Celts and Anglo-Saxons

Many in Britain today are looking forward to leaving the European Union, wanting to retreat to some (imagined) past when England was just for the English, and there weren't any of those pesky immigrants.  In fact, England has experienced waves of conquest, where the newcomers weren't just immigrants who blended in with the locals but conquerors who decided they were in charge now.

This of course is not a uniquely English situation, though since I'm blogging today about Celts and Anglo-Saxons, Great Britain is my focus.  After all, the US, a nation of immigrants, is also a nation full of people saying that just because Grandpaw arrived in this country poor and unable to speak English, we shouldn't allow in any more poor people who can't speak English.

The earliest people in Britain who we know much about (and it's not a lot) are the megalith builders who built Stonehenge, pictured above.  Then around 500 BC came the Celts, though there were various people like Picts who still lingered around the margins.   Then came the Romans under Caesar.  Then the Angles and Saxons.  Then the Vikings.  Then the Normans in 1066.  Things have been a bit quieter, invasion-wise, since then, but it's clear nobody British is "pure" anything.

Earlier I discussed the Romans in Britain.   Today I want to focus more on the ways that the Romanized Celtic population dealt with and merged with the Anglo-Saxon conquerors.

Because the original Anglo-Saxons didn't write, we know about them primarily through archaeology, digging up things like their pottery.  The Romans had had mass-produced pottery, thrown on wheels, fired in kilns, distributed from what were in essence factories.  One quickly stops seeing this kind of pottery after about the year 500, although a few examples seem to have survived as precious possessions.  (We find most of the earlier ones in graves or in pieces.)

The assumption has been that the rougher-looking, hand-shaped pottery that came into use instead was therefore Anglo-Saxon pottery, pots baked in open fires rather than in kilns (and therefore less durable).  But a lot of this pottery looks in overall style just like Roman pottery, even if not as professionally made.  It does not have the style of the pottery found along the lower Rhine, where the Angles and Saxons originated.

So the question is, were the Anglo-Saxon invaders trying to copy the local pottery?  Or were there local Celtic populations still trying to make the kind of pots that seemed right to them, but the centers that had produced them were gone?  After all, the conquerors went after the rich lords, not the ordinary people.  If ordinary people couldn't buy their pots from the shop at the villa because it no longer existed, then they would have to make it themselves, as best they could.

This is much more likely than that the Celts completely disappeared overnight (caught up in the rapture?), and the Angles and Saxons found examples of their pottery Left Behind, grunted, "Ugh.  Good," and tried with their crude techniques to copy it.  This kind of thinking can lead too easily to assuming that if one finds supposedly "Anglo-Saxon" pots, then all the people buried with them must have been Anglo-Saxon, and everything else in the graves must be a marker of Anglo-Saxon culture, even though it looks weirdly like Roman-Celtic material goods.  In fact, it is far more likely that Romanized Celts and Anglo-Saxons intermingled and intermarried, as well as trading bits of their culture, just as the Anglo-Saxons did with the Normans 500 years later.

Professor Robin Fleming of Boston College has done a great deal of work on this subject.

© C. Dale Brittain 2018

For more on English medieval history, see my new ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages.