The Celts (In Our Time)

this is the BBC this podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK thanks for downloading the nighttime podcast for more details about in our time and for our Terms of Use please go to bbc.co.uk/topgear hello around 400 BC a great sway the Western Europe from island to southern Russia was peopled by one civilization perched on the northwestern fringe of this vast Iron Age culture were the British who shared many of the religious artistic and social customs of their European neighbors these customs were Celtic and those who made up the civilization were the Celts the Greek historians who studied and recorded the Celts way of life considered them to be one of the four great barbarian peoples of the world the Romans wrote vivid accounts of Celtic rituals including the practice of human sacrifice provided presided over by druids and the tradition of decapitating their enemies and turning their heads into drinking vessels but it seems that their apparent lust for violence was accompanied by a love of poetry and beautiful art how far should we just trust written sources of the classical historians in their writings on the Celts and what can we learn from the archaeological remains that have been discovered in this country with me to discuss the Celts in Britain are Barrie Cunliffe professor of European archaeology at Oxford University and author of among others facing the ocean Alistair Moffat writer an historian and author of the sea kingdoms the story of Celtic Britain and Ireland and Miranda elders Greene professor of archaeology at the University of World's Newport and author of of dying for the gods pirate kind of let's start at the beginning what do we mean by the term Celts and where did that term itself that name come from but I think what we've got to do is to realise that the term kelp means something different every time it's used really and if we start from the beginning the first time we see the word calcs used it's being used by the greeks to describe barbarians in northwest Europe what about a 5th 4th centuries BC yeah they're saying that those people up there are barbarians they're different from the ones in Africa they're different from the ones so let's call them Celts so it's a general term for northern barbarians so just saying this can't mean anything there's the greek word quel toy does it mean and it can its variously interpreted but it probably just means the sort of other people's or something of that sort very difficult to get at that one and what when when we come on a bit later people like Julius Caesar of being a bit more specific they're saying in Gaul there are people who call themselves Celts and they actually give some geography they live more or less between the Gehringer on them axis and the send so they're sort of central Gaulish but what no one ever does is to say that the people who live in Britain accord counts what they what we can say is that there are as you said in your introduction there is this shared belief system and shared value system over large slabs of Europe from well from the east of Europe right across to to Ireland and languages are similar across those areas but we can't say that every one of those groups was called Celt when the greeks called them one of the four Great Barr barians or Persians everything what did they mean by the term barbarians is this just non-greek or non Roman or did it take did it take us any further because as we're going to discover they're far from barbaric and the normal painted savage sense although the normal patient savage comes into the descriptions as indeed no I think what the Greeks were mean you were people who didn't speak Greek people who made these unrecognizable sounds like bah ha ha ha ha you know it's a derogatory term people who are other than us basically and that's that's what we get the whole time in the classical writers the Greek and Roman writers it's the stereotype of the other so so we are stable civilized people ordered people they are the opposite they are unstable there is no order there and and so on so so it's it's like a caricature what the classical writers tell us is the caricature of the Celts but like all caricatures there's an element of truth so up there meaning up from Greek and Roman Northern Europe this in northern northwestern Europe there are these people caught but we're not talking about a unified lot we're talking about lots of different tribes aren't we yes we're talking about a very large number of different tribes hundreds of different tribes and we know the names of some of these different tribes and some are more like each other than others but Celtic is a good general purpose for lumping them all together and saying something of value about the similarity of people up there north of the Alps meringue girl has green American live said that as refer to the dispute it may be or difficulty maybe about referring easily to the British as Celts could you develop that yes I think so I think what Barry's getting at it is something which is very true and that is that if we look at the classical writers of whom about sort of 30 or 40 whom you might mention the Britain the ancient Britons there is no source which actually mentions the Britons as kelps I mean Caesar for example writing the mid 1st century BC Cawthon britanni they're never called Celts Caesar does say that he noticed great similarities of attitude and customs between the south east british and the goals but that's as far as we get in terms of getting close to being able to call the Britons Celts so there is this problem people who are arguing against the use of the term Celts are worried that by calling Britons Celts and everybody else Celts in Europe you're kind of ironing out differences and getting away from the fact that there's tremendous regional diversity in Europe from about the fifth century BC when plateau of course even earlier but there are so many differences that some people wonder whether it's at all useful to use this blanket term because it is in a sense homogenizing the past and I