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| ISSN 1449-9320 | |
| Volume 3 2007 pages 169-186 | |
| This material is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without written permission from the authors and publisher. |
Invasion, settlement or political conquest: changing representations of the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain Martin Grimmer
AbstractThe nature of the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain c 450-600, and the survival of the incumbent Romano-British population, has long been an emotive topic. Traditional views represented the coming of the Anglo-Saxons as an invasion of entire tribes with large and aggressive warbands, and used vivid imagery of the Anglo-Saxons 'storming the earthwork camps ... slaughtering and driving away the Romanised Britons', and of the Romano-Britons being 'as nearly extirpated as a nation can be'.1 The last 50 years, however, have seen a growing trend towards representations of the Anglo-Saxon arrival as an elite settlement, in which the Romano-Britons assimilated with the Anglo-Saxons, adopting their cultural characteristics in order to fit in to a new social order. This paper aims to consider the process by which views of the Anglo-Saxon arrival have undergone this transformation, and to place this process in the broader context of England's changing position in the world, and its changing relationship with its Celtic neighbours.
In the 200 years after Roman authority ceased in Britain, in approximately 410, something dramatic occurred in the former province. What had been essentially a Romano-British population in so far as this can be known, emerged, with the arrival of Saint Augustine's mission in 597, as being identifiable, materially and linguistically, as Anglo-Saxon.2 The fact that the new Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in Britain were the largest part of the old western Roman Empire to remain pagan for so long is an indication that what happened must have been in some sense disruptive.3 Yet the actual nature of the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons remains a contentious issue, as does the survival of the incumbent Romano-British population. Was the Anglo-Saxon arrival a mass migration of entire tribes with large and aggressive warbands, or was it a small-scale military movement of elite warriors who replaced the Romans as lords and landowners?
When one examines the issue, it is possible to see that the language used to describe the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain has changed since the subject was first canvassed in modern scholarship in the nineteenth century.4 The prevailing representation by nineteenth-century scholars was one of large scale 'invasion', a view which persisted well into the twentieth century. However, in the last 50 years there has been a gradual shift to representing the arrival as a small scale 'settlement', or as a 'political conquest'. Obviously, this shift has been influenced by changes in available evidence - principally in terms of archaeology - as well as the interpretive framework though which the evidence is viewed. However, the change in views cannot be explained merely by the accumulation of new evidence.5 Rather, certainly part of the answer lies in considering the changing place of England in relation to the rest of the world: its gradual retreat from being an imperial power, as well as its changing relations with its Celtic neighbours: Ireland, Scotland and Wales.6 Thus, the aim of this paper is to consider the process by which views of the Anglo-Saxon arrival have undergone this transformation.
When the first substantive modern narrative histories of the Anglo-Saxons and their arrival in Britain appeared in England in the first half of the nineteenth century, Anglo-Saxon scholarship had already witnessed several centuries of development. Its emphasis up to that point had centred around the adulation of the Anglo-Saxon period 'as a golden age of free institutions' and of popular liberties.7 As England broke with Catholic Europe in the sixteenth century and the Church of England was created, interest was stimulated in the primitive Anglo-Saxon church.8 Reformers wished to demonstrate that England was simply returning to an older, purer, more religious orthodoxy that had been lost in the centuries after the Norman conquest.9 With the dissolution of the monasteries, secular scholars began to retrieve Anglo-Saxon records that had been housed therein, and thus more sources were brought to light which could be used to assist in the creation of a distinctively English history.10 In the seventeenth century, what had been an overriding interest in the antiquity of Anglo-Saxon Christianity gave way to a concern for Anglo-Saxon political and legal institutions. Parliamentarians found that Anglo-Saxon England could be used to provide a historical rationale for the alleged antiquity of parliament, and the protection afforded by common law could be traced, correctly or otherwise, to the variety of Anglo-Saxon law codes.11 This theme of democracy and freedom was given further impetus in the eighteenth century and was picked up, for example, by elements in the English migration to America, who constructed Anglo-Saxon England as a land free from the constraints of feudalism. Thomas Jefferson, for example, had a deep interest in Anglo-Saxon studies, and even proposed putting the legendary Anglo-Saxon leaders, Hengist and Horsa, on one side of the great seal of the United States.12
Also during the eighteenth century, the ancient, now-called 'Celtic', peoples of Britain were undergoing a period of romantic idealisation.13 Notions emerged of the Celts as being somehow different, or removed, from the English.14 They came to be constructed as 'other-worldly': impractical, natural, fickle and poetic.15 This conception of 'Celt as other' was not entirely a new idea. Peoples who were now called Celts had been subject to the primitivist thinking of earlier English medieval writers who had regarded the Irish as degenerate and savage, the Scottish highlanders as barbarians, and the peoples on the 'Celtic border' as brutes of the first order.16 The Welsh, though, did come to enjoy the reflected prestige of their association with the Tudor dynasty, and indeed with that most celebrated Briton, King Arthur.17 Celts too had often colluded in the racial myths offered to them by the English.18 It also needs to be acknowledged that both Celts and Anglo-Saxons had been subject to the romanticism of the eighteenth century. The call to the 'free Anglo-Saxon' past, frequently made by those advocating renewal or indeed revolution,19 was not dissimilar to the elaboration of the Celts as unpredictable, natural and free.20 However, the nineteenth century saw a transformation of views such that the Anglo-Saxons came to embody progress, materialism, industrialisation, civilisation, and cultural and political domination:21 in other words, the antithesis of the Celts.22
A number of developments explain this change in position, which it is not my intention to rehearse here in any detail. The new interest in racial theory and the so-called 'science of man' played a part, resulting in arguments for national 'racial' unity, and for the superiority of the Germanic race, with the Anglo-Saxons being the realisation of the full potential of the German.23 The nineteenth century also witnessed the unparalleled spread of the British empire across the world, into Asia, Africa and the Pacific. By the 1820s, dominion was claimed over roughly 25 percent of the world's population.24 It was in this climate that scholars looked to the Anglo-Saxon period for the origins of the manifestly obvious ability of the English, at the head of the empire, to dominate. Thus, the Anglo-Saxon arrival in Britain came to be given substantive treatment in the standard histories of the day.
