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The Book of Kells: "a masterpiece of medieval calligraphy and painting"
"The Book of Kells is a masterwork of medieval calligraphy and painting", writes Michael Wood
The Book of Kells, one of the greatest pieces of medieval art, is today displayed in the library of Trinity College Dublin. This illuminated gospel book is named after the monastery in County Meath where it was kept in the Middle Ages. It’s a masterwork of medieval calligraphy and painting, with its Celtic knot patterns, scintillating colour, and the staggering intricacies of the display pages and canon tables – all smoky golden magnificence. An Irish annalist called the book “the great Gospel of Columcille [Columba], the chief relic of the western world”. It may be the work described by the historian Gerald of Wales in the 1180s, in his book on Ireland. “Look more keenly at it and you will penetrate to the very shrine of art,” he wrote. “You will make out intricacies so delicate and so subtle… that you might say that all this were the work of an angel, and not of a man.” The book survived war, plunder and the English – Cromwell’s troops were once billeted in Kells. In the 19th century, it was a huge influence on the Celtic revival movement in the arts, and today is seen as the pinnacle of the western tradition of illuminated manuscripts. Read more | Michael Wood on amazing insights into medieval daily life The book was produced around the end of the eighth century, just at the moment Britain and Ireland were about to be changed forever by the arrival of the Vikings. It was long believed to have been created on Iona. But in The Book of Kells: Unlocking the Enigma, published in October, Victoria Whitworth suggests that it was actually written at the Pictish monastery of Portmahomack on the Moray Firth in north-east Scotland. This is one of the least known areas of the medieval British Isles. The Pictish monasteries were destroyed in the Viking age, and with them virtually all written records. The kingdom of the Picts became part of the Scottish kingdom of Alba in the ninth century, and gradually the memory of the Picts faded, leaving many unsolved mysteries. One key survival is their stone carving, of which there are brilliant examples in the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh. Some, such as the huge memorial slab from Hilton of Cadboll etched with horsemen and hunting dogs, are absolutely stunning. You can still see these wonderful works of art on the ground when you head up the coast of north-east Scotland. At Aberlemno is a magnificent carving perhaps commemorating the battle of Nechtansmere in 685 at which the Pictish king Bridei defeated and killed the Northumbrian invader King Ecgfrith. And by St Vigeans Church on the outskirts of Arbroath there’s a fascinating museum holding more than 30 pieces of Pictish sculpture. This Pictish trail leads to Portmahomack, a beautiful spot on the Tarbat peninsula looking across to the distant hills of Sutherland. The origins of Christianity here are still obscure. Bede mentions a saint whom we know as Ninnian, who evangelised in the fifth century. In the sixth century came St Columba, who reached as far north as Moray. Read more | Medieval miracle worker: how St Columba transformed Christianity in Britain But it was only in the 1990s that the first excavation of a Pictish monastery took place at Portmahomack. Its construction began around 550 – which might fit with a foundation by St Columba – and was probably destroyed in a Viking attack in the early ninth century, though some kind of community hung on after that. It was later dedicated to St Colman of Lindisfarne, who played a famous role in the Synod of Whitby in 664 – the great debate over Celtic and Roman traditions of Easter. Colman then returned to Iona and died in Ireland, but he was still celebrated in later times at Portmahomack. When excavating the levels burned during the Viking raid, the archaeologist found over 200 fragments of Pictish stone carving in a style very similar to the Book of Kells. This led Dr Whitworth to propose that the most famous of all Irish manuscripts was actually made here. Indeed, finds from the dig included workshops and a room where vellum was prepared, interpreted as a scriptorium – perhaps the very place where the Book of Kells was written? All of this only underlines how much we still don’t know about the early Middle Ages in the outer reaches of Britain. We don’t even know the site’s original name. As for the Picts themselves – still known today by the name that the late Romans gave them, meaning the ‘painted people’ – their identity eventually merged with the Scots, and their language (probably pre-Indo-European?) became extinct. But recent DNA studies suggest that their legacy endures in the genetic inheritance of people across Scotland. And of course in Trinity College Dublin you can still glimpse the unique, dazzling, colourful vision that infused the astonishing art of the Picti. This column was first published in the December 2025 issue of BBC History Magazine
Geoffrey of Monmouth: the lost voice of ancient Britain
For centuries, Geoffrey of Monmouth's medieval history of the British Isles has been cast as a work of pure make-believe. Yet, says Miles Russell, look beyond the tales of wizards and giants and what you have is a priceless insight into what life was really like for the inhabitants of Celtic Britain
“Favourable winds brought the Trojan Brutus to the promised isle, which at that time was called Albion. It had no inhabitants save for a few giants. This pleasant land led Brutus and his companions to settle there and, after driving off to mountain caves any giants they encountered, they divided it up and portioned it out. Brutus named the island Britain after himself and called his followers Britons” - So the 12th-century writer Geoffrey of Monmouth described how Britain first came to be discovered, named and settled. Compiled in around 1136, Geoffrey’s Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain) is an epic, which chronicles the rulers of Britain from earliest times until the seventh century AD. Containing characters such as Cole (the merry old soul), Lear and Cymbeline (both later immortalised by Shakespeare), as well as Arthur, Merlin and Mordred, the Historia was a medieval bestseller, and its influence upon European culture cannot be overstated. Who was Geoffrey of Monmouth? We know next to nothing about Geoffrey but it would appear that he was either born or spent a significant amount of time in Monmouthshire, at the borderlands between what is now England and Wales, in the early years of the 12th century. He was certainly familiar with the geography of the area – the Roman fortress town of Caerleon, near Monmouth, appears many times in the Historia Regum Britanniae. Geoffrey spent most of his working life in Oxford, his name appearing on a number of charters there between 1129 and 1151, where he is referred to as magister or teacher. Geoffrey apparently conceived the Historia at the request of Walter, archdeacon of Oxford, in order to provide the British with their own heroic mythology: a national epic to rival any produced by the Saxons or Normans. It is thanks to his Historia that Geoffrey is widely remembered as the man who, more than any other, created and popularised the myth of King Arthur. The Historia features, for the first time, the whole life of Arthur, from his conception at Tintagel in Cornwall, his battles across Britain and Europe with his sword Caliburn (Excalibur), his love for Ganhumara (Guinevere), his colleagues Gawain and Merlin, the treachery of Mordred and the final battle after which, mortally wounded, Arthur is carried to the Isle of Avalon. Geoffrey’s work clearly contains numerous fictional stories – and so it’s hardly surprising that, within a few years of the Historia being published, serious doubt was being cast on the authenticity of his research. In 1190 William of Newburgh declared that “it is quite clear that everything this man wrote… was made up”, while 800 years later, Geoffrey Ashe insisted that “Monmouth is an entertaining and memorable companion, so long as one never believes anything he says”. Geoffrey himself claimed that the inspiration for his work was an ancient book “in the British tongue”. Yet the fact that this source remains utterly elusive to us today has added weight to the conviction that it was nothing more than a figment of his imagination. King Arthur: 6 things you need to know about the warrior king and his legend However, I think this view does Geoffrey a disservice. In fact, having examined the Historia in great detail over recent months, I’m convinced that there is sufficient evidence within its pages to suggest that it was no work of make-believe. On the contrary, I believe that it was compiled from a variety of genuine sources – most of them hailing from what is now the south-east of England – dating back at least to the first century BC. For me, the key to unlocking Geoffrey’s text lies in the story of Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain, the first ‘event’ in the book that can be independently verified from other historical sources. Caesar stepped ashore on these islands on two separate occasions – in 55 and 54 BC – and recorded his exploits in a series of campaign diaries, known collectively as the Gallic Wars. In Caesar’s own account of his second invasion, there are three main protagonists: the hero (himself); the villain, a British king called Cassivellaunus whom Caesar defeats; and the ally, a young British aristocrat called Mandubracius. In the Historia, however, Geoffrey duplicates the events of 54 BC, and sets them down as if they are two discrete military operations. In the first, the aggressor, Ilkassar (Caesar), is defeated by the heroic Briton Cassibellaun (Cassivellaunus) at the “Battle of Dorobellum” and driven back into the sea. In the second version, a few pages later, Cassibellaun, now the bad guy, is waging an unprovoked war upon his rival, Androgeus (Mandubracius), when he hears that Ilkassar has landed upon the south coast. At the battle of Durobernia, Ilkassar prevails, thanks to the timely intervention of Androgeus on the Roman side. Fearing the power of Androgeus, Ilkassar makes peace and departs. The Celts: were they friends or foes of the Romans? It is clear that in describing this particular invasion, Geoffrey was using two versions of the same event, written from two very different