Simon Jenkins - The Celts: A Sceptical History

1. viii

The most vivid account of the geography of the British Isles appears in the first volume of the Oxford History of England, published in 1936. It refers to the islands as created in two parts. The western part is ancient, mountainous, rugged, broken, irregular, scrubby, sour-soiled and incommunicable in short, not a pretty place. The eastern part is a contrast, newer, softer, warmer, alluvial and fertile, attractive to invaders. The authors of the History assured readers that, despite this distinction, the series would be all-encompassing. It would narrate the story of the islands of Britain as a whole.

That promise was not kept, and is rarely kept in histories of the British Isles. Historians invariably direct their readers to the eastern half of the archipelago, the fertile, attractive side called England. This bias is reflected in the attention given to the peoples occupying the two sides, notably to the conflicts between them leading to the supremacy of the peoples of the east. Britons are taught from birth the story of England, just England. They are taught little or nothing of the others notably the Irish, Scottish and Welsh commonly referred to collectively as the Celts.

The first part of this book explains why the word Celt is a misnomer. As we shall see, scholarship since the 1960s has struggled to dismantle long-held theories of how the British people came into existence. This dismantling is important because, to a remarkable extent, theories of Celticism continue to fuel many of the prejudices and misconceptions that divide the peoples of the British Isles to this day. They both distort history and demean the distinctive characteristics of the Irish, Scottish and Welsh nations.

First among those misconceptions is that a people called the Celts invaded Britain from continental Europe sometime in the second or first millennium bc. There has never been found a distinct people, race or tribe claiming the name or language of Celtic. The word keltoi first appears in Greek as applied generally to aliens or barbarians, assumed to be inhabitants of western Europe before the rise of the classical world. In Latin, the term used is Galli or Gauls. Nowhere in this period was any such term applied to the people of the British Isles. Excavations in the nineteenth century of Iron Age sites at Hallstatt in Austria and La Tne in Switzerland were declared evidence of a Celtic civilisation, possibly even stretching from Asia Minor in the east to Portugal in the west. Its artefacts too were granted the designation Celtic, the style in use to this day.

As we shall see, early analysis of ancient DNA generally accepted that the peoples who occupied the British Isles dated back to a climatic migration northwards after the end of the last Ice Age. This migration occurred with global warming, primarily up the Atlantic coast of Europe from Iberia. On the eastern side of the islands, perhaps more recent DNA showed an occupation from continental northern Europe. There is little consensus on the balance between these two incursions, or when they occurred. Neither merits the title Celtic invasion.

Probably in the late Bronze Age (c.2100800 bc ) these inhabitants of Britain came into contact with a variety of languages spreading across Europe that accompanied the growth of trade in metals. These tongues, loosely related to each other within the proto-Celtic Indo-European group, were assumed to have permeated every corner of the British Isles at least down to the period of the Roman occupation. That permeation is now doubted, with the eastern side of Britain thought possibly to have been speaking some version of the Germanic of northern Europe.

Certainly, two completely different language groups were in use in the British Isles by the second century after the withdrawal of the Roman empire. This was attributed to another misconception: a further mass incursion this time of Saxons in the fifth and sixth centuries, supposedly either wiping out the eastern Celtic speakers or driving them westwards across Britain. Like the Celtic invasion before it, this second one is also now discredited. While there are genetic signs of people migrating round the North Sea at the end of the Roman empire, there is nothing to indicate a wipe-out of its inhabitants and their total replacement throughout the length of eastern Britain. It is now thought possible that the many different peoples of the British Isles, east and west, evolved their own languages independent of any population movement. The east looked east and the west looked west.