Two influential themes are discernible in nineteenth-century views of the Anglo-Saxon arrival. The first is represented in the work of John Mitchell Kemble, arguably the most important Anglo-Saxon scholar of the nineteenth century.25 In The Saxons in England, published in 1849, Kemble interpreted the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain as a process of complete, though gradual, Germanisation; he did not accept that there was any Romano-British survival in terms of institutions or language.26 However, he exercised a great degree of scepticism concerning the sources for the period, which he regarded as:
A confused mass of traditions borrowed from the most heterogeneous sources, compacted crudely and with little ingenuity, and in which the smallest possible amount of historical truth is involved in a great deal of fable.27
Kemble's convictions regarding the Germanisation of Britain came more from his research into the philology of Old English. Nonetheless, the Anglo-Saxon period provided him with the foundations for the legitimacy of English institutions and imperial rule. The Saxons in England was, indeed, dedicated to Queen Victoria, 'our exalted Lady, who sits safe on her throne ... secure in the affections of a people whose institutions have given them all the blessing of equal law'.28
This latter theme struck a chord in the hearts of other English scholars, namely Kemble's expression of the legitimacy of English rule as a continuous heritage from the Anglo-Saxon period.29 This was reflected in contemporary notions of the manifest destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race to dominate, and also to shelter, protect and support other less-favourably blessed races such as the Celts.30 And as Christopher Hill pointed out, 'Only when Saxon freedom had ceased to be a rallying cry for the discontented masses did it begin to be enthusiastically taught in the lecture-rooms of Oxford'.31 In essence, Kemble's work provided the foundation for the transformation of Anglo-Saxonism into an expression of dominance which was in structural opposition to the marginal 'fringe-dwelling' Celts.
What did not strike a chord, though, were Kemble's views on the usefulness of the primary sources. Later nineteenth-century historians, rather followed the lead of the antiquarian Edwin Guest, who is representative of a second theme of nineteenth-century thinking regarding the Anglo-Saxon arrival.32 In 1849, the same year in which Kemble's The Saxons in England was published, Guest read a paper before the Salisbury meeting of the Archaeological Institute - that Kemble chaired - in which he presented an account of the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons which both defended and showed a complete confidence in the literal truth of the primary sources.33 For Guest, Bede's account of the advent of the Anglo-Saxons was sacrosanct, as was that of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and both showed that the Britons had been removed in a violent displacement, with explicit references to extermination and massacre.34 Under this view, the border was pushed back through violent struggle and terrible slaughter, and the Celtic Britons were ultimately confined within the isolation of the mountainous and remote west and north of Britain.
Both Kemble's legitimation of English dominance and Guest's credulous acceptance of the primary sources became united into the orthodoxy of the later nineteenth century, represented at its most extreme in the work of the so-called 'Teutomaniac' Edward Freeman.35 More moderate and influential were other scholars such as William Stubbs and John Richard Green, who both produced some of the standard academic and popular texts of their day.36 Green achieved possibly the widest currency in his 1877 work, History of the English People, and for him:
Not a Briton remained as subject or slave on English ground. Sullenly, inch by inch, the beaten men drew back from the land which the conquerors had won; and eastward of the line which the English sword had drawn all was now purely English.37
The representation of the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons as an 'invasion' of entire tribes thus became the prevailing nineteenth-century conviction. This has been variously labelled as the 'Germanist view' or the 'clean-sweep theory': one of wholesale displacement of the Celtic Britons by a mass migration of Anglo-Saxons who simply 'swept-up' the British population wherever they went, driving many westwards, killing off the majority of the remainder, and allowing remnants to live on only as slaves.38 The true 'racial' and institutional heritage of England was thus held to be Germanic.39
This is not to say that there were no qualifications made of the pure Germanist view, nor any dissenting voices. Sir Francis Palgrave had, earlier in the century, argued for the survival of the British population after the Anglo-Saxon adventus, in the form of a dependent peasantry on estates which were taken over by new Anglo-Saxon lords.40 Green himself, though accepting that the Britons were driven out of the east, did argue for more interaction and assimilation in the west, closer to what became the Welsh border.41 Indeed, the pure Anglo-Saxonist view could be a 'tangle of inconsistencies' that ranged from pure bigotry to bona fide acknowledgment of difference.42 Freeman and his compatriots did not go unchallenged, and the Celts of course had their nineteenth-century champions.43 The essayist Grant Allen, for instance, argued for a significant Celtic contribution to Anglo-Saxon England.44 Anthropologists and natural scientists such as Thomas Huxley and John Beddoe spoke of the mixed 'stock' making up the population of England, which included an appreciable Celtic component.45 Of most importance were Matthew Arnold and his colleague Ernest Renan. Arnold's influential Oxford Lectures, given in 1865-1866 on The Study of Celtic Literature, inspired wide popular and scholarly interest in Celtic-speaking peoples and their culture.46 What the work of Renan and Arnold served to do, however, was perpetuate the traditional antithesis of Celt versus Saxon, but with the Celts in the favourable position. The structural opposition remained secure, as did the generalised Romantic picture of the Celts.47
