Blood of the Isles

by Bryan Sykes

There was just one Sigurd in mid-Wales, Mr Jones, from the small village of Garthmyl near Rhyader. And none at all in south Wales, even in Pembrokeshire where the high level of blood group A was explained by a Viking settlement in the area. There would need to have been a very large influx of Vikings into Pembrokeshire to alter the blood-group proportions of the whole region and we would have been bound to find several Sigurds in the vicinity. But we did not find a single one. I think that has to mean that the Viking explanation of Morgan Watkin for the high frequency of blood group A in ‘Little England beyond Wales’ is wrong.

  Turning to the clan of Wodan, this hovers around the 10 per cent mark in all three regions of Wales. However, when I looked at the detailed fingerprints, I found a small cluster in mid-Wales that caught my eye. There were only half a dozen of them, but they were unusual. Mr Rees from New Quay, a picturesque fishing port on Cardigan Bay, Mr Jones from Mynachlog near Tregaron, and finally Mr Davies from Lampeter.

  Before I draw any profound conclusions, may I recommend Lampeter as the best place in Wales for ice-cream. At the junction of the High Street and the Tregaron Road stands the ice-cream emporium of Conti’s Café. Going inside, when I was last there, was like returning to the cafés of my youth. No cappuccinos or lattes here, just weak milky coffee in one of those unbreakable glass cups, served by a waitress in a blue tabard. A rare experience indeed these days. Alas, I’ve heard that the interior has been recently revamped, but the ice-cream is still wonderful. Made every day on the premises by the owner, Leno Conti, not brought in ready-made. Perish the thought.

  Now for the profound conclusions. I think this Wodan Y-chromosome has been in mid-Wales for a very long time. There are first-generation derivatives nearby, by which I mean Y-chromosomes that have diverged away by one mutation. And it is only one mutational step removed from a chromosome cluster in Pictland. I have not found this chromosome in Ireland or in England, except in one place. Mr Roach, from Sidmouth in Devon, has it. I could be wrong, but I don’t think this is a Norman chromosome. If it were, I would have expected to find similar chromosomes in other parts of England, which, with the exception of Mr Roach, I have not. I couldn’t help wondering if this is a very ancient Welsh chromosome. After all, Tregaron and Lampeter are not that far from Plynlimmon where H. J. Fleure was convinced from his work on skull shapes that he had found a relic population, and where there was also a very high frequency of blood group B. I wonder, as I write this, whether the great anthropologist ever tasted Conti’s ice-cream on his travels.

  Of course, we must not forget the clan of Oisin. This is far and away the most common clan in all the three regions of Wales, which it also is in the whole of the Isles. In fact, at 86 per cent, mid-Wales has the highest proportion of Oisin in the Isles outside Ireland. Interestingly, the Pictland region of Grampian is only just behind, with 84 per cent. Only Munster and Connacht in the west of Ireland have higher proportions of Oisin. The Atlantis chromosome, the prevalent Y-chromosome in the clan, is very frequent in Wales, more so even than in Ireland, as a proportion of Oisins as a whole.

  There is one other interesting thing to point out. The diversity, that is the variety, of different Oisin Y-chromo-somes is lower in Wales, especially mid-Wales, than anywhere else in mainland Britain. Geneticists usually put that down to a recent arrival date, there having been less time for mutations and diversity to have arisen. But to find the lowest diversity in mid-Wales of all places seems very peculiar to me, since all the other historical indicators suggest that mid-Wales has been among the most stable and longest settled of any region in the Isles – even if I did not find any evidence of Neanderthals. The lower than expected amount of accumulated mutations in the Y-chromosomes is beginning to be a recurrent feature of most of the Celtic regions of the Isles. Whether this is also true of England, we are about to discover as we push east over the hills.

  15

  ENGLAND

  As we cross the long-disputed boundary into England, the land spreads out in all directions, undulating certainly but without the mountains that insulated Wales, and Scotland, against the full force of foreign invasion which began with the Romans and continued for more than 1,000 years. Geography, as always, led history by the hand. It was the fertile lowlands of England, not the barren hills of Wales or Scotland, that made the Isles such a tempting target from the Roman invasion of AD 43 to the Norman Conquest of 1066 and beyond. But the settlement of England and the Isles began thousands of years earlier.

