The collapse of Roman authority in the western provinces during the fourth and fifth centuries CE marked the end of one chapter in the history of the Celtic world and the beginning of another. To follow the post-Roman Celtic survival is to trace the long transformation of a civilization that had lost its political independence but that retained its languages, its religious traditions, and its cultural memory into the medieval and modern worlds. This story, the most important chapter in the long history of the Celtic civilization after the Roman conquest, explains how the Celtic-speaking peoples of Britain, Ireland, Brittany, and elsewhere survived the fall of Rome and built the distinctive medieval Celtic societies that have endured, in various forms, into the present day.
The post-Roman Celtic world was not a single entity but a constellation of different societies that responded to the fall of Rome in different ways. In Gaul, the Celtic-speaking population was gradually absorbed by the Latin-speaking Gallo-Roman culture and by the Germanic successor kingdoms of the Franks and the Burgundians, with the Celtic language of Gaul eventually dying out in the early medieval period. In Britain, the situation was very different. The withdrawal of the Roman military, the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons, and the long resistance of the Brittonic Celtic kingdoms of Wales, Cornwall, and Strathclyde created a new political map in which the Celtic-speaking regions of the island became the nucleus of the medieval Celtic-speaking societies of the British Isles. In Ireland, never part of the Roman Empire, the early medieval period saw a flowering of native Celtic culture that produced some of the most remarkable literary and artistic achievements of the entire medieval world.
The End of Roman Gaul
The Roman province of Gaul in the late fourth and fifth centuries was a region in slow decline, weakened by economic crisis, political instability, and the relentless pressure of Germanic invasions from beyond the Rhine. The Celtic language of Gaul, Gaulish, was still widely spoken in the rural areas of the province, and the Celtic religious traditions, including the worship of the old gods and the activities of the Druidic order, were still very much alive. The great healing sanctuary of Sequana at the source of the Seine, the temple of Mercury at the Puy de Dôme, and the rural shrines and holy wells of every part of Gaul attest to the persistence of Celtic religious practice into the Gallo-Roman period.
The collapse of Roman administration in Gaul during the fifth century was not a single dramatic event but a long, drawn-out process. The crossing of the Rhine by the Vandals, the Alans, and the Suevi on the last day of 406 CE marked the beginning of a period of chaos in which successive waves of Germanic peoples moved through the western provinces. The Visigoths, the Burgundians, and the Franks all established kingdoms on Gallo-Roman soil, and the old Roman provincial structure gradually gave way to a patchwork of Germanic successor states. By the seventh century, the Celtic language of Gaul was confined to the western fringes of the former province, in Brittany, and possibly in some remote rural areas of central and eastern Gaul. The Breton language, the only Celtic language now spoken on the continent of Europe, is the direct descendant of the Celtic language of southwestern Britain, which was carried across the Channel by Brittonic-speaking refugees fleeing the Anglo-Saxon advance in the fifth and sixth centuries.
The Sub-Roman Britons
The situation in post-Roman Britain was very different from that in Gaul. The withdrawal of the Roman military in the early fifth century CE, traditionally dated to 410 CE, left the Britons of the province to defend themselves against the multiple pressures of internal political fragmentation and external invasion. The arrival of Germanic-speaking peoples from the continent, the Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, and the Frisians, began a long process of settlement and conquest that would eventually transform the linguistic and cultural map of lowland Britain. The Celtic-speaking Britons of the south and east were gradually pushed westward and northward, and a series of independent Brittonic Celtic-speaking kingdoms emerged in the regions beyond the reach of Anglo-Saxon expansion.
The traditional British response to the Anglo-Saxon advance is the subject of some of the most celebrated, and most disputed, sources in medieval British literature. The sixth-century monk Gildas, in his De Excidio et Conquestu Britanniae, laments the fall of Roman Britain and the victories of the Saxon invaders, and he attributes the disasters of his time to the sins of the British people. The much later Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth, written around 1136, presents a more heroic narrative in which a long line of British kings, culminating in the legendary Arthur, leads the resistance to Saxon rule.