Notwithstanding these qualifications, the Germanist view persisted well into the twentieth century, even though ingenuous belief in the veracity of the primary sources did not. W H Stevenson, for example, attacked those historians - notably Guest - who unreservedly accepted the received accounts of the Anglo-Saxon invasion, calling 'the methods old ... the evidence loosely interpreted or perverted' and claiming that there could be no justification for the uncritical manner in which the chronicles were used.48 Hector Munro Chadwick, on the basis of early Anglo-Saxon law codes, postulated a more layered view of Anglo-Saxon society which allowed for Celtic survival predominantly at the lower levels of the social hierarchy.49 L F Rushbrook Williams similarly provided a considered analysis of the status of the Britons in seventh-century Wessex as revealed by Ine's Law Code: the 'alien population in his western dominions'.50
Even with a more critical eye to the sources, the Germanist view prevailed both amongst the scholarly community and in more popular volumes, though without the overt racialism that could be seen in nineteenth-century scholarship.51 Some still spoke in quite vivid fire and sword imagery, of towns and villas being burned, of inhabitants slaughtered or driven away.52 Sir Frank Stenton, in his Anglo-Saxon England, first published in 1943, was less emotional but still argued that the sources were 'unlikely to be very far from the truth', and he talked of the English over-running the Britons, referring to their arrival as a 'folk migration'.53 Dorothy Whitelock, writing in 1952, similarly did not entertain the possibility of any significant ethnic continuity between Roman Britain and Anglo-Saxon England.54 The validity of the Germanist view was simply assumed by most scholars, and any new work had to be reconciled with it.55 This was facilitated by the development of history syllabuses in the early twentieth century that, while being labelled 'British', were more accurately 'English'.56 Place-name research and archaeology both seemed to confirm this view, at least in a general way.57 The small number of Celtic placenames in England, the truism that English and not Welsh is spoken in most of Britain, and the limited presence of the Britons in the archaeological record all implied that there were considerable numbers of Anglo-Saxons, and that there could not have been a substantial survival of Britons within Anglo-Saxon England.58
The principal thrust of the scholarship which eventually led to an alteration of the Germanist hegemony occurred after World War II, when there appears to have been some anxiety within archaeological circles to redress the direct equation of Anglo-Saxons with Germans.59 There was perhaps an impetus to distance the ancestors of the modern English from the ancestors of the Germans. Archaeologists began to argue more frequently for continuity between Roman Britain and Anglo-Saxon England, in terms of issues such as Roman forms of land tenure, so-called Romano-Saxon pottery, the survival of the 'Celtic field' system and of Celtic art forms.60 In addition, the migratory explanation for the origin of peoples began to go out of vogue, partly due to its association with earlier European imperialism, but also because it came to be viewed as a crude explanation for social and cultural change.61 It is a point of speculation as to whether this change in thinking was influenced at all by England having just survived possible German invasion in the 1940s, and whether it became more attractive to stress indigenous survival as opposed to foreign incursion. Within historical circles, the most persistent attacks on the Germanist view came from Celtic scholars, who began to argue for large-scale British survival within eastern Britain.62 Celtic peoples had been the first to bear the brunt of Anglo-Saxon expansionism, and thus might otherwise have been expected to harbour a continued antagonistic impression of Anglo-Celtic relations. However, from a Celticist's point of view, the traditional Germanist view presented a dismal picture of the Celtic Britons: a people emasculated by Roman occupation, harassed and bewildered by repeated invasion, incapable of defending themselves, and thus easy prey for the heroic Anglo-Saxon invaders. This was hardly a flattering image. In promoting large-scale British survival, and a small-scale Anglo-Saxon settlement, Celticists were arguing for a re-evaluation of this representation.
The impact of this scholarship can be demonstrated most clearly by looking at one of the main avenues through which it first began to be promulgated, namely the O'Donnell Lectures. These lectures were established under the terms of the will of Charles James O'Donnell, an Irishman who died in 1934, and were founded to encourage discussion of the relations between the Celtic and Anglo-Saxon peoples of Britain and Ireland; the first lecturer appointed, in 1954, was J R R Tolkien.63 Specifically, O'Donnell wished that the lectures should examine the 'British or Celtic element in the existing population of England', which he firmly believed to be 'quite nine tenths of the whole'.64 He considered that the Britons largely survived the Anglo-Saxon arrival and, to quote Leslie Alcock, that 'if you scratch an Englishman, you will find a Briton beneath the skin'.65
O'Donnell's agenda of uncovering this 'subcutaneous Briton' necessarily permeated the lectures given under his name. Even if some of the speakers were not persuaded by his overtly partisan ideology, many presented arguments for Celtic survival, and began to examine contacts between the Anglo-Saxons and the Celts, and their cultures, for the first time. As the lectures came to be published, rather than just delivered, in the 1950s and 1960s, they reached a wide audience.66 Kenneth Jackson - one of the great Celtic linguists of the twentieth century - felt able to claim in his O'Donnell Lecture published in 1963 that the Germanist view was well on the wane, and that 'nowadays the difficulty for the Celtic scholar is the reverse: to restrain some historians from putting up Celts from every bush'.67 O'Donnell's agenda also served the cause of Celtic nationalism.68 Saunders Lewis, for example, in his 1962 BBC Wales Radio Lecture entitled 'The Fate of the Language', warned against the imminent demise of spoken Welsh.69 It helped the fight for the Welsh language to have Celticists present 'proof' of British Celtic survival in England, and thus have the English establishment believing that Welsh was part of their heritage too. In addition, England's position in world affairs had begun to change. After the war, the empire was on retreat, and even if the era of empire-building was really over by World War One, it took some time for this realisation to sink in.70 H P R Finberg's Lucerna was arguably the seminal work of the 1960s and its publication represented the turning point, if there could be a single one, in the transformation of the once-dominant Germanist view of the Anglo-Saxon invasion.71 By the end of the decade, this view had few defenders, and the revisionist argument of small-scale settlement was being incorporated into mainstream Anglo-Saxon scholarship.
