Blood of the Isles

by Bryan Sykes

  We have seen what a significant genetic effect the Viking settlements from the late eighth century onwards have had in Scotland. Can we expect the same in Wales? Although the Vikings soon dominated the western seaways and had, by 830, begun to set up colonies at Dublin and other Irish coastal towns, there is very little evidence of them having succeeded in colonizing Wales. In the north they were actively repelled by Rhodri Mawr (Rhodri the Great), King of Gwynedd, who defeated a Danish attack on Anglesey in 856.

  Only in the far south-west is there any suggestion of Viking settlement. It is there, as we saw in an earlier chapter, that the high levels of blood group A have been used to argue for a substantial Viking settlement in what is now Pembrokeshire. We shall certainly see if we can find corroborative evidence when we look at the genetics. Based on the experience in the Northern Isles, if Viking genes are there in large numbers we will certainly find them.

  The Welsh kings continued in their internecine wars, sometimes making alliances with the Saxon kings against one another. So long as they were busy fighting between themselves, they were no threat to England. Only once did they unite under a single ruler, and then only for six years. Gruffudd ap Llywelyn began as the King of Gwynedd and it was from this position that he launched a campaign of murder and usurpation against the other kings that culminated in his recognition as the King of all Wales by 1057. Gruffudd’s campaigns against Mercia on the border with England revived the memories of Cadwallon, the last Welsh king to interfere in English affairs, so in 1063 the English decided to do something about it. Harold, Earl of Wessex, went after him. Gruffudd was pursued back to Snowdonia, where he was killed by the son of one of his royal victims. To show there were no hard feelings, Harold married Gruffudd’s widow, Ealdgyth, the granddaughter of Lady Godiva. When Harold became king in January 1066, Ealdgyth became Queen of England after six years as the first, and only, Queen of Wales. Her reign as Queen of England was even shorter: it came to an abrupt end when Harold was himself killed by the Normans at the Battle of Hastings the following October.

  The Norman Conquest had immense repercussions for life in England almost immediately. For Wales, the old border held the Normans at bay – for a while. Compared to Scotland, with its 200 years of unified rule under the descendants of Kenneth MacAlpin, Wales was in a shambles after the downfall of Gruffudd ap Llywelyn. Feuds between claimants to the now vacant kingdoms had created a chaos of murder and betrayal which culminated in the battle of Mynydd Carn in 1081. Two royal houses emerged: Gwynedd in the north and Deheubarth in the south.

  Again the perpetual problem of a secure border with Wales presented itself to the first Norman king, William the Conqueror, just as it had to the Romans and the Saxons before him. He had no interest in the conquest of Wales, but he did want a stable frontier. His solution was to grant lands along the frontier to his most reliable barons and, without positively encouraging them, to turn a blind eye if they felt like expanding their holdings into Wales. These men, the Marcher Lords, began by building castles along the frontier, first of earth and timber, then of stone. Then they really let rip and spilled over the border in deadly earnest.

  By 1093 the most aggressive of the Marcher Lords, the Earl of Shrewsbury, reached the Irish Sea coast at Cardigan at the mouth of the River Teifi. Up went a castle. From there he pushed south into Dyfed and built the huge castle at Pembroke. Another Marcher Lord launched an attack against Rhys ap Tewdwr, the ruler of Deheubarth, who was killed at Brecon in 1088 resisting the advance. It was the death of Rhys ap Tewdwr that, to later historians, marked the final demise of the Welsh kingship. It looked as if nothing could save the Welsh from the Norman threat. However, the Welsh did manage to fight back. The forces of the Marcher Lords were expelled from Gwynedd, Ceredigion around Cardigan and from most of mid-Wales, but they hung on around Pembroke, Glamorgan and Brecon. The Norman domination was never complete and there was a resurgence in the position of the Welsh princes. In the Treaty of Montgomery in 1267, Henry III recognized Llywelyn ap Gruffud as the first ‘Prince of Wales’ with control over several of the old Welsh kingdoms.

  However, Henry’s successor, Edward I, decided to conquer Wales once and for all and in 1277 led his army of 800 knights and 15,000 infantry into the heartland of Gwynedd, stronghold of Llywelyn, and forced his submission. Edward continued his campaign through Wales, building a new series of castles, including the impregnable structures at Conway, Harlech, Beaumaris and Caernarfon. A revolt in 1282 gave Edward the excuse for another campaign. This time the Welsh fared better and defeated Edward’s army on more than one occasion. However, Llywelyn himself was killed near Builth in December 1282 and resistance had collapsed by the following summer. In 1284 the Statute of Rhuddlan set out England’s sovereignty over Wales and in 1301 Edward’s son, who became Edward II, was invested with Llywelyn’s title ‘Prince of Wales’ at an elaborate ceremony at Caernarfon Castle. With the exception of Edward II himself, every subsequent British monarch has given the title ‘Prince of Wales’ to their eldest son.

  The Welsh made one final attempt to free themselves from English domination. In 1400, taking advantage of the confusion caused by the overthrow of Richard II, the Welsh rose up in revolt under Owain ap Gruffydd Glyn Dwr of Glydyfrdwy, better known outside Wales by the English translation Owen Glendower. On 16 September 1400 he was proclaimed Prince of Wales at Bala and his followers began their quest to regain the independence of Wales by attacking nearby English settlements at Ruthin. Intriguingly, Owen Glendower used his alleged descent from the legendary Brutus, first King of the British, to back his claim. He reigned for twelve years, even convening a Welsh parliament at Machynlleth in mid-Wales and he was recognized as sovereign of an independent country by the King of France. The revolt was eventually ended by England’s military superiority. Many of the great castles built 100 years earlier by Edward I had never surrendered, and by 1414 the army of Glendower surrendered at Bala. Owen Glendower himself was never captured and, rather like his ‘ancestor’ King Arthur, he vanished into the mists. Finally, in 1563, the Act of Union formally combined the political fortunes of England and Wales.

  14

  THE DNA OF WALES

  Wales is the only part of mainland Britain where the original language is still spoken. We might take that as an indication that there has been very little disturbance of ancient Welsh culture, and maybe very little disturbance of the indigenous genetic make-up. But it is clear from Welsh history that there have been very many foreign intrusions on to Welsh soil from the Roman period onwards. What we do not know is the magnitude of their genetic effect. Traces of Viking DNA are a strong possibility in Pembroke, and the effects of the Saxon and Norman incursions may have had substantial genetic consequences.

  Our campaign in Wales, for that is how it seemed, began in the early days of the Genetic Atlas Project. Four of us set off by car in a planned series of swoops on secondary schools throughout the Principality. This was in the days before we had discovered the easy delights of the DNA brushes. We needed blood. But we had not arranged to visit blood-donor sessions in Wales. We had yet to refine that approach. The blood samples we used in the early days were taken from fingerpricks, the collection of which had unintended consequences. One of my research team, Kate Smalley, had once been a teacher and she realized that hard-pressed sixth-form Biology teachers might welcome a visit from outside scientists if we gave a lecture and, in return, we might be able to ask for volunteers. That would give the teacher a double period off, if nothing else. We chose Oswestry, a market town on the English–Welsh border not far from Shrewsbury, as our first destination. My main concern was that, however well the lecture on our project went down, it might be hard to get volunteers to submit to a fingerprick blood test. The automatic lancets, the ones diabetics use to take a sample for blood-sugar measurements, drive a short needle into the skin. It isn’t painful, but neither is it completely painless.

  I had been through my presentation and the time to ask for volunteers h
ad arrived. I was met by a sea of blank faces. ‘It really doesn’t hurt,’ I entreated. There was no reaction. I suddenly realized what I needed to do. I got out a lancet and pulled back the spring-loaded trigger. I wiped the tip of my left index finger with an alcohol swab to sterilize it and, ‘ping’, lanced it, trying not to wince. That did the trick and soon we had everybody lancing their own fingers or, better still, their friends’. The drops of blood were soaked up on special cards, which we knew would keep the DNA safe until we got back to the lab. I don’t think we would be allowed to take blood these days. Everyone is so scared of it.

