INTRODUCTION

Few European peoples have proved quite as durable as the Celts. From obscure beginnings in the Bronze Age, the Celts came to dominate the European continent in the Iron Age before their neighbours, the Germans, Dacians and Romans, forced them into a fighting retreat. By the first century ad the Celts were confined to Europe’s Atlantic fringe, yet they outlasted the Romans and the Dacians and survived to play an influential role in the cultural life of early medieval Europe. By the later Middle Ages, Europe’s last autonomous Celtic societies were under constant pressure from the English, Lowland Scots and the French and all had been suppressed by the middle of the eighteenth century. At this point, when their extinction seemed inevitable, European intellectuals began to take a serious interest in Celtic history, language and culture. Romanticised by poets, artists and nationalists, the Celts fired the popular imagination and began a remarkable revival of Celtic identity, which continues to this day.

Much recent academic writing about the Celts has focused on the nature of the Celtic identity: did the ancient Celts really exist, or are they simply a modern construct? Are the modern Celts real Celts or just an invention of the Romantic era? With some reservations, which I explain in the book, I am satisfied that both are real. For those people who do not believe in the ancient Celts, their survival into the modern age is not an issue (the modern Celts are simply an interesting cultural phenomenon). Those people who do beheve in the ancient Celts rather take their survival into the modern world for granted, or, if they are romantically or nationalistically inclined, explain it in terms of heroic struggle against the odds. But, when you think about it, the fact that there were still people around in the Romantic era who could rediscover themselves (or reinvent themselves, if you are a sceptic) as Celts is really rather remarkable. After all, where are most of the other peoples of Iron Age Europe? The Etruscans, Iberians, Illyrians, Thracians, Dacians, even the Romans, have all vanished. Rather than looking at Celtic history as a two-millennia-long decline, there is a real story of survival there.

The survival of the Celts over more than 2,500 years requires a proper consistent and systematic explanation. Historians of the Celts have generally been more interested in explaining - why they were conquered and assimilated, rather than why they resisted conquest and assimilation so successfully for so long, and their conclusions are often mutually contradictory. For example, the Gauls’ decentraUsed tribal society is supposed to have allowed the Romans to divide and conquer but early medieval Ireland’s similarly decentrahsed tribal society is supposed to have made it impossible for the Vikings to conquer and hold territory, bar a few fortified enclaves. Then when we come to later medieval and early modern Ireland, we are back to Irish disunity as the reason for the English conquest.

As an early medievaUst, I have always been struck by the way that it was the well-run kingdoms that got conquered most easily. Charlemagne conquered the outwardly powerful Lombard kingdom of Italy in a single campaign, yet it took him 25 years to conquer the pagan and still tribal Saxons. England in 1066 was arguably the best-run kingdom in western Europe and the Normans conquered it after just one battle. But when the Normans tried to repeat the feat in Wales and Ireland, their success was quite limited, despite enjoying a clear superiority both on the battlefield and in the art of fortification building. What was going on was this. In a centrahsed kingdom, where power and leadership are concentrated in few hands, ‘all’ an invader has to do is knock out that elite and step into its shoes to take over completely. This is what happened to England in 1066. Where power and authority are decentrahsed this cannot be done. Early medieval Ireland is a perfect example. Not only was it divided up into dozens of sub-kingdoms and over-kingdoms but all of these kingdoms had very extended royal lineages. There was no way that the Irish were going to unite to fight off an invader and that makes early medieval Ireland look weak, and in a way it was. The lack of unity meant that the Vikings and Normans could raid and plunder at will, but actually holding, controlling and settUng land with your own people is quite another matter. Who was there to negotiate a lasting peace with? What institutions of government were there to be taken over and used to control the natives? How do you wipe out the elite to deprive discontented natives of leadership? Kill an Irish king in battle, together with his sons and even their sons too, and that was hardly a beginning. In early medieval Ireland there was an almost infinite supply of credible royal claimants to lead resistance. Though they both won most of the battles they fought, the Vikings stayed cooped up in their walled towns on the coast, while the Normans did conquer territory but were similarly dependent on fortifications. Once the Irish had learned to avoid fighting them on their own terms, the Anglo-Normans could rule wherever they had an army or a castle and that was it. Had power and authority been as centrahsed in Ireland in 1170 as it was in England in 1066 it would surely have been conquered just as easily.

Decentralisation was a hidden strength for the Irish, and if so in the early Middle Ages, why not at other times too?

The Romans had an incredibly effective battle-winning army but, just as the Normans did, they found it a lot easier to conquer centralised, hierarchical urbanised societies than decentralised tribal societies. Egypt, with a 3,000-year-long tradition of centralised government, was taken over without even a fight. What a contrast to their conquest of Celtic Spain. For nearly 200 years the Romans had an average 20,000-25,000 troops engaged against the Spanish Celts every year. In the same amount of time the Romans conquered the entire eastern Mediterranean. And Celtic Spain never came close to uniting against the Romans. And where did the Roman war machine finally run out of steam in western Europe? Northern Britain, Ireland and Germany: all areas where very decentrahsed, tribal societies prevailed. The significance of this is emphasised by a consideration of Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. By 58 bc Gaul was actually becoming a very civilised place; it was still tribal but state institutions were emerging and society was narrowly hierarchical. For six years Gallic resistance was uncoordinated and Caesar had to race from one end of Gaul to the other putting down uprisings with no end in sight. Then in 52 bc Vercingetorix united the Gauls and concentrated almost all their armed strength at Alesia, where the Roman army smashed it in a few weeks. The Gallic war was almost over. The Gauls would have done much better without Vercingetorix.

The nature of Roman and medieval English colonialism adds weight to the conclusion that disunity was not a decisive weakness for the Celts. The Roman empire depended on the cooperation of the provincials; it simply could not afford to impose direct coercive military government on its provinces. Once they were conquered, the local elites had to be persuaded to take on the task of local government. The more authority had been concentrated in these elites before the conquest, the easier the task was. It also helped if the area had an intensive agricultural system (arable rather than pastoral) with a settled peasantry that was already being efficiently exploited by the elite. Gaul in 58 bc and southern Britain in ad 43 satisfied these requirements: it was both practical and profitable for the Romans to conquer them. Northern Britain, Ireland and Germany did not and this made them difficult and expensive to conquer. It follows from this that, had Gaul been more united, that is more centrahsed, than it was in 58 bc, it would have been even easier for the Romans to conquer it. Only if the Gauls had developed a more efficient military system than the Romans could the outcome have been any different. Like the Romans, the EngHsh found it hard to conquer and hold places where they could not impose an English social and economic system. Like the Romans, the English expected their conquests to pay for themselves, as they simply could not afford prolonged military occupations. The more fertile parts of South Wales and south-eastern Ireland were well suited to the imposition of the

Manorial system and so were attractive to English settlement. North Wales and western and northern Ireland were not. Of course, all of Wales and Ireland were eventually conquered by the English, but the cost was enormous, and by the end of the sixteenth century the English had simply given up on the idea that the Irish could ever be assimilated, so they resorted, with limited success, to ethnic cleansing.

So, these are the interacting themes that run consistently through Celtic history for nearly 2,000 years. One is the way their decentralised social structures made them difficult to conquer, even when faced by an enemy with a vastly superior military system. The other is the limitations of their enemies’ colonial systems, which could not easily assimilate decentralised societies even after they had been beaten in battle. These are the reasons why the Celts survived that this book sets out to explore.