think that's what causes the problem the other thing about calling Britons Celts is that that opens the way for people who wish to make a direct link between past Celts and present cults because in the term Celtic is used for people living on the western periphery in Scotland Ireland Wales Cornwall and so on and because Celtic languages are known about and people identify themselves as Celts you know living in these peripheries now it's easy then to elide backwards to say oh yes the british celts they were there in the iron age they're the same celts as the Welsh and the Irish and the Scottish now and that of course is nonsense but these the use of that blanket term tends to make that kind of homogenizing process which I think is academically you know a bit suspect well where does that take us then I mean are we talking of the British when I say British Celts am I talking incorrectly or am I talking about a degree of difference too far as it were the the Finch that became a non Finch in Darwinian sense if you hop over the channel and suddenly they're having this much the same sort of traditions and we find but very similar this sudden the other but they're not Celts the because Caesar and the other 39 classical writers don't call them cows they are not killed I mean do we stop the discussion and start talking about something else or can we still use the word Celtic to get us into this can you briefly because I was jumping together III think that the term can be used I think we need to be sure of what we're talking about we need to be sure of our definitions I think it's fine to use the term Celts for the Arnage past and even for our native Britain Avon's we know what we're saying what I think we do need to be clear about is that if we're using the term Celt for the Arnage past in Britain that if we're using the same term to discuss 18th 19th 20th 21st century identity in the north and west of Europe we're not necessarily talking about the same thing well I I mean this program rarely comes as close to home as the 18th very difficult water for us to get into can we just flip back 2,000 years where we're much more comfortable Alistair what is your not reaction but what's your view on these British Celtic what I want to do is to clear up a sort of platform so sure because we're going to discuss the British girl so in his call them something else but talk about what was going on then around the turn of the millennium from 2 or 300 BC to 2 or 300 AD that kind of thing I mean I'd be happy to call them hobbits oh darling captain scarlet and the mr. runs I don't really care but what I think is going on here is a very interesting historical three-card trick I've looked at two and a half thousand years of Celtic history in Britain and Ireland and basically in a rapid sketch the pattern is dead straightforward military defeat colonization marginalization pastiche led by Walter Scott a feral border shortbread tins tartan and all rest of it and now hey guys we don't exist so that's what's going on it seems to me it's a more subtle removal of our history than in the past but it's a removal nonetheless and Miranda's contention that the talk of British Celts and you know one ad in two thousand one ad as being unconnected and characterizing that as nonsense I think is amazing frankly of course their Celts of course they share a cultural coherence all down the west of Britain the most important and interesting thing I think from the point of view my point of view in this discussion is that these languages still exist they don't exist anywhere else in Europe kal Tiberian the Pontic and Gaulish all these European Celtic languages have died they're still alive here related languages are still alive here is punished garlic garlic the Welsh banks and Cornish and they hold inside them two and a half thousand years of history there's no question about that they're the most important surviving artifact if you like and the difficulty of course is that so few people who claim that the counts don't exist don't understand these languages they don't read them they haven't learned them and so on so in a way it's easy to claim that so I would rather as you say get over that put it to one side we'll call them hobbits or whatever you like my boy is dead straightforward these peoples have a great deal in common not only their languages not only their geography but also their history and that history has had a great deal in common with itself I suspect for a very long time come back on language because I I think I should I'm sure your your view on this that the people who speak a common language have got a common idea that are likely to have a common identity so I'm very happy with that but we talk about the Celtic languages in the West we've got to remember what we're talking about we're talking about a concept that developed in 1700 by the director of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford we're not talking about anything of of reality he could have called the languages of the West he could have called them Atlantic which I think we would have done now rather than Celtic he only called in Celtic because he was making a preconceived jump and we call them Celtic now fine there are languages which were spoken by the Celts in in central core so I've got no problem with that but we just have to be slightly careful about some how we use our arguments I don't disagree with you at all so you can see where these post-imperial Jess oh sure sure sure here we are you know having our history taking our name ticking away fellas yeah no I would go back to you know the point we started with that the Celts are constantly being reinvented and and remodeled and what we have now in in our concept of Atlantic Celts is is the most recent remodelling of a concept that started and thousand years BC just move to say you want then I'll ask my question I was just going to say a little bit about language because I mean one of the one of the problems about languages is that it's difficult to trace them back into prehistory but we do have sets of place names normally