Justice for Celts
A. L. Rowse
CELTIC BRITAIN by Charles Thomas
Thames & Hudson, £12.50
Ifind this book utterly fascinating. Of course, as a Celt I am prejudiced in its favour. All the same, I can tell first-class work when I see it. Charles Thomas is the leading archaeologist and historian of the subject; he has done a great deal of specialised digging, which I am not always able to follow. In this book he writes like a civilised man for ordinary intelligent read- ers. The result is masterly — and a beautiful book too, in which the illustrations light up, and point up, the text.
His subject is what happened in Britain in the provoking period between the collapse of Roman civilisation and the advent of the Teutonic barbarians, the English-speaking peoples. Any civilised man is bound to regret the breakdown of Roman Britain. When one thinks of the villas with their mosaics, frescoes and central heating, all ruined; the desolation of the cities, with their temples, forums, basilicas, monuments, sculpture. The breakdown of irrigation and canals that let in the waters and created the Fens; the loss of literacy, as well as arts and crafts, glass-making, brick-work, lead-piping, plumbing. Professor Thomas tells us that the trading contacts with the civilised world of the Mediterranean did not reach the same level for a thousand years.
What a collapse it was! An eloquent map shows the island under attack from all sides, though what determined the future was the adventus Saxonum, the rapacious Teutons who were after our British rural areas, the richest cultivable lands, and gradually got them. We have seen the same rapacious lot after the corn-lands of East- ern Europe — Lebensraum— in our time. Beastly Germans!
I confess that when I read about the Saxons killing the three British Kings of Gloucester, Cirencester and Bath in 577, or the taking of Chester with a large slaughter of Britons in 613 — thus splitting Celtic Britain and giving the English strategic control — I still feel an atavistic resentment against them.
The compensation for the loss of the best half of Britain is supposed to be the revival of the independent Celtic parts of the island. What is original about Thomas's book, though not the only thing, is that he sees the living relevance of this today: the revival of regional identities in Scotland and Wales, even in 'the little land of Cornwall'; the centrifugal tendencies, reacting against deadening centralisation. (Celts are notable for reacting against— as I do!).
More important, Thomas puts the ques- tion why is there so much un-Englishness in this country and in evidence? What does it all go back to? His subject is precisely that, to tell us what. I have always noticed the characteristic English tendency to over- look us. Even Trevelyan's History — in spite of his name — tells the island story entirely in English terms; so too, in spite of his Celtic names, does Arthur Morgan Bryant. (We have been brainwashed — but I am not wholly!) And of course the first volume of the Oxford History of England neglects the Celtic element — Myers should have known Welsh. In the first world war, the fine fighting record of the Welsh regiments was listed under 'English' battle records, and don't forget that Agin- court was largely won by Welsh archers. The Welsh do not like being overlooked — and in my books I have always tried to give them their historical due. Still, I am objective enough to prefer English Thatch- er (a woman too) to the Celt Kinnock. Thomas's specific field runs roughly from 450 to 800 A.D. , it includes early Cornwall, early Wales, early Scotland, the Christianity, monasticism, art and archaeology of the period. I respect his strong commonsense, enthusiasm does not outrun scholarship. He is ready to disillu- sion us from thinking that the 'cells' on the island at Tintagel are monastic: he thinks that they belong to the Norman castle. We are not to believe that the Cornish crosses go back to the Dark Age — more likely from 1200 onwards.
He rarely chances his arm. When he does it is with good reason. He emphasises the early importance of Tintagel: the thousands of sherds of wine-jars bespeak its connections with wine-growing coun- tries; the Roman milestones nearby are Pointers. He thinks that the place must have been a residence of a sub-Roman, Celtic kinglet, and that its prestige gave an aura that persisted into the Norman period — hence the castle. So Geoffrey of Mon- mouth was handing on an early tradition after all. I have always thought that there was a substratum in his History, that it was not all fancy. No nonsense here about 'King' Arthur. Thomas says little about him, but holds the commonsense view of a resistance-leader Who held up the English advance for a Period. On the other hand, he does hold that the Tristan story is anchored to Cornwall and reasonably locates it at Cas- tle Dore, with the inscribed stone near Fowey which was formerly at the hill-top fort.
The most original part of the book deals with the Picts, for whom Thomas expresses a special sympathy. We learn that Pictish art — its remarkable sculptured slabs — is 'unique in Britain, and no other Celtic- speaking people developed so full a non- literate system at so late a date.' The Picts — tattooed ancestors of the Highlanders — were so far away, no wonder they were late in development. Here I cannot follow him, never having penetrated into Pictland. He considers that Iona was not so much directed as a mission to the Picts as to the Irish settlements in Britain. These were more numerous than we realised, all down the west coast of Britain — the emphasis here another original feature of the book. The earliest, and most beautiful, manu- scripts with their illuminations are Irish. There must have been a holocaust of such things when the Vikings — more beastly, destructive Teutons — devastated the country, by then Anglo-Saxon England. Time has its revenges.
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