perspectives. The first, with Cassivellaunus as the hero, appears to have been generated by supporters of the British king; the second is written from the perspective of Cassivellaunus’s rival, Mandubracius. It may therefore be wrong to search for a single primary source for Geoffrey’s account – after all, as he says in his foreword, in his day the lives of these early kings were “celebrated by many people by heart, as if they had been written”. As one might expect for a pre-Roman heroic society, these tales had survived to Geoffrey’s time not because they had been transcribed but because they had been transmitted from generation to generation by word of mouth. Listen | Miles Russell offers a bold view on the historical King Arthur based on his reinterpretation of medieval sources How reliable is Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia? Once you accept that the Historia does not represent a single epic but a mass of unrelated stories woven together to form a grand narrative, it’s easier to tease out individual tales. And these tales can radically reconfigure our understanding of the British past, producing new ways of seeing how the Britons dealt with the arrival of Rome, and what happened following the collapse of Roman authority in the fifth century AD. The Historia matters because it is something that was set down by the ancient Britons themselves: it is their ‘lost voice’. This is, perhaps, best summed up by the description of the celebrations following the expulsion of Julius Caesar from Britain. The Britons, we are told, “summoned all the nobility” to Colchester “in order to perform solemn sacrifices to the gods”, slaughtering “40,000 cows and 100,000 sheep and also fowls of every single kind without number, besides 30,000 wild beasts of several kinds” before “they feasted themselves… and spent the rest of the day and night in various plays and sports”. This is no work of pure fiction but the remembrance of a real event from a period of the past we still mistakenly call prehistory. 8 insights that the Historia can give us into ancient Britain Ancient Britons gloried in their Trojan ‘past’ Perhaps the most incredible claim contained within the pages of the Historia is that the British monarchy was descended from Trojan nobility. As far-fetched as this may seem, a chance comment by John Creighton in his book Coins and Power in Late Iron Age Britain (published in 2000) suggests that Geoffrey didn’t merely pluck this ‘fact’ from the ether. Creighton noted that it “exemplifies precisely the genre of foundation myth that would have been created within the political context of Britain” in the early first century AD. In other words, British dynasts of late Iron Age Britain may have wanted to fabricate a semi-mythical lineage that closely linked them to the Romans, who themselves claimed descent from the Trojan refugee Aeneas. (The Britons were also, remember, keen to adopt Roman symbols and titles on their coins.) This is something that Geoffrey has Julius Caesar himself articulate when, just prior to the invasion of Britain, he observes that “we Romans and the Britons share a common ancestry”. Young British aristocrats were educated in Rome Geoffrey says that many British kings travelled to, and grew up in, Rome. On the face of it, this seems preposterous, but the system of bringing up the children of allied kings in the imperial capital was an old and established one. Such children may have gone to Rome partly in order to ensure the loyalty of their parents, but also to be educated the Roman way and benefit from imperial patronage – a system of networking that proved vital to those determined to make it big. Having the offspring of barbarian aristocrats growing up under close supervision in Rome is something that emperors such as Augustus positively encouraged, and it is difficult to see why the Britons would have been treated differently. A number of British kings are known to have been at court during the reigns of both Augustus and Claudius, while images reproduced on early British coins slavishly imitated Roman designs, confirming a strong Mediterranean influence. Tenvantius fathered the ‘Great King of the Britons’ One of the many British kings that Geoffrey describes in the Historia is Tenvantius, Duke of Cornwall, a warlike man who, we’re told, “governed his realm diligently”, insisting on “the full rigour of the law”. Unfortunately, Tenvantius is conspicuous by his absence from the Roman sources – yet that doesn’t mean he’s a figment of Geoffrey’s imagination. As Geoffrey tells us, after Tenvantius’s death the crown passed to his son Cymbeline (or Cunobelinos), who is recorded on coins and in contemporary historical accounts, as ‘Great King of the Britons’. Interestingly, on Cymbeline’s coin series – minted from native power centres at both Colchester and St Albans – the monarch declares that his father had been ‘Tasciovanus’. It is clear from these coins, and those minted by Tasciovanus himself, that Tenvantius/Tasciovanus was very real – his name, like that of Cymbeline/Cunobelinos, being irrevocably garbled over time. Britons helped quell Boudica’s rebellion That the Historia was compiled from sources produced within the pro-Roman tribal kingdoms of south-eastern Britain is confirmed by the fact that those who fought against Rome, such as Caratacus or Boudica, barely merit a mention. And when they do, it’s hardly in glowing terms – Geoffrey casts the Boudican revolt of AD 60–61 as a wholly negative event. Boudica herself appears as ‘Soderick’, while her tribe, the Iceni, are called ‘Scythians’. Geoffrey also gets his geography mixed up, moving the revolt from Norfolk to southern Scotland. Crucially, when the Iceni/Scythians start razing the region, it is not the Romans who march to attack them but the British king ‘Marius’, who “won several engagements and killed Soderick”. In the Roman account there is no room for native allies. Yet the fact that the southern British kingdoms thrived in the revolt’s aftermath suggests that the Romans received significant support from indigenous groups. What if… Boudica had defeated the Romans? There was method to the geographical madness Geoffrey’s detractors have long used his appreciation of geography – or lack of it – as a stick with which to beat him. Not only, they point out, did he mistakenly claim that Boudica went on the rampage across southern Scotland, he also moved various towns, cities and battlefields from their rightful historical settings of Kent, Hertfordshire and Essex a hundred miles or so west to Wales and Cornwall. Yet I believe that, far from simply sticking a pin in a map, Geoffrey genuinely based the settings of his history on Roman sources – it’s just that, on a number of notable occasions, he misinterpreted these sources. Take the titles the ‘Duke of Cornwall’ and the ‘Duke of London’, both of which repeatedly crop up in the Historia. It seems that Geoffrey mistook ‘Catuvellauni’ for ‘Kerniw’ – or Cornwall – when in fact Catuvellauni was the name of a British tribe based around St Albans. Likewise, he took Trinovantes to mean ‘New Troy’ or ‘London’, when it referred to another British tribe, this one established around Colchester. By AD 1136, both tribal names had lost any meaning and so Geoffrey equated them with geographical terms that made sense to his audience. British grandees built big in southern England According to Geoffrey, mid-first-century AD Britain was ruled by King Coilus, who “had been brought up from his infancy in Rome”. By paying what was required to the Roman government, Coilus “enjoyed his kingdom in peace and no king ever showed greater respect to his nobility… binding them to him through his continual bounty and munificence”. There can be little doubt that of all the areas of early Roman Britain, the most bountiful and munificent was along the coast of central southern England. Here, the remains of at least eight palaces, of which Fishbourne is the most famous, have been found. That extravagant new residences were being erected by native aristocrats such as Togidubnus, Catuarus and Lucullus is beyond doubt – the last of these could plausibly have been Geoffrey’s peace-loving ‘Coilus’. The Romans may have added their own touches to Stonehenge One of the most curious incidents in the Historia relates to Stonehenge which, we are told, was set up by the post-Roman King ‘Aurelius Ambrosius’ to commemorate those treacherously slaughtered by the Saxons. The stones in question were, on advice from the wizard Merlin, taken from a mountain in Ireland and transported to Salisbury Plain. This story may read like it’s straight out of a fairy tale, yet it could be doing Geoffrey a disservice to dismiss it as a mere flight of fancy. For a start, we know that the bluestones at Stonehenge did indeed originate from a source in the west – albeit Pembrokeshire in Wales rather than Ireland. What’s more, recent excavations at the monument hint at significant late or post Roman activity. Many of the bluestones that we see at Stonehenge today may actually have been reshaped, reset or otherwise significantly modified in the fourth or early fifth century AD, during the time that the historical Ambrosius Aurelianus is thought to have ruled. A native elite ran south-east Roman Britain The Historia presents an alternative late Iron Age Britain in which there is no military occupation by a foreign power. Rather than being part of a Roman province, Geoffrey describes Britain as a friendly, tribute-paying dependency whose monarchs retained a degree of autonomy beyond Rome’s invasion of AD 43. At first glance, this may appear to be a hopelessly rose-tinted interpretation of the facts. But is it? After all, having invaded south-east England – the area from which most of Geoffrey’s sources hailed – the Roman army swiftly moved on to fight the recalcitrant tribes to the north and west. And, instead of leaving garrisons, they delegated day-to-day governance of the area to the native elite. Everything you wanted to know about Roman Britain, but were afraid to ask So, as far as the south-eastern corner of the island was concerned, Geoffrey was right: the transition from Britain to Roman Britain would have appeared relatively seamless. Miles Russell is a senior lecturer in archaeology at Bournemouth University. He is co-author of UnRoman Britain: Exposing the Myth of Britannia (The History Press, 2011) This article was first published in the December 2014 issue of BBC History Magazine
What’s the real history behind ‘Britannia’?