encapsulated in Roman writings and geographies and so on which do show that over this vast swathe of northern Europe there are commonalities of place names which you get popping up again and again whether you're in Ireland whether you're in Scotland where they are in in Gaul or Eastern Europe or even in parts of Turkey places like the Nemeton names and amytal meaning sanctuary or sacred place Brieger dunam these are fortified places these you do find in Spain in France in in Eastern Europe and so on and that isn't an incumbent indeed and that of course it is a very unifying thing so I mean in a way we can take language backwards what we can't do necessarily is to say a great deal about what people were speaking in the 5th century BC we just don't really have the evidence ok we're gonna stop that Roman if you don't mind can I just before just getting finishing off this first part about the cup because Miranda and then briefly there is we're going to come to sort of rather caricature descriptors typical descriptions we may think of them but this one of the things interested me I might have learnt it to school or something but I didn't till I went back I didn't read is the technological Authority that they had that we're talking about people who worked wrought iron which was difficult to work and and so on the technological basis of their society gives them in my view a kind of force that they stopped being scavenging trash scavenging tribes just jumping on horses every 10 seconds they are tremendously sophisticated in terms of the technology both in terms of iron and wrought iron and in terms of art styles and art is I think one of the most important keys to trying to get a handle on unified groups of people the the the art styles the the techniques of working bronze and on are absolutely superb even noted by the Romans as being absolutely second to none yeah but I just like to continue this the technology will come to the art in a minute this alistair know about this this does put a different cast on them if you have a technology if you have to cut down all this woodland you have to make all this stuff you have very very highly skilled people you have to have settlements in a in a very strong way this is whether stuff is made you and so on it's a different for many people this thing I think well wise I did a wearable oh there's no doubt it's a sophisticated culture and I think it's that sophistication in the production of the items that Miranda mentioned which actually drives the expansion and the spread of these languages in my view I think that Catholic languages spread through trade through the the fact that these people who spoke these languages in Central Europe had the grip of this technology and were able to take with it their language I mean it's a process of acculturation if you like that goes on I mean I guess a good analogy is the internet and I remember a piece in the independent a couple of years ago where Hamish McRae talked about English being driven by the internet and I think degree chaotic languages in Europe weren't driven by this metal technology which was so advanced I mean they made stunning weapons I mean what's the slashing sort called the spatha and so on which has a razor edge to because they can hone it to an amazing shot there's no if you're a cavalry warrior and you've got a slashing sword that will cut like a razor well you want one well the Masters of illustrations with swords in your book sparring aren't there Joe can I just take a pencil and come back to the source a moment um that absolutely right I would argue that the Celtic language evolved as very much a lingua franca for trade and exchange and then not just trade an exchange of materials but of ideas and technologies and belief systems and that that's why the language as as a unifier has got to be seen alongside technology and belief systems can we just stick with the technology okay technology what one thing that I love of calc Celtic work is the barrel now just a little bit of technology to be able to shrink an iron hoop onto a barrel is is a pretty gee whiz bit of Technology and to be able to do that on to a spoked wheel and they could do that own to perfection as far back as the 6th century BC and the chances are that the thing like the barrel was actually invented by the Celts yes now we have let's can we have a set of general agreement that will call the British Celts the British Celts will call them the British cast is that around the table do we have all right [Music] well good call them British culture and absolutely all right now we're talking about tribal lives here in this in these islands aren't we Barry coming can you give us some idea of the shape and size of the tribes we only know about the tribes as tribes really in the fest from the first century BC because it's then they begin to mint coins and we can find their tribal names and plot the distribution and find capitals and they were at that stage really quite small and Colchester for example capital of what one of the tribes Catalani more or less Essex and into Hartford she at rubato is based on so Chester pretty well Hampshire with a bit of Berkshire thrown in it's that sort of thing well what is particularly interesting I think is that many of these tribes at that stage map on more or less to the English country I'm not suggesting continuity but that there is there is a unit of government there that Mos Eisley talking about my return about 400 people 4000 people 40 people we very very difficult safe we just take population as a whole I think we've underestimated population of the island as a whole and many of us now would think perhaps you know 2 million in the Iron Age is not at all excessive so we might be talking about tens of thousands of in some of these slightly larger tribal groups like the cat Avalon e and the hierarchical structure was that did we have the 3 class system as it were we can get this through the archaeology to some extent if you look at the burials in the southeast of Britain you can see that there are kingly burials you can see