  England is home to 49 million people, which is almost 80 per cent of the entire population of the Isles, packed into 50,000 square miles, which is 40 per cent of the space. England has examples of almost every kind of geological structure, from extremely old volcanic rocks in Cornwall and Cumbria to very recent, reclaimed soils in the fenlands of East Anglia. Between these extremes of age and distance lie successions of sandstones and limestones from different geological eras which cross the country diagonally from the south-west to the north-east. As a rule of thumb, the further east, the younger in geological time the rocks become. These sedimentary bedrocks, built up over hundreds of millions of years when England lay beneath a warm and shallow sea, are mainly alkaline. They erode to very fertile soils, and almost all of England is now intensively farmed. It was always the agricultural wealth of England and the opportunities this provided for taxation and tribute, as well as settlement, that attracted the attention of foreign invaders.

  Beyond the fertile plains and rolling downland, England is surrounded by mountains and high hills. Along the centre, the spine of the Pennines in the north of England rises to 893 metres at Cross Fell. Forty miles to the west, among the picturesque mountains of the Lake District, is Scafell Pike (977 metres), England’s highest peak. The garland of mountains and hills which form the boundaries with Wales and Scotland have preoccupied all invaders as they tried, and usually failed, to protect England behind stable frontiers.

  The first people to reach England after the Ice Age were the big-game hunters of the Old Stone Age, colonizing the Isles directly over the land bridge from continental Europe. By 12,000 years ago, hunters were living in the caves at Cheddar. After the cold snap of the Younger Dryas forced a temporary retreat, the Mesolithics returned 10,000 years ago. They were confined to the coasts and riverbanks by the dense woodland that soon covered the warming Isles. Like the occupants of Mount Sandel in Ireland and Oronsay off the coast of Scotland, they were semi-nomadic, with winter and summer camps alternating between woodland and shore to make the most of the wild food: fish and shellfish in winter, birds’ eggs in spring and summer, hazel and other nuts in the autumn – and red deer at any time they could be killed. The Mesolithic life in England was no different from that in the rest of the Isles, and is nowhere more completely documented than at Starr Carr in the Vale of Pickering in North Yorkshire, 5 miles to the west of the seaside resort of Scarborough.

  At the marshy edge of a lake, this was a site where, 9,500 years ago, the elusive Mesolithics brought their kills from the nearby high ground of the North Yorkshire Moors to be butchered and distributed. Thanks to the marshy, waterlogged conditions, all sorts of things have been preserved which on dry sites would have been lost. Pollen, insects, charcoal, wood and animal bones are all preserved in the damp and airless peat. From an analysis of the bones left at Starr Carr, most of the meat came from wild cattle, the enormous aurochs which roamed through the dense woods. There were elk and red-deer bones too, sometimes with marks to show where a flint-tipped arrow had cut through the skin on its way to the beast’s heart. Badger, red-fox and pine-marten bones show that even smaller mammals could be killed, perhaps for food, perhaps only for their skins. The Mesolithic occupants of Starr Carr were extremely skilled in working deer antler, making not only large objects like spearheads, but also smaller, but still deadly, arrowheads. The flints they used to work the antlers lie all around the site. But perhaps the most remarkable revelation at Starr Carr is the evidence of domestic dogs. The hunters, we can assume,
used these dogs to round up deer and wild cattle or to pursue a wounded animal if an arrow had failed to find the heart.

  Farming arrived in England a little before it did in the rest of the Isles. Bit by bit the wild woods were cleared. The Mesolithics already knew how to kill trees by ring-barking, so they created glades to encourage the growth of hazel bushes. The Neolithic farmers killed trees in the same way, and may have been descendants of the same people. They targeted elms in particular, because they understood that they grew in the most fertile soils. Gradually, more food was grown than was strictly necessary for survival, which meant that not everyone had to spend all their time looking for food. Thus began the social revolution that culminated in the rise of chieftains and then minor kings, each battling it out for supremacy and ownership of land. Megalithic monuments, like the stone circles at Stonehenge and Avebury, took pride of place in a landscape rich in burials and tombs. The newly discovered metals of copper, bronze and iron, in that order, replaced bloodstone and flint as the principal materials for axes, knives and other agricultural implements. They also found their uses as weapons, cast or beaten into daggers, swords and spears as warfare became endemic. Iron tools, much stronger than bronze and with a much sharper cutting edge, made woodland clearing easier. The increase in the acreage of agricultural land led to a big rise in the population of the Isles.

