I started this book with a debunking of the idea of a Celtic people in any shape or form. There was no such tribe, country, culture or language. Not only that, but the peoples customarily identified as ‘Celtic’ have never behaved together so as to justify one name. They came in the eighteenth century to be classified as Celts because of their geographical proximity and because their ancestors spoke languages derived from one branch of Indo-European.
I believe these peoples should be regarded as they regard themselves, as Irish, Scottish or Welsh – or for that matter Manx, Cornish or Breton. Each has its own history, language and culture, deserving the dignity and status of uniqueness. In searching for authenticity in these peoples, I have tried at every turn not to lump them together, least of all as Celts.
Towards the end of her life I often discussed with the Welsh writer Jan Morris her aggressively romantic view of her compatriots. She placed great store behind the myths and legends of a glorious Welsh past. When I protested that myths cannot be treated as history she disagreed. Myths, she said, were facts, just as history was facts. I should never underrate the role of myths in a nation’s identity. They could be among its most potent ‘facts’.
I am afraid it is on such myths that the birth of the British people came to be built. One held that a people invaded and conquered the British Isles and eliminated the ancient Britons in or round about the Bronze Age. These were the so-called Celts. The other myth was that Saxons invaded and conquered these Celts, driving them westwards in the fifth and sixth centuries ad and bringing with them a new, increasingly all-pervasive language.
These myths have come to underpin the story of Britain. They posit the Celts as a humiliated people. They posit the Saxons as a horde of foreigners who replaced them as true ‘Britons’. This fed a Victorian ideology of Saxon superiority, relegating the Irish, Scots and Welsh to the nuisance fringe of history. Celtic mythology became a loser’s culture. It validated England’s failure to understand and live at peace with the peoples of the west.
I remain astounded that the English people and their leaders have not been able to overcome these myths, indeed continue to hold to them. They have been unable to sustain a union with their neighbours in a prosperous modern federalism, as have most of the composite states of modern Europe. One of the world’s richest and most liberal countries, that delights in lecturing every corner of the world on democracy and civil rights, still cannot fashion for its own people a constitutional equilibrium. It has been enriched over centuries by the mixing of its four component peoples, English, Irish, Scots and Welsh. This mixing is the true legacy of the domestic empire created over a thousand years by the rulers of the English people in London. That legacy is worth preserving. It must not fall victim to myth.