The Origins of the British: The New Prehistory of Britain (4 page)

Not all archaeologists see it that way. Dissidents include Colin Renfrew, who in his landmark
Archaeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo-European Origins
, published in 1987, questioned the evidence for this whole perspective of invading ‘Celtic ethnicity’. In fact there is now a growing consensus view of the
lack
of evidence, both in the archaeology and in early historical
documents, for any large-scale pre-Roman Iron Age invasions of the British Isles, apart from shared Belgic tribal names across the Channel (of which more below).

Although mainstream archaeologists, on principle, do not refer to it much, there is a large corpus of Irish legendary-historical records, written down and collated by various cleric-academics over the past 1,500 years, which echoes the views of the dissident archaeologists. These unique texts fail to support the concept of any military invasions of Ireland after those of the Late Bronze Age. The latter invasions, stretching back from the Bronze Age to the Late Neolithic, are all explicitly recorded in the Irish Kingship Lists as coming from the Mediterranean region, in particular from or via Spain and even from Greece, suggesting an alternative legendary reconstruction of Gaelic history.

More recently, Simon James has been more outspoken than his fellow-archaeologists. In his book
The Atlantic Celts
he describes the story of the Iron Age Celtic invaders of the British Isles from Central Europe as just that – a story. In particular, he unravels a modern myth created in the early eighteenth century by a Welsh antiquarian, Edward Lhuyd. The term ‘Celtic’ had never been applied to inhabitants of the British Isles until the time of Lhuyd, who correctly identified the relatedness of languages spoken today in Brittany and throughout the western British Isles. Lhuyd was not the first to arrive at that conclusion, and he believed in successive Celtic waves, but he erred in conflating this linguistic unity with the Roman nonlinguistic term ‘Celtae’. The latter was used during classical times, often rather loosely, to describe tribes somewhere in Western Europe, in much the same ill-defined way that some
people nowadays speak of ‘Asians’. Unfortunately, the pseudo-ethnic terms ‘Celtic’ and ‘Celts’, with their Central European Iron Age baggage, have stuck since the nineteenth century.

James speculates that Lhuyd, living in the eighteenth century, preferred the term ‘Celtic’ as a language label to the more geographically appropriate ‘Gallic’ for obvious nationalistic reasons. The connection, or further conflation, of Atlantic Celts with the Iron Age Hallstatt and La Tène cultures has no basis in direct linguistic evidence,
²
and came with nineteenth-century archaeology. By this time, Lhuyd’s linguistic idea ‘Celtic’ had matured into a rich story of ethnic identity with strong nationalistic overtones telling of ancient Celtic invaders. The Romantic-heroic image was seized upon by people living in the non-English-speaking parts of the British Isles. They had plenty of real history to remember, of English oppression over the previous 1,500 years.

This is where one of the most deeply embedded of British roots myths comes in: namely, that the English story starts late in the day with Angles, Saxons and Jutes, as inferred from the illuminated writings of the Dark Age clerical historians Gildas (sixth century
AD
) and the Venerable Bede (seventh century). Here the label ‘myth’ is mine, rather than that of any dissident archaeologist.

I agree that much of the unique genetic, cultural and linguistic identity of the English did come from the nearby continent of north-west Europe, but I contend that this process started, not as some blitzkrieg during the Dark Ages, as we learn from our history books, but long before the arrival of the Romans. What
is more,
Beowulf
– our first written poem
and
the only surviving complete saga in Old English – used a Germanic language, one of whose ancestors could have arrived in England even before the Romans made their mark in Britain.

Apart from the etymology of our country’s name, how did the conventional view of the English as descended from recent Saxon invaders come about? The Saxon story goes right back to the Dark Ages. Bede and St Gildas tell respectively of fierce invading Angles from Angeln (in Schleswig-Holstein, northwest Germany), or Saxons from Saxony and Jutes from Jutland over the fifth and sixth centuries
AD
. And then there is the well-documented history of Anglian and Saxon kingdoms covering England for half a millennium before the Norman invasion. The Saxon suffix ‘-sex’, for example (Sussex means ‘south Saxons’), is plastered all over our English shire-names.