  By the fourth century BC, the archaeological evidence points to an increase in inter-tribal warfare. Hill forts became more numerous and their defences more elaborate. Swords replaced daggers in a sign of more organized fighting. By the third century BC, the style of metal-working for both weapons and jewellery had changed to the second Celtic phase of La Tène, but always with a distinctive British dialect. The export of Cornish tin, an essential ingredient in the manufacture of bronze, continued apace, with the export trade to the Mediterranean dominated by Phoenicians.

  One of the very first accounts of the Isles of the time, by Pytheas from the Greek colony of Massilia (now Marseilles) in southern France, was written around 320 BC. His original work, On the Ocean, has not survived and we only know of his remarkable journey through references to it from other classical writers like Eratosthenes and Pliny. Pytheas probably travelled overland from Massilia to the mouth of the Gironde, near present-day Bordeaux, and boarded a ship bound for the north. It took him three days to sail up the coast of France and around the edge of Brittany. From there, his journey took him across to Cornwall and the Prettanic Isles, as he calls Britain. He noted the lengthening day as his voyages took him right up the eastern side of Britain to the Orkneys. From there he travelled even further north to a land of frozen seas and volcanoes. This must have been Iceland, though whether he actually went that far north himself or only sailed as far as the Shetlands and recorded the tales of sailors he met there is still keenly contested among historians. On the Ocean is important in two ways. It brought the Isles to the attention of the classical world, and it also showed how active were the sea lanes up and down the Atlantic coast of France and all round the British coastline as well. Pytheas seemed able to pick up a sea passage whenever he wanted one.

  The need to impress and confirm status with material objects was at least as prevalent then as it is now. The desire for displays of wealth led to the creation of astonishingly beautiful objects and ceremonial weapons. The finds from the royal burial at Sutton Hoo near Woodbridge in Suffolk, from the seventh century AD, in the middle of what we now refer to as the Dark Ages, are delicate and beautiful beyond belief. This was almost certainly the tomb of King Raedwald, a Saxon king from the 620s. Buckles and strap-mounts of gold inlaid with garnets and millefiori glass, so fresh and so delicate that, when I saw them on display in the British Museum, it was very difficult for me to believe that they were the originals and not modern copies. The ceremonial shield, the inlaid helmet – these were not objects to be used in battle; they were strictly for display only. Even the sword, its blade forged from eighteen laminated iron rods twisted together and beaten flat, was purely for show. There the display is a modern replica. The original lies with its iron blade rusted, peeled and pitted. But the handle ends with a gold and garnet cloisonné pommel as bright and fresh as new.

  In the centuries preceding the Roman conquest, life in the Isles followed the progression widely found across continental Europe. Iron replaced bronze as the principal metal. Fortified encampments developed on the hills. Although there were still extensive forests, much of the land had been cleared for grain or pasture. In the centuries before Caesar’s expeditions in 55 and 54 BC, the Isles, and England in particular, had adopted many of the artistic styles of the continental Iron Age. The perennial question as to whether these cultural changes were the consequence of large-scale immigration or of the indigenous people copying and adapting new styles has never yet been confidently answered – and is one that genetics should be in a better position to explore than most disciplines.

