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.

Beer and burial in the early Middle Ages

One of the big questions in early medieval British archaeology is the change in pottery.  What we now think of as England had become a thoroughly Romanized part of the Roman Empire, Christian, Latin-speaking elites, villas with mosaics, hot baths.  (See more on this here.)  Pottery was professionally made, smooth, thrown on a wheel and thus perfectly symmetrical, fully glazed, fired in a kiln.

But in the fifth century a different kind of pottery began to appear, shaped by hand but not on a wheel, thus not nearly as symmetrical (though it might be decorated), glazed on the outside but not the inside, fired in a bonfire rather than a kiln.  (One can tell the difference because a kiln gets a lot hotter, being enclosed, and the clay fires much harder.)  Why the change?

Now the easy answer was always that the Anglo-Saxon invaders brought a cruder way of making pots with them.  But this only makes sense if the local populations was completely replaced by the newcomers.  And in fact for at least a generation both kinds of pots were used, so there must have been more to it than Celts fleeing with their symmetrical pots while crude Germans and crude pots replaced them.

To further complicate the issue, most of the hand-built pots that archaeologists have discovered were used to bury cremated bodies.  And some of the pots have trace elements on the interior surface that suggests they were used for making beer.  The Romans had believed in cremation (though much less so once they became Christian), whereas Germanic peoples often buried people in elaborate graves with grave-goods, so this further messes up any effort to explain the change in pots by changes in the population.

One way to explain this is to start not by supposing a change in population but rather a change in who was in charge and who made the beer. While Romanized lords ruled the villas, they tended to have the beer made in industrial amounts.  They then distributed it to their tenants, who were I'm sure suitably grateful.

But if the Anglo-Saxons did not completely replace the local Celtic population, they certainly did a number on the lords in the villas.  Who was going to make the beer?  (And it wasn't as if they could drink wine instead--England is not really warm enough for wine grapes, even now, and wine imports from the Continent had stopped a few generations earlier.)

Beer making fell to the local women.  With no lords in the villas, the locals had to figure things out for themselves.  And one thing they seem to have figured out is that getting beer to ferment needs yeast, which they couldn't see (it's a microorganism), but which they knew was in bakeries or, and this was the key issue, in containers that had been used to brew beer before.  (That is, they didn't specifically know about yeast, but they knew about fermenting and getting it started.)  And they certainly knew that pots unglazed on the inside were more likely to retain the "fermenting principle."

So it may well be that women made these "cruder" pots specifically to brew beer, even while Roman-style pots were still being made for other purposes.  Because they were fired at a lower temperature (better for a pot not entirely glazed), they were more fragile and couldn't be counted on to last more than a year or so in use.  Pots archaeologists have found generally had a crack or leak.  But what more appropriate to use as a container for a woman's cremated remains than the kind of pot in which women had been brewing beer?  An intriguing possibility!

This blog post was inspired by the ideas of Andrew Welton, of the University of Florida.

© C. Dale Brittain 2017

For more on Romans and Anglo-Saxons, see my ebook, Positively Medieval:  Life and Society in the Middle Ages, available on Amazon and other ebook platforms.