It's AD 43 and the Romans are coming. With the advertising tagline "No one wants to be civilised", Sky Atlantic's new sword and sandals TV series Britannia is about to invade our living rooms with – if the trailers are to be believed – more than a fair smattering of orgiastic violence, fire and blood. Here, archaeologist and author Miles Russell previews the coming season
The Roman invasion of Britain is an event which, perhaps rather strangely, has yet to be featured much in either TV or film. There have been any number of cinematic outings (as well as documentaries and books) about Queen Boudica, who led an uprising against the Romano-British government in AD 60/61 destroying the cities of Colchester, London and St Albans – but the initial stages of conquest have been largely ignored. Britannia, written by Jez Butterworth, suggests that this is all about to change: the publicity promises swords, sex, carnage and “a country dominated by powerful druids and warrior queens”. Whilst both the costumes and setting look reasonable (so far), how much of the series is actually drawn from real events? Here’s what we do and don’t know about the Roman invasion of Britain in AD 43. Who were the Celtic Britons? At the time of the invasion, Britain was an island which was politically fragmented, with multiple tribes each led by a chief, king or queen who – if we believe Roman writers – were constantly at war with one another. Some of the names of the British tribes, such as the Cantiaci (of Kent), the Trinovantes (of Essex) and the Durotriges (of Dorset), were preserved by the Roman government when they built brand new towns to win the hearts and minds of the indigenous population. Unfortunately, we know very little about the customs, lifestyle, outlook, language or religion of these individual tribes. Some had leaders who actively traded with the Mediterranean world, exchanging locally-produced cattle, grain, metal and slaves for wine, olive oil and exotic forms of glassware and pottery. Others seem to have actively opposed any kind of Roman influence. Why did the Romans invade Britain? The Roman Empire, which in the early 1st century AD stretched from Spain to Syria, was a resource-hungry superstate and Britain, on its north-western frontier, was a hugely attractive target. This was a land rich in metals (especially iron, tin, lead and gold), cattle and grain. Unfortunately for Rome, Britain lay beyond the civilised world, on the other side of ‘the Ocean’. Just getting there seemed a risky endeavour – especially if, as many Romans believed, the place was full of monsters and barbarians. Julius Caesar had led two expeditions to southern Britain in 55 and 54 BC and, although these ultimately came to nothing, he had been celebrated in Rome as a hero simply for daring to cross the sea. Caesar’s heirs meddled constantly in British politics, trying to bring order to the frontier-land by helping to resolve disputed royal successions and organising lucrative trade deals. By the time Claudius came to power in AD 41, several British aristocrats had formed alliances with Rome, visiting the city in person to pay their respects and leave offerings to the Roman gods. When the political situation in southern Britain became unstable, with warring tribes threatening both trade and the wider peace, Claudius deployed boots on the ground. The fact that he needed to draw public attention away from difficult issues at home, whilst simultaneously hoping to outdo the military achievements of the great Julius Caesar, probably helped to spur this on. What do we know about the invasion? Very little, as no contemporary record survives. The popular view today is that four legions together with auxiliary support, totalling between 30-40,000 soldiers, landed on the Kent coast and fought their way inland. But there is no real archaeological or historical evidence to support this. What we do know is that the ‘invasion’ appears to have been undertaken in two distinct phases. The first, led by senator Aulus Plautius, was probably a peace-keeping mission, which saw Plautius operating with a small force in order to negotiate a truce between the various British factions whilst hoping to restore certain British refugee monarchs to power. Not all the tribes were opposed to Rome in AD 43 and many leaders would have seen the emperor and his advisors as friends. Unfortunately, for whatever reason, negotiations broke down leaving the emperor no choice to trigger a second phase of the invasion, some months later. This was a calculated display of force, designed to shock and awe enemy elements into submission. Claudius himself led the reinforcements, bringing with him a number of war elephants (he intended to arrive in style). Shortly after, Roman troops marched into Camulodunum (Colchester), the centre of native resistance, and took the formal surrender of 11 British leaders. How did Britons respond to the invasion? Some, like the Trinovantes – a tribe based around what is now Colchester – seem to have actively resisted the advance of the Roman legions whilst others, such as the Atrebates (of Berkshire), supported the newcomers and were subsequently very well rewarded. The native town of Camulodunum (Colchester) was subjugated by the Roman military and had a legionary fortress built directly over it. Elsewhere, the Trinovantes were treated as a conquered people whilst the Catuvellauni tribe, who had helped the Romans, were awarded special status in the province and had a brand-new town, full of civic amenities, built for them at Verulamium (St Albans). Having lost the first stage of the war, the British resistance leader Caratacus fled west, stirring up tribes in what is now Wales against Rome. Eventually Caratacus was betrayed by the pro-Roman queen Cartimandua, and handed over to the emperor Claudius in chains. Was Aulus Plautius a real person? Yes, although he was probably nothing like the battle-hardened veteran depicted in the TV series (by David Morrissey), being more of a capable and reliable member of Rome’s ruling senatorial class. Although Plautius would have had some experience in the army, he was ultimately a career politician (a safe pair hands) and, for military advice, would have relied on the more experienced legionary officers under his command. Are Queen Antedia and Kerra, who both appear in Britannia, real? Who might they be based on? Unlike the male-dominated world of Rome, ancient British society was more egalitarian with both men and women wielding political and military power. We know very little about the command structure of British tribal armies opposing Rome during the invasion. Although the names of some leaders survive on Celtic coins and in the pages of Roman writers and historians, there is, unfortunately, no historical evidence (yet) for the female war leaders Antedia and Kerra (played by Zoë Wanamaker and Kelly Reilly in the TV series). A king called Antedios certainly seems to have ruled in Norfolk just prior to the invasion whilst the leader of the British resistance was a king called Caratacus (who later became target number one for the Roman government). There were certainly strong and militarily capable women within the British tribal armies – this was a point often used by Roman generals in an attempt to ridicule their foe. Later, in the AD 60s, Queens Cartimandua of the Brigantes (in Yorkshire) and Boudica of the Iceni (in Norfolk) emerge. Both, however, were, at least during the early stages of the invasion, firm supporters of Rome, seeing the obvious benefits of siding with a Mediterranean superpower. Did druids exist at this time and what might have been their status or role? In popular culture, the druids are usually seen as being integral to Celtic society: part mystical, religious teachers and part hard-line resistance leaders, constantly stirring up trouble for Rome. The problem is that we really have very little evidence for their existence in Britain. In Gaul (France), Julius Caesar had noted their presence in the mid-50s BC, but there is only one definite reference to them in the British Isles, on the island of Anglesey where, so the Roman writer Tacitus tells us, they were committing acts of human sacrifice in AD 60. Modern writers and historians tend to view druids as part of an all-encompassing religion (druidism) and, thanks to fictional accounts (most notably in the stories of Asterix the Gaul) suggest that every tribe would have had one: a prehistoric equivalent, perhaps, of a parish priest or holy-man. The trouble is, as plausible as this theory may appear, there is absolutely no evidence for this. Miles Russell is a senior lecturer in prehistoric and Roman archaeology at Bournemouth University. Britannia begins on Thursday 18 January at 2am on Sky Atlantic
How and when the Celtic Queen met her end has been lost to history, but could one of the rumours over her burial place have inspired JK Rowling?
