Celtic Britain

Front matter

arfg Fitam

©0

G

Preface To The First Edition

These are the days of little books, and when the author was asked to add one to their number, he accepted the invitation with the jaunty simplicity of an inexperienced hand, thinking that it could not give him much trouble to expand or otherwise modify the account given of early Britain in larger works ; but closer acquaintance with them soon convinced him of the folly of such a plan— he had to study the subject for himself or leave it alone. In trying to do the former he probably read enough to have enabled him to write a larger work than this ; but he would be ashamed to confess how long it has occupied him.

As a student of language, he is well aware that no severer judgment could be passed on his essay in writing history than that it should be found to be as bad as the etymologies made by historians are wont to be ; but so essential is the study of Celtic names to the elucidation of the early history of Britain that the risk is thought worth incurring. The difficulty of writing anything intelligible on the subject arises not only from the scarcity of the data handed down by ancient authors, but also in a great measure from the absence of the information necessary to enable one rightly to connect those data with one another. Take, for instance, the allusion by Ammianus Marcellinus to the Verturiones as one of the nations of the north of Britain : one cannot be said to be much the wiser for it, until one happens to recognize th6 regular Goidelic form of their name re-emerging as that of the Men of Fortrenn, who play an important part in the history of Alban. Identifications of this kind will, it is hoped, do something to bring the history of early Britain out of the quicksands into which historians' etymologizing has helped to steer it, and to make up for the shortcomings of the work. These will probably be found to be of two kinds : the errors into which one unaccustomed to write on historical subjects can hardly avoid falling ; and the crudities of certain theories which further research may show to be untenable. For it h

IV CELTIC BRITAIN.

unavoidable that much of the reasoning should be of a highly hypothetical nature, of which the reader will in due time be reminded by the changes rung on such harddriven words as appears and seems, as probably, po iibly % and perhaps.

Two or three words may here be appended as to some of the authorities cited, with which the general reader may not be very familiar. For the writings of Gildas the references are to those published by Haddan and Stubbs, in the first volume of their work, entitled ''Councils and Ecclesiastical Documents relating to Great Britain and Ireland'': those learned authors regarded Gildas as having written no later than 547 or 550. Great liberty has been taken with Nennius in these pages, as a number of tracts of various dates and origins are more or less loosely associated with him ; but the author is happy to be now able to refer to an account of the whole group in a recently published work by M. Arthur de la Borderie (Paris and London, 1883), a small volume which may be recommended as a model of clearness and precision calculated to dispel much of the haze floating round the name of Nennius. What has been here sometimes called the Welsh Chronicle is also known by the fancy name of Annates Cambria, under which it was published in i860 for the Master of the Rolls, from three manuscripts : the oldest of them appears to end with the year 954, while one of the other two brings the entries down to 1288. They are written in Latin, and the author takes the liberty of stating that he has heard no less an authority than Mr. Freeman speak of them in comparatively strong terms of praise. To avoid unnecessary misunderstanding from another source it is right to add that one and the same Irish manuscript has carelessly been cited in this volume, sometimes by its native name of Lebar na h-Uidre, and sometimes by the translated one of the Book of the Dun. It was published in lithographed facsimile by the Royal Irish Academy (Dublin, 1870) ; and it derives its name from the story, that the original, of which the existing manuscript is a fragmentary copy, was written by St. Ciaran on the skin of a favourite dun cow, which, when he escaped from his father's house to

PREFACE. V

enter a monastery/spontaneously followed him, and faithfully served him for many years. The copy dates about the end of the eleventh century, since it is on sad record that the transcriber was murdered by a party of robbers in the stone church of Clonmacnois in the year 1106. Lastly, mention [must here be made of a work of capital importance, which came into the market just as these sheets had passed through the press, to wit, Vigfusson and Powell's Corpus Poeticum Bo'eale (Oxford, 1883) : the Norse text and the rendering of the same into English, together with the mine of rare learning in ihe numerous notes and excursuses appended, will be found to be interesting first and foremost, it is true, to the student of literature and of civilization generally ; but they are scarcely less so to writers on history, not only when they undertake to describe the doings of the Wickings in Alban and the islands adjacent, but also when they would grapple with the much harder task of trying to give a full and satisfactory answer to the difficult question, what manner of men the Norsemen found there.

