Arthur and the Lost Kingdoms

by Alistair Moffat

  The P-Celts were illiterate and while that means that very little of how they describe their experience at the time has come down to us, it does not mean that they were verbally unsophisticated. The opposite in fact. Cato was not the only Roman historian to be struck by the eloquence of the Celts. It was a function of illiteracy. It involved the training of memory in a way that book-readers cannot now imagine. Important speech had to be formed in a manner that could be easily recollected. The devices of metre, rhyme, alliteration, symbolic lists were all harnessed to the construction of an enormous house of Celtic memory. While much of this is now in ruinous decay, historians are too reliant on written record and too ready to dismiss the history held in common memory. Much that is truly old in Border culture is remembered, not scripted and not taken from a text of any sort.

  Eloquence is still believed to be a Celtic characteristic, particularly among people anxious to believe in their Anglo-Saxon roots. But it is denigrated now as ‘blarney’ or in phrases like ‘he talks a great game’ or ‘all mouth’ and so on. This sort of prejudice, I hope to show, is one of the many unattractive consequences of the Celtic wars in Britain. The obverse is, of course, the adoption of English as a written medium by the Celts and the consequent outflowering of so-called English literature in the twentieth century: Joyce, Yeats, MacDiarmid, Heaney, Stevenson, O’Neill, Dylan Thomas, Barrie. There is a much longer list available but it suffices to ask where the blarney is in all that.

  Reckless bravery ran through Roman descriptions of the Celts, particularly during Caesar’s invasion of Gaul.²¹ Protected by the absolute certainty of an afterlife, warriors fought to the death and, as we shall see, to the last man. There are even reports from the historian Polybius of a class of Celtic spearmen who went naked into battle. Wearing only a torc around their necks, these men believed that their nudity protected them, and that their souls were immortal.

  Drunkenness was also associated with battle and in later poetry scenes are painted of warriors feasting and drinking prodigious amounts of mead, beer and wine over long and sustained periods. There was a clear sense that being out of one’s mind could be a spiritual experience, perhaps best caught in the curious phrase ‘being beside himself with drink’. But there is no doubt that in modern times Celtic blarney-men such as Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas have been only too ready to fill the stereotype.

  Inebriation was and is the extreme expression of a general sense of there being a prideful, insolent Celtic temperament (I knew one Welsh rugby player who was described as temperamental; that is, 50 per cent temper and 50 per cent mental) which can find eloquent expression in unlikely places.

  What also struck classical writers, partly because it differed so profoundly from their own attitudes, was how Celtic society treated women. They were powerful figures in their own right and Celtic memory is lit by their presence. A British example shows the cultural differences sharply. When Prasutagus, King of the Iceni tribe in East Anglia, died in AD 60 he had no son and the Roman provincial administration refused to recognize any rights that his two daughters and his Queen Boudicca might have. When the governor’s staff arrived at the Iceni capital to begin the process of incorporating the kingdom into the empire as part of the directly controlled province of Britannia, they seem to have met some argument from Boudicca and her courtiers. Their response was incomprehension; women could have no place in government. Ignorance turned to atavism and, far from succeeding to his kingdom, Prasutagus’s daughters were brutally raped while Boudicca was stripped and publicly flogged by a centurion of the governor’s praetorium.

  The P-Celtic Iceni saw this appalling outrage as a spark to ignite a savage rebellion. Colchester was taken and burned and after the Roman garrison had barricaded themselves into the stone temple they were overcome after a siege of two days and slaughtered. Both St Albans and London fell to Boudicca and southern Britannia was aflame. The governor Suetonius Paullinus hurried east from campaigning in Wales and it needed all his legionaries’ experience to defeat the Iceni chariots at a battle near Towcester. Even allowing for the excesses of propaganda, the historian Dio Cassius paints a vivid picture of Boudicca:

  She was huge of frame, terrifying of aspect and with a harsh voice. A great mass of bright red hair fell to her knees: she wore a great twisted golden torc, and a tunic of many colours, over which was a thick mantle, fastened by a brooch. Now she grasped a spear, to strike fear into all who watched her.²²

