Rodney Castleden - The Element Encyclopedia of the Celts

Prasutagus was the Latinized form of his Celtic name, Prastotagus. One of his coinswas inscribed in a mixture of British and Latin, SVB ESV PRASTO ESICO FECIT , which means “Esico made [this] under Lord Prasto[tagus].” The coin bears Prastotagus’s portrait.

Vix is a village in Burgundy at the site of an important ancient fortified settlement with several burial mounds.

One of the mounds contained the body of a 30-year-old aristocratic woman who died in about 550 BC. Her body was buried with great ceremony on a bier that was made out of the body of a wagon. The wheelswere taken off and laid against the wall of her burial chamber. Her grave goods included a range of treasures, including Greek cups and other drinking vessels, but most remarkable was the huge bronze vessel, a krater for mixing wine. This stands as tall as the princess herself and is one of the most beautiful treasures of archaic Greek artthat have survived to the present day. It is in the museum at Châtillon-sur-Seine in Burgundy.

The krater was made in Greece or a Greek colony in about 500 BC, and transported in kit form, in labeled pieces, across the Mediterranean and up the Rhône Riverinto central France. The pieces were assembled for the royal client at Vix. This astonishingly exotic and expensive vase was decorated around its neck with a frieze of Greek warriors in full armor with chariots. The Greek krater does not tell us that the Greeks colonized central France, but that the Iron Age kings of Gaul were rich and powerful enough to purchase luxury goods from far afield.

It was importing artwork of this distinction that inspired the Celtic craftsmen to aspire to ever-higher artistic standards. It fueled cultural growth. The burial of the Greek krater also ensured that at least one example of this type of object survived for people of later centuries to enjoy; nothing quite like it has survived in Greece itself. By burying grave goods, the Celts became, unconsciously perhaps, custodians and curators of a European heritage.

An Iron Age Celtic tribein eastern Brittany, with its main center at Rennes. The Redones sent a contingent to fight against Julius Caesarduring the siege of Alesia.

The Roman conquest of Gaul was a bloodbath. A million Gauls, 20 percent of the population, were killed; another million were enslaved. Three hundred tribes were subjugated and 800 towns were destroyed. All the native Gauls living in Avaricum (modern Bourges) were slaughtered by the Romans—40,000 people.

The son of Maelgwnand his successor as King of Gwynedd.

Maelgwn’s son-in-law Elidyrtried to take Gwynedd from Rhun, but was killed on the beach at Caernarvon. Rhydderch Hael sailed south to avenge the killing of Elidyr, but his raid on Gwynedd was unsuccessful and he had to withdraw. Rhun responded by gathering an army and marching it north, through South Rheged, probably by way of York. It was a march of legendary distance and duration. Rhun’s army was away from home for a very long time and is said to have met no resistance. Elidyr’s son and successor, the boy king Llywarch Hen, was in no position to resist and had not the temperament either; it was probably wiser anyway to allow Rhun’s great army pass through unopposed. Llywarch Hen was left alone, and eventually died, an elderly Celtic exile writingpoetry in Powys, long after the English had overrun his kingdom.

Rhun marched on, deep into the Gododdin (south-east Scotland), all the way to the Forth, still unopposed. After this impressive parade of military strength, he marched his great army home to Gwynedd. It was a triumph. Yet it also illustrated, just as Arthur’s career had 30 years earlier, how the British could organize brilliant and spectacular military coups de théâtre and yet fail to hold together the polity of a large kingdom. To judge from Gildas, the British disliked kings. They felt no overriding need to unite behind a powerful monarch or submit to central control. They simply did not see, even as late as 560, how dangerous the growing Anglo-Saxon colonies in the east and south-east were. The soldier’s loyalty was always to his lord, but this was a local war-band loyalty. Petty rivalries among the war-band leaders, the kings, and sub-kings, would be likely to erupt quickly, easily, and repeatedly into civil war.

The northern British poems express the spirit of the times well. The highest ethic involved the devoted loyalty of faithful warriors to their lord and his personal destiny. The idea of sacrificing or compromising that loyalty by serving an overlord ran against this sentiment. Long-term loyalty to an overking or commander-in-chief would have been alien to the rank-and-file warrior. The effect was that although British resistance to the advance of the Saxons in the sixth and seventh centuries may have been intermittently highly successful, in the end it was doomed, in the same way that resistance to the Roman invasion had been in the first century, as contemporary Roman commentators had recognized ( see Myths: The History of Taliesin ).

Rhun, son of Urien, became a cleric, settling in Gwynedd. He may have been the author of The Life of Germanus in about 630. Varying accounts of the baptism of King Edwin of Northumbria exist. One is that Rhun baptized Edwin while the latter was in exile, a boy-refugee in Gwynedd, some 15 years before Paulinus baptized the people of Northumbria. Another account (recorded by Nennius) is that Rhun baptized Edwin in 626, in Northumbria, when he was king. Both may be true, as it may have been deemed necessary to stage a repeat baptism ceremony for the king, in public, for the benefit of his subjects.

Bede’s account is different again, giving Paulinus the credit, but Bede had a political motive. Writingwhen he did, he may have wanted to show the first Christian Anglian king as sponsored by the Roman Church, not by the Celtic Church. A power struggle between the two had been going on since Augustine’s arrival at the end of the sixth century, and Bede would have had a strong motive for reducing the role of the British priesthood and exaggerating that of the Roman. It seems likely, then, that it was Rhun who actually wrote the account of the baptism ceremony, first hand, in 627.

See Elidyr , Urien.

See Dyfnwal , Kentigern.

One of the things the Romans did for us was to build roads. That at least is what we have been led to believe. But what was there in the way of a road system before the Romans arrived in the Celtic west—in Gaul, in Hispania, in Britain?

Ancient trackways followed the crests of prominent hill ridges, especially where these persisted for long distances. The chalk and limestone escarpments of lowland England and northern France lent themselves to this form of communication. One advantage was that they were raised and on permeable rock, so they were drier and firmer than tracks on lower ground. Another advantage was that navigation was easier; all you had to do was to follow the crest of the ridge. Being raised up also gave better views across the landscape, so you had better opportunities to identify where you were.