How official history tells lies about origin of Cumbrians
Tradition says north-west people are the descendants of survivors from a massacre of Celtic Britons 1,600 years ago. Here’s why that is tosh.
In the corridors of power at Westminster, Cumbria is considered part of what is derisively termed the “Celtic Fringe”.
It is seen as one of the western regions of this country historically inhabited by savage, uncivilised and whimsical ancient Britons who were partial to human sacrifice, blue body paint and fighting battles as a disorganised mob.
One of the central tenets of history is that these Celts were almost totally eradicated in a massacre launched by Anglo-Saxon invaders in 449 AD. The result was that the British were left with pure Germanic blood in their veins which gave them the toughness and discipline to build an empire. A tiny number of bedraggled survivors of the bloodbath are supposed to have crawled to hiding places such as in the Cumbrian mountains where their progeny lives today, so the narrative goes.
Although this story is now being challenged by archaeologists who insist there is no evidence for such a Dark Age holocaust, this account continues to be fiercely defended by mainstream historians.
It still fuels a tendency in Government to treat Cumbria and its fellow fringe regions Wales, Cornwall and Scotland as less important despite recent guilty promises to “level up” and compensate the Celtic Fringe for past unfairness.
But now, dissident scholars are publishing evidence that the Anglo-Saxon invasion never happened and stories of a massacre are ideologically-motivated fibs.
To grasp the enormity of the insult that has been directed at Cumbrians, you have to read the strange way they are portrayed in history.
According to the conventional story they are the descendants of a people that survived a massacre. It was carried out by “racially superior” Anglo-Saxon invaders 1,600 years ago.
The mass killing wiped out ninety per cent of the original inhabitants of these islands, the Celtic-speaking Britons, it is said.
Just a small number of these Celts somehow avoided annihilation. They found refuges in marginal and mountainous areas - and their offspring now occupy places like Cumbria, Wales, Cornwall and Southern Scotland.
So, what is the evidence for this extraordinary theory? Mainstream historians point to the fact that only about thirty Celtic words made it into the English language we speak today. So, they conclude, the Celts must have been almost entirely eradicated.
As the result of this alleged ethnic cleaning, the vast majority of people living in Britain today have pure Anglo-Saxon blood in their veins.
This version of British history is beginning to break down.
Archaeologists report there are no mass graves from the alleged genocide and no sign that farms were devastated by war in the early Middle Ages, as would inevitably have happened.
After two centuries of systematic excavation, it is also telling that only a few individuals in the cemeteries or settlements that have been dug up by archaeologists have been proven by DNA analysis to be Anglo-Saxon immigrants or their direct descendants. The rest of the bodies are, genetically, local, indigenous Britons.
But despite the black hole in the evidence, the Anglo-Saxon invasion theory has stubbornly remained a vital part of official thought since the 19th century and still has great prestige in Whitehall. As a result, Cumbrian seven-to-nine-year-olds are still taught about “the Anglo-Saxon invasion” in Key Stage 2 of the Government’s National Curriculum, even though there is no evidence it ever happened and the idea has quite damaging consequences, as we will see.
Politicians have never been shy of boasting about the “racial superiority” of the Anglo-Saxons as Sir Winston Churchill frequently did, notably during a 1943 White House visit. According to Vice President Henry A. Wallace the Premier said: “why be apologetic about Anglo-Saxon superiority, that we were superior, that we had the common heritage which had been worked out over the centuries in England and had been perfected by our constitution?”
Others, such as the former Tory party leader Lord Salisbury, in 1890 demanded that the number of MPs from what he derisively christened the “Celtic Fringe” be reduced. He argued the region was full of ungovernable peasants who didn’t deserve such a big say in national affairs.
Why does this matter? Well, these views are deeply embedded among our rulers who are largely educated to believe in the Anglo-Saxon myth of Celtic inferiority. It has led to them to treat people living at the edges of Britain - in Cumbria, Wales, Cornwall and Scotland - as if they are less important.