  The Boudicca rebellion offers a pungent sense of difference between the Mediterranean world and that of the Celts. Ever practical, Caesar left a clear description of the way the Celts ordered their society and the sorts of people they recognized.²³

  The basic unit of Celtic military organization seems to have been the pagus, a group of comrades-in-arms which perhaps evolved from ancient ties of blood and marriage. Gradually the military unit came to denote a piece of land; incidentally pagani is the derivation of ‘peasant’ or more clearly heard in the French paysan. It also came to mean ‘heathen’ or ‘non-Christian’ by transfer because in its early centuries Christianity was mostly confined to townspeople who thought of ‘peasants’ and ‘pagan’ as virtually identical terms.

  In Gaul and Britain a ‘people’ or a tribe like the Iceni was made up of several pagi who recognized a king or a sub-king. In turn a tribe was centred on a place, usually fortified in some way, which the urban Romans miscalled an oppidum. This was the tribal capital and in France and England some cities still bear their ancient connections: Paris was the capital of the Parisi, Canterbury of the Cantiaci and so on.

  Caesar divided the Celts into three groups under the king: equites, druides and plebes. The strict definition of equites is ‘horsemen’ and although in Rome it had come to bear a looser meaning of ‘aristocracy’, I believe that Caesar chose the word more carefully. He wanted to describe a caste of horse warriors, either cavalry men, or charioteers, the élite Celtic fighting force. Certainly they were aristocrats, landowners, patrons as well but they first acquired their defining eminence on the back of a horse.

  The Druids were more than simply the ancestors of the mistletoe-bearing white-robed priests who gather now at Stonehenge at the solstices. This was a powerful stratum of people, pan-tribal according to Caesar and holding allegiance only to their beliefs and their brotherhood. They were the priests who officiated at the great festivals of Samhuinn, Imbolc, Beltane and Lughnasa on sacred sites like Eildon Hill North. Druids kept no chapels or temples, rather they held that wooded glens and in particular oak groves were places where the gods were close. Hard by the Eildon Tree lies Oaken Dean, an old name.

  The Romans believed that the Druids underwent a twenty-year training, memorizing a vast store of unwritten and arcane knowledge. And lest anyone believe that these men were anything other than hugely powerful, it seems certain that Druids conducted human sacrifice. The Romans believed Britain to be the centre of the cult and in AD 60 the provincial governor attacked the Druidical centre of Anglesey and destroyed the sacred groves on the island. Generally tolerant of most religions within the empire, this merciless treatment was unusual and must have represented a belief that the Druids formed a potential focus for trouble.

  In addition to their priestly function, they also acted as bards, historians, lawyers and doctors and were vital to the cohesion of the Celtic peoples. But for all that the Druids remain a shadowy group, few of whose names have come down to us. In Scotland in the sixth century there seems to exist only one report of a man who held such an influential role. When St Columba went to the court of the Pictish King Brude at Castle Urquhart near Inverness,²⁴ his success at conversion was complete when the Druid Briochan was dismissed. He may have been the last Druid in Scotland to exert political power.

  The Plebs were as usual the largest group and the least noticeable. The bedrock of Celtic society, as farmers and craftsmen, their daily toil allowed the horse warriors to make war and the Druids to make politics. There seem also to have been slav
es but even less is known of them past the reasonable supposition that they were prisoners of war.

  So far much of this story has been told by analogy and by the use of sources written by outsiders and sometime enemies of the Celts, the Romans. Two other pieces of history written by winners add something to the picture. In 731 the Northumbrian monk Bede completed his Ecclesiastical History of the English People.²⁵ Writing at Jarrow, only sixty miles south of the Tweed, he had disappointingly little to say of Scotland. Even though that was not his purpose – he dedicated the book to King Ceolwulf of Northumbria, and wanted to legitimize with a proper history the Anglo-Saxon conquest of England – it is still surprising.