So, who were those Ancient Britons and their descendants remaining in England to be slaughtered when the legions finally left? For recent scholars, the presence in Roman England of some Celtic personal and place-names suggests that occupants of England were Celtic-speaking at that time. This argument could gain further support from the story of Iron Age Celtic invasions driving through England, if that were true. There is a reasonable linguistic evidence for the presumption that there were ‘Celts’ living in England before and during the Roman occupation. But then, in the absence of any other linguistic evidence, this firms up to the modern linguistic view that before the Roman invasion
all
rather than
some
Ancient Britons were ‘Celts’ and Celtic-speaking.

It is natural to conclude that something cataclysmic happened in England during the Dark Ages. Many think, for instance, that
the Celts were totally eradicated – culturally, linguistically and genetically – by invading Angles and Saxons. This sort of logic derives partly from the idea of a previously uniformly ‘Celtic’ English landscape, together with the clear evidence of uniformly Germanic or Norman modern English place-names today, and the preponderance of Germanic words in modern English.

Now, Gildas and Bede painted a grim picture, but neither actually specified complete ethnic cleansing. Some geneticists, and rather fewer historians and archaeologists, however, still believe that these invasions were massive and involved the influx of whole communities from Germany. In the extreme view, invaders were thought to have swept across a defenceless and largely depopulated England and to have replaced all the remaining ‘Celts’ in the country. Such complete replacement, not only of a people but of their presumed ancient English Celtic linguistic and cultural heritage, would have to be explained in the context of the lack of any Celtic linguistic substratum in English of any period.

How sure can we be that England was universally Celtic before? Roman writers, for instance Strabo, explicitly exclude Celtic affinities of the English on various grounds, such as greater size and less yellow-hair. Unfortunately we have little to go on as to what Romans actually meant by ‘being like Celts’. From his own stated view of ‘Celtic’, Strabo would have meant southwest rather than Central European. Tacitus, on the other hand, felt that those Britons living near Gaul were more like the Gauls physically and linguistically as a result of migration, although it is probable that he meant the Belgic and not the Celtic Gauls (see below). He was more explicit about some other Britons that we now choose to call Atlantic Celts. Referring to the
Welsh, whom he calls ‘a naturally fierce people’, he states: ‘The dark complexion of the Silures, their usually curly hair, and the fact that Spain is the opposite shore to them, are an evidence that Iberians of a former date crossed over and occupied these parts.’
³
This observation can hardly be support for the notion that the other parts of the British Isles were necessarily the same or had a common ancestry even at that time, and merely reinforces the new genetic evidence I shall present in this book.

So, if not ‘Celtic’ by Strabo’s description, but rather Gaulish according to Tacitus, who were the Britons occupying England at the time of the Roman invasion? The Belgae of northern Gaul (Belgium and France north of the Seine) had tribal namesakes in England during Caesar’s time (e.g. there were tribes called Belgae and Atrebates around Hampshire as well as in Gaul). Tacitus, like Caesar, reported that between Britain and Gaul ‘the language differs but little’.
⁴
As we know from Caesar’s famous opening paragraph of the
Gallic Wars
, which begins ‘All Gaul is divided into three parts’,
⁵
‘Gaul’ included the Belgae in northern Gaul, a region that stretched from the Rhine as far south as the Seine and Paris. However, unlike the Celtae of the middle part of Gaul, who he said identified themselves as Celtic in their own language, Caesar did not specify the language of the Belgae – stating repeatedly, however, that they mostly descended from the Germani.

The history of early coins in Britain reveals a pre-Roman influence that is predominantly derived from north Gaul. The earliest coins to circulate in south-east England, c.150
BC
, were made in Gaul and were produced by the Belgae. The richest Iron Age treasure ever discovered in Britain was unearthed at Snettisham in Norfolk. A burial date of c.70
BC
is suggested by
coins found in the majority of such hoards as grave goods, along with bronze, silver and gold torcs (Plate 16). Coins were subsequently produced locally throughout southern England, but not in contemporary Cornwall, Wales, Scotland or Ireland.

