The purpose of this blog is to refute the notions of certain people in Cornwall, and of some romantically inclined but ill-informed people from overseas, that Cornish people share a distinctive ethnic identity with the Welsh, Bretons, Irish and Scots, but not with those from the greater part of England. People claiming this supposed identity unjustifiably regard themselves as Celts. The living and dead languages of the so-called Celts are therefore termed celtic. I shall refer to people with these notions as celticists and their doctrine as "celticist". I shall refer to the so-called celtic language groups of the British isles as Brythonic, for Welsh and old Cornish, and Goidelic for Erse (Ireland) and Gaelic (Scotland). I shall refer to the speakers of Brythonic languages as Britons. I shall classify Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes and Vikings collectively as being Germanic.
I have a Cornish ancestry but have never lived in Cornwall and in consequence I am not inward-looking like some of the people in that somewhat isolated peninsula. Quite obviously I am not to be confused with Alan Mark Kent, the prominent celticist writer. (Nevertheless I have traced eight "last common ancestral marriages" that we share, one of them on our Kent lines. A last common ancestral marriage is the latest marriage forming part of each of two ancestral lines, one for each of two persons. As a Cornish surname Kent has nothing to do with the county so-named but is taken from Cant, part of St Minver parish. Strangely, the Cornish Kents are probably descended via the Fitzhardings and Berkeleys from an Anglo-Saxon quisling called Harding who supported the Normans.)
The following lines by Alexander Pope could well have anticipated celticism:
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely, sobers us again.
I encountered an example of the "shallow draughts," part truths presented as whole truths, over 30 years ago. In the issue of the Journal of the Cornwall Family History Society for September 1977 a member asked whether the Celts were fair haired as some supposed, or dark haired as others supposed. I had books about the Celts, written at a time before it was realised that the concept of the Celts, as a people coming to Britain from central Europe in the Iron Age, was based on unjustified speculation, so I wrote an article which was published in the following issue. I supported the fair-haired view and as I was then dark-haired and dark-eyed I supposed that I represented the pre-Celtic Bell Beaker people. I had already realised that Cornish celticism was arrogant and unjustified so I concluded Celts and fellow-travellers go home - to Europe where you belong.
A leading Cornish celticist James Whetter replied. The full letter, apart from Whetter's signature, is reproduced at the end of this blog. (Zooming in may be helpful.) The part of his letter that the editor saw fit to publish includes the words
How does he explain the fact that by far the majority of placenames in Cornwall are in a Celtic language, Cornish in contrast to the dominance of English-derived placenames east of the Tamar. It is clear that the Tamar was a very real and cultural boundary with Celtic speakers to the west and English to the east.
The statement about placenames is one of the part truths. The second sentence makes the now discredited identification of race, culture and language. The rest of the truth about names is that a very large proportion of rivers and hills throughout England have Brythonic-based names.
Much of the local population remained after the invasions. They retained the old names for geographical features and the Germanic speakers copied them. A common river name is Avon. This is essentially the Brythonic word for "river." When the locals were talking about "the river" the newcomers thought that they were naming it. Penyghent in North Yorkshire has an ill-disguised Brythonic name signifying "hill in the open country". Towns and cities based on Roman establishments usually have two elements, the first being Latinised but of Brythonic origin and the second denoting the type of establishment. Lincoln is from Lindum Colonia, "the colony/settlement by the lake", Gloucester from Glevum Castra, "the camp at the bright place."
The reason that towns and villages east of the Tamar usually have English names is due to the chaos following the Germanic invasions. This led to people living in stockaded communities, tons - now towns - which were established and given names by the newcomers. The Britons had lived in the period of the Pax Romana and had no need for such named communities. (The Cornish later realised that towns were useful even when not required for defence, so built "churchtowns" round their churches. That is why many are named after the patron saints of the churches.)
Nevertheless there are towns and villages in anglicised regions that are well away from the Welsh border but which have Brythonic-based names, for example Kinver and Penkridge in Staffordshire, Pentrich and Crich in Derbyshire.
There were prominent people with Brythonic names in Anglo-Saxon England. One was Caedmon, the so-called father of English poetry. Although Wessex was nominally an Anglo-Saxon kingdom some of the earlier kings had Brythonic names: Cerdic, Cynric and Ceawlin. A later king was Caedwalla who died in 689. With allowance for spelling variations there was a king of Gwynedd, Wales, with the same name who died in 634.
