A Brief History of the Celts

by Peter Berresford Ellis

  As the La Tène period progressed on the Continent we find half-timbered houses often two storeys high and sometimes even rising to three storeys. A Celtic village excavated at Monte Bibele in the Apennines has revealed a site occupied by the Celts between 400 and 200 BC with a possible population at any one time of 200–300 people. They lived in some forty or fifty houses, which were built of stone and timber, probably thatched, and arranged in a systematic pattern. The timbers show that they were houses of two storeys. The excavated houses were destroyed by fire about 200 BC and we can hypothesise that this happened during one of the Roman incursions into the area for the site fell within the territory of the Boii tribe dwelling south of the Po River.

  In the second century BC, the Celtic settlements throughout Europe began to change pattern and a system of cities emerged. One of the biggest was Manching, 8 kilometres south of Ingoldstadt, Bavaria, close to the Danube. It was a walled city, with a circumference of 8 kilometres, and the walls stood up to 5 metres high, enclosing some 380 hectares. Within the walls there was a system of well laid out streets and an orderly arrangement of the mainly timber buildings.

  Manching was the capital of the Vindelici and a centre of arts and crafts, including pottery. There was even a mint for striking coins. The Romans attacked and destroyed the city in about 15 BC. Excavations began in 1938 and still continue, and in 1988 a museum was opened on the site. Previous finds are divided between the Prähistorische Staatssammlung in Munich and the Stadtmuseum of Ingoldstadt.

  The great walls of Manching were built of a box structure of criss-cross timbers laid horizontally. A stone wall was built on both sides with the ends of the cross timbers inserted. The centre was then filled with rubble and stones. Caesar mentions finding such great wall constructions in Gaul proper and he called them muri Gallici. He was particularly impressed with the capital of the Aedui, Bibracte (Mont Beuvray), which was surrounded by a wall 5 kilometres in circumference and 5 metres in height. Bibracte was not destroyed by the Romans for the Aedui were initially pro-Roman. Its business life continued, with iron workers, jewellers and other craftsmen working in their shops along the main streets and its royal palace dominating the city. Bibracte did not fall into disuse until after 5 BC when the Romans and Romanised Celts built a new city, Autun, nearby.

  Numantia was another great Celtic town, situated overlooking the River Douro in Spain. It was the capital of the Arevaci, occupied from ancient times but achieving the height of its prosperity in the third century BC. It covered some 20 hectares with a well-defined street system and houses of stone or stone foundation, timber and clay brick. In 133 BC the Roman general P. Cornelius Scipio threw up siege works around the town and starved the inhabitants into surrender. The town was then systematically destroyed by the Romans and the occupants were sold into slavery.

  Maiden Castle, Dorset, and Danebury, in Hampshire, are among the best known of the British Celtic townships. They were originally built as hill-forts and grew over the years. The fortifications at Maiden Castle are immense and it seems they were constructed around 350 BC. The town walls enclosed some 19 hectares. Over the years the fortifications were added to with ramparts reinforced with limestone blocks. The inner rampart itself was a vertical barrier of 15 metres. Danebury was built on a lesser scale, but its exterior fortifications enclosed a site of 11 hectares. It was occupied from 650 to 100 BC. Danebury has been carefully excavated over the years, and the Museum of the Iron Age in Andover shows many artefacts and reconstructions of life in these fortified towns. Both Maiden Castle and Danebury were destroyed by the II Augusta Legion under Vespasian who subsequently became emperor.

  The most important sites of cities and towns in the ancient Celtic world, from an archaeological viewpoint, were Alesia, Bibracte and Gergovia in France, Heidengraben and Manching in Germany and Staré Hradisko and Závist in the eastern Celtic area. Alesia occupied some 100 hectares on the slopes of Mont Auxois, near Alise-Sainte-Reine. It was here that Vercingetorix had to face the starvation of his people or surrender to Caesar. The site was apparently so important that it was still used after Vercingetorix surrendered it to Caesar, and was not abandoned by its inhabitants until the Middle Ages.

