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FIRST EDITION

All illustrations © Andy Paciorek, except “Cerne Giant” (see Cerne Abbas) and “Spiral” (see Spiral) by Rodney Castleden

© Rodney Castleden 2013

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Source ISBN 9780007929795

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780007519439

Version 2017-08-10

DEDICATION

This book is dedicated to a people who, over many centuries, have been misunderstood and frequently misrepresented.

The harp that once through Tara’s halls

The soul of music shed,

Now hangs as mute on Tara’s walls

As if that soul were fled.

So sleeps the pride of former days,

So glory’s thrill is o’er,

And hearts, that once beat high for praise,

Now feel that pulse no more.

The Irish poet Thomas Moore (1779–1852)

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright page

Dedication

Preface

Introduction

PART 1: Celtic People and Lifestyle

PART 2: Celtic Places

PART 3: Celtic Religion

PART 4: Myths, Legends, and Stories

PART 5: Symbols, Ideas, and Archetypes

PART 6: Celtic Twilight and Revival Celtic Twilight Celtic Revival

Brief Bibliography

About the Publishers

PREFACE
“SO SLEEPS THE PRIDE OF FORMER DAYS”

This book is an attempt to explore the entire spectrum of Celtic culture. Each of us carries, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously, a particular image of the Celts and their culture. It is like a distinctive and familiar smell or flavor that we recognize as soon as we encounter it.

To some “Celtic” means the soulful, echoing music of harps or bagpipes, or a particularly plaintive style of singing, while to others it means a political movement striving to create—or restore—a regional identity. To some it means modern team games, while to others it means clans and tartans. To some it is a wild, rocky landscape with mist, sea spray, and the roar of breaking waves, while to others it is dissent, tribal warfare, and the world of Braveheart. To some it means ancient legends about dragons, King Arthur, and the Lady of the Lake, while to others it means a lost empire that more than 2,000 years ago spanned Iron Age Europe.

With so many different contemporary takes on Celticness, it will be useful to explore where these ideas have come from. Those who are Celts may want to relive what Thomas Moore called “the pride of former days” and bring that pride into the present, but to do that honorably there is a need to be honest about the past.

One important idea that will emerge from this book is that the nature of Celticness has changed through time, and that means that we need to look at the Celts of 2,000 years ago, look again at the Celts of the Middle Ages, and look yet again at the Celts of today. In order to reach the true nature of Celticness, we have to establish who the Celts were—and who they are.

INTRODUCTION
WHO WERE THE CELTS?

For many people, the word “Celt” conjures two different images; two quite different personalities. One is hot-blooded, fiery, passionate, quick to take offense, volatile, and argumentative. The other is quiet, nostalgic, thoughtful, contemplative, mystical, and in tune with the natural world and also with the world of the spirit. These are two quite different personalities, but they complement each other. They are the two sides of an ancient Celtic coin: the Janus faces of Celticness.

The Celts have tended to dwell on their past, forever looking back to days of former glories and brooding over past defeats. The ancient and medieval Celts loved to tell stories about their tribes, their leaders, their heroes, and their gods. Sometimes there was a practical value in this. Kings and princes needed to justify their positions of privilege, and their ancestry was an integral part of their title. “I am your king because my father was your king and his father before him…” They needed bards to recite their genealogies so that their subjects were regularly reminded of their lords’ pedigrees. Sometimes these genealogies included glamorous imaginary heroes and the recitation of the family tree developed into entertainment.

Storytelling has always been an important element in the Celtic psyche, and the edge between story and history has always been blurred. But a story, or the complex web of interlocking stories that made up the tribal myth, was what held Celtic society together. Every community needs an idea of itself in order to survive, a clear self-image that makes it possible to tell the difference between itself and other communities. This was why one tribe adopted one totem animal and another tribe adopted a different animal, and why one tribe adopted one species of tree, and another tribe a different species. “We are the elm people.” “We are the oak people. We are different.” That sense of special identity has always been important.

An important theme in this book is that the key to that sense of identity has changed through time. The basis, the foundation, of Celticness is not the same now as it was. What I hope to show is that in spite of this the roots of Celticness are deep; they are thousands of years old, much older than most modernday Celts realize.

PEOPLE WE KNOW

Sometimes we think of that early world of the Celts as being an anonymous tribal world, a place where we know no one. In fact we know a surprisingly large number of people who lived in that world and we will be meeting some of them in the first section of this book.

There were several kings in Britain whose names are known: Cassivellaunus (or Caswallawn), Cunobelin (or Cymbeline), Caratacus, Cogidumnus, Cartimandua the client queen of the Brigantes, Boudicca the warrior queen of the Iceni, Diviciacus the Druid king who visited Rome and befriended Cicero, and Vercingetorix the heroic Gaulish king who surrendered to Caesar rather than see his horses, or any more of his companions, killed. A few centuries later we stumble upon St. Patrick, St. Columba, and the ever-mysterious, ever-elusive figure of King Arthur.

Arthur has somehow moved across from history to myth, acquiring the character of a Celtic god along the way, and some of the mystification surrounding his life may reflect the religious beliefs of the time. Another section of this book is devoted to these beliefs.

The spirit world was integrated into the everyday Celtic world in a way that it no longer is today. There was no separation between the people and the spirits: the gods and goddesses who inhabited and controlled everything. The spirits were seen as residing within the natural features of the landscape. Every hill and headland, and every stream and spring, every forest and marsh had its own in-dwelling spirit. Worship was a matter of communing with the spirits in the places where they lived. People went to riverbanks to commune with the spirits of the river. They went to springs to commune with the sprites who looked after those magic places where life-giving water seeped out from the Underworld. There were temples and shrines, but a great deal of the mediation between the everyday world and the spirit world went on out in the landscape, in the open air.

Another section of this book looks at places that have special associations with the Celts: their settlements and strongholds, the scenes of their famous victories and defeats in battle, their sanctuaries and cult places.

There is also a section about the symbols and archetypes that underpin the culture of the Celts and another looking at a selection of their myths, legends, and folktales; the Celts have always been great storytellers.

The final section is a brief overview of the last thousand years or so of Celtic history, which falls into two halves. One is a phase of suppression and eclipse which I call the “Celtic twilight.” The second is a phase of rediscovery and re-emergence—the “Celtic revival”—which brings this review of the Celts up to the present day.

To go back to the beginning, the origin of the people first named the Celts by classical writers has long been the subject of speculation and discussion. The Celts of the Iron Age have an aura of mystery about them because, like the Minoans, they did not leave us any written literature of their own. There are some inscriptions and a fragmentary calendar, but there is no literature as such. The ancient Celts, either deliberately or inadvertently, surrounded themselves with mystery, like the hero Caswallawn with his magic plaid of invisibility.

Who were they? It is a question we are going to come back to again and again, and it is not an easy one to answer. BBC Wales has posted a Celts “factfile” on its educational website aimed at children. The first question is: “Who are the Celts?” It is answered by a simple timeline showing five blocks of time: “STONE AGE” (to 2000 BC), “BRONZE AGE” (to 600 BC), “IRON AGE CELTS” (to AD 50), “ROMANO-BRITISH” (to AD 400), followed by “CELTS OF TODAY.” There are two cartoon Celts: one wearing a helmet and waving a sword, for the Iron Age, and one wearing a yellow shirt and blue tracksuit bottoms for today. So, according to BBC Wales, “Celt” has two senses, describing a group of people today and another group of people 2,000 years ago. Then a link between them is made: “Their culture lives on in language, music, song, and literature.”

One of the questions this book needs to address is how far that is true. Is the Celticness of today really the same as that of 2,000 years ago?

BARBARIANS?

The earliest documented reference to the Celts comes from about 450 BC. Herodotus, long known as “the father of history,” mentions the “Keltoi” briefly:

The River Ister [Danube] begins in the country of the Celts and the city of Pyrene [perhaps Girona, near Barcelona] and flows through the middle of Europe, bisecting it. The Celts are outside the Pillars of Heracles, bordering the Kynesians, who dwell at the edge, farther toward the setting sun than all other inhabitants of Europe.

Herodotus was well traveled, but he admitted to knowing little about northern and western Europe. His Celts are located in relation to the source of the Danube, which he wrongly believed to be near the Pyrenees, but he emphasized that the Celts lived further west in Europe than any other race. This implies that he was thinking of them as being the people of the Atlantic fringe, not of central Europe, but the misplacing of the Danube source confuses the issue. Herodotus had perhaps heard that the Kynesians and Keltoi lived in the far west (the Bay of Biscay coast of northern Spain), not far from the Pyrenees, and that was true. It was also true that those people lived further west than the Pillars of Heracles, which were the Straits of Gibraltar (longitude 5° 21’W). The longitude of La Coruña in Galicia is 8° 25’W, three degrees further west. Herodotus was just mistaken about the course of the Danube. Nineteenthcentury scholars chose to correct him regarding the river’s source, which is in the Black Forest, and accordingly moved the homeland of the Celts to southern Germany as well.

Other fragmentary references to the Keltoi suggest that some Greeks may have used the name loosely to apply to all the tribes of northern and western Europe.

The ancient Greeks thought their own language was the hallmark of civilization and that people who gabbled away in foreign languages were automatically uncivilized—the meaningless “barbar” of their speech defined them as barbarians. So the Greeks tended to lump together all the indigenous peoples of northern, central, and western Europe—non-Mediterranean Europe—and treat them as if they were all the same, even though they were not.

By the fourth century BC, the Celts were regarded as one of the four peripheral peoples of the known world. To the south were the Ethiopians, to the east were the Scythians, and a long way farther off were the Indians. It was a simple, generalized view: only the Mediterranean world was in sharp focus.

The Roman writers of 2,000 years ago took the same view as their Greek predecessors, regarding all the non-Latin-speaking peoples who lived to the north as “barbarians.” The word was not used with any anthropological accuracy—even then—and covered a multitude of peoples with a range of customs and traditions. Roman writers had little interest in the ethnic differences among these peoples. The word Galli was used in the same negative way as the label “barbarian”—the Galli, Gauls, or Celts were all the uncivilized people on the other side of the Alps, and the Romans were doing them a tremendous favor by conquering and civilizing them.

The Romans stereotyped these people, denigrating them in standard clichés. The Celts wore trousers (a very primitive garment compared with Roman tunics and togas) and let their hair grow long and tousled. They were tattooed, foolhardy, and aggressive. They were childish, quarrelsome, and inconstant. They went in for bloodthirsty rituals including human sacrifice. They were headhunters and drunkards, and led scandalous sex lives. In Britain, most amazingly of all, their warriors tore about in chariots—an outmoded style of warfare that in the Mediterranean world had gone out with Homer’s Iliad. (The Romans used chariots only for racing and for sport, not for warfare.)

The Romans liked to portray the Celts as backward and primitive. When Roman legionaries were posted along Hadrian’s Wall, they referred disparagingly to the native Celts as Brittunculi—“wretched little Brits.” It was typical colonial army talk.

The mindset of the Romans was not so very different than that of the British imperialists who 1,700 years later denigrated a wide range of native peoples all around the world, labeling them “pagans,” “heathens,” or even “cannibals.” Bringing such unfortunates under the umbrella of British rule and converting them to Christianity was seen as the right thing to do. The British genuinely believed they were doing these modern barbarians a favor by conquering them, imposing British law, and forcing on them a Victorian version of Christianity.

Having said this, the Roman commentators were partially right, at least in grouping together the peoples who lived north of the Alps. In the period 500–200 BC, north of the Alps from France across Europe to the Black Sea, there was a family of peoples who shared a number of common elements.

A surge in population growth seems to have driven the central European group to become expansionist. In about 400 BC, Celtic tribes moved south into Italy. In 387 BC, they defeated the Romans in battle and sacked Rome itself. In 279 BC, another group of Celts moved into Greece, attacking and plundering the rich, sacred site of Delphi. The following year, 278 BC, three tribes crossed into Asia Minor. Together these three tribes were known as the Galatae, which may be the ultimate origin of the name Keltoi (in Greek) or Celtae (in Latin). They established colonies in what is still known as Galatia.

These things happened. But nineteenth-century historians believed that there was an aggressive expansion in all directions.

THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY VIEW

There is a familiar and oftenrepeated classic nineteenthcentury view of the Celts, which survives in some serious academic work written as late as the 1970s, and in more popular writings since then that are based on the older books. It is still being promoted in some quarters. As recently as the 1990s, a book was published in Ireland, in Irish, and therefore presumably for Irish consumption, which gave the view in outline:

Before Rome became a power, the people we call Celts dominated much of Europe. Their influence ranged from Britain and Ireland in the north to France and Spain in the south and east as far as Turkey. They were united not by a common ruler but by a common language and culture… Their power declined, the influence of their language and culture remains.

This persuasively expressed view gives us an Iron Age race of people bonded by language and culture, with a heartland in central Europe in the first millennium BC. These people migrated outward from their heartland in all directions to invade and colonize most of Europe, taking their culture with them (roughly 800–100 BC). The objects unearthed by antiquarians and archeologists were identified as being in more than one style, so three successive invasions or waves of migrants were inferred, representing three different cultures: Hallstatt, La Tène, and Belgic.

A key element in this approach is the idea that almost everywhere the old pan-European Celtic culture has died out. Only a few refuges are left in the far west—Galicia, Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.

Interestingly, however, the Greek and Roman writers who used the word “Celts” applied it only to the barbarian people who were their northern neighbors, not to the people living on the Atlantic fringes to the far northwest. There is a certain irony in this, as these are just the people who are usually thought of as Celts today.

THE NEW VIEW

By the 1960s, the nineteenthcentury view was being seriously challenged. There was no real archeological evidence for three major invasions; in fact there seemed to be no evidence of any invasions.

Now we come to an important archeological reality: there was no Iron Age Celtic explosion in the center of Europe spinning migrant Celts off in all directions. This will make an enormous difference to the way we view the modern Celts of the Atlantic coastlands. If those territories on the western fringe of Europe were not invaded by waves of Celtic invaders or migrants in the first millennium BC, the people who live there now are unlikely to be descendants of the central European Celts. This is an idea we will come back to later.

The modern view may perhaps be disappointing to some people. There was not, after all, a pan-European Celtic civilization that was uniform in language, culture, and race: there was no golden age of the Celts. Instead there were many separate autonomous communities—tribes—who exchanged goods, styles, and ideas but remained quite diverse and independent, and their relationships with one another shifted through time. This modern view is based on greater archeological and anthropological knowledge.

The new view is that the prehistoric Celts were essentially two distinct groups: the Iron Age peoples of central Europe and the Iron Age peoples of the Atlantic coastline of western Europe. The Atlantic Celts were more or less stationary, although there was a good deal of trading and other communication among them. The central European Celts, on the other hand, were on the move, migrating south into Italy and east toward Romania and Greece.

A fascinating and exciting aspect of this new approach is the realization that the Atlantic Celts did not arrive in the west as a result of an Iron Age migration in the first millennium BC. They were there already and they had been there for a very long time. Their culture had been evolving over thousands of years. They borrowed or acquired some fashions from the central European Celts, but as a result of contact and trade, not invasion or mass migration. The book will focus mainly on the Atlantic Celts, whose enduring culture was a very long time evolving, though there will be entries about the central European Celts too.

THE PAST IN BOOKS

The Celts had their roots in several pasts. We are perhaps too accustomed to reading about peoples in books, where the neatness and clarity of chapter headings can give too sharp a focus.

In nineteenth-century school history books, centuries, periods, and reigns were separated off from one another in just this way; it made history simpler for pupils to learn, simpler for teachers to test.

There was a leftover of this approach in a recent TV history program. The writer and presenter, a distinguished historian, compellingly described the Battle of Hastings and its climax with the death of the last Saxon king of England, King Harold. “That was the end of Saxon England” made a dramatic and memorable conclusion to the program. The battle was certainly a major landmark in English history. The Saxon king was dead, hacked to pieces on the battlefield, and there would never be another Saxon monarch, but 99 percent of the “Anglo-Saxon” population of England lived on, and they passed on their genes, their language, and many of their customs to their children and grandchildren, whereas only a small number of Norman French people arrived in England in 1066. In a very real way, England went on being as “Saxon” as it was before, in spite of being ruled by Normans.

But this raises another question: were the people living in England Anglo-Saxon when Duke William conquered it in 1066? Had the Celtic population of England really been wiped out and replaced by the Anglo-Saxon colonists who had arrived in the fifth, sixth, and seventh centuries?

To take one area as an example, when the Jutes arrived from Jutland on the European mainland, they landed in Kent and established a base on the Isle of Thanet in 449. From there they were able to take over the old kingdom of Kent by military force. They did this by murdering or driving out the British (Celtic) ruling class. The conquering Jutish chief, Hengist, ruled Kent from about 455 to 488. Hengist was succeeded by Aesc, who reigned from 488 to 512. His family and descendants, the new Kentish ruling class, became known as Aescings. This was to distinguish them from all the other people living in Kent, the Kentings, who were descendants of the Cantii, the Iron Age tribe living there before both the Jutish and Roman occupations. The Kentings were the Britons who were doing the manual work and producing the food. They were the the slave class. They were Celts. In the nineteenth century there was an assumption that the invaders had massacred all the existing inhabitants, but this would not have been pragmatic. It was more useful to keep the Kentings, who knew the land and how to work it.

Throughout the country, the Anglo-Saxon conquest was a process of replacing the ruling class, but underneath that there was continuity of community: continuity of bloodline, continuity of genetic material, and continuity of custom. Again, as far as the nineteenthcentury historians are concerned, it is a case of a chapter boundary that has been drawn too sharply.

Many people living in southeast England today are less English than they imagine. In terms of ancestry, they are more Celt than Saxon. According to Professor Stephen Oppenheimer, a leading DNA expert, as few as 5 percent of the people now living in England are of Anglo-Saxon stock; most people who think of themselves as English are genetically of a much more ancient native stock—not Germanic incomers at all.

This discovery, a result of the DNA revolution, raises many questions about ethnic identity. Often when the issue of devolution has been discussed in relation to Wales or Scotland, journalists and politicians have spoken of the views of “the Welsh” or “the Scots,” as if the Welsh and the Scots are distinct and recognizable populations. But, in the terms envisaged in any referendum that has been conducted or planned, they are simply those with Welsh or Scottish addresses who are entitled to vote. Many people of Welsh and Scottish origin have moved to England in search of work; are they no longer Welsh or Scottish? There are also many people raised in England who have gone to Wales or Scotland to live; have they ceased to be English? Did they become Welsh or Scottish by moving house? Defining the Welsh and the Scots turns out to be much harder than anyone imagined.

Professor Norman Davies dedicated his excellent 1999 book The Isles: A History to “the memory of Richard Samson Davies: English by birth, Welsh by conviction, Lancastrian by choice, British by chance.”

Simon James, who wrote The Atlantic Celts (also 1999), makes the interesting point that each of us possesses more than one ethnic identity, because several identities nest inside one another. Simon James himself is a Westerner, a European, a British citizen, an Englishman, a Southerner, and a Londoner. He also has more than one ethnic identity because of his mixed ancestry. Among his recent forebears (he is not specific, but by implication his grandparents and great-grandparents) he can identify Welsh or Cornish, Norman-French, and English people, which gives him the mixed genes of Celtic, Latin, and Germanic bloodlines.

I worked for three years in London, but that did not make me a Londoner. I lived for 12 years in Northamptonshire, but that did not turn me into a Mercian. I was born in Sussex of Kentish parents, Kentish grandparents, and Kentish great-grandparents: Kentish farm laborer stock. That ought to make me thoroughly English. I was brought up to believe that I was English and I feel as though I am English, yet my bone structure tells a different story: I am of pre-Anglo-Saxon British stock—Celtic. That unique British expert on the archeology of feet, Phyllis Jackson, tells me I have trademark Celtic feet. And if you are wondering what Celtic feet look like, they are long and narrow, with toes almost in a straight line, and a long longitudinal arch. My descent is therefore (probably) from that necessary Kenting slave class kept on by the Jutes when they colonized Kent in the fifth century. In fact a great many people born and bred in England are Celtic, as Professor Oppenheimer’s research has shown.

It works the other way too. A great many people living in Scotland and Wales are Anglo-Saxon in origin. It is not what one might have expected. DNA test results turn up more and more problems for claimed or perceived ethnicity.

The words “Celts” and “Celtic” have themselves been used differently over time, especially over the last 200 years, as perceptions of the past and perceptions of the present have shifted. The Celtic revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries identified two kinds of Celt (the Celt according to race or language), and the twentieth century produced three further kinds (the Celt according to culture, politics, or preference). We tend to use the name “Celts” to include people from a continent-wide area, right across Europe, and across quite a long period too, from the Iron Age to the present day. But a lot of those people would never have thought of calling themselves by that name. A monk living on Iona in the eighth century AD would probably have thought of himself as an Irishman in exile. A man in a plaid driving cattle down a Scottish glen in the sixteenth century would have seen himself as a Highlander and a Campbell. A woman living at the Maiden Castle hillfort in the fourth century BC would have thought of herself as a member of the Durotriges tribe, possibly with kin across the water in Brittany. Each of these people would have been startled to hear themselves called Celts: as far as they were concerned, that was not their identity.

THE ATLANTIC CELTS

We have to set aside the long-held assumption that the Celts were a pan-European Iron Age race. This means rethinking European prehistory. Modern archeological and anthropological evidence is pointing toward a reality that is far more exciting.

Instead of the Celts of the west being relative newcomers, arriving in the Atlantic coastlands between 2,000 and 3,000 years ago, they are emerging as an indigenous people with a very ancient ancestry indeed. Ten thousand years ago, the last cold stage of the Ice Age was ending and the ice that had covered much of Britain and Ireland was melting back. After the long glacial episode, the islands were becoming habitable again. What happened then was that people living in refuges in northern Spain began to migrate northward, bay-hopping along the coast, to colonize the lands that were thawing out. These early migrants spread through exactly the areas that we now think of as Celtic—Galicia, Brittany, Cornwall, Wales, and Scotland—plus a margin along their eastern edges—northern Spain, the Bay of Biscay coast of France, Normandy, and the whole of England. This is where the Celtic ancestry of Britain (England included) came from—this ancient migration from the south.

The people we call Celts were the descendants of these Middle Stone Age hunters, gatherers, and fishermen, and of the New Stone Age farmers, pastoralists, and stone circle builders who succeeded them.

One of the stone circles, Stonehenge, has become an emblem of Celtic Britain. Modern Druids have claimed it as theirs, and we could question this entitlement, but this process of claiming and adopting has probably been repeated over and over again through time. Stonehenge was once thought to be the work of a Mycenaean architect, partly because of the similarity between the stone trilithons and the architecture of the great Lion Gate at Mycenae, built in 1250 BC, and there are carvings on the stones that seem to show a Mycenaean dagger. But now radiocarbon dates show that they were raised long before that, in 2500 BC. The earth circle round them dates from 3100 BC, and the totem poles that stood close by were raised in 8000–7000 BC. Stonehenge turns out to be a monument that was modified and developed repeatedly, by indigenous people, during the course of the long evolution of the Atlantic Celtic culture. The site witnessed and expressed the whole span of the Atlantic Celts’ prehistory.

Most of the big standing stones in the lands of the Atlantic Celts were raised in the Neolithic (3000– 2000 BC), some in the Bronze Age (2000–600 BC), and a small number in the Iron Age. They clearly speak of the bond the Atlantic Celts had developed with standing stones.

The megaliths that are known to belong to the Iron Age tend to be relatively small—man-height—and single monoliths only. Some are simple, tapering, and rounded pillars, others are fluted like Doric columns. Another group is low and rounded, almost cushion-shaped, like the Turoe Stone in County Galway.

The Christian Celts of later centuries remained interested in the earlier megaliths. They Christianized some of the old pagan stones, converting them by carving their tops into crude crosses. They even raised a brand-new family of megaliths: magnificently carved massive Celtic crosses such as Muireadach’s Cross at Monasterboice in Ireland.

Big standing stones were a part of the Atlantic Celtic consciousness all the way through.

