Saxons, Vikings, and Celts

by Bryan Sykes

  The intense spirituality of the Australian Aborigine, the connection to ancestors and the homeland, is in a muted form reflected in the search for Celtic roots. Displaced by the invader and forced to the margins before being forced into exile overseas, the Celt is perceived to be the British–or even the European–aboriginal. She continues, ‘to have Celtic roots is to demonstrate that one also has a rich, tribal heritage rooted deeply within a landscape that is both mystical and mythical’.

  And it is the case that in ‘New Age’ bookshops around the world, titles on Celtic spirituality are found on the same shelves as Aboriginal and Native American material in the same genre. However, be warned that I heard the distinguished American sociologist Michael Waltzer in a recent lecture dismiss excess spirituality as ‘the solace of a conquered people’.

  Before we move on to more solid ground, let me just mention Frank from Boulder, Colorado. After spending twelve years with Native American teachers, Frank took part in the Sun Dance ceremony of the Lakota people, an experience which set him on the path to discovering his Celtic heritage. He now describes himself as ‘a poet, ecopsychologist and visionary teacher in the Celtic spiritual tradition’. Frank leads pilgrimages to the Scottish Highlands to promote what he calls ‘Highland cultural soul retrieval’.

  The range of emotion covered by the Celtic umbrella is vast, from a feeling of displacement and affinity with aboriginal groups, to a successful marketing tool, to a political rallying call, to the focus for sporting identity, even fanaticism. Can genetics lift the veil and see what lies beneath? Faced with this multiplicity of meaning for Celt and Celtic, what range of possibilities should we expect genetics to reveal? Might we be able to detect the waves of a large-scale migration envisaged by Edward Lhuyd? Or might we find evidence that what we now call Celts have been here all along? Will we find any genetic similarity between the present-day Celts and the people of the rest of Britain, or will there be a sharp divide? And where should we look for origins? Though not absolutely essential for success in historical genetics, it is always best to formulate some scenarios that can be tested.

  One of the most striking emblems of the Celtic brand, the intricate naturalistic knotwork that inspires the modern Celtic jeweller, had its origin not in the Atlantic communities linked by a common language, but in central Europe. The evolution of this highly distinctive art form coincided with the rise of rich settlements north of the Alps, centres which controlled the trade of goods like amber and tin, flowing south to the Mediterranean world and their exchange for luxuries, such as wine and jewellery. In all likelihood, these luxury imports were used by local chieftains as a badge of status and also distributed among their subordinates in exchange for favours and services.

  The trading settlements spanned the heartland of Europe where its great navigable rivers converge in a relatively small area in eastern France and Switzerland. The Loire going westward to the Atlantic, the Rhône south to the Mediterranean, the Rhine north to the North Sea and the Danube east to the Black Sea. These were the arteries of prehistoric Europe along which flowed the life-blood of trade. Whoever controlled the heads of the rivers and the land between them controlled the trade–and grew very rich on it. At the peak, around 600 BC, there was enough wealth to stimulate and support the production of a local style of craft-work, and this is where we see the first appearance, principally in the delicate metalwork, of what we now call Celtic Art. The La Tène style, which we now most strongly associate with the Celtic brand, began not on the ocean coasts of the Atlantic, but within sight of the Alps.

  But was it just the goods and the ideas that moved, or was it the people migrating en masse from central Europe to the far west? Although there is very good archaeological and historical evidence that people from this region did indeed move in numbers east and south to Greece, where they attacked the temple at Delphi in 273 BC, before finally settling in central Turkey, there is no evidence at all that the ancestors of today’s Celts of the Isles took the opposite track and ended up in Britain. Yet, although support for the popular notion that the Celtic people of the Isles travelled across land from central Europe may be entirely lacking, we may still find the evidence for it in the genetics.

  However, the most obvious of routes linking today’s Celts of the Isles is not the land at all but the sea. Motorways and fast roads have inverted in our minds the comparative difficulty of moving across land and water. In ancient times, and indeed until the last two centuries, getting around by boat was a lot easier than travelling over the land. Until the rise of, first, the railway and then the car and the lorry, water was the way to travel. Was a sea route to the Isles the more likely?