Moreover, he has accepted and employed the theory advanced by ethnologists, that the early inhabitants of this country were of Iberian origin ; and he hopes to take an early opportunity of writing on the glottological aspect of that question ; also of explaining more in detail why he has changed his opinion as to the classification of the Celtic nations. Then to come to a matter of spelling, it has been attempted throughout to present the early Celtic names in their native form rather than in a Latinised one ; but with regard to the later names he would be greatly surprised to find that he had succeeded in being consistent, as it is by no means easy to choose from the variety of spellings used at different times, or even in different manuscripts of the same age.

Lastly, the author has great pleasure in thanking many kind and learned friends for valuable suggestions and corrections. He would mention them by name but that he is loth to risk the danger of their being in a manner held sponsors for opinions not theirs.

J. RHYS.

Oxford, January, 1884.

Preface To The Third Edition

It is with a feeling of mingled pleasure and sadness that I pen this word of preface, pleasure to find that a third edition is urgently called for, and sadness to think how many good and helpful friends I have lost since this little book was first published twenty-two years ago. But the unobserved lapse of time has brought a measure of compensation in the appearance of a number of books which have proved very useful to me, such as Professor Zimmer's u Nennius Vindicate, " and the varied help which it elicited from other scholars to a more exact appreciation of the writings commonly associated with the name of Nennius. The work done in that direction may be regarded as appropriately crowned by the publication of Mommsen's exhaustive edition of Gildas and Nennius in the " Monumenta Germanise Historical It would take up too much room to enumerate here the other important works which have appeared in the interval, but references to them will be found in their proper places in the following chapters.

The reader who has the curiosity to compare the present edition with the previous ones will find that it has been revised throughout. It is hoped that he will feel that the numerous changes made are for the better; that some crude theories have been made less crude, and that some others have rightly been, so to say, turned inside out. At the same time it has been the endeavour of everybody concerned to alter the form of the whole as little as possible.

J. RHYS.

Jesus College, Oxford, Octobe?', 1904.

Chapter I. Britain In The Time Of Julius Caesar

Preliminary Remarks P&ge *

Names of the Celts and their classification 2

Pytheas and his visits to Britain 5

Posidonius visiting it 7

Caesar's first expedition to Britain 9

His second expedition 13

Britain after Caesar's departure. Early coins, copper

and bronze, iron ... 18

Inscribed coins and the tribes of southern Britain, Com-

mios and his Sons 21

Coins of Tasciovant, Cunobelinos, and others. Policy of

the Catuvellauni 26

The Eceni : the situation of some of the tribes : Com-

mios and the Catuvellauni 28

Chapter II

BRITAIN DOWN TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. Allusions to Britain in the works of ancient authors ... 32 Coins of the Dobunni and other Western Tribes ... 35

The policy of the Eceni 36

The Cornavii, the Coritani, the Brigantes, the Parisi and their coins 38

Vlil CELTIC BRITAIN.

The tribes that used coins, and those that did not. Trade routes, the exportation of tin Page 41

No evidence of direct trade between Cornwall and the Continent. The Carthaginians, the Veneti and their marine 47

The population of Britain, the growing of corn, tattooing, polyandry 52

Political state of the Brythons mostly like that of the Gauls 57

Kings of the old type disappearing among the Brythons 61

Kings by divine right among the GDidels compared with those of Greece in the Heroic Age 63

Aryan polytheism of the Celts in Britain. Druidism

derived from the Aborigines 67

The Druidic tonsure 74

Chapter III

THE ROMANS IN BRITAIN, AND HOW THEY LEFT IT The conquest of the island by Aulus Plautius ... ... 76

