Rodney Castleden - The Element Encyclopedia of the Celts

Throughout the country, the Anglo-Saxon conquest was a process of replacing the ruling class, but underneath that there was continuity of community: continuity of bloodline, continuity of genetic material, and continuity of custom. Again, as far as the nineteenthcentury historians are concerned, it is a case of a chapter boundary that has been drawn too sharply.

Many people living in southeast England today are less English than they imagine. In terms of ancestry, they are more Celt than Saxon. According to Professor Stephen Oppenheimer, a leading DNA expert, as few as 5 percent of the people now living in England are of Anglo-Saxon stock; most people who think of themselves as English are genetically of a much more ancient native stock—not Germanic incomers at all.

This discovery, a result of the DNA revolution, raises many questions about ethnic identity. Often when the issue of devolution has been discussed in relation to Wales or Scotland, journalists and politicians have spoken of the views of “the Welsh” or “the Scots,” as if the Welsh and the Scots are distinct and recognizable populations. But, in the terms envisaged in any referendum that has been conducted or planned, they are simply those with Welsh or Scottish addresses who are entitled to vote. Many people of Welsh and Scottish origin have moved to England in search of work; are they no longer Welsh or Scottish? There are also many people raised in England who have gone to Wales or Scotland to live; have they ceased to be English? Did they become Welsh or Scottish by moving house? Defining the Welsh and the Scots turns out to be much harder than anyone imagined.

Professor Norman Davies dedicated his excellent 1999 book The Isles: A History to “the memory of Richard Samson Davies: English by birth, Welsh by conviction, Lancastrian by choice, British by chance.”

Simon James, who wrote The Atlantic Celts (also 1999), makes the interesting point that each of us possesses more than one ethnic identity, because several identities nest inside one another. Simon James himself is a Westerner, a European, a British citizen, an Englishman, a Southerner, and a Londoner. He also has more than one ethnic identity because of his mixed ancestry. Among his recent forebears (he is not specific, but by implication his grandparents and great-grandparents) he can identify Welsh or Cornish, Norman-French, and English people, which gives him the mixed genes of Celtic, Latin, and Germanic bloodlines.

I worked for three years in London, but that did not make me a Londoner. I lived for 12 years in Northamptonshire, but that did not turn me into a Mercian. I was born in Sussex of Kentish parents, Kentish grandparents, and Kentish great-grandparents: Kentish farm laborer stock. That ought to make me thoroughly English. I was brought up to believe that I was English and I feel as though I am English, yet my bone structure tells a different story: I am of pre-Anglo-Saxon British stock—Celtic. That unique British expert on the archeology of feet, Phyllis Jackson, tells me I have trademark Celtic feet. And if you are wondering what Celtic feet look like, they are long and narrow, with toes almost in a straight line, and a long longitudinal arch. My descent is therefore (probably) from that necessary Kenting slave class kept on by the Jutes when they colonized Kent in the fifth century. In fact a great many people born and bred in England are Celtic, as Professor Oppenheimer’s research has shown.

It works the other way too. A great many people living in Scotland and Wales are Anglo-Saxon in origin. It is not what one might have expected. DNA test results turn up more and more problems for claimed or perceived ethnicity.

The words “Celts” and “Celtic” have themselves been used differently over time, especially over the last 200 years, as perceptions of the past and perceptions of the present have shifted. The Celtic revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries identified two kinds of Celt (the Celt according to race or language), and the twentieth century produced three further kinds (the Celt according to culture, politics, or preference). We tend to use the name “Celts” to include people from a continent-wide area, right across Europe, and across quite a long period too, from the Iron Age to the present day. But a lot of those people would never have thought of calling themselves by that name. A monk living on Iona in the eighth century AD would probably have thought of himself as an Irishman in exile. A man in a plaid driving cattle down a Scottish glen in the sixteenth century would have seen himself as a Highlander and a Campbell. A woman living at the Maiden Castle hillfort in the fourth century BC would have thought of herself as a member of the Durotriges tribe, possibly with kin across the water in Brittany. Each of these people would have been startled to hear themselves called Celts: as far as they were concerned, that was not their identity.

We have to set aside the long-held assumption that the Celts were a pan-European Iron Age race. This means rethinking European prehistory. Modern archeological and anthropological evidence is pointing toward a reality that is far more exciting.

Instead of the Celts of the west being relative newcomers, arriving in the Atlantic coastlands between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago, they are emerging as an indigenous people with a very ancient ancestry indeed. Ten thousand years ago, the last cold stage of the Ice Age was ending and the ice that had covered much of Britain and Ireland was melting back. After the long glacial episode, the islands were becoming habitable again. What happened then was that people living in refuges in northern Spain began to migrate northward, bay-hopping along the coast, to colonize the lands that were thawing out. These early migrants spread through exactly the areas that we now think of as Celtic—Galicia, Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, and Scotland—plus a margin along their eastern edges—northern Spain, the Bay of Biscay coast of France, Normandy, and the whole of England. This is where the Celtic ancestry of Britain (England included) came from—this ancient migration from the south.

The people we call Celts were the descendants of these Middle Stone Age hunters, gatherers, and fishermen, and of the New Stone Age farmers, pastoralists, and stone circle builders who succeeded them.

One of the stone circles, Stonehenge, has become an emblem of Celtic Britain. Modern Druids have claimed it as theirs, and we could question this entitlement, but this process of claiming and adopting has probably been repeated over and over again through time. Stonehenge was once thought to be the work of a Mycenaean architect, partly because of the similarity between the stone trilithons and the architecture of the great Lion Gate at Mycenae, built in 1250 BC, and there are carvings on the stones that seem to show a Mycenaean dagger. But now radiocarbon dates show that they were raised long before that, in 2500 BC. The earth circle round them dates from 3100 BC, and the totem poles that stood close by were raised in 8000–7000 BC. Stonehenge turns out to be a monument that was modified and developed repeatedly, by indigenous people, during the course of the long evolution of the Atlantic Celtic culture. The site witnessed and expressed the whole span of the Atlantic Celts’ prehistory.

Most of the big standing stones in the lands of the Atlantic Celts were raised in the Neolithic (3000– 2000 BC), some in the Bronze Age (2000–600 BC), and a small number in the Iron Age. They clearly speak of the bond the Atlantic Celts had developed with standing stones.