The last 40 years have seen a consolidation of support for the notion of a small-scale settlement of Anglo-Saxons in Britain, and for the assimilation of the native British population amongst the newcomers.72 Archaeologists found common cause with the Celticist reassessment. Dissatisfaction with the paucity of the documentation led some to declare that the initiative for the study of the period had passed from the historians' hands into theirs.73 The new sub-area of landscape archaeology produced revised estimates of the population of late Roman Britain as being in the order of four to five million people.74 It came to be considered unlikely that a population of such a size could be displaced by an inferior number of incoming Anglo-Saxons.75 Thus, just as Celticists had done some decades earlier, archaeologists also argued that most of the Britons stayed where they were and, to quote Celtic scholar Charles Thomas, 'in some enigmatic fashion eventually became not Britons at all but Saxons or Angles and ultimately English'.76 There has subsequently been much debate concerning the process of culture change or 'ethnogenesis' that, under this assessment, must have occurred in sub-Roman Britain.77 Nicholas Higham, for example, argues for a model of voluntary acculturation under which the Celtic Britons gave up their linguistic and material culture in order to improve their status within the new Anglo-Saxon social structure:
The impression is of a political conquest rather than a mass migration, characterised by small numbers engaged in the seizure of estates and 'regions' ... The British aristocracies were killed or fled into exile, leaving the majority of the population to make what terms they could with the aggressors ... In such circumstances English was not imposed on the indigenes but embraced by them as one element in the process of cultural integration which they believed offered advantages to themselves [emphasis added].78
Much of the work that has subsequently been published on cultural, political and ethnic continuity from British and Anglo-Saxon rule in Britain is now based on the presumption of a minimalist Anglo-Saxon settlement.79 Current work on genetics has generally been interpreted as supportive of this minimalist Anglo-Saxon view.80 Indeed, arguments have been put forward on the basis of genetic evidence that no single group of invaders can account for more than five percent of the current gene pool in Britain.81 However, there are counter-arguments and criticisms. On the basis of Y-chromosome variation, for example, it has been claimed that there was a substantial Anglo-Saxon migration, contributing between 50 and 100 percent to the modern English gene pool.82 Thus, there does not yet appear to be agreement on what the genetic evidence means.83
Recent decades have also witnessed a surge of interest in Celtic studies and Celticism, as well as the advent of the term 'Celtomania' to describe the phenomenon.84 With the re-emergence of a Celtic consciousness, in the face of England's retreat as a global power and the concurrent political changes in Europe, the past has become fertile ground for self-conscious Celts searching to justify their distinctiveness as well as their separateness from the English.85 As such, the structural opposition between the material Anglo-Saxon and the spiritual Celt has been perpetuated in such notions as Celtic Christianity and spirituality, Celtic literature and folklore, and Celtic art.86 The supposed uniqueness of Celtic 'heroic' society has also become a topic of examination, with some scholars mining the relatively under-used resource of written documents from the Celtic-speaking countries,87 much to the annoyance of more sceptically-minded Celticists such as David Dumville.88
Doubtless as a reaction to this reinvigorated Celticism, as well as the 1997 vote for devolution in Wales and Scotland, there has also occurred the development of a new 'Anglo-Saxonism', and certainly some of the scholarship on the Anglo-Saxon arrival could be represented as a case of 'The Empire Strikes Back'. For instance, archaeologist Simon Esmonde Cleary has stated that:
[The Anglo-Saxons] eventually imposed their language, their law, their political system and their material culture on what is now England. Given that the number of Anglo-Saxon migrants to Britain was probably in the order of tens of thousands, as against an indigenous population probably numbering in the millions, the achievement is all the more remarkable [emphasis added].89
Archaeologist Richard Hodges similarly titled his book The Anglo-Saxon Achievement, and linked the origins of English capitalism to the Anglo-Saxon period.90 The use of the word 'achievement' is significant here, as it implies a certain pride in the ultimate dominance of Anglo-Saxon culture;91 an attempt perhaps to rehabilitate the image of the Anglo-Saxon. And indeed, there is a renewed tendency in some of the literature and in the popular media to explicitly identify the modern English with the Anglo-Saxons. This notion was promoted, for example, in an exhibition of Anglo-Saxon art and culture in the British Museum. In the exhibition catalogue, Nicholas Brooks felt able to describe the Anglo-Saxons as 'the true ancestors of the English today [emphasis added]'.92
Conceptions of the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain have clearly undergone much transformation. The traditional Germanist view created an entrenched picture of antagonism and aggression, and of the clear dominance of Old English and of Anglo-Saxon institutions. The more recent shift from this conception to representing the Anglo-Saxon arrival as a small scale settlement or as a political conquest has informed a new anxiety within the literature to emphasise, rather, cooperation and compromise. Nevertheless, there is still an affinity between older and newer representations of the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, with Anglo-Saxons and Celts still existing in some form of structural opposition.93 Linda Colley has said that for historians to reconstruct the British past without paying close attention to the outside world, however that is imagined, would be a grievous mistake; a 'retreat into blinkered parochialism'.94 Similarly, representations of the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in Britain need to be considered in a broader context, and this paper has aimed to show that part of this context needs to be England's changing position in the world, and its changing relationship with its Celtic neighbours.
Dr Martin Grimmer, School of Management, University of Tasmania
Notes1 G M Trevelyan, History of England (London, 1926) 28-29; E Freeman, Four Oxford Lectures: Teutonic Conquest in Gaul and Britain (London, 1888) 74.
2 I recognise that there are difficulties with the term 'Anglo-Saxon'; it suggests a unity that is almost certainly anachronistic. However, I make use of it here, as the purpose is to differentiate incomers from incumbents, not to compare different Anglo-Saxon peoples, the origins and nature of which are historically obscure.
3 J Campbell, 'The lost centuries, 400-600' 20-44 in J Campbell (ed), The Anglo-Saxons (London, 1982) at p 22.
4 I am attempting, in this paper, to use 'arrival' (Latin adventus) as a neutral term.
5 See D A White, 'Changing views of the adventus Saxonum in nineteenth and twentieth century English scholarship', Journal of the History of Ideas 32 (1971) 585-594 at p 594.
6 L Colley, 'Britishness and otherness: an argument', Journal of British Studies 31 (1992) 309-29 at p 311-312.
7 R Horsman, 'Origins of racial Anglo-Saxonism in Great Britain before 1850' 77-100 in M C Horowitz (ed), Race, Gender and Rank: Early Modern Ideas of Humanity (New York, 1992) at p 77.
8 A J Frantzen and C L Venegoni, 'The desire for origins: an archaeology of Anglo-Saxon studies', Style 20 (1986) 142-156 at p 144.
9 Horsman, 'Origins of racial Anglo-Saxonism', 77; M McDonald, 'Celtic ethnic kinship and the problem of being English', Current Anthropology 27 (1986) 333-347, at p 336; S Piggott, Celts, Saxons and the Early Antiquaries: The O'Donnell Lecture 1966 (Edinburgh, 1967) 13.
10 Frantzen and Venegoni, 'Desire for origins', 144; Piggott, Celts, Saxons and the Early Antiquaries, 11-12.
11 The classic study on this topic is by J G A Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law: A Study of English Historical Thought in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1957); see also Horsman, 'Origins of racial Anglo-Saxonism', 78.