Ostorius operating against the Eceni, Deceangli and

Brigantes 80

Oitorius's engagement with the Silures, and the defeat

of Caratacos 81

Suetonius Paulinus reaching Mona, and Tacitus's account of the Druids 83

The revolt of the Eceni 84

Britain under Vespasian's great generals, Petilius

Cerealis, Julius Frontinus, and Julius Agricola ... 85

Britain down to the death of Severus in 211 90

Britain independent under Carausius and Allectus. Rejoined to the empire by Constantius Chlorus in 296, cleared of invaders by Theodosius in 369 93

CONTENTS. ix

Maximus taking the troops from Britain in 387. Constantine doing the same in 407. The Roman officials driven out in 410 Page 95

Britain, Upper and Lower. Administration of the province by the Romans , 97

Christianity and Latin in Britain : military character of the province 101

The province, after the Romans left, governed by native successors of the Dux Britanniarum and Comes Litoris Saxonici ... 102

Lower Britain under Aurelius Ambrosius... 104

The rise of English States in Lower Britain 105

Summary of the dealings of the West Saxons with the Celtic inhabitants down to the time of ^Ethelstan ... 107

What became of the Celts of Lower Britain iig

Chapter IV. The Kymry

The peoples of Upper Britain, the rise of English states

in the same 112

The jurisdiction of the Dux Britanniarum marking the

limits of the State of the Kymry 116

The Latin Dux becoming the Welsh Gwledig : Cunedda

the first Gwledig... - 118

The rule of Cunedda and his Sons 120

The princes of Upper Britain in the time of Gildas ... 122

The legend how Maelgwn acquired his power 124

Mielgwn's successors, and the battle of Chester 126

Wars of the Kymry with Edwin and his successors ... 120 The Gwledig, sometimes called dragon, and the English

term Bretwalda related 135

X CELTIC BRITAIN.

The contests with the Angles as pictured in Welsh literature. The name Kymro P&gfi 139

The land of the Kymry severed into Wales and Cumbria :

English encroachments on the former 141

Summary of the history of Wales down to 1090 142

Cambria and Cumbria, forms of one name 144

Summary of the history of Cumbria 146

Chapter V. The Picts And The Scots

The Picts of Galloway 150

The Picts of Lothian 151

Remarks on Manaw and Galloway... ... ... ... 154

The Dalriad Scots in Britain 156

The Picts beyond the Forth 160

The Pictish kingdom not Celtic in its origin. The relative

position of the chief peoples of the North 162

The growth of the power of the Mseatae and other Picts.. 166 The Picts from the time of Brude mac Maelchon to the

ecclesiastical revolution under Nechtan 171

Nechtan and his competitors for power : the Brython

Ungust overcoming the rest 175

The Brythons of Fortrenn mostly in power till their

defeat by the Danes in 839 179

Kenneth mac Alpin establishing the power of the Goidels 182 Kenneth's successors down to the year 900 : the kingdom

beginning to be called Alban ... 184

Summary of the history of Alban till the death of

Kenneth's last male descendant in 1034 187

CONTENTS xi

Duncan and Macbeth... .» Page 190

Macbeth not so much a usurper as leader of the Picts in

their effort to reassert their power 192

The spread of the Goidelic Language in Alban under the

Kennem dynasty 197

The rise of Feudalism in the North 200

The capacity of the Goidel and of the Pict for political

organisation 201

Chapter VI. The Ethnology Of Early Britain

The name Albion 204

The spelling and history of the names, Britain, Britannia,

Original meaning of Britanni, Brittones, &c 211

Classification of the Celtic nations based on Celtic phonology 215

The parts of Britain which were Brythonic and Goidelic

respectively 218

The same enumeration continued, with indications of

traces of the earlier inhabitants 221

The situation 01 the various tribes of the North 224

Ptolemy's account of Britain : the position of the Caledonian Forest 226

Celtic proper names with p in Early Britain either Brythonic or non-Celtic 228

Other distinctions of a similar nature 231

The treatment of cs or x supplying another probable test 233 The topography of Britain affected by the legends about

Arthur and Finn respectively 236

Xll CELTIC BRITAIN.