  Caesar’s expeditions set the pattern for the Roman invasion proper a century later. What prevented Caesar himself from embarking on a full-scale invasion, or even if this was his intention, is not known. Certainly he had his hands full in controlling rebellions in Gaul and his ambitions may have been curtailed by such practical considerations. Nevertheless, his expeditions set the pattern for the later invasion. Caesar had forced the surrender and submission of tribal leaders in Britain and had exacted annual tribute payments from them. He also installed puppet kings. So, although there was no permanent occupation, the political influence of Rome was already substantial well before the invasion proper. The British aristocracy began to adopt the trappings of Roman civilization, particularly in the south-east where there was vigorous trade with the nearest parts of Gaul. Britain was exporting corn, iron and cattle to the Roman Empire across the busy sea routes to the ports of Gaul, while Roman luxury goods flowed in the opposite direction. Even if Britain was not part of the Empire, it certainly benefited from the proximity and the requirements of its armies.

  The full integration of Britannia into the Empire was only a matter of time. Under Caesar’s successor Augustus, and even under Tiberius who came after him, there was no appetite for invasion, even though it would have been comparatively easy. But the taxes were flowing in and Britain posed no military threat. A few troublesome Gauls might have crossed the Channel to escape the wrath of Rome, but that was all. One British tribe, the Catuvellauni, centred on Hertfordshire, began to expand their territories into the lands of neighbours who had thought they enjoyed Rome’s protection. But the Romans, now under Augustus, turned a blind eye to these infringements, enabling Cunobelinus, King of the Catuvellauni, to move his headquarters to Colchester, the former base of the Trinovantes, from where he could control the trade routes across the North Sea to the Rhine.

  In a re-run of the age-old story, a disgruntled prince – in this case it was Amminius, one of the sons of Cunobelinus – fled to the emperor for assistance. By now the emperor was the notoriously unstable Caligula, who claimed that by accepting the formal submission of Amminius he had actually negotiated the surrender of the whole of Britain, and he issued orders for an invasion to consolidate the surrender. That was abandoned at the last minute, but only after Caligula had reached the Channel coast with his armies. He collected some sea shells and ordered a withdrawal back to Rome.

  Although this was a farce, all the ground work had been done. The military build-up, the logistics of invasion, the public relations with the citizens of Rome: everything was in place, so it was an easy matter for Caligula’s successor – after his welcome murder – to give the signal to invade. The new emperor was Claudius, Caligula’s uncle. Widely thought of at the time as mentally retarded, he was nothing of the sort. Claudius needed a military triumph to cement his authority and Britain was the obvious target. The excuse was an invitation from Verica, King of the Atrebates, who had been expelled following an internal palace coup. The invasion force that assembled on the Channel shore comprised four legions: the II A
ugusta and XIV Gemina from the upper Rhine, the XX Valeria from the lower Rhine and the IX Hispania from Pannonia in modern Hungary, each with about 5,000 men and an equal number of auxiliaries. The legionnaires were all Roman citizens, mainly drawn from Italy at this period, while the auxiliaries were recruited from native fighters from previously conquered regions of the Empire and organized into regular regiments with Roman commanders. Forty thousand men in 600 ships, under the command of Aulus Plautius, who had seen service in the Balkans, crossed the Channel from Boulogne in Gaul to land on the shingle at Richborough, near Sandwich on the east coast of Kent.

  The landings were unopposed and, after digging defensive ditches at Richborough, the troops advanced rapidly to the River Medway, 20 miles to the west, where the British defence under Caratacus and Togodumnus, joint leaders of the Catuvellauni after their father Cunobelinus’s death, lay in wait. The British assumed that a major river crossing would deter the advancing army. But Paulinus sent across a contingent of Batavian auxiliaries who were trained in swimming across rivers in full armour. The Britons wore little or no body protection and their long, slashing swords were no match for the short, stabbing gladius of the Romans in close combat. Unable to halt the Roman advance at the Medway, the Britons withdrew to the Thames and prepared to defend the crossing at London. Instead of launching his attack at once, Plautius sent word to Rome so that the Emperor could witness the decisive battle. Claudius hurried to join his legions, accompanied by a retinue of Roman aristocrats and a troop of elephants. Once he had arrived, the fighting could begin. It did not last long. Togodumnus was killed and his brother Caratacus fled to Wales. Within days, Claudius entered Colchester, capital of the Catuvellauni, surrounded by his elephants, to receive the submission of eleven British kings, including the Pictish King from Gurness in Orkney.