Another link across this long span of time was made in 1996, when the remains of Cheddar Man were subjected to DNA analysis. Cheddar Man is the complete skeleton of a man who lived in Somerset in 7150 BC and when he died was buried in Gough’s Cave at Cheddar. It was found that this Stone Age man’s DNA was a close match with that of a local teacher, Adrian Targett. So, a man living and working at the Community School in Cheddar in the late twentieth century turned out to be a direct descendant of someone living in the same place more than 9,000 years before.

THE CELTS AND THE OCEAN

The Celts and their culture are also deeply embedded in their windswept, wave-washed, and rocky landscape. The Atlantic coastline has played a major role in shaping the coastal communities and producing a convergence of mindset. The smell of the sea saturated the lives and histories of these communities. They depended on the richly stocked waters for fish, and for the trade that they made possible. Tribes on opposite sides of the English Channel traded with each other, and trade led to other contacts, including treaties of mutual defense and intermarriage; kinship bonds developed. On the British side of the Channel, the Durotriges, the Iron Age tribe of Dorset, traded with the Coriosolites, who lived on the north coast of Brittany around what is now St. Malo. Coins minted by the Coriosolites have been found at Hengistbury, the Durotrigians’ main port in Christchurch Harbor. The trade route ran by way of the Channel Islands, immediately off the coast and directly between the Coriosolites’ territory and Dorset; coins of the Coriosolites tribe have been found on Jersey. There were lively cross-Channel contacts between 100 and 50 BC; trade that had been going on for 2,000 years. In 80 BC the Durotriges looked across to Gaul when they adopted not only coinage but the simple designs they put on their coins.

After 50 BC there was a downturn in cross-Channel trade, which narrowed the horizons of the Durotriges and left them in a backwater. This was partly a result of piecemeal Roman conquests in Gaul generally and political settlements that left the Hengistbury merchants high and dry. It was probably largely due to an embargo imposed on the Durotriges by Julius Caesar as a punishment for supporting the Armorican rising against him in 56 BC. The people of Iron Age Dorset had felt sufficiently strong kinship with their trading partners across the sea to send warriors in an attempt to stem the Roman invasion of Gaul.

The resistance to Rome was a failure in the end, but it shows the determination of the Durotriges to resist the might of Rome. When the armies of Claudius arrived in Britain 90 years later, the fiercely independent Durotriges were once more among those offering the most aggressive resistance. Even though they were conquered by Vespasian in AD 44, they were still able, 20 years later, during the revolt of another fiercely independent tribe, the Iceni under Boudicca, to offer a potential threat to Rome’s hold on southern Britain.

This snapshot of one tribe’s activities during the first centuries BC and AD shows how a community of Atlantic Celts functioned in relation to other tribes—and not just near neighbors. There were networks of relationships that spread far and wide, thanks to the all-embracing ocean.

The relationship between peoples and the sea helps us to understand what has been called the longue durée: the underlying consistencies that bind communities together and the persistent rhythms that influence their development across long periods of time. The peoples of the Atlantic façade shared common values and beliefs over thousands of years, and this sharing was conditioned to a great extent by their unique habitat on rocky coastlines looking out across the ocean.

A simple Breton verse sums it up:

At sea, all is anguish.

At sea, all is prayer.

To this day, some of the islanders living on the small islands off the Irish coast depend on boats to get them about, yet they do not learn to swim. They surrender to fatalism when they see someone in difficulties in the sea because the sea is claiming its own. “But,” as an Aran islander once said, “we do only be drownded now and again.”

TWO KINDS OF IRON AGE CELTS

In 500 BC, there were two communities of Celts, the central European Celts and the Atlantic Celts, leading parallel lives. How much contact was there between the two?

The arrival in Britain of distinct artistic styles that can be related to the styles prevailing in central Europe shows that there was contact. The similarities of style are so strong that they formed the basis of the idea of migration. Now it is thought more likely that only small numbers of people were on the move, perhaps traders and a small number of migrants, yet these movements were enough to take stylistic ideas from one area to the other.

The western Celts interacted with successive European cultures: the Hallstatt, La Tène, and Belgic cultures within the Iron Age, then the Roman civilization, and then the cultures of the Jutes, Angles, Saxons, and Vikings. On the Atlantic fringe, sometimes the culture of the western Celts spread far and wide, making a continuously identifiable Atlantic culture. On occasions this culture was continuous with the central European culture, so that a very extensive culture area was formed. At other times it shrank to relatively small pockets, cells, or refuges.

The waxing and waning of other cultures have sometimes inhibited the development of Celtic culture; at other times they have stimulated it. There was a long period of stasis and conservatism in Europe in the Bronze Age. Much of what happened was a response to the more dynamic and aggressive cultures of south-eastern Europe. In Anatolia (modern Turkey) there was the great Hittite Empire, and adjacent to that were the thriving Minoan and Mycenaean civilizations of the Aegean region. In about 1200 BC the Hittite Empire collapsed. The Minoan civilization was already weakened and subsumed by the Mycenaean civilization, then that too collapsed. Whether these collapses were to do with fundamental inherent weaknesses—time-bombs embedded within the cultures—or were precipitated by invasions or raids from outside, perhaps by the mysterious Sea Peoples, archeologists continue to debate. What is certain is that the pace of cultural development in Europe was suddenly no longer wholly governed from its south-eastern threshold.

The collapse of the Hittite Empire meant that the secrets of ironworking, which had until then been a Hittite monopoly, spread across Europe. The “barbarians” of Europe learned a new technology, which involved beating bronze into thin sheets that could be made into cups, shields, and helmets. They also acquired a taste for wine, which led to an opening of trade routes south to the Mediterranean so that wine could be acquired. Finally, the opening of contact between northern and southern Europe led to a fruitful interchange of ideas between the two regions.

The Bronze Age Europeans who underwent these major changes were the Urnfielders: the people who were the central European (Iron Age) Celts’ immediate precursors.

Even within the Iron Age, what happened in central Europe was affected by what was happening in, and to, Greece. In 540 BC the Phocaean Greeks were in conflict with Carthage, and the two forces fought for supremacy in the western Mediterranean region in a sea battle off the Italian coast. The Carthaginians won and blockaded Greek trade in the Mediterranean. This in turn meant that the Celtic communities developing north of the Alps were cut off from Greek goods, and therefore from Greek models and standards. Those trading relationships were not recovered for 50 years. When they were, developments in Iron Age Celtic culture had taken it elsewhere. A new and more advanced Celtic culture was evolving, the La Tène culture, with a focus on the Rhône and middle Marne valleys.

Later, in the first century BC, came the major inhibiting force of Rome, as the Roman Empire spread northward and westward into the territories of the Celts, conquering, subduing, and Romanizing.

REAL PEOPLE

When the Romans left Britain in the fifth century AD, the Dark Age Celts (the Romanized Britons left behind) had a new battle for survival on their hands, this time against an incursion of Anglo-Saxon invaders.

This was the time of Arthur, the legendary Arthur, the Dark Age Celtic king who rallied the Britons and led them into battle, halting the westward advance of the Saxons across Britain for a quarter of a century, until he too fell in battle at Camlann in 547—if indeed he existed. There are some who believe that he really did. If so, how many of the stories about him are true?

There is a wide spectrum of views about Arthur. Some people believe that he was everything the legends of the high Middle Ages say he was—a noble, true, and Christian king who rallied the native Britons at a time when they were being overwhelmed by the westward march of the Saxons. Others believe that he never existed at all, that there was no such king, and that he was invented in retrospect long after the British struggle for survival had been lost. Was he perhaps a typically Celtic keening for a lost might-have-been history?

King Arthur does seem to represent the essence of Celticness in the same way as a bagpipe lament. Complex and enigmatic, resonant with visionary ideals, noble failure, and a wistful nostalgia for what might have been, his story represents a dark, vibrant, inspiring, and wonderful past that we desperately want to believe in.

For centuries, myth, mystery, magic, and mysticism have been associated with the Celts. I hope this book will satisfy any curiosity regarding that spiritual side of the Celtic personality. But it is also important to remind ourselves that the Celts ate and drank and lived in houses, worked for their living, played music, told stories, and liked playing games. This everyday side needs to be sketched in, however lightly, to round out the picture of a remarkable, inventive, and longenduring people—a real people, as real as we are.

ADDEDOMARUS

A king of the Trinovantes tribe at the end of the first century BC. His territory consisted of what is now Essex and south Suffolk. Although this area is now part of England, Addedomarus and his people were not English but native Celtic Britons. He was the first British king north of the Thames River to mint inscribed coins.

Addedomarus moved the Trinovantes’ tribal capital from Braughing in Hertfordshire to Camulodunum (Colchester) in Essex. In about 30 BC, Tasciovanus, king of the neighboring Catuvellauni tribe to the west, seized his territory from him and began issuing his own coins from Camulodunum. The two kingdoms were apparently then run jointly from the Trinovantian capital by the Catuvellaunian king.

Addedomarus somehow regained control in about 20 BC and reigned over the Trinovantes until his death in 10 BC (approximate dates). He is thought to be the king who was buried in the Lexden Tumulus in Camulodunum. On his death, he was succeeded by Dubnovellaunus.

In the Welsh Triads, Addedomarus is remembered as one of the founders of Britain.

ADOMNÁN

Abbot of Iona 686–704. He was the main northern Irish advocate of support for the Roman Easter. With others, in 697, he was responsible for setting up the Cain Adomnain, a code of war designed to protect non-combatants. He went to Northumbria in 686 to negotiate the release of 60 Irish prisoners abducted by the Northumbrians in a raid.

AED

Sixth-century Irishman, brought up in Meath without any education. His brothers divided their father’s inheritance, giving him nothing. To force their hand, he abducted a young woman. He was rebuked by Bishop Illand for his action and promised something better if he entered the Church, which he did.

Aed was consecrated bishop in Meath, where he founded monasteries and performed miracles. He also secured the release of many slaves and prisoners who wanted to enter monasteries: it was a recruitment drive.

AEDAN

Aedan was a sixth-century monk sent from Iona to Lindisfarne as bishop. He was abbot of the Columban house of Lindisfarne (north of Bamburgh) and bishop of the Northumbrians. The chronicler Bede emphasized the singleminded simplicity of his life.

AEDAN MAC GABRAIN

Aedan mac Gabrain was King of Dal Riada in south-western Scotland. He was probably born about 550 and became king in 574. He named his firstborn son Arthur (Artorius), probably after the great Arthur, the overking who had recently died.

According to the Life of Columba, Aedan was unsure which of his three sons—Arthur, Eochaid Find, or Domingart—would be his successor. St. Columba chillingly prophesied that “none of these three shall be king, for they shall fall in battle, slain by their enemies; if you have any younger sons let them come to me, and the one the Lord has chosen will at once rush into my lap.” Fortunately, Aedan did have more sons. It was Eochaid Buide who ran straight to Columba.

Arthur and Eochaid Find were killed shortly afterward in the Battle of the Miathi in about 575–80. Domingart was defeated and killed in battle in “Saxonia,” which was presumably what is now eastern England. Eochaid Buide did indeed become king, 608–29. Aedan himself lived on until 609.

AEDUI

A Gaulish tribe, with its main center at Bibracte. According to the Roman historian Livy, the Aedui joined the expedition of Bellovesus into Italy in the sixth century BC. Around 90 BC they became allies of Rome. When they were invaded and defeated by their neighbors the Sequani, they sent Diviciacus the Druid to Rome to appeal to the senate on their behalf.

When Julius Caesar arrived in Gaul in 58 BC, he restored their independence. Even so, the Aedui joined the coalition of Gaulish tribes against Caesar. After Vercingetorix surrendered at Alesia, however, they were glad to go back to supporting Rome. Augustus ordered Bibracte, their native capital on Mont Beuvray, destroyed; it was replaced by a new town, Augustodunum (Autun).

AGRICOLA

See Aircol.

AILLEL MOLT

The High King of Ireland in the late fifth century. There were several major kings in Ireland, of Leinster, Munster, Connacht, Ui Neill, and Uliad, with many petty kings and sub-kings beneath them. Aillel Molt was their overking. He was killed by an alliance of Irish kings in the Battle of Ocha in 482. Then the High Kingship fell to King Loegaire’s son Lugid.

AIRCOL

A Dark Age king of Demetia (south-west Wales), Aircol was also known by the Latin form of his name, Agricola. His father’s personal name was forgotten by the chroniclers, who referred to him only as “The Tribune.”

Dark Age Celtic leaders valued what was to them a precious Roman legacy; in their minds, using Latin gave them higher status, and they invariably used it on their memorial stones, sometimes alongside their native Celtic names. For example, a sixth-century memorial stone near Chesterholm is inscribed: “Brigomaglos, who is also Briocus, [lies] here.”

Aircol was one of the two Dark Age kings Gildas praised. He was also mentioned as an exemplary warrior hero by Taliesin. Cynan Garwyn of Powys was described in battle in Aircol’s own kingdom, as “like Aircol himself on the rampage.”

Aircol died in 515 and was succeeded by his son Gordebar, or Vortipor the Protector.

AMBIANI

A Celtic tribe in Gaul, with its main center at Samarobriva (later Amiens). In 57 BC, the year of Julius Caesar’s campaign against the Belgae, the Ambiani were said to be able to raise 10,000 armed men to fight. They joined the great Gaulish rebellion against Rome.

AMBIORIX

The chief of the Eburones tribe in Gaul at the time of the Battle of Alesia (see Places: Alesia).

AMBROSIUS AURELIANUS

The battle leader, or dux bellorum, of the British in their struggle against the Anglo-Saxons. He was the leader who succeeded Vortigern (and may have been responsible for ousting him from power) and immediately preceded Arthur. It is odd that he is mentioned by the sixth-century historian Gildas, then in the eighth century by Nennius, but by no other historian until the Middle Ages. He nevertheless existed. Gildas describes him as a modest man, which is a surprising quality in a battle leader.

He appears to have been a Celtic nobleman and it has been suggested that the “Ambros” place-names may represent the stations of the units that he raised and led, styled Ambrosiaci. This is an attractive idea, but it is unclear how Amberley, deep in West Sussex and very close to the south Saxon heartland, could possibly have functioned as such a base for Celtic troops.

The Latinized form, Ambrosius, of the Celtic name Ambros or Emrys may have been given by a chronicler, or adopted by Emrys himself as a badge of formal respectability, something that many other British noblemen did (see Aircol). It does not prove, as some have proposed, that he was a member of a Roman family who stayed on after the Roman troops left. He represents a class of post-Roman native British aristocrats who clung to an older order of things and disapproved of Vortigern’s reckless politicking with the untrustworthy Germanic colonists.

It is likely that Ambrosius was a focus for dissent among the Britons over the way Vortigern was leading the confederation to disaster.

Gildas describes how Ambrosius’ leadership marked the beginning of a more successful phase for the British:

When the cruel plunderers [the Saxons attacking the British in about 460] had gone back to their settlements, God gave strength to the survivors [the British]. Wretched people flocked to them from all directions, as eagerly as bees when a storm threatens, begging burdening heaven with unnumbered prayers that they should not be destroyed. Their leader was Ambrosius Aurelianus, a gentleman who, perhaps alone of the Romanized Britons, had survived the shock of this great storm [the Saxon invasion of Britain]; certainly his parents, who may have worn the purple, were slain in it. Under him our people regained their strength and challenged the victors to battle.

After this the British started to win battles, and they were eventually rewarded with the overwhelming victory at Badon.

Another view of Ambrosius comes from Nennius’ Miscellany. There Ambrosius is “the great king among all the kings of the British nation.” This may mean only that his reputation grew steadily after his death, that he was promoted by history, rather as Arthur would be a little later. It may alternatively be a genuine reflection of Ambrosius’ status as dux bellorum.

Interestingly Cynan of Powys was later to be called Aurelianus, which may have been another title of the dux bellorum.

Although it is not known where Ambrosius came from or where he lived, Amesbury in Wiltshire is possible. Amesbury was spelt “Ambresbyrig” in a charter dated 880 and may derive its name directly from Ambrosius himself. If he held Salisbury Plain as his estate, or at any rate this part of it, he would have controlled the critical north-eastern corner of Dumnonia. The frontier of Dumnonia was marked by an earthwork called the Wansdyke, and it lies 7 miles (12km) north-east of Amesbury. Where Ambrosius’ stronghold was is not known, but it may have been the Iron Age hillfort known as Vespasian’s Camp, just 1 mile (1.6km) to the east of Stonehenge. This spacious fort would have made an excellent rallying-point for the forces Ambrosius gathered; it would also make sense of the otherwise inexplicable association that Geoffrey of Monmouth made between Ambrosius and Stonehenge.

From about 460 Ambrosius is said to have organized an island-wide resistance of the British to the Anglo-Saxon invasion. His campaign prospered. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is silent about this period, suggesting that the British were in the ascendancy; there is no boasting of a Saxon victory until 473. Gildas enthused about Ambrosius: “though brave on foot, he was braver still on horseback.” This implies a preference for cavalry action, which his successor, Arthur, would share. “The Britons fled to him like swarms of bees who fear a coming storm. They fought the war with Ambrosius as their leader.”

Fanciful legends were later embroidered round this heroic figure. It was said that in Ambrosius’ reign Merlin the magician brought the stones of Stonehenge over from Ireland and set them up in Wiltshire. This does not square with the geology or archeology of Stonehenge. The sarsen stones came from the chalk downs near Avebury; the bluestones came from Pembrokeshire. Both arrived on Salisbury Plain in the middle of the third millennium BC—and that was long, long before the time of Ambrosius Aurelianus.

AMMINIUS

One of three sons of Cunobelin. The Catuvellaunian kings enlarged their sphere of influence to include Kent, which became Amminius’s fiefdom, with Canterbury as his capital. There was some kind of family quarrel, as a result of which in AD 40 Amminius fled to Rome—the Rome of the emperor Caligula. His arrival with some sort of complaint about the way he had been treated gave Caligula a welcome pretext to reopen the question of Britain.

Julius Caesar had failed to annex Britain for the Roman Empire, but it was still on the wish list for conquest. The strength of Catuvellaunian control in south-eastern Britain was such that an invasion could not be undertaken lightly. If the divine Julius could not conquer Britain, could Caligula conquer it? In AD 40 he got as far as the Channel coast at Boulogne before losing his nerve and returning to Rome.

In AD 43, after the assassination of Caligula, his successor, Claudius, determined to invade, and he succeeded.

ANEIRIN

See The Gododdin.

ART

Celtic art has often been compared with classical art, the art of Iron Age Greece and Rome, and been found wanting. European and North American artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tended to look to classical models.

Celtic art comes closer in spirit to some of the art movements of the twentieth century. The Celtic artist looked at a model, whether human or animal or part of the physical landscape, and tried to reduce it to its raw essentials. The aim was to simplify and so draw attention to certain raw qualities or characteristics. The carving might be done with care, without necessarily producing a “realistic” representation of the model. The same is true of the bronzes, many of which have survived in good condition. The Matisse-like figurine of a naked woman dancing is a superb piece of Celtic art: rhythmic, free, and uninhibited.

As for the images, reduced to their essentials, they could appear rough, crude, and massive. These works can be visually reminiscent of Henry Moore’s sculptures, and they have a similar presence.

Sometimes there was a desire to make images ambiguous. It is difficult to be sure whether the legs of Cernunnos have actually turned into writhing serpents or if he is simply standing behind the snakes. It is as if the artist was deliberately setting up a visual riddle. The pairing of Cernunnos, the antlered god, with his companion, the stag, in itself suggests a bond between them. But to give both stag and god identical antlers is taking the statement a step further, toward shapeshifting. Can the stag and the god actually transform into one another? Are they in fact two manifestations of the same being?

The weirdness of some images is intentional; this is the weirdness of the Otherworld—the dream world where people and gods can mingle, and where the living can meet the dead. It is the strange world we inhabit, or migrate to, when we fall asleep.

One of the finest pieces of artwork from Britain in the first century AD is the Battersea shield—if judged by classical standards. This piece of Romano-Celtic bronze parade armor was deposited in the Thames River at Battersea, and probably left there deliberately.

The bronze-covered iron helmet found at Agris in Charente must have been made for ceremonial use. It is covered in fine detail in low relief, with gold and coral inlays added: an astonishingly sophisticated piece of metalwork, more crown than helmet.

The distinctive art style that we generally recognize as Celtic is really the linear art that began with the La Tène culture. It consists of a decorative line that curves sinuously in an S-shape, often repeatedly and rhythmically, sometimes symmetrically, and sometimes not. The S-shape was often developed with eddies and circles to make very elaborate patterns. The style reached its peak long after the La Tène culture was over, indeed long after the Celts generally had lost their political and cultural dominance in Europe, when even their religious beliefs had been overwhelmed and supplanted. The peak was reached in the illuminated gospels drawn and painted by monks in the eighth and ninth centuries AD, works such as The Book of Kells and The Lindisfarne Gospels.

The minutely elaborate detailing of The Book of Kells was described by a visitor in 1185 as “the work of an angel,” and so it still seems. It is so ornate, so exuberant, so controlled, and so perfect that it can scarcely be the work of human hand. The intricate design was not a sudden late invention, but part of a long tradition that went back to the fourth century BC.

It is hard to single out specific artworks as representing the pinnacle of a culture, but there is general agreement that the illustrated manuscripts of the eighth and ninth centuries AD are the finest productions of Celtic art. There is a certain irony in this. The Celts of pre-Christian, pre-Roman Europe were reluctant writers; the miraculous fusion of elements in the early medieval The Book of Kells is really a masterpiece of calligraphy, the most elaborately decorated writing ever conceived.

ARTHMAEL

St. Arthmael was the son of a noble in Glevissig (Glamorgan), who was probably educated at Illtud’s school. He took holy orders on leaving school. He was a pioneering, crusading Christian and is thought by some to be one of the prototypes for an otherwise fictional Arthur. He decided to give up his property and emigrate to Brittany. When Conomorus killed Jonas of Domnonie, Arthmael withdrew for safety with Judwal of Domnonie along with St. Samson and others. They took refuge for a time with Childebert in Paris. When Arthmael returned to Brittany, he settled at St. Armel near Rennes.

ARTHUR

Possibly the best-known and least-known figure of the Celtic Dark Ages. Everyone knows the name of Arthur, but there are many different views about his historicity. Some scholars think he was a real British king, though not the king of all Britain, while others think he is a complete fiction. My own view is that he was real.

DID HE REALLY EXIST?

There are two certain dated references to Arthur in the Easter Annals, which show that he existed as a prominent historical figure:

516: Battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the cross of our lord Jesus Christ on his shoulders for three days and three nights, and the British were victors.

537: Strife of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut perished [or fell].

There are various scraps of evidence of his celebrity as warrior and war leader, for instance in The Gododdin (a series of elegies) a warrior is compared unfavorably with Arthur—he fought well, though “he was no Arthur.”

The inscriptions on scattered stone memorials created in the sixth century are consistent in content and date with genealogies and other documents that we only have in copies written down much later. In other words, some of the later documents are corroborated by evidence dating from Arthur’s time. A pedigree from Pembrokeshire running to 31 generations mentions a prince named Arthur who lived in the later sixth century and was probably born around 550, just about the time of Arthur’s death according to the Easter Annals. It is possible that the child was named in memory of the king who had recently died.

An argument against Arthur’s existence is that he is not mentioned in The Ruin of Britain by the monk Gildas, written in about 540. “The silence of Gildas” can be explained fairly easily. First, Arthur was so well known by Britons living in the mid-sixth century that they didn’t need Gildas to explain who he was. Secondly, Gildas refers to kings obliquely, by nickname. Contemporary readers would have known exactly who he meant, even if we don’t, and it was his contemporaries Gildas was addressing. But Gildas describes a king called Cuneglasus as “the Bear’s charioteer.” The identity of the Bear is not immediately obvious to us, but Gildas played word games with the names of other kings, referring, for example, to Cynan or Conan as Caninus, the Dog. “The Bear” in Welsh is Arth, which brings us equally close to the name of Arthur. King Cuneglasus might as a young princeling 20 years earlier have served in Arthur’s army, and he might have been given the privileged position of driving Arthur’s chariot. So, Arthur does appear to be mentioned by Gildas after all, even if in disguise.

