Saxons, Vikings, and Celts

by Bryan Sykes

  Having survived nearly three centuries of almost continuous attack by Vikings from Norway and Denmark, the Saxon dynasty of Alfred eventually succumbed to the Vikings from France. The resistance had lasted from the day in the summer of 789 when the King’s sheriff was murdered on the Dorset coast, to the death of the last of Harold’s huscarls on an autumn afternoon 277 years later. In the 940 years since the Norman Conquest many have tried to invade the Isles, but none has succeeded.

  17

  THE DNA OF ENGLAND

  Our strategy for recruiting volunteers for the Genetic Atlas Project in England was at first the same as our successful campaigns in Scotland, through blood-donor sessions. We did try one or two other methods, like setting up stalls at agricultural fairs. This worked very well in Cornwall, where a team at the nearby University of Plymouth was conducting a medical research project which involved taking blood samples. In other places it was less successful, mainly because we had not developed our cheek swab method for collecting DNA and were asking for blood. A further factor was that the majority of visitors to agricultural shows were farmers. On the one hand, this was why we had originally thought of the shows as a good place to collect DNA samples, reasoning that we were more likely to encounter families whose roots in the surrounding countryside went back a very long way. That part of the logic turned out to be true. But the flaw was that most farmers are men. If there is one universal truth which many years of fieldwork has taught me, it is that men are far more reluctant to give a DNA sample in unfamiliar surroundings than are women. In the blood-donor clinics it was different. We were part of the main event, not separate as I felt we were at the shows. If we had been a little more patient and perfected our approach, and if we had tried again with our cheek swab method, it may have worked. I think the reasoning was right; in Cornwall, where this worked really well, practically everybody whose DNA was sampled had at least two grandparents from the local area.

  Our first English blood-donor sessions were in East Anglia and over a couple of months we collected almost 1,500 blood samples in ways with which you are now familiar. I well remember travelling over the flat lands of the fens, where the soil is almost black and raised dykes drain the excess water to the sea. Scattered farmhouses and the occasional windbreak of Scots pine are all that protrude above the deadpan flatness. I know many people love the feel of openness and the big skies of East Anglia, but I need hills. When asking donors about their own origins, I was surprised how little movement there had been in the fens, even at places only a few miles from cosmopolitan cities like Cambridge. On one visit to a blood-donor session at the market town of Chatteris, 15 featureless miles north of Cambridge, the insularity of the fens came home to me when I was sitting next to a man in his forties, a farmworker, and going through my introduction of why we were there and why we wanted some of his blood. I explained how we were building up a genetic map and that was why we needed to know where people came from, so we could locate them properly on the map. When I had finished, he said he thought he probably shouldn’t take part. That was unheard of, so I asked him why. He said it was because he had moved into Chatteris only recently.

  ‘That’s no problem,’ I replied cheerfully. ‘We can put you on the map wherever you’re from, so long as we know. Where did you come from, before you came to live in Chatteris?’

  ‘From Wimblington,’ he replied.

  ‘And where is Wimblington?’ I enquired, ready to be told it was in Yorkshire or Dorset or somewhere else a long way away.

  ‘It’s up the road towards March,’ he replied. And so it is, by 5 miles!

  I think of that episode from time to time. The man is almost certainly still living in Chatteris and whenever I am asked how on earth I could ever expect to compile a genetic map from today’s inhabitants that will reveal anything about the distant past, since people are so mobile these days, I tell them about the man from Chatteris.

  Things were going nicely. We had more or less completed our DNA collections from Scotland, Wales and East Anglia and we had just been awarded another two years’ funding from our major sponsors, the Wellcome Trust, which would give us ample time to complete our collections from the rest of England. I had arranged with other blood-transfusion regions in England to continue our work along the same lines. Word had got round that we did not interfere with the smooth running of the donor sessions. Indeed, donors on the whole enjoyed hearing about our work and it added a little more interest to their visit. I had a wonderful team who had honed their skills with, by now, three years of practice. In particular two of them, Emilce Vega and Eileen Hickey, who were assigned full time to the Genetic Atlas Project, were literally irresistible.