Until recent times shepherds in several parts of England counted their sheep using corrupted Brythonic numerals, implying that Anglo-Saxon farmers had employed Britons as shepherds and that their practices continued.
According to the laws of Germanic peoples, persons guilty of homicide had to pay money called wergeld to the family of the victim, the amount depending on the standing of the victim. King Ine of Wessex, 688-728, prescribed the rates for victims who were Britons - Welshmen as they called them in Wessex. Celticists will be gratified to know that their rates were about half of those for Saxons of the same standing. That there were Britons whose standing could be equated to that of the Saxons shows that they were not all serfs.
Thus, although towns and villages beyond the Tamar have English names there is strong and varied evidence of the continuing presence of people of British origin throughout the Anglo-Saxon period who lived reasonably amicably with the newcomers. As an educated man interested in these matters Whetter must have known something of the foregoing. Was the intention behind his simplistic argument to make celticism credible to naive and uninformed readers? His statement that the Tamar formed a very real racial and cultural boundary is preposterous.
What we did not know until recently were the relative proportions of Britons and Germanic newcomers throughout Britain. The continuing presence of Britons is contrary to the old notion that they were slaughtered by the newcomers or else driven into the western peninsulas. As noted in Bryan Sykes' Blood of the Isles this story was first put about by the monk Gildas in the sixth century and has been believed by many down to the present time - after all how could a holy monk tell anything but the truth?
The concept of the Celts is loaded with misconceptions. The equivalent Greek word referred to barbarian neighbours and some of them may have called themselves by an equivalent name. We cannot be certain who they were, or even whether they formed a distinct tribe, as the information from classical authors is muddled and confusing. Julius Caesar sometimes referred to the Gauls, inhabitants of what is now France, as Celts but with no obvious justification. There is no evidence that British natives were described as Celts in classical times. In the early seventeenth century Edward Lluyd, an Oxford scholar of Welsh descent, perceived that the Brythonic, Goidelic and Gallic languages were related and, following Caesar, classified them together as celtic. At that time its was supposed that linguistic distinctions corresponded to ethnic distinctions. The speakers of the so-called celtic languages were therefore supposed to form an exclusive celtic race, the Celts. That is when the nonsense started. The reader of any writing which states or implies that the inhabitants of any area were Celts should regard the word Celt as signifying the inhabitants of that area and nothing more. The word of itself does not imply any ethnic or cultural link with the inhabitants of other areas so designated. For want of a better term I shall designate Lluyd's "celtic" languages as Western Indo-European (WIE) languages.
In the Iron Age in regions north of the Alps there were two successive and related cultures named after the places, Hallstatt and La Tène, where their distinctive artefacts were first discovered. The discovery of artefacts of the same type in Britain by 19th century archæologists confirmed, or so it was believed, that "Celts" coming from the regions in which these cultures thrived had invaded Britain in the Iron Age, bringing their languages and artefacts with them. Signs of Greek and Etruscan influence at these sites demonstrate that the cultures practised trading. But no account was taken of the possibility that the presence of the artefacts in Britain was due to trading, or even to copying, rather than to immigration.
Recent DNA analysis, as described by Sykes in Blood of the Isles, counters the celtic myth in two ways. First it shows that the population of the British Isles is fairly homogeneous ethnically, apart from the Orkneys and Shetlands where there is a substantial Viking element. The settlers started arriving after the last ice age and the bulk were already here several thousands of years ago. They came mainly from Iberia, using the coastal route. Their languages are not known but relationship to Basque is a possibility. Second, it gives insight into the relative proportions of Britons and Germanic newcomers, and hence of those in our ancestral lines. DNA analysis is able to take separate account of the male ancestral lines of men and the female ancestral lines of men and women. About 10% of the male population in the south of England have a male Germanic ancestry. This rises to about 15% in former Danish-occupied areas and 20% in East Anglia. The corresponding figures for a female ancestry are about half of these. Thus our Germanic ancestry is not insignificant, but it is of no great significance. Gildas' account is quite false. The disparate figures for the male and female lines suggests that there was some displacement of British men and that some of the newcomers took British wives while others brought their own.