  Gergovia, the home town of Vercingetorix and an Arverni stronghold, enclosed 75 hectares and did not fall to Caesar’s siege tactics. Even more spectacular was an unnamed town at Heidengraben, on the Swabian Alb north-east of Urach. The site covered an incredible 1660 hectares and was defended by walls and gates. An area of 153 hectares in the southern part of the walled-in site was given additional protection by ramparts and pits and was, perhaps, the aristocratic or royal quarter. Finds suggest it was built in the second century BC but, sadly, no full-scale excavations have yet been made. No evidence of when it fell into disuse has been found but it seems likely that the Celts who occupied it formed part of the great Helvetian confederation and that they abandoned it when they began their westward migration around 58 BC.

  Staré Hradisko, 18 kilometres east of Prostejov in Moravia, was a site of 40 hectares but surrounded by a chain of fortifications some 3.2 kilometres in circumference. It appears to be one of the most important eastern Celtic towns. Závist, south of Prague, at the confluence of the Beraun and Moldau, was another important eastern Celtic town and the site of a Celtic religious sanctuary. Its earliest fortifications date back to the sixth and fifth centuries BC. By the second century BC the town covered 170 hectares. In the last decades BC, as the Celts were being forced westward by the pressure of the incoming Germanic tribes from the north and Slavs from the east, the town was burnt, presumably either in an attack or by the Celts themselves. Caesar says that when the Helvetii and their allies moved westward they adopted a scorched earth policy rather than leave their townships and immovable wealth to the invaders.

  The evidence in both Gaul and Britain is that the fortified sites had generally fallen into disuse during the late La Tène period. Having no enemies, the Celts often lived in unwalled farming communities or in the great cities. Then, firstly with the threat from the Romans and then with the threat from the Germanic tribes, the Celts reoccupied the fortified sites and strengthened them.

  The excavation of these fortified towns or hill-forts leaves one open-mouthed at the craftsmanship of the Celtic architects and builders. There are literally hundreds of hill-forts and thousands of ring-forts throughout the ancient Celtic world. The work involved in moving such colossal amounts of earth and stone is absolutely breath-taking. Of course, we must allow for centuries of burning and destruction by the Romans and Germanic tribes before we can understand what the face of Celtic Europe really looked like.

  While the vast majority of constructions were of wood, the ancient Celts also built in stone and many examples have survived. One of the best-preserved early Celtic villages built in stone is Chysauster, at Madron, in Cornwall. It appears to have been built in the century before the Roman invasion in the south-east of Britain, and to have been peacefully occupied until the fourth century AD. There are eight houses in the village, four on either side of a street, while a ninth house lies down an alleyway. The stone houses are oval in shape; an entrance passage, often 6 metres long, leads into a courtyard out of which a series of doors open into circular and rectangular rooms. The floors were stone-faced. Some of these rooms were for living in, others apparently for working. One of the houses had underfloor drainage, showing that the Romans were not the only Europeans possessed of such ingenuity. It seems that the courtyards were left open to the sky but the houses were either corbelled or thatched. Near the houses is a fougou, or underground storage chamber, some 15 metres long. Terraced and walled garden plots are situated behind the houses, a field system is close by and a track leads to a stream where tin working was carried out.

  Scotland seems to have more surviving stone constructions than many other places. The Celts probably built in stone here because of the weather conditions. The most visually exciting survival of early Celtic architecture is the broc
h, or defended homestead. Over 500 have been recorded with only a dozen of these outside northern Scotland and the western and northern islands. They are therefore considered to be an innovation of the Celtic tribes who later emerged under their Roman nickname Picti (past participle of pingere, to paint).

  Dr Ian Armit maintains that the first identifiable ancestors of the brochs are a series of thick-walled dry-stone round houses that began to appear around 600 BC. The Bu round house, on Orkney, was divided into rooms by tall flagstones.