Some of those scholars who believe that Arthur did not exist argue their case on something very close to conspiracy theory. They begin from the presupposition that he never existed, therefore all the references to him, even in otherwise authentic documents, must be unhistorical, later interpolations, anachronistic intrusions, and corruptions of the text. Once a decision is made that Arthur cannot have existed, any evidence that he did exist must be fake. This is not so far from the conspiracy theory about the Apollo moon landings, which some people like to see as an elaborate hoax. The more evidence that is brought forward to show that the flights to the moon really happened, the more elaborate and cunning it proves the hoax to be.

We could contrast the historic Arthur and the mythic Fionn. Fionn is alleged to have fought with Vikings, but he died in AD 283, which is too early for him to have encountered them. Conversely, the Easter Annals strongly imply that Arthur fought his major campaign against the Saxons in the sixth century, between the Battle of Badon in 516 and the Battle of Camlann in 537, which is exactly the right time—according to the archeology—for him to have been doing that on the eastern boundary of Dumnonia.

WHO WAS ARTHUR?

This scenario converges on the idea that Arthur was primarily the King of Dumnonia. This ancient kingdom is now the English West Country, consisting of Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, and Dorset. Gildas’s peculiar account of the state of Britain, The Ruin of Britain, is really a tortured lament about the poor leadership shown by the Dark Age kingdoms that occupied the English West Country and Wales in the first half of the sixth century. This region coincides exactly with the fourth-century Roman administrative province of Britannia Prima, and it implies that after the Romans abandoned Britain some vestiges of the Roman administrative structure remained.

Certainly by AD 314, when the names appear in the Verona List, Britain was formally divided into four provinces: Prima, Secunda, Maxima Caesariensis, and Flavia Caesariensis. It is possible to visualize a loose confederation of Dark Age kingdoms still functioning in the sixth century within the boundaries of Britannia Prima.

Perhaps the kings of this province went their separate ways most of the time and came together only when there was a common danger. That common danger was the approach of the Saxon colonists, so the many small war-bands of the separate kingdoms needed to be coordinated. In Gail, the Bibracte council in 52 BC agreed on a common strategy: to join forces and resist Rome under the war leadership of one of their kings. In exactly the same way the kings of Britannia Prima agreed to resist the encroachment by the Saxons; and their choice of war leader was Arthur. He was to be dux bellorum, the leader of battles, while that threat existed.

The dates for Arthur’s first and last battles, 516 and 537, give us the span of his later military career, and they imply that he was born in about 475. This would have made him 41, a mature and accomplished commander at the time of Badon, and 62 at the time of Camlann.

A pedigree of unknown reliability exists in the Welsh tradition. Here Arthur was the son of Uther and Ygraine (or Eigr). Ygraine was the daughter of Amlawdd Wledig, who married Gwenn, daughter of Cunedda Wledig. Wledig or gwledig means “king” or “overking,” so Arthur’s maternal line at least was royal. Ygraine had a sister Reiengulid, who was the mother of St. Illtud, which is how Illtud comes to be Arthur’s cousin.

The lack of a well-authenticated (paternal) pedigree for Arthur can be interpreted in many ways. Some say it shows he never existed, while others see it as evidence that he was not of royal blood and others as evidence that he was a usurper. Whatever his origins, Arthur became a king, then overking, and probably through prowess more than birth.

WHERE WAS CAMELOT?

Elsewhere, I have argued that Arthur was initially the sub-king of a small north Cornish territory called Trigg (meaning “three war-bands”), with his home at Castle Killibury, not far from the modern town of Wadebridge. Killibury was a small and discreetly defended hideaway that had a superb view down the Camel estuary, which Arthur probably used as his harbor. In fact imported Dark Age pottery wares have recently been discovered near the seaward end of the estuary.

It is highly significant that early Welsh tradition gives Kelliwic as the name of Arthur’s favorite residence; even the Welsh saw Arthur’s principal home as Castle Killibury. A Welsh Triad lists the places where Arthur held court in Three Tribal Thrones of the Island of Britain. The northern one was at Pen Rhionydd—a place that has not been identified, but thought to near Stranraer in Galloway. The Welsh throne was at St. David’s and the Cornish tribal throne was at Kelliwic. Kelliwic was firmly recognized as Arthur’s base long before any idea of Camelot came up. The poem Culhwch and Olwen mentions five times that Kelli Wic was Arthur’s port. An old name for Castle Killibury is Kelly Rounds and an Anglo-Saxon charter mentions a place called “Caellwic.”

Not far away is Tintagel Island. A significant amount of very high status and very expensive pottery imported from the Mediterranean confirms it as a royal focus of some kind. It was not a permanent settlement but a place for special occasions. The footprint carved into the living rock at the island’s summit marks it as the coronation place: the spot where kings of Trigg (north Cornwall), and perhaps kings of all Dumnonia, came to take their oath and assume the mantle of kingship. This was where Arthur drew his power from the stone (see Places: Tintagel).

Like other Dark Age and medieval kings, Arthur was always on the move. Kings had to peregrinate around their kingdoms in order to be seen by their subjects and maintain the bond of loyalty between king and subject.

Arthur had various muster points where the Dumnonian war-bands could gather before being marched east to engage the Saxons: Warbstow Bury and Lydford were two in the center of Dumnonia; South Cadbury was the major one close to the eastern border, the “war zone.”

One of the many mysteries surrounding Arthur is the location of Camelot, that place of special mystique. It is unlikely to be Castle Killibury. The name “Camelot” strongly suggests a connection with the Celtic war god, Camulos, and if Camelot was named for the war god it is likely to be associated with fighting and with gatherings of the war-bands. Camelot is elusive, for the simplest of reasons: it was not one place, but several. It was mobile; it was wherever Arthur was encamped with his warriors.

THE LAST BATTLE

The site of the last battle, Camlann, has been discussed endlessly. Every author who has written about Arthur has their own favored site. I have discussed elsewhere the reasons for thinking that the likeliest place is Pont ar Gamlan: a boulder-strewn fording-place at the confluence of the Eden and Mawddach rivers a few miles north of Dolgellau in North Wales. A third river, the Gamlan, flows down the steep mountainside from the west to join the Mawddach close by. It flows down through an oak forest and over some impressive waterfalls: the Black Falls, just above Ganllwyd. The name “Gamlan” is very close to the traditional name of the last battle, and in Welsh a cadgamlan is an utter rout, a complete massacre, and this is likely to be the original meaning of the battle’s name, now commemorated in the name of the river.

This may seem an odd place for Arthur to be fighting a battle in that the threat from the Saxons was from the east. But the various traditions about the last battle have in common the idea that it was a fight amongst the British. Arthur was betrayed by a relative, perhaps a nephew, called Modred or Medraut. With that in mind, the final battle might have been fought well inside the frontiers of Britannia Prima, in Devon, Cornwall, or anywhere in Wales.

The North Wales location suggests that Arthur was making his way north into the kingdom of Gwynedd along the major south–north Roman road known as Sarn Helen. The King of Gwynedd was Maelgwn, and his fortress was Castell Degannwy, perched on a rocky, twin-peaked hilltop overlooking the Conwy estuary. Like many other Dark Age strongholds, this was a refortified Iron Age fort. The site has yielded sixth-century pottery and there is a tradition that it was the seat of Maelgwn, though, like Arthur, Maelgwn had a less conspicuous refuge residence, at Aberffraw on the west coast of Anglesey. Degannwy was Maelgwn’s frontline fortress, and this was where Arthur was heading. The last battle took place in an atmosphere of distrust and civil war, and Arthur was probably hoping to deal with Maelgwn’s disloyalty.

Maelgwn had a reputation for ruthlessness. We know from the outright condemnation of him by Gildas that he murdered his own uncle in order to become King of Gwynedd; now he was envious of Arthur’s High Kingship and determined to get it for himself. Maelgwn was Arthur’s enemy; the king who was destabilizing the British confederation and who wanted him dead so that he could be dux bellorum himself.

Whether Arthur and his war-band rode into Gwynedd to quell an overt rebellion and open and anticipated hostility or were lured there by some guile of Maelgwn’s and fell unsuspecting into a trap at Ganllwyd cannot be determined from the existing evidence. Certainly the site, confined by steep valley sides and dense forests, is ideal for an ambush.

Two things are known for certain: Maelgwn did gain the High Kingship shortly after the Battle of Camlann and Arthur’s disappearance—in 546, according to one version—and gained it by deception. There is also the tradition that Arthur was in the end the victim of treachery at Camlann: perhaps the treachery was Maelgwn’s, not Modred’s. And just possibly Arthur was the murdered “uncle” mentioned by Gildas.

If Maelgwn was indeed responsible for the death of Arthur and for bringing the Arthurian peace to an end, Gildas’s extraordinary hatred and condemnation of Maelgwn’s many-sided wickedness becomes understandable. Arthur was behind the golden years of relative stability and justice between the Battles of Badon and Camlann, and those years came to an end with his final defeat. Gildas mentions specifically that Maelgwn removed and killed many tyrants (meaning kings, not necessarily tyrants in the modern sense), that Maelgwn was “last in my list but first in evil,” and that Maegwn “cruelly despatched the king your uncle.” Here, too, is the uncle-slaying regicide motif that would later be attributed, by Geoffrey of Monmouth, and possibly mistakenly, to Modred.

THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ARTHUR

What happened to Arthur after the Battle of Camlann is shrouded in mystery. One version of the story is that he was carried from the battlefield mortally wounded and either died elsewhere or simply disappeared. One explanation is that locally the truth of the matter was known—that Arthur had died on or near the battlefield—and this tradition was preserved and passed on through Welsh families, like the details about the few fellow warriors who survived the battle. Meanwhile, Arthur’s subjects in Cornwall had less detailed information about what had happened to the king. All they really knew was that he had not returned. In the days and weeks following the Battle of Camlann, all kinds of misinformation and rumor may have circulated.

Writing in the Middle Ages, Geoffrey of Monmouth was aware of the uncertainties. In his version of Arthur’s disappearance he describes him as “mortally wounded” on the battlefield, yet moved to Avalon “to have his wounds healed.” Some scholars have argued persuasively that Geoffrey was deliberately ambiguous about what had happened because he had on his desk two different versions of the king’s fate: one originating in Wales and giving Arthur as killed in battle; the other from Cornish or Breton sources and giving Arthur as surviving the battle and being transported elsewhere to recover or die.

This is persuasive and goes a long way toward explaining the post-Camlann confusion, but it may be that the contradictory stories carried a different clash of scenarios. It may have been known, to a privileged few in Wales, that Arthur had been wounded, rescued from the battlefield, and taken north to a place of safety; meanwhile, in Cornwall, the story was that Arthur was “missing presumed dead.”

Great play has been made of the absence of a grave for Arthur. The sixth or seventh-century poem Songs of the Graves gives the locations of many Dark Age heroes, for instance:

The grave of Owain ap Urien in a secluded part of the world,

Under the grass at Llan Morvad;

In Aberech, that of Rhydderch Hael. (Stanza 13)…

The wonder of the world, a grave for Arthur. (Stanza 44)

The missing grave became a major element in the mystique surrounding the vanished king. If Arthur was the great overking, chief of the kings of Britain and dux bellorum, we might expect to find an impressive monument of some kind raised over his grave, or at any rate for its location to have been remembered, but there is nothing. On the other hand, where is the grave of Aelle, the first Saxon bretwalda? Where is Vortigern’s mausoleum? Even the whereabouts of the tombs of King Alfred and King Harold are uncertain. So perhaps we should not be surprised that we have no grave for Arthur.

There is a tradition that he was buried secretly. The Life of St. Illtud credits Illtud with being the priest who conducted the secret funeral. Probably only those who were actually present—perhaps only ten people altogether—ever knew where the king was buried, and as likely as not those ten took the secret with them to their own separate graves.

One question naturally arises: why should those close to Arthur have wished to bury him in secret? Obviously his death was disastrous to the British cause. If he had succeeded only recently in re-cementing the loyalty of the kings of southern and central Wales to a common cause, the news of his death could have precipitated immediate fragmentation, laying Wales open to attack from the east; alternatively, and equally dangerously, it could have exposed Powys and the southern kingdoms to attack from Gwynedd first, rendering them powerless to resist Saxon incursion from the east. The continuing expansion of Gwynedd a century or two later seems to show that this was an ever-present danger. If news of Arthur’s death had reached the Saxons, who had been held at bay by his power for 20 years, they would have pushed westward with confidence and ease; if it had spread widely among the Britons, they would have been demoralized and given in under the renewed Saxon onslaught. In every way and for every reason it was important to conceal the death of Arthur, and those close to him may have hoped to hide the catastrophic truth long enough for a successor to be found and for him to establish his position as overking before too many people realized what had happened.

It may be that an alternative fate was concealed, but for the same reasons. If Arthur was not killed at Camlann but so badly wounded that he was going to be unfit to fight or even ride for a long time, he would have been forced to retire. It was common for Dark Age kings to retire when they became physically incapable of fighting through age or infirmity. They withdrew from public life completely by entering monasteries.

Several examples are known from these times. In around 580 Tewdrig or Theodoric, King of Glevissig (Glamorgan) abdicated in favor of his son Meurig and retired to a religious house at Tintern. He made the mistake of coming out of retirement in about 584, when his son engaged the Saxons in battle nearby, and was mortally wounded in the battle. Pabo Pillar of Britain, King of the Pennines, similarly abdicated in favor of his sons and went to live in seclusion in a remote monastery in Gwynedd, far from his own kingdom; he later died and was buried there, in the church at Llanbabo in Anglesey. A link between the Pennine kingdom and Gwynedd is suggested by another example. In the church at Llanaelhaearn on the Lleyn Peninsula is a fifth or sixth-century memorial stone inscribed with the words “Aliortus, a man from Elmet, lies here.”

There are hints in the medieval genealogies that a much earlier Dumnonian king, Coel Godebog, also retired a long way from home: he died and was buried in the far north, in York, in 300.

Did Arthur, now aged 62 and badly wounded, decide to abdicate and retire immediately after Camlann? The Legend of St. Goeznovius, a Breton saint, includes some information that is corroborated in other sources, such as the migration of British saints to Brittany in the fifth and sixth centuries. It may overstate Arthur’s achievement, in boasting that the Saxons were largely cleared from Britain by “the great Arthur, King of the Britons” but, in a telling phrase, it relates how Arthur’s career ended when he “was summoned from human activity.” This is equivocal, in that it holds back from saying that Arthur died, even if most of us reading the story would infer that that was meant. The expression might equally be taken to mean that Arthur withdrew from secular, worldly affairs in order to lead a purely religious life.

If Arthur’s reign ended at Camlann but he lived on in retirement, it could explain the discrepancy between the date of 537 or 539 given in the Welsh Annals for Arthur’s fall at Camlann and the date of 542 given by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Perhaps Geoffrey had access to a tradition of Arthur living on for another five years after the battle (see Places: Avalon).

The idea that Arthur did not die but somehow lived on and will one day return may seem to remove Arthur completely from history and place him safely in the world of myth and mysticism. Yet Arthur is but one of many great charismatic leaders, many of them kings, who were believed to have lived on after their “official” deaths. The last Saxon King of England, Harold Godwinson, officially died at the Battle of Hastings close to the site of the high altar of Battle Abbey and his remains were buried at the same spot. The Bayeux Tapestry is unambiguous—“Harold interfectus est”—but even in 1066 doubts were circulated about the official story. The Norman chronicler William of Poitiers reported that the Conqueror contemptuously ordered Harold’s body to be buried on the beach. More uncertainty arose because of the mutilation of the corpse, so even a burial in Battle Abbey might have been that of another battle victim. By the thirteenth century an Icelandic story was told of Harold being found alive on the battlefield by two peasants who were looting corpses the night after the battle. They took him home with them and it was suggested that he should rally the English once more, but Harold knew that many would have sworn fealty to William and he did not want to compromise them. He would retire to a hermitage at Canterbury. Three years later, when Harold died, William was told and he saw that Harold was given a royal burial. Gerald of Wales, writing in 1191, also affirmed that the Saxons clung to the belief that Harold was alive; as a hermit, deeply scarred and blinded in the left eye, he is said to have lived for a long time in a cell at Chester, where he was visited by Henry I.

Similar survival stories have been told about other historical figures: the Norwegian King Olaf Tryggvason, Richard II, the Grand Duchess Anastasia, Alexander I of Russia, Holger Danske, Sebastian of Portugal. These were real people, yet elaborate stories adding layers of mystery to their deaths are still told. The mystery elements added to Arthur’s life do not mean that he never existed at all.

THE SYMBOLIC VALUE OF ARTHUR

Why did this particular king so fascinate his contemporaries and those who came after? The most immediate reason is that his military prowess halted the westward progress of the Anglo-Saxon colonization of southern Britain for 20 years. His time would afterward be remembered as the sunset of Celtic England. A distinctive feature of the Celts is dwelling on defeats; there is wailing, keening, lamentation, and nostalgia. A. L. Rouse commented, “It was the hero of the losing side, King Arthur, who imposed himself on the imagination.” Arthur became a symbol of the glory of Britain as it once was and might yet have been, but for its destruction by the Saxon invaders. He was the perfect symbol of a kingdom and a culture lost.

The image of the king hung over the aristocracy of the Middle Ages like a faded, tattered, war-torn battle standard hanging in a royal chapel, redolent of past greatness and signifying virtues that could never be matched by the living. The idea of Arthur became a force in politics. Henry II wanted to prove that Arthur was dead in order to remove any hopes the Celts may have nursed that he would rise again to do battle against the Plantagenets. It was probably for this reason that in 1190 Henry II arranged for Arthur’s coffin to be “discovered” at Glastonbury and exhumed. We know that, when Henry II visited Pembrokeshire in 1179 and met the bard who told him where Arthur’s grave was, he was also told of the tradition that Arthur would ride once more. If Henry could produce Arthur’s bones, even the most superstitious would be able to see that there was no chance of Arthur riding again.

King Edward III identified himself as Arthur’s successor when he contemplated re-establishing the Round Table as an order of chivalry. In the end, in 1348, he founded the Order of the Garter instead, but still in imitation of King Arthur’s order of Round Table knights.

ARVERNI

An Iron Age Gaulish tribe, with its main center at Gergovia: a hillfort on a plateau in the Puy-de-Dome. In the second century BC, under King Luernios, they were the most powerful tribe in Gaul. Luernios was known for scattering gold and silver coins to his followers from his chariot. When his son Bituitus was defeated by the Romans in 121 BC, the power of the Arverni was diminished and the Aedui and Sequani became the leading tribes in Gaul. The Arverni were able to negotiate a peace treaty with the Romans that preserved their independence, though in the end they lost territory. No more kings are mentioned.

ATREBATES

An Iron Age British tribe in central southern England. Their territory occupied the modern counties of West Sussex, West Surrey, Hampshire, Berkshire, and north-east Wiltshire.

The Atrebates in England had strong ties with the Atrebates of north-west Gaul, where Commius was king under Julius Caesar. When Commius fled from Gaul, he went across the Channel to join the British Atrebates; and it was there that he had his new coins struck.

BARDS

A class of poets, like the minstrels of the Middle Ages, specializing in popular and non-religious subjects. They were distinct from ovates or vates, a class of priest with a focus on composing and performing prophetic poetry. Bards had a particular and recognized place in society.

Posidonius describes an incident involving a bard:

When at length he fixed a day for the ending of the feast, one of their barbarian poets arrived too late. The poet met Luernius [or Luernios, King of the Arverni] and composed a song magnifying his greatness and deploring his own late arrival. Luernius was delighted and asked for a bag of gold and threw it to the poet who ran beside his chariot. The poet picked it up and sang another song saying that the very tracks made by his chariot on the ground gave gold and blessings to mankind.

The bards also had a public role in disseminating myths and genealogies amongst the ordinary people. There were different grades of bard, the lowest of which was the novice, or Mabinog.

BARINTHUS

The Navigator, also known as Barrfind and Barrindus, who guided Merlin and Taliesin on their voyage to the Otherworld with the wounded Arthur; Barinthus was the ferryman of the dead.

Barinthus also accompanied Ternoc on a voyage to the Land of Promise and reported his experience to Brendan.

BARRFIND

See Barinthus.

BARRINDUS

See Barinthus.

BATTERSEA SHIELD

See Art.

BELLOVACI

An Iron Age Gaulish tribe with its capital at Beauvais. The Bellovaci intended to expand their territory and Julius Caesar saw this as a threat to his plan to control the whole of Gaul. He confronted the Bellovaci under their leader Correus. They were taken by surprise, but Caesar was intimidated by the size of the enemy force. At first there were only skirmishes and the Bellovaci retreated into their camp. When Correus attempted an ambush of Roman troops, the Bellovaci were defeated and Correus himself was killed. Caesar treated the Bellovaci leniently, as a result of the intercession of Diviciacus.

BENIGNUS OF ARMAGH

Pupil and successor of St. Patrick in 468.

BERACHUS

Berachus of Kilbarry in Roscommon was a pupil of Dagaeus and lived in the sixth century. He acquired Kilberry from a “minister” by a miracle, and was prosecuted by a royal wizard who claimed inheritance by hereditary law (See Magicians). The case was referred to Aedan, King of Dal Riada, who passed it on to Aed Dubh of Brefni and Aedh of Tethba. The wizard was struck dumb and fled; he was later killed. An attempt by the wizard’s heirs to set fire to the monastery was thwarted by a miracle.

Aedan granted Berachus a fort to use as a monastery at Aberfoyle, commanding the northern road from Loch Lomond to the upper Forth: the only route usable by Dal Riada armies to reach the southern Picts without violating Alcluith territory. The site was of enormous strategic value to the kings of Dal Riada, so granting it implies a great favor from Aedan, who must have thought highly of Berachus.

BERNACUS

See Brynach.

BEUNO

Welsh saint, son of Bugi, and born in the kingdom of Powys. He studied under Tangusius at Caerwent during the old age of King Ynyr Gwent and was granted Berriew near Welshpool by Mawn, son of Brochmail, King of Powys. He heard Saxons shouting “Ker Gia,” apparently calling to their hunting dogs, but perhaps abusing the Welsh. After this, he withdrew westward, staying with Tyssilio at Meifod. He founded a church, but was later expelled by the sons of Selyf, son of Kynan.

One of his miracles was replacing the head of Teuyth’s daughter Wenefred, after it was severed by a nobleman whose advances she had spurned. Wenefred lived to a great age as an abbess, patroness of Holywell, Flint.

Beuno also brought back to life the daughter of Ynyr Gwent, who had been murdered by her husband, an artisan from Aberffraw who had been employed at the court of Caerwent. Her brother Idon came to Caernarvon to reclaim her dowry. He also decapitated the murderous husband, but Beuno again replaced the head.

BITUITUS

See Arverni.

BITURIGES

An Iron Age Celtic tribe in Gaul, with its main center at Avaricum (Bourges). When the Romans arrived to conquer Gaul, the Bituriges were politically one of the main tribes; their Druids in particular held great power. As Julius Caesar reduced the power of the Druids, the power of the Bituriges also declined.

Vercingetorix pursued a scorched earth policy, burning Gaulish towns as the Roman legions advanced. But Avaricum was not burned—an indication of the importance of the Bituriges. The Romans destroyed it instead (See Redones).

BOATS

See Ships and Boats; Symbols: Boat.

BOECIUS

Boecius of Monasterboice, a great monastic center which he founded, was Irish by birth, but studied in Italy under Abbot Tilianus. From there he sailed to the land of the Picts with what are described as 60 “German” saints (presumably Saxons).

Boecius resuscitated King Nectan (ruled 462–86), who gave him a castellum. Then he crossed to Irish Dal Riada and resuscitated the daughter of the king. Boecius died in 521.

THE BOOK OF KELLS

See Art.