  Nobody, male or female, young or old, could refuse Eileen and Emilce. They were, and still are, both striking young ladies, but in utterly different ways. Both are tall and slim, but while Eileen has the bright blue eyes, pale skin and auburn hair of her Irish ancestors, Emilce has the dark hair and deep brown eyes of her Argentinian forebears. Travelling to donor sessions with Eileen and Emilce was always interesting and our arrival at the small hotels we regularly used was always eagerly anticipated, and not because the owners were glad to see me again. Yes, things were going very well. Then disaster struck.

  In scientific research the way is rarely smooth. Funds can be withdrawn, labs may have to be moved, extra duties of teaching or administration can be suddenly announced. It was none of these things. I put it all down to Ally McBeal. She, for those of you who do not know the TV series, was a glamorous New York lawyer, though prone to fits of hysteria and some very strange dreams. Suddenly a career in law became a very attractive option for young women. Two of my team announced that they were abandoning their scientific careers to retrain as lawyers. And one of them was Emilce. It’s always sad to see that happen, but it is also very understandable. Despite all the publicity about how badly the country needs scientists, the prospects for young scientists are actually pretty dismal. Even if you succeed against very stiff competition in landing a junior academic position with the chance of a career in science, the pay is not good. With the upsurge in biotechnology in the late 1990s, law firms were keen to recruit and retrain geneticists for work in that sector as either patent or commercial lawyers. I could hardly object, and I did not. Soon afterwards, Eileen decided to move into forensics, which at least offered the prospect of long-term security, which young scientists crave. Of course, I cannot really blame Ally McBeal, but the loss of my two best fieldworkers was a blow. By the time I had recruited replacements for Eileen and Emilce, there were only ten months for the project to run. It was too late to get the new recruits up to speed on the delicate technique of charming the DNA out of blood donors.

  So I decided to fall back on Plan B. This had its origins in an unexpectedly fruitful visit a few years previously to a service station on the M6 motorway, where I had first seen an advertisement for the electoral roll in electronic form. As this ad was in the toilets I was a little doubtful, but I ordered a copy anyway. It has been extremely useful and I have used it extensively in my genealogy work, tracing the names and addresses of men who share the same surname. Plan B aimed to recruit volunteers for the Genetic Atlas Project in parts of England we now no longer had the time to visit through blood-donor sessions. We could have written to people in the regions of England we needed to cover and asked for their help directly. But there were two predictable drawbacks here. First, this would be unsolicited mail with very little context and likely, as with other unexpected material, to dive head first into the wastepaper bin. The second problem was that we would have been unable to tell by their addresses alone whether people were new arrivals to an area or whether they had lived there all their lives. Although we could have placed the origins of new arrivals elsewhere in the Isles, which would still have been useful, we really needed people with deep roots in the area, like Chatteris Man, to fill in the large gaps that we still had left in our coverage of England.

  We got round this
by combing the electoral role for surnames. By choosing names which we could tell from their geographical distribution were local to the areas where we needed coverage, we stood a good chance of getting hold of volunteers who had, at least on their father’s side, been there for several generations. Thanks to the strictly enforced feudal system instigated all over England after the Norman Conquest, estates had insisted that men adopt surnames. This was so that they could be told apart and so that inheritance of land tenancies from father to son could be properly controlled. By the end of the thirteenth century the practice had spread throughout the land, and practically everyone in England had a forename and a surname.