12 See Horsman, 'Origins of racial Anglo-Saxonism', 80.
13 McDonald, 'Celtic ethnic kinship', 335-336; Piggott, Celts, Saxons and the Early Antiquaries, 18-20. The eighteenth century saw the Celts associated with a revived interest in Druidism, with monuments such as Stonehenge (thanks to John Aubrey), with the enormously influential Ossianic forgeries produced by James Macpherson, and with Edward Williams (renamed Iolo Morganwg) and his invented Gorsedd rites performed on Primrose Hill, London, in 1792. E J Cowan, 'The invention of Celtic Scotland', 1-23 in E J Cowan and R A McDonald (ed), Alba: Celtic Scotland in the Middle Ages (East Linton, 2000) at p 19, quotes the controversial scholar John Pinkerton, writing at the end of the eighteenth century: 'this may be called the Celtic century, for all Europe has been inundated with nonsense about the Celts'.
14 M Chapman, The Celts: The Construction of a Myth (New York, 1992) 214; P Sims-Williams, 'The visionary Celt: the construction of an ethnic preconception', Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 11 (1986) 71-96, at p 72.
15 Sims-Williams, 'The visionary Celt', 72. This view of the Celts was given full voice in the work of nineteenth-century figures such as Ernest Renan and Matthew Arnold, discussed below.
16 M Chapman, The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture (London, 1978) 17; Chapman, The Celts, 126-128; Cowan, 'The invention of Celtic Scotland', 5-6; R R Davies, Historical Perception: Celts and Saxons (Cardiff, 1979) 14-16; R R Davies, 'Buchedd a moes y Cymry: the manners and morals of the Welsh', Welsh History Review 12 (1984-1985) 155-179 at p 174, 178-179; U Morét, 'Historians and languages: medieval and humanist views of Celtic Britain', 60-72 in T Brotherstone and D Ditchburn (ed), Freedom and Authority: Scotland c.1050-1650 (East Linton, 2000) at p 62, 70; C A Snyder, 'Celtic continuity in the middle ages', Medieval Perspectives 11 (1996) 164-178, at p 172-173. The barbarisation of the Celts by twelfth-century English writers has been explored in a series of articles by John Gillingham: 'The context and purposes of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain', Anglo-Norman Studies 13 (1990) 99-118; 'Conquering the barbarians: war and chivalry in twelfth-century Britain', Haskins Society Journal 4 (1992) 67-84; 'The beginnings of English imperialism', Journal of Historical Sociology 5 (1992) 392-409; 'Civilising the English? The English histories of William of Malmesbury and David Hume', Historical Research 74 (2001) 17-43. He argues that 'the first English historian to adopt a new and contemptuous attitude to Celtic peoples' - an attitude that went beyond simply equating barbarians with pagans - was William of Malmesbury. See especially his 'The context and purposes of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History', 106-109; 'Conquering the barbarians', 69-70, and the works cited therein.
17 Morét, 'Historians and languages', 65, 69-71; Piggott, Celts, Saxons and the Early Antiquaries, 13.
18 Chapman, Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture, 28; Davies, 'Buchedd a moes y Cymry', 175; S Gilley, 'English attitudes to the Irish in England, 1780-1900' 81-110 in C Holmes (ed), Immigrants and Minorities in British Society (London, 1978) at p 81; Gillingham, 'Civilising the English?', 41-42; Sims-Williams, 'The visionary Celt', 77. Sims-Williams provides a list of such 'Celtic conspirators', including Geoffrey of Monmouth, Gerald of Wales, James Macpherson, and Edward Williams (Iolo Morganwg).
19 Horsman, 'Origins of racial Anglo-Saxonism', 78-80.
21 McDonald, 'Celtic ethnic kinship', 336; Sims-Williams, 'The visionary Celt', 74.
22 Horsman, 'Origins of racial Anglo-Saxonism', 77.
23 J C Pritchard, Researches into the Physical History of Man, 3rd Edition (London, 1836-1847) vol III, 342, 377-378.
24 Colley, 'Britishness and otherness', 323.
25 See B Dickins, 'John Mitchell Kemble and Old English scholarship', Proceedings of the British Academy 25 (1939) 51-84; R A Wiley, 'Anglo-Saxon Kemble: the life and works of John Mitchell Kemble 1807-1857, philologist, historian, archaeologist', Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 1 (1979) 165-273. Kemble had studied in Germany, and was one of the first English scholars to introduce the objectivist methods of German philology into the English mainstream. This gave his work a greater air of scholarship and technical proficiency than had been evidenced in English histories up to that time.
26 J M Kemble, The Saxons in England: a History of the English Commonwealth till the Period of the Norman Conquest (London, 1849) vol I, 14. See also White, 'Changing views of the adventus Saxonum', 586.
27 Kemble, Saxons in England vol I, 23. In his scepticism regarding the primary sources for the Anglo-Saxon invasion, Kemble followed the lead of Sharon Turner, History of the Anglo-Saxons (London, 1799-1805), who also questioned the historical value of the received accounts.
28 Kemble, Saxons in England vol I, v.
29 For instance, in commenting on Kemble's work, the Edinburgh Review concluded that 'the true mission of the Germanic people [in the fifth and sixth centuries] was to renovate and reorganise the western world ... re-infusing life and vigour ... into the effete and marrowless institutions of the Roman world': Edinburgh Review 89 (January 1849) 82, cited in Horsman, 'Origins of racial Anglo-Saxonism', 93.
30 This view was popularised, amongst other outlets, in the short-lived magazine of 1849 and 1850 called The Anglo-Saxon: see Horsman, 'Origins of racial Anglo-Saxonism', 97-98.
31 C Hill, Puritanism and Revolution: Studies in Interpretation of the English Revolution of the 17th Century (London, 1958) 115.
32 P Sims-Williams, 'The settlement of England in Bede and the Chronicle', Anglo-Saxon England 12 (1983) 1-41 at p 1-2.
33 This paper was reprinted in Edwin Guest's Origines Celticae (London, 1883) vol II. See also White, 'Changing views of the adventus Saxonum', 587-588.
34 Bede himself had relied on the testimony of Gildas, although nineteenth-century historiography did not readily account for the extent of Gildas's influence. On this point, see M Miller, 'Bede's use of Gildas', English Historical Review 90 (1975), 241-261 at p 241; Sims-Williams, 'The settlement of England', 27.