BOUDICCA

Queen of the Iceni tribe. Boudicca was born in about AD 25 and lived at Thetford in Norfolk at the time of the Roman invasion of Britain. She married Prasutagus in AD 48, when she was about 23 and he was perhaps ten years older. He was King of the Iceni, one of three Celtic tribes to have treaty arrangements with Rome; the others were the Regnenses and the Brigantes. Boudicca gave birth to two daughters: one in AD 49 and one in 50. On the death of Prasutagus, in AD 60, she became regent.

Prasutagus bequeathed half his kingdom to Nero, reserving the rest for his widow and daughters. The Roman governor Suetonius Paulinus was away on campaign in Wales when Prasutagus died, and the procurator, Decianus Catus, decided to swoop in and take the whole of Prasutagus’ estates for Rome. Decianus Catus was ruthless and acquisitive, and his officials were backed by undisciplined troops. The operation was bungled and army discipline broke down. The soldiers raped Boudicca’s daughters, who can only have been 11 or 12 years old, and flogged the queen herself.

The Iceni rose against Rome behind their humiliated queen, joined by their neighbors to the south, the Trinovantes, who had also been roughly handled by greedy legionaries at Camulodunum (Colchester). Together, the Iceni and Trinovantes attacked and burned down the new town. Then Boudicca and her army moved on to sack Verulamium (St. Albans) and London. Paulinus brought 10,000 legionaries back from Wales to confront her somewhere to the north-west of London. At an unidentified location somewhere along Watling Street, Boudicca’s army was slaughtered. The queen herself escaped from the battlefield but died shortly afterward of some illness, perhaps after taking poison; according to Dio Cassius she was given a rich burial. Boudicca’s treasure-laden grave has never been discovered.

Boudicca was famously described in Rome: “She was huge of form and terrifying of aspect and with a harsh voice. A great mass of red hair fell to her knees and she wore a great twisted gold necklace, and a tunic of many colours.”

Dio Cassius makes a point of describing her as invariably wearing a “great twisted golden necklace.” The marvelous gold torc found at Snettisham was made in about 50 BC, which at first sight makes it too early to have belonged to Boudicca. But royal regalia is often several generations old—its antiquity is part of its ceremonial value—and it is possible that this torc, and the rest of the Snettisham hoard, did belong to the queen.

BOYA

See David.

BRENDAN OF CLONFERT

Brendan (486–578) was a pupil of Bishop Erc of Kerry. He was a navigator and sailed to Iceland. From there he sailed west to a “beautiful land beyond the fogs.” He also sailed to the Fortunate Islands (assumed to be the Canary Islands). The ocean voyages took place in the years before 560.

Exactly where Brendan went is the subject of endless speculation. Some believe he discovered North America long before Columbus. What is certain is that he traveled to Wales, to Iona, and then to Ireland, where he founded a monastery at Annaghdown. There he spent the rest of his days, dying there in about 578 while visiting his sister Briga. Before his death, he arranged for his body to be taken secretly back to the monastery he had founded at Clonfert; it was transported hidden in a luggage cart. What he feared was that his followers might dismantle his body for relics. He was buried, intact, in Clonfert cathedral.

BRENNUS

There were two Gaulish chiefs of this name, both leaders of invasions. It is possible that “Brennus” was a title, meaning dux bellorum or “commander-in-chief” rather than a personal name.

Diodorus Siculus tells us about the second Gaulish King Brennus, who lived in the third century BC:

Brennus the King of the Gauls, on entering a temple [at Delphi in Greece] found no dedications of gold or silver, and when he came only upon images of stone and wood, he laughed at them [the Greeks], to think that men, believing that gods have human form, should set up their images in wood and stone.

The implication is that the more sophisticated Gauls did not think of the gods in anthropomorphic terms and this tallies with their art, much of which at that time did not feature humanoid forms.

It was an earlier Gaulish King Brennus, who was the King of the Senones tribe, who led the Celtic warriors in the sack of Rome in 387 BC. He caused more havoc there than would be seen again until Alaric the Goth descended on the city in the fifth century AD. Brennus demanded his own weight in gold, with the cry, “Vae Victis!” (“Woe to the defeated!”) He was interested in loot rather than conquest, which was perhaps unfortunate in the longer term, though the Celts remained a force to reckon with in Italy until 295 BC.

BRIDEI

King of the Picts, who reigned from 555 to 584. He is the only British king from the fifth or sixth centuries to be mentioned in a chronicle on the European mainland. Bede describes him as rex potentissimus, “most powerful king,” which suggests that the Picts had their own overking. Bridei, or Brudeus, was a son of Maelgwn, King of Gwynedd, and he was elected king. The Picts would not have chosen an obscure or low-ranking person as their king, and Maelgwn, we know, was an overking. Pictish succession passed through the female line, so it is likely that for him to be eligible for the Pictish throne; Bridei’s mother or grandmother was a Pict. In fact Welsh tradition has it that Maelgwn’s mother was a Pict.

Bridei’s high reputation among the Picts rests on a great military victory won in 560. Gabran, King of Dal Riada, had taken a large area of Pictland and, by defeating him in 560, Bridei won most or all of this land back and once more united the northern and southern Picts.

St. Columba visited him and asked Broichan, his chief magician, to set free his Irish slave girl.

Bridei was eventually killed in 584 during a rebellion of the southern Picts.

BRIGANTES

An Iron Age tribe in the north of England. At the time of the Roman invasion, Queen Cartimandua was their ruler; she had a treaty arrangement with Rome.

BRIGHID

See Religion: Brighid.

BRIOC

St. Brioc was born in 468 in the West Wales kingdom of Ceretigan (or in Latin Coriticiana, modern Cardigan). He was the son of Cerpus and Eldruda. He performed various miracles, including rescuing a stag from a king in Ceretigan.

In about 510 he sailed away with 168 companions to a port in Cornwall and converted King Conan (or Kynan) and his people to Christianity. Later he crossed the Channel to Brittany, but went back to Ceretigan again to comfort his people when plague struck them in 547.

The Cornish port was probably on the Camel estuary: St. Brioc’s (now St. Breock’s) parish is very large, covering the area south of Padstow. Recently a Dark Age port has been uncovered on the Camel estuary near Padstow.

BROICHAN

The wizard of the Pictish King Bridei. Broichan covered Loch Ness with darkness and raised a storm so that for a time St. Columba was unable to set sail on the lake (See Magicians).

BRUDEUS

See Bridei.

BRYCHAN

See Nectan, Theodoric.

BRYNACH

Brynach or Bernacus was of noble birth, and probably Welsh rather than Irish. He visited Rome and killed a dragon. He returned by way of Brittany to Milford Haven in south-west Wales. There he resisted attempts at seduction and founded many churches. He resisted a demand from Maelgwn for food and managed to secure a grant from him exempting him from future royal exactions.

CADFAN

A king of Gwynedd who died in about 620 or 630. The Llangadwaladr Stone on the island of Anglesey is his memorial. Translated from some oddly laid-out Latin, the inscription reads “Cadfan, wisest king, most renowned of all kings.” The lettering suggests a date around 620, which fits with the information in the Welsh Annals, to the effect that Cadfan’s father died in 616 and his son Cadwallon was killed in 633 by Oswald of Northumbria. This is his genealogy: Cadfan, son of Iago, son of Beli, son of Rhun, son of Maelgwn of Gwynedd.

CADO

See Geraint.

CADOC OF LANCARFAN

Son of Gwynnliw of Glevissig, educated at Caerwent, Cadoc refused the royal scepter of Penychen because of his commitment to the Church and was granted Llancarfen by Paul Penychen; there he built Castil Kadoci, perhaps to be identified as Castle Ditches near Llancarfen. Much later he left Llancarfen to Elli of Llanelli and moved to Beneventum (possibly Abergavenny), where he was visited annually by Elli and became bishop under the name Sophias.

He visited Rome in the time of Pope John III (560–72). He also visited Jerusalem, Cornwall, and Brittany. He acquired Gildas’ bell, though Gildas refused to surrender it to Cadoc until he was ordered to do so by Pope Alexander; he also acquired the Gospel book that Gildas wrote while studying at Nantcarvan for a year while Cadoc was away in Scotland.

He was finally martyred “by the soldiers of a cruel king.”

Cadoc has more church dedications than any other Welsh saint except David and he is very prominent in both Welsh and Breton fable.

CADWALLON

A Dark Age king of Gwynedd. He fought alongside Penda of Mercia in the Battle of Meicen in which King Edwin of Northumbria was killed. The battle was noted by a British scribe as gueith meicen, ‘the strife of Meicen.” The battle in which the great King of Northumbria was slain justified a longer-than-usual entry in the annals.

CALEDONII

A major tribe living in the Grampians in Scotland at the time of the Roman occupation. The incredibly hardy Caledonii were described by Dio Cassio:

The Maeatae live near the wall [Hadrian’s Wall] that divides the island [of Britain] in two, the Caledonii beyond them. Both inhabit rough mountains with marshy ground [the Scottish Lowlands] between them, neither have walled places or towns or cultivated lands. They live by pasture, hunting, and on a kind of fruit with a hard shell [hazelnuts?]

They eat no fish, though their waters are full of many species. They live in tents, unclothed and barefoot. They have their women in common, and raise all their children. Their government is democratic, and they delight in raids and plunder. They fight from chariots and have small, fast horses. Their infantry move fast, and have great stamina. Their weapons are a shield and a short spear with a bronze knob at the butt end.

They can stand hunger, thirst, and all other hardship. They dive into the marshes and can hold out there for several days with only their heads above water. In the forest they live on bark and roots.

CALETI

A Gaulish tribe with its main center at Harfleur. Its territory was in what is now Normandy.

CANTII

The Iron Age British tribe who lived in Kent. The Cantii probably went into a state of shock when they saw Julius Caesar landing with his troops in their territory. Cassivellaunus was disappointed with the poor support they gave to his resistance to the Roman invasion.

But there was one useful attack by the Cantii. Four Kentish kings—Cingetorix, Carvilius, Taximagulus, and Segovax—organized a surprise attack on Caesar’s ships, where they were drawn up on a Kentish beach. The Roman troops managed to beat this attack off by capturing Lugotorix, a British noble. Caesar does not make much of the incident, though he was present when it happened.

At least it was not the case that the Cantii did nothing.

CARADOC VREICHVRAS

Caradoc Vreichvras, “Strong-Arm,” was the king of lands in both south Dorset and Brittany in around 550. South Dorset, between Chesil Beach and Lulworth Cove, is the likeliest location for Caradoc’s British territory, as this was the only area on the central south coast of England that was not in Saxon hands in 550.

CARADOG

See Caratacus.

CARATACUS

A king of the Catuvellauni tribe, who led the British resistance to the Roman invasion in the first century AD.

Caratacus (Caradog in Welsh) was a son of King Cunobelin of the Catuvellauni and a warrior chief already experienced in warfare before the Roman conquest began. He was actively involved in the expansion of his tribe’s territory, fighting battles to achieve this. He was the protégé of his uncle Epaticcus, who was responsible for extending the power of the Catuvellauni westward into the territory of the Atrebates. Epaticcus died in about AD 35, and after that the Atrebates, under their leader, King Verica, were successful in regaining some of their lost territory. But Caratacus regained the upper hand, completed the Catuvellaunian conquest of the Atrebates, and Verica was deposed.

Success for Caratacus meant defeat for his enemies, and defeated kings went to Rome with their grievances. Verica went and appealed to Claudius to have his kingdom restored to him. This gave Claudius the pretext he was looking for to invade and conquer Britain in AD 43. By now, the powerful Cunobelin was dead and the defense of his Southern Kingdom was in the hands of two of his sons, Caratacus and Togodumnus. The smaller kingdoms in Britain were relatively powerless and disorganized, so it was left to Caratacus and Togodumnus to provide the leadership.

Rome meanwhile pitted four legions against Britain, under Aulus Plautius: around 40,000 men. In his resistance to Rome, Caratacus used a combination of guerrilla warfare and set-piece formal battles. He was more successful in guerrilla fighting and kept to this whenever he could.

The Catuvellauni were defeated in two crucial battles, on the Medway and Thames, and this led to the loss of most of the south-east to the Romans. According to one reading of the Roman accounts, Togodumnus was killed and the Catuvellauni territory was overrun by Rome. Another reading suggests that Togodumnus may have been on the side of Rome against his brother, survived the two battles and later continued to collaborate with the Romans.

Claudius arrived in Britain in time to witness his legions marching in triumph into the town of Camulodunum.

Caratacus survived this final defeat, retreating to the west, where he continued the resistance against the spread of Roman control in Wales, leading the Silures and Ordovices tribes. He was now fighting Plautius’ successor as governor, Publius Ostorius Scapula. Scapula defeated Caratacus in the Battle of Caer Caradoc, captured Caratacus’ wife and daughter, and received the surrender of his brothers. Caratacus himself somehow escaped capture and fled northward into the territory of the Brigantes. There Queen Cartimandua captured him and handed him over to the Romans.

Once Caratacus had been captured, the Romans were in control of most of what is now England and Wales. He was sent to Rome as a prize of war, and would, according to normal Roman practice, have been executed after a triumphal procession. In spite of being a captive, he was allowed to make a speech to the senate:

If the degree of my nobility and fortune had been matched by moderation in success, I would have come to this City as a friend rather than a captive, nor would you have disdained to receive with a treaty of peace one sprung from brilliant ancestors and commanding a great many nations. But my present lot, disfiguring as it is for me, is magnificent for you. I had horses, men, arms, and wealth: what wonder if I was unwilling to lose them? If you wish to command everyone, does it really follow that everyone should accept your slavery? If I were now being handed over as one who had surrendered immediately, neither my fortune nor your glory would have achieved brilliance. It is also true that in my case any reprisal will be followed by oblivion. On the other hand, if you preserve me safe and sound, I shall be an eternal example of your clemency.

This speech was so impressive and effective that Claudius pardoned Caratacus. He was granted a pension and he and his family were permitted to live in Rome. Caratacus in his turn was so overwhelmed by the majesty of the city that he was bewildered that the Romans could be interested in conquering Britain. He said, “And can you, then, who have such possessions and so many of them, covet our poor tents?”

CARTIMANDUA

Queen of the Brigantes in the first century AD. Her kingdom was in northern England and she ruled from about AD 43 until 69.

Little is known about her, though she was clearly influential in Roman Britain. Unlike Boudicca, who opposed the Romans, Cartimandua was an ally of Rome. In fact she formed a large tribal alliance that was loyal to Rome. The inscription on the triumphal arch of the emperor Claudius declared that 11 “kings” of Britain surrendered to Rome without fighting, and Cartimandua may have been one of them. She was of noble birth and probably ruled by hereditary right rather than by marriage. Her husband was Venutius. The couple were seen by Rome as loyal and, in return, they were “defended by our [Roman] arms.”

In AD 51, when Caratacus sought refuge with Cartimandua after he had been defeated by Ostorius Scapula in Wales, she put him in chains and handed him over to the Romans. In return for supplying Claudius with the prize exhibit for his triumph, she was rewarded with enormous wealth.

Eventually Cartimandua divorced Venutius and married his armor-bearer, a common soldier called Vellocatus. She took the precaution of holding Venutius’ brother and other relatives hostage, but Venutius still made war against her, building alliances against her. In about 55, he invaded her kingdom, but the Romans anticipated this and supplied Cartimandua with troops for her defense. There was some inconclusive fighting until Caesius Nasica appeared with a legion to defeat Venutius and the rebels. Rome recognized its debt to Cartimandua and helped her to keep her kingdom.

In 69, the year of four emperors, she was less lucky. During the instability Venutius mounted another revolt, aided by other tribes. Cartimandua asked the Romans for help, but this time they sent only auxiliaries. Cartimandua was evacuated and Venutius took over the kingdom of the Brigantes.

From this moment, Cartimandua vanishes from history.

CASSIVELLAUNUS

A great Celtic chief, and the earliest British Celt whose name we know. He was known as Caswallawn by his fellow Britons; the Romans knew him by the Latin form of his name, Cassivellaunus. He was king of the powerful Catuvellauni tribe and led the British resistance to Julius Caesar’s invasion of 55 and 54 BC. Caesar mentions him by name in his reminiscences. Cassivellaunus killed the King of the Trinovantes, whose son Mandubracius fled for his life to the European mainland to seek Caesar’s protection. At that time, Caesar was engaged in the conquest of Gaul and some of the British tribes had been supporting Gaulish tribes in resisting him, which explains his interest in invading Britain.

The Roman legions landed in Cantium (Kent) and their focus of attention was on the Thames estuary. Cassivellaunus’s strategy was to draw the Roman columns into the interior, with a view to mounting an attack on their landing-site, perhaps to cut off their retreat. His difficulty was in persuading his fellow kings to collaborate with his strategy. His ancestral tribal base was at St. Albans, but he had an ongoing feud with his neighbors to the east, the Trinovantes, who gave in to Caesar without a fight. Cassivellaunus also failed to rally the Cantii. Alone, the Catuvellauni were no match for the heavily armed legionaries of the Roman army. On the other hand, Cassivellaunus’s 4,000 chariots were able to harry the Romans very effectively as they tried to ford the Thames River, and the Catuvellauni put up a good fight in pitched battle.

Cassivellaunus and his soldiers fled north, perhaps first to St. Albans and then to Camulodunum, hoping for an attack on the Romans’ rear from Cantium. When he saw that it was not going to happen, Cassivellaunus surrendered hostages to Caesar, who made him promise to leave the Trinovantes in peace and agree to pay Rome an annual tribute. Caesar also allowed the Trinovantes to appoint Mandubracius as their king.

After Cassivellaunus’s submission, Caesar considered that as far as Rome was concerned Britain had been conquered, and sailed away.

Cassivellaunus was the grandfather or great-grandfather of Cunobelin.

CASWALLAWN

See Cassivellaunus; Myths: Branwen.

CATHBAD OF ULSTER

See Religion: Druids.

CATUVELLAUNI

A very powerful British tribe in the first centuries BC and AD. Its territory extended across the modern counties of Hertfordshire, south Bedfordshire, and Buckinghamshire, but the Catuvellauni reached out to control their neighbors. Their kings were very strong and the lack of hillforts within their borders shows that they had their petty kings and local chiefs firmly under control.

There was a long-term power struggle between the Catuvellauni and their neighbors to the east, the Trinovantes. It was probably pressure from the Catuvellauni that led to the expulsion of the Trinovantian prince Mandubracius. He went to appeal to Julius Caesar in Gaul. Rome found political refugees like Mandubracius useful, especially when they were looking for an excuse to intervene; disaffected princes must also have been a useful fund of intelligence.

Other British tribes who feared the Catuvellauni joined the Trinovantes, including the Iceni. This was a great bonus for Caesar, because they brought with them exactly the information he needed—the whereabouts of Cassivellaunus’s headquarters. Cassivellaunus was King of the Catuvellauni, but he had adopted the Trinovantian capital, Camulodunum, as his base. It speaks highly of the loyalty that he inspired that he was able to keep this secret for so long. Caesar marched on Camulodunum at once.

The defenders ran away and it seems that Cassivellaunus escaped. He appealed for peace through Commius, King of the Atrebates, and the resistance to Caesar was over. Surprisingly, Caesar had already decided to withdraw from Britain to Gaul for the winter, because he had intelligence of an imminent uprising there. Perhaps Cassivellaunus should have gone on fighting; Caesar could scarcely have coped with a continuing British insurrection and the large-scale Vercingetorix rising that was about to erupt.

At the pinnacle of their power, the Catuvellauni achieved the confederation of south-eastern England in an informal Southern Kingdom (See Tasciovanus, Trinovantes).

CAUUS

Cauus or Caw of Alclud (see Places: Alcluith) was the father of Gildas. He lived in the upper Forth valley, perhaps 20 miles (30km) north of Glasgow. In about 495, he and his family moved to Wales. Legend gives him a second son, Cuil, who stayed in Scotland and died fighting against Arthur, but legend also makes Cauus a giant, because the word “cawr” in Welsh means “giant” (See Funeral Odes).

CAW

See Cauus; Funeral Odes.

CELTOMANIA

There has been a surge of renewed enthusiasm for all things Celtic in modern times. It began in the early eighteenth century with the awareness that there were links between the ancient languages of the Atlantic Celts, and intensified with the growing awareness that these languages were in retreat.

The surge of interest in tartan and Celtic art in the nineteenth century and Celtic music in the twentieth century were further symptoms of Celtomania. There has recently been a political dimension too, as people have become aware that peripheral regions of Europe could lose their cultural identity as the hub of the European Union develops and strengthens (see Part 6: Celtic Twilight and Revival).

CENOMANI

A Celtic tribe in Gaul; its main center was at Le Mans.

CERDIC

See Natan-Leod.

CERETIC GULETIC

The King of Alcluith (Clyde) at the end of the fifth century. He appears in the story of St. Patrick as King Coroticus; Patrick claimed to have turned him into a fox.

Ceretic’s fleet went across to raid the Irish in the middle of the fifth century.

He died in 500 and was succeeded by his son Dyfnwal.

CHARIOTS

Chariots were used for showing off before battle. Queen Medb of Connaught, for example, was driven in her chariot around her camp as a prelude to battle.

Here is what Julius Caesar had to say about the British Celts on the battlefield:

In chariot fighting the Britons begin by driving all over the field hurling javelins, and generally the terror inspired by the horses and the noise of the wheels are sufficient to throw the opponents’ ranks into disorder. Then, after making their way between the squadrons of their own cavalry, they jump down from the chariots and engage on foot. In the meantime their charioteers retire a short distance from the battle and place the chariots in such a position that their masters, if hard pressed by numbers, have an easy means of retreat to their own lines. Thus they combine the mobility of cavalry with the staying-power of infantry; and by daily training and practice they are able to control the horse at full gallop, and to check and turn them in a moment. They can run along the chariot pole, stand on the yoke, and get back into the chariot as quick as lightning.

Caesar saw all this first hand and he was impressed by what he saw.

Chariots could also acquire cult status. Two Gaulish cult vehicles were imported, dismantled, and buried in a mound with a cremation burial at Dejbjerg in Denmark in the first century BC. There was a throne at the center of each wagon, and the bodies buried at the site are believed to have been female. Were they perhaps warrior queens?

No British Iron Age chariots have survived, though a chariot wheel was found in a second-century rubbish pit. It was a single piece of ash bent in a circle, fixed to an elm hub, with willow spokes. Early Irish folk-tales, such as The Wooing of Emer, from the Ulster Cycle, offer descriptions of working chariots:

I see a chariot of fine wood with wickerwork, moving on wheels of white bronze. Its frame very high, of creaking copper, rounded and firm. A strong curved yoke of gold; two firm-plaited yellow reins; the shafts hard and straight as sword blades.

CHILDHOOD

Very young children had low status in Celtic society, counting as extensions of the family. Individual identity was allowed only as a child grew. Among the nobility, the education of children took place away from the parents. There was a widespread practice of sending children away to be brought up by another family, often with the intention of creating new kinship ties with a group far away. This fostering practice was carried through into the Middle Ages. The Druids took charge of the education of many children.

Julius Caesar mentions that in Gaul boys were not allowed to appear in public until they were old enough to bear arms. It was considered a disgrace to the father if a son who was still a child stood beside him in public. The change in status marked by bearing arms suggests a rite of passage of some kind, and it is likely that there were complex initiation rites associated with status changes at different ages. In the Irish tales about Cú Chulainn, we hear about the rites of passage he has to undergo with other boys to acquire manly status. In one ritual, he is attacked by 159 boys throwing their hurley sticks at him. The young hero manages to dodge all of them.

Probably headhunting marked a later rite of passage. In Ireland, killing a foe and taking his head was the signal that a youth’s military instruction was complete.

A further rite of passage was marriage, which had, in Irish folk-tales at least, to be preceded by an adventure. Cú Chulainn has to undertake a long journey, during the course of which he has to undergo various ordeals. When he returns to take his bride-prize, he finds he has to force his way into her house and abduct her. This is no doubt a heightened version of some real trial by adversity that real-life grooms had to undergo.