  After Oswestry we divided into two teams of two, one heading north to Anglesey while Kate and I set out for Bala and Dolgellau. At Bala I discovered the unexpected advantages of the fingerprick technique as a way of collecting DNA in schools. It is this. Because there is some discomfort involved, to take the test is a mini-act of bravery. And once the children had done it, what better thing to do, at the break after the lesson was over, than to run to their friends in other classrooms and taunt them into having the test. It certainly worked. Once they had given the blood sample, the children were running off round the school, to the staffroom and the canteen, collecting more volunteers. They had started a chain reaction. A queue of children, teachers and dinner ladies formed and we were busy for at least another hour. By the end we had over 200 samples from Bala, practically the entire school. By the end of the week, we had been to twenty schools and collected over 2,500 samples. Fantastic.

  What are we on the lookout for in Wales? The early blood-group work, as well as proposing the Viking settlers/Flemish weavers solution to the elevated blood group A frequency in Pembrokeshire, also noted very high levels of blood group B around the Black Mountains at the western end of the Brecon Beacons south of Llandovery. There is also abundant work from the early twentieth century by H. J. Fleure, an eminent anthropologist based at Aberystwyth University, on the unusual head shapes and Neanderthal-like faces of people living in the remote mountains near Plynlimmon in mid-Wales at the head-waters of the River Severn and the River Wye.

  Plynlimmon is not very far from the market town of Tregaron, where, while staying at the Talbot Inn in the market square one October night on another visit to collect DNA samples, I was told the fantastic story of the Tregaron Neanderthals. The Talbot Inn is an old drovers’ inn dating from the thirteenth century, complete with stone walls, oak beams and open fires. It was a dark night and the rain had not stopped all day. The fire was blazing away and there were a few local men at the bar, staring at their pints of bitter and glad to be out of the rain. We got talking, and before long I was telling them about what I was doing in that part of Wales and about the Genetic Atlas Project. We had evidently been overheard by a man sitting alone at a small table. He beckoned me over and I sat down. And then he began to tell me about the elderly twin brothers, both bachelors, who had lived at the end of a long track leading into the Cambrian Mountains behind the ruins of the Cistercian monastery at Strata Florida, further up the Teifi from Tregaron. I knew this track, as once in my youth I had been up it looking for an incredibly rare bird, the Red Kite. Now, thanks to successful reintroductions to the Chilterns, anyone can see these beautiful birds gliding and twisting every time they travel on the motorway between Oxford and London. But, back then, there were only a few pairs left, all of them in mid-Wales. I had heard that a pair was nesting in the woods behind Strata Florida and I remember walking for several miles up into the hills, first through the woods then up on to the grassy uplands. I did not see a Red Kite, but I do remember seeing a cottage, up a side track, which, from the washing on the clothes line, was clearly inhabited. I think this must have been the place. I don’t remember any other dwellings.

  My companion at the Talbot told me that the men who lived in this cottage in the 1950s and 1960s were Neanderthals. This fact was well known. So well known that a visit to the brothers was on the history syllabus at Tregaron school. Every year, in the summer term, the third-form History class would take the school van as far as they could up the track and the children would walk the rest of the way to the cottage. The Neanderthals obviously looked forward to the visits because, on the appointed day, they made sure they had plenty of cakes and lemonade. The children stayed for an hour while the teacher explained about human evolution and where the Neanderthals fitted into the scheme of things. Then they left and walked back down the hill to the van.

  Of course I didn’t actually believe these men were Neanderthals any more than I am. But I do still hope one day to find just one person with Neanderthal DNA. It is a vanishing hope as more and more DNA is tested from around the world. But could I recognize it if I found it, whether around Tregaron or Cardiff, or London or California? The answer is definitely yes – so long as it is mitochondrial DNA.