their rich rich burials which might be sort of elite chiefdom burials and then you can see those lower down with just mirrors or sorts in and those lower down still you can recognize in the burial if it didn't even get in that those who are scattered to the winds yeah literally but four or five sort of grades you can recognize in the archaeological evidence so this is likely to be a reflection of a fairly structured society and the Roman writers looking back on this pair talk about kings and warring kings and so on and some of these people actually do call themselves Kings on the coins one did one one thing that struck me about Caesars remarks amyandhannah screen was that he said common folk commit themselves in slavery to the nobles and wasn't the three great exports of the British and British girls who were dog slaves and wool woolen cloaks so did he find that unusual that common fur committed themselves to selecting slavery to the nose was this an unusual thing he found him on the British gold so I think Caesar is probably talking from the perspective of being you know patrician Roman and clearly he belonged to a slave owning society and when he came to Britain he found and when came to Gold he found a strictly hierarchical society where anybody who counted where you know they were the Knights all the Druids were craftsmen but everybody else was in an almost sort of surf like state and I think he found that was that that was strange interestingly archaeologically we've got quite a lot of evidence for slave ownership we have gang chains for example from late on age sites in North Wales in gang slave gang chains you're on chains four five or six people at a time the chain gang goes where absolutely absolutely and working for the triangle indeed and that encounter yep and we actually have a wonderful pic a wonderful picture from the National Museum where Cardiff students were put into one of these slave gang chains to see how they actually worked in operation very good and it was very interesting to find how immediately you're in a gang chain your head goes down you become a kind of non person you become just a just just just a body as it were and it's unbelievable how defeated how humiliated being in a gang chain makes you because you have to behave like everybody else you have to be in exactly the same position as everybody else and that kind of gang chain effect I think you're also finding in some of the Arnage ball bodies that you get in Northern Europe including Britain it ropes around their necks again it's a humiliation thing and so this idea of degradation slavery contempt is something which I think we can find in the material culture and Caeser going from heads down to heads off Alistair Moffat there was a great culture of decapitation in battle one of the first things what not one of the first things but one of the things the Roman writers observed that after great battles when they've Celts the goldish culture swept him they decapitated their enemies they scarred the skulls they gilded them sometimes turn them in they put them in fences to ward off their enemies ghosts cars and so on what was that all about and how did it fit in with the the druidical aspect of the religion I think the reason that the Decapitator their enemies was somehow to capture something of their soul to possess them absolutely and as you say many of these heads that they had contained the song yes I mean and many of these heads are preserved in oil and so on and there are tales of Catholic chiefdoms refusing to give up a head the head of a defeated warrior for many pounds of gold and so on it's not something that's exclusive to Celtic society the Vikings did this too and there are stories of warriors right into the Middle Ages and the north of Scotland tying heads to their saddles and so on to show that they defeated enemies and so I think it was obviously a trophy thing in terms of these fences that you talk about these what one writers called ghost fences where priests would use skulls as a method of warding off or keeping out difficult or evil things that still continues as a tradition every Halloween kids make turnip lanterns and their their their druidical skulls in my view a memory of that at least can we trace back that heads to go into the Celtic religion they drew I was using it as an entry point for that as well so people think oh the Druids big knives circles stabbing sacrifice that seems to be sort of right well there are interesting relics of this I mean one of the the Druids came up in the seventh century at the Synod of Whitby amazingly which was organized to discuss the correct dating for Easter the Celtic dating versus the Roman dating and round one exactly wrong one one of the things they also argued about was the tonsured of mikesh tonsure and they were one again and wrong one again because they wanted the one that meted the crown of thorns you know that but limited go back don't let me finish this point because the the the Celtic tosser has been sure to have been how the druids looked because it was cut from ear to ear over the crown of the head and shaved at the front with long hair at the back and that's why they rejected it because it was a pungent whiff of the pagan past there is representation of the 3rd century BC from Bohemia showing somebody with that Celtic concea so this is what these men look like yeah we should take you know the Druids is all that and thunder and heads been compared he gave them great authority didn't he said they contiune that laws and and settle disputes and move across tribal boundaries and teach young people and astronomy and he talking about he's talking about teachers and leaders and and they didn't do military service and I didn't pay taxes there were special people in the community yeah I think I think what Caesar does as Miranda was saying earlier is that he sort of clumps all sorts of ideas together and some half understands them half presents them and what he's doing with the the Druids is saying that there are a whole range of specialists sort of vaguely intelligent and