HAVE WE GOT THE CELTS ALL WRONG?
The teaching of Dark Ages history is not a hot topic in our schools, but I think the traditional narrative of these islands is quite well known. When the Romans departed, the Celts who were left behind invited in Anglo-Saxon mercenaries, who were supposed to protect them from other continental invaders but instead engineered a bloody takeover.
Despite the endeavours of the legendary King Arthur (right) and his companions, those Celts who were not massacred were eventually driven back into Wales, Cornwall and Strathclyde, which remained an independent Celtic stronghold until it was subsumed into the nascent kingdom of the Scots, who were fellow Celts but came from Ireland.
That’s the story, but as Simon Jenkins insists in this unsentimental revisionist polemic, subtitled ‘A Sceptical History’, it simply doesn’t accord with the archaeological and scientific evidence.
DNA analysis of ancient skeletons has revealed that 70 per cent of us are descended from people who lived in Britain during the Middle Stone Age. There was no ‘genocide’ of the Celts, and the Germanic speakers who supposedly replaced them were here already. Nor is there even any real evidence of a distinctive Celtic culture.
The Welsh, the Irish, the Bretons, etc were separate peoples who have nothing more in common with each other than, say, the Spanish and the Romanians, who happen to speak languages in the same linguistic group.
This may sound like the driest of dry histories, but to many people it is inflammatory stuff, smiting at the roots of cherished myths and subverting notions of patriotic identity. Jenkins gives his version of the past 1,500 years or so with clarity and erudition, but his book isn’t really about the past. It’s about the future. Our United Kingdom seems more disunited than ever, and Jenkins thinks that identity politics supported by bad history fans the flames. There is a Celtic legacy of victimhood, and a corresponding English sense of superiority, exemplified by the Victorian poet Matthew Arnold’s judgment that the Anglo-Saxons were ‘a disciplined and steadily obedient people’ imbued with freedom and self-discipline, unlike the romantic but sentimental Celts. The historic concentration of political power in London, reinforced by the mania of successive Conservative governments for centralisation, has heightened discord, while Tony Blair’s attempt to solve the problem through devolution only catalysed separatist feelings. Whether or not you agree with Jenkins’s conclusion that the UK requires a complete political reset along federal lines, this is a compelling, often unsettling argument that deserves to be studied seriously in Whitehall. But I’m not holding my breath.