Celtic History

Subtopic

The Celts in the British Isles

The long story of Celtic-speaking peoples in Britain and Ireland, from prehistoric migrations through the medieval flowering of insular Celtic culture.

The British Isles were the last major region of Europe to be reached by Celtic-speaking peoples, and they became, in the long run, the most important stronghold of Celtic language and culture today. To follow the Celts in the British Isles is to trace a story of migration, cultural transformation, conquest, and survival that spans more than two and a half millennia, from the first arrival of Celtic-speaking communities in the late Bronze Age to the modern Celtic-speaking nations of Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Cornwall, Brittany, and the Isle of Man, as part of the broader history of the Celtic civilization.

The British Isles were never a single Celtic culture. The Celtic presence took different forms in different regions, and the relationship between the Celtic-speaking peoples of Britain and those of Ireland was complex and shifting. The arrival of the Anglo-Saxons in the fifth and sixth centuries created a sharp division between the Celtic-speaking regions of the west and north and the Germanic-speaking regions of the south and east, a division that has shaped the history of the islands ever since.

The Arrival of the Celts

The arrival of Celtic-speaking peoples in the British Isles is one of the most debated questions in British and Irish archaeology. The traditional view, inherited from the nineteenth-century Celtic revival, held that the Celtic invasions took place in two main waves: an earlier Goidelic wave from the continent, which gave Ireland and Scotland their Q-Celtic languages, and a later Brythonic wave, which gave Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany their P-Celtic languages. Modern scholarship has tended to complicate this picture considerably, and the chronology and even the existence of these discrete waves are now questioned.

What is clear is that Celtic-speaking populations were present in the British Isles by the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age, and that the spread of Celtic material culture, including the La Tène art style, the iron sword, the war chariot, and the roundhouse, is well documented in the archaeological record. The introduction of iron working, the development of hill forts, the construction of oppida such as Camulodunum, and the production of high-quality metalwork all testify to a strong Celtic presence in southern and eastern Britain by the fourth and third centuries BCE. In Ireland, the archaeology of the late Bronze Age and early Iron Age is less rich in La Tène style objects, but the linguistic evidence suggests that Goidelic Celtic was spoken throughout the island by the end of the prehistoric period.

The pre-Roman Celtic societies of Britain and Ireland were organized into a large number of small tribes and kingdoms, each with its own territory, its own leader, and its own gods. Caesar, in his account of the conquest of Gaul, claims that the Britons of his day were a Celtic people with institutions similar to those of Gaul, and that the Druids of Gaul regarded Britain as the intellectual and spiritual center of the Celtic world. The classical sources, beginning with Pytheas of Massalia in the fourth century BCE and culminating in the detailed descriptions of Caesar and later Roman writers, give a fragmented picture of these societies.

Celtic Britain Before Rome

The pre-Roman Celtic societies of Britain are known to us from a combination of archaeological evidence, classical literary sources, and later traditions preserved by medieval Welsh and Irish writers. Caesar, who invaded Britain in 55 and 54 BCE, left a brief but evocative account of the island and its peoples, describing a population of agriculturalists and warriors, organized into tribes and kingdoms, who lived in settlements of various sizes and fought with swords, spears, and war chariots.

The archaeological record of pre-Roman Celtic Britain is rich and varied. Hill forts, ranging from small univallate enclosures to massive multivallate complexes like Maiden Castle in Dorset and Danebury in Hampshire, dotted the landscape of southern and central Britain. Oppida, large fortified settlements that combined political, economic, and religious functions, are found at sites like Camulodunum, Verulamium, and Bagendon. High-status burials, including chariot burials and rich furnished graves, attest to a wealthy warrior aristocracy with access to imported Mediterranean luxuries, while the remains of roundhouses, field systems, and storage pits give a vivid picture of the daily life of the Celtic population.

The religion of pre-Roman Celtic Britain is known primarily from Roman-period survivals and from the medieval Welsh and Irish traditions. The Roman conquest preserved a remarkable amount of evidence for Celtic religious practice, including the famous shrine of Sulis Minerva at Bath, the temple of the Deae Matres at Cirencester, and the great religious complex at Colchester. The medieval Welsh tradition, especially the Mabinogion and the poems attributed to Taliesin and Aneirin, preserves fragments of the older Celtic mythology of Britain, while the early Irish tradition, especially the Lebor Gabála Érenn and the Táin Bó Cúailnge, preserves a parallel body of myth and legend from Ireland.