CIARAN OF SAIGAR

An Irish saint, born in Ossory, Ciaran lived for 30 years in Ireland, unbaptized because the community he lived in was pagan. He went to Rome in the time of Pope Hilary (461–68) and was consecrated bishop. He founded a double monastery, for men and women, with his mother in charge of the women.

Ciaran, Ailbe, Declan, and Ibar were the four bishops of southern Ireland who preached before Patrick.

Ciaran was abused by Aillel, King of Munster, and stopped a war between Aillel and Loegaire, the Irish High King. He visited Tours and died in Cornwall.

CIVILIS

See Religion: Druids.

CLEMENS

See Petroc.

CLYTO

See Fingar of Gwinnear.

COEL GODEBOG

“Coel the Magnificent,” according to one tradition, was a prince of Cornwall, son of Tegvan ap Dehevraint. The tradition is that he took upon himself the kingdom of Britain in 272 and held it for 28 years. The Romans were in power at that time, so it is scarcely possible for Coel to have been in any real sense “King of Britain.” There may, even so, have been some sort of agreement among the native kings and chieftains as to seniority.

Another tradition has Coel as Lord of Colchester, a local ruler who was allowed to rule under Rome with status of a municipal senator or Decurion.

COEL HEN

“Coel the Old” lived around 350–430. According to one tradition he was Coel Godebog’s successor as Lord of Colchester, and was the last ruler there, under Rome, at the time when the Romans left. He earned his nickname because he was long-lived.

But there was an early tradition, which therefore may be more authentic, that Coel Hen was a powerful king in the north of England. According to this version, he ruled the kingdom of York and perhaps the whole of the north, south of Hadrian’s Wall.

Coel’s mother went by the extraordinary name of Stradwawl, “Street Wall.” He named his daughter simply Wawl, “Wall.”

Apart from this, we know very little about the real Coel. He lives on, just, in a children’s nursery rhyme:

Old King Cole was a merry old soul,

and a merry old soul was he;

he called for his pipe,

and called for his bowl

and he called for his fiddlers three.

This is a reminder that the Celtic inheritance is a strange one, sometimes more colorful than its origin, but sometimes a paler and weaker wraith. The nursery rhyme really tells us nothing about the flesh-and-blood King Coel.

COGIDUMNUS

Tiberius Claudius Cogidumnus was the king of the Regnenses tribe (West Sussex and Hampshire) in the first century AD. He was a tribal chief in the years before the Roman conquest of Britain in AD 43, then a British client king under Rome.

The Regnenses were a group within the Atrebates tribe, and Cogidumnus may have been king over all of the Atrebates. In one Roman document he is said to have governed several civitates as a client ruler after the conquest and to have been loyal to Rome “down to our own times” (in the 70s). His name is on a damaged inscription found in the Roman city of Chichester, a few miles from Fishbourne, which reads, “To Neptune and Minerva, for the welfare of the Divine House, by the authority of Tiberius Claudius Cogidumnus, great King of the Britons, the guild of smiths and those in it gave this temple at their own expense.” This indicates that he was given Roman citizenship by the emperor Claudius.

Cogidumnus’s collaboration with Rome ensured the success of Vespasian’s conquest of central-southern Britain, not least because Vespasian was able to utilize Chichester Harbor, which the Romans called “The Great Harbor,” for their fleet.

Sir Barry Cunliffe, the principal excavator of the Roman palace at Fishbourne, at the head of Chichester Harbor, believes that Fishbourne was the palace of Cogidumnus.

COINAGE

The Celts on the European mainland began minting coins in the fourth century BC, with designs based on Greek originals. Many of these found their way into Britain during the course of trading and eventually, in the first century BC, British kings began minting their own coins. This started in Cantium (Kent), with cast imitations of bronze coins of the Ambiana tribe across the Channel in northern Gaul.

Coins were made in surprisingly large numbers. It is said that from the middle of the La Tène period, they were minted by the million.

Pre-Roman Celtic coins sometimes have figurative images on them: representations of animals or people. These are evidently heavily symbolic. Some coins show a boar, and this is a motif on other objects too, such as the Witham shield made in the second century BC. It is also thought that coins had a special role as largesse and as an indicator of wealth, which would have made the imagery more potent.

A Gaulish coin found near Maidstone shows a stag and a boar running together. The stag has a huge eye and over-large antlers. The boar has over-large bristles. There are three different circular symbols, one of which may represent a rayed sun.

Coins of the Aulerci Eburovices tribe, who lived in the Evreux region in Gaul, show a boar image superimposed on the neck of a manlike image. This has a link with a similar pairing on a stone carved from Euffigneix: a human figure wearing a torc, with a boar carved along its torso.

By AD 10, the Camulodunum mint was turning out magnificent gold coins inscribed in full with name of the king, CVNOBELINVS. More often, kings contented themselves with an abbreviated form of their names and the names of their mints, so some coins had CVN and CAM (or CAMV) on them or CVN REX TASCIO F, “King Cunobelin, son of Tasciovanus.”

A British coin bearing King Cunobelin has the short form of his name on one side, CVNO, and the abbreviated name of his capital on the other, CAM for Camulodunum. The designs are admirably simple, compared with the fussy designs on modern coins.

The imagery on these coins sometimes tells us a lot about the tribal mindset. Cunobelin was setting out to be as Roman as could be. Other tribes portrayed totem images. Others went on imitating Gaulish coins, in ever-freer styles, so that the images became totally abstract. The head of Apollo was transformed into a swirl of hair. The image of a horse became more and more stylized until it was reduced to a few sweeping lines. The exploded horse image was already in existence in Britain, drawn on the chalk hillside at Uffington, and that had been there since the very beginning of the Iron Age, so the image was already available, and it is possible that the coin image was copied from it.

On the other hand, some northern tribes, such as the Parisii and the Brigantes, seem to have held back from engaging in the money economy and never struck any coins of their own.

COLUMBA OF IONA

Columba was born a prince of the northern Ui Neill in 521. Two of his first cousins became kings during his lifetime, and he himself was eligible for kingship. When he was in his twenties, he was hostile to the overriding influence of the (non-aristocratic) Ciaran of Clonmacnoise.

Columba is said to have founded around 40 monastic houses in Ireland: the first at Derry, close to the dynastic home of his family at Ailech.

Without permission, he copied the Gospel Book of Finnian belonging to Moville, who sought judgment against him from King Diarmait. Diarmait had executed the King of Connacht’s son, who had killed a youth while playing games and who had sought sanctuary with Columba. Columba rallied the monks and the regional kings of Ireland against Diarmait’s centralized and tyrannical rule. He also won a military victory against him at the bloody battle of Cuil Dremhne in 563.

The consequence was exile, imposed on Columba by a monastic synod that deplored the involvement of monks in political warfare. This is how Columba arrived at Iona.

Once there, Columba converted Brudeus or Bridei, King of the Picts, and consecrated Aedan, King of the Scots, at Dal Riada. He appointed monks as bishops to communities in Britain; as monks, they remained under Columba’s authority. He visited Ireland several times, and also the Irish colonists in Dal Riada in Britain; he made at least two journeys to visit the northern Picts, where Bridei had enormous respect for him.

Overall, Columba had enormous influence over the development of the Church in northern Britain and Ireland. He also wielded considerable political power, and it was probably his influence that kept the northern kingdoms at peace with one another.

CONAN

See Brioc.

CONCHOBAR MAC NESSA

See Myths: The Ulster Cycle; Symbols: Sky Falling Down.

CONOMORUS

See Gildas, Leonorus.

CORIOSOLITES

An Iron Age Celtic tribe living on the north coast of Brittany, around St. Malo. The main tribal center was at Corseul.

CORMAC MACAIRT

See Symbols: Magic.

COROTICUS

See Ceretic Guletic.

CORREUS

See Bellovaci.

CULTURES

The central European Celts of the Iron Age had their origins in the Urnfield culture of the late Bronze Age. This had its beginnings in about 1300 BC, just 50 years before the Trojan War. It flourished at the same time as the great warrior-hero culture of the Mycenaeans and its growth may be connected with the decline of Mycenaean power.

As the name suggests, Urnfield was associated with a distinctive type of cemetery: large-scale cremation burials laid out in flat cemeteries, without burial mounds. These cemeteries were widespread over such a large area that archeologists have been confident in identifying the Urnfield people as proto-Celts, the immediate predecessors of the Celts.

The introduction of cremation (instead of the burial of the unburned body) suggests a change in beliefs regarding death and the afterlife. The use of large quantities of sheet bronze implies industrial-scale production of metal and reliable, well-organized trade routes to supply that industry. The sheet-bronze was used to make a variety of objects, including large vessels and shields. Sometimes the vessels were mounted on wagons for religious ritual.

The development of religious paraphernalia shows an increasingly complex religious symbolism and more integrated and uniform ways of expressing religious ideas.

Other changes were under way as well. By about 800 BC horses were used not just as draft animals but for riding. The horse became a symbol of the warrior elite, just as the horse-drawn chariot had been the symbol of the Mycenaean warrior heroes.

By 700 BC the Hallstatt culture had emerged out of Urnfield. This is the first of the classically recognized Celtic cultures. It was at Hallstatt, a picture-postcard lakeside village in Austria, that archeologists first identified new types of metal horse harness. The salt mines in the mountains were the basis of the prosperity and fame of this area between 700 and 400 BC. For the first time iron-working appears on a big scale. Hundreds of years before, the Mycenaeans evidently knew about iron, but they did not think of using it for tools or for weapon-making. The practice of iron-making was quickly copied at site after site. By 600 BC, the Atlantic Celts were making iron in Britain and Ireland.

The Hallstatt culture in central Europe has distinctive hallmarks. One is the rich burial of a warrior-prince or king in a timber mortuary-house, often with a four-wheeled wagon (sometimes in dismantled kit form), covered by a burial mound made of earth. Often in these burials there are three sets of horse-harness. The wagon-team would have comprised a pair of horses, just like a Mycenaean chariot, so what is the third set of trappings for? It is possible that it represented the prince’s or king’s personal steed: his charger.

The elite men, and sometimes women, buried in these opulent graves were rich enough to import wine from the Mediterranean lands.

By 500 BC the power centers had moved away from Austria, north and west toward the Rhineland and the Marne Valley in northern France. Changes in burial custom at the same time led archeologists to identify this development as a new culture: La Tène. The culture was named after a site in Switzerland, on the shore of Lake Neuchatel. La Tène means “The Shallows” and it was a location along the lakeshore that was seen as sacred: a fit place to leave offerings to please the gods. When the site was excavated in 1906–17, it yielded a rich haul of objects that were of new types, including iron swords and everyday ironwork.

There was still a warrior aristocracy and it still went in for burials with funerary carts, but now the carts were a more elegant two-wheeled type rather than the heavier four-wheeled type: a chariot more on the lines of the Mycenaean chariot; a two-wheeled vehicle was far more maneuverable. The old four-wheeled wagons were more the vehicles of fighting farmers; the new two-wheeled chariots were skillfully designed, showing collaboration between carpenters, blacksmiths, and wheelwrights to produce a professional fighting machine.

More arresting still, the accoutrements of the warrior-princes were elaborately decorated with what we now see as typical Celtic designs. The La Tène style is familiar to us: it is the root of all the later artwork that we recognize as Celtic. The S-shaped line that endlessly repeats suggests a variety of things, including rippling water and plant tendrils. But there are also surprises. In the middle of a swirl of lines we sometimes recognize an animal head, so stylized that we cannot be sure whether it is really there, intended by the artist-craftsman, or we ourselves are projecting it—like the giants or mountain landscapes we sometimes see in cloud formations. And here is a hint of the Celtic love of shapeshifting legends.

According to the threefold model for Iron Age Britain, a third wave of innovation came with a third lot of migrants, the Belgae, who arrived in south-east England late in the first century BC. The Belgic culture area extended from Belgium across northern France into south-east England. Distinctive objects associated with the Belgae in Britain were wheel-made pottery and Gallo-Belgic coins.

But this threefold model has been shaken by the general acceptance that there were no mass movements of people into Britain in the first millennium BC. There were no invasions, apart from Julius Caesar’s; instead we should think rather of a complex evolution of an indigenous culture.

CUNOBELIN

King of the Catuvellauni tribe, son of Tasciovanus, and grandson or great-grandson of Cassivellaunus. He was the successor of Dubnovellaunus, King of the Trinovantes, the Catuvellauni’s eastern neighbors, when he died in about AD 10. Dubnovellaunus had fled to Rome, taking refuge at the court of Augustus when the Catuvellauni had annexed his territory and had no doubt been hoping that the emperor would intervene on his behalf. Cunobelin anticipated trouble from Rome and prudently became a Roman ally. As a client king he could expect favorable treatment from Augustus.

Cunobelin was a strong ruler and under his leadership the old imposed alliance between the Catuvellauni and the Trinovantes was re-asserted. This expanded kingdom was undoubtedly the strongest political entity in Britain on the eve of the invasion by the emperor Claudius in AD 43, and the Roman historian Suetonius described Cunobelin as “King of Britain.”

Cunobelin ruled the large joint kingdom from Camulodunum, near modern Colchester, which was previously the chief settlement of the Trinovantes. This move appears to have been made in order to tap into the European trading network more easily.

Camulodunum was a large urban complex covering 12 square miles (30 square km) and marked out by flanking rivers and big earth ramparts. It was a major industrial focus that included a mint. At Gosbecks there was a massive concentration of expensive imported pottery in one area, which was probably Cunobelin’s palace. Nearby there was a royal burial ground.

Cunobelin and his court were Romanized Celts. They were native Britons, but they were also keen to acquire all the luxury goods they could from Rome. They may have adopted Latin; some Latin graffiti have been found, though they could have been inscribed by Roman visitors. The Catuvellaunian aristocrats were in effect being bought or groomed by Rome in advance of the Claudian invasion. Having some client kings in Britain made invasion and annexation much easier.

Strabo observed that certain British kings “procured the friendship of Caesar Augustus by sending embassies and paying court to him.”

Cunobelin is the original of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, and the only pre-Roman chief to be remembered in later times. Shakespeare’s portrayal of Cymbeline bears little relation to history, except for the idea that a client king was expected to pay annual tribute to Rome and that he found this hard to suffer:

…Britain is

A world by itself, and we will

nothing pay

For wearing our own noses.

The Lexden Tumulus in Colchester may be the grave of Addedomarus or of Cunobelin. It is about the right date to be Cunobelin’s, and of the right status. It contained chain-mail armor, Roman bronzes, furniture, and 15 wine amphorae. The bronze ornaments in the grave date from the eve of the invasion by Claudius. One of the grave goods is a pendant made out of a silver coin with a fine portrait bust of the young Augustus on it (see Places: Lexden Tumulus).

Cunobelin may have worn the pendant: he saw himself as the British Augustus. On his own coins he had the portrait of Augustus imitated and labelled CVNO.

After Cunobelinus’s death, his two sons, Togodumnus and Caratacus, expanded Catuvellaunian power even more aggressively than their father. They seemed to be fearless of the Romans hesitating to invade on the other side of the Channel.

CURSE TABLETS

Romano-Celtic curses inscribed informally on sheets of lead are known by the Latin name defixiones, because of the form of words often used: somebody’s name followed by defictus est (“is cursed.”) They were deposited with other offerings in shrines. In effect the curse was offered up to the gods just like any other prayer.

In 1930 only four curse tablets were known, but subsequent excavations, at places such as Bath, and Uley in Gloucestershire, have revealed many more of them. They are difficult to read because they have been hastily scratched.

Curse tablets are of interest in their intensely personal character. A fine example was found at the Romano-Celtic sanctuary at Uley. It was written on both sides of a rectangular lead sheet 3.5 inches (9cm) across and then rolled up tightly, presumably so that no one except the god would be able to read it. When it was found, it had to be unrolled very carefully under laboratory conditions, to make sure that it did not break up. The conservation was successful, and this is how the inscription runs:

A reminder to the God Mercury from Saturnina, a woman, concerning the linen cloth she has lost. Let him who has stolen it have no rest until he brings the aforesaid things to the aforesaid temple, whether this is a man or a woman, slave or free. She gives a third part to the aforesaid god on condition that he exacts those things which have been written above. A third part of what has been lost is given to the god Silvanus on condition that he exact this whether [the culprit?] is a man or woman, slave or free.

This curse was left at the shrine, where a fine stone statue of Mercury presided; its head has survived. Where Saturnina wrote the name of the god Mercury, the name of another god, Mars-Silvanus, has been erased. The later reference to Silvanus confirms that the woman was depositing her curse with two gods, not just one, as an insurance. It also looks as if she had left a curse with Mercury before: this is “a reminder.” Whether Saturnina ever got her linen back we shall never know.

Some tablets sound more legalistic. One from Bath reads: “I have given the goddess Sulis six silver pieces which I have lost. It is for the goddess to extract it from the debtors Senicianus, Saturninus, and Anniola. This document has been copied.”

Some are difficult to translate because they have been written informally and ungrammatically, apparently in a rage. One of these, again from Bath, reads: “I curse whoever has stolen, whoever has robbed Deomorix from his house. Whoever is guilty may the god find him. Let him recover it with his blood and his life.” Deomorix was a Celt.

A tablet from Moorgate in London was written in a towering rage: “I curse Tretia Maria and her life and mind and memory and liver and lungs all mixed up together, her words, thoughts and memory, thus may she be unable to speak of things concealed…”

One from Harlow, addressed to Mercury, is not about theft—which most are—but about a love triangle: “I entrust to you my affair with Eterna and her own self, and may Timotneus feel no jealousy of me at risk of his life blood.”

CYNLAS

See Ewein Whitetooth.

DAVID

David or Dewi of Menevia (St. David’s) was probably born in 523. He died in 589. He was the son of “Sanctus,” King of Cardigan, and Nonnita, daughter of Cynyr, “in the time of King Triphunus and his sons.” He was baptized by Ailbe and educated at Vetus Rubus (Henllwyn) under Illtud. After a time he established Vallis Rosina (Hodnant, now called Merry Vale). David was harassed by an Irish chief called Boya, who paraded naked women in front of his monks in order to tempt them. He established an austere monastic rule, living on vegetables and water, which earned him the nickname David Aquaticus. Gildas denounced his extremism.

At the Synod of Brefi, in about 545, called to discuss Pelagianism, David addressed the assembly and his oratory persuaded them, much to the anger of Cadoc, who was then overseas. But this synod was a decisive victory for David. New monastic houses were founded all over the country and David was informally acclaimed archbishop or even “head” of all Britain.

One notable disciple was Aedan of Ferns, and through him up to one third of Ireland followed David’s rule. David’s name recurs frequently in the Lives of Irish Saints.

The cult of David spread widely in Demetia (Pembrokeshire), Brecon, and the Wye Valley. It was more scattered in Cornwall and Brittany, was never established in Glamorgan, where Cadoc and Illtud held sway, and was absent from Scotland.

DECEANGLI

A British tribe living in North Wales, in what is now Clwyd.

DECIANUS CATUS

See Boudicca.

DEWI

See David.

DIARMAIT

See Columba of Iona, Ruadan.

DICUL

An Irish abbot who set up a small monastic house at Bosham, in Sussex, in around 650. He had with him five or six monks and they apparently had no effect at all on the local (pagan Saxon) population. St. Wilfrid found them there when he arrived in 680.

DIODORUS SICULUS

A Greek historian who lived in the first century BC. He was born in Sicily and later lived in Rome, where he collected the materials for his huge history of the world in 40 books. Some of our most reliable information about the state of Europe in the late Iron Age, not least about the Celts, comes from Diodorus.

DIVICIACUS

A Druid of whom Julius Caesar had personal knowledge. As well as being a Druid, Diviciacus was chief of the Aedui tribe and brother of Dumnorix. He went on a diplomatic mission to Rome, where he got to know Cicero, who described how Diviciacus would predict the future by augury. Cicero referred to him as a Druid.

Diviciacus helped Caesar enormously in his conquest of Gaul by persuading some of the tribes to collaborate with Rome. Caesar depended on him to form alliances that enabled him to conquer Gaul more smoothly and rapidly.

Caesar must have known that Diviciacus was a Druid, yet he does not mention it. But he did remember him as “the greatest man in Gaul”—a leader who had held sway among Gallic tribes and was also influential in Britain.

DOCCO

Also known as Kyngar of Congresbury, Docco was the son of Luciria and the emperor Constatinus III. He was born in 400–10. He was a cleric who traveled from Italy to found several major early monastic houses in Britain, including Congresbury in Somerset. The site was on the estate of a Roman villa, though the villa itself had by then gone.

Docco also crossed the Severn Sea to Glamorgan to found a monastery in the territory of Paulentus Penychen and visited Ireland, Aran, Rome, and Jerusalem. His monastery at St. Kew is the earliest known Cornish monastery—it was already well-established when St. Samson visited it in 540.

Docco died in Jerusalem in 473 and his body was buried at Congresbury.

Docco, David, and Gildas are the only British churchmen to be mentioned in the Irish Annals.

DRESS

In the first century BC, Posidonius wrote this colorful description of the Celts:

To the frankness and high-spiritedness of their temperament must be added the traits of childish boastfulness and love of decoration. They wear ornaments of gold, torcs on their necks, and bracelets on their arms and wrists, whilst people of high rank wear dyed garments besprinkled with gold.

The torc was a neck ring that was a mark of status of freeborn Celtic men (and sometimes women). Rich people wore gold torcs, which were flexible enough to be bent and sprung back around the wearer’s neck. Poorer people wore torcs of iron or bronze, which had movable sections that could be pegged into place. The huge difference in wealth between rich and poor is clear from the finds of torcs.

The Snettisham hoard, found in Norfolk between 1948 and 1968, includes a rich array of gold torcs dating from perhaps AD 50, and it shows how incredibly rich the Iceni nobility were compared with the ordinary people. The magnificent Snettisham torc is fine enough to have been a piece of royal regalia, and it may have been worn by the kings and queens of the Iceni: Snettisham was in their territory (See Boudicca).

Torcs were worn by the aristocracy throughout the world of the Celtic west, even in Galicia.

DRUIDS

See Religion: Druids.

DUBNOVELLAUNUS

See Addedomarus, Cunobelin.

DUBRICIUS

Dyfrig, also known by his Latinized name, Dubricius, was a Dark Age saint. According to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s glamorized version of King Arthur, after Uther’s death, Britons gathered “from their various provinces in the town of Silchester and suggested to Dubricius, the Archbishop of the City of the Legions [Caerleon], that he should crown Arthur, the son of Uther, as their king.”

Dubricius was a real historical figure living in sixth-century post-Roman Britain, and the only bishop to be attached to a city. Today that is normal, but in the Dark Ages bishops were more often unattached. Bishops were usually creatures of their kings, and very much personal appointments. Dubricius consecrated Samson as bishop, apparently as his successor.

DUMNORIX

A chief of the Aedui tribe in Gaul in the first century BC. He fought vigorously against any Gaulish alliance with Julius Caesar. In 54 BC, Caesar chose him as one of the hostages he would take with him on his expedition to Britain, fearing that he would cause trouble if left behind in Gaul. When he failed to argue his way out of this, on the grounds that he suffered from sea-sickness, Dumnorix tried to escape from Caesar’s camp. Caesar sent cavalry after him. Dumnorix was killed, shouting that he was “a free man and a citizen of a free state” (see also Diviciacus).

DUNAWT

See Pabo Post Prydain.

DURATIOS

See Pictones.

DUROTRIGES

A fiercely independent Celtic tribe who resisted the Roman conquest. Their territory coincided with the modern English county of Dorset. Their capital was the magnificent hillfort of Maiden Castle, which was attacked by the Romans and then replaced by a new open town (Dorchester) on lower ground nearby.

DWELLINGS

The standard dwelling in the Iron Age was a stoutly built round wooden hut with a conical thatched roof and a porch opening to the south-east.