judicial religious specialists let's call them all druids and let's say they do all this what he's probably talking about is a whole range of different functions linked to different people but there is this class of the specialist people now what seems to me to be the key that Caesar has got that says in that text of his is that they are the intermediaries between man or people and the gods and you can't as an ordinary person communicate with the gods unless you do it through a druid so they had an enormous power yeah exactly but who were the Celtic gods man how much did the Celts believed in the Celtic gods well against Caesar and when we keep on coming back to Caesar I wish we had a few more no no no I'm he you've got to interpret sees we've got to try and interpret sees he didn't unpack she understand what all everything he was seeing nor did he communicated accurately it I always think of Caesars texts being rather like perhaps the letters written by the wife of a missionary in Africa to animate Nant back at home you know he goes through all these black boxes so that what she is observing and watch is communicating are two entirely different things but there are grains of truth in season that's what we've got to get at but um this this intermediary between the matin between people and the gods is very important in the Caesars sense and I do believe this that that and the druids connects communicate you virtually and make you unclean because they won't let you communicate with the gods and if they do that you're actually outside scientists very powerful yeah and they won't let you come to sacrifices which is the great punishment but who are these gods Alistair no one of the things that the Celts do is they climb Hills and that's interesting and on the top of the hills they build these enclosures and there's a huge one on top of yielding Hill north and the borders which may have enclosed as many as 500 hot stances and they build fires on these hills and the place names that Miranda was talking about remembers this I mean Tinto Hill and south of Scotland is from the world China for fire fire hill that's what it means and they built these fires at festival points at points in the calendar which were important to them as stalks Minh and as far as farmers and these for festivals occur you know it's sensible I mean Halloween if you like is as a memory of one of them hence the attachment of the town at lanterns and so on it's a very wispy and hard to catch memory so they climb Hills they light fires and they do a whole range of things as Barry said one of the things about the chaotic priestly class that characterizes them is an absolutely prodigious memory I'm still trying to get after this God it's actually it's obviously quite difficult to get any God so for the third time I think the literary evidence and the archaeological evidence give us a handle on the Celts as being people who believed in spirits place they they believed in a multiplicity of divinities in all aspects of nature so there will be sky gods there will be water gods there would be mountain gods there would be fire gold there'll be Sun gods and there's quite a lot of archaeological evidence for this and one of the most important pieces of archaeological evidence is the veneration of water shown by the deposition of important prestigious objects often military objects into water into marshes rivers lakes and so on and this goes on throughout Europe often these weapons are ritually broken to send them over into the other world and to generate a force by the breaking they're then cast into water and sacrifices are made to to the gods so and as alistair blowing down his book Excalibur is a sort of lovely relic of like coming out of the lake and being thrown back into the lake and so on but what do these gods do and what if I were a Celt what would the gods do there interact what do i what do I get from the what do they want from me you enter into a kind of contract with the goals so that Genomes yes well we can back project from the Roman period when the Roman period gives us Celtic God names on inscriptions they've got names we don't know how far we came back predict those names into into prehistory but say I mean there is one particular God who's mentioned in classical sources like Lucan God quarter eNOS he's the Thunder God needs a Sun God you will probably say to him I want to pray for you I'm very anxious it'll be a good harvest this year if I sacrifice this all that animal or even this or that human to you I will expect in return a good harvest and you were also in indulging aversion sacrifices so for example if you wanted to make quite sure you weren't going to be defeated in battle you wanted reward of something bad happening you would have a sacrifice in anticipation of that event um well just follow on what Miranda says we've actually got hard archaeological evidence for this so I was excavating some years ago at an Iron Age hill fort got Danebury down in Hampshire and we found the large numbers of grain storage pits where silos underground silos where people have stored their seed grain and putting it in the realms of the deities of the underworld the cathodic deities for safety in this liminal period between cropping it and sowing it and then you take it out and you sow it what you want to do is to have a contract with the gods to make that fertile so you make put an offering and we find these offerings in the bottoms of the grain storage pits and you might put a cow or a dismembered horse or even a piece of an ancestor or some horse gear or something in the bottom of the pit and then quite often we find that slightly later on in the year when the harvest presumably comes in you put another offering in which is the thank offering so one is propitiating the deities saying please and the other is propitiating the deity saying thank you can we come to the oral culture and Alistair muffin which is something that is a kind of despairing aspect really are these great civilization we hear about these fragments and showers comes and they didn't write it