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Throughout its early history, as in later periods, the human settlement of Wales has been dictated by the geographical personality of the countryside. It is part of the highland zone of Britain, a land chiefly of mountain and high plateau; its connections with the eastern parts of Britain facing mainland Europe are less than those with Ireland, and with the western sea route that brought the Mediterranean into contact with Scandinavia.
Wales's relative physical isolation meant that native cultures persisted for many centuries after they had been replaced in lowland Britain. An outstanding example is the hut circles of the Bronze Age in North Wales, which were absorbed into the cultures of the Early Iron Age and continued in use well into Romano-British times. Caves, also, which were used in prehistoric times, continued to be used as the homes of Romano-British people. At the same time, the settlement of Wales was governed by the height of the human habitation line on the mountain sides, and by the presence of coastal plains in the south and southwest.
Before the end of the last Ice Age around ten thousand years ago, Wales and the rest of Britain formed part of the greater European whole and the early migrant inhabitants eked out a meagre living on the tundra or a better one amongst the oak, beech and hazel forests in the warmer periods. Most lived in the southeast of Britain, but small groups foraged north and west, leaving 250,000-year-old evidence in the form of a human tooth in a cave near Denbigh in north Wales and a hand axe unearthed near Cardiff. It wasn't until the early part of the Upper Paleolithic age that significant communities settled in Wales, with evidence that people were living in Wales as early as 20,000 years ago. Traces of these people have been found in caves near St. Asaph. During the Middle Stone Age (The Mesolithic period), about 10,000 BC the people tended to live around the mouths of rivers and along the seashore, and their food consisted of fish and shellfish but also of birds and small animals. Traces of these people have been found near Prestatyn. These people originated in North Africa. This civilization was far behind those of central France or northern Spain, and remained on Europe's cultural fringe as the melting ice cut Britain off from mainland Europe around 5000 BC. New people came to Flintshire about 2500 BC (The Neolithic Period) and they grew crops and kept herds or flocks of animals. Skilled in agriculture and animal husbandry, the Neolithic people also began to clear the lush forests covering Wales below 2000 feet, enclosing fields, constructing defensive ditches around their villages and mining for flint. They appear to choose to live on hilltop sites not far from the coast. These pre-Celtic peoples were the builders of Stonehenge, the cairns and megaliths which dot the English and Welsh countryside, and were builders of hill forts. Not much is known of these folks, but it is generally accepted that it is their genetic stock which comprised the bulk of the population at the time of the arrival of the Celtic culture around 1000-400 BC. About 2000 BC during the Bronze Age (circa 5,000 - 500 BC), a new group of people came to Britain and they have been called 'Beaker-folk' because of their fine pottery. They probably introduced copper working to the British Isles. These people were semi-nomadic sheep and cattle herders and probably had no settled homes. They buried their dead in mounds called tumuli or barrows and there are about 140 of these Bronze Age tumuli in Flintshire. Through their extensive trade networks, the inhabitants of Wales and the rest of Britain gradually adopted new techniques, changing to more sophisticated use of metals and developing a well-organized social structure. The established aristocracy engaged in much tribal warfare, as suggested by large numbers of earthwork forts built in this and the immediately succeeding period - the chief examples being at Holyhead Mountain on Anglesey and the Bulwalks at Chepstow. The earliest of the hill forts in Wales - at Dinorben - has been dated to about 1000 BC. The term "hill fort" is a rather loose one encompassing a variety of enclosed defensive structures, generally built on prominent, easily defended hill tops. These enclosures, some 600 of which have been found in Wales, range in size from large communal sites of over 15 acres to small rings which probably encircled a single farmstead. Archaeological finds at the few hill forts that have been thoroughly excavated allow us to draw a few tentative conclusions about the lives of these late Bronze Age and Iron Age inhabitants. Although the presence of grain mills indicates that some harvesting of that foodstuff was carried on, by far the largest amount of remains is that of animal bones, a pretty clear mark of the level of importance given to stock-husbandry.