Even farther north, the curious Iron Age culture of East Yorkshire known as the Arras Culture, characterized by chariots and square burial barrows, lasted for four hundred years until the Roman invasion and showed cultural links with northern Gaul. The fact that the Romans would call the inhabitants of East Yorkshire ‘Parisii’, a name also given to the tribe who went on to found Paris, has led some to speculate that these people were immigrants from northern France.

So, one might surmise that the ‘common language’ referred to by Tacitus as being spoken on both sides of the Channel was not Celtic, but was similar to that spoken by the Belgae. From present linguistic geography, and from numerous hints dropped in Caesar’s
Gallic Wars
about languages spoken in northern (Belgic) Gaul, the language shared across the Channel is more likely to have been of the Germanic group (see
Part 3
). If so, it might have been a member of the West Germanic branch of Indo-European (i.e. something like Dutch, Flemish or, more likely, Frisian) rather than Atlantic Celtic (Gaulish). In other words, a Germanic-type language or languages could already have been indigenous to England at the time of the Roman invasion. In support of this inference there is some recent linguistic analytic evidence, which I shall discuss, that the date of the split between Old English and Continental Germanic languages goes much further back than the Dark Ages, and that English may owe more to Scandinavian languages. But such speculation merely adds to the confusion that standard comparative
linguistic analysis
already
places Old English (the language of
Beowulf
) on its own separate branch, and closer to Frisian than to Saxon. The last observation is clearly inconsistent with the orthodoxy of Angles and Saxons replacing Celts, quite apart from the near-complete absence of Celtic words in either Old or Modern English.

Modern popular images of the sort of English people the Romans met on their arrival, and left on their departure, vary. They range from the dark, feral, woad-painted savages, gibbering a version of Cornish, depicted in the recent Hollywood movie version of King Arthur’s story, to the more honest admission of ignorance shown by French cartoonists René Uderzo and Albert Goscinny in their famous
Asterix
comic-strip adventures of Celtic-speaking tribes in Brittany (Plate 3). In
Asterix Goes to Britain
, the cross-Channel connection is caricatured in the form of a moustachioed, spindly-legged toff in plus-fours, a fraffly polite British cousin of the Gaulish Asterix. Named Anticlimax, he comes over from England to Asterix’s village in Armorica to ask for help fighting the Romans. In sketching the latter portrait they create their hallmark mixture of slapstick and modern contemporary lampoon, underwritten by a canny reading of the classics.

Uderzo and Goscinny incidentally come much nearer the mark than Hollywood. In one frame, Asterix echoes Tacitus’ comparison in telling his friend, the huge, dull Obelix (who has just violently misunderstood the purpose of a handshake with Anticlimax), that ‘
they
don’t talk quite the same as us’. If the cousinship and the people and language links had been Belgic rather than Gaulish, the sketch would, in my view, have been very close to reality. The first coins struck in Britain, around 40
BC
, bear the name Commios. It is believed that this might well be Commius, a king of the Belgic Atrebates, who fled to Britain in 51
BC
after rebelling against Julius Caesar.

My unorthodox view of English roots does not deny the historical significance of the imposition on the indigenous population of an Anglo-Saxon ruling elite. There are ample historical records for the establishment of Saxon kingdoms in England – Wessex, Essex, Kent, Sussex, East Anglia, Northumbria and Mercia – and of violent internecine warfare, but that may have been carried on against a pre-existing English cultural and genetic background.

The English maternal genetic record (mtDNA) denies the Anglo-Saxon wipeout story. English females almost completely lack the characteristic Saxon mtDNA marker type still found in the homeland of the Angles and Saxons. The Y chromosome evidence is potentially more informative, but the same data have been used by researchers variously to ‘prove’ either a wipeout or slightly less than 50% replacement. In this book I shall show that although there is some evidence for invasion in the first millennium
AD
, the ‘replacement’ was a mere 5%. So what does the Y chromosome say about English links with the Continent? A picture emerges that is surprisingly similar to that provided by mtDNA. There are general English similarities with Frisia, but these result mainly from common colonization history and intrusions in Neolithic times. Interestingly, the sixth-century writer Procopius of Caesarea mentions the Frisians as Dark Age invaders of the Isles, but his second-hand report is highly suspect. Specific genetic links do exist between the English and the European source regions suggested by Bede, but they do not support the wipeout theory.