Not long after the Roman conquest of Britain in AD 43, Boudicca became the Queen of the Iceni (a powerful tribe in modern-day Norfolk). In AD 60, she led her warriors in a revolt against Britain’s Roman rulers and was initially very successful. Her forces utterly destroyed the cities of Camulodunum (Colchester), Londinium (London) and Verulamium (St Albans), and amassed a huge following of other Britons looking to throw off Roman control. Boudica: scourge of the Roman empire The Celts: unpicking the mystery She was finally defeated in a battle to the north-west of London, somewhere along Watling Street. Roman sources claim that a force of only 10,000 soldiers stood against 230,000 warriors – which is most likely exaggerated but there is no question that she had hugely superior numbers. In his 1937 book Boadicea – Warrior Queen of the Britons, Lewis Spence suggested, with no real evidence, that the opposing armies had fought on land now occupied by the railway stations of King’s Cross and St Pancras. The Roman historian Cassius Dio, writing over a century after the battle, suggested that, in defeat, Boudicca “fell ill and died” before her followers put on a lavish burial. In truth, this seems unlikely, as Dio provides no source for the claim and, in the aftermath of the revolt, the Iceni fell victim to brutal and relentless reprisals. This hasn’t prevented people searching for a grave, and the myth that her final resting place lies somewhere beneath platforms 9 and 10 of King’s Cross – probably thanks to Spence’s book – is still popular. Given this specific location, the story appears to have inspired JK Rowling, who famously placed the departure point of the Hogwarts Express at King’s Cross Platform 9¾. It is unclear whether the 2,000-year-old Queen has ever attended Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. This article was taken from BBC History Revealed magazine
Celtic myths: the tales that might have inspired Star Wars and Harry Potter
Tales of monsters, Gods, spells and love affairs: Celtic myths reflected the social thinking and traditions of pre-Roman Celts of Britain, Ireland and Europe. Spread by travelling poets and storytellers who plied their trade from village to village, the myths came into being partly to explain natural phenomena, and to try to address basic human concerns about life and death. This article was first published online in January 2015
Miranda Aldhouse-Green, an expert in archaeology and shamanism, reveals how traditional Celtic characters and symbols can even be found in contemporary popular culture series such as Star Wars and Harry Potter. Here, writing for History Extra, Aldhouse-Green recalls five of the most fascinating Celtic myths… In the Middle Ages, Christian monasteries in Ireland and Wales were the engines of literacy and education. Many monks took it upon themselves to record pagan myths and legends dating to pre-Christian times, leaving us a rich legacy of gods, goddesses, supernatural heroes, enchanted animals and magical objects. But their Christian chroniclers seasoned these stories with a heavy sprinkling of early Christian ethics, so mythic warfare tended to end in disaster; amoral and over-powerful women inevitably came to grief, and good usually triumphed over evil in the end. It is generally accepted that these myths were first written down between the 8th and 12th centuries AD. The two most important groups of Celtic myths are found in the Welsh Mabinogion and the Irish Táin Bó Cuailnge (more popularly known as the Cattle Raid of Cooley). Pagan Celtic myths were originally transmitted orally, by storytellers who acted both as travelling entertainers and as peddlers of news. But the origins of the myths were probably very ancient indeed. Like most mythic traditions, they came into being partly to explain natural phenomena, including disasters such as floods, famines and plagues, and to try to address basic human concerns such as ‘who are we? Why are we here? Who came before us? What happens to us when we die?’ But Celtic myths tap into another hugely rich vein of tradition: the pantheon of gods and goddesses worshipped by the pre-Roman Celts of Britain, Ireland and Europe, between about 500 BC and the Roman period. Thus, for instance, we find the Celtic horse-goddess, Epona, who was venerated over huge areas of Roman Europe, transformed into the iconic figure of Rhiannon, the horse-heroine of Welsh mythology. Celtic myths are full of monsters, heroes, gods, shape-changers, spells, wars and love affairs. Apart from their interest as ancient pagan myths, they are richly entertaining stories. Here are five of the most fascinating… Cú Chulainn: the Hound of Culann Cú Chulainn was an Irish hero, son of a mortal and a god. He was a mighty warrior, champion of the Ulstermen in their war with the people of Connaught, who were led by their formidable queen Medbh (Maeve). While he was still an infant, the Druid Cathbad prophesied that he would lead a short but glorious life. When he was five years old, Cú Chulainn routed the Ulster king Conchobar’s 50-strong youth brigade. While still a young boy, he demanded arms from the king, and shattered 15 sets of weapons before accepting those belonging to Conchobar himself. The young hero got his name, the ‘Hound of Culann’, when he accidentally killed the guard-dog of Culann the blacksmith. Ashamed of his deed, he pledged to redeem himself by acting in the dog’s place. He grew up very fast, and quickly became Ulster’s war-leader. Like many ancient mythical heroes, he regularly communed with spirits, and he had a particular affinity with the Morrigan, a war-goddess who frequently appeared to him in the guise of a crow. A particular feature of Cú Chulainn was his habit of going into ‘warp-spasm’, or a berserk state, when roused. When like this, he was literally out of his mind, and his body did strange and monstrous things: one eye bulged out while the other sank into his cheek and his body rotated in his skin, while the ‘hero-light’ shone fiercely around his head. Betrayed by his enemies, he met his death on the battlefield but when mortally wounded, he had himself bound to a stake so that he would die standing upright, facing his foes. In the end, the Morrigan betrayed him, perching on his shoulder to show his enemies that he was dead. Blodeuwedd: the false flower-woman of Welsh myth Blodeuwedd appears in the ‘Fourth Branch’ of the Welsh Mabinogion. She was not mortal, but was conjured from wild flowers (the oak, meadowsweet and broom) by two magicians, Math and Gwydion, for their kinsman Lleu Llaw Gyffes (the ‘Bright one of the Skilful Hand’). Because he was illegitimate, Lleu’s mother Arianrhod cursed him at birth, denying him a name, weapons or a wife unless she herself gave them to him. The boy’s uncle Gwydion [although it is elswehere suggested that Gwydion is actually also Lleu Llaw Gyffes’ father] tricked his sister into endowing the child with both a name and weapons, but getting him a wife proved trickier, so