The late Dennis Endean Ivall was an artist with considerable skill and a sound knowledge of heraldry. The logo on the letter below could well be an example of his work. He was born in Essex but moved to his mother's home county of Cornwall where he practised his art. In the first issue of the Journal of the Cornwall Family History Society, July 1976, he wrote In modern times the arguments regarding the control of arms continues strong, and no doubt some Cornish patriots [so attempting to flatter celticists] would in any case scorn the idea of control by the College of Arms in London. Indeed there exists, even though in embryo form a Cornish Guild of Heralds.
In times past Cornish people did not scorn to submit their pedigrees to the College in order to confirm their right to bear arms, as extensive books reproducing these pedigrees demonstrate. But of course these people were members of the upper classes who were proud of their families. They were not people with an inate sense of social inferiority, the sort of people who try to justify their inferiority by blaming it on the supposedly superior attitudes of seeming outsiders, as celticists do. Like anyone else the Cornish are allowed to display designs of their own without having them registered as arms by the College. So it it hard to see what the arguments alleged by Ivall were. But by setting up his so-called Guild it appears that he was going into the business of devising and registering arms for a fee, especially no doubt for people from overseas. If so he was breaking the law, and he doubtless knew it, for the College of Arms/Heralds has a monopoly in the matter. His article was shown to a genealogist who had personal contacts with the College of Arms and I have seen no advertisements for Ivall's guild that were published much after this. Pity any naive overseas person who was sold arms with a bogus registration, supposing it to be valid.
The Welsh have an supposedly ancient annual "celtic" ceremony called the Gorsedd. It goes all the way back to 1792 no less. In it people called bards recite their own literature, historical researches, and so on. To do so they dress up in strange clothes which supposedly reproduce those of the bards of ancient times. Gorsedds are conducted in Welsh, a living language. To confirm the Cornish "celtic" identity the Cornish Gorsedd was established in 1928. Similar clothes are used and the ceremonies are conducted in the dead Cornish language, so understanding must be limited. By dressing up in strange clothes those participating in Gorsedds are kidding themselves that they are re-creating ancient ceremonies.
"This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as night the day, thou canst not be false to any man."
There is no reason why communities should not hold local cultural sessions. But Welsh gorsedds are ludicrous in that they attempt to re-create a "celtic" past that never was. Cornish gorsedds are doubly ludicrous, first for the same reason that Welsh ones are, second because they ape the Welsh in attempting to demonstrate a "celtic" cultural identity of a sort that never was. It should not be supposed that I consider silliness of the sort associated with the Gorsedds is exclusive to the celticists. Parading round Stonehenge with various accoutrements at the time of the solstice is just as silly, and the underlying mentality in each case is probably the same.
Even more ludicrous than the Gorsedd is the Cornish tartan. This traditional Cornish dress pattern was devised by Ernest Edwin Morton-Nance, 1909-2002, way back in 1963. He was a poet and so perhaps more in sympathy with imagination than reality. The tartan is of course a Scottish device, its design being regional, depending on locally available dyes, and later associated with the tribe - clan - that lived in the region. Ancient peoples who did not wear trousers wore skirts, known as kilts in Scotland, and the Scots gave them tartan patterns.
Celticists have justified the Cornish tartan by finding representations of ancient Britons wearing skirts and assuming that they were tartan kilts. Even if the related Brythonic and Goidelic languages represented a distinctive ethnic unity, the associated ethnic division when the languages diverged would have occurred many thousands of years ago, probably on the Continent, and thus many thousands of years before tartans were devised. What is ludicrous is the supposition that the "Brythonic" Cornish tartan is ethnically and culturally linked to the "Goidelic" Scottish tartans. An advertisement for the sale of the tartan begins To my Cornish cousins wherever you may be . Scottish tartans have considerable tradition behind them so it might seem that this is true also for the Cornish tartan. But there is no statement in the advertisement that this tartan is a modern invention without tradition or history. So the further away the cousins are the better perhaps it is, for then they are more likely to be sufficiently naive to purchase an untraditional bogus product. If Cornwall as a former WIE-speaking region is to have its own tartan then why not every other such region? Those that should have one would include all parts of Britain, France, Lombardy, Bohemia, Bavaria, Spain and central Turkey.