  Bede begins with a general description of the island of Britain; it contained five languages and four nations: the English, British, Irish and Picts. Naturally he leads with the English even though it is highly unlikely that they were more populous than the British P-Celts. By ‘Irish’ he includes Scots and clearly he sees both the British and the Picts as separate peoples. Each group, he notes, has its own language and the fifth is of course Latin. By 870 the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle,²⁶ an even more one-sided version of history than Bede, lists five languages and then goes on to name six: ‘English and British and Welsh and Scottish and Pictish and Book Language’. It seems that by the ninth century Welsh was growing away from the P-Celtic mother-tongue of England and southern Scotland. Wales had held its borders and under kings such as Hywel Dda and Rhodri Mawr it was developing politically. By ‘Scottish’ the chronicler meant Q-Celtic or Gaelic and by Pictish it is likely (but impossible to be sure since there are no written records) that a northern dialect of P-Celtic was spoken in the Highlands.

  Under pressure from the Anglo-Saxon élite it is clear from every side that P-Celtic in England was dying by the ninth century. Even as early as 450 in Gaul a Christian bishop reports that the leading aristocratic families were trying to throw off the ‘scurf of Celtic speech, condemning it as a language of home and hearth while Latin was the lingua franca, a language for serious people. This set of attitudes must have been mirrored much later in England, particularly in the towns where English established itself quickly as the language of everyday government and of power. And also with Bede and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle it became the language of record. No competing version could possibly be forthcoming from the illiterate Celts, not until the early Middle Ages when, through many pairs of interested hands, versions of their poetry began to be written down.

  The job of suppression was not difficult; it is easy to prevent a dumb person from communicating. The Celts became the peasants, the pagans, the people in the hill country, the men of the wild margins of Britain. As a postscript to all these lost messages, it is cheering to note that it was thought important, even at a distance of 450 years, to vilify, even to demonize Britain’s last truly powerful P-Celtic king. Many admire his eloquence, no one doubts his physical courage, some think him dominated by his wife, but few in the audience are on the side of Shakespeare’s Macbeth.

  Having coloured a Celtic background as vividly as sources allow, I want to pause and say something more about why the telling of this story is, in my opinion at least, important. With the passing of the last Ice Age and the coming of the Old Peoples and the Celts, Scotland (as well as England, Ireland and Wales) was peopled anew. And preserved in uncultivated upland peat-bogs, bodies of these early settlers have been found sufficiently intact to allow scientists to characterize their DNA. Two large-scale studies have been completed in Northumberland and Shetland to compare the chromosome patterns of more than 2,000 years ago with the people living in the same areas today.²⁷ In Shetland there was general disappointment that the present inhabitants were in fact not descendants of the daring Viking adventurers who had come and colonized the islands for half a millennium. Rather they had many Celtic chromosomes and researchers could have laid the DNA make-up of prehistoric Shetlanders over that of the present inhabitants and detected little, if any, difference. In Northumberland, the findings were also identical, despite the invading Angles establishing a powerful Dark Ages kingdom based at the stronghold of Bamburgh.

  This scientific evidence is backed by historical common sense. Britain is an island only recently easily reached. For two millennia the twenty miles of the English Channel has discomfited Julius Ceasar, defied Napoleon and Adolf Hitler and even when the weather allowed crossing, comparatively few invading people came. Jutes, Saxons, Angles, Danes, Vikings and Normans were mostly men who came in small boats. Unlike continental Europe, where anyone who can walk can migrate or invade, Britain has not seen its population base overrun by the great tribal migrations of the first millennium AD. We are who we were, two thousand years ago.

  However scant and half-formed these stories may be, they are what the medieval re-inventor of the Arthur myth, Geoffrey of Monmouth, called the Matter of Britain. It is no accident that the P-Celts are often called the British. It is no accident that Arthur, our greatest hero, was British, not English. Why do we not celebrate the Saxons, the Vikings or the Normans? After all they were winners, they established their control over the larger part of England. Yet we do not identify with them or their heroic journeys and victories. It is the British, it is Arthur, fighting a gloriously losing battle, we venerate.