Chapter VII

THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN CONTINUED. Probable history of the term Picti, and some of its

equivalents Page 24c

The name Scotti 243

The Goidels of Britain partly invaders from Ireland : remarks on the ancient sepulchral monuments of Wales 24; The distribution of early Goidelic inscriptions in Wales 255

The Brythons probably buried in barrows 261

Some Goidelic names non-Aryan in point of origin or

of formula 263

The language of the non-Celtic Aborigines spoken in

historical times in Britain 271

Race characteristics more persistent than language ... 277

Appendix

Additional notes on some of the names in the text .. 27g

INDEX 326

MAPS, &c.

A coloured map of Britain, showing the relative positions of its chief peoples during the Rjman occupation.

Ptolemy's " British Isles,"

Strabo's " Western Europe."

Wales in deaneries of the time of Henry VIII.

A plate with engravings of five coins, preceded by a brief letterpress description of each, pp, xiii., xv

CELTIC BRITAIN. x jjj

THE COINS.

(See p, xiv.)

No. i represents a gold stater of Philip II. of Macedon, with the wreathed bust of Apollo on the obverse, and a charioteer in a biga on the reverse : underneath is the name of Philip, -HAinnOT.

No. 2 is an early British imitation of the stater : the coin is in Sir John Evans's collection, but the place of finding is unknown. Among other things it will be noticed that it nas been attempted to make the charioteer into a winged figure of Victory, and that the two horses have been converted into one horse with eight legs.

No. 3 is also in Sir J. Evans's collection, and was found at Leighton Buzzard in 1849. Besides that the faces look the other way, it will be noticed that the place occupied by Philip's name on the original is in this instance devoted to a kind of ornamentation, which at a distance has somewhat the appearance of letters.

No. 4 is a coin of Addedomaros, a part of whose name is to be read A09||D on the reverse. On the obverse the face has given way to the coiffure which has developed into a sort of cross.

No. 5 is a coin of the Parisi, and it is to be seen at the York Museum. The obverse is taken up by the coiffure, so that it shows no part of the face. The reverse represents a very peculiar horse, accompanied by the legend VEP CORF.

(Seep, xiii.)

Chapter I. Britain In The Time Of Julius Caesar

The Celts form, in point of speech, a branch oi the great group of nations which has been variously called Aryan, Indo-European, Indo- Germanic, Indo-Celtic, and Japhetic, while the other branches are represented by the Italians, the Greeks, the Teutons, the Litu-Slaves, the Armenians, the Persians, and the chief peoples of Hindustan. The respective places of these nations in the geography of the Old World give, roughly speaking, a very fair idea of their relative nearness to one another as to language. Thus the gulf is widest between the Celtic languages and Sanskrit or Zend, and narrowest between Celtic and Latin, while it is comparatively narrow between the Celtic and Teutonic languages, among which is included English, the speech destined in time to supersede the still living idioms of the insular Celt. Now the Celts of antiquity who appeared first and oftenest in history were those of Gallia, which, having been modified by the French into Gaule, we term Gaul. It included the France and Switzerland of the present day, and much territory besides. This people had various names.

One of them was Gallic which in their language meant warriors or brave men, and seems to have been always used by the Romans to designate them ; but some of the Gauls in Caesar's time preferred the name which he wrote Celt<z. This may have been synonymous with the other, and so it would appear to have meant warriors, its origin, if Aryan, being probably the same as that of the Old Norse hiid-r, war, battle ; but the word would admit of being explained as originally of the same meaning as Brittones, of which we shall have to speak later. Recent writers, however, are of opinion that the terms Galli and Celtae argue an ancient distinction of race ; that the latter at first applied exclusively to the aborigines who were non-Aryans, while Gaulish tribes only came in as the Aryan invaders of their country ; and that these races only became one nation by a long process of amalgamation. As might be expected, ancient authors commonly mix up the two names, and from that of the Celtae of yore modern writers have derived the terms Celt and Celtic, which are employed in speaking of the family in its widest sense. This would be a further extension of the meaning of the old word, as Britain was considered to be outside the Celtic world. It was an island beyond Celtica, or over against it, as the ancients were wont to say.