There have been occasional spasms of guilt about this, as illustrated by Boris Johnson’s highly publicised but as-yet unfulfilled promises in February 2022 to “level up” those areas and atone for the obvious injustices of the past.
Historians who support the massacre theory say that in 449 AD warrior bands of Angles, Saxons and Jutes, from different parts of Germany and Denmark invaded our island and killed virtually all four million indigenous Celtic-speaking Britons. That means on average the Anglo-Saxon immigrants each would have to murder 200 souls, a rate of killing easily on a par with the Nazi Holocaust.
One could compile a long list of quotations from senior scholars who endorse this disturbing narrative.
Here is a representative sample:
West of England University Professor Richard Coates, declared in a landmark 2007 essay that so few Celtic words made it into modern-day English the Britons must have been eradicated: “I therefore accept the traditional view that in parts of what became England there were few visible Britons and that this state might have been achieved by emigration, annihilation or enslavement.”
Kendal-born David Starkey chilled the blood of viewers of his Channel Four series Monarchy by claiming: “It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the scale of the Saxon incursions. Perhaps 200,000 people flooded into a native population…ninety per cent of the native male population were driven out or killed and their women and villages were taken over by the incomers. This is ethnic cleansing at its most savagely effective.”
Heinrich Härke, Reader in archaeology at Reading University argued that, despite the lack of archaeological evidence to back his opinions up, the theory that large numbers of Anglo-Saxons arrived and killed Celtic men, stole their farms, or pushed them into “marginal” areas such as Cumbria was still the “best explanation” for what happened. He argued the invaders probably imposed an apartheid system that forbade the remaining female Britons from having children.
The massacre theory has been popular ever since archaeology began regarding itself as a systematic science in the late 19thCentury. Writing history from documents then carried far more weight academically than artefacts dug out of muddy holes. Therefore, the job of archaeologists was seen mainly as supplying confirmation for what was already apparently evident in paper sources. The historical tail was vigorously wagging the archaeological dog.
The ruling class experience of bossing native populations around the British Empire heavily influenced the interpretation placed on any archaeological evidence that did turn up. A body found with a Germanic-style brooch was assumed to be an invader rather as if a cadaver found to be wearing jeans would be deemed an American.
The rapid adoption of apparently north-west European forms of pottery, jewellery, dress, and weaponry in the fifth and sixth centuries offered physical evidence for the Germanic migrants moving here, traditionalists assumed. Inconvenient evidence revealing that there were far fewer Anglo-Saxon cremations in the ground than Celtic-style burials with unburned skeletons have been quietly ignored for decades. Finds of Anglo-Saxon style artefacts are extremely rare in Cumbria, in any case.
Celtic Britons were, perhaps unconsciously, viewed as equivalent to indigenous peoples such as the Māori in New Zealand whose population was destroyed and displaced by British colonial settlement and the importation of western diseases. The perceived success that Britain had in taking over much of the world bolstered the assumption that the Anglo-Saxon British had special qualities.
It was a short hop to assuming that the elimination of the Britons and their alleged Celtic traits of unsteadiness and emotionalism had produced a population with pure Germanic blood in its veins. Intellectuals associated the Anglo-Saxons with the values of bravery, perseverance and honour and, therefore, imperial success.
The fact that Latin and Greek were the mainstay of the public-school education received by most civil servants and politicians was another factor in this story. Classical sources appeared to confirm the notion that the Anglo-Saxons were superior because of their supposed racial purity. One key source was a book called Germania by Roman historian Tacitus. Published in 98 AD, it expressed admiration, envy, doubt, and foreboding about the fierce, strong and morally simple Germanic tribe.
The Germans had often scored temporary victories against the Roman legions in battle and three hundred years later their raids would go on to trigger the downfall of the Western Empire. Tacitus attributed the strength of the Anglo-Saxons to their unmixed blood. They were “a race untainted by intermarriage with other races, a peculiar people and pure, like no-one but themselves,” he wrote.