Chysauster in Cornwall, inhabited from about 50 BC to AD 300, was built in a much more ancient tradition. The irregular, fetus-shaped houses with thick, stone-built walls were much more like the stone houses built in Neolithic Orkney hundreds of years earlier. The design was probably partly remembered from an earlier age, and partly a response to a windy, maritime environment.

At Jarlshof in Shetland, the communal memory linking the centuries is made visible. Jarlshof was first inhabited in the Neolithic and continued as a village through the Bronze Age and into the Iron Age, with interruptions when it was engulfed by sand.

Like the Jarlshof houses, the houses at Chysauster were in effect stoutly walled courtyards designed to keep out the wind, with rooms opening out of them. Once there were walled fields round Chysauster, the walls dating from the same time as the village. Thanks to an insane EU subsidy policy, these were plowed up some time ago to make a rocky landscape that is no use for arable or pasture, and its archeology has been destroyed too.

The brochs of Orkney, Shetland, and the Western Isles of Scotland represent a similar design approach—rooms ranged around a courtyard—but carried up into the air to make imposing towers. The finest is the Broch of Mousa, which has survived almost intact because of its inaccessibility on an uninhabited island off the east coast of Shetland. Built in the first century BC and inhabited until about AD 150, it soars 40 feet (10m) above the shore in a graceful drum shape. Timber ranges once lined the interior walls, with galleries at various levels, reached by stone staircases built within the thickness of the outer wall. There was a single door and no windows; it must have been very dark and dank inside.

The hearth was the centerpiece of every dwelling and it had the status of an altar in domestic cult. This custom may have had its roots in the Neolithic; the layout of the stone houses at Skara Brae in Orkney, with large central square hearths, treats the domestic fire almost theatrically.

The Laws of Hywel Dda supply inventories of the objects to be seen in a typical household in early medieval Celtic Britain. They include boilers, blankets, bolsters, coulters, fuel axes (axes for chopping firewood), broad axes, augers, gimlets, firedogs, sickles, baking griddles, trivets, pans, and sieves.

DYFNWAL

Dyfnwal Hen was a king of Alcluith (Clyde), whose fortress was the formidable Dumbarton Rock below Glasgow. His father or grandfather was Ceretic Guletic.

Dyfnwal lived at the end of the fifth century. His grandson was Tutagual Tutclit, and his great-grandson was Riderch, mentioned by St. Adomnán as ruler of the Rock of Clyde. From another son of Dyfnwal descends a long line of recorded kings of Strathclyde, right down to the end of the kingdom in the tenth century.

DYFRIG

See Dubricius.

ECONOMY

The Celtic economy was strongly rural in character, with some arable farming and a great many livestock. The Iron Age landscape was a patchwork of small irregular fields and meadows, with scattered round huts separated by substantial areas of dense forest.

By the end of the Bronze Age a particularly hardy form of wheat called spelt and a new hardy type of barley (hulled instead of naked barley) were introduced into Britain. These innovations meant that in the Iron Age a crop could be sown in the autumn and harvested in the spring—before the spring-sowing. The Greek writer Hecateus observed that as early as the sixth century BC the people of Britain reaped two harvests a year.

The fields were irregular in shape, but on average roughly 1 acre (0.4 hectares) in area. It was the size of field that could be plowed in a day by two oxen ambling along at 2 miles (3km) per hour.

The farming year was marked by four major quarter-day festivals, Imbolg, Beltane, Lugnasad, and Samhain.

ELIDYR

A king of South Rheged (Lancashire and Cheshire) who was the son-in-law of King Maelgwn of Gwynedd.

Elidyr landed near Caernarvon in an attempt to take Gwynedd from Rhun, son of Maelgwn, but was killed on the beach. He was apparently not supported by the York or Pennine kings. Instead it was Rhydderch and other northern allies who sailed south to Gwynedd to avenge his death.

Rhun’s half-brother Bridei had become King of the Picts in 555; he was not only Maelgwn’s son but a cousin of Egferth, King of the Bernicians. A kinship alliance of this kind between Gwynedd and Pictland was something of a threat to the security of the Celtic kingdoms in between, Clyde and Rheged.

But Rhydderch’s raid on Gwynedd was unsuccessful and he had to withdraw. Rhun, King of Gwynedd, responded by gathering an army and marching it north, probably by way of York. It was a march of legendary length and duration and the warriors returned to Gwynedd in triumph.

ELISEG

A king of Powys, commemorated on the Pillar of Eliseg. The inscription, as read by Edward Lhuyd in 1696, is as follows:

Concenn, son of Cattell, Cattell son of Brohcmail, Brohcmail son of Eliseg, Eliseg son of Guoilliac. Concenn, who is therefore great-grandson of Eliseg, erected this stone to his great-grandfather Eliseg. Eliseg annexed the inheritance of Powys throughout nine years from the power of the English.

The inscription also mentioned that “Britu moreover was the son of Vortigern whom Germanus blessed,” which seems to tell us the name of King Vortigern’s successor.

The inscription has deteriorated as a result of weathering and is no longer legible (see Symbols: Phallus).

ELOQUENCE

The Celts have always admired eloquence, believing it to be more powerful than brute strength.

ETAIN

Etain of the Tuatha dé Danann was the heroine of the Irish love story Midhir and Etain. This tale has been the inspiration of poems and plays, and is probably best known through Fiona McLeod’s play The Immortal Hour and Rutland Boughton’s opera, which in turn is based on the McLeod play (see Part 6: Celtic Twilight and Revival).

EWEIN WHITETOOTH

King of Powys in the early sixth century. He was murdered by Maelgwn, the notorious King of Gwynedd, and succeeded by his (Ewein’s) son Cynlas. Cynlas was nicknamed, possibly privately by Gildas, Cuneglasus, which meant “Pale Dog” in Brittonic.

FANNELL

See Religion: Headhunting.

FARANNAN

An Irish monk from Sligo who went with Columba when he left for Iona.

FEIC

See Fiacc of Sletty.

FERGNA BRIT

An abbot of Iona, 608–624.

FIACC OF SLETTY

A magus or wizard of Loegaire, High King of Ireland. Fiacc or Feic was a student under Dubthach Maccu Lugir. He was the only one of Loegaire’s magi to accept Patrick (See Magicians).

FILIDH

See Learning.

FINGAR OF GWINNEAR

A Cornish saint. He was the son of an Irish king called Clyto. When Patrick visited Clyto’s court in Ireland, Fingar alone honored him. Fingar was apparently disinherited and emigrated to Brittany (via Cornwall) where he founded monasteries with his sister Piala and 770 companions and seven bishops. They were accompanied by St. Hia, who traveled by herself on a leaf. This odd convoy landed at Hayle, where it was attacked by the local King Theodoric, a pagan who was afraid the missionaries would convert his subjects. He had been warned by Clyto that his son had sailed and fell on the rear of one party and killed them. According to one account, Fingar’s party then surrendered and were massacred. Fingar himself was beheaded, but he replaced his head and went on to perform several miracles.

FINNIAN OF CLONARD

Finnian was the “teacher of the saints of Ireland.” He founded Clonard, where he encountered the magus Fraychan.

Finnian’s mother founded a monastic house for women, together with the mother of Ciaran of Clonmacnoise.

Finnian lived on a simple diet of bread, vegetables, and water, and a little fish on feast days. He slept on the ground with a stone pillow. He died in 551.

His tradition was hard, rather like St. David’s, but without the harshness or arrogance that was attributed to David. Finnian was said to be full of learning and compassion.

FOGOU

A low-ceilinged subterranean passage in Cornwall. Fogous are similar to souterrains in being associated with settlements, but they are made in a different way. The Breton souterrains were burrowed out of sand, while the Cornish fogous were built in open trenches with side walls of stone and roofed with capstones; they were then covered with backfill. There is the same discussion about their function as with souterrains; on balance it is most likely that their primary use was as grain stores.

The fine fogou at Carn Euny in Cornwall was made in the first century BC. The passage is 66 feet (20m) long with, unusually, a circular side chamber.

FOILL

See Religion: Headhunting.

FOOD AND FEASTING

Ceremony surrounded the Celtic domestic hearth. Even more ceremony surrounded the provision of large meals. Banquets and feasting were major characteristics of the Celtic way of life.

Posidonius described a feast:

The Celts sit on hay and have their meals served up on wooden tables raised slightly above the earth. Their food consists of small numbers of loaves together with a large amount of meat, either boiled or roasted on charcoal or on spits. This food is eaten cleanly, but they eat like lions, raising up whole limbs in both hands and biting off the meat…

When a large number dine together they sit around in a circle with the most influential man in the centre, like the leader of the chorus, whether he surpasses the others in warlike skill, or lineage, or wealth. Beside him sits the host and next on either side the others in order of distinction…

The Celts sometimes engage in single combat at dinner. For they gather in arms and engage in mock battles, and fight hand-to-hand, but sometimes wounds are inflicted, and the annoyance caused by this may even lead to killing unless the bystanders restrain them. In former times, when the hindquarters were served up the bravest hero took the thigh piece, and if another man claimed it they stood up and fought in single combat to the death.

Feasts such as these were designed to reinforce the pecking order among the warriors, and to strengthen the ties among members of the band.

The main drinks in an Iron Age Celtic feast were beer and mead, though the nobility adopted wine as soon as the trade routes to the Mediterranean allowed. At first it was a very expensive luxury. There was even a tale current in Rome that the Celts had crossed the Alps and invaded Italy just to get closer to the vineyards.

FORTIFICATIONS

On some of the hilltops there were large hillforts, surrounded by complex ramparts and palisades. Although called forts, they had several functions. They were stock enclosures and refuges in times of danger, they housed permanent settlements, and they were the focus of tribal gatherings and feastings (See Food and Feasting, Tribes). They probably also had a ceremonial and religious function, as well as acting as clear territorial markers—literally landmarks—that would help to create a sense of cohesion among people who were normally scattered across the landscape in separate homesteads.

The hillfort was usually laid out on the summit of a hill and surrounded by an earthwork that was intended to be clearly visible from below. The massive squared ramparts were faced front and back by rows of upright timbers tied by horizontal crossbeams. The earthen rampart was topped by a stout palisade, to defend the fighting-platform behind it, as at Hollingbury in Sussex. All the timber breastworks have disintegrated now, and the earth and rock they supported has slipped sideways, yet the ramparts can still be imposing. Maiden Castle in Dorset is the most impressive of the hillforts, with a complex mazelike entrance; it was the capital of the Durotriges tribe.

In Galicia, there were lots of defended homesteads built on hilltops. The presence of these castros distinguishes Galicia from the rest of the Iberian peninsula; they are the hallmark of its ancient Celtic past. The castro is a hilltop settlement, like a miniature hillfort, defended by multiple walls. Within, there is an ordered settlement, mostly with round stone houses built to a high density. Castro de Baroña is a fine example (See Dwellings).

FUNERAL ODES

One of the duties of a Celtic bard was to write a funeral ode on the death of his king. A fine example has survived, entitled Marwnad Uthyr Pendragon, which can be translated as The Funeral Ode to the Wonderful Pendragon. For a long time this was thought to be the funeral ode for Uther, Arthur’s father, but the word “uter” can be an adjective meaning “terrible” or “wonderful,” while pendragon is a Celtic title for High King or dux bellorum. This means that the ode might have been addressed to Arthur himself:

The longing and lamentation of the multitude

Are unceasing throughout the host.

They earnestly yearn for the joyful prize of blue enamel.

There your stone with your name became a riddle.

They also wish for their Prince.

All around appears the rule of order at the head of the feast.

They seek to dress the head of the feast with black.

They unendingly shed blood among the war-bands,

Longing for you to defend them and give them succour.

The sword that was in the van in taming the brothers of Caw of the Wall.

They crave with longing for a portion of your cause

And for refuge in the manliness of Arthur.

They long for your coming in a hundred fortresses.

A hundred manors long for your assurances.

They long for your coming in a hundred schools.

A hundred chieftains long for your coming:

The great and mighty sword that supported them.

They look for your best judgements of merit,

The restoration of principalities.

Your sayings are remembered, soothing the aggressive.

The eloquence of the bards is not great enough:

Toiling for weeks with the eagerness of beavers,

With the names of men and war-bands to compare you.

Above the eagles, above the fear of disorder,

I am the one who is with the great Warrior.

I am the bard, the bagpiper. I am with the Creator;

Seventy musicians create the great rhapsody of the first power…

The Leader of Heaven has left the nation without a roof.

“Caw of the Wall” seems an odd phrase. The Life of Cadoc tells us that Caw (Cauus) lived in southern Scotland, not far from Hadrian’s Wall; he was the father of Gildas.

In another poem, The Dream of Rhonabwy, Arthur is described as sitting with Gwarthegydd, another son of Caw.

Other evidence confirms that Arthur and Caw were contemporaries, so the ode was written at the right time to have been for Arthur. If it is his eulogy, it tells us a great deal about the way he was regarded at the time of his death. The final image is the most telling of all: “The Leader of Heaven has left the nation without a roof.”

GABRAN

See Bridei.

GAMES

Celtic chiefs undoubtedly played board games and maybe their subjects did too.

Gaming pieces made out of wood have not survived, but a set made out of glass was found in a royal grave at Welwyn Garden City, just north of London. It consisted of a set of 12 white marbles and an opposing set of 12 black marbles, both highly decorated. The wooden game board was 2 feet (0.6m) square and badly decayed. This was a game similar to Ludo, and it was designed for two players. Although Ludo itself was patented in the nineteenth century, it was based on a very old board game.

Dice have been found at other sites, but in the Welwyn grave there were six fragments of beads and bracelets, which may have been thrown to determine the number of moves each player made.

GENEALOGY

Kings and princes were entitled to their privileges by birthright, in other words according to who their mothers and fathers were. They therefore had a strong vested interest in establishing and committing to memory their family trees. No doubt these were transmitted orally for countless centuries and written down only from about the seventh century AD onward, when the process of Christianization made written records much commoner (See Writing). The lack of interference from the Romans in Ireland has meant that more in the way of Irish genealogy has survived.

King lists were drawn up and doubtless recited on special occasions by bards. These were designed to establish the king’s entitlement to his position, and doubtless flattering connections with long-dead heroic figures were added as a matter of course. A considerable amount of invention is involved in some of them. The powerful Irish chiefs of the Middle Ages wanted to be descended from Celtic gods, or from Egyptian pharaohs. But sometimes the names of heroes and kings follow one another in a credible sequence that recurs in other genealogies, and this corroboration inspires more confidence.

According to bardic sources, Slaine the Firbolg was the first High King of Ireland. From the time of his accession to the year 1, there were 107 High Kings: nine Firbolgs, nine Tuatha dé Danann, and 89 Milesians. After the rebellion in the first century AD, the High Kingship was reinstated, and after that there was an unbroken line of 81 High Kings until Rory O’Connor who, in 1175, surrendered his overlordship to Henry II of England.

The texture of the bardic genealogies often shows a shift from the mythic to the historic. Conaire Mor was the son of the bird god Nemglan; by contrast Ollamh Foola, the eighteenth High King, who came to the throne in 714 BC, is said to have provided Ireland with its first law code, which has a more historic ring to it.

GERAINT

A Dumnonian (Cornish) king who was born in about 480 and a contemporary of King Arthur. His pedigree survives. He was Geraint (or Gerontius in Latin), son of Erbin, son of Kynoar, son of Tudwaol, son of Gorwaor, son of Gaden, son of Cynan, son of Eudaf Hen, and known as Geraint Llyngesog, the “Fleet-owner.”

He was married first to Gwyar, daughter of Amlawdd Wledig, by whom he had four children: Selyf, Cyngar, Iestyn, and Cado. He then married Enid, daughter of Ynywl, Lord of Caerleon. Geraint himself was the son of Erbin, who held lands in both south-east Wales and Dumnonia. Early sources name both Geraint and his son and heir Cado or Cato as “rulers who ruled with Arthur.” This supports the idea that there were several Cornish sub-kings, with Arthur as their overking.

The poem Geraint may be a genuine sixth-century poem. It is an elegy for the warriors who fell at the Battle of Llongborth, written in the wake of one of Arthur’s battles (see Funeral Odes). Llongborth means “Port of the Warships” and is thought to be the westernmost of the Saxon Shore Forts: Portchester, at the head of Portsmouth Harbor, a likely location for the battle with the Saxons:

In Llongborth I saw spurs

and men who did not flinch from spears,

who drank their wine from glass that glinted.

In Llongborth I saw Arthur,

heroes who cut with steel,

the emperor, ruler of our labour.

In Llongborth, Geraint was slain,

heroes of the land of Dyfnant,

and before they were slain they slew.

GIFTS

Celtic chiefs competed with each other in the giving of lavish feasts, so feasts should be regarded as a form of gift (See Food and Feasting). There was also a principle of reciprocation: the guest was expected to respond in kind, inviting his host to another banquet.

This set in train an endless cycle of exchanges of food and drink, the purpose of which was to consolidate social ties. Of course the feasts were very enjoyable, but the temptation to be over-zealous was always there, to try to outdo your host. Ariamdes, a Celtic nobleman from Galatia, threw a feast that was so extravagant that it represented a year’s supply of food.

GILDAS

Gildas the Wise was a Celtic monk who lived and wrote in the sixth century. He was born in Alcluith, the son of Cauus, and possibly the brother of Cuillus, who rebelled against Arthur. He migrated, probably in infancy, to Wales. He attended Illtud’s famous school, along with with Samson and Paul Aurelian.

Gildas preached in north Pembrokeshire in the time of King Tribinus and his sons. He preached in northern Britain, received a message from Brigit, and sent her a bell. He arranged a marriage between Trifina, the daughter of Weroc of Vannes, and the evil tyrant Conomorus (who died in 560). Conomorus cut off Trifina’s head, which Gildas promptly restored.

Gildas wrote strongly condemning the harsh discipline of St. David, and equally strongly supported the milder rule of Illtud and Cadoc of Lancarfan. He returned from a visit to Ireland, visited Cadoc, and supervised the school for a year, writing a Gospel that would later be bound in gold and silver. He spent a winter on Echni (Flat Holm, an island in the Bristol Channel), where he was disturbed by pirates from the Orkneys. After that, in the days when King Melwas ruled Somerset, he went to Glastonbury, where he died in 570.

Gildas is of special interest in being the only historian or commentator who was actually writing at the time of Arthur. His theme was the condition of Britain, which he thought was in a poor state politically and morally, though it was a beautiful land. His book opens with a surprisingly lyrical description of Britain’s watery beauty:

This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land … decked with lucid fountains, abundant brooks wandering over snow white sands, transparent rivers that glide with gentle murmur, lakes which pour forth cool torrents of refreshing water.

Written in Latin in about 540, the book has the title Book of Complaint on the Ruin and Conquest of Britain. Gildas describes a great British leader called Ambrosius Aurelianus initiating an increasingly successful campaign against the Saxons in the run-up to the Battle of Badon, which he identifies as a landmark in history. By 540, the battle, which had been fought 20 or so years earlier, was seen as a watershed engagement: one that marked the end of one phase of history and the start of another, much as Trafalgar or Waterloo would have been perceived by a mid-nineteenth century historian. It is strange that Gildas does not mention Arthur in connection with Badon, as great a puzzle as Aristotle’s total silence regarding his pupil Alexander the Great.

What Gildas was complaining about above all was the complacency of the British. Those who had struggled to push back the Saxons in the years leading up to Badon had died. The new generation was “ignorant of the storm”—it had no idea what efforts were needed to defend Celtic Britain against the invaders.

It is an articulate and emotionally highly charged account, with a great deal of invective directed at one British ruler after another: Gildas was dissatisfied with nearly all of them. Probably with conscious understatement, he calls his thunderous accusations admonitiuncula, “just a little word of warning.”

The text is largely compiled from biblical quotations, making it more sermon than history. Another frustration is the obscure Latin style Gildas uses, making it rich in ambiguity when what we want is clarity.

There may also have been more than one version. Bede’s specific references to Gildas imply that he, in 731, was working from a different version than the one we have today, and we have no way of knowing which is the more authentic. Gildas died in 570.

THE GODODDIN

A series of elegies in 103 stanzas about a disastrous expedition of the bodyguard of Mynydd Mwynfawr, King of Din Eidyn (Edinburgh). The expedition was ranged against the Anglians at Catraeth (probably Catterick).

The Gododdin has survived in a single manuscript called The Book of Aneirin. We are told simply, “This is The Gododdin. Aneirin composed it.” The subject matter and the detail tell us that this is a genuine sixth-century Celtic poem. The bard Aneirin lived in the second half of the sixth century. The Gododdin of the title are the men of the Votadini tribe, but the warriors on this expedition include handpicked men from kingdoms all over Britain—Elmet, Clyde, Gwynedd, and Dumnonia—which tells us that communications among the British kingdoms must have been effective and that the Britons were ready to help one another against the Anglo-Saxons (See Alduith).

The Gododdin chief feasted the men for a year at Din Eidyn before sending them to fight the Lloegrwys (the men of England) or the Dewr a Brynaich (the men of Deira and Byrnaich). Aneirin comments grimly, “They paid for that feast of mead with their lives.” The British attack on Catraeth was probably pre-emptive, an attempt to annihilate the embryonic Anglian community while it was still relatively small and powerless; the crushing defeat would have been all the more traumatic because it was unexpected.

One line in The Gododdin jumps off the page. A warrior is praised for his fighting prowess, “though he was no Arthur.”

GORDEBAR

See Aircol, Vortipor.

GOSCELIN

See Places: Cerne Abbas.

GURGUST LETHAM

The King of York in the early sixth century.

GURON

A hermit living at Padstow in north Cornwall, who was evicted by St. Petroc.

GWALLAWG

A king of the Dark Age Pennine kingdom of Elmet.

GWRGI

See Peredur Steel-Arm.

HELMET

A very fine horned helmet made of bronze was deposited in the Thames River at Waterloo Bridge in the first century BC. It was found in 1868.

Like the Battersea shield, also found in the Thames (See Art), this was almost certainly not an accidental loss, but a deliberate deposit in water. The horns may have been intended to combine ferocity and potency symbolism. The bronze was originally enameled. It is a masterpiece of the armorer’s craft, and it is possible that it was made to adorn a wooden statue of a god rather than to be worn by a mortal in battle; it would scarcely protect the wearer from a well-aimed sword blow. The Romans had an equivalent to this in their decorative parade helmets.

HENGIST AND HORSA

See Vortigern.

HUNTING

See Religion: Headhunting; Helis; Symbols: Dog, Stag.

HUSSA

See Urien.

ICENI

A British tribe living in East Anglia. Its tribal focus or capital was at Caistor St. Edmund, for which the Roman name was Venta Icenorum. In the 1930s, when it was partially excavated, the evidence showed that the Iceni had adopted very little Roman culture. They were few opulent houses and few substantial public buildings. The surrounding area had few Roman villas, they were few mosaics, and there were few oil amphorae. All this was interpreted as showing that the Iceni were poor and backward. We now see the same evidence as showing that the tribe was consciously retaining its Celtic identity and resisting a takeover by the Roman way of life—not a sign of poverty or backwardness at all.

The Iceni famously engaged in a revolt against Rome in AD 60–61, after their queen, Boudicca, suffered maltreatment by Roman soldiers.

ILLTUD

Illtud was a Breton, a cousin of King Arthur, and converted to the monastic life by Cadoc of Lancarfan. He may, as claimed, have been baptized by St. Germanus. He was ordained by St. Dubricius in the time when Merchiaun the Wild was King of Glamorgan.

Not long after his death he was described as “an exceptional teacher of the British, in the tradition of St. Germanus.” He is still remembered chiefly for his remarkable school at Llantwit Fawr in Glamorgan, where he taught some remarkable boys: David, Leonorus, Gildas, Samson, Paul Aurelian, and Maelgwn—all became saints except the last, who became the infamous King Maelgwn of Gwynedd.

The boys started at the age of five, learning the alphabet. There were no set fees: Illtud relied on customary “donations.”

Illtud’s teaching method was gentle and lenient. He did not believe it was sensible for growing boys to go in for excessive fasting. He also tried to dissuade the 15-year-old Paul Aurelian from going off to a desert hermitage, but in the end left the decision to the boy.