down we know that we are told that 300 stories could be remembered by some of the reciters or priests or which is quite easy to be I used to think that was a terrible difficult thing to believe till I got to know some very good classical actors in this country and their memories are pretty just what they could so that can be held so I believe all but they didn't write it down so eh why didn't they briefly and be more importantly where does that leave us in discovering as much about them as makes a real sense I think the Romans were unusual in that they did write things down many cultures didn't write things down not just the counts I mean I think the the the almost obsessive nature of recording things particularly after the period of the empire and makes the Romans different so I think the Celts were were not unusual in that sense the difficulties you see is that there's nothing on paper but why do we always trust things on paper I mean who would look at it who would look at the Sun newspaper as a reliable record of anything that's going to really affect the Egyptians wrote things down the Greeks wrote things disorder the Kelston I mean let's take it as a useful starting one they didn't write things don't know so lots of people didn't so that will do for an answer now what do you think we've lost by them not writing things down well clearly we've lost stories and that's something which we don't have I mean you know we haven't got a Tacitus we don't have a Caesar we're reduced to always making comments about the counts from it from the outside often asking questions which are asked from the outside and answered from the outside so you really get an absolutely authentic meeting as it were from that culture because it's been remembered that is why the languages are so important because they carry the stories inside them in terms of attitude in terms of systems for thinking about the world if you want to know more about Scotland land scots gaelic because it will tell you about that country in a way that english can only do so partially and the same is true in where I was in Ireland and in Manx in Mann and Cornwall sure you have an example many descriptions of the brownness of a cow is it absolutely I mean it's the you know the the there's that there's a cattle owning society a society obsessed by cows in some ways I mean some of the earliest epic the the Tyne book corner is about stealing a bull from the king of Ulster and when people in in Ireland in the in the early period want to compare their power they count their cows so cows are very important and the ability to recognize 20 different colors of cow is very important and the language is very sophisticated in that regard it's not sophisticated in other ways particularly so far as the modern period is concerned but it also describes nature the natural world very very well because that was important to where there was vital can I come to this are you sticking with the oral history point yes can I throw up you meant you mentioned as dimensions that the twins this great Irish epic note the here is is a piece of folk tradition that was remembered and remembered and passed down and modified generation after generation the eighth century AD version was eventually written down about the Trance century by monks and emasculated still further but we do have it written down this is a great pan-european epoch which reflects cattle raiding and all those things the irish modern irish have said this is ours you know this is our history i think that's not quite right it's European it's a European epoch a great European epoch of which we have one Irish version but we do have it and it's an amazing text about life in the past that takes us to something that we've we've held off from but it's actually the first way that people recognize the Celts when they're writing about them which is to do with the raiding their warrior qualities I mean that was that the Romans spoke with all of their war records of their bravery of their they would go naked into battle even if all the odds were against them and they would still go can we just talk about that and this this idea war rage and rage fit they got themselves into beforehand would you like to start over yes one of the things about the Greek and Roman writers about the Celts is that clearly it would have been in a war situation where they would tend to meet them and therefore that would be some uppermost in their minds and we get this picture from the classical writers of groups of Celts who were much bigger much taller much than the Romans and different and fought differently and fought very much as individuals rather than as part of a amassed army so a complete contrast with the sort of a disciplined Roman forces you get these individualistic bombastic Flambeau flamboyant people you know dripping with jewelry and body paint and whirling great falls around their heads and so on being very very fierce and frightening and the archeology to an extent does endorse this I mean I think it tends perhaps to distort our picture of Celts because what has survived in terms of the archaeology tends to be the the flamboyant that the rich metalwork the the horse harness the the swords the shields the this kind of spheres that that kind of thing but certainly if you look at a lot of high status graves in Britain in our age Celtic Britain one of the marks of status will be that you're buried with your your chariot perhaps and your sword your sphere and that would be something very important so and all of that as has come to give us this picture of this sort of war this war culture this rebel actually says the Celts are war mad but we can get behind we can get behind that a bit because here again we've got the classical world looking at something they don't understand trying to explain it if you look at it anthropologically what we're seeing is endemic warfare which is the norm for most of the world most of the time where warfare is part of the social system in the Celtic world and there were two forms of warfare one was the raid where you built your