Blood of the Isles

by Bryan Sykes

  Niall was succeeded in the High Kingship by his nephew, Dathi, his brother’s son. This was typical of the Gaelic tradition of derbhfine, the rules of inheritance that chose the new king from among the direct male relatives of the old. This served to ensure the patrilineal inheritance of the High Kingship itself and of the whole clan of Ui Neill. Their hold on the High Kingship was remarkably durable, lasting from the seventh to the eleventh century AD. Brian McEvoy’s and Dan Bradley’s Y-chromosome tests on the Irish showed that a high proportion of men with Ui Neill surnames – names like Gallacher, Boyle, Doherty, O’Connor and even Bradley, as well as O’Neill – shared an identical or very closely related Y-chromosome signature, strongly indicative of direct descent from Niall himself. In the parts of Ireland most strongly associated with the Ui Neill, mainly in the north-west, the proportion of these Y-chromosomes reaches almost one quarter of the male population.

  These bursts of Y-chromosome success over a few generations are something to be aware of in our interpretations of the genetic evidence from the Isles. The predictable effect will be to distort the Y-chromosome profile of a region in favour of the local chieftains and also to exaggerate the differences between the regions. We have already seen how this may be happening in that Y-chromosome similarity scores between regions are usually lower than the same comparative score for mitochondria. The only regions that we have so far encountered where the Y-chromosome similarity score is almost as high as the mitochondrial are the two Pictland regions of Tayside and Grampian. If inheritance and succession really were matrilineal, then this practice would indeed neutralize the Genghis effect, since no Y-chromosome could be linked to wealth and power for generation after generation. Another effect will be to reduce the age of a patrilineal clan. If one or a few Y-chromosome signatures come to predominate in a region due to the Genghis effect, they can do so only at the expense of others. These, it follows, are eliminated either because the men who carry them are actually killed, as was the case in the Mongol Empire, or because they do not have their fair share of children, since the Genghis male monopolizes the women in one way or another. The Genghis effect can substantially reduce the variety of Y-chromosomes, so the normal way of estimating the age of a clan in a region by averaging the number of mutations will be distorted. The fewer different Y-chromosomes there are, the fewer mutations will be found, the average will drop, and the age estimate will become artificially younger. The more pronounced the Genghis effect, the greater the distortion and the greater the difference between the true age of a clan and the estimate. To take things to extremes just to illustrate the point, were Genghis Khan’s Y-chromosome the only one to have survived from thirteenth-century Mongolia, only the mutations along his line would have accumulated and the age estimates of Mongolian Y-chromosomes would come out around 800 rather than thousands of years.

  Scotland has shown us a bit of everything. Vikings, Picts, Celts, the erratic effects of patrilineal kingship and the ancient bedrock of maternal ancestry. We have discovered that the Viking settlement of Orkney and Shetland was very substantial but also much more peaceful than was previously thought, with as many Norse women as men among the settlers. We now know how to identify a Norse Viking genetic presence anywhere in the Isles. Orkney and Shetland aside, there is a very close genetic affinity between Scotland and Ireland. There has certainly been a substantial settlement from Ireland at some time in the recent past, and the Irish Y-chromosome infiltration into the west of Scotland is almost certainly the signal of the relocation of the Dál Riata from Ulster to Argyll in the middle of the first millennium. We have also made an important discovery about the Picts. Their descendants are still in Scotland in force, yet they are not the weird prehistoric relics that were once imagined. They fit very comfortably into the Celtic bedrock of the Isles and they have been here a very long time. The Y-chromosomes are more diverse in the Pictland regions of Grampian and Tayside than in, say, Argyll or Ireland, and the explanation may have something to do with the tradition of matrilineal inheritance. The Western Isles stand out as being a little different from the mainland. There are Viking genes there for sure, but also strange ratios of the maternal clans. The Western Isles have the highest concentration of Katrines in the whole of Scotland, twice that of the Pictish heartland of Grampian, along with large numbers of a maritime branch of the clan of Tara which has travelled from the Mediterranean.