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Expansion of Celts |
The Bronze Age peoples had been in Britain about 1000 years when the Celts arrived. The Celts were a fair-haired Aryan race who came out of the east, probably from the Danube basin around 1200 BC. In the 6th century BC they spread into Spain and Portugal. They were pioneers of ironworking, reaching their peak in the period from the 5th century BC to the Roman Conquest. By 300 BC they were the dominant race of the western world, having imposed their Iron Age culture from the Bosphorus to the Atlantic. (The Iron Age began in the 7th century BC). These people were farmers and raised cattle. However they never established an empire, but remained a grouping of warlike tribes, connected by a family of languages and a polytheist religion with its druidical priesthood. They first arrived in Britain about 1200 BC in small numbers but it was not until about 500 BC that they came to Flintshire. Familiar with Mediterranean civilization through trading routes, they introduced superior methods of metal-working that favoured iron rather than bronze, from which they forged not just weapons but also coins. Gold was used for ornamental works - the first recognizable Welsh art - heavily influenced by the symbolic, patterned La T?e style still thought of as quintessentially Celtic.
The Celts are credited with introducing the basis of modern Welsh. The original Celtic tongue was spoken over a wide area, gradually dividing into Goidelic (or Q-Celtic) now spoken in Ireland and Scotland, and Brythonic (P-Celtic) spoken in Wales, Cornwall and later exported to Brittany in France. The Celtic languages arrived in Britain around 1000BC, brought by the people known as Keltoi (Greeks) or Celtai (Romans). Cornish, Welsh and Breton arose from a group of languages known as Brythonic (Gaelic - Irish, Scots and Manx - derive from Goidelic). With increasing incursions of Germanic peoples, the Celts were driven to the north, and west. After the Battle of Chester in c 613, the Welsh found themselves cut off from their compatriots. At around this time, the word 'Cymry' first appears in a poem (Cymry meaning the Welsh), and at the same time we can begin to talk of Welsh as opposed to Brythonic.
Iron being a harder metal was stronger and knives and axes made from it were sharper and retained their edges longer. These gave them a distinct advantage over the Bronze weapons of the residents. In the 1st century BC they were defeated by the Roman Empire and by the Germanic tribes on the continent and were confined largely to Britain, Ireland, and northern France. Their domination in the British Isles ended following the Roman invasion in AD 43. The Decangli Celtic tribe were living in North Wales from about 100 BC.
The Celtic nobility became Romanised and in places retained some local administration powers on behalf of the Romans. After the Romans left in the late 4th century AD the Celts returned to power but were then displaced by the pagan Anglo-Saxons. Celtic culture was diluted under the Romans but remained largely intact in Wales. Their religion was controlled by the Druids, who to protect their power forbade any written language. The Celts transmitted their culture orally, never writing down history or facts. This accounts for the extreme lack of knowledge about them prior to their contact with the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome. Having left no written records themselves it is not always easy to sort out. The bulk of what is written about them comes from observations made by their enemies or by those who would somehow rule them. Therefore all knowledge was committed to memory and it took 20 years of learning to become a Druid. The language they spoke survives in the Welsh and Gaelic tongues of modern Britain. It is highly probable that the Celts of Britain were a mixture of the fair-skinned invaders and the shorter and darker Bronze Age folk, with whom they intermarried.
The average lifespan for men was 30 and 20 for women. Women tended to marry at around 14, often dying in childbirth, with about 50% of the children dying before reaching 12. The Celts built round, thatched houses with walls of wattle and daub in the lowlands and of dry stone in the highland areas. They built or rebuilt Bronze Age hill forts for refuge in times of trouble into which men and beasts could retreat when threatened. Examples in our area are Moel-y-Gaer at Rhosesmor, Moel Fenlli behind Mold, and Moel Arthur and Pen-y-Cloddiau near Nannerch. They were in use from about 500 BC until about 500 AD.
The regions of Wales were developing along tribal lines by the time the advent of iron ushered in a new cultural change. The Ordovices in the north east and the Silures in the south east are but two of these early tribes, the names of which are not their own but those given them by late Roman invaders. The earliest iron artefact in Wales is a sword dating to about 600 BC, but by 400 BC iron was being smelted and crafted into tools all over the British Isles.