  The typical broch was a dry-stone structure, with walls usually about 5 metres thick and with an internal diameter of 10 to 13 metres. Their tapering shape was designed to give them great strength. There is a single entrance, a door, chambers and one or more staircases leading to galleries. Inside were ovens, cupboards and stairways leading to the various levels.

  The most famous example is that of Mousa (Shetland) where the walls remain about 15 metres high. Another spectacular broch is Dun Twelve, Inverness, where the walls stand up to 10 metres and are 4 metres thick. Many artefacts were discovered here and are now in the National Museum of Scotland. A reconstruction has been made of the Clickhimin broch which was in use from the end of the second century BC to the second century AD. It has been conjectured that they came into being as a visual expression of the power of the maritime trading tribes. Dr Armit believes that there were more than twenty ‘broch villages’ in Caithness alone and that such groups of broch houses represented the architectural embodiment of social control. The petty king or chief ruled from the exceptionally tall and imposing structure, which was surrounded by a series of cellular stone buildings in which those of lesser rank dwelt. The broch would take its place as the equivalent of the local château or castle dwelling of the lord of the territory.

  The ancient Celts also built circular, timber-framed thatched houses on artificial islands in lakes, estuaries or marshland, called crannogs. The majority have been excavated in Scotland but there are also several in Ireland, mainly in the north, and some have even been found in the fens of East Anglia, in England, while there is a solitary example in South Wales. Most crannogs were built at the start of the Hallstatt period.

  The crannog is further evidence of the ingenuity of Celtic architects and builders. Once the site was located – say, in a lake – large boulders were rafted to the position and sunk until, eventually, an island broke the surface of the lake. Great numbers of wooden piles, beams and stakes were cut and incorporated into the boulders as foundations, and a wooden platform was built just above the water level. On this, the house was built, sometimes as large as 15 metres in diameter. A quay was added and, sometimes, a planked walkway to the shore which usually incorporated a drawbridge as a means of protection. The main purpose of these houses was to provide their occupants with protection from any sudden attack. Through Loch Tay there have been some fifteen crannogs identified.

  The Celtic builders in Ireland used similar techniques. Ring-forts, or enclosed farmsteads, and fortified dwelling places of varying sizes are found throughout Ireland. It has been estimated that some 30,000 to 40,000 sites have been identified. As well as crannogs there are also over fifty major hill-forts, including the spectacular stone-built Dun Aengus. One of the most impressive examples of Celtic stone building is Staigue fort in Co. Kerry. Built in the fifth century BC, the fort is strategically situated at the head of a valley around which the hills form an amphitheatre. It is also surrounded by a ditch. The circular walls, of dry-stone construction, still stand at 4 metres in height and are 2.5 metres thick in places, with steps and walkways around the interior circumference and two inner chambers. The entire structure is 27 metres in diameter. The door faces down the valley and has sloping jambs.

  When the Brehon Laws were codified in Ireland, the position of builder carried professional status. The Ollamh (surviving as the modern Irish word for a professor) builder superintended the craftsmen in their work. Kings – both petty and provincial kings and the high king – employed an Ollamh builder, who received a yearly ‘retainer’ of the value of twenty-one cows. The law even classifies the work which the Ollamh builder could undertake – nineteen classes in all – and the payment he would receive for such work. For example, if he was required to build a new kitchen his fee was the value of six cows. Obviously, this was no ordinary kitchen but the kitchen of a king or a chief.

  The ancient law text, the Críth Gablach, deals with offences against buildings and the penalties they incurred. The ancient Irish recognised the offence of damaging buildings. If straying cattle ate the thatch of a house, if someone broke down the door of a house and especially if someone set fire to a house, there was a whole list of fines and compensations to be paid. There are references in the surviving law texts to a lost text entitled Bretha Forloiscthe, ‘judgements of arson’. According to the surviving commentaries on it, this text distinguished between accidental fire, fires caused by negligence and fires caused by deliberate arson. It laid down the penalties for causing death or injury to people and to domestic animals in such fires. St Patrick in the fifth century AD is said to have preached strongly in support of the law against arson.

