Lowlands and Highlands, Protestants to the east and Roman Catholics to the west, tended to smother the emergence of popular anti-British/English feeling until the second half of the twentieth century.

The victory of William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 set the seal of Protestant domination in Ireland. In the north this domination came from Scotland, in the south from England. During the eighteenth and subsequent centuries opposition to Protestant domination in Ireland was largely expressed through the Roman Catholic faith and the revival of a Gaelic or Celtic identity. Today the notion of Celticity still gives rise to strong feelings in Ireland, where the wrongs of the recent past are very keenly felt. Even in academic circles the archaeological debunking of the ancient Celts meets with strong resistance.

The situation in Wales was perhaps even more complex than in Ireland. In Wales, Protestantism was the dominant religion, and the chapel formed the focus of many industrialised communities. The expression of an anti-British Welsh identity began, ironically enough, among London Welsh in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The stimulus was provided by economic migration from rural areas (mainly to the NewWorld); this in turn was accompanied by a huge movement of English people to work in the industrialised south of Wales.

In the 1790s there was a revival of their literature and history by the Welsh population resident in London, and it took a strangely archaeological course. The following appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine in October 1792:

This being the day on which the autumnal equinox occurred, some Welsh bards, resident in London, assembled in congress on Primrose Hill, according to ancient usage…A circle of stones formed, in the middle of which was the Maen Gorsedd, or Altar, on which a naked sword being placed, all the Bards assisted to sheath it.

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The celebration of Welsh identity which accompanied the literary revival was focused on a colourful figure known as Iolo Morganwg, born Edward Williams in 1747. Williams was a Glamorganshire stonemason who had been working in London since the 1770s and was a member of a group of Welshmen who took an active interest in the literature, history and antiquities of their native land. He adopted the bardic name Iolo Morganwg (‘Iolo of Glamorgan’) and set about reviving (and sometimes forging) documents, and creating new customs that bolstered his passionately held views on Welsh politics and identity—which owed much to the ideas of radical political theorists like Thomas Paine, author of The Rights of Man. Morganwg linked his ‘Gorsedd’ (circle of stones or pebbles), and the ceremonies associated with it, to ancient times—even as far back as the Druids.

Morganwg achieved something quite remarkable: he managed to have his largely invented Gorsedd ceremonies attached to the genuinely antique Eisteddfod. The Eisteddfod was (and is) an annual meeting that celebrates Welsh music, literature and poetry. The first recorded Eisteddfods took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries at a time when the Welsh poets (Welsh Beirdd) were still a distinct and ancient class with their own ‘orally transmitted rules and norms’.

(#litres_trial_promo) By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, the tradition of the Eisteddfods was flagging, and the addition of the politically loaded Gorsedd rituals had a galvanising effect on their popularity.

The first Gorsedd Circle bardic ceremonies to be held in Wales took place at the end of the three-day Eisteddfod in Carmarthen in 1816. The grafting of the ‘dignified nonsense’ of the Gorsedd rituals onto the Eisteddfod has given subsequent students of Welsh history serious headaches.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

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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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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).

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.

(#litres_trial_promo) 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.