  At school we are taught that ‘civilization’ arose around the Mediterranean, in the ancient cities of Egypt, and that we trace the origins of our culture and our political processes to the countries bordering that almost landlocked sea. Our taught impression of life beyond the Strait of Gibraltar is one of barbarism and savagery, rather like the Greeks’ view of the Keltoi. We are taught nothing of the vigorous culture and the technological achievements of the Atlantic seaboard, the coastline stretching from North Africa in the south 2,000 miles to Shetland off the north coast of Scotland and beyond to Scandinavia. But this Atlantic zone has a prehistory as ancient and as colourful as any in the Mediterranean. There were people living along this coastline 8,000 years ago and they were using boats not just for cruising close to the shore but for venturing out into deep water, judging by the types of fish whose remains litter their encampments. None of these sea-going vessels survives, which is no surprise since they would have been made of perishable wood and animal skins. By 6,000 years ago, agriculture had seeped into the region via the Mediterranean coastline, evidence once again of the maritime traffic. The first, literally, hard evidence of widespread exchanges along the coast came in the form of distinctive polished stone axes, manufactured in Brittany, which found their way all along the coast of France and Spain to the south, and north across the sea to Cornwall. But the most dramatic examples of continuity along the Atlantic zone are the great stone monuments, the megaliths, which rise from the ground from Orkney and Lewis in the north to Spain and Portugal in the south. These are a purely Atlantic phenomenon, owing nothing at all to the Mediterranean world. Could it be that it was by this route that the Celts of the Isles first arrived?

  4

  THE SKULL SNATCHERS

  The first forays of science into the highly charged arguments about British origins came at the height of the Victorian enthusiasm for Saxon superiority. It is hard to imagine how ingrained was the sense that the people of Britain were split into two entirely different ‘races’ and how superior the Saxons felt about themselves. Just to remind us, I quote again from the extremely popular if eccentric author, the surgeon Robert Knox. He wrote that ‘Race is everything, literature, science, art–in a word, civilisation depends on it’. And Knox left his readers in no doubt where his sympathies lay in the debate on the racial character of Celt and Saxon. The Saxon, he claims, ‘cannot sit still an instant, so powerful is the desire for work, labour, excitement, muscular exertion’. The Celts, on the other hand–judging by such woodcut illustrations as ‘A Celtic groupe, such as may be seen at any time in Marylebone, London’, in which a group of deformed and decidedly dodgy characters glower from the page–are the complete opposite: irredeemable malingerers.

  The text is no more flattering. On the notorious Highland Clearances, he writes: ‘the dreamy Celt exclaims at the parting moment from the horrid land of his birth “we’ll maybe return to Lochaber no more.” And why should you return, miserable and wretched man, to the dark and filthy hovel you never sought to purify?’

  Knox pulls out all the stops when it comes to the Celts of Ireland: ‘the source of all evil lies in the race, the Celtic race of Ireland. The race must be forced from the soil, by fair means if possible, still they must leave’. A few sentences later is an entreaty to genocide no less chilling in intent than in Bosn
ia or Rwanda:

  The Orange Club of Ireland [an extreme protestant group] is a Saxon confederation for the clearing of the land of all papists and jacobites; this means Celts. If left to themselves they would clear them out, as Cromwell proposed, by the sword; it would not require six weeks to accomplish this work.

  By the time Knox was penning his poisonous invective, in the mid-nineteenth century, science was making itself felt in all walks of life. The appeal to rational arbitration of such issues as the racial purity, or otherwise, of Celt and Saxon had obvious attractions to those with a more liberal outlook than the likes of Robert Knox. The most articulate of these, Matthew Arnold, literary critic and a prominent champion of Celtic literature, despaired of the wedge being driven between Celt and Saxon, not just by fanatics like Knox, but by powerful and influential members of the British Establishment. Men like Lord Lyndhurst, whose description of the Irish as ‘Aliens in speech, in religion, in blood, makes the estrangement [of Celtic and Saxon] immense, incurable, fatal’. Feeling forced to react, Matthew Arnold makes an optimistic appeal: ‘Fanciful as this notion may seem, I am inclined to think that the march of science will insist that there is no such original chasm between the Celt and the Saxon as we once popularly imagined’.

