The Romans liked to portray the Celts as backward and primitive. When Roman legionaries were posted along Hadrian’s Wall, they referred disparagingly to the native Celts as Brittunculi—“wretched little Brits.” It was typical colonial army talk.
The mindset of the Romans was not so very different than that of the British imperialists who 1,700 years later denigrated a wide range of native peoples all around the world, labeling them “pagans,” “heathens,” or even “cannibals.” Bringing such unfortunates under the umbrella of British rule and converting them to Christianity was seen as the right thing to do. The British genuinely believed they were doing these modern barbarians a favor by conquering them, imposing British law, and forcing on them a Victorian version of Christianity.
Having said this, the Roman commentators were partially right, at least in grouping together the peoples who lived north of the Alps. In the period 500–200 BC, north of the Alps from France across Europe to the Black Sea, there was a family of peoples who shared a number of common elements.
A surge in population growth seems to have driven the central European group to become expansionist. In about 400 BC, Celtic tribes moved south into Italy. In 387 BC, they defeated the Romans in battle and sacked Rome itself. In 279 BC, another group of Celts moved into Greece, attacking and plundering the rich, sacred site of Delphi. The following year, 278 BC, three tribes crossed into Asia Minor. Together these three tribes were known as the Galatae, which may be the ultimate origin of the name Keltoi (in Greek) or Celtae (in Latin). They established colonies in what is still known as Galatia.
These things happened. But nineteenth-century historians believed that there was an aggressive expansion in all directions.
THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY VIEW
There is a familiar and oftenrepeated classic nineteenthcentury view of the Celts, which survives in some serious academic work written as late as the 1970s, and in more popular writings since then that are based on the older books. It is still being promoted in some quarters. As recently as the 1990s, a book was published in Ireland, in Irish, and therefore presumably for Irish consumption, which gave the view in outline:
Before Rome became a power, the people we call Celts dominated much of Europe. Their influence ranged from Britain and Ireland in the north to France and Spain in the south and east as far as Turkey. They were united not by a common ruler but by a common language and culture… Their power declined, the influence of their language and culture remains.
This persuasively expressed view gives us an Iron Age race of people bonded by language and culture, with a heartland in central Europe in the first millennium BC. These people migrated outward from their heartland in all directions to invade and colonize most of Europe, taking their culture with them (roughly 800–100 BC). The objects unearthed by antiquarians and archeologists were identified as being in more than one style, so three successive invasions or waves of migrants were inferred, representing three different cultures: Hallstatt, La Tène, and Belgic.
A key element in this approach is the idea that almost everywhere the old pan-European Celtic culture has died out. Only a few refuges are left in the far west—Galicia, Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.
Interestingly, however, the Greek and Roman writers who used the word “Celts” applied it only to the barbarian people who were their northern neighbors, not to the people living on the Atlantic fringes to the far northwest. There is a certain irony in this, as these are just the people who are usually thought of as Celts today.
THE NEW VIEW
By the 1960s, the nineteenthcentury view was being seriously challenged. There was no real archeological evidence for three major invasions; in fact there seemed to be no evidence of any invasions.
Now we come to an important archeological reality: there was no Iron Age Celtic explosion in the center of Europe spinning migrant Celts off in all directions. This will make an enormous difference to the way we view the modern Celts of the Atlantic coastlands. If those territories on the western fringe of Europe were not invaded by waves of Celtic invaders or migrants in the first millennium BC, the people who live there now are unlikely to be descendants of the central European Celts. This is an idea we will come back to later.
The modern view may perhaps be disappointing to some people. There was not, after all, a pan-European Celtic civilization that was uniform in language, culture, and race: there was no golden age of the Celts. Instead there were many separate autonomous communities—tribes—who exchanged goods, styles, and ideas but remained quite diverse and independent, and their relationships with one another shifted through time. This modern view is based on greater archeological and anthropological knowledge.
The new view is that the prehistoric Celts were essentially two distinct groups: the Iron Age peoples of central Europe and the Iron Age peoples of the Atlantic coastline of western Europe. The Atlantic Celts were more or less stationary, although there was a good deal of trading and other communication among them. The central European Celts, on the other hand, were on the move, migrating south into Italy and east toward Romania and Greece.
A fascinating and exciting aspect of this new approach is the realization that the Atlantic Celts did not arrive in the west as a result of an Iron Age migration in the first millennium BC. They were there already and they had been there for a very long time. Their culture had been evolving over thousands of years. They borrowed or acquired some fashions from the central European Celts, but as a result of contact and trade, not invasion or mass migration. The book will focus mainly on the Atlantic Celts, whose enduring culture was a very long time evolving, though there will be entries about the central European Celts too.
THE PAST IN BOOKS
The Celts 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,