Why don’t Cumbrians know they are (mostly) Celts?
School pupils are taught they live in "Anglo-Saxon Britain". They are told that the Germanic "invaders" gave us our laws, religion, monarchy and culture. But is that true?
It is easy to construct a provocative narrative that portrays British history as a series of takeovers emanating from the South-East of England.
These conquests gobbled up the regions and nations of the British Isles bit by bit and then much of the world. This subjugation was often accompanied by sweeping acts of suppression.
The English banned conquered people from speaking their own language. Welsh was banned in 1535, Irish was banned in 1541 and Gaelic was banned in 1616. Traditional clothes were also banned. Wearing your clan’s tartan was banned in 1746.
Even entire industries were banned. The import of Indian cotton to the UK was banned in 1720. In 1835 the British banned lessons in the traditional languages of education, Sanskrit and Persian, in Indian schools. They imposed a Western curriculum taught in English. It was to create, as education supremo Thomas Babington Macaulay put it: “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.”
The aim of all this was to foster economic and political dependency along with a kind of cultural amnesia. When the British Empire fell apart after the Second World War, this process went into reverse. Colonies and the so-called “Celtic Fringe” demanded their independence back – a recovery that Boris Johnson has denounced as “a disaster”.
Modern Celts have undergone a similar kind of process. The most extreme traditionalist historians try to argue the Celts are nothing but a figment of the imagination.
A leading proponent of this view is Professor of Archaeology at Leicester University, Simon James. In his 2015 book “The Atlantic Celts: ancient people or modern invention?” he claimed the Celts “never existed”.
The Celts, Prof James said, were “invented” by an 18th Century linguist called Edward Lhuyd as part of a political campaign aimed at portraying the British as oppressors of the regions.
In fact Lhuyd did not invent anybody. Instead, he was the man who first identified that the people of Brittany, Cornwall, Ireland, Isle of Man, Scotland, Wales, and, until the 13th Century, Cumbria, spoke mutually comprehensible dialects of the Celtic language, a tongue that was thousands of years old and rather like contemporary Welsh.
So, in view of this history, how much of an accident is it that, today, the Government-commissioned National Curriculum does not require teachers to tell primary school pupils anything at all about Celts?
This omission has the effect of amplifying the importance of the Anglo-Saxons who, Primary School pupils are taught, “invaded” Britain in 450 AD.
The claim about an invasion is odd, since there is no documentary or archaeological evidence for any such thing at that time. Youngsters are also taught that the Anglo-Saxons made a great contribution to the history of Britain. They allegedly gave us language, a monarchy, laws and poetry. In fact, the Celts who had lived here for thousands of years already enjoyed all four of these advantages.
Plus, the Celts had adopted Christianity and the literate culture that went with it at least two hundred years before the pagan Anglo-Saxons. Oh, and the indigenous Celts outnumbered the incoming Anglo-Saxons eight to one even at the peak of the migration. Far from being non-existent, the Cumbrians are the leading candidates for being the original Britons.
The overwhelming tendency of the British education system is to suggest that the Celts, including Cumbrians, had a negligible impact on British culture. This claim is not just implausible, it is false.
It was the Victorian Prime Minister Lord Salisbury who coined the disparaging term the “Celtic Fringe” in 1890 and declared the Celts deserved less political power. He wrote: “The great defect of our present representation is that the Celtic edges of the country on both islands are represented enormously out of proportion to the rest of the Anglo-Saxon population.”
In reality, Cumbrians are two-thirds Celtic, according to DNA tests carried out by Professor Bryan Sykes, a human geneticist at Oxford. This result was backed up by a separate genetic survey of Cumbrians by the Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics in partnership with Oxford University.
Wellcome published a genetic map of Britain in 2012. It showed the distribution of Celtic genes among Cumbrians matched the outline of the county remarkably. The people who live there are overwhelmingly the descendants of families who inhabited the place in the Dark Ages. In fact, the science suggests, they are essentially the offspring of the people who migrated north from Iberia after the ice age 15,000 years ago.
So, why are relatively few Cumbrians aware of their Celtic heritage? It may be because leading historians are largely public-school educated. Their training predisposes them to think that the west gained its key ideas from Greece and Rome. There is a heavy emphasis in school history lessons on Rome’s invasion of Britain. Yet it is notable that the Romans left no detectable trace of their presence in the DNA of Britain, mainly because the invaders were made up of a hotch-potch of ethnicities and few were from Italy or Rome anyway.