  The logic of Plan B was that if we had a DNA sample from a man whose surname we knew was concentrated in an area we needed to cover, his Y-chromosome had probably been in the vicinity since the thirteenth century. For this to work, we needed a lot of names, for the following reason. Men with the same surname often have the same Y-chromosome signature, precisely because they are related to a common ancestor. It would be no use recruiting lots of men with the same surname just because they all lived in an area we needed to cover. Like as not, most of them would have the same Y-chromosome. To give you an extreme example, we could have got more than enough DNA samples from the Colne Valley in West Yorkshire just by writing to men with the surname Dyson. But 90 per cent of Dysons have the same Y-chromosome, owing to their common ancestry. We would get plenty of one particular Y-chromosome fingerprint and precious little else, and so our impression of Colne Valley genetics would be very misleading. For Plan B to give results for the Colne Valley that did give a representative picture of the whole area, we had to get DNA from all the local surnames. We would need to write to Dysons, Bamforths, Sykeses, Hirsts, Sutcliffes, Hills, Woods, etc., etc.

  We worked our way through England, region by region, picking out scores of different surnames that, from directories and census distributions, were local to an area. We wrote to ten of each with an explanation of our project, a DNA sampling brush and return envelope. It was an exercise of, for us, military proportions. We sent out over 15,000 DNA brushes and got just over 3,000 back, a return of a little over 20 per cent, which proved to be a remarkably consistent average whichever region we tried. We also sent out 5,000 brushes to addresses in Wales, with a similar 20 per cent return rate. The DNA from our earlier blood spots from Wales had proved difficult to extract for Y-chromosomes. Plan B was no substitute for collecting in person, but we were left with little alternative if we were to complete the project on time. We did eventually manage to fill in all the gaps in our coverage of England. Fortunately, the DNA brushes kept their precious cargo in good condition, even after several days in the post, and we had barely a failure when we set out to recover it in the lab. What did we find?

  We were expecting, as you would too knowing its turbulent history, that England would be the most mixed of all the regions of the Isles. That is largely how it turned out, with the exception of Orkney and Shetland. In these Northern Isles, the settlement of so many Vikings had an enormous influence on what, from the Pictland results, we might imagine the genetic make-up of the indigenous islanders to have been. In the Northern Isles, the great surprise had been that the proportion of Norse women who settled was on a par with the men. That unexpected result came from the comparison of maternal and paternal lineages. Would we see the same sort of family-based settlement in England? Or would the genetics parallel the more lurid histories in seeing a massive replacement on the male side and very little on the female? Let’s take a look.

  I first divided England into the rural districts shown on the map (page xiii). The maternal clan pattern is stubbornly familiar wherever you are, but it does show a definite trend from the east and north to the south and west. It is literally as if the separation followed the line of the Danelaw. The Helena fraction is high, as usual, varying from 43 per cent in East Anglia to 47 per cent in the north of England. Below the Danelaw line it is only fractionally higher, rising to 49 per cent in the far south of England. There is really nothing in it. But it is in the other clans that the differences stand out, particularly when you get down to the detail, from which I will spare you. The most striking are the differences within the Jasmine clan and the presence of some very unusual sequences in East Anglia and the north of England.

  Taking the Jasmines, the ‘farming clan’, to begin with, there are two different branches, which arrived in northern Europe by separate routes, as we saw in an earlier chapter. Let’s call one the Ocean branch. They travelled around the coast of the Mediterranean from the Balkans, round Italy, to Iberia and then up the coast of France. The other, which we will call the Land branch, made their way overland to the Baltic and North Sea coasts. In Wales, Ireland and Scotland, the only branch is the Ocean branch. Only on the eastern side of Britain do I find much of the Land branch, and that is not a great deal. The great majority of Jasmines are from the Ocean branch and they pepper the map of the west side of Britain from bottom to top. They also occur in Norway.