The Roman Impact on Celtic Britain

The Roman conquest of Britain, beginning in 43 CE and continuing in fits and starts for nearly two centuries, had a profound but uneven effect on the Celtic-speaking peoples of the island. The lowland south and east of Britain, including most of modern England, was rapidly incorporated into the Roman province of Britannia, and the Celtic-speaking population of this region was thoroughly Romanized within a few generations. Cities like Londinium, Camulodunum, Verulamium, and Aquae Sulis became major centers of Roman urban life, with temples, theaters, public baths, and a Latin-speaking population. The Celtic languages of lowland Britain retreated before the advance of Latin, and by the fourth century CE, the population of Roman Britain was overwhelmingly Latin-speaking.

The highland west and north of Britain, including Wales, Cornwall, the Lake District, the Pennines, and the southern Scottish lowlands, remained Celtic-speaking throughout the Roman period. The Romans established military garrisons in parts of highland Britain, including the legionary fortresses at Chester, Wroxeter, and York, and they built the great frontier works of Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall, but they never succeeded in imposing Roman-style administration on the unconquered Celtic regions. The Celtic-speaking peoples of highland Britain retained their languages, their tribal organization, and many of their traditional customs throughout the four centuries of Roman rule, and they continued to worship the older Celtic gods, often in syncretic forms that combined Celtic and Roman elements.

Ireland, lying west of the Roman province, was never conquered by Rome, and it remained entirely Celtic-speaking throughout the Roman period. The pre-Christian Celtic civilization of Ireland is poorly documented, since Irish literacy begins only with the Christianization of the island in the fifth century, but the archaeological record, the early Irish law texts, and the rich manuscript tradition of the early medieval period give a vivid picture of a sophisticated and distinctive Celtic society. The Irish of the late Iron Age and the early medieval period lived in a complex of small kingdoms and tribal territories, with a warrior aristocracy, a free peasantry, and a class of craftsmen, poets, and religious specialists who occupied positions of considerable social prestige.

The Arrival of the Anglo-Saxons

The withdrawal of the Roman military from Britain in the early fifth century CE was followed by a series of dramatic transformations that would reshape the island for centuries. Germanic-speaking peoples from the continent, the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, and the Frisians, began to settle in the south and east of Britain, displacing or absorbing the Celtic-speaking population of the region. The process was long and violent, and it is commemorated in the work of the sixth-century monk Gildas, whose De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae laments the fall of Celtic Britain to the barbarian invaders, and in the much later legendary history of Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose Historia Regum Britanniae (c. 1136) provided a narrative framework for the supposed British resistance to the Saxons under leaders like King Arthur.

The Anglo-Saxon settlement pushed the Celtic-speaking peoples of Britain into the western and northern fringes of the island. The Britons of what is now Wales retreated before the Saxon advance and established a series of independent kingdoms in the western hills. The Britons of Cornwall, Devon, and the southwest maintained their independence in the rugged peninsula of the far southwest. The Britons of the Lake District and the north formed the kingdom of Strathclyde, which would persist as an independent political entity until the eleventh century. And in the far north, the Picts, whose language is now lost but who may have spoken a Brittonic Celtic language, established the powerful Pictish kingdom that would eventually become the heart of medieval Scotland.

Early Medieval Ireland

The most distinctive development in the early medieval Celtic world took place in Ireland, where the conversion of the island to Christianity in the fifth century CE was followed by an extraordinary flowering of monastic, literary, and artistic culture. The traditional account of the conversion credits Saint Patrick with the main role, but the actual process was much more complex and involved multiple missionary efforts from Britain and continental Europe.

The result of the conversion was a Christian Ireland that was, paradoxically, one of the most distinctive and culturally self-confident societies of early medieval Europe. The Irish Church developed its own liturgical and monastic traditions, organized around great monasteries like Armagh, Kildare, Clonmacnoise, Glendalough, and Bangor, and it produced a generation of remarkable scholars and missionaries who played a major role in the Christianization of Anglo-Saxon England and the continent. Irish monks such as Columba, Columbanus, and Aidan founded monasteries in Scotland, northern England, and continental Europe, and the Irish monastic tradition became one of the intellectual powerhouses of the early medieval world.