The monastery was Illtud’s own property, which his nephews expected to inherit. He died some time after 525.

JULIUS CAESAR

By no means a Celt himself, Gaius Julius Caesar earns his place here as a destroyer of Celts. He made a greater negative impact on the Celts than anyone else in history.

Caesar came from an old patrician family. In 85 BC, when he was only 16, his father died suddenly. Caesar was young to be head of the family, but he started at once working his way up the cursus honorum, the ladder of offices and appointments that would enhance his social status. In pursuing his political career and lobbying for offices, he ran up debts and was accused of corruption.

When he was appointed Governor of Cisalpine Gaul (northern Italy), with Transalpine Gaul (southern France) added later, he was glad to get out of Rome. He was deeply in debt: a great spur to military adventure.

From a variety of motives, including self-glorification and ultimate political triumph, Caesar worked his way through Gaul, attacking the Gallic tribes one by one and defeating them. Once he had conquered the tribes along the coast of the English Channel, the way was clear to cross and take Britain.

In 55 BC, Caesar blocked an attempt by two Germanic tribes to invade Gaul. Then, in late summer, he crossed the Channel into Britain. But his geographical and political knowledge of Britain was not good enough. He managed to establish a bridgehead on the coast in Sussex, but could not go further. He withdrew to Gaul for the winter.

In 54 BC he returned to Britain with a larger force and achieved more, setting up some alliances that would prove useful later. But there were poor harvests in Gaul, and a widespread revolt there forced Caesar to withdraw from Britain again.

What Caesar did, unintentionally, was to set down a challenge for future emperors who wanted to make a name for themselves. Could they succeed in conquering Britain, where great Caesar himself had failed?

In 52 BC there was a new and larger revolt in Gaul, led by Vercingetorix. This was well-coordinated and Caesar was defeated several times before the revolt was put down at the Battle of Alesia.

Plutarch claimed that in Caesar’s Gallic Wars one million Gauls had died and another million had been enslaved. Caesar had subjugated 300 tribes and destroyed 800 towns. The figures may have been exaggerated, but it is no exaggeration to see this as little short of a Celtic genocide.

KENTIGERN

St. Kentigern was the son of Owain, son of King Urien of Rheged. His mother was Thynoy.

Kentigern traveled to David at Menevia. He founded St. Asaph’s and was attacked by Maelgwn of Degannwy. He visited Europe and went to Rome seven times. It seems that he was Bishop of Senlis, near Paris, from 549–65.

While he was abroad, Riderch became King of Alclud (see Alcluith), and Kentigern returned to Glasgow. He taught that Woden was a mortal man, a Saxon king, not a god. He preached widely, visiting Pictland, and was visited by Columba of Iona, who gave him a staff, which is still preserved at Ripon. Kentigern died in around 603.

KYNGAR OF CONGRESBURY

See Docco.

LANGUAGE

The old languages still spoken in the Atlantic Celtic lands are related to one another, though they are not all as closely related as once believed. The current view among linguists is that historically there are two families of Celtic languages. The Q-Celtic family, known as Goidelic, has a western Gaelic branch from which Irish is descended and an eastern Gaelic branch from which Scottish Gaelic and Manx Gaelic are descended. Then there is a P-Celtic family, known as Brittonic, with a northern Brittonic branch from which Welsh developed and a southern Brittonic branch from which Cornish and Breton are descended. This division may help to explain why Welsh-speakers cannot understand Gaelic-speakers.

The “Q” and “P” families were first identified in the early eighteenth century by Edward Lhuyd. Q-Celtic is recognized from the presence of the “Q” sound in the word Mac, “son of.” P-Celtic has the “P” sound in the corresponding position: Map. This “P/Q” exchange is found in other words as well.

The relationship between the Cornish and Breton languages is the closest. This is explained by the exodus of Britons, via Cornwall, in the Dark Ages, as they were driven out by the advancing Anglo-Saxons. These British refugees fled westward through southern Britain to Cornwall, then crossed to Brittany in considerable numbers, and they took their language with them.

In the Middle Ages, Scotland was divided culturally between Highlands and Lowlands. The Highlanders spoke Gaelic (Irish “Celtic” or Erse), while the Lowlanders spoke Scots, which was a Germanic language close to English. This difference was perhaps a legacy of the Anglo-Saxon colonization of the Scottish Lowlands in the Dark Ages.

In the late 1980s Professor Colin Renfrew put forward the view that Celtic speech evolved from its Indo-European ancestor in the British Isles and the adjacent continent at some time after 4000 BC. Professor Renfrew believes that the Celtic language was not taken to Britain at all, but developed in situ. This is very much in line with the general view emerging of Celtic culture as a whole.

Much of what was passed on to others was learned by listening. Little was written down (See Writing). There were nevertheless the means to write. The Ogham alphabet was made of combinations of short and long marks, often chipped along the edges of stones. It was an ideal method for recording someone’s name on a gravestone. Ogham was widely used in southern Ireland, and more than 900 examples have been found in Britain and Ireland as a whole.

It is widely believed that the Celtic language was completely wiped out in England, but there are many surviving Celtic place-names. For a long time after the Anglo-Saxon colonization period (about AD 400–700), Celtic and Anglo-Saxon names existed side by side. Sometimes it is the Celtic name rather than the English name that we know today. The Cotswold Windrush River had an English name, Dikler, which died out as late as the sixteenth century; we now call the river by its older Celtic name, even though it has (or had) an Anglo-Saxon name. The Cotswold Hills take their name from a Celtic word and an Anglo-Saxon word. Cuda was a goddess of the Dobunni tribe; wold was the Anglo-Saxon word for a wooded upland.

In the Roman occupation and the post-Roman period, Celtic kings and princes thought it smart to use Latin. Grave markers from the fifth and sixth centuries are often inscribed in Latin. A gravestone at Penmacho in North Wales reads CARAVSIVS HIC IACIT IN HOC CONGERIES LAPIDVM, “Here lies Carausius in this heap of stones.”

LEARNING

Celtic society was highly structured and it allowed for the cultivation of learning and literature. There were professional classes who were responsible for their maintenance: the Druids, the bards, and a third order between them, known in Ireland as “the poets.”

In Ireland by the seventh century AD the Druids had disappeared, as they bore the brunt of the Church’s opposition, and the intermediate group, known as the filidh, were the sole inheritors of the druidic tradition. The filidh managed to establish a remarkable modus vivendi with the Church that enabled the two authorities to continue running side by side and were therefore able to maintain many of their ancient functions. The Irish bards suffered an eclipse too, as they limped on with a reputation as inferior rhymers.

In Wales, it was again the poets, or filidh, who emerged from the clash with Christianity in a position of strength, or at least with an enhanced and dignified reputation. Confusingly, the Welsh equivalents of the filidh were called bards.

According to Julius Caesar’s description, the Druids in Gaul were teachers and disciples of learning. They distrusted the written word, committing vast amounts of poetry to memory. Caesar said the period of study necessary to become a Druid lasted 20 years. Similarly in Ireland, it took at least seven years to qualify for the filidh.

We know the Druids had views about the size and nature of the universe, but unfortunately we do not know what those views were.

LEONORUS

Leonorus (510–61) was a pupil at Illtud’s school and confirmed by Dubricius at the age of 15. He emigrated to Brittany with 72 disciples and many servants, landing near Dinard.

They cleared a wooded site of trees, but the seed corn they had brought from Britain had been lost on the voyage. Fortunately, they were miraculously helped by a robin and Leonorus also dug up a golden ram.

The king of the Breton territory, Rigaldus, died and the land was annexed by Conomorus. To escape persecution by Conomorus, Leonorus and others escaped to Paris. There, Leonorus presented the golden ram he had found to Childebert, in exchange for confirmation of his rights to land in Brittany.

Conomorus was defeated in 560, and Leonorus died soon afterward.

LEUDONUS

Leudonus, or Llew mac Cynvarch, was a brother of Urien, King of Rheged. He was ruler of Lodoneis and the father of Gwalchmai (Gawain).

LINDOW MAN

See Places: Lindow Moss.

LLEW MAC CYNVARCH

See Leudonus.

LLYWARCH HEN

See Rhun, Son of Maelgwn.

LOEGAIRE

See Ciaran of Saigar, Fiacc of Sletty, Patrick.

LUERNIOS

See Arverni, Bards.

LUGID

See Aillel Molt.

MACLOVIUS

See Malo.

MAELGWN

The great king of Gwynedd, who ruled in North Wales from about 517 until his death in 547. His father was Caswallon Lawhir, son of Einion Urdd, son of Cunedda Gwledig, son of Edeyrn. He is mentioned in an inscription made in about 540 at Penmachno; there he appears as MAGLO MAGISTRATUS—“King Maelgwn.” He appears in Gildas’s Ruin of Britain as Maglocunus and of the five kings Gildas singled out for condemnation, it was Maelgwn he dealt with most harshly:

What of you, dragon of the island [Anglesey, where Maelgwn’s home was], you who have removed many of these tyrants from their country and even this life? You are last in my list, but first in evil, mightier than many both in power and malice, more profuse in giving, more extravagant in sin, strong in arms but stronger still in what destroys a soul, Maglocunus. Why wallow like a fool in the ancient ink of your crimes like a man drunk on wine pressed from the vine of the Sodomites? The king of all kings has made you higher than almost all the generals of Britain.

Maelgwn died in the Yellow Plague of Rhos in 547, and was succeeded by his son Rhun by his concubine Gwalltwen (See Arthur; Myths: The History of Taliesin).

MAGICIANS

The Druids, ovates, and bards were in some ways part of the public religious cult, because they formed colleges or fraternities. But there were others who were on the fringes: the magicians or sorcerers. These were secret dealers in rituals and beliefs that had come down from remote times and had little to do with mainstream Celtic religion.

The underground cult of magic was scarcely visible to travelers and other outsiders. There were probably many magicians and sorcerers living far from the oppida (See Oppidum), far from the mainstream cult centers, out in the countryside, where they trafficked in cures and magic charms.

MALO

St. Malo or Maclovius was a native of Gwent and a cousin of Samson. He was a pupil of Brendan of Clonfert at Nantcarvan. He was ordained by Brendan and sailed with him and a crew of 95 in a single ship on a seven-year voyage to the Island of Yma. On the way he encountered an island that looked as if it was made of glass—it was an iceberg. He reached Yma and found a bush that sounds like acanthus. He celebrated mass on the back of a whale. Then he returned home to plant his bush at Nantcarvan.

On a second voyage, he failed to find Yma but reached the Orkneys and other northern isles.

On yet another voyage, Malo left Nantcarvan for Brittany, revived a corpse, and celebrated mass in the presence of Conomorus, King of Dumnonie.

After many more travels and adventures, he died in 599 or 604.

MANDUBRACIUS

See Cassivellaunus, Catuvellauni.

MAUCENNUS

Maucennus of Rosnat was the abbot of Ninian’s monastery, which was at Whithorn in south-west Scotland. Maucennus and Mugentius are the only two named abbots of Rosnat: one in the late fifth century, and the other in the sixth. Maucennus was referred to as a great teacher (librarius) from the far north, and who lived three days’ journey from the home of Samson’s parents in Demetia. The balance of evidence points to Maucennus being the abbot of Whithorn, which was also known as Rosnat.

MEDB OF CONNAUGHT

See Chariots; Myths: The Ulster Cycle; Religion: Coligny Calendar, Mother Goddess; Symbols: Magic.

MEDRAUT

See Arthur.

MELOR

See Religion: Headhunting.

MELWAS

A Dark Age king of Somerset. Later tradition associates him with Glastonbury Tor.

MERCHIAUN

King of Rheged in the early sixth century.

MERCHIAUN VESANUS

“Merchiaun the Wild” was King of Glevissig (Glamorgan) in the early sixth century. He may have been given his nickname to distinguish him from his contemporary namesake: the much more important King Merchiaun of Rheged.

Mark Conomorus, the south Dumnonian king, was a son of Merchiaun the Wild; he was exiled to the Breton kingdom of Dumnonie.

MERLIN

The wizard who was King Arthur’s legendary mentor.

It is generally and understandably assumed that Merlin never existed, and he was to an extent an invention of Geoffrey of Monmouth, but the character was based on a collection of old poems, riddles, and triads preserved in Wales but relating to a real sixth-century Celtic bard, or carminator, called Myrddin, the Celtic form of Martin, who lived in the north close to Hadrian’s Wall. The aristocratic Norman-French readers for whom Geoffrey was writing would have pronounced Myrddin Merdin, and probably sniggered at a name so close to merde (= excrement). The Latin form of Myrddin, Merdinus, was no better—merda means “excrement” too, so Geoffrey had little choice but to change it. He chose Merlin.

In the Dark Ages, kings regularly employed bards to compose praise poems, occasional pieces on great victories or disastrous defeats, and funeral odes. The bards memorized their compositions for recitation in the feast halls (See Food and Feasting, Memory). A major role of the bard of the war-band was to entertain the warriors, often with stirring tales of their own great deeds. The impression given by the surviving fragments of Dark Age Celtic poetry is of ceaseless warfare, feasting, drinking, boasting, and showing off. Occasionally, bards confronted warriors with uncomfortable truths, perhaps to shame them into trying harder. In Rheged arise, Taliesin writes, “Not too well did they fight around their king [Urien]: to lie would be wrong.”

Taliesin served at least three and possibly four kings in succession—Cynan of Powys, Urien of Rheged, Gwallawg of Elmet, and Owain of Rheged—and seems always to have had the greater cause of the British—the Cymry, as they called one another—at heart, even if that meant deserting white-haired Urien for the younger Gwallawg. This element of unpredictability is one distinctive trait of the legendary Merlin.

We have no direct evidence of Arthur’s bard, but he too would have had such a figure to sing of his exploits: in part to entertain and in part to condition his companions and warriors to see his as the greatest cause and inspire their unswerving loyalty.

Yet Arthur’s Merlin has been portrayed by tradition as more than a bard. He is a magus. It is often assumed that this is an invention of the high Middle Ages, perhaps specifically an invention by Geoffrey of Monmouth, but there is plenty of evidence that sixth-century kings invariably had spiritual advisers or chaplains at their sides so that supernatural help was always on call. Muirchetach mac Erca, High King of Ireland from 503 onward, was a contemporary of Arthur’s and very much an Arthur-like figure himself. He leaned heavily on a British monk.

Bridei, King of the pagan Picts in the years after Arthur’s death, had a chief magician called Broichan, who also functioned as a foster father and tutor to the king in true Celtic tradition. The relationship between these two real, documented, and truly historical figures is very similar to that described as existing between Arthur and Merlin in the fully developed medieval romances.

Arthur’s “Merlin” may have even been based on a priest-companion. The Dark Age saints were a law unto themselves—wayward, volatile, intensely committed to their mission, fiercely jealous and competitive, and ever on the alert for the voice of God telling them to pack up and move on. This eccentric and unpredictable behavior is very much what we see in Merlin’s character, even to the disappearing and reappearing. One tradition is that St. Piran was Arthur’s chaplain. Another possibility is that Merlin might be loosely based on St. Dubricius: the bishop credited with crowning Arthur.

Whether Arthur had a saint or a wizard at his side is hard to tell. Perhaps one of the things that made him extraordinary in his day was that he kept a wizard even though he was at least a nominal Christian. He may have had a wizard in his entourage to get the other point of view.

MEURIG AP TEWDRIG

A king of Gwent, the son of Dyfrig (also known by his Latin name, St. Dubricius).

Meurig married Onbrawst, daughter of Gwrgant Mawr, son of Cynfyn, son of Pebaw, son of Erb, King of Erging. His son was Arthrwys.

MODRED

See Arthur.

MORCANT

See Urien.

MORINI

An Iron Age tribe in Gaul with its main center at Boulogne.

MUIRCHETACH MAC ERCA

High King of Ireland from 503. Muirchetach mac Erca held the High Kingship very conspicuously for 30 years, dominating political and military affairs in much the same way that Arthur is thought to have dominated in southern Britain.

MUSIC

“The sound of song and of the harp filled Tara’s halls.” Music had a place at every feast (See Food and Feasting), and probably in the musicians’ homes as well. Flutes were made out of bones; pan pipes were made out of bone or wood. There were also horns. The large, curved bronze trumpet found at Lough-na-Shade in County Armagh dates from about 100 BC.

The most remarkable Irish hoard, found at Downs in County Offaly, was a collection of nearly 200 bronze objects that had been deposited in a lake or bog, probably over a long period. Among the objects were 26 great, curving, bronze horns. They would have made a noise somewhere between a bull-horn and a didgeridoo, and they appear to be distinctively Irish in character.

MYNYDD MWYNFAWR

See The Gododdin, Urien.

MYRDDIN

The bard of Gwenddolau, and the model for the legendary Merlin. Myrddin took no part in the Battle of Arderydd, but he watched it. When he saw his lord killed, he lost his reason and retreated to the Wood of Celidon. By the eleventh century, this had become:

The Battle of Arderydd between the sons of Elifer and Gwenddolau the son of Ceidio; in which battle Gwenddolau fell; Merlin became mad.

According to legend, in the time before Albion (Britain) was peopled, it was known as Clas Myrddin—Merlin’s Grove (see Symbols: Treasure).

NAMNETES

An Iron Age Celtic tribe living in southern Brittany, along the lower Loire, with its main center at Nantes.

In 56 BC the Namnetes formed an alliance with the Veneti to fight against Julius Caesar’s fleet. The ensuing sea battle was won by the Roman fleet commanded by Decimus Brutus.

An island close to the mouth of the Loire, perhaps the Ile de Noirmoutier, was known as the Women’s Island. No man was allowed to land there. The women living on the island had to sail to the mainland for sex. They had a custom of replacing their temple roof on the same day every year: each woman on the island bringing her own load of materials for the work. If any woman dropped her load, she was torn to pieces by the others, who then carried her limbs around the temple, crying, “Ev-ah!” in a frenzy. If the temple roof was made of reeds, it probably would have needed replacing every year, as described. The Celts were also noted for believing that it was unlucky to drop new materials. Circumambulation, the ritual of walking round a building, was also a common Celtic practice.

NATAN-LEOD

The Celtic king of an inland part of Hampshire at the end of the sixth century. He was killed by Cerdic, the leader and later king of the West Saxons.

NATH-I

A High King of Ireland who died while crossing the Alps in 428. He was struck by lightning. It was believed to be divine retribution for his destruction of a tower built by a hermit called Fermenus.

NECTAN

A Cornish saint, the eldest son of King Brychan of Wales. Nectan was killed by robbers who stole his cows.

NINIAN OF WHITHORN

A fourth-century British saint whose father was King of Alcluith. Ninian studied for several years in Rome. On his way home he visited St. Martin of Tours, who lent him the masons who built the stone church at Whithorn, a holy place with a high reputation in the fifth and sixth centuries. Martin died in 397.

Ninian cured the blindness of King Tuduvallus, the local king, also known as Tuduael or Tutaguel of Alcluith.

When Ninian died, he was buried at Whithorn.

OGHAM

Some of the ancient Celts used a strange alphabet that was developed specifically for making short inscriptions on standing stones. One edge of the standing slab was used as the writing line and short horizontal linear marks were made from this, to right or left or both. They were carved singly or in groups of up to five. In this way 20 different characters could be created.

The resulting alphabet was sometimes known as Beth Luis Nuin, after the (original) first three letters, just as with ABC for our modern Western alphabet. The surviving layout of the alphabet means that the system should logically be called Beth Luis Fearn (one, two, and three horizontal strokes to the right, respectively). The fact that the alphabet is known as Beth Luis Nuin shows that there was a still older Gaelic system, of which only the nickname has survived.

Because the basis of the alphabet was a vertical line and the characters were lines branching to left and right from it, the system was like a tree, and it is sometimes called the Ogham Tree. This idea led on to giving the characters the names of trees. Beth means “birch,” Luis means “rowan,” and Nuin means “ash.” The system is a tree; the alphabet itself is a forest. Individual trees held high symbolic significance, so the forest alphabet was deemed to be a repository of wisdom. The word for “knowledge” also means “wood.”

Inscriptions are read from the bottom up, the way a tree grows.

The name “Ogham” comes from the name of the Irish god Ogma, the god of poetry and learning who is said to have devised the alphabet himself.

It is likely the Ogham alphabet was used for writing on perishable materials such as wood, leather, and bark, but these have not survived. The inscriptions that have survived are all on stone and they all date from AD 300 to 700.

The intensification of agriculture in Ireland meant that many Ogham stones were threatened. Some were rescued and put on display at University College Cork; the West Wing Stone Corridor there houses the largest collection of Ogham stones in Ireland. These stones are a national treasure, in that they represent the earliest examples of writing in Ireland, unless we count the remarkable Neolithic symbols carved on the Boyne passage graves. Another collection of Ogham stones is housed at Mount Melleray monastery near Cappoquin in County Waterford.

Some of the standing stones were raised as boundary markers. Some, mainly the later ones, were raised to mark graves. Many of the surviving Ogham inscriptions have been translated to read “name of person + name of father + name of tribe.”

An Ogham stone from Ballymorereagh in County Kerry carries a Latin inscription on its face, which reads FECT QUENILOC, “Made by Qeniloc.” Along the edge is Qeniloc’s name and ancestry in Ogham.

Ogham was not confined to Ireland; Irish migrants took it to Wales.

OLLAMH FOOLA

See Genealogy.

OPPIDUM

Each tribe had at least one oppidum: a big market center with everything except a defensive rampart. By the first century BC every civitas had at least one, which functioned as its capital. It was a kind of town, with residential areas and areas of workshops, though unlike modern towns, it also included pasturage for livestock. Julius Caesar noted that he found a great many livestock in Cassivellaunus’s oppidum.

Caesar’s account of the Gallic War is of particular interest because the date of his account is so precise, 58–51 BC, and this is exactly the time when the Celtic oppida were at their fullest development.

ORDOVICES

See Caratacus.

OSISMII

A Celtic tribe in Gaul, living in the extreme north-west of Brittany. They were first mentioned by the Greek traveler Pytheas in the fourth century BC. He located them on the western tip of Brittany, on a headland then called Kabaion; this was later known by the Latin name Finis Terrae, the End of the World, and is still known by the French version of this, Finistère.

The main town of the Osismii was Vorgium: modern Carhaix. The tribe submitted to Julius Caesar in 57 BC, though the following year they joined the Veneti in a revolt against Caesar, who suppressed them.

OSSIAN

Ossian was an ancient Gaelic bard invented by James Macpherson. The Poems of Ossian, also concocted by Macpherson, were published in the 1760s. They were an immediate sensation and Ossian acclaimed as a Celtic Homer.

During the next 30 years, the poems were widely read and translated into many languages. Goethe translated parts into German. Napoleon carried a copy with him on his march to Moscow. He also commissioned the artist Ingres to paint The Dream of Ossian.

The poems were extremely influential. They gave a huge impetus to the dawning Romantic movement. Poets as different from each other as Blake, Byron, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were affected by them. The composers Mendelssohn, Schubert, and Brahms wrote music inspired by Ossian. The poems also stimulated the study of folklore and ancient Celtic languages.

When Macpherson first published his book, he claimed it was a translation of an ancient manuscript in Gaelic: a copy of an original work by Ossian. Several people challenged this, including Samuel Johnson, who said the poetry was the work of Macpherson himself, but Macpherson neither owned up nor produced the ancient manuscript. The controversy went on for many years.

Macpherson’s fake Celtic world was based on some authentic Celtic material. Fingal is based on Fionn Mac Cumhaill; Temora is Tara; Cuthulinn is Cú Chulainn; and Dar-Tula is Deirdre of the Sorrows. Parallels such as these create an air of authenticity, but most of the incident is Macpherson’s own invention.

One of the poems is Fingal. Macpherson presented his “translation” in continuous prose. Here I have broken it up into lines to make it easier to read. This is how Book 1 opens:

Cuthullin sat by Tura’s wall;

by the tree of the rustling sound.