The kingdom of Strathclyde, centered on the region of modern Glasgow and extending into northern England, important of the post-Roman Brittonic Celtic-speaking kingdoms. Strathclyde maintained its independence against both the Anglo-Saxons of the south and the Picts of the north for several centuries, and it was only finally absorbed by the Scottish kingdom in the eleventh century. The Cumbric language, the Celtic language of the Britons of Strathclyde, gradually died out during the early medieval period, and the region was eventually Gaelicized as part of the expansion of the Scottish Gaelic cultural sphere.
The Pictish North
The northernmost of the post-Roman British kingdoms was that of the Picts, a people whose language and culture have been the subject of scholarly debate for centuries. The name Picti, meaning “the painted ones” or “the tattooed ones,” was given to them by the Romans, and it is a name that the Picts themselves do not seem to have used. The Pictish language is known mainly from a small corpus of inscriptions, place names, and personal names, and its classification has been one of the most intractable problems of Celtic linguistics. Most recent linguistic analyses tend to favor a Brittonic classification, but the matter is far from settled.
The Pictish kingdom, centered on the region north of the Firth of Forth, was a powerful political entity throughout the early medieval period. The Picts fought repeated wars against the Angles of Northumbria, the Britons of Strathclyde, and the Scots of Dalriada, and they maintained their independence until the ninth century, when the Pictish king Cináed mac Ailpín is traditionally said to have united the Picts and the Scots under a single dynasty. The gradual Gaelicization of the Pictish kingdom, beginning in the ninth and tenth centuries, transformed the cultural and linguistic character of the region and laid the foundations of medieval Scotland. The Pictish symbol stones, carved with a unique set of abstract symbols and images of animals, warriors, and Christian iconography, are among the most distinctive monuments of early medieval Britain.
The Coming of Christianity to the Celtic World
One of the most significant developments in the post-Roman Celtic world was the Christianization of the Celtic-speaking regions. The conversion of Ireland is traditionally attributed to Saint Patrick, a Romano-British Christian active in Ireland in the fifth century, but the actual process was more complex and involved multiple missionary efforts from Britain and the continent. By the end of the fifth century, most of Ireland had been Christianized, and the Irish Church had begun to develop its own distinctive traditions of monasticism, liturgy, and scholarship.
The result, by the seventh century, was a fully Christianized Celtic world, in which the older pagan traditions of the Celtic religion had been replaced by a distinctive Celtic Christianity that combined Christian doctrine with many features of the older Celtic religious world. The Irish Church developed a monastic tradition uniquely well suited to the cultural and political conditions of early medieval Ireland, and the great monasteries of Armagh, Kildare, Clonmacnoise, Iona, Bangor, and Glendalough were among the most important institutions of early medieval Europe.
The Celtic Church also developed its own distinctive approach to questions of liturgy, monastic organization, and ecclesiastical discipline. The dating of Easter, the tonsure, and other matters of ritual practice were among the issues that divided the Celtic churches from the Roman Catholic church, and the long debate over the “Celtic Easter” and the “Celtic tonsure” was only finally resolved in favor of Roman practice at the Synod of Whitby in 664 CE and the subsequent councils of the seventh and eighth centuries.
The Golden Age of Insular Celtic Culture
The seventh and eighth centuries were, in many ways, the golden age of medieval Celtic culture. In Ireland, the great monastic centers were at the height of their intellectual and artistic power, and the production of illuminated manuscripts, metalwork, and stone sculpture reached extraordinary levels of sophistication. The Book of Durrow, the Lindisfarne Gospels, the Book of Kells, the Book of the Dun Cow, and the Book of Leinster are among the masterpieces of medieval European art, and they preserve a body of religious and secular literature that is one of the great cultural heritages of the medieval world.