he and Math got round the problem by creating Blodeuwedd. But because she was not a mortal woman and was thus without morals (the Christian influence is perhaps showing here!), Lleu’s flower-wife betrayed him with another man, Gronw, and the lovers plotted his death. Lleu himself was clearly a hero or even a god, for he could only be killed in a peculiar, ‘impossible’ way; he had to be neither inside nor outside a house, naked or clothed or on water or land, and only a spear made during the hours that smithing was not permitted could kill him. By huge cunning (together with a certain dimness on Lleu’s part), Blodeuwedd persuaded her husband to act out the only circumstances in which he was vulnerable: by making a bath for Lleu on a riverbank and erecting an arched roof above it, then thatching it so that it let in no water. She brought a billy goat and stood next to the bath, and then Lleu placed one foot on the back of the goat and the other on the edge of the bath. Whoever struck Lleu while he was in that position would be able to kill him. Then, Gronw smote him with his spear. As he was struck, Lleu uttered a ghastly shriek, turned into an eagle and flew into an oak-tree. There Gwydion found him and restored him, but Blodeuwedd he cursed, turning her into an owl, and condemning her to hunt alone at night, shunned by all other birds, for eternity. Capricious Cauldrons There is a Welsh mythic story called The Spoils of Annwn, which narrates a raid on Annwn (the Otherworld) by Arthur, whose target was a magical cauldron, described as made of shimmering bronze and studded with gems. This cauldron knew its own mind: it needed the breath of nine virgins to heat the broth within it, and it would never provide food for a coward. Arthur’s cauldron-rustling expedition ended in a Pyrrhic victory: he gained the vessel but lost most of his men to the forces of darkness in so doing. Arthur’s cauldron is only one of many that had magical properties. For the Celts, cauldrons were vessels of rebirth. The myth of Brân the Blessed, lord of Harlech, a Welsh hero (so large that he could wade across the Irish Sea and whose severed head remained alive and talking after his death), contains an account of Brân’s most treasured possession, a cauldron that could bring the dead to life. But, again, this was a vessel that had its own agenda. When Matholwch, king of Ireland, was insulted by one of Brân’s relatives when he came to woo his sister Branwen, he could be appeased only by the gift of the cauldron. Later on, when war broke out between Ireland and Wales, Matholwch used Brân’s gift as a weapon: every night, the Irish war-dead were cooked in the cauldron and emerged good as new to fight another day. But these resurrected soldiers were, in fact, ‘undead’ zombies, for they had lost the power of speech. Ireland had its own cauldron-myths. Gods, such as the Daghdha (a father-god) had Otherworld ‘hostels’ in which they served food in ever-replenishing cauldrons, and where pigs that had been cooked and eaten – rather chillingly – returned charred and squealing to be re-cooked every day. Shape-shifting Lovers: Oenghus and Caer Oenghus mac Oc was an Irish god of youth. He was the son of two deities: the Daghdha and Boann, goddess of the river Boyne. But Boann was married already when she became pregnant with Oenghus, and so they enchanted the sun so that it neither rose nor set for nine months, until the baby was born. Thus Oenghus was conceived and born on the same day, and the illicit lovers managed to conceal their union from Boann’s husband Nechtan. Given the circumstances surrounding his birth, it is not surprising that Oenghus became the patron god of star-crossed lovers. Indeed, he had his own love story: one night, he had a dream in which he saw a wonderfully beautiful girl and fell in love with her. When he woke, his passion was undimmed and he set out to discover who she was and how to find her. Eventually Oenghus tracked her down to a lake where the girl lived with a bevy of other young women. Her name was Caer Ibormeith (‘Yew-Berry’). But Caer and her companions were under an enchantment. Every alternate year, at the Festival of Samhain on 1 November (the Celtic New Year), the girls were transformed into swans. Oenghus asked Caer’s father for her hand in marriage, but he refused. Realising that the only way to win her was to wait until she was in swan-form, he went to the lake at Samhain and called her. When she came, he turned himself into a swan and both birds flew away, circling the lake three times and singing a spell as they flew, so that everyone below fell asleep and they could not be pursued. The lovers took up residence at Oenghus’ palace at Brugh na Bóinne and, it is to be hoped, lived happily ever after. Rhiannon the Horse-Maiden The ‘First Branch’ of the Mabinogion tells the story of Pwyll, lord of Dyfed in south-west Wales. Near his court at Llys Arberth (modern Narberth), there was a gorsedd, a magical mound. Anyone who sat on the mound was assured either of a catastrophic shock or a wondrous event. One day, Pwyll was sitting on the gorsedd when he saw a beautiful woman riding, clad in shimmering white upon a dazzling white horse. He commanded his swiftest horsemen to ride after her and stop her but, however fast they galloped, she outpaced them, even though her own mount appeared to be ambling. So Pwyll leapt on his own steed and pursued her, to no avail. In desperation he called out to her and immediately she reined in her horse and sat waiting for him. When he caught up with her, she told him she had only been waiting for him to address her before she stopped. The horsewoman’s name was Rhiannon (‘Great Queen’). The pair fell in love and married, but at first their union appeared cursed, for no child was born to them. After three years Rhiannon produced a son, but even then the couple’s troubles were not over: on the night of May-eve, just before the spring festival of Beltane, the baby was stolen. Rhiannon’s watch-women had fallen asleep at their post. When they woke, fearing blame, they framed the slumbering Rhiannon, killing a puppy and smearing her hands and face with its blood, so that the mother appeared to have killed – and eaten – her own son. Pwyll neither banished not executed Rhiannon, but imposed a strange punishment: she had to crouch by the gate of the palace and carry every visitor up to the door on her back, like a beast of burden. But there was a happy ending: the baby was found and returned to his parents. Rhiannon named him Pryderi, which means ‘care’. Rhiannon’s recurrent association with horses probably betrays her origins as a pagan horse-goddess. The Celtic Myths: A Guide to the Ancient Gods and Legends by Miranda Aldhouse-Green, was published by Thames and Hudson in February 2015. To find out more, click here.
Historians have been puzzling over this most enigmatic of ancient peoples for centuries, but are we any closer to establishing their origins? Barry Cunliffe investigates...
