Lhuyd’s interest in antiquarianism began in the early 1690s when he was commissioned to tour Wales to collect material for a revised edition of William Camden’s Britannia. Originally published in 1586, this had been the first serious study of British prehistory. In the Middle Ages, history was understood in theological terms, as the working out of God’s plan for the world. The European view of the past was dominated by stories from
The Bible and the Greek and Roman classics, and popular myths and legends, such as the tales of King Arthur. There was little attempt to distinguish fact from fiction. Virgil’s epic Aeneid and Caesar’s Gallic ITtir were treated as being equally historical. Such was the residual prestige of the Roman Empire that there was little interest in Europe’s pre-Roman past. Many European peoples, including even the Welsh, constructed legendary histories giving themselves a common origin with the Romans.
As was the case with so many other disciplines, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw the beginning of a recognisably modern, rationalistic approach to history in Europe. Pioneering antiquarians like Camden and John Aubrey (1626-97), who is sometimes described as the first English archaeologist, studied and surveyed the surviving ancient monuments of the European countryside. A more critical attitude was taken to legendary traditions, and Classical literature was studied anew for what Greek and Roman writers had to say about the barbarian peoples of Europe. European contacts with less developed peoples in the New World gave antiquarians plenty of food for thought about what prehistoric Europeans might have been like. John Aubrey, for example, imagined the ancient Britons to have been ‘two or three degrees. . . less savage than the Americans’. Gradually antiquarians began to break free of the medieval view of the past and construct a prehistory of Europe. From a modern perspective, it is easy to underestimate the difficulty of this task. There were no scientific techniques for archaeological excavation and, before the development of modern geology and scientific dating methods, the true antiquity both of the Earth and of humankind was simply not conceived of. Well into the nineteenth century, historians had to work within an established chronology in which the Creation in 4004 bc and the Deluge in 2348 bc were regarded as fixed points. All of European prehistory had somehow to be telescoped into the 2,000 years between the beaching of Noah’s Ark on Mount Ararat and the rise of Rome.
In the process, the ancient Celts were rediscovered. One of the first scholars to write about the Celts was the sixteenth-century Scot George Buchanan. Buchanan believed the Celts to have been a people of southern Gaul, some of whom had migrated, via Spain, to Ireland. It was from their language that Gaelic had developed, he argued. Buchanan also recognised similarities between the surviving fragments of the ancient Gaulish language and modern Welsh, Cornish and Breton, which he described collectively as the ‘Gallic’ languages. Thus for Buchanan the Irish, and their Scots descendants, were Celts but the Gauls, Britons and Piets, and their modern descendants, were not. For others, such as the decidedly eccentric Breton scholar Jacques-Yves Pezron, Celt was simply another name for the Gauls. Lhuyd’s achievement in Archaeologia Britannica was to unite these different schools of thought by conclusively demonstrating the close relationship between Gaelic and what Buchanan had called the Gallic languages. Given the evidence, Lhuyd w'ould have been quite justified in sticking with Buchanan’s terminology and calling the language family he had defined the Gaulish or Gallic languages. There were good reasons why he did not. By 1707, ‘Gallic’ had become closely associated with the French, who, of course, speak a Romance language, and in 1707, too, England and France were at war with one another. Instead Lhuyd chose to call his language family the ‘Celtique’ or ‘Celtic’ languages.
Although Lhuyd believed that Britain had been colonised from Gaul and had, elsewhere, described the ancient Britons as Celts, he did not call the modern Celtic-speaking peoples ‘Celts’ - but the implication was clear enough. The link between language and identity is a close one and what Lhuyd had failed to say explicitly, others soon did. On 1 May 1707, just three weeks after the publication of Archaeologia Britannica, the Act of Union united England and Scotland to create a united Kingdom of Great Britain. The earl of Cromarty expressed the hope that in future, ‘may we be Brittains and down goe old ignominious names of Scotland and England.’ While this prospect may have pleased at least some of the English and Scots, it had unwelcome implications for the Welsh. The Welsh had always regarded themselves, justifiably, as the descendants of the ancient Britons, that is the original inhabitants of Britain. Even after they had been conquered and formally incorporated into England, this prior claim to the land remained important for the Welsh in maintaining a non-English identity. Little wonder, then, that the new British identity was problematic for them. The English-dominated kingdom of Great Britain had usurped an important part of their identity. By the nineteenth century ‘British’ and ‘English’ had become almost synonymous. The Welsh needed a new way to emphasise their non-English identity and their prior claim to Great Britain. The Celts fitted the bill in a way that the Gauls, being already associated with another colonialist state, never could have. Within a few years of the publication of Archaeologia Britannica, educated Welsh people were describing themselves as Celts and were showing a revived interest in their own language. What began with the Welsh spread in the course of the nineteenth century to the rest of Lhuyd’s ‘Celtique’ speakers, the Gaelicspeaking Irish and Highland Scots, the Manx, the Cornish and the Bretons. The modern concept of Celtic identity had arrived.
World History