  Once again we see that the popular notion of ancient Celtic society as consisting of itinerant hordes, constantly on the move from one area of Europe to another and living in hastily constructed wood or mud huts, is entirely erroneous.

  13

  CELTIC RELIGION

  When they speak of ‘Celtic religion’, many people are referring to the insular Celtic mythology of which we have written records, albeit in a bowdlerised Christian form. However, religion is not merely mythology, although the sacred traditions of the latter often account for beliefs relating to ritual practices and festivals. There is, admittedly, a fine line between what is mythology and what is religion, by which we mean the cults of deities, and the rites and beliefs associated with them.

  As the ancient Celts did not leave us written records of their beliefs in a systematic form, some have expressed the belief that it is impossible to summon the pre-Christian Celtic religion from the grave and have simply left the field to those who have conjured the inventions of the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth-century romantics to claim all manner of weird rituals for the ancient Celts. However, when we examine the evidence, there is much we know about Celtic religion.

  Like almost all the religions of the ancient world, Celtic religion was polytheistic. There are over 400 names of Celtic deities, male and female, recorded but the vast majority would appear to be local deities, tribal gods and goddesses. However, that leaves some hundred or so who are to be found throughout the Celtic world; indeed, many of the deities are clearly the major deities of the Celts.

  Julius Caesar commented that the Celts were a very religious people, a characteristic still evident among modern Celtic peoples. As a Roman, Caesar saw the Celtic religion as something exotic, alien and barbaric. However, the themes of the common Indo-European inheritance are still there to be observed, and the pantheon of Celtic deities is not far removed from the pantheon of Latin, Greek or even Hindu deities. If we may overlook the Irish Christian bowdlerisation of their gods and goddesses, as they appear in the written mythology, they were as fallible, unpredictable and subject to all the human vices as were the deities who dwelt on Mount Olympus in Greek culture or the Hindu gods as depicted in the epics the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

  Our problem is that the Greek and Roman observers have added to our confusion by attempting to equate the Celtic deities with their own and also by comments which seem at odds with the evidence. We find a school of thought which claims that the Celts did not make images of their deities in human form until late in the Iron Age because, according to Diodorus Siculus, when the Celts stormed the Greek sanctuary of Delphi, their leader Brennus is reported to have laughed at the idea of gods and goddesses being represented in human form. ‘When he came only upon images of stone and wood he laughed at them, to think that men, believing that gods had
human form, should set up their images in wood and stone.’

  Yet Caesar on the other hand says that the Celts believed that the deities were their ancestors and not their creators, so, surely, they had human form? And, indeed, we have an image of Cernunnos, clearly in human form albeit with horns coming out of his head, from the fourth-century BC rock scratching at Paspardo in the Val Camonica, a long time before Brennus reached Delphi. Confusion lurks everywhere for the unwary. Cernunnos was certainly a major god. The name seems to indicate ‘the horned one’ and he is often depicted with the symbol of stag’s antlers – which remained a royal symbol among the Irish kings, particularly the Eóghanacht dynasty of Cashel. It has been argued that the Cernunnos of the Continental and British Celts is The Dagda (The Good God) of Irish mythology.

  At Nautae Parisiaci both his name and his description are given on a monument dating from around AD 14–37. It was found in March 1711, beneath the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. He is bearded, with stag’s antlers from which hang hero’s torcs. While the lower part of this figure has been lost, indications are that Cernunnos is sitting in the lotus position. There are over 300 figures of gods found in the Celtic world adopting this classic meditation position so closely associated in the modern mind with the Buddhist or Hindu religions. Again, in this we see an Indo-European common practice. Cernunnos, of course, appears on the famous Gundestrup Cauldron where he also sits in the lotus position. He is sometimes accompanied by a ram-horned snake. On one relief found in Haute-Marne he is depicted as feeding this snake. In other carvings he has a female consort – in examples found at Clermont-Ferrand and at Besançon she is antlered as well.