  We now have a very good idea of the basic genetic structure of Scotland and Ireland, two of the three regions of the Isles that are most closely identified with a Celtic ancestry. The third is Wales and to reach it we go south down the west coast, through the North Channel and into the Irish Sea. We sail past the Norse outpost of the Isle of Man and head further south to the distant peaks of Snowdonia, the highest point in the land of the Red Dragon.

  13

  WALES

  The smallest in land area of the four regions of the Isles, Wales has a population of just under 3 million, occupying a country of 8,000 square miles. Like Scotland, Wales is a mountainous country, with a broad upland spine running down the centre from the high mountains surrounding the summit of Snowdon (1,085 metres) to the Brecon Beacons, which rise to 886 metres in the south. Between these, the upland plateaux of the Cambrian Mountains are intercut by river valleys radiating in all directions and emptying the abundant rainfall into the Irish Sea and the Bristol Channel. Like Scotland, Wales is bounded on three sides by the sea, backed by coastal lowlands, and shares a land boundary with England. And, also like Scotland, this border, the Welsh Marches, has moved backwards and forwards according to the successes and ambitions of the rulers on either side.

  The archaeological evidence for the earliest settlers is comparatively thin on the ground. There is the ancient tooth from the cave at Pontnewydd in north Wales that we met in Chapter 1, but at 300,000 years it is far too old to be from a modern human species. At the other end of the country, at Paviland Cave on the Gower Peninsula, the remarkable burial of the ochre-tinted body of the Red Lady showed that Homo sapiens had reached Wales before the last Ice Age, but had been forced to retreat south as the temperature dropped and the great herds left the slowly freezing land.

  Precisely when humans returned to Wales is uncertain, but considering how close it is to the Cheddar Caves across the Severn, it is surely likely that Palaeolithic hunters got that far, though they left no trace. There are just a handful of late, coastal Mesolithic sites around the Irish Sea, where conditions were similar to sites in Ireland and on the west coast of Scotland. Life for the early Welsh followed the familiar pattern we have already seen elsewhere in the Isles: a life of gathering shellfish, offshore fishing in coracles and hunting in the wooded slopes behind the seashore. There are Neolithic megaliths in Wales, though none matches the magnificence of the Irish passage graves at Newgrange or the great monuments in Orkney or at Stonehenge. Neither have any Neolithic villages like Skara Brae yet been discovered. The earliest houses, round in outline, are isolated. There is some evidence of communal activities around the sites of chambered tombs, the cromlechs, whose stark stones have been stripped of their protective mounds of earth.

  The history of Wales reads like a catalogue of struggle and resistance against invasion. The Romans were the first to make a serious attempt to subdue the Welsh after the Claudian invasion of Britannia in AD 43. There were, of course, no national boundaries in those days. There was no country called Wales, or Scotland, or England. The only defined territories were those occupied by Celtic tribes, in Wales the Silures in the south, the Demetae in the south-west, the Cornovii in mid-Wales, the Deceangli on the north coast and the Ordovices in the mountains of Snowdonia and Cader Idris. Our only knowledge of these tribes and the lands they occupied comes from what the Romans themselves recorded on their campaigns. How accurate this is, we cannot know.

  The relentless expansion of the Roman Empire was nowhere near as well thought out as we might imagine. It was much more of a hit-and-miss affair, and when the invasion wa
s launched, the Romans had very little idea of the extent or the geography of Britannia. They probably did not even realize that beyond the easily subdued fertile lowlands lay barren mountain tracts which were far more difficult to conquer and then to hold against stubborn and spirited resistance. The mountains were also hardly worth having anyway, since the land was so poor that it could never yield much in the way of taxes. Everywhere there was the problem of secure frontiers.

