The Celts belong to that loose ethnic/linguistic grouping known as "Indo-European". Other peoples in the "Indo-European" classification include the Nordic and Germanic peoples (including the modern French, Spanish and Italian), the Greeks, the peoples of north India and Pakistan, the Iranians (Persians) and many of the peoples of central Europe. All these people share a common root to their languages that stretches back into prehistory. Their original homeland is not known, but the various branches seem to have migrated out from a centre perhaps in the lands between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea.
The group we now call "Celts" first come to the attention of archaeologists as part of the so-called "urnfield" culture dating back some 4000 years, but they do not become prominent until the European Iron Age. At this time, about 500BCE, the Celts swept across southern and western Europe in a kind of "blitzkrieg". They were highly mobile, possessed state-of-the-art weapons technology and developed a warrior-class culture of unmatched ferocity. At their height, they dominated Europe from modern Switzerland to Ireland in the west, Spain in the South and Turkey in the east. In 387BCE, the Celts defeated the might of the Legions and sacked Rome itself. Other expeditions raided Greece and penetrated as far down as Delphi while others invaded and settled large areas of Anatolia, in modern Turkey.
The Celts themselves did not use the term "Celt". When they referred to themselves as a separate people, it seems that they used a word like "Gal" or the modern "Gael". They named many of the areas they moved into and occupied after themselves. An obvious example is Gaul, "the land of the Gael". Others are Galatia, part of what is now Turkey, to whom the Christian Saint Paul wrote an Epistle, Galicia in modern Spain and "Gwalia", an archaic form of "Wales". In some places, such as Ireland and Scotland, the affirmation of the ancient heritage is found not only in the place names, but in the native language, "Gaelic" which, above all else, has always been the common bond of the Celt.
One legacy of the "warrior culture" of the Celts was a system of bitter blood feuds between families, tribes and clans. This made social cohesion on a large scale next to impossible. Temporary alliances easily dominated other individual tribes as the Celts spread across Europe, but these alliances quickly broke down and reformed as each goal was reached. Despite earlier successes, the Celts were not able to settle their differences or forget internal hatreds long enough to defeat a determined
and organised enemy. They found this enemy in Rome.
Julius Caesar invaded Gaul in 58BCE. Gaul was a territory roughly equivalent to modern France. It was not a single unit, but was occupied by many independent Celtic tribes, some or most involved in internal disputes with neighbours. Caesar was able to make inroads by defeating one tribe or small alliance at a time until, in 52BCE, he was met with the one and only example of the Celtic Gauls banding together in the face of a common enemy under a single leader, Vercingetorix. Caesar's defeat of Vercingetorix at Alesia was followed by the collapse of any further attempt at Gaulish resistance and paved the way for the swift occupation of the rest of the country. With their social structure destroyed, the
Gauls became a subservient people and slowly slipped into terminal decline.
The British Celts learned no lessons from this. When Claudius invaded southern Britain ninety five years later in 43CE, he found a situation similar to that of Gaul in Caesar's day. There were numbers of petty tribal kingdoms, mostly locked into internal feuds and disputes. Some were greedy for the riches and luxury that Roman occupation had brought to their cousins in Gaul. Some were willing to trade their independence in return for Rome's help in defeating a troublesome neighbour. Some were violently patriotic and were implacably opposed to Roman intervention.
The invading Romans exploited these differences to obtain a foothold in Britain and to extend the territory under occupation. Even when a large native kingdom, that of the Iceni, was occupied in 60CE in a blatantly illegal and brutal manner, the other tribes stood by and watched as the Iceni, under their outraged queen Boudicca, embarked on a single handed and suicidal rebellion. Like the Gauls, the British tribes settled into life in the Roman Empire and slowly lost their separate identities, becoming known to later historians and archaeologists just as 'Romano-Britons'.
Ireland was never invaded by Rome. Nearly all Roman invasions were driven ultimately by accountants and balance-sheets. Ireland was not seen as a viable proposition - the income to be derived would not show a profit for the Senate. Most importantly, the various Irish tribes and clans were too busy fighting and raiding each other in long-running blood feuds to pose a political threat or destabilising influence to occupied Britain.
At the fall of Rome in 410CE, such Gauls who still acknowledged themselves as Celts were swiftly overrun by successive waves of barbarian invaders - Vandals, Visigoths and Franks. Within a short time, they were all absorbed or eliminated. By the sixth century CE, the European Celt had all but vanished from history everywhere except in the British Isles. Without the unity enforced by Rome, Celtic Britain quickly broke up into small squabbling princedoms and dukedoms, continuing the endemic internal feuding that has always bedevilled Celtic social history.
In 410CE, the Roman Legions stationed in Britain, already depleted, were withdrawn in a hopeless last-ditch attempt to save Rome itself from destruction at the hands of barbarian invaders. The Celtic Britons were no more able to act together in the face of the external threat of invasion from the Picts and Germanic tribes than their ancestors were nearly four hundred years before against Rome. In a chilling repeat of the first stages of the Roman invasion, at least one Celtic leader, Vortigern, invited in the very barbarians who posed the greatest threat, the Saxons, to preserve his own internal position against other Celtic
tribesmen. The result was predictable and inevitable. By 530CE the Saxons had driven a wedge across Britain from sea to sea; the Celts were divided and scattered. In a curious reverse invasion, a group of Celtic Britons escaped across the sea to a deserted promontory in northern Gaul which still bears the name Brittany and where shreds of the old language of Iron Age Britain can still be heard. Within a hundred years the Saxons had welded a hegemony of seven states that stretched from the rivers of
Clyde and Forth to the English Channel. The last remnants of the Celtic Britons were left with their backs to the sea in the far west, in Wales and Cornwall.
The Saxons, or English as they were now beginning to think of themselves, had to deal with invaders in their turn. The rest of Saxon English history is dogged by relentless wars on three different fronts. Principally, there were the Danish Viking raids. These developed into full-scale Danish invasions and culminated in a period when there was a separate Danish state within England and Danish kings on the English throne. After centuries of struggle, the best the English really achieved was a draw. From the north, there was relentless pressure from the sea-raiders of Norway. These incursions were always repulsed, but never without great effort and cost. Finally, there were the Scots, a warring tribe from northern Ireland who had come (or been pushed) across the Irish Sea to thinly-populated west Caledonia (modern Argyll) and were vigorously carving out a kingdom of their own in the lands north of the great Roman Wall.
The last and most enduring invasion of Britain was, of course, the Norman invasion of 1066, when Saxon England finally succumbed to the Vikings, the Normans being none other than second- or third-generation "Northmen" settlers in occupied French territory.
Bright Blessings,
Coifi
Copyright Chris Turner 1998