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misleading to talk about pre-Roman Celtic Britain as if it was a unified society. In fact the reverse was true, as we will see in Chapter 3.

      A side-effect of the debunking of the ancient Celts has been to deprive us of a species of archaeological book that was often very well-written and coherent. As the authors of Celtic histories believed they were describing a lost people, they were quite happy to draw together disparate strands of evidence to paint a vivid picture in a way we would hesitate to do today.¹¹ The origins and consequences of the Celtic myth have recently been reviewed by the archaeologist Simon James. He takes a decidedly minimalist view of the Celts, with which I am in complete agreement:

      The term ‘Celtic’ has accumulated so much baggage, so many confusing meanings and associations, that it is too compromised even to be useful as a more general label for the culture of these periods. The peoples in question organised themselves in a diversity of ways…and, it seems, spoke a variety of languages and dialects, which were not all mutually intelligible. The undoubted similarities and relations between them are best explained in terms of parallel development of many societies in intimate contact, rather than of radiation from a recent single common origin.¹²

      James considers that the notion of British identity is remarkably recent, and did not develop until the later Middle Ages.¹³ It is an idea that might be thought to have its roots in the Act of Union between England and Scotland in 1707, as that was the time when it became politically important to start thinking in terms of a broader British nation. But in fact there was little public enthusiasm for the idea until the 1770s, following the loss of the American colonies. Unsuccessful foreign wars can have unifying effects at home. The emergence of a broader British identity was given further impetus by the late eighteenth-century development of the second British Empire, based on India, which was beneficial to the interests of both Scotland and England. So any differences between the two countries were placed on hold.

      Archaeologists are part of modern society, and reflect the norms of that society; that is how the Celtic myth came into existence. It was then given intellectual substance by prehistorians, who have since been the first to debunk it. The modern notion of ‘Celticity’ or ‘Celticness’ has its origins in British insular independence movements. Many people in Ireland and Wales did not feel part of a Britain that was dominated by England. The situation in Scotland was more complex, because regional differences and traditional frictions between Lowlands and Highlands, Protestants to the east and Roman Catholics to the west, tended to smother the emergence of popular anti-British/English feeling until the second half of the twentieth century.

      The victory of William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690 set the seal of Protestant domination in Ireland. In the north this domination came from Scotland, in the south from England. During the eighteenth and subsequent centuries opposition to Protestant domination in Ireland was largely expressed through the Roman Catholic faith and the revival of a Gaelic or Celtic identity. Today the notion of Celticity still gives rise to strong feelings in Ireland, where the wrongs of the recent past are very keenly felt. Even in academic circles the archaeological debunking of the ancient Celts meets with strong resistance.

      The situation in Wales was perhaps even more complex than in Ireland. In Wales, Protestantism was the dominant religion, and the chapel formed the focus of many industrialised communities. The expression of an anti-British Welsh identity began, ironically enough, among London Welsh in the last decade of the eighteenth century. The stimulus was provided by economic migration from rural areas (mainly to the NewWorld); this in turn was accompanied by a huge movement of English people to work in the industrialised south of Wales.

      In the 1790s there was a revival of their literature and history by the Welsh population resident in London, and it took a strangely archaeological course. The following appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine in October 1792:

      This being the day on which the autumnal equinox occurred, some Welsh bards, resident in London, assembled in congress on Primrose Hill, according to ancient usage…A circle of stones formed, in the middle of which was the Maen Gorsedd, or Altar, on which a naked sword being placed, all the Bards assisted to sheath it.¹⁴

      The celebration of Welsh identity which accompanied the literary revival was focused on a colourful figure known as Iolo Morganwg, born Edward Williams in 1747. Williams was a Glamorganshire stonemason who had been working in London since the 1770s and was a member of a group of Welshmen who took an active interest in the literature, history and antiquities of their native land. He adopted the bardic name Iolo Morganwg (‘Iolo of Glamorgan’) and set about reviving (and sometimes forging) documents, and creating new customs that bolstered his passionately held views on Welsh politics and identity—which owed much to the ideas of radical political theorists like Thomas Paine, author of The Rights of Man. Morganwg linked his ‘Gorsedd’ (circle of stones or pebbles), and the ceremonies associated with it, to ancient times—even as far back as the Druids.

      Morganwg achieved something quite remarkable: he managed to have his largely invented Gorsedd ceremonies attached to the genuinely antique Eisteddfod. The Eisteddfod was (and is) an annual meeting that celebrates Welsh music, literature and poetry. The first recorded Eisteddfods took place in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries at a time when the Welsh poets (Welsh Beirdd) were still a distinct and ancient class with their own ‘orally transmitted rules and norms’.¹⁵ By the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, the tradition of the Eisteddfods was flagging, and the addition of the politically loaded Gorsedd rituals had a galvanising effect on their popularity.

      The first Gorsedd Circle bardic ceremonies to be held in Wales took place at the end of the three-day Eisteddfod in Carmarthen in 1816. The grafting of the ‘dignified nonsense’ of the Gorsedd rituals onto the Eisteddfod has given subsequent students of Welsh history serious headaches.¹⁶ What cannot be denied, however, is that while the reinvention of Welsh identity represented by Morganwg and his followers was very popular, it was an essentially middle-class phenomenon. The bulk of the Welsh population were English-speakers, and they expressed their identity and shared values through the chapel, choirs and active involvement in Labour politics.

      What are we to make of the modern invention and reinvention of a Celtic identity? The first point is that it owes little or nothing to the ancient Celts, who, as we have seen, did not exist as a single cultural or ethnic entity. So is it still valid? I believe it is, but only time will tell how long it will last. I would agree with Simon James that the modern concept of Celticness matters because it is an expression of self-identity. It is also a shared sense of difference from the English/ British who were (and are) seen as a threat. And it cannot be denied that the people concerned share, or more usually shared, languages whose ancient roots were related. Maybe their view of a common early history is flawed, but then so is that of the English. Simon James would go further: ‘That this tradition [of the ancient Celts] is now under attack does not invalidate modern Celtic identity, because to some degree all modern ethnic and national identities create essentially propagandist histories.’ Writing about the people of the British Isles, he notes:

      Ethnicity and nationhood depend on self-identity, on being aware of larger groupings and their interactions, and feeling involved in one of them. I would argue that, until the rise of the four historic nations in the medieval period, and even long after, a clear sense of large-scale ethnic or national identity—of belonging to an imagined community like the Scots, Welsh, Irish or English—was usually weakly developed among the mass of the people, who rarely had to deal with such issues.¹⁷

      If the concepts of Britain and Britishness are seen by many Welsh, Scottish and Irish people as no more than ways of referring to England and Englishness, what of the English? Even if they wanted to, they could not identify themselves with the Celts, as they themselves are the Other, the forces of opposition, which played a key role in the birth

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