  The first frontier in western Britannia between the Romans and the unconquered tribes followed the diagonal course of the Fosse Way from Exeter to Lincoln. This proved to be an unstable border and was repeatedly attacked by the Silures in AD 47 and 48, encouraged by Caratacus, the fugitive chieftain of the defeated Catuvellauni who had taken refuge in Wales. To contain the Silures, the Romans built fortresses at Gloucester and Usk. Caratacus moved north to the Ordovices in Snowdonia, and after their defeat in AD 51, and the capture of his wife and children, he fled to the court of Queen Cartimandua, leader of the Brigantes in northern Britannia. There his flight ended and he was handed over to the Romans by Cartimandua and taken to Rome in chains. Rather than execution, which captured ‘rebels’ could usually expect, Caratacus was released by Claudius after a defiant speech in which he is said to have exclaimed, referring to the grandeur of Rome, ‘Why do you, who possess so many palaces, covet our poor tents?’

  Welsh resistance to Rome did not end with the capture of Caratacus. The Silures resumed their attacks and defeated the twentieth legion in AD 52. Eventually the Emperor Nero, who had succeeded Claudius in AD 54, issued instructions to subdue the entire island of Britannia and in AD 58 a new governor arrived in Britannia to carry out the orders of the Emperor. Suetonius Paulinus was a professional soldier with campaign experience in the Atlas Mountains of Algeria, so he was used to dealing with independent-minded tribesmen the hard way. In two years of campaigning he had Wales in an iron grip. Refugees fled to Anglesey, the centre of the Druids, and Suetonius launched an attack. Tacitus records the scene with the British lining the shore of the Menai Straits: ‘Among them were black robed women with dishevelled hair like the Furies, brandishing torches. Close by stood the Druids raising their hands to the heavens and screaming dreadful curses’.

  Tacitus was a historian, but he needed to sell books, so his popular histories were always written to appeal to his readers in Rome. His description of the Druids’ habit of ‘drenching their altars in the blood of prisoners and consult[ing] their gods by means of human entrails’ was bound to boost sales.

  Neither the sight of wailing women nor the threat of evisceration on a Druid altar was likely to deter Suetonius Paulinus. His troops swam across the Straits and easily defeated the Celtic refugees and the Druids, not only killing all they could find but destroying the groves of trees that were sacred to their religion. However, Suetonius was forced to withdraw immediately to deal with the revolt of the Iceni under Boudicca and it was left to Tacitus’s father-in-law, the general Julius Agricola, to complete the subjugation of the Ordovices in AD 78, which he did, according to Tacitus, by killing them all, before moving off the following year to deal with Caledonia.

  Containing the Celtic tribes of Wales proved to be a long and costly operation for the Romans. Legionary forts at Chester, at Wroxeter near Shrewsbury and at Caerleon near Newport in south Wales defined the boundary between the rebellious uplands and the subjugated lowlands. Smaller forts at Caernarfon in the north-west and Carmarthen in the south-west contained Wales within a fortified rectangle, supplemented with a network of camps and smaller forts placed one day’s march apart and connected by straight roads. The military presence was strongest in the lands of the most belligerent tribes, the Ordovices in Snowdonia – so some must have survived Agricola – and the Silures of the south. The other Welsh tribes, the Deceangli along the north-western coastal plain between Conway and Chester, and the Demetae of Dyfed, showed less appetite for resistance and their territories were accordingly less densely garrisoned. Eventually the Celtic tribes of Wales settled for the life of a distant outpost of the Empire. The Romans took gold from Dolaucothi in mid-Wales back to Rome to be minted into coins and mined copper from the Great Orme near Llandudno. The Romans began to withdraw their garrisons from Wales by the beginning of the second century, indicating that the inhabitants were coming to terms with the Roman occupation, the last to succumb being the Ordovices.