“The whole race… is war-mad, high-spirited and quick to battle… And so when they are stirred up they assemble in their bands for battle quite openly and without forethought.” So wrote the Greek historian Strabo about the Celts at the beginning of the first century AD. It is a generalisation that has coloured our view of the northern neighbours of the Romans and Greeks ever since. Celts first came into the consciousness of early modern historians in the 16th and 17th centuries when the works of classical writers like Strabo, Caesar and Livy were becoming widely available. These texts describe how the many barbarian tribes of western and central Europe came into conflict with the Roman and Greek worlds. The writers called these disparate peoples ‘Celts’ or ‘Gauls’ – a tradition that is at least as early as the sixth century BC, when the ethnographer Hecataeus of Miletus wrote of Celts living in the hinterland of the Greek colony of Massalia (Marseilles). Later, in the fourth century BC, the Greek historian Ephorus of Cymae believed that barbarian Europe was occupied by only two peoples, the Scythians in the east and the Celts in the west, and Strabo adds the gloss that Ephorus considered Celtica to be so large that it included most of Iberia as far as Gades (Cadiz). These early generalisations were accepted by the later Roman authors when they came to write about their growing contacts with the peoples of central and western Europe. In the fifth century BC, quite possibly as a result of an exponential increase in population, the tribes occupying a broad arc including the Loire valley, the Marne region, the Rhineland and Bohemia began to take on a new mobility, thousands of people moving en masse out of their homelands. These were the Celts. One of the migrating hordes thrust southwards through the Alpine passes to the Po Valley, where the disparate tribes settled down in reasonable harmony. Another moved eastwards to the fertile country of Transdanubia (Hungary) and beyond that to the middle and lower Danube region (Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania). Once settled in their new homelands, the various Celtic tribes could indulge in raiding – a socially embedded system that enabled individuals to display and enhance their status. From the Po Valley, raiding parties swept across the Apennines deep into the Italian peninsula, confronting Roman armies and, in 390 BC, besieging Rome itself. Later, from the middle Danube, other tribes penetrated Greece, ravaging the temple of Apollo at Delphi in 279 BC. Deflected from Greece, these migrating bands later crossed the Dardanelles and the Hellespont into Asia Minor and eventually settled in the vicinity of modern Ankara, from where they began to raid the Hellenistic cities of the Aegean coast. The raids lasted until the powerful state of Pergamon successfully defeated the marauders in a series of engagements. To commemorate these campaigns, a victory monument was erected at Pergamon depicting the defeated enemy. The famous statue of the Dying Gaul, now in Rome, is a copy of one of the figures. Image problem The classical world, then, came into conflict with Celts in Italy, Greece and Asia Minor. As victors, they wrote of these strange barbarians, carefully depicting them as ‘other’ by emphasising the characteristics that distinguished them from the civilised Mediterraneans: the Celts were brave fighters, but lost heart and ran away – unlike the steadfast Romans; the Celts drank wine undiluted and got drunk – unlike the Romans, who diluted theirs and remained sober; the Celts fought naked in battle – unlike the well-armed Romans, and so on. It was a biased picture – a caricature almost – but, like any good caricature, it had within it some elements of the truth. Much of our popular picture of the Celts comes from these very biased sources. Later, in the middle of the first century BC, when Julius Caesar campaigned in Gaul, we get from his Commentaries a rather more balanced picture of many different tribal groups, often centred on well-established towns, in various forms of alliance, with stable systems of government, able to come together to act in unison against the external threat posed by Rome. Caesar was reluctantly impressed by the belief systems of the Gauls and the centralising power of the druids. One tribe, the Aedui, sent their chief magistrate, Divitiacus, who was also a druid, to seek Roman aid against their enemies. Divitiacus addressed the Roman Senate and met Cicero, who wrote that Divitiacus “declared that he was acquainted with the system of nature that the Greeks call natural philosophy and he used to predict the future both by augury and inference”. The orator was impressed. The picture we can glean from these engagements is of a sophisticated people, quite different from the image of hairy, naked savages rushing blindly into battle. The archaeological evidence too offers a far more reliable and unbiased picture of tribal societies at the time and also enables us to understand the earlier formative centuries. By about 1000 BC, much of western and central Europe shared a broadly similar culture and set of belief systems, reflecting a society in which warrior prowess was important. The foundation of Massalia around 600 BC saw Mediterranean luxury goods, such as wine vessels and wine itself, being traded northwards to the chiefdoms (called Hallstatt) occupying a wide zone north of the Alps. Much of this exotic material was eventually buried in the graves of the elite, so is well known to us from the famous burials of Vix in Burgundy and Hochdorf near Stuttgart. In return for the luxury goods, the Hallstatt chiefs in all probability offered raw materials such as gold, tin and amber, as well as slaves, which were becoming increasingly important to the Mediterranean economy. Such a system depended on the co-operation of tribes living around the Hallstatt chiefdom zone, who acquired and supplied the raw materials and the slaves. The market for slaves encouraged raiding in these peripheral zones, creating instability that led to the breakdown of the system in the early fifth century BC. As a result, the old Hallstatt chiefdoms collapsed, while the peripheral groups occupying that arc from the Loire to Bohemia became increasingly dominant. These societies shared cultural aspects –both in burial rites, now focusing on the warrior, and in a highly original elite art style expressed mainly in metalwork. In the archaeological terminology, this cultural manifestation is called La Tène (after a site in Switzerland) and the decorative style is often referred to as Celtic art. It was from these La Tène tribes that the migratory movements which impacted on the classical world came. Given this archaeological background, it is reasonable to argue that the Celts, as defined by the Hellenistic and Roman writers, developed from a cultural tradition that can be traced back in west central Europe well into the second millennium BC. When, in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, antiquarians began to take an interest in the Celts and Celtic origins, they had no archaeological evidence to inform them, but instead had to create hypotheses based partly on interpretations of the Bible and partly on the classical sources then available. The general view to emerge was that the Celts must have originated somewhere in the east and moved westwards across Europe, eventually crossing into Britain and Ireland. The idea was taken up by a brilliant antiquarian and linguist, Edward Lhuyd, keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, who in 1707 published his great work Archaeologia Britannica, in which he set out details of his study of the native languages of Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall and Brittany, recognising them as belonging to the same family, which he called Celtic. Later, in letters to friends, he speculated that the languages had been introduced into Britain, Ireland and Brittany by waves of Celtic migrants coming from western central Europe. In this he was simply following the theories then current. Lhuyd’s work was to form the cornerstone of Celtic studies for the next 250 years and provide the predominant model, which later scholars were content to follow. Challenging the consensus From the mid-19th century, archaeological evidence began to appear in increasing quantity and was at first interpreted in terms of the accepted hypothesis, but by the 1960s archaeologists were finding it difficult to force the increasingly sophisticated data set into Lhuyd’s old linguistic model: there were things that simply did not fit. Most notably, there was no convincing archaeological evidence of migrations from central Europe into Britain and Ireland, or into Iberia – regions where the Celtic languages were known to have been spoken. It was time to take a new objective look at the evidence. Out of this has grown a new theory: that the languages we call Celtic originated in the Atlantic zone of Europe (Iberia, western France, Britain and Ireland) as a lingua franca among the maritime communities who can be shown to have been in active contact with each other along the Atlantic seaways from the fifth millennium BC. Belief systems, artistic styles and a sophisticated knowledge of cosmology were shared along this Atlantic facade, implying that people could communicate with one another in a common language. But if the Celtic language developed in this zone (where, in some areas, it is still spoken), then how and when did it spread eastwards into central Europe? The simplest hypothesis consistent with the archaeological evidence is that the advance took place in the second millennium with the spread of the Maritime Bell Beaker phenomenon – a time of complex movements of people, beliefs and knowledge associated with the rapid development of copper and bronze metallurgy and the exploitation of a wide range of raw materials. By the end of the second millennium, the Beaker phenomenon embraced the whole of western and central Europe and provided the basis from which subsequent Bronze Age cultures, including those of the early Hallstatt