And what has poor France done for its people to be excluded from the Celtic master race? Are they not the descendants of the ancient WIE-speaking Gauls, only lightly polluted by the incursion of the Franks? But we hear of no French Gorsedd. Nor do celticists include France in their lists of "celtic countries". Perhaps it is because the French committed the sin of abandoning WIE speech for a somewhat distorted form of Latin.
Whetter is the founder of the so-called Cornish Nationalist Party and in 1978, following my celts go home article, he sent me some of his publications: the political programme of his party and two issues his magazine "The Cornish Banner", presumptuously described as "The voice of the Cornish people" rather than as "The voice of James Whetter and his crew." Perhaps he thought that they would be sufficiently cogent to convert me to his cause. There are two versions of the political programme, one in English and one in the dead Cornish language which Whetter hoped would form the basis of all communication and teaching in Cornwall. The wealth of that language and its consequent capability in expressing present-day ideas can be judged from the programme's bilingual title Program an Party Kenethlegek Kernow.
The magazines carry an advertisement for the Cornish Guild of Heralds offering family devices, applications to be sent to Ivall's home address. A letter in one of the magazines provides another example of how celticists use tendentious part truths to make their point: I went to Bude on Saturday. I was disgusted - everything is for the tourist. Nothing for the people who live there. Never mind, one day we Kernewek [Cornish] people can do something about it. Bude is a small seaside resort in the northern extension of Cornwall. The tourists are of course the infamous English. (Incidentally, the 1642 Protestation Return shows that even then the great majority of the people in this extension, which is adjacent to Devon, had English surnames, so that they were scarcely "celts.") The part truth is of course the implication that the situation is exclusive to Cornwall. Wherever there is such a resort, no matter on which side of the Tamar it lies, the distinctive facilities there are intended to attract holiday-makers.
A statement in one of the magazines shows how celticists clutch at straws to make their point. It deplores the fact that Cornish raw materials are not always processed in Cornwall, while allowing that processing in another "celtic" region is better than nothing: At the Gorsedd Ceremony, held in a field near St Columb, in the heart of the sheep and cattle farming country, the Cornish tartans on sale there were woven in the Orkneys. Fair enough to support some vital village industry in 'another Celtic country.' But I ask . . The author thus makes a speculative celticist statement which is quite out of line with the reality of the situation. DNA evidence shows that about 37% of Orcadians have a Viking ancestry on the male side and 30% on the female side. The Orkneys are thus second only to the Shetlands where the proportions are about 42% and 40%. The proportions of Germanic ancestries in other parts of the British isles are much less. (Sykes.) What would the author have said if he knew that people with a substantial alien ancestry were taking Cornish money by weaving and selling the revered tartan?
Cornish celticists might like to remember that their superior Celtic DNA has been diluted by inferior Anglo-Saxon DNA brought into the county by the Rashleighs, Molesworths, Bassets, Yellands, Brokenshires, Elfords and others. The Cornish have been well represented in English affairs, some acting badly, others acting well. I'll name one of each kind. Sir Robert Tresillian of Tresillian in Newlyn-in-Pydar was a lawyer who took advantage of his legal positions to aggrandise himself. From 1381 to 1387 he was Chief Justice of the Kings Bench. In this office he was unduly severe in his treatment of participants in the Peasants' Revolt. He was executed for treason, that is for loyalty to the ineffectual king.
John Trethewy of St Stephen's-in-Brannel lived in the 17th century and was secretary to the royalist commander in the west, Ralph Lord Hopton. He accompanied Lord Hopton and the court to Jersey and the Continent following the defeat and execution of Charles I and was in contact with the new king, Charles II. He was well rewarded with honorary court positions following the Restoration and he pursued these while acting as an estate agent for the aristocracy, as a supervisor of taxation in Bristol and Somerset, and as conveyor of the proceeds to London. On one occasion he delivered the money to the Navy Office, run by his wartime friend Sir George Carteret and the latter's assistant Samuel Pepys, rather than to the Treasury. The reason was the navy's lack of funds. The Treasury was rather cross but Trethewy was not punished as he was regarded as having acted on behalf of the king.
The celticist philosophy is based on unjustified inferences from false premises and part truths, and on romantic wishful thinking. It therefore deserves ridicule. And this leads to another of my reasons for rejecting it. I had Cornish grandparents and my grandmother often used to tell me about Cornwall. Their ancestors and hence mine were Cornish. I do not like anything that suggests that their county is one that breeds crackpots.