  The other difference in the matrilineal DNA is the occurrence of the minor clans of Wanda, Xenia and Ulrike. Wanda, along with Isha and Xenia, was originally subsumed in the clan of Xenia, and Ulrike is, as we saw, the ‘eighth’ daughter of Eve. All three are found in East Anglia and the north of England, but hardly anywhere else. Mrs Archer from Great Dunmow and Mrs Peachey from Coggeshall, both in Essex, are descendants of Ulrike. Ulrike’s clan is particularly frequent in Scandinavia, so the hint is there that perhaps these two ladies are descended from that rare commodity, Viking women. Rare, that is, outside the Northern Isles. Xenia’s clan originated in the steppes of Russia 25,000 years ago and travelled to Britain from the east. Wanda’s clan is usually coupled with Xenia’s, but has a more recent origin, 18,000 years ago, though she too came from the same vicinity. Mrs Lewis from Braintree in Essex and Mr Simmonds from Toft’s Monk near Bury St Edmunds are both in Wanda’s clan. They have certainly come a long way from the Ukraine.

  In England there is a definite suggestion through detailed matches in most maternal clans of female immigration into the east from continental Europe, something which is undetectable in the west and north. How about the men? Here we do see a huge difference, even in the distribution of the clans, the crudest of indicators. Oisin’s clan is down to only 51 per cent in East Anglia. The proportions increase as you travel west to Wales and north to Scotland. Where Oisin declines, Wodan increases and it reaches its highest proportions in the whole of the Isles in East Anglia, where Oisin is lowest. But there are virtually no Sigurds in East Anglia. However, there are plenty of Sigurds in the north of England, where they amount to 7 per cent of the total, which is a third of the Shetland total. In the south of England and in the Mercian territory of central England there are plenty of Wodans, and Sigurds too. The Appendix gives the figures.

  The difference between the eastern regions and the rest intensifies when we look at the Y-chromosome diversity, which is much higher in the east, indicating a longer settlement if you follow the traditional way of interpreting genetic diversity. Diversity is much higher in the Wodan clan than in Oisin wherever you care to look.

  By now there are so many threads in the air, so many facts to digest. And I have only been able to give you a tiny fraction of the detail. For every fact I have shown you, I have a hundred more in reserve. It has been a long tour, in time as well as in space. We have travelled to every corner of the Isles. At each step we have moved closer to an answer and now the time has arrived to distil the essence of our discoveries and draw our conclusions.

  18

  THE BLOOD OF THE ISLES

  You have read the myths about the origins of the Isles that shimmer in the background, just out of reach; stories of brave kings and treacherous villains, fantastic monsters and invincible warriors. You have heard the ancient tales that have floated down the generations, stories that have been told and retold a thousand times around the campfire or in the flickering flame-light of the
Great Hall. You have also heard how they were set down by Christian monks, transcribed from the world of the spoken and the sung to the realm of the written.

  These same monks also wrote their own versions of our origins, histories that were sometimes an earnest attempt to pass on an impartial narrative of events and sometimes a fantastical torrent of loathing and contempt, fantasy and corruption. You have heard how these twisted histories were seized upon by kings, re-cast and put to work to bolster a fading reign or to right an ancient wrong and, in so doing, to inspire and justify a new conquest.

  You have heard the chronicles of historians, from the amiable and conscientious Tacitus to the malignant architects of the Third Reich, each in their own way deriding and denigrating the people of the Isles as degenerate and barbaric. Yet archaeologists, whose account you have also heard, draw a sketch of the ancient Britons as masters of the shore and forest, able to fell the mighty aurochs with the well-directed flight of a flint-tipped arrow. You have heard how a medical man, the epitome of the Victorian amateur scientist, ranged through the Isles with card, tape and calipers searching for clues to our origins. You have heard how the search continued in the blood banks and laboratories of great hospitals.

  I have introduced you to a new art and a new language. An art that is written in the codes of our DNA, those unseen architects of our bodies, even of our souls. It is a new art, not long tested and yet somehow irresistibly correct. How can anyone doubt that we are all our parents’ children, as they also are the children of their parents? That is the simplicity of this art even though the language is new and obscure. I have tested you with talk of ‘DNA sequences’, ‘haplotypes’ and ‘genetic diversity’, of ‘Y-chromosomes’ and ‘mitochondrial DNA’. I have impudently claimed that my art is oblivious to the prejudice of the human mind.