It is a long time ago since the first Celts crossed the sea to settle in Britain. Nobody knows how long, but we should probably not be wrong in supposing it to have been more than a millennium before the Christian era. And when they did come the immigration was not all over in one year or even in one century. The invasions may, further, be regarded as made by peoples belonging to both branches of the Celtic family. For as the Teutonic nations divide themselves into High Dutch, Nether Dutch, and Scandinavians, so the Celtic family, as far back as we can trace it into the darkness of antiquity, consisted of two groups or branches with linguistic features of their own which marked them off from one another. To the one belonged the ancestors of the people who speak Gaelic in Ireland, the Isle of Man, and the Highlands of the North, a language which existed also in Wales and Devon in the sixth century, and probably later. The national name which the members of this group have always given themselves, so far as one knows, is that of Gaoidhel, pronounced and spelt in English Gael, but formerly written by themselves Goidel. So, as there is a tendency in this country to understand by the word Gael the Gael of the North alone, we shall speak of the group generally as Goidels and Goidelic. The other group is represented in point of speech by the people of Wales and the Bretons ; formerly one might have added the Welsh of Cumbria, and till the 1 8th century some of those of Cornwall. The national name of those speaking these dialects came sooner or later to be that of Briton ■ but, since that word has no precise meaning, we take the Welsh form of it which is Brython, and call this group Brythons and Brythonic, whenever it may be needful to be exact. The ancient Gauls must also be classified with them, since the Brythons may be regarded as Gauls

B who came over to settle in Britain. Moreover, the language of most of the country south of the Forth, where English now prevails, probably differed little at the time of the Roman conquest from that of the Gauls ot the Continent. This form of Celtic afterwards spread itself by degrees among the Goidels in the west of the island ; so that the later Brythons there cannot be regarded as wholly Brythons in point of blood, a very considerable proportion of them being probably Goidels using the language of the other Celts. The Brythons formed the first group ot Gaulish invasions and they appear to have settled here before the middle of the fourth century B.C., for Pytheas, to whom we are coming, gives indirect evidence to their presence. 1 The next group of Gaulish invasions was that of the Belgae, which was recent in Caesar's time. As the language of the Belgae was not essentially different from Brythonic, their name and individuality seem to have been eventually lost in those of the Brythonic element. The Goidels were undoubtedly the first Celts to come to Britain, as their geographical position to the west and north ol the others would indicate, as well as the fact that traces of them are difficult to discover on the Continent. They had probably been in the island for centuries when the Brythons came and drove them westward. The Goidels, it is right to say, had done the same with another people, for there is no reason to suppose that when they came here they found the country without inhabitants. Thus we get at least four

1 See Ch. H. Read's " Guide to the Bronze Age Antiquities in the British Museum '* (London, 1904) p. 22.

BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS C/ESAR. 5

peoples to deal with — three Celtic and one pre-Celtic ; and a great difficulty in writing the history of early Britain arises from the circumstance that the ancient authors, on whom we have to rely fas* our information, never troubled themselves to make nice distinctions between these races, though they were probably in different stages of civilization. We shall, therefore, proceed at once to give the substance of what they have put on record respecting this country, and make what use we can of ancient coins or other relics of the past to supplement that information about the island, seizing as we go on every opportunity of distinguishing between the different races peopling it. When the reader has thus become acquainted with the leading facts, something will be added by way of a more detailed account of our ethnology.

No such islands as Britain and Ireland were known to Herodotus in the fifth century before the Christian era ; but some time afterwards one of the Scipios of Rome visited Marseilles 1 and Narbonne to find out whether trade could not be established with the region beyond Southern Gaul, so as to injure the Carthaginians, whose sailors used to bring tin, not only from Spain and certain tin-producing islands off the north-west of that peninsula, but also from Gaul. The Roman could not, however, get any information about the north, but the idea of a voyage of discovery took form among the merchants of Marseilles, and the result was, that they fitted out an expedition accompanied by an eminent mathematician of that city, with whose name the reader should 1 Strabo, A, 2, 1 (C. 190).

