The Celts
The Druids and the Picts
In AD 43, more than a century after the Romans invaded Gaul and ended the Celtic world in mainland Europe, they turned their attention to Britain.
Lindow Man
Roman accounts describe the Britons as a superstitious people who performed savage religious rituals, including human sacrifice. They talk of a powerful and mystical order of Druids, who worshipped in oak groves and cut down mistletoe with golden sickles. What evidence is there for these mysterious Celtic figures that seemed to wield such authority?
One compelling clue was found in the rural north-west of Britain. Lindow Common is a Cheshire peat bog – and an ancient crime scene: in 1984, the remains of a man were found embedded in the peat. Forensic science revealed that, when he died between AD 50 and AD 100, he had been brutally murdered. But it was the nature of his injuries that made archaeologists consider the role of Druids and the purpose of ritual sacrifice in Celtic Britain.
‘Lindow Man’ was found in what had been a pond, naked except for a band of fox fur around his arm. First, he received terrible head wounds from a blunt instrument. Then he was garrotted. It’s not known whether the cord found round his throat was used to strangle him or to break his neck, because that was also broken. In addition, his throat was cut, and it appears that he was allowed to bleed.
And then if that didn’t actually kill him, he had been placed face down in the pool of water to make sure. Elsewhere in Iron-Age Europe, water was considered a special place in which to make offerings to the gods. Lindow Man’s location in water implies that this was a ritual killing.
The contents of Lindow Man’s stomach gave clues to his identity. Examination revealed grains of mistletoe pollen mixed in a grain cake. According to the British Museum’s Dr J D Hill, ‘We know from one of the ancient writings that the mistletoe was sacred to the Druids. Since mistletoe pollen was found in Lindow Man’s stomach, people have always wanted to associate him with the Druids.’
The man died just as the Romans invaded Britain. Did local Druids sacrifice an important person in a desperate final act to appease the gods? ‘Imagine you’re being conquered by the Roman army,’ says Dr Hill. ‘This may well be exactly the time when you’re pleading with the gods for help against the invaders. It’s possible that he was a Druid. Certainly if you look at his fingernails, for example, you see that this person did no hard labour before he died. Human sacrifice is an extraordinary step to take, but it’s clearly one that was fairly often taken in Iron-Age Britain.’
The Druid doctor
If Lindow Man represents Druids and human sacrifice, there is another side to the Druids’ story. The Romans also described them as highly educated philosophers, soothsayers and even doctors. They were said to be the keepers of traditional wisdom, skilled in the reading of omens, the interpretation of dreams and the construction of calendars.
Before the Romans invaded Britain, Colchester in what is now Essex had been a huge Celtic hill fort and settlement, home to a British tribe called the Catuvellauni. In a sand quarry at Stanway near Colchester, a high-ranking member of the Catuvellauni was buried in about AD 50, seven years after the invasion. Interred with his cremated remains was an extraordinary selection of grave goods – including amphorae, a gaming board and medical instruments – which give us a remarkable insight into the sophistication of British Celtic culture at the time.
‘He ate meals in the Roman way, with cups, plates and bowls imported from Gaul,’ says Phil Crummy, director and chief archaeologist of the Colchester Archaeological Trust. ‘He was probably a Briton, but there’s an outside chance that he came from Gaul. He was what the Romans would have called a “barbarian”.
‘The grave goods also tell us that the dead person was a doctor, a healer,’ continues Phil. ‘We’re pretty sure about that because of the surgical instruments – the earliest medical tools ever found in Britain. They are not Roman; they are British. The set includes scalpels, forceps and a surgical saw. With these tools, it would have been possible to perform operations such as bone surgery, varicose vein removal and even eye operations. Traces of the herb artemisia found in a Celtic bowl strainer could be evidence that he also practised herbal medicine.
‘And he was probably a diviner, which we can tell from the eight rods that were also found in the grave. It is very likely that they were used for divination – not quite fortune-telling but a similar idea, like reading tea leaves.’
The Picts
When the Romans arrived, some Britons stayed put, like the man in the Stanway grave, and cooperated and carried on as best they could. Others resisted. With the defeat of Boudica in AD 60/61, resistance in south-east England more or less ended, and the British slowly became Romanised.
The Romans disliked the political power of the Druids and they went to great lengths to destroy them in their main base on Anglesey. The Roman war machine was finally stopped by the Irish Sea and by the Celtic armies in the north. So fearsome were the Caledonian tribes in Scotland that the Romans built not one but two walls to keep them out.
Most of what we think of as Celtic Scotland is a romantic Victorian invention. The true ancient Scots were a mysterious people called the Picts. The Romans dubbed them the ‘painted people’, with good reason. Their warriors fought naked, their bodies decorated with elaborate designs. The Picts like other Celtic tribes had no written language, but they did have a sophisticated visual one.
There was never one tribe called Picts but a confederation of fiercely independent tribes drawn together by the common enemy: Rome. Their formidable fighting skills were legendary, and they were never defeated on their own soil by the Romans.
But as with the Druids, there was another side to the Picts that the Romans failed to mention. Their enduring legacy is a series of standing stones uniquely decorated with graceful and haunting carved images. These include animals that were once native to Scotland, and there are also abstract symbols, the meanings of which are a mystery.
The Tarbat monastery
Misunderstood and misinterpreted, the Picts have fascinated people for centuries. But at Tarbat, on the north-east coast of Scotland, new archaeological research has revealed a whole new view of the Picts. Here are the ruins of the first Pictish monastery ever found in Scotland: a 7th/8th-century AD church, burial ground, large stone monuments, workshops, mill and farm. The pagan Picts had converted to Christianity.
This was much more than a place of prayer and devotion. Tools found here would have enabled the creation of manuscripts on an industrial scale – the previously illiterate Picts had been trained to write and the Celtic world finally had a written language. The Pictish artists would carve their new faith with quill pen and chisel, their remarkable standing stones combining pagan tradition with Christian symbolism.
‘We see here a very advanced monastic community in the heart of “Pictland”,’ says archaeologist Professor Martin Carver. ‘It brought with it beliefs that had been generated in Ireland, from literature created in Greece and in Rome. These aren’t barbarians. These are very well-read people, superlative artists, clearly intellectuals. These are people of the highest civilisation.’
The Picts did not vanish. They simply became Scots. Now their stones alone bear witness to their pre-literacy genius, but their meaning has been lost too. We can only speculate on the rich imagination and immense technical skill that made them and ponder what they mean.