Where did this stress on the importance of blood purity come from? There was a cult of honour and the preservation of the purity of blood among Roman aristocrats which was linked to a (theoretical) worship of chastity. This theme surfaces in the Bible, for example in Leviticus, where blood cleanliness serves as a complex symbol, particularly for holiness.
The eradication of Celts was finally elevated to the level of religious doctrine by Henry VIII. After his acrimonious break with Rome in the 1530s he needed to distance Reformation England from Catholicism. So, his propagandists seized on the Anglo-Saxon massacre theory to suggest all the original Celtic Britons were killed. Therefore, Henry’s public relations team argued, the English were all Saxons with no Catholic blood in their veins. Since dons at Oxford and Cambridge had to conform rigidly to Protestant doctrine until 1877, any academic dissenting from the Anglo-Saxon massacre theory risked unemployment.
The insane racial ideology of the Nazis and the gas chambers of the Second World War undermined the notion that Germanic warriors were uniquely heroic and pure. A growing number of academics became dissatisfied with a murderous theory for which there was no apparent evidence.
One leading archaeologist of prehistory, Dr Francis Pryor, denies outright that an Anglo-Saxon invasion ever took place and he argues there was no massacre. He favours an alternative explanation that the Anglo-Saxon migration took place in dribs and drabs over a lengthy period and that the indigenous people voluntarily adopted Old English and Anglo-Saxon culture. Celts adopted the Germanic language because that was essential for trade. But it is not true to say the Celts had no influence on English - they stripped Old English of its cumbersome framework of Germanic word endings to make it the flexible language it became. They acculturated themselves to the Germanic world because nostalgia for the vanished Roman past paled against the introduction of north European heavy ploughs, the beauty of intricate Germanic jewellery and stories such as Beowulf composed in about the year 700 AD.
Pryor said there was no mass killing and the Britons adopted Germanic culture as a style over time. “I can see no convincing archaeological evidence for 'Dark Age' chaos, disruption and turmoil” he wrote in his influential book, Britain AD.
Pryor challenges the generally accepted history not because he disagrees with it on principle, although he does, but because there is simply no archaeological evidence to support the theory of the Anglo-Saxon invasions. Meanwhile, there is plenty of archaeological evidence to disprove the theory which he regards as the product of widespread but bogus Victorian speculation about race.
He wrote: “The Victorian era was a time when the previously separate strands of history and science came together in a form of both pseudo-history and pseudo-science which today we would simply label as racist. This doctrine held that human beings came in physically, mentally and intellectually distinct races, the 'purity' of which would be threatened by mixing with the blood of another race. This was of course a fundamentally flawed doctrine, which would have appalling consequences in the twentieth century.”
There are so many problems with the unscientific, evidence-free and ideologically-driven Anglo-Saxon invasion theory, it is difficult to know where to begin to address its flaws.
But, just for starters, it is not true that that the Celtic language spoken by Cumbrians died out in 449 AD. No records written in Cumbric survive, but the Celtic language persisted as a spoken tongue until the 13th Century. Remnants remain in Cumbrian place names (Helvellyn, Carlisle) counting systems (“yan, tyan, tethera”) and the Cumbrian dialect. From this alone we can say with absolute certainty that Cumbrian Britons were not wiped off the map and, on the contrary, their descendants are living in the county today.
But why would prominent academics continue to defend the Anglo-Saxon invasion hypothesis so fiercely when the evidence for it is so shaky?
This is an extract from a forthcoming book. You can read more like it in my latest, The Trophy at the End of the World. You can buy it instantly here:
https://www.fletcherchristianbooks.com/product/the-trophy-at-the-end-of-the-world
Or you can pick up a copy from the New Bookshop, Main Street, Cockermouth, Bookends in Keswick or Carlisle and Sam Read in Grasmere.
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