The culture of the local Celtic tribes that the Romans encountered in Cumbria, the Brigantes and the Carvetii, was strong. The conquered people were part of an international civilisation whose art was superior, whose culture was more authentic and whose trade was far more extensive than the Roman Empire’s ever was. Roman culture and technology was largely borrowed from elsewhere.
Celtdom remained very vigorous after the Roman Empire collapsed and it is still alive and kicking today. Cumbrian Celts never adopted the Roman way of life because it offered little that they wanted.
Meanwhile, evidence that Celts had lived in Cumbria for millennia is everywhere : for example in place names such as Blencathra, Helvellyn, Coniston Old Man, Carlisle, Penrith and Penruddock.
Buried hoards of weapons, bog bodies, Celtic stone heads, roundhouses and other material evidence back this up.
But the Celtic impact on British life is much more significant than this. It is quite true that the English language we speak is derived from Old English, a Germanic tongue that was brought in from Western Germany and the Netherlands by Anglo-Saxon incomers.
Historians point out that English contains hardly any Celtic words. This misses the point in a big way.
When the majority of illiterate Celts picked up the language from speaking to and trading with Anglo-Saxons, they radically simplified it. They didn’t know the rules. They just made it conform to Celtic grammar, as seemed perfectly natural.
Remember the Celts were by far the majority. So when they used it, they had enormous power to change it. The language transformed from a Germanic tongue that transmitted meanings using word endings to one that used word order.
So, out went the complex system that gave objects three genders: masculine, feminine, and neuter. Long compound words and the four Germanic noun case endings also got the chop. The Celts turned lumbering Anglo-Saxon from German into highly flexible English language that has since spread around the world. Yet school text books virtually ignore Celtic influence on our language.
So, what else? The Celts invented trousers and military innovations such as chain mail and helmets, ideas which the Romans were happy to pinch.
The Legend of King Arthur is Celtic. The doings of Cumbria’s sixth-century king, Urien, inspired many of the stories. Fairies, mermaids, leprechauns, pixies are all Celtic. Celts invented the bagpipes, the fiddle, the Celtic harp, the longbow, soap, and numerous fairy tales. Halloween is a Celtic festival, as is May Day.
Celts invented the monastic system which preserved knowledge, writing and virtually everything we treasure in our early literary culture through the turbulent Middle Ages.
The Celtic intellectual class, the Druids, contributed to the development of mathematics, astronomy, physics, religion, philosophy, and law.
Another great fraud is the common claim that Carlisle was founded by the Romans. Encyclopaedia Britannia, Lancaster University and other official histories all insisted for years that no one lived in the place before the Romans established a fort called Luguvalium in 72-3 AD.
In fact the fort’s very name is a Romanised version of a masculine Celtic word Luguwalion which means “city of the strength of Lugus”. Lugus was a Celtic god reputedly skilled in all the arts. The Romans thought he was version of Mercury, their god of commerce.
Yet, as late as 1978, the Oxford University trained archaeologist Dorothy Charlesworth claimed there was no evidence that Celts lived in Carlisle before the Romans, apart from a single bone arrowhead.
This was an extraordinary statement given that the Roman fort had a Celtic name! At times, there seems to have been a determination among traditionally-educated academics to see Roman stuff but a wilful blindness towards the Celtic reality that lies underneath.
In fact aerial photography conducted three years before Charlesworth published her paper discovered two phases of pre-Roman ploughing in Blackfriars Street, Annetwell Street and the Lanes. It identified a prehistoric roadway surfaced with stones in The Lanes area. The road was aligned with the Celtic plough marks, and it headed in a different direction to later Roman plough marks.
All this suggests there were farms supplying food to a Celtic fort before the Romans arrived. Since it was the only walled town in the entire north west of Roman Britain, Manchester University Archaeology Professor Nick Higham believes Luguvalium was the capital of the Celtic Carvetii tribe who inhabited the entire area from north of the Solway to North Lancashire.
So much for not existing.
This is an extract taken from my book called The Lost Kingdom. You can buy the book at The New Bookshop, Main Street, Cockermouth, at the Moon & Sixpence cafe at Lakeside, Keswick, Bookends in Keswick and Carlisle, and Sam Read in Grasmere.
You can also order by post instantly here:
https://www.fletcherchristianbooks.com/product/secrets-of-the-lost-kingdom
In your book you mention the DNA testing done showing the number of participants from Carvetti descent. I was just wondering if any of the off the shelf DNA tests (ancestory etc) show this level of detail. I’d be really keen to check, but don’t want to spend money to find out I’m “from the north west”