In Wales, the period saw the consolidation of the Welsh kingdoms, the development of the Welsh literary tradition, and the foundation of great religious houses like Bangor, Saint David’s, and Llancarfan. The Welsh bardic tradition, with its complex system of meters and its elaborate praise poetry, was already highly developed by this period, and the great Welsh bards of the sixth and seventh centuries, including Taliesin and Aneirin, produced a body of heroic and elegiac poetry that is among the most distinctive literary achievements of early medieval Europe.
In Scotland, the period saw the gradual Gaelicization of the Pictish north, the rise of the Scottish kingdom under the MacAlpin dynasty, and the consolidation of the Gaelic cultural sphere that would dominate the Highlands and the Hebrides for centuries to come. The artistic achievements of this period, often called the Insular or Hiberno-Saxon style, are among the most distinctive of any medieval European culture, and the combination of Christian, classical, Celtic, and Germanic elements in works like the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels produced an art that was immediately recognizable and that has had an enduring influence on European art.
The Viking Age and Its Aftermath
The Viking age, beginning with the raid on Lindisfarne in 793 CE and continuing for the next two centuries, brought a new wave of upheaval to the Celtic world. Norse raiders attacked the Irish and Scottish monasteries repeatedly, and the great monastic centers of Iona, Glendalough, Clonmacnoise, and many others suffered devastating losses. The Viking impact on the political map of the Celtic world was even more dramatic. In Ireland, the Norse established permanent bases at Dublin, Waterford, Cork, and Limerick, and the resulting political fragmentation of Ireland lasted for centuries. In Scotland, the Norse established control of the Hebrides, the Orkneys, the Shetlands, and the Isle of Man, and the resulting Norse-Gaelic culture of the Scottish Isles became one of the most distinctive cultural zones of medieval Europe.
The Viking impact on the Celtic world was not purely destructive. The Norse brought new trading networks, new technologies, and new political models to the Celtic world, and the period of Viking contact also saw a revival of urban life, the development of new forms of political organization, and an increased contact between the Celtic-speaking regions and the wider medieval world. The eventual recovery of the Celtic world from the Viking impact was a long process, with the political unification of Ireland under high kings like Brian Boru and the consolidation of the Scottish kingdom under the MacAlpin dynasty marking the beginning of a new phase of medieval history.
The Medieval Celtic Societies
The medieval period saw the consolidation of distinct Celtic-speaking societies in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Brittany, and the Isle of Man, each with its own language, its own legal and political traditions, and its own literary and artistic culture. The Irish, the Scots, the Welsh, the Cornish, the Bretons, and the Manx each developed their own national identities during this period, identities that were closely tied to their Celtic languages, their distinctive legal and religious traditions, and their unique historical experiences.
The political fortunes of these medieval Celtic-speaking societies varied, but they all faced significant pressures from larger neighbors. Wales was gradually absorbed by the English crown in the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries, and the Welsh language retreated before the advance of English. Ireland came under increasing English pressure in the Norman and later medieval period, and the Irish language was eventually confined to the rural Gaeltacht regions of the west. Scotland, after centuries of warfare with England, was eventually incorporated into the British state by the Union of 1707. Cornwall became effectively English-speaking, although the Cornish language lingered in remote areas into the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Brittany maintained a distinct Celtic identity within the Kingdom of France, and the Breton language remained an important vernacular in the western part of the peninsula.
The survival of the Celtic languages into the present, despite centuries of political and cultural pressure, is the most striking testimony to the durability of the post-Roman Celtic survival, and the Celtic revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has given new life to many of the older Celtic traditions.
Related Topics
- The Celtic encounter with Rome provides the background to the fall of the Roman west and its consequences for the Celtic world.
- The Celts in the British Isles traces the development of the medieval Celtic-speaking societies of Britain and Ireland.
- The Brehon law tradition shaped the legal and political life of medieval Ireland.
- The medieval Celtic literature of the period is one of the great literary heritages of medieval Europe.
- The Celtic revival of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries brought the older Celtic traditions into the present.