Celt, Roman, or Saxon?

[caldrail]

Who the first inhabitants of Britain were, whether natives or immigrants,is open to question; one must remember we are dealing with barbarians. But their physical characteristics vary, and the variation is suggestive. The reddish hair and large limbs of the Caledonians proclaim a Germanic origin; the swarthy faces of the Silures, the tendency of their hair to curl, and the fact that Spain lies opposite, all lead one to believe that the Spaniards crossed in ancient times and occupied that part of the country. The people nearest to the Gauls resemble them...

 

...History tells us that the Gauls too had their hour of military glory; but since that a life of ease has made them unwarlike; their valour perished with their freedom.The same has happened to those Britons who were conquered early; the rest are still what the Gauls once were.... Agricola - Tacitus

 

The British, as the 1st Century Romans saw them. Of course, Tacitus was relating this description largely second-hand, and recent discoveries at Vindolanda uncovered the term Brittunculi ("Little Britons") which is perhaps amusing at first until one realises the scorn that lies behind it. These were the views of important men in the farthest province of the Empire, who saw their populace there not as Roman, but as barbarians under Roman rule. Strabo, a greek geographer of the 1st Century, wrote...

 

The whole race, which is now called Celtic or Galatic, is madly fond of war, high spirited, and quick to battle, but otherwise straightforward and not of evil character. And so when they are stirred up the they assemble in their bands for battle, quite openly and without forethought; so that they are easily handled by those who desire to outwit them. For at any time or place, and on whatever pretext you stir them up, you will have them ready to face danger, even if they have nothing on their side but their own strength and courage...

 

....To the frankness and high-spiritedness of their temperament must be added the traits of childish boastfulness and love of decoration..."

 

We therefore know about the Celts from our classical sources. The Celts however left no description of themselves.

 

A great is made of the concept of 'Romanisation', almost as if they assimilated populations under their control and somehow brainwashed them into becoming Roman. This is not true. The Romans weren't interested in the lives of their subject peoples provided they obeyed laws and paid taxes. The Britons did not necessarily see themselves as 'Roman' at any time, rather they thought of themselves as Britons under Roman rule.

 

The senior members of Roman communities were initially the same men who had ruled the tribal hill-forts, and later, their children or those who had risen to emulate them. That in itself does not make them Roman - it means they accepted Roman culture and lived in a manner that pleased their masters on the continent. It was conformity within the 'establishment'. No doubt some of these men adopted a haughty attitude toward their former lives or countrymen, others would have remained 'Britons in Togas'.

 

Those we would class as rural peasants lived a life not far removed from the pre-Roman times. There was certainly enough of them. Estinates put rural poor as something like eighty percent of a total of two million inhabitants of Roman Britain at its densest population. The presence of villas made a new distribution of land use and commercial activity, yet it must be said that Roman civilisation was primarily urban and the villa system connected to it. Roman villas were distributed unevenly with the majority, perhaps not suprisingly, in the southeast. There were wide tracts of land - at least to our current knowledge - that were sparsely inhabited by the villa system.

 

Those British settlements that had survived their initial encounters with Roman soldiers pretty much remained where they were, and although their produce had become part of the Roman economy, it was so on a peripheral nature and the lure of Roman towns must have been powerful. Indeed, Tacitus notes with some element of scorn that the British had been seduced by "porticoes, baths, and sumptuous banquests". Can we assume that Britons who indulged themselves were completely Roman, or that they had merely indulged themselves because of the luxurious nature of these things the Romans made available?

 

Roman roads are famous and their paths can be seen in the networks of roads across Britain. These were created anew for their own purposes, to facilitate the military occupation and the administration of the province, and in doing so the Romans ignored for the most part the existing trackways that connected tribal sites. These trackways were nonetheless still in place, and whilst the ppublic weren't banned from using Roman roads, that wasn't their purpose and certainly the rural Celts had little use for them unless they needed to travel to Roman towns. Once the post-Roman collapse made itself felt, the carefully prepared Roman road did not entirely fall into disuse, since remnant populations were often found in those towns described by Germanic settlers as having been 'made by giants'. Rather than supplant the trackways of old, in the aftermath of Roman withdrawal, the roads became linked and part of the Celts own network, to become for at least a short while an extension of those cultural ties that existed since the Iron Age and in many cases much earlier.

 

There's another interesting aspect to the retention of Celtic identity. In Roman times people were intensely superstitious. The Romans themselves did not push aside local gods for fear of divine retribution, but instead connected them with their own mythos as if the local god was an avatar of established Roman ones. Most importantly of all, the religious life of local people was retained albeit reorganised in a Roman fashion. Temples often had kiosks to sell religious paraphenalia essential to proper worship in the same way as continental practice though precious little evidence exists for this.

 

The local gentry, themselves Celts who had become part of the Roman establishment, would support this religion by the sponsorship of temples built to honour the local god. These temples were built for local people. The value of water is essential to understanding the religious significance of local gods. Water was a barrier between the world of the living and that of the dead. A river was an obstacle, a place where approval of the god that ruled that river was essential to avoid a watery fate. This is why springs are often associated with Romano-British religious life, and interestingly enough, local gods that pre-dated Roman culture had similar leanings as we see in the sacrifice of swords into waterways. This was something the Romans could relate to.