  I had once attempted, but failed, to recover Neanderthal DNA from the Tabun skull from the Natural History Museum in London. The Tabun skull was dated to 100,000 years ago and the teeth looked in fairly good shape. But when I tried to drill into a molar tooth, it was rock hard and I was terrified it would fracture. I did get a little dentine powder from the inside, but I did not smell the reassuring scent of burning flesh, the smell that meant success. However, I did manage to recover a few molecules of DNA from the Tabun tooth. When I put them through the DNA analyser, the mDNA sequences looked distinctly modern, with their closest matches in Israel, where the skull had been excavated. The big debate at the time, in the early 1990s, was whether Neanderthals were an extinct species of human, in which case their DNA should be very different from ours, or whether they were just a phase in the evolution of modern humans, in which case the DNA should be reasonably similar. I never felt confident enough about proclaiming that the modern-looking DNA that I had recovered from the Tabun skull was really from the skull, rather than from the archaeologists and museum curators who had handled it over the fifty years since it was excavated.

  I am glad I was cautious, because two years later what did appear to be genuinely ancient DNA was recovered from the Neanderthal-type specimen, the original one that had been found in the Neander Valley in Germany (Tal is valley in German) in 1863. This DNA was very different from any modern DNA. It had 27 mutations in comparison to the mitochondrial reference sequence, while even the most distinct modern DNA only varies from the reference by 12 changes. When similar DNA was found in two further Neanderthal remains, from Croatia and the Caucasus mountains, it provided reasonable proof that Neanderthals were indeed an extinct species of human. The last Neanderthal died in southern Spain about 27,000 years ago; at least that is where the most recently dated remains have been found. But that was before the world knew about the Tregaron twins!

  The brothers had passed away in the 1980s, so another trip up the track into the hills would be pointless. Since they were men, and bachelors at that, their mitochondrial DNA could not have been passed on to their children, even if they had any. And neither the man at the Talbot Inn, nor anyone else I spoke to in Tregaron, knew where the brothers had come from, so I could not track down a relative. The only chance was that, among the smiling children at the local school, there was one who, through maternal connections, would carry the tell-tale Neanderthal DNA. There was a lot to look out for in Wales.

  Examining first the matrilineal DNA from Wales, the living record of the journeys of women to this part of the Isles, the pattern of maternal clans is very similar to Ireland, and to what we have also seen in the two Pictland regions of Scotland, Tayside and Grampian. The clan of Helena predominates, as always, with 47 per cent of people in both regions belonging to that clan. When Ireland is compared to the whole of Wales, this close similarity extends to the other clans as well. When I divided Wales into three regions, north, mid- and south Wales, a few differences did emerge, mostly ones that showed a closer genetic link between north and mid-Wales than either did to the south of the country. But the overall pattern was one of continuity with Ireland and, to a lesser extent, with the
Pictland regions of Scotland. But, unfortunately, there was no sign of any Neanderthal mDNA.

  When I looked at the patrilineal Y-chromosomes in the three regions of Wales, the pattern was extremely interesting. There were two outstanding features. First, there was practically no sign of Norse Viking settlement. If you recall from the Northern Isles and from Norway itself, there is a high concentration of members of Sigurd’s clan; 20 per cent of Shetland men are in this clan. And yet in Wales there are virtually no men from Sigurd’s clan. I interpret this as strong evidence against any substantial Norse Viking settlement in Wales. The only hint of Viking ancestry is in the north, where just three men, Mr Roberts from Bangor, Mr Owen from Llanfair and Mr Davies from Meifod, are in the clan of Sigurd. At such low frequencies we must doubt whether they have inherited their Sigurd chromosomes from Vikings directly or in their transmuted form in the blood of a Norman. Since there were no Sigurds at all in our samples from south Wales, which was far more heavily occupied by Normans than was the north, I tend to think that these three gentlemen are more likely to be of direct Viking than Norman ancestry. You will recall that there were Viking raids on Anglesey which were actively repelled by Rhodri Mawr in 856. Perhaps it was from action around this time that Messrs Roberts, Owen and Davies acquired their Viking ancestors. Their detailed fingerprints are certainly matched in Norway.