own status by going up and pinching someone's cows or or or slaves or wives or something like that and there are plenty of examples of that but the other is is the kind of metal that that brand was talking about where the two armies come together they face each other and they put out their heroes in their heroes shout yell abuse and I'm the greatest and all the rest they boast then they go into a cave in front of the tamara's of the world see what they're with the word goes back to the button doesn't work and so you've got these two you know the heroes fighting in front of the two armies and then when one lot of heroes fight they someone dies and they go back and next heroes come out and so on it's competition it's controlled warfare sometimes it goes wrong and the two armies fight but normally it doesn't normally in the Celtic warfare it is display and heroes just like the football matches now football matches an exact parallel to this sub endemic quality along but the Roman they met a different sort of data they made a different sort of way to modify their techniques as soon as they met the Romans can we talk a little bit more about this world Foley maybe have enough time for one last play and and the rage fit and the way of steaming us which I'd like to ally with the idea of history that they had if this doesn't seem too ridiculous was that it all came through people acting men and women acting it wasn't movements it wasn't it it was to do with history was to do with this man doing that that man doing that that woman doing that because women featured we haven't got to that I'm afraid but women did feature very strongly in Celtic that's right Affairs that's right I mean one of the things that's interesting about the the comments that you get from classical writers about their bellicosity about their their war madness is that they actually admire them they admire their courage frankly and that's something that we forget you know you hear talk which verges on the kind of crazy savage stuff but these people are immensely courageous and they were able to work themselves up into what these almost transcendent rage fits the threatened to become in a Gallic phrase beside themselves people are now beside themselves with anger or whatever and that's what the counts tried to do so that they could nerve themselves to take on this fight or to take on this battle classical writers do talk about all-out charges as well and of course they were still going on at Culloden in 1746 and they're still gone in Ireland in 1798 you know the all-out flat-out charge so this is not recklessness this is a tradition as it were these are quite well understood traditions and it's to do I think with immense courage as much as anything may be backed up by the fact that they felt that the soul of a dead person moved to another but Caesar thought that that might be associated really but there isn't time for that just one thing which I'd feel terrible if I didn't just mention it but just to mention it Eve's even more terrible and this I'm going to lose lose and we know that women featured powerfully their women could inherit property they could inherit power they could act as druids we know from birdies here about occur that they could ride in chariots and go to war is the reference to women now sort of politically correct and and rather we better mention a few women or does it was it really important it was really important I think that's borne out very much by the recent discovery of the chariot grave at whet Wang the very recent one where we have a very tall powerful woman of about thirty five years old who died with her chariot she was quite clearly a woman of immense power we know that from the classical writers that they're women like Boudicca like Carter manager in the first century AD who were independent path women in their own right I think it was probably not the norm but certainly the archaeological evidence shows that women could go right through society in a way which they couldn't in the Greek and Roman world and that's what's important the the difference between the position of women in Celtic society and in classical societies is very profound with in Greek and Roman society women couldn't even the citizens it's quite clear that in Britain and in France women could be very powerful and very important yes absolutely and and and particularly in Britain strangely enough we but or rather we've got more evidence for it in Britain than in any other part of the Celtic well briefly have you any accounting for that Elsa I think it's basically because as far as the Celtic akattak society was concerned although other relays or other workings of other were priests there's unquestionably a sense where it's a community and that still survives you know the the the Protestant religion that's been very powerful in the West as rather suppress the position of women in recent times but in the past I think that wasn't the case well thank you all very much I enjoyed that I'm sure a lot of people listening to it they'll tell us if they didn't do it and and you Rhonda and Alistair and we'll be back next week discussing virtue with a philosopher's Roger crisper and Africa and Galen Strawson thanks for listening we hope you've enjoyed this radio 4 podcast you can find hundreds of other programs about history science and philosophy a BBC code at UK forward slash Radio 4 you

Channel: BBC Podcasts

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Rating: 4.6666665 out of 5

Keywords: the celts, celtic, ancient, television documentary (tv genre), europe (continent), alps (mountain range), roman empire (country), celts (ethnicity), complete series, viking (film subject), barbarian, empire (quotation subject), documentary (tv genre), legend, b.c., druids (film), druidism, british broadcasting company, bbc one (tv network), society, culture, british broadcasting corporation (production company), history (tv genre), enya, celts, pop, top10, top ten, toptenz

Id: hYh6jgKgcjs

Length: 43min 41sec (2621 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 04 2018