  But what was the basis for Matthew Arnold’s optimism? It was this. That even if many thousands or hundreds of thousands of Saxons arrived in the centuries following Hengist, they would, within a few generations, intermarry and blend with the Britons already here. This was anathema to racial purists–it just could not happen. Races were pure and indivisible. But how could this theory of racial purity overcome the all too apparent empirical fact–especially obvious as white imperial boundaries expanded into Africa, India and America–that there were no barriers to mating between ‘races’? The answer came that the offspring of such matings were weakened hybrids, incapable of sustaining themselves over more than a few generations. How this worked in practice was explained using the Spanish ‘conquest’ of South America and the interbreeding which followed. According to Knox:

  When the best blood in Spain migrated to America, they killed as many of the natives as they could. But this could not go on, labourers to till the soil being required. Then came the admixture with the Indian blood and the Iberian blood, the produce being the mulatto.

  Even the name, Spanish for ‘little mule’, recalls the sterile hybrid of horse and donkey. Knox continues:

  as a hybrid he [the mulatto] becomes non-productive after a time, if he intermarries only with the mulatto. Thus, year by year, the Spanish blood disappears, and with it the mulatto, and the population, retrograding towards the indigenous inhabitants, returns to that Indian population, the hereditary descendants of those whom Cortes found there.

  Races, in this exposition, do not hybridize and any unnatural mixing produces only enfeebled offspring whose progeny are doomed to extinction. Though the nineteenth century was dominated by the extreme views of people like Robert Knox, who believed in the sanctity and purity of racial groups–with Saxons at the top of the rankings, of course–there were a few lone voices raised against the predominant dogma. One of these was Luke Owen Pike, a Lincoln’s Inn barrister. His well-argued, and witty, riposte to the Teutomaniacs like Knox was to point out that it was extremely unlikely, even if the entire population of Jutes, Angles and Saxons arrived in Britain, that they could have exterminated all the Britons, with their centuries of experience of Roman military tactics. Even if they had managed to kill all the men, they would not have killed all the women.

  The women and the children, at least, are doomed to a different, if not a happier fate. And for this reason it must almost always happen that, after the conquest of any country, the blood of the original inhabitants will still preponderate. There is no reason to suppose that the result was different in the case of the Saxon conquest.

  Pike not only rejected the concept of the immiscibility of races, he argued for the creation of a hybrid racial mixture in which the indigenous component would usually predominate.

  Although the ranting racist diatribes of Robert Knox, the moderation of Luke Owen Pike, even the commentaries of Matthew Arnold, were the expression of strongly held opinions, none of them had a solid basis of factual evidence. While the fierce argument was raging about whether races were fixed and immiscible or could happily and successfully interbreed and blend, a few people did begin to gather systematic scientific observations to inform the debate.

  The first to do so on a significant scale was John Beddoe, a doctor who spent the best part of his life travelling to every part of Britain recording the physical appearance of the natives, both alive and dead. He was a classic case of the Victorian amateur scholar, amassing a huge amount of data which, in sheer bulk alone, has never been surpassed. John Beddoe was born in 1826 in rural Worcestershire, the second of eight children. Though his family was comfortably well off, John was a sickly child and missed most of his formal education. Nevertheless he managed, through family connections, to get a place at University College London to study medicine. He eventually graduated, not in London but in Edinburgh, and after a spell in the Crimea set himself up in Bristol. Building up his medical practice in the fashionable quarter of Clifton was difficult, especially as he had to compete for patients with a resident pool of extremely competent and well-established doctors. With time on his hands, he began to indulge his passion for observing and recording people’s appearance.