6 CELTIC ERI1AIN.

be familiar as that of one of the most intrepid explorers the world has seen. This was Pytheas, 1 who lived in the time of Alexander the Great and Aristotle, the latter of whom died in the year 322 B.C., while the year 330 is guessed as the date of the floruit of Pytheas. The publication of the history of his travels is supposed to have taken place soon after the death of Aristotle; and fragments of the diary of his voyage have been preserved to us in the works of various ancient authors. Pytheas sailed round Spain to Brittany, and thence to Kent and other parts of Britain; next he set out from the Thames to the mouth of the Rhine, and thence he rounded Jutland, proceeding east so far as the mouth of the Vistula : he turned back from there and possibly coasted Norway. Finally he returned to Britain and sailed thence to Brittany, whence he reached the mouth of the Garonne, and he found a route over land to Marseilles. Thus Pytheas was in Britain twice, and paid more attention to it than to any of the other countries he visited; but he does not seem to have been as far as the tin districts in the west, and it is remarkable that he gives no hint which would lead one to suppose that there was any communication between them and the Continent. That intercourse, as we are left to suppose, was confined to the south-east of the island, where the Channel was narrowest. Pytheas took a great many observations in Britain ; but owing to the nature of the instruments which

1 For a fuller account of Pytheas see Elton's •' Origins ol Eng. Hist." (London, 1882), pp. 13-40, and the extracts at the ;nd of that volume.

were then in use, they are of no value. It is quite otherwise with regard to what he says of the inhabitants : he saw plenty of corn in the fields in the south-east, and he noticed that the farmers gathered the sheaves into large barns, in which the threshing was done. They had so little sun that the open threshing-floors of the brighter south would not have done in a land of clouds and rain like Britain. He likewise found that they made a drink 1 by mixing wheat and honey, which is the mead still known in certain parts of Wales ; and he is supposed to have been the authority for their use of another drink, which Greek writers 2 speak of as made of barley and used instead of wine. The name by which it was known to them is still the Celtic word for beer ; it was formerly curmi, and it now makes cuirtn in Irish > and cwrw in Welsh. Thus we have ample evidence that in the fourth century before our era the Aryan farmer had made himself thoroughly at home in Britain. Now the expedition of Pytheas had been got up for practical purposes by his fellow-citizens, the Greeks of Marseilles, and it resulted undoubtedly in the extension across Gaul of their trade, directly or indirectly, to the corner of Britain nearest to the Continent. Some light, it may be added, is shed on this by the fact that the first coins supposed to have been struck in the island, though that happened long after Pytheas's time, were all modelled after Greek

2 Among others, Athenseus and Dioscorides : see Diefenbach's "Origines Europcese/' s. v. ceivisia.

coins made during his time. This points to a tradfl then opened wita the north. 1

Some two centuries later another Gieek of note extended his travels to the island and visited Belerion, 2 as he called the district in Cornwall where tin was found. This was Posidonius, with whom Cicero studied at Rhodes. Besides his description of the people and their method of working the tin, Posidonius is supposed to have been the authority of Diodorus Siculus y for stating that the inhabitants of Britain lived in mean dwellings made for the most part of reeds or wood, and that harvest with them meant cutting the ears of corn off and storing them in pits underground, whence what had been longest in keeping was fetched day by day to be dressed for food. This appears to have been a way of preparing the cereal which was well understood in the 18th century in the Western Islands of Scotland, where one proceeded so skilfully to prepare the corn with the aid of a flame, that it might be dressed, winnowed, ground, and baked within an hour after reaping. 4 Posidonius would seem to have been speaking of a part of the country more remote than the south-east corner, to which the words of Pytheas probably applied. But we have

1 See Evans's "Coins of the Ancient Britons," p. 24.

4 See Elton's "Origins of Eng. Hist.," p. 33, where he quotes from Martin's "Description of the Western Islands of Scotland," published in 1703, a passage illustrative of this practice. See also, with regard to Ireland, Tylor's "Primitive Culture" (2nd cd.), i. pp. a, 45.