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

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.³

      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.’⁴

      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.⁵ 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.⁶ 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.⁷ 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).⁸

      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.⁹ 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 43.¹⁰

      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