  First, he had to devise a reliable classification for the features he decided to concentrate on–the colour of the hair and the colour of the eyes–exactly those features we use ourselves in the first description of a stranger. He also wanted to be quite sure that he was looking at permanent features, not something that would change from year to year. For this reason he rejected skin colour, perhaps an obvious one to include, because he was worried that it might be influenced by exposure to sunlight, which of course it is. He also decided against recording skin colour because there was a theory doing the rounds that daily exposure to smoke and grime made city-dwellers darker and darker as they got older, while their rural contemporaries remained fresh-faced and pale in comparison.

  John Beddoe was determined to break free from the generalizations that were so commonplace, and still are, about regional differences in appearance. He disregarded the clichés of short, dark Welshmen or muscular, red-headed Highlanders and set out to replace these prejudiced impressions with real observations. He frequently discovered that what had been written about a place and its people was completely at odds with reality, even when the source of the misleading reports would normally have given no cause for doubt. For example, the Church of Scotland minister in Wick, a town at the north-east tip of Scotland not far from John O’Groats, was obliged to compile a statistical account of his parishioners, including their overall appearance. The minister described his flock as ‘having for the most part dark brown or black hair, and dark complexions, remarkably few having red or yellow hair’. But when Beddoe arrived, he found the complete opposite. Among more than 300 individuals whose appearance he recorded, blonds and redheads were in the majority.

  How did Beddoe make his observations? You can imagine how this might get very complicated–are those eyes green or hazel? Is that hair light brunette or dark blond? But Beddoe needed something much simpler, and easy to record–we will see why in a moment–and he spent several months refining his system. He decided to create just three categories of eye colour and five for hair. For eyes they were Class 1 light, Class 2 intermediate or neutral and Class 3 dark. In the light category, Class 1, were included all the blue eyes plus bluish grey, light grey and very light green. In Class 3 he put black and deep brown eyes. Class 2 included most shades of green and hazel, very light brown and very dark grey. It is not a particularly refined system, but it succeeds in its simplicity. I’ve tried it and I can almost always put someone’s eye colour into one of the three categories at a glance without any difficulty.

  When it
comes to hair, though, it is harder. Most of my women friends over the age of forty probably colour their hair. Actually several have forgotten what their original hair colour was, even growing their hair out for a few weeks to be reminded, before going straight back to the hairdresser when they find out. This is nothing new and Beddoe was well aware of artificial hair colouring and its changing fashion, even in the nineteenth century. ‘When I began work in England,’ he wrote, ‘dark hair was in fashion among the women, and light and reddish lines were dulled by greasy unguents. In later years, fair hair has been more in fashion, and golden shades, sometimes unknown to nature, are produced by art’.

  In Beddoe’s time, these artificial hair colours were far more confined to the wealthy than they are now. Beddoe was much more interested in the ‘ordinary folk’ than the ‘upper classes’, as he called them, as they were, in his opinion, ‘more migratory and more often mixed in blood’. He eventually settled on five classes of hair colour: R for red and shades of auburn which were nearer red than brown; F for fair, including blond and very light brown hair, along with pale auburn; B included all the other shades of mid-brown; D was reserved for very dark brown; and N for the few cases of jet-black hair which he encountered.

  Beddoe developed a routine. He arrived at a location and walked casually around looking at everyone who passed within 3 yards. In the palm of his left hand he held a small card divided by lines into columns and rows. In his right hand he concealed a pencil and, as people passed by, he put a tick in the appropriate square on the card. As one card filled up he replaced it, then at the end of each day worked out a simple numerical score for that locality. He called this score the ‘Index of Nigrescence’, which he calculated by adding the number of dark-brown (class D) scores to twice the number of jet-black (N) then subtracting the fair (F) and red (R). The ubiquitous mid-browns (B) were omitted from the calculation. He explains why he doubled the influence of the jet-blacks in the formula. It was to ‘give the proper value to the greater tendency to melanosity shown thereby’. That sounds rather arbitrary to me, but the jet-blacks were so rare it didn’t make a lot of difference. The simple equation for each place was: