Part One
1
A group of Mesolithic people standing 8,200 years ago on the North Downs above what is now the Strait of Dover might have witnessed an astonishing sight. At their feet was an outlet into the English Channel of two great rivers, now the Thames and the Rhine. To their north lay a series of marshes, relics of the land bridge that had joined Britain to mainland Europe across what was known as Doggerland.
Our onlookers would have seen a cloud towering over the northern horizon above a wall of water possibly thirty metres high. This tsunami had been created by a landslip off the Norwegian coast that would become known as the first Storegga Slide. The resulting wave made landfall in north-east Scotland and left traces that can still be found thirty kilometres inland. It swept south, submerging Doggerland and carrying millions of tons of rubble and sand hurtling towards the downs on which our onlookers were standing.
The impact would have been seismic. The water burst through a valley in the uplands and out into what is now the English Channel. Underwater archaeology has revealed scouring marks as the debris was dragged along the Channel floor. What had been a peninsula at the western extremity of Europe was now the British Isles.
During the following millennia, the inhabitants of this now-maritime nation developed an agrarian economy, felling most of the virgin woodlands and evolving a social organisation sufficient to build boats, exchange goods by sea, lay out settlements and erect monuments. Their faces have vanished, their words are a mystery, only fragments of their artefacts survive. These were the indigenous people we used to call ancient Britons, ghosts flitting across the stage on which the drama of British history was later enacted.
The traditional narrative
The prehistory of the British Isles was long the preserve of one profession, archaeology, fashioning theories often in a fog of inherited conjecture and myth. One such theory held that the ancient Britons were subjected to an invasion by a newly arriving people during the second or first millennium bc, outlier of a great population sweep across Europe from the east. This was thought to originate in the steppes of Russia, the Caucasus or Anatolia, impelled by the arrival of horses and the discovery of copper and tin in the late Bronze Age.
These people were said to have occupied Europe before the rise of Greece and Rome, filling what scholars viewed as a vacuum in the prehistoric narrative. They were first mentioned as keltoi, a general term meaning little more than ‘aliens’, by the Greek historian Herodotus (c.484–425 bc) and later described by Julius Caesar as Gauls. Though sometimes given the names of individual tribes, these people were lumped together as ‘Celts’ or more often ‘barbarians’. They were also assumed to have brought with them northern Europe’s first lingua franca, a branch of Indo-European known as proto-Celtic. No one at that time placed the Celts in Britain, rather in Spain and France. The first mention of Britons is c.320 bc by the Greek geographer Pytheas of Massalia as Pretani or Briteni, implying that they were ‘painted ones’.
The identification of people in Britain with Herodotus’ Celts was suggested only in the seventeenth century, purely on grounds of language. A French priest, Paul-Yves Pezron, first identified as ‘Gallic’ the similar languages of his Breton compatriots and those of the western British Isles. He hazarded that they were at some time past the same people. This insight was developed by Edward Lhuyd (1660–1709), a Welsh scholar working in Oxford around the turn of the seventeenth century, who classified ‘Goidelic’ Irish and Scots Gaelic as Q-Celtic. He classified Welsh, Cornish and Breton as P-Celtic or ‘Brythonic’. Lhuyd chose to group them collectively as Celtic rather than Pezron’s Gallic, apparently as a patriotic – or non-French – gesture. All were assumed to have come to Britain from France.
Lhuyd’s thesis became received wisdom. It joined similar ‘foundation narratives’ in nationalist France and Germany. Napoleon later imagined himself a latter-day Celtic emperor. German linguists and anthropologists hailed the Celts as the first Germans. The idea that this was all one people and one culture was reinforced by the archaeological discovery in the 1840s that Hallstatt, then and now a picturesque Austrian settlement, was a centre of salt mining and manufacture in the first millennium bc. This was followed by discoveries at La Tène in Switzerland. Their excavation yielded artefacts of elegance and charm from what became two eponymous material cultures, duly declared signs of a great Celtic civilisation.
Who these people were – or perhaps more intriguing had once been – remained a mystery. In 1956 a leading Lithuanian–American anthropologist, Marija Gimbutas, discovered a people called the Yamnayans who swept westwards from the Pontic and Caucasian steppes c.3300–2600 bc. They are supposed to have brought with them such wonders of Asian civilisation as the horse and wheel, ideal accompaniments to the emerging ages of copper and bronze. These incomers spread out across the Ukrainian and Hungarian plains, fusing their so-called ‘steppe’ DNA with that of indigenous peoples.
How far these Yamnayans fed into the Celtic narrative is confused. The assumption is that c.2600 bc they mutated into the so-called Bell Beaker culture of the Bronze Age, permeating westwards across northern Europe and becoming in turn Herodotus’ keltoi. This fitted neatly into the idea of a Europe constantly overrun and enriched by invaders. Hallstatt and La Tène demonstrated a status sufficient to threaten early Greeks and Romans, a threat that suggested a mighty people. To nationalist prehistorians, they were thus fitting ancestors of the later glory of France and Germany. By the 1920s the French historian Albert Grenier could declare the Celts nothing less than an empire, possibly ‘the greatest power in Europe … inexhaustible in energy and human might’.
This concept of a Celtic empire continues to dominate maps and histories of ‘Celtic Europe’. Geographers, like historians, cannot bear gaps. They seek links, commonalities, lines of invasion, influence and power. Whatever was west Europe’s pattern of occupation – and DNA may yet clarify this – it had evaporated by the time of Rome’s expansion northwards. By now ‘the Celts’ had become a people massively dispersed and reduced to ‘tribes’. They had expanded – or possibly been driven by new invaders – to the extremities of the continent, clinging to the wild Atlantic shores of Spain, France and the British Isles. In the case of Britain they were portrayed as replacing the entirety of the population with their language and culture. With the decline of Rome, their old lands were now overwhelmed by new waves of intruders, Franks, Goths, Huns and Vandals. Thus the Oxford History of England was unequivocal. It described Britain as ‘a refuse-heap on the edge of the ocean into which are swept the outworn relics of ethnic migrations.’ Britain became the Celt’s last redoubt.