 

For all its earthy celebration and solitary communion with their gods, the Roman religious system nonetheless lost out in the long run to christian beliefs in the late empire. Whereas the pagan religions were romanised versions of older beliefs, Christianity was a matter of social worship and one demanding regular attendances rather than ad hoc visits and annual festivals. Given that Christianity was inherently more political, and a major landowner in its own right, their success in becoming the state religion isn't suprising. They had done so in the face of opposition from pagan gods, Mithraism, Arianism, and other sects.

 

It was in effect a triumph of oriental religion in colonising Roman religious life. Yet the connection with the supporting state was also important, and with the withdrawal of Roman legions, and governmental authority with it, the Christian church in Britain began to suffer setbacks. Firstly, the immigrant european tribes brought their own gods with them. Secondly, since Roman culture was essentially urban, the support of communities was focused on larger settlements. After the initial prosperity of taxation free-Brtain, the economic disaster that followed reduced the importance of Christian churches and indeed, with disease becoming rife in Romano-Celtic towns and with declining infrastructure to support the previously large populations, the Christian god must have seemed to have 'failed' the Romano-Celts.

 

Gildas, a sixth century monk, wrote a work condemning the rise of tyrants in the post-Roman Britain, and describes the 'Proud Tyrant' (thought to be Vortigern) as 'attempting to return to the old pagan ways'. That he would attempt to do so implies he knew of such things. It's easy to read too much into that. Christianity wasn't overly popular in dark age Britain. Gildas mentions the spread of Arianism and other heresies, and the arrival of Augustine on British shores marked the church's response to falling congregations.

 

In an important twist, there were Saxon tribes who interpreted Augustines teachings in the light of their religious beliefs, much as the Celts had done with Roman religion, and this presented a Germanic heresy as they frequently worshipped on different days to the mainstream Christians in Britain of the 5th and 6th centuries. The Saxons were therefore 'a race hateful to God' as one contemporary monk described them.

 

A connection with cultural roots for Celts even during the Pax Romana weathered the changes wrought in commerce, agriculture, industry, religion, and lifestyles. However there was an efficiency and comfort that the Romans brought to Britain and one readily accepted in a land that Tacitus described as having 'A wretched climate'.

 

The Roman method of governing a province was not to create and enforce a new government, but to turn the existing social hierarchy to their needs. That is the extent of romanisation. People remained what they were unless they chose to adopt Roman ways and further their careers, and the predatory commercial sphere no doubt proved an important influence.

 

Underneath this trend toward Roman behaviour and fashion, the delimitation of land was no different to the pre-Roman era. The old demarcations were in use as boundaries throughout, and in rural populations, some elements of the old tribal divisions would still be found. In fact, it has been argued that the Romans deliberately reinforced the old tribal divisions as a means of providing stable government, especially in turbulent northern England which never accepted Roman culture as readily as the southeast. In fact, the kings of Strathclyde and Manau Gododdin, both in northern Britain, retained latin titles into the 5th Century. They were in effect using Roman titles as a manifestation of Roman authority, something the Celts must have keenly felt in the wake of Roman occupation, and whilst this seems an abandonment of their own cultural roots, it must be pointed out that these noblemen were carrying on a tradition established in Roman times yet doing business in Celtic terms.

 

Although one can argue the extent of romanisation in Britain, it was essentially a condition that existed where the Celts lived and dealt with Romans on a daily business. Since the Romans were the masters and landowners, the Celts took enough of Latin culture that enabled them to do whatever business they required, but still at heart a native Celtic society.

 

Whereas the Romans had impinged themselves upon the existing Celtic social order and adapted it to enable a relatively smooth transition to Roman rule, the immigrant warriors of the Dark Ages weren't interested. They had arrived to find new land to farm and weren't particularly interested in who owned it when they got there. In one sense, the defence of England by the Romano-Celts, and the inspiration behind Arthurian mythos, was a desperate attempt to keep what little Roman life was left to them. In another sense, it was the re-emergence of Celtic values including that of martial prowess, and although the natives ultimately found themselves marginalised and pushed into remote areas of the British Isles, they fought for their cause valiantly.

 

Iron Age hillforts, many abandoned during the Roman period or used at a much lower level than the protected centers of settlement they had once been, began to be re-used as the urban nature of Romano-British society atrophied from the 4th Cenury. Especially in times of uncertainty, the defensive nature of these places was a bonus and a return to settlements used by their Celtic forebears for centuries made a lot of sense to people seeing Roman towns lying derelict and barely inhabited. In fact, the arrival of Saxon tribes particularly in the campaign to conquer the area now known as Wessex proved their value - the Saxons would not assault these forts lacking the wherewithall to conduct such warfare.

 

Where these places failed is that although the Saxons chose not to attack, they effectively blockaded them. It's no coincidence that battles between Celts and Saxons occured in the nearby area rather than at the location itself. In at least one case, that of Barbury in Wiltshire, the fort was used by its Saxon victors as a cemetary, a somewhat ironic fate. In this severing of the Celtic identity with the land, the Saxons achieved a significant victory beyond their understanding, one that reverberates down to this day in modern regional relations which must more than anything else, point to the strength of Celtic identity even after nearly two thousand years.

 

Agricola - Tacitus

An Imperial Possession, Britain in the Roman Empire - David Mattingly

Decline and Fall of Roman Britain - Neil Faulkner

Roman Britain - Peter Salway

Roman Britain and Early England - Peter Hunter Blair