35 Edward Freeman is famously quoted: 'Though the literal extirpation of a nation is an impossibility, there is every reason to believe that the Celtic inhabitants of those parts of Britain which had become English at the end of the sixth century had been as nearly extirpated as a nation can be. The women would doubtless be often spared; but as far as the male sex is concerned, we may feel sure that death, emigration or personal slavery were the only alternatives that the vanquished found at the hands of our fathers ... How far the vanquished were slain, how far they were simply driven out, we can never tell. It is enough that they were exterminated, got rid of in one way or another, within what now became the English border', in his Four Oxford Lectures, 74, 76. The 'Teutomaniac' reference is from Gilley, 'English attitudes to the Irish in England', 86.
36 For example, J R Green, A Short History of the English People (London, 1894); W Stubbs, Selected Charters Illustrative of English Constitutional History (Oxford, 1870; rev 1913-1969); W Stubbs, The Constitutional History of England, In Its Origin and Development (Oxford, 1891).
37 J R Green, History of the English People (London, 1877) vol I, 28.
38 N J Higham, Rome, Britain and the Anglo-Saxons (London, 1992) 3; K H Jackson, 'Angles and Britons in Northumbria and Cumbria' 60-84 in H Lewis (ed), Angles and Britons: O'Donnell Lectures (Cardiff, 1963) at p 73.
39 B Ward-Perkins, 'Why did the Anglo-Saxons not become more British?', English Historical Review 115 (2000) 513-533 at p 518.
40 This was first argued by Francis Palgrave in his The Rise and Progress of the English Commonwealth of 1832. Palgrave argued for the continuity of Roman institutions and law in western Europe after the fifth century; although though he was less easily able to uncover relevant evidence for Britain, he emphasised the continuity of Roman 'symbols' and rulership such as in Bede's list of imperium-wielding kings: See R Smith, 'European nationality, race, and commonwealth in the writings of Sir Francis Palgrave, 1788-1861', 233-253 in A Smyth (ed), Medieval Europeans: Studies in Ethnic Identity and National Perspectives in Medieval Europe (Hampshire, 1998) at p 239-241.
41 For example J R Green, The Conquest of England (London, 1883) 3-4.
42 Gilley, 'English attitudes to the Irish in England', 88.
43 Ward-Perkins, 'Why did the Anglo-Saxons', 519.
44 G Allen, 'Are we Englishmen?', Fortnightly Review 28 (1880) 472-487, repr in M D Biddiss (ed), Images of Race (Leicester, 1979) at p 238-256.
45 T Huxley, 'The forefathers and forerunners of the English people', Pall Mall Gazette (10 January 1870) 8-9, repr in Biddiss, Images of Race, at p 159-169; J Beddoe, The Races of Britain (London, 1885).
46 Published as M Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (London, 1867). Renan's most influential essay, 'La Poesie des races celtique' ('The poetry of the Celtic races') was published in 1854. At a similar time, the 'rediscovery' of Scottish (Gaelic-speaking) Highland culture and history was being promoted through the work of the largely unsung scholar W F Skene, especially his three-volume Celtic Scotland: A History of Ancient Alban (Edinburgh, 1876-1880). On Skene's contribution, see Cowan, 'The invention of Celtic Scotland', 1-4.
47 McDonald, 'Celtic ethnic kinship', 336; Sims-Williams, 'The visionary Celt', 74.
48 W H Stevenson, 'Dr Guest and the English conquest of south Britain', English Historical Review 17 (1902) 625-642.
49 H M Chadwick, Studies on Anglo-Saxon Institutions (Cambridge, 1905) 90-96, 372-373.
50 R F Rushbrook Williams, 'The status of the Welsh in the Laws of Ine', English Historical Review 30 (1915) 271-277 at p 273.
51 M Gelling, 'Why aren't we speaking Welsh?', Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 6 (1993) 51-56 at p 53; Sims-Williams, 'The settlement of England', 4; White, 'Changing views of the adventus Saxonum', 589. See especially R Lennard, 'The character of the Anglo-Saxon conquests: a disputed point', History NS 18 (1933) 204-215 at p 204, for a summary of the views of his day: 'today it would, I suppose, be more orthodox to maintain ... that "the Saxons, Jutes and English worked together against the Britons", that "the Saxons swept with fire and sword all over eastern Britain, and even as far as the western Sea"'. For a contrary view, see J N L Myres, The English Settlements (Oxford, 1937) 444-445, 447, who offered a different opinion: 'While there have been few advocates at any time of the idea that the native population was completely annihilated, there have been many scholars who displayed the tendency to reduce its survival to the lowest terms and to speak of it as an altogether negligible factor ... the best anthropological opinion would appear to envisage a very considerable degree of British survival'. He argued that 'the survivors of the native population were mostly to be found in the slave class, which appears to have been very large in early times'.
52 For example, Trevelyan, History of England, 28-29, talked of the English 'storming the earthwork camps ... burning the towns and villas ... slaughtering and driving away the Romanised Britons'.
53 F M Stenton, Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1943) 1, 18, 30-31, 64.
54 D Whitelock, The Beginnings of English Society (Harmondsworth, 1952).
55 J Moreland, 'Ethnicity, power and the English', 23-51 in W O Frazer and A Tyrrell (ed), Social Identity in Early Medieval Britain (London, 2000) at p 28. Moreland notes, for example, the tendency for early-twentieth-century archaeologists to attempt to locate their work within the context provided by Bede.
56 Davies, Historical Perception, 24-25; D Lowenthal, 'British national identity and the English landscape', Rural History 2 (1991) 205-230 at p 209. Davies argued that 'It is one of the oddities, even absurdities, of academic history courses in Britain that they have generally chosen to ignore the peoples of Scotland, Ireland and Wales except at those moments when they have impinged, often unpleasantly and obstreperously, on the history of England'. Indeed, even the recent television series hosted by Simon Schama, his History of Britain which screened in Australia in 2001-2002, remained Anglo-centric in its content and approach.
57 For example, E T Leeds, The Archaeology of the Anglo-Saxon Settlements (Oxford, 1913).
58 H Loyn, Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest (London, 1962) 6; White, 'Changing views of the adventus Saxonum', 589-590.