  What might have been the genetic consequences of the Roman occupation that we should look out for? After the initial campaigns of subjugation, which may well have resulted in the deaths of thousands of men, the military outposts became important centres of economic activity. Around Caerleon, for example, a small township or vicus grew up outside the walls of the fort. By AD 100 there were 2,000 people living in the Caerleon vicus, attracted from far and wide by, and dependent on, the great wealth, in comparative terms, of the garrison. Even though there were rules which banned official Roman marriage between the legionaries and the indigenous people before AD 190, unofficial liaisons were tolerated. Indeed, as the threat level fell, garrisons were reduced in size and troops were withdrawn to be redeployed elsewhere in Britannia; this had a severe effect on the economy of the vici. And not only on the economy, according to one historian, who points out the effect that the redeployment of the garrison would have had on the women who had borne children. They had to stay behind.

  As usual, if there is one, it will be the Y-chromosome that is the witness to this activity. But who were the soldiers of the Roman army? Not all from Rome, that’s for sure. After the initial campaigns, when there would have been a substantial Italian contingent in the legions, the occupation itself was left in the hands of the auxiliaries. In Wales these troops, who would be granted citizenship when they retired, were drawn largely from the valleys of the Rhine and the Danube. It is for Y-chromosomes from that part of Europe that we should keep an eye out as a sign of the genetic influence of the Roman occupation.

  After the withdrawal of the Roman army from Wales in the fourth and fifth centuries AD, the demilitarized population came under attack from the Irish, including the infamous Niall of the Nine Hostages. In a mix of raiding for slaves and settlement, reminiscent of the first decades of the Viking age in Scotland, the coast of Wales facing the Irish Sea endured continual attacks. This period of attempted Irish colonization coincides with the expansion of the Dál Riata into Argyll, only 100 miles to the north. It may even have been carried out by the same people, and for the same reasons: the ambitions of the Ui Neill. But the Irish never established themselves in Wales as successfully as they did in Argyll. There was no equivalent in Wales of the continuous friction in Scotland between the Picts and the Gaels of Dalriada. The Irish form of Gaelic never displaced the P-Celtic of the Welsh as it did in Scotland.

  Within Wales, the people divided into a succession of minor kingdoms and before long the disputed land frontier became a battle zone once again, as it had been during the first years of the Roman occupation. This time the enemy were the Saxons, who had arrived in England in the middle of the fifth century and who, like the Irish, took advantage of the power vacuum left behind when the Romans departed. There is more to come on the Saxons and their genetic legacy when we travel to England, but for the time being we need only know that their westward expansion was effectively halted at roughly the same frontier that the Romans had defined with their lines of legionary forts.

  The boundary was formally marked out in the late eighth century by Offa’s Dyke, named after the Mercian king responsible for its construction. Unlike Hadrian’s Wall, Offa’s Dyke was not a fortified frontier barrier with regularly spaced garrisoned forts, but an earthwork built to denote rather than to defend the frontier, though in its construction it was far more than a boundary fence. Offa’s Dyke consisted of an earth embankment up to 3 metres high and backed by a ditch up to 20 metres wide. The boundary it defines stretched for 240 kilometres from Prestatyn on the north coast to Beachley near Chepstow on the Severn Estuary.
The Dyke marks this boundary for 130 kilometres, the rest being defined by natural features like the River Severn. Though it is built only of earth, thousands of men must have been involved in its construction, proof of the level of organization in the kingdom of Mercia at the time.

  The Saxons did not advance far beyond the Dyke but, as you might by now expect, it proved to be a fluid boundary. Though the construction of the Dyke coincided with the beginning of the Viking Age, the Welsh kings did not respond by uniting under one leader as the Celts and Picts had done in Scotland. The Welsh never did regain the lost lands in England on behalf of the Britons, though not always through want of trying. In 633 Cadwallon launched a counter-attack against the Saxon King Edwin, whose title Bretwalda at least claimed control of the whole of Britain. Edwin had attacked Anglesey, but Cadwallon drove him back into England and eventually defeated and killed him at the battle of Meigen near Doncaster. He then killed Edwin’s heirs, Osric and Eanfrith, and, according to Bede, it was his intention to exterminate the whole English race. He had his best and only chance in 633 for, the following year, he was himself killed by Eanfrith’s brother. As we shall see, the memory of Cadwallon’s near success was to shape things to come.