The literary and artistic achievements of early medieval Ireland are among the most remarkable of any medieval European culture. The great illuminated manuscripts of the period, including the Book of Kells, the Book of Durrow, the Book of the Dun Cow, and the Book of Leinster, are masterpieces of Insular art. The Irish manuscript tradition preserved a vast body of secular as well as religious literature, including the great cycles of Irish myth, the early legal texts of the Brehon law tradition, the bardic poetry of the high court of Ireland, and the historical and genealogical tracts that constitute the medieval Celtic literature of the period.

Medieval Wales, Scotland, and Cornwall

The medieval Celtic-speaking societies of Britain developed in different directions, shaped by their own internal dynamics and by the external pressures of Anglo-Saxon, Norman, and Norse expansion. Wales, the largest and most politically complex of the medieval Celtic regions, was organized into a shifting pattern of kingdoms and principalities that were gradually absorbed by the English crown between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries. The Welsh language, supported by a vigorous literary tradition that produced the Mabinogion, the poetry of Taliesin and Aneirin, and the later cywyddau of the medieval poets, remained the everyday language of the Welsh countryside throughout the medieval period and into the present.

Scotland was a particularly complex political entity, combining the Pictish north, the Brythonic Celtic-speaking south, the Gaelic-speaking Highlands and Hebrides, and the Anglo-Saxon-speaking southeast. The gradual Gaelicization of much of Scotland produced a unified Gaelic cultural sphere that extended from the Highlands to the Hebrides and, in some periods, parts of the northern mainland. The Pictish language died out sometime in the early medieval period, and the Picts were gradually absorbed into the Gaelic-speaking Scottish kingdom. The medieval Scottish Gaelic literary tradition, including the Fenian cycle of tales and the bardic poetry of the Highland chiefs, is one of the great literary heritages of medieval Europe.

Cornwall, the southwestern peninsula of Britain, was a Brythonic Celtic-speaking region throughout the early medieval period, and it was only gradually absorbed by the English crown and the English language. The Cornish language, related to Welsh and Breton, was spoken in Cornwall until the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, and the medieval Cornish literary tradition, including the Passion Poem and the Ordinalia cycles, preserves a small but distinctive body of medieval literature. The last known traditional speaker of Cornish, Dolly Pentreath of Mousehole, is traditionally said to have died in 1777, although Cornish survived in fragmentary form and has been successfully revived as a community language today.

The Viking Impact

The Viking age brought a new wave of upheaval to the Celtic-speaking regions of the British Isles. Norse raiders attacked the Irish monasteries repeatedly, and the great monastic centers of Iona, Kells, Clonmacnoise, and Glendalough suffered devastating losses. The Vikings established permanent bases at Dublin, Waterford, Cork, and Limerick, and they founded several towns that would become major urban centers of medieval Ireland. The political map of Ireland was transformed by the Viking presence, and the long period of Viking contact also brought new opportunities for trade and cultural exchange.

The Viking impact on Scotland was even more profound. Norse raiders and settlers established themselves in the Hebrides, the Orkneys, the Shetlands, the Isle of Man, and parts of the Scottish mainland, and the resulting Norse-Gaelic culture of the Scottish Isles became one of the most distinctive cultural zones of medieval Europe. The Kingdom of the Isles, ruled from Finlaggan on Islay by the lords of the Isles, was a powerful Norse-Gaelic state that controlled much of the western seaboard of Scotland until the fifteenth century. The Isle of Man, with its bilingual Norse and Gaelic culture, produced the remarkable body of medieval Manx literature and law that is one of the unique cultural achievements of the Celtic-Norse world.

The Viking impact on Wales was less dramatic, but the Norse settlers of the Irish Sea region, including the Wirral peninsula, parts of northwest Wales, and Pembrokeshire, established communities whose descendants can still be recognized by distinctive genetic, linguistic, and place-name evidence. The Viking age in Wales also brought significant economic changes, with the growth of urban markets and the increased importance of long-distance trade with Ireland and the continent.

Articles in this section

When Did the Celts First Arrive in Britain The prehistoric migrations that brought Celtic-speaking peoples to the British Isles, from the late Bronze Age to the Iron Age, and the archaeological and linguistic evidence for their arrival. Why the Romans Never Conquered Ireland The Roman expeditions, intelligence gathering, and strategic calculations that left Hibernia beyond the empire, and the consequences for the development of medieval Celtic civilization in Ireland.