59 L Laing and J Laing, Celtic Britain and Ireland, AD 200-400 (Dublin, 1990) 66; Ward-Perkins, 'Why did the Anglo-Saxons', 532.
60 D Brown, 'Problems of continuity', 16-19 in T Rowley (ed), Anglo-Saxon Settlement and Landscape (Oxford, 1974) at p 16; White, 'Changing views of the adventus Saxonum', 590.
61 W Adams, D van Gerven and R Levy, 'The retreat from migrationism', Annual Review of Anthropology 7 (1978) 483-532; J Chapman, 'The impact of modern invasion and migrations on archaeological explanation' 11-20 in J Chapman and H Hamerow (eds), Migrations and Invasions in Archaeological Explanation (Oxford, 1997); H Hamerow, 'Migration theory and the Anglo-Saxon "identity crisis"' 33-44 in Chapman and Hamerow, Migrations and Invasions in Archaeological Explanation; C Hills, 'Roman Britain to Anglo-Saxon England', History Today 40 (October, 1990) 46-52 at p 47.
62 See White, 'Changing views of the adventus Saxonum', 593.
63 Sims-Williams, 'The visionary Celt', 71. A catalogue of O'Donnell lectures from 1955-90 has been compiled by C Parker, at http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/dept/scwmss/wmss/online/modern/odonnell/odonnell.html; the collection is held at the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.
64 See D E Evans, 'Celts and Germans', Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 29 (1981-1982) 230-255, at p 230; Lewis, Angles and Britons v, for the terms of O'Donnell's will which were more specifically directed towards 'the British or Celtic element in the English language'.
65 L Alcock, Economy, Society and Warfare among the Britons and Saxons (Cardiff, 1987) 267.
66 For example, Lewis, Angles and Britons. Note also the studies on early contacts between the Britons and Anglo-Saxons that were collected in N K Chadwick (ed), Celt and Saxon: Studies in the Early British Border (Cambridge, 1963) 1, in which Chadwick commented that further study was 'badly needed' on the 'intercourse between the old-established Celtic peoples and their more recently established Teutonic neighbours on the line which eventually became known as the Marches, or the Border'.
67 Jackson, 'Angles and Britons in Northumbria and Cumbria', 73. Loyn, Anglo-Saxon England and the Norman Conquest, 12, similarly warned that 'There is a need ... to guard against a modern tendency to look for Celts under every stone'. On this issue, see N K Chadwick, 'England is Celtic too!', The Irish Digest 82 (1965) 77-80, and her O'Donnell Lecture: 'The British or Celtic part in the population of England', 110-147 in Lewis, Angles and Britons.
68 G Evans and D Trystan, 'Why was 1997 different?' 95-117 in B Taylor and K Thomson (ed), Scotland and Wales: Nations Again? (Cardiff, 1999) at p 96.
69 F Delaney, The Celts (London, 1986) 156.
70 Colley, 'Britishness and otherness', 328.
71 H P R Finberg, Lucerna: Studies of Some Problems in the Early History of England (London, 1964): see especially his essay on the question of 'Continuity or cataclysm?' at p 1-20. On the contribution of Finberg, see N Brooks, 'Foreword' vii-viii in Frazer and Tyrrell, Social Identity in Early Medieval Britain, at p vii.
72 C Arnold, Roman Britain to Saxon England (London, 1984); A S Esmonde Cleary, The Ending of Roman Britain (London, 1989); M Faull, 'British survival in Anglo-Saxon Northumbria' 1-56 in L Laing (ed), Studies in Celtic Survival (Oxford, 1977); Higham, Rome, Britain and the Anglo-Saxons; R Hodges, The Anglo-Saxon Achievement: Archaeology and the Beginnings of English Society (London, 1989).
73 For example, Arnold, Roman Britain to Saxon England, 7. C A Snyder, An Age of Tyrants: Britain and the Britons A.D. 400-600 (Pennsylvania, 1998) 132, has complained that the reductionism of archaeologists such as Arnold, who exclude written evidence, has led to 'even less illumination of this murky period of Britain's past'.
74 See the discussion in D Hooke, 'The Anglo-Saxons in England in the seventh and eighth centuries: aspects of location in space' 65-99 in J Hines (ed), Anglo-Saxons from the Migration Period to the Eighth Century: An Ethnographic Perspective (Woodbridge, 1997) at p 87-88. Debate on the size of the population of late Roman Britain has led to an increase from the one to two million suggested in the 1950s.
75 For example, Esmonde Cleary, Ending of Roman Britain, 204.
76 C Thomas, Celtic Britain (London, 1986), 185.
77 For example, T M Charles-Edwards, 'Language and society among the Insular Celts 400-1000' 703-736 in M J Green (ed), The Celtic World (London, 1995) at p 729-735; P Garwood, 'Social transformation and relations of power in Britain in the late fourth to sixth centuries A.D.', Scottish Archaeological Review 6 (1989) 90-106; Gelling, 'Why aren't we speaking Welsh?', 51-56; Hamerow, 'Migration theory and the Anglo-Saxon “identity crisis”', 33-44; Hooke, 'Anglo-Saxons in England in the seventh and eighth centuries', 65-99; H Kleinschmidt, 'Beyond conventionality: recent work on the Germanic migration to the British Isles', Studi Medievali 3rd Series 36 (1995) 975-1010; Moreland, 'Ethnicity, power and the English', 23-51; C Scull, 'Approaches to material culture and social dynamics of the migration period in eastern England' 71-83 in J Bintliff and H Hamerow (ed), Europe between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages: Recent Archaeological and Historical Research in Western Europe and Southern Europe (Oxford, 1995); Ward-Perkins, 'Why did the Anglo-Saxons', 513-533. There is also debate surrounding the identification of Britons within 'Anglo-Saxon' cemeteries: see S Crawford, 'Britons, Anglo-Saxons and the Germanic burial ritual' 45-72 in Chapman and Hamerow, Migrations and Invasions in Archaeological Explanation; Faull, 'British survival in Anglo-Saxon Northumbria', 1-56; Hamerow, 'Migration theory and the Anglo-Saxon "identity crisis"', 33-44; H Härke, 'Finding Britons in Anglo-Saxon graves', British Archaeology 10 (1995), 7; H Härke, 'Early Anglo-Saxon social structure', 125-170 in Hines, Anglo-Saxons; A Tyrrell, 'Corpus Saxonum: early medieval bodies and corporeal identity' 137-155 in Frazer and Tyrrell, Social Identity in Early Medieval Britain.