  I believe that the answer to this conundrum is a simple one. We are not Saxons, for the most part, or Vikings either and Normans hardly at all. We are the children of a defeated Celtic culture. And we live a sort of myth history, something from that ancient time between remembering and forgetting. Between sleep and waking, we try to hold on to a sort of Arcadia, resisting cold Anglo-Saxon pragmatism. Almost nothing at all is actually known about our greatest hero. There are few facts about Arthur and yet he is the centre of one of the most powerful secular stories the world has ever known. He casts a mighty shadow, but it has little substance except in our minds. That, as much as any DNA test, makes Britain a Celtic nation. We remember with our blood and without words we pass on our characteristics, our fears, our loves to our children. Early German and Austrian psychologists believed that we held these things in our subconscious and they called it folk memory.

  5

  THE ENDS OF EMPIRE

  Archaeologists’ finds show that the P-Celts first rode into the Tweed valley some time around 700 BC. Their language can be read on the Ordnance Survey, and their early history sketched with examples from the collective of Celtic nations, but that is all. No written records survive and consequently there are few events or stories to hear.

  Not until AD 80, when Gnaeus Julius Agricola, the governor of Britannia, marched his legions over the Cheviot tops, do we hear the scrape of a pen on the history of the P-Celts.²⁸ As apologist, war correspondent and propagandist, Agricola brought his son-in-law Tacitus to Britain. The resulting biography offers the first historical glimpse of Scotland from an outsider. Given Tacitus’s prior ignorance and his purpose in writing a hagiography of Agricola, his survey of Scotland shows characteristic Roman precision and an almost forensic objectivity. The mixture of anthropological interest in the natives, pity for their miserable plight, imperial arrogance and mild surprise at their ability to resist or do anything sensible at all, reminds the reader of early British imperial history. But the most striking tone in Tacitus is one of business. Like the East India Company or the Hudson’s Bay Company, the Romans adopt a cool, efficient and businesslike approach, clear in their objectives and not much interested in what the natives did, or how they reacted. After 300 years of imperial expansion stretching from the Persian desert to the Black Forest, they had developed a colonizing method whose template they laid over Scotland. Or tried to.

  Here it will be useful to grasp something of Roman imperial policy in Britain. Because southern Britannia was valuable, fertile and relatively easy to control, its governors had been content to leave a client kingdom semi-autonomous in the north of England. Stretching from Lancashire over to the southern Pennines into Yorkshire was the kingd
om of the Brigantes. The name is P-Celtic and comes from the root word Brig, which can mean precisely a summit but more generally hilly or mountainous. The Brigantes were the Hill People and it is cheering to observe a surviving remnant of their existence in the name Pennine which comes from the P-Celtic pen for head. With Cumbria and Cornwall the Pennines form what might be called the ancient ‘Gaidhealtachd’ of England.

  Strong women figure in the early history of Britannia: Boudicca of the Iceni had already made her bloody mark in AD 60/61, and Queen Cartimandua of the Brigantes indirectly sparked another rebellion. As a faithful client of Rome, Cartimandua had surrendered the British resistance leader Caratacus when he fled north for sanctuary. The son of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline or Cunobelin, he had tried and failed to raise an insurrection in the south. Cartimandua’s husband Venutius was outraged by his wife’s treachery and he began the process of changing Brigantia from a client/buffer kingdom into the enemy of Rome.

  In his campaigns Tacitus writes that Venutius summoned ‘help from outside’. That can only have come from one direction: southern Scotland. It is the first, shadowy historical appearance of these tribes and, as we shall see, it was not a happy one. In 71 the governor of Britannia, Q. Petillius Cerialis, marched the Ninth Legion north from Lincoln to a place they called Eboracum, or York, or Ebor as the Anglican Archbishop still styles himself. It comes from the Celtic for yew tree, iubhar, which, because of the traditional use of its elastic branches, came by extension to mean the ‘bowmen’. York was to become the military headquarters of northern Britannia, a place that has never lost its strategic significance, and about which more will be said later.