culture, emerged. The new hypothesis neatly explains how the Celtic language may have spread and why the earliest identified Celtic inscriptions, dating to the seventh century BC, are to be found in south-western Iberia. If we accept that speakers of the Celtic language can be called Celts then, by this hypothesis, the Celts originated in Atlantic Europe long before the Greeks and Romans first encountered them in the mid-first millennium BC. Whether the new hypothesis will stand the tests of time remains to be seen, but powerful new techniques of scientific analysis are being developed to create entirely new data sets to put alongside the archaeological and linguistic evidence. The most promising of these, the study of ancient DNA derived from human bone, will enable us to chart the movements of populations and to see if the ancestors of the Celts really did come from the west. In 1963, despairing at the fragmented nature of Celtic studies, JRR Tolkein wrote: “Celtic of any sort is… a magic bag into which anything may be put, and out of which anything may come… Anything is possible in the fabulous Celtic twilight, which is not so much a twilight of the gods as of the reason.” He would, I think, be reassured that Celtic studies are now in vigorous good health and are at last emerging from the dimly lit realms. Were the Britons Celtic? The inhabitants of the British Isles spoke the same language as their continental cousins. But did that make them Celts? The word Celtic was loosely used by the classical writers and has continued to be loosely used in more recent times to such a degree that some commentators question whether it has any value at all. Julius Caesar, however, very specifically said that the region between the rivers Garonne and Seine was known to its inhabitants as Celtica and this is supported by a late fourth-century BC writer, Pytheas, who refers to the projecting mass of the Armorican peninsula as Keltike. But no ancient writer refers to the Britons as Celts. The poem Ora Maritima, which makes use of sources going back to the sixth century, calls Britain “the island of the Albiones”, adding that Ireland was inhabited by the Hierni, but the more widely used name was Prettanike or Pretannia whence came the name Britannia, familiar to the Romans. Prettanike may come from the word ‘painted ones’, referring to body decorations of the natives. If so, it may not be an ethnonym (the name people called themselves), but a description of the islanders reported to Pytheas by the neighbouring inhabitants of Gaul. So can we call the Britons and Irish Celtic? That they were indigenous people and not immigrants is now broadly agreed, but they were bound to continental Europe by networks of connectivity across the English Channel and southern North Sea and along the Atlantic seaways, and through these connections they shared aspects of their culture with their continental neighbours. The most dramatic is ‘Celtic art’, which developed in western central Europe and was being introduced into Britain and Ireland by the fourth century BC to be copied and developed by local craftsmen. The motifs of Celtic art were redolent with meaning and reflected belief systems that the Britons must now have held in common with their continental neighbours. More telling is the fact that the Celtic language was used in Britain and Ireland as well as across much of the continent – and there is good reason to suggest that the language first developed in the Atlantic zone. If so, then the Irish and the Britons, as early Celtic speakers, have a strong claim to be classified as Celts. That said, while the tribes in regular contact with the continent will have recognised their similarities with their continental neighbours, they will also have been conscious of their differences. They will have seen themselves as first and foremost a member of their tribe, but they will also have recognised an affinity with those across the Channel. Whether they regarded their common language and traditions as part of a broader Celtic heritage, we will never know. Barry Cunliffe is emeritus professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Britain Begins (OUP, 2013). You can also listen to our Celts special podcast here. This article was first published in the November 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine
Graham Robb, author of a new book on the Celtic peoples, argues that it's high time we challenged the Roman characterisation of the Celts as primitive hooligans with terrible table manners
Every film maker and book illustrator knows how to depict an ancient Celt. A typical Celt is supposed to have been a hairy, mud-smeared hooligan dressed in ragged tartan. In a land of trackless forests beyond the edges of the Roman empire, those ignoble barbarians, inspired by bloodthirsty priests known as druids, conducted a futile campaign of resistance against the superior civilisation from the south. Violently nostalgic and rarely sober, they were easily outclassed by the super-efficient Romans. The popular view of our Celtic ancestors would have been instantly recognisable to a Roman, based as it is on Roman prejudice. The Roman historian Cassius Dio claimed that the Celts of northern Britain lived off roots and bark, and were capable of surviving for days on end in swamps with only their heads above water. Even in the relatively civilised land of Gaul (which covered roughly the same area as France), Homo Celticus was barely human. He blundered into battle with his brawny, blue-eyed wife wearing either animal skins or nothing. At home, he drank undiluted wine and wore trousers instead of a toga. This was in the part of Gaul known as Gallia Bracata (‘Trousered Gaul’). Further north, in Gallia Comata (‘Hairy Gaul’), things were even worse. The natives’ table manners were atrocious. They had been known to fight to the death over the pork roast, and since Celtic aristocrats never shaved their upper lips, according to Diodorus Siculus, “their moustaches become entangled in the food, and when they are drinking, the beverage passes through a kind of a strainer”. Works of art More than 2,000 years after the legions of Julius Caesar slaughtered and enslaved two-thirds of the population of Gaul, we still imagine the barbarian Celts lurking in the primeval squalor of their thatched huts, waiting for the Roman landlords to come and install the plumbing and the central heating. Yet, as archaeologists have known for some time, Celtic civilisation was one of the most advanced of the ancient world. At its height, it stretched from the Highlands of Scotland to the shores of the Aegean Sea, and produced a dazzling array of artistic and scientific masterpieces. In the sixth century BC, when Rome was still an obscure settle- ment on the lower Tiber, a Celtic princess lived in a wooden palace above the Seine in Burgundy. Behind the yellow-painted walls of her palace, she was surrounded by hi-tech luxuries and expensive foreign imports: her jewellery and tableware came from all over the known world. She had glass and amber beads from the Baltic, and a solid gold torc from the Black Sea. Her state-of-the-art chariot had wide-angle steering, and her wine-mixing urn from southern Italy could hold 1,100 litres of the red nectar. By the time Caesar landed in Britain in 55 BC, even the northern Celts were living in warm, well-insulated houses. Some of their timber mansions were greater feats of engineering than any Greek or Roman temple. Wealthy Britons drank wine from glasses and snacked on Mediterranean olives. No doubt those luxuries were reserved for an elite, but the general standard of living was high. When the Greek writer Timagenes was conducting research for a history of the Celts, he was amazed to find healthy and elegant people wherever he went: “You will never see in all these countries a man or a woman, however poor, either dirty or in rags.” These were not the savage tribes described by Caesar in his book on the Gallic War. Caesar knew that his readers in Rome wanted to hear tales of daring exploits in an untamed world, and so he boasted of epic marches through bogs and forests. In reality, he discovered a land of tidy fields and coppiced woods. Celtic agriculture was advanced enough to supply the Roman armies with the 100 tonnes of wheat they required for each day of the eight-year-long campaign. Even the semi-mythical land of Britannia was surprisingly civilised – not that this is apparent from Caesar’s account: “The Britons fortify their tangled woods with a ditch and a rampart and call it a town.” He wrote to Cicero, who passed the information on to a friend: there was “no prospect of booty” from Britain, “unless you count the slaves – and you won’t expect any of them to be highly qualified in literature or music!” The excavation of the Roman town of Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester) has revealed a very different picture. In 2011, beneath the remains of Roman Calleva, archaeologists found an earlier, British town or oppidum. It had a grid pattern of streets oriented on the solstice sun. This is one of the most important archaeological discoveries of the last few decades: the Romans can no longer take the credit for the first planned towns in Britain. It is revealing that Caesar himself, instead of returning to Italy, spent the winter of 52–51 BC in a “large and well-supplied” Celtic oppidum in Gaul. It was at Bibracte, on the summit of Mont Beuvray, in a teeming town of shops and factories, that he wrote his book on The Gallic War. Those comfortable Celtic towns were connected to one another by a vast network of roads funded by tolls. This is one of the many facts about the Celtic world that has been erased by Roman prejudice. Schoolchildren are still taught that there were no proper roads before the Romans, and that the Celts had to make do with winding, muddy tracks. Yet most of the settlements that stood along ‘Roman’ roads were there before the Romans... If there were no proper roads before Caesar, one would have to believe that the Celts thoughtfully arranged their towns in straight lines so that, when the Roman engineers arrived, they could