78 Higham, Rome, Britain and the Anglo-Saxons, 198, 224, 236. He adds: 'it is not the superior but the inferior community which is motivated to destroy apartheid'.
79 For example, S Bassett, 'Church and diocese in the west Midlands: the transition from British to Anglo-Saxon control' 13-40 in J Blair and R Sharpe (ed), Pastoral Care Before the Parish (Leicester, 1992); S Bassett, 'How the west was won: the Anglo-Saxon takeover of the west midlands', Anglo-Saxon Studies in Archaeology and History 11 (2000) 107-118; M Gelling, The West Midlands in the Early Middle Ages (Leicester, 1992); P H Hase, 'The church in the Wessex heartlands' 47-81 in M Aston and C Lewis (ed), The Medieval Landscape of Wessex (Oxford, 1994); N J Higham, 'Britons in northern England in the early middle ages: through a thick glass darkly', Northern History 38 (2001) 5-25; P Sims-Williams, Religion and Literature in western England, 600-800 (Cambridge, 1990). For criticism of this prevailing view, see D N Dumville, 'Anglo-Saxon and Celtic overkingships: a discussion of some shared historical problems', Bulletin of the Institute of Oriental and Occidental Studies, Kansai University 31 (1998) 81-100, at p 81-82.
80 M Evison, 'Lo, the conquering hero comes (or not)', British Archaeology 23 (1997) 8-9; S Wavell, 'No Saxon please we're British', The Sunday Times (20 April 1997) 8.
81 S Oppenheimer, The Origins of the British: A Genetic Detective Story (London, 2006). See also N Wade, 'A United Kingdom? Maybe', The New York Times (6 March 2007) 1.
82 M G Thomas, M P H Stumpf and H Härke, 'Evidence for an apartheid-like social structure in early Anglo-Saxon England', Proceedings of the Royal Society B 273 (2006) 2651-2657; M E Wade, et al, 'Y chromosome evidence for the Anglo-Saxon mass migration', Molecular Biology and Evolution 19 (2002) 1008-1021.
83 For general discussion on the use of genetic evidence, see K A Brown and M Pluciennik, 'Archaeology and human genetics: lessons for both', Antiquity 75 (2001) 101-106; P Sims-Williams, 'Genetics, linguistics, and prehistory: thinking big and thinking straight', Antiquity 72 (1998) 505-527.
84 See J Collis, 'Celtic myths', Antiquity 71 (1997) 195-201; P Sims-Williams, 'Celtomania and Celtoscepticism', Cambrian Medieval Celtic 36 (1998) 1-35, and the references cited therein.
85 Chapman, The Celts, 219-224; Colley, 'Britishness and otherness', 313; S James, 'Celts, politics and motivation in archaeology', Antiquity 72 (1998) 200-209; McDonald, 'Celtic ethnic kinship', 334; J V S Megaw and M R Megaw, 'Ancient Celts and modern ethnicity', Antiquity 70 (1996) 175-181; Sims-Williams, 'Celtomania and Celtoscepticism', 1-7; Snyder, 'Celtic continuity in the middle ages', 164; B Taylor, J Curtice and K Thomson, 'Introduction and conclusions' xxiii-xlii in Taylor and Thomson, Scotland and Wales: Nations Again?
86 See I Bradley, Celtic Christianity: Making Myths and Chasing Dreams (Edinburgh, 1999); D Meek, 'Celtic Christianity: what is it, and when was it?', Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 9 (1991) 13-21; Sims-Williams, 'The visionary Celt', 74-77; Sims-Williams, 'Celtomania and Celtoscepticism', 10, and the references cited therein. For criticism of the concept of a 'Celtic Church', see W Davies, 'The Celtic Church', Journal of Religious History 8 (1974-1975) 406-411; W Davies, 'The myth of the Celtic Church' 12-21 in N Edwards and A Lane, (ed), The Early Church in Wales and the West (Oxford, 1992); K Hughes, 'The Celtic Church: is this a valid concept?', Cambridge Medieval Celtic Studies 1 (1981) 1-20.
87 For example, L Alcock, Arthur's Britain: History and Archaeology AD 367-634 (Harmondsworth, 1971); D Binchy, Celtic and Anglo-Saxon Kingship (Oxford, 1970); J Morris, The Age of Arthur: A History of the British Isles from 350 to 650 (London, 1973).
88 Specifically D N Dumville, 'Sub-Roman Britain: history and legend', History NS 62 (1977) 173-192, at p 173. See also K Hughes, 'The Welsh Latin chronicles: Annales Cambriae and related texts', Proceedings of the British Academy 59 (1973) 233-258; M Miller, 'Historicity and the pedigrees of the Northcountrymen', Bulletin of the Board of Celtic Studies 26 (1974-1976) 255-280.
89 Esmonde Cleary, Ending of Roman Britain, 204.
90 See Hodges, The Anglo-Saxon Achievement.
91 See, for example, H Härke, 'Early Saxon weapon burials: frequencies, distributions and weapon combinations' 49-62 in S Chadwick-Hawkes (ed), Weapons and Warfare in Anglo-Saxon England (Oxford, 1989); Higham, Rome, Britain and the Anglo-Saxons; Hooke, 'Anglo-Saxons in England in the seventh and eighth centuries', 87.
92 Cited in D Banham, 'Anglo-Saxon attitudes: in search of the origins of English racism', European Review of History 1 (1994) 143-156 at p 154.
93 B Bradshaw, 'The wild and woolly west: early Irish Christianity and Latin orthodoxy' 1-23 in W J Sheils and D Wood (ed), The Churches, Ireland and the Irish (Oxford, 1989); Frantzen and Venegoni, 'Desire for origins', 142; Snyder, 'Celtic continuity in the middle ages', 172-173. Sims-Williams, 'The visionary Celt', 74, states that the Celtic/non-Celtic antithesis 'is still very much alive on the fringes of the academic world'.
94 Colley, 'Britishness and otherness', 329.