His spear leaned against the rock.

His shield lay on the grass by his side.

Amid his thoughts of mighty Cairbar,

a hero slain by the chief in war;

the scout of ocean comes, Moran the son of Fithil!

“Arise,” said the youth, “Cuthullin, arise.

I see the ships of the north!

Many, chief of men, are the foe.

Many the heroes of the sea-borne Swaran!”

“Moran!’ replied the blue-eyed chief.

“Thou ever tremblest, son of Fithil!

Thy fears have increased the foe.

It is Fingal, king of deserts,

with aid to green Erin of streams.”

“I beheld their chief,” says Moran,

“tall as a glittering rock. His spear is a blasted pine.

His shield the rising moon! He sat on the shore!

like a cloud of mist on the silent hill!’

“Many, chief of heroes!” I said,

“many are our hands of war.

Well art thou named, the mighty man;

but many mighty men are seen from

Tura’s windy walls.”

He spoke, like a wave on a rock,

“Who in this land appears like me?

Heroes stand not in my presence:

they fall to earth from my hand.

Who can meet Swaran in fight?

Who but Fingal, king of Selma of storms?

Once we wrestled on Malmor;

our heels overturned the woods.

Rocks fell from their place;

rivulets, changing their course,

fled murmuring from our side.

Three days we renewed the strife;

heroes stood at a distance and trembled.

On the fourth, Fingal says, the king of the ocean fell,

but Swaran says he stood!

Let dark Cuthullin yield to him,

that is strong as the storms of his land!

#x2019; “No!” the blue-eyed chief replied.

I never yield to mortal man!

Dark Cuthullin shall be great or dead!

Go, son of Fithil, take my spear.

Strike the sounding shield of Semo.

It hangs at Tura’s rustling gale.

The sound of peace is not its voice!

My heroes shall hear and obey.’

He went. He struck the bossy shield.

The hills, the rocks reply.

The sound spreads along the wood:

deer start by the lake of roes.

Curach leaps from the sounding rock!

and Connal of the bloody spear!

Crugal’s breast of snow beats high.

The son of Favi leaves the dark-brown hind.

“It is the shield of war,” said Ronnart;

“the spear of Cuthullin,” said Lugar!

Son of the sea, put on thy arms!

Calmar, lift thy sounding steel!

Puno! dreadful hero, arise!

Cairbar, from thy red tree of Cromla!

Bend thy knee, O Eth!

descend from the streams of Lena.

Caolt, stretch thy side as thou movest along

the whistling heath of Mora:

thy side that is white as the foam of

the troubled sea,

when the dark winds pour it on

rocky Cuthon.

Now I behold the chiefs,

in the pride of their former deeds!

Their souls are kindled at the battles of old;

at the actions of other times.

Their eyes are flames of fire.

They roll in search of the foes of the land.

Their mighty hands are on their swords.

Lightning pours from their sides of steel.

They come like streams from the mountains;

each rushes roaring from the hill.

Bright are the chiefs of battle,

in the armour of their fathers.

Gloomy and dark, their heroes follow

like the gathering of the rainy clouds

behind the red meteors of heaven.

The sounds of crashing arms ascend.

The grey dogs howl between.

Unequal bursts the song of battle.

Rocking Cromla echoes round.

On Lena’s dusky heath they stand,

like mist that shades the hills of autumn;

when broken and dark it settles high,

and lifts its head to heaven.

PABO POST PRYDAIN

Pabo Post Prydain, “The Pillar of Britain,” was a king of the northern Pennines and brother of Eliffer of York. His territory was south of the Tyne, with borders on the Vale of York and the Pennine frontier of Rheged. His son Dunawt was chief of the Northern Alliance that eventually destroyed Urien.

PATRICK

St. Patrick, patron saint of Ireland, was probably born in South Wales. His father was a Romano-British deacon named Calpurnius, and his own Celtic name was Succat.

According to legend, Patrick was abducted as a 16-year-old boy by Irish slave traders in about 405 or 410 and carried off to Ireland. He was sold in County Antrim to a chief called Milchu. He managed to escape after six years of captivity and made his way 200 miles overland to board ship. He was at sea for three days, then made his way home to his parents. They urged him never to leave again, but a deep restlessness inspired dreams that made him travel to Rome. He became a monk in Gaul, first at Tours, then at Lerins, before returning to convert his captors. According to Patrick himself, he had decided a long time before that he would have to return to Ireland.

Patrick was consecrated a bishop at the age of 45. In 432 he is believed to have been sent by Pope Celestine I to Ireland as a missionary. He landed at Wicklow and from there sailed north to convert his former master Milchu. In Down he was able to convert another chief, Dichu, to Christianity, and at Tara he preached to Loegaire, King of Tara. He also converted the tyrannous Mac Cuil, who became bishop of the Isle of Man.

After 20 years of missionary work, Patrick fixed his see at the royal center of Armagh, close to the ancient capital of Emain Macha, in 454. He died at Saul in 459 and was probably buried at Armagh.

As a slave himself, Patrick had the strongest personal motive for preaching against slavery. He preached from experience. In an open letter probably written in 445, he censured King Coroticus (Ceretic) of Clyde for stealing Irishwomen and selling them to the Picts as slaves. King Coroticus was not only a pagan, he was a committed anti-Christian. According to Patrick’s hagiographer, Patrick turned him into a fox.

In the 450s, Patrick came into conflict with the wizards of King Loegaire, son of Niall, at Tara (See Magicians). Murchu describes the trial of strength:

The fierce heathen emperor of the barbarians reigned in Tara, the Irish capital. His name was Loegaire, son of Niall. He had wise men, wizards, soothsayers, enchanters and inventors of every black art who were also in their heathen, idolatrous way to know and foresee everything that happened. Two of them were above the rest, their names being Lothroch and Lucetmael.

They predicted that a strange new and troublesome faith would come and overthrow kingdoms.

A pagan festival, Beltane, coincided with Patrick’s celebration of Easter. On the eve of Beltane when a great sacred bonfire was lit, a fire was seen to be burning in the direction of Tara: the religious focus of Ireland. This was surprising, as only the magi were authorized to kindle such a fire. They anxiously approached the blaze and found Patrick and his followers chanting psalms round their campfire.

Patrick was summoned to the Assembly at Tara, where he eloquently defended his mission. The magi challenged him to perform a miracle to prove divine support, but he refused. The magi then cast a spell and blanketed the landscape in heavy snow. Patrick made the sign of the cross and the illusion evaporated.

All kinds of magic feats were performed during this contest between Patrick’s white magic and Lothroch’s black arts. At one point Patrick caused one of the magicians to rise up into the air, fall headlong, and brain himself on a rock.

A great deal has been written about Patrick but his only certain literary remains are his spiritual autobiography, called Confession, and the letter he wrote to Coroticus. The point of his Confession was to explain why he would not return to Britain. The implication is that a British synod claimed authority over him and summoned him in order to exert that authority. Patrick implies that he could override the wishes of the British synod, and he evidently had Pope Leo’s (440–61) approval to support him.

In spite of his high profile, Patrick did not have any obvious successor and in the years following his death he was seen in Ireland as just one saint among many.

PAUL AURELIAN

A sixth-century Celtic saint, the son of a nobleman, Perphirius of Penychen. He had two brothers, Notolius and Potolius, and a sister, Sativola. He was educated at Illtud’s school at Llantwit (some say he was at Caldey Island, which was an offshoot of Illtud’s foundation) and wanted to live the life of a hermit. Illtud tried to dissuade him, but let him go when he insisted.

After spending time in a hermitage on his ancestral estates, Paul was summoned to the court of King Mark Conomorus at Villa Banhedos (later Caer Banhed, and now Castle Dore in Cornwall), where he was engaged in two sea defense projects involving building stone embankments to keep the sea back.

He later emigrated to Brittany, landing at Ushant with 12 disciples and 12 relatives. He won the respect of the local chief, Withur (Victor), whose “city” was at Roscoff. Paul then crossed to the island of Batz, where he got rid of a dragon. Withur and his people begged him to become their bishop. In about 550 he went to Paris with Samson. After foretelling the destruction of Batz by the Normans and directing that his body should be buried on the nearby mainland for the convenience of future pilgrims, he died on Batz.

PEOPLE

In the 1950s it was estimated that there were about 250,000 people in Britain in 100 BC, increasing to 400,000 by the time of the Roman invasion. More recent estimates have been more cautious, and few prehistorians now will attempt even to guess a population figure, but the numbers do seem to have increased in the late Iron Age. This population growth may have been associated with improvements in food production. Julius Caesar’s description leaves out numbers:

The population [of Britain] is exceedingly large, and the ground thickly studded with homesteads, closely resembling those of the Gauls, and the cattle very numerous… There is timber of every kind, as in Gaul, except beech and fir. Hares, fowl and geese they think it unlawful to eat, but rear them for pleasure and amusement. The climate is more temperate than in Gaul, the cold being less severe… Most of the tribes of the interior do not grow corn, but live on milk and meat and wear skins.

It was Julius Caesar who also created for posterity the enduring image of blue-painted savages: “All the Britons, indeed, dye themselves with woad, which occasion a bluish colour and thereby have a more terrible appearance.” It is still not clear whether this meant that the Britons painted their bodies with woad or tattooed themselves.

Diodorus Siculus gave a description of what the Gauls did to their hair. Men and women wore it long, sometimes plaited: “They continually wash their hair with limewash and draw it back from the forehead to the crown and to the nape of the neck, with the result that their appearance resembles that of Satyrs or of Pans, for the hair is so thickened by this treatment that it differs in no way from a horse’s mane.” This description is supported by the statue of the Dying Gaul (see Symbols: Nudity) and the coin portrait of Vercingetorix.

Normally, the Celts were warmly clad. They wore close-fitting trousers that the Romans referred to as bracae, “breeches.” Over these they wore a long tunic made either of wool or of linen, which was held at the waist by a belt. Over this, they wore a cloak that was fastened at the shoulder with a brooch. The textiles were dyed bright colors and threads of different colors were woven so as to produce striking striped or checked patterns (See Tartan). The Roman observers were startled by the colors and patterns, which they were not used to seeing.

Nor were they used to seeing beards and moustaches. The Celts grew both and grew them long. Diodorus commented fastidiously, “When they are eating, the moustache becomes entangled in the food, and when they are drinking the drink passes, as it were, through a sort of strainer” (See Dress).

PEREDUR STEEL-ARM

Peredur and his brother Gwrgi were co-rulers of the kingdom of York (north-east England) in the late sixth century. They were the sons of King Eliffer of the Great Army. Peredur Steel-Arm was King of York from about 560 until 580, when he was killed in the Battle of Caer Greu.

A prince called Arthur was associated with Peredur, doubtless named after the great overking of southern Britain who had died not long before (See Arthur).

PETROC

A Dark Age Celtic saint, the son of Clemens, a Cornish chief. He studied in Ireland for many years, returning to Cornwall with disciples Dagan, Credanus, and Medanus. They landed near Padstow (Petroc’s Stowe). Both Samson and Wethenoc had set themselves up in oratories in the area, and they were expected to move out to make way for Petroc, which they did with reluctance.

After a seven-year pilgrimage to Rome and Jerusalem, Petroc returned to Cornwall following the death of King Theodoric. Then Wethenoc returned and, to avoid a quarrel, Petroc withdrew to Little Petherick. He baptized the Cornish King Constantine. A powerful local magnate, Kynan, built an oratory in his honor near Bodmin.

After many years at Padstow and Petherick, Petroc moved to Bodmin, where he displaced the hermit Guron. He was visiting the monks at Padstow and Petherick when he was taken ill; he died at a farmhouse at Treravel.

St. Petroc spent much of his time teaching and despatching missionary monks from Padstow, which was then the main port for southern Ireland, south Wales, southern Dumnonia, and Brittany.

PICTONES

A Celtic tribe in Gaul, with its main center at Lemonum (Poitiers). Julius Caesar depended on the Pictones to build ships for him on the Loire. At the time of the Roman conquest, Duratios was King of the Pictones and frequently aided Caesar in naval battles. The Pictones supported the Romans because they were afraid of the expansionist strategies of other Gaulish tribes. Even so, they did send 8,000 men to support Vercingetorix during the Gaulish rebellion of 52 BC.

PICTS

A general Latin name given to the people who lived in the northern half of Scotland, “Pictland,” in the third century AD. “The Painted People” was a nickname given by the Romans to northern Brits who wore woad or sported tattoos. “Pict” does not therefore really define a tribal or ethnic group in the Roman period, and Pictland, Alba, and Caledonia seem to have been thought of as being much the same area—Scotland.

In the past it has been suggested that the Picts were in some way the pre-Celtic inhabitants of Scotland, but that presupposes a belief that the Celts arrived in these islands during the Iron Age. Now that we see that they were well-established there by that stage, in fact they had been settled in Britain for thousands of years, the concept of “pre-Celts” has no meaning.

One theory holds that the Picts came originally, in the first millennium BC, from Ireland, having been displaced by incoming Celts—but there seems to be no particular reason for believing this. Any cultural or “ethnic” differences between the Picts and the people living to the south could be explained by their geographical isolation. They did evolve some extraordinary pictorial symbols, which appear to relate to their language. In other words the Picts’ carved memorial stones carry pictograms (no pun intended).

The Irish called the Picts Cruithin, which is an early Irish transliteration of Britanni, so the Irish were not really identifying them as a distinct people either.

PLAID

A plaid is a tartan blanket thrown over one shoulder to make a kind of cloak. Plaid is the Gaelic word for “blanket.”

POSIDONIUS

A Greek philosopher and polymath (135–51 BC) who studied at Athens. In 86 BC he settled in Rome, where he became a friend of Cicero and other leading figures. He wrote about history and geography and is a source of information about the Celts in the late Iron Age.

PRASUTAGUS

King of the Iceni tribe in the first century AD. He was Boudicca’s husband. On his death he left half of his kingdom to Rome and assumed Rome would allow his family to inherit the other half. He underestimated the greed of the Roman administrator, who took everything; this led his successor and widow to lead a revolt against Roman rule in AD 60–61.

Prasutagus was the Latinized form of his Celtic name, Prastotagus. One of his coins was inscribed in a mixture of British and Latin, SVB ESV PRASTO ESICO FECIT, which means “Esico made [this] under Lord Prasto[tagus].” The coin bears Prastotagus’s portrait.

PRINCESS OF VIX

Vix is a village in Burgundy at the site of an important ancient fortified settlement with several burial mounds.

One of the mounds contained the body of a 30-year-old aristocratic woman who died in about 550 BC. Her body was buried with great ceremony on a bier that was made out of the body of a wagon. The wheels were taken off and laid against the wall of her burial chamber. Her grave goods included a range of treasures, including Greek cups and other drinking vessels, but most remarkable was the huge bronze vessel, a krater for mixing wine. This stands as tall as the princess herself and is one of the most beautiful treasures of archaic Greek art that have survived to the present day. It is in the museum at Châtillon-sur-Seine in Burgundy.

The krater was made in Greece or a Greek colony in about 500 BC, and transported in kit form, in labeled pieces, across the Mediterranean and up the Rhône River into central France. The pieces were assembled for the royal client at Vix. This astonishingly exotic and expensive vase was decorated around its neck with a frieze of Greek warriors in full armor with chariots. The Greek krater does not tell us that the Greeks colonized central France, but that the Iron Age kings of Gaul were rich and powerful enough to purchase luxury goods from far afield.

It was importing artwork of this distinction that inspired the Celtic craftsmen to aspire to ever-higher artistic standards. It fueled cultural growth. The burial of the Greek krater also ensured that at least one example of this type of object survived for people of later centuries to enjoy; nothing quite like it has survived in Greece itself. By burying grave goods, the Celts became, unconsciously perhaps, custodians and curators of a European heritage.

REDONES

An Iron Age Celtic tribe in eastern Brittany, with its main center at Rennes. The Redones sent a contingent to fight against Julius Caesar during the siege of Alesia.

The Roman conquest of Gaul was a bloodbath. A million Gauls, 20 percent of the population, were killed; another million were enslaved. Three hundred tribes were subjugated and 800 towns were destroyed. All the native Gauls living in Avaricum (modern Bourges) were slaughtered by the Romans—40,000 people.

RHUN, SON OF MAELGWN

The son of Maelgwn and his successor as King of Gwynedd.

Maelgwn’s son-in-law Elidyr tried to take Gwynedd from Rhun, but was killed on the beach at Caernarvon. Rhydderch Hael sailed south to avenge the killing of Elidyr, but his raid on Gwynedd was unsuccessful and he had to withdraw. Rhun responded by gathering an army and marching it north, through South Rheged, probably by way of York. It was a march of legendary distance and duration. Rhun’s army was away from home for a very long time and is said to have met no resistance. Elidyr’s son and successor, the boy king Llywarch Hen, was in no position to resist and had not the temperament either; it was probably wiser anyway to allow Rhun’s great army pass through unopposed. Llywarch Hen was left alone, and eventually died, an elderly Celtic exile writing poetry in Powys, long after the English had overrun his kingdom.

Rhun marched on, deep into the Gododdin (south-east Scotland), all the way to the Forth, still unopposed. After this impressive parade of military strength, he marched his great army home to Gwynedd. It was a triumph. Yet it also illustrated, just as Arthur’s career had 30 years earlier, how the British could organize brilliant and spectacular military coups de théâtre and yet fail to hold together the polity of a large kingdom. To judge from Gildas, the British disliked kings. They felt no overriding need to unite behind a powerful monarch or submit to central control. They simply did not see, even as late as 560, how dangerous the growing Anglo-Saxon colonies in the east and south-east were. The soldier’s loyalty was always to his lord, but this was a local war-band loyalty. Petty rivalries among the war-band leaders, the kings, and sub-kings, would be likely to erupt quickly, easily, and repeatedly into civil war.

The northern British poems express the spirit of the times well. The highest ethic involved the devoted loyalty of faithful warriors to their lord and his personal destiny. The idea of sacrificing or compromising that loyalty by serving an overlord ran against this sentiment. Long-term loyalty to an overking or commander-in-chief would have been alien to the rank-and-file warrior. The effect was that although British resistance to the advance of the Saxons in the sixth and seventh centuries may have been intermittently highly successful, in the end it was doomed, in the same way that resistance to the Roman invasion had been in the first century, as contemporary Roman commentators had recognized (see Myths: The History of Taliesin).

RHUN, SON OF URIEN

Rhun, son of Urien, became a cleric, settling in Gwynedd. He may have been the author of The Life of Germanus in about 630. Varying accounts of the baptism of King Edwin of Northumbria exist. One is that Rhun baptized Edwin while the latter was in exile, a boy-refugee in Gwynedd, some 15 years before Paulinus baptized the people of Northumbria. Another account (recorded by Nennius) is that Rhun baptized Edwin in 626, in Northumbria, when he was king. Both may be true, as it may have been deemed necessary to stage a repeat baptism ceremony for the king, in public, for the benefit of his subjects.

Bede’s account is different again, giving Paulinus the credit, but Bede had a political motive. Writing when he did, he may have wanted to show the first Christian Anglian king as sponsored by the Roman Church, not by the Celtic Church. A power struggle between the two had been going on since Augustine’s arrival at the end of the sixth century, and Bede would have had a strong motive for reducing the role of the British priesthood and exaggerating that of the Roman. It seems likely, then, that it was Rhun who actually wrote the account of the baptism ceremony, first hand, in 627.

RHYDDERCH HAEL

See Elidyr, Urien.

RIDERCH

See Dyfnwal, Kentigern.

ROADS

One of the things the Romans did for us was to build roads. That at least is what we have been led to believe. But what was there in the way of a road system before the Romans arrived in the Celtic west—in Gaul, in Hispania, in Britain?

Ancient trackways followed the crests of prominent hill ridges, especially where these persisted for long distances. The chalk and limestone escarpments of lowland England and northern France lent themselves to this form of communication. One advantage was that they were raised and on permeable rock, so they were drier and firmer than tracks on lower ground. Another advantage was that navigation was easier; all you had to do was to follow the crest of the ridge. Being raised up also gave better views across the landscape, so you had better opportunities to identify where you were.

There were the South Downs Way and the Pilgrims Way in Sussex and Kent, the Ridgeway in Wiltshire, the Jurassic Way in Northamptonshire and the Icknield Way in Buckinghamshire, Hertfordshire, Suffolk, and Norfolk.

In wetlands, wooden walkways were constructed. In the Somerset Levels, around 40 wooden tracks dating from 3000 BC onward were built so that people and livestock could cross from Wedmore to the islands of Byrtle, Westhay, and Meare, and from there to the Polden Hills. These tracks were up to 2 miles (3km) long.

Some roads that we think of as Roman roads were in fact Roman surfaces added on top of pre-existing Iron Age roads. These were roads that had been built by the indigenous people. A rescue dig next to a quarry 2 miles (3km) south of Shrewsbury gave an opportunity to test a long stretch of known Roman road. The road surface was first built in 200 BC after the land was cleared by burning. The route was used for driving cattle, and their hooves churned it into mud (the Irish Gaelic word for road is bothar, which means “cow-path.”)

To improve the road, a layer of elder brushwood 15 feet (4.5m) wide was laid down, with earth on top, followed by a layer of gravel and sand, then river cobbles, which were compacted into this foundation. The result made an all-weather roadway about 16.5 feet (5m) wide. It was subsequently remade a little wider, and then remade again. The road’s surface was grooved by parallel ruts, showing that carts with a 6.5-foot (2m) wide wheelbase were being used. And all this happened before the Roman occupation, when a Roman road surface was added on top of the Iron Age road layers.

So, there were decent, dry, all-weather engineered roads in Britain—and Gaul—before the Romans arrived. Julius Caesar does not describe these roads, but he does say that the Gallic charioteers preferred to fight off-road, which means that there must have been roads.

Even in Italy, there were roads before the Romans. The Via Gabina was mentioned as early as 500 BC and the Via Latina in 490 BC, when the Etruscan king had only just been overthrown and the Roman republic was scarcely underway, yet it seems the “Roman” road system already existed.

RUADAN

The son of Birra of the Eoganachta (in Munster, Ireland). Ruadan was a huge man, said to be 12 feet (3.6m) tall. He revived the son of a British king who was drowned when one of Brendan’s ships sank in the Shannon estuary.

His monks lived an easy life, thanks to the manufacture of a “lime juice” that was evidently a distilled liqor. The easy living and the lime juice attracted many monks from other houses. Under pressure from indignant abbots, Finnian told Ruadan to stop production and practice conventional subsistence farming.

Ruadan is said to have written several books, including Against King Diarmait, The Miraculous Tree, and The Wonderful Springs of Ireland. He died at Lothra; his head was preserved in a silver reliquary until the sixteenth century. A bell that was found in a well at Lorrha was venerated as the bell he rang at Tara against King Diarmait.

Unfortunately the recipe for lime juice has not survived.

SAMSON

St. Samson was a sixth-century contemporary of Arthur. His father was a Demetian landowner and also an altrix, a companion of the king, who was at that time probably Agricola (See Aircol).

The idea that Samson should attend Illtud’s monastic school at Llantwit Major in Glamorgan, next to a ruined Roman villa, came from “a learned master in the far north,” probably Maucennus, Abbot of Whithorn, who is known to have visited Demetia at the right time. Samson was duly sent to St. Illtud’s. Illtud was responsible for educating many boys from aristocratic families, from the age of five until they were 16 or 17. He had great influence, in that he turned out men of the caliber and importance of St. Samson, Paul Aurelian, Gildas, Leonorus, St. David, and Maelgwn, King of Gwynedd.

By the age of 15 Samson was already very learned and at an unusually young age was ordained priest and deacon by Bishop Dubricius. This aroused the jealousy of Illtud’s nephews, who feared that he might succeed as the school’s head when Illtud retired and so deprive them of their inheritance. Perhaps because of this ill-feeling, Samson gained a transfer to another of Illtud’s monasteries, newly set up by Piro on Caldey Island, where his great scholarship and austerity astonished the Caldey monks.

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