easily join them all together. Long before the Roman conquest, merchants were racing from the Mediterranean to the English Channel in under 30 days. Even in the 18th century, the same journey took only a few days less. Beautifully engineered chariots have been found in Celtic graves from Yorkshire to the Rhineland. Those sleek machines were clearly not built for rubbly trails. The Romans had been so impressed by Celtic carriages and carts when they first encountered them in the fourth century BC that they adopted the new technology and abandoned their own antiquated contrap- tions, which is why nearly all the Latin words for wheeled vehicles have a Celtic origin. Along those high-speed roads, Greek merchandise had been flowing into Celtic lands since the sixth century BC. It was then that the port of Massalia (Marseille) was founded by traders from Phocaea. Soon, other Greek trading posts sprang up along the Mediterranean coast. Massalia quickly became one of the most cosmopolitan cities in the ancient world. The traders and explorers who ventured up the Rhone and the Seine with trinkets and wine amphorae also brought intellectual treasures – surveying instruments and techniques, trigonometry and mathematics, Greek philosophy and science. One of the commonest fallacies about the Celts is that they were illiterate. The only evidence for this is Caesar’s statement that the druids thought it sacrilegious to commit their teachings to writing. But he went on to say that: “In almost all other matters, public as well as private, they use the Greek alphabet.” Caesar saw detailed population censuses written in Greek characters by Celtic scribes. Writing implements have been found all over the Celtic world, and a custom reported by Diodorus Siculus suggests that literacy rates were unusually high: “The Celts cast letters to their relatives onto funeral pyres in the belief that the dead will be able to read them.” The druids themselves may have practised human sacrifice, but a religious ritual that now seems abhorrent is not necessarily a sign of savagery, especially in an age when Romans enjoyed the spectacle of bloody combat, and when their armies massacred or mutilated entire tribes. The druids were not the white-robed wizards of popular fiction, anachronistically depicted in the setting of a Stone Age temple. They were the intelligentsia of Celtic society. In fact, Caesar’s closest friend in Gaul was a druid called Diviciacus – a scientist, scholar and diplomat who once stayed at Cicero’s home on the Palatine Hill and addressed the Roman senate. Diviciacus was a product of the most advanced education system in western Europe. A boy or a girl who went to druid school could expect to remain there for up to 20 years, which is as long as it takes today to go from nursery school to a doctoral degree. The curriculum included mathematics, natural and political science, history, law and religion. This meritocratic system was not reserved for the aristocracy: children of humble origins were able to attend druid school if their parents and relatives clubbed together to provide them with a scholarship. Maps of the world Only fragments of the druids’ teachings have survived in Welsh and Irish legends, and yet much of their wisdom can be recovered. Five years ago, I discovered something that seemed at first impossible, and which I describe in my book The Ancient Paths: Discovering the Lost Map of Celtic Europe: the druids had not only organised their temples and towns using astronomical measure- ments, they had devised a continent-wide system of ‘solstice lines’ based on simple geometrical ratios. These solar paths had determined the orientation of roads, the location of settlements and battles, and the itineraries of tribal migrations. By applying the Greek system of latitude and longitude lines to Gaul and then, even more spectacularly, to Britain, the Celts created what is in effect the earliest accurate map of the world. The same accuracy can be detected on a microcosmic level. The labyrinthine shapes of Celtic art seem to belong to a pre-classical world of swirling mists and superstition. Yet they, too, are governed by precise formulae. Even the humblest artefacts – a piece of harness or a fastening pin – are complex visual riddles. The strange faces that seem to peer out at us from Celtic designs are clues to a much greater pattern. To the Romans, Celtic art was a closed book. Their prejudices, which have had such a corrosive effect on perceptions of our Celtic ancestors, were based on ignorance. Like most ridiculous ideas about foreigners, they were also born of fear. Long before Rome had an empire, Celtic tribes had colonised northern Italy. Milan, Turin and Bologna are all Celtic names. Rome itself was captured by an army of Celtic warriors in 387 BC. That humiliation was never forgotten. Centuries later, when the barbarians had been driven back over the Alps, the old fears still glowed like embers, and when Caesar brought civilisation to Gaul in the form of slavery and genocide, few voices in Rome were raised in protest. It says a great deal about the vigour of Celtic culture that it survived the Roman invasion. Historians now talk about ‘the Roman interlude’, to stress the continuity of Celtic civilisation. Only a few generations after the Gallic War, tribal identities were stronger than ever, which is why so many French towns bear the original tribal name instead of the name imposed by the Romans: the Remi live in Reims, the Turones in Tours, and the Parisii still have a capital on the river Seine. In Britain, the Dark Age kingdoms retained the old Celtic boundaries, and some of the druids’ wisdom was preserved in early Christian rites and doctrine. Perhaps the most pernicious Roman prejudice is the notion that the Celts were a race. Many people still believe that their Celtic heritage is inscribed in their DNA, in the colour of their hair or even in certain forms of behaviour. But it was precisely because the Celts were a culture, not an ethnic group, that their influence spread so rapidly to much of western Europe, even to parts of Ireland and Spain that were never invaded or settled by Celtic tribes. Everyone living in Europe today owes a great deal to the Celts, whether or not they have long hair, dress in tartan and drink undiluted wine. When the Celts dominated Europe In the third century BC, the Celts were pre-eminent from the Scottish Highlands to the shores of the Aegean... A gem in a peat bog The silver Gundestrup Cauldron, which depicts druidic rites and Celtic myths that are otherwise unrecorded, was discovered in a danish peat bog in 1891. It is thought to have been manufactured in the region of bulgaria in the second century BC. A resistance graveyard? The crumbling hillfort of Dinas Emrys in Snowdonia was recently acquired by the National Trust. It may have been here that Caratacus, leader of the British resistance, was defeated by the Romans in AD 51. Later legends associated it with Merlin and King Arthur. The Celtic ‘mother-city’ Alise-Sainte-Reine in Burgundy is the Celtic hill town of Alesia, where the allied tribes of Gaul were defeated by Julius Caesar in 52 BC. Alesia was ‘the mother-city’ of the Celts, and was said to have been founded by Hercules. A new visitor centre has recently been opened. Urban living Some of the earliest towns or oppida of the Celts grew from hillforts in the Danube basin. The vast oppidum of Závist, south of Prague, covered more than 400 acres. Falling on their swords The mass suicide of the inhabitants of Numantia (Numancia in modern-day Spain) in 133 BC marked Rome’s greatest victory over the Iberian Celts. A gateway for the Greeks The port of Massalia (Marseille) near the mouths of the Rhone was the main gateway by which Greek civilisation reached the Celtic world. Celts in Anatolia The Galatians of Asia Minor – and of St Paul’s epistle – were the descendants of immigrants from Gaul. What the Celts did for us They built proto-towns The first towns in europe north of the alps were the hillforts or oppida of the Celts. In the first century BC, people whose ancestors had lived in isolated farms came together and began to live like town-dwell- ers. these proto-towns had paved streets and efficient drains, and were divided into different districts – residential, industrial and religious. They created a monetary union Europe as a political entity dates from the days of the ancient Celts. Before the Roman conquest, the most powerful tribes in Gaul created a monetary union, with domestic and interna- tional exchange rates. Pan-tribal meetings were held every year, and tribal federations were strengthened by a common language and a network of long-distance roads. They left us their saints Many Christian rites and teachings have an ancient Celtic origin. The early Hibernian saints were often known as ‘druids’. Saint Brigit, the female patron saint of Ireland, was said to be the daughter of a druid. Her name is that of a Celtic goddess, and her feast day (1 February) is the day of Imbolc, one of the four great Celtic festivals. They mapped the known world At a time when the Romans believed that Spain lay just on the other side of Ireland, the Celts had a comprehensive vision of the geography of the known world. Their astonishingly accurate ‘maps’ took the form of legends, sacred itineraries and continent-wide configurations of towns and sacred places. Some of these configurations are still visible in the population patterns of modern Europe. They gave us Europe’s first education system The Celtic scientists and scholars known as druids created the first education system in western europe. A fully qualified druid was an expert in astronomy, mathematics, political science, religion and history, which is why a complete education could take up to 20 years. Some of the earliest universities and monasteries in Europe were direct descendants of druid schools. Graham Robb is a historian and author whose books include The Discovery of France (Picador, 2007) and Parisians: An Adventure History of Paris (Picador, 2010) This article was first published in the Christmas 2013 issue of BBC History Magazine