Sooo Gildas in
his Excidio claims the Anglo-Saxons wiped out the Celts, but we have literary
evidence from shortly after Gildas’ death that he was wrong. We also have a
possible record of an oral tradition, the existence as well as the features of
which argue for an assimilated Celtic-Saxon culture. This is supported by
modern science, which also identifies a gap in Gildas that we can’t let slide.
From
archaeology, we know that a wealthy layer of people survived the Roman period.
They didn’t congregate in cities and they didn’t maintain Roman outposts; they
lived in villas scattered about the region. They imported luxury African Red
Slip Ware through Cornwall. They had peaceful relations with the Angles for the
most part. But they didn’t convert the Angles. When Augustine of Canterbury
came to convert the Angles, he pushed the Welsh clergy to help and they refused.
They refused to knuckle under to Roman Christian customs for a long time; the
Christian culture they missionized in Europe was the Welsh rite practiced by
St. Columba.
The British protected
certain parts of the country, the sacred sites in the Witham Valley, the
cathedral of Canterbury built in 507, and other churches and the market towns
around them. But this probably only involved a set battle in a couple of cases;
there’s always somebody hopped up on testosterone and adrenaline that you have
to dump on his ass. When Cynric became “king” of Gwyllt, it’s probably closer
to the truth that he became an ealdorman subordinate to the British, than that
he conquered the region.
The main piece
of modern evidence to go by is something you will never hear of in the web’s fake
historical videos about the Arthurian period. DNA evidence argues against “Gildas”.
In London, refounded by the Angles after Gildas’ death, nearly 50% of the male
population has Celtic Y-chromosome DNA, an inheritance from Celtic forefathers,
not Celtic foremothers who bore children to Angles. The percentages are higher
in Wales and Ireland of course, but a value this large in this region with this
history, disproves the genocide notion. Gildas couldn’t have known about DNA,
of course, but he could only support the notion of the Angles and Saxons as
outright enemies by living so cloistered that he had no knowledge of the peaceable
relations most of them had with Britons.
Fake historical
videos will try to convince you that Gildas was writing in the time of the first
and worst Krakatau eruption. One says that the “thick black cloud” in Gildas
refers to the same sort of clouding as occurred in the eruption of the 1880s.
This claim is a fallacy called quoting out of context. When you return those
words to their context, you find a “thick black cloud of vices.” This is part
of Gildas’ jeremiad, not a weather report.
What’s more,
Krakatau is too far away from Britain to produce a thick black cloud. The video
ignores the other catastrophe of the same period, the eruption of Ilopango in
Central America. Its plume particles would have been carried directly to Britain
on the jet stream as it existed at the time.[1] The
same subtropical jet stream that now creates the “English Riviera” where palm trees
can survive. What resulted?
Well, it wasn’t
the catastrophe the fake video wants you to think. Irish missions to the
continent went on for 300 years, even after the Irish adopted the Roman Easter calculation
in the 700s. The British exemption from Goth, Vandal, and Hunnish immigration meant
they still had copies of documents that had been destroyed on the continent,
and the Irish and Scots brought them back. Missions like that require logistics
– lodgings and food for the missionaries and their pack animals – and while
monks have lower standards of living than most people, starvation is starvation
and death.
After the
eruption, Pope Gregory sent Augustine to convert the Anglo-Saxons, and his entourage
needed sustenance on their 900-mile overland trek. Sure, when they reached
Britain they may have found the population reduced by hunger, and by the plague
brought from Ethiopia by merchants carrying that luxurious African Red Slip
Ware. They probably didn’t read Gildas’ fulminations; they probably didn’t
think twice about whether there had once been more people in Britain than they
found upon arrival. Once the Britons refused to cooperate, the Augustinian
ministry probably ignored them. The mission documented the converts about whom
Gregory wanted to hear, not the Christians who already existed.
Gildas didn’t write
about Augustine’s mission; he died before Augustine arrived. Augustine never
made it to Lindisfarne. Anglo-Saxon Bryneich converted to Christianity in the
600s CE, and the first Christian king there lost a war to a Celtic British Christian
allied to an Anglo-Saxon pagan. So much for the Anglo-Saxons wiping out the
British Celts, so much for the British Celts hating the pagan Anglo-Saxons and,
since the Anglo-Saxon ally had control of the Severn Valley as well as Mercia,
so much for anything like a system of apartheid between Christians and pagans
in Britain. Bede gives the history
of the Bryneich battle; claiming the Celts were wiped out ignores his data, a
fallacy called sampling bias and a failure of the Test of Occam’s Razor.
Fake historical videos are a great
jumping-off point for research, but obviously you can’t trust them to present
all the relevant data, even if they have it. New historical data and new
insights from new tools turn up constantly; claims have to be revisited periodically,
or they turn into urban legends. It’s a lot of work, but it has to be done to
get at the truth of history.
[1] Paired oxygen isotope
records reveal modern North American atmospheric dynamics during the Holocene.
Zhongfang Liu, Kei Yoshimura, Gabriel J. Bowen, Nikolaus H. Buenning, Camille
Risi, Jeffrey M. Welker & Fasong Yuan. Nature Communications volume 5,
Article number: 3701 (2014) https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4701
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