The tribes of Wales developed regional styles of working iron, gold, and other metals, following the exquisite western European style known as La Tene (after the village of La Tene in Switzerland). At the same time as iron was introduced to Britain a new crop of settlers arrived from northern Europe. These were the Celts, whose cultural influence cannot be overstated. Traditional history has viewed the Celts as fierce conquerors who swept away the vestiges of earlier cultures and took complete control of Welsh society. A more balanced and likely theory is that the actual number of Celtic newcomers was low, and though they managed to dominate the culture of the earlier inhabitants of Wales, they did so without changing the overall physical or racial characteristics. So the Welsh of today are more likely to owe their physiognomy, if not their culture, to the Beaker People rather than the later Celts.
WHO WERE THE CELTS?
The Iron Age is the age of the Celt in Britain. Over the 500 or so years leading up to the first Roman invasion a Celtic culture established itself throughout the British Isles. Who were these Celts? The Celts as we know them today exist largely in the magnificence of their art and the words of the Romans who fought them. The trouble with the reports of the Romans is that they were a mix of reportage and political propaganda. It was politically expedient for the Celtic peoples to be coloured as barbarians and the Romans as a great civilizing force. And history written by the winners is always suspect.
Where did they come from? What we do know is that the people we call Celts gradually infiltrated England and Wales over the course of the centuries between about 500 and 100 BC. There was probably never an organized Celtic invasion; for one thing the Celts were so fragmented and given to fighting among themselves that the idea of a concerted invasion would have been ludicrous. The Celts were a group of peoples loosely tied by similar language, religion, and cultural expression. They were not centrally governed, and quite as happy to fight each other as any non-Celt. They were warriors, living for the glories of battle and plunder. They were also the people who brought iron working to Britain.
Celtic family life. The basic unit of Celtic life was the clan, a sort of extended family. The term "family" is a bit misleading, for by all accounts the Celts practiced a peculiar form of child rearing; they didn't rear them, they farmed them out. Children were actually raised by foster parents. The foster father was often the brother of the birth-mother. Clans were bound together very loosely with other clans into tribes, each of which had its own social structure and customs, and possibly its own local gods.
Housing. The Celts lived in huts of arched timber with walls of wicker and roofs of thatch. The huts were generally gathered in loose hamlets. In several places each tribe had its own coinage system.
Farming. The Celts were farmers when they weren't fighting. One of the interesting innovations that they brought to Britain was the iron plough. Earlier ploughs had been awkward affairs, basically a stick with a pointed end harnessed behind two oxen. They were suitable only for ploughing the light upland soils. The heavier iron ploughs constituted an agricultural revolution all by themselves, for they made it possible for the first time to cultivate the rich valley and lowland soils. They came with a price, though. It generally required a team of eight oxen to pull the plough, so to avoid the difficulty of turning that large a team, Celtic fields tended to be long and narrow, a pattern that can still be seen in some parts of the country today.
The lot of women. Celtic lands were owned communally, and wealth seems to have been based largely on the size of cattle herd owned. The lot of women was a good deal better than in most societies of that time. They were technically equal to men, owned property, and could choose their own husbands. They could also be war leaders, as Boudicca (Boadicea) later proved. Language. There was a written Celtic language, but it developed well into Christian times, so for much of Celtic history they relied on oral transmission of culture, primarily through the efforts of bards and poets. These arts were tremendously important to the Celts, and much of what we know of their traditions comes to us today through the old tales and poems that were handed down for generations before eventually being written down.
Druids. Another area where oral traditions were important was in the training of Druids. There has been a lot of nonsense written about Druids, but they were a curious lot; a sort of super-class of priests, political advisors, teachers, healers, and arbitrators. They had their own universities, where traditional knowledge was passed on by rote. They had the right to speak ahead of the king in council, and may have held more authority than the king. They acted as ambassadors in time of war, they composed verse and upheld the law. They were a sort of glue holding together Celtic culture. The Isle of Anglesey seems to have been held in special esteem by the Celtic-Welsh druids.
Religion. From what we know of the Celts from Roman commentators, who are, remember, witnesses with an axe to grind, they held many of their religious ceremonies in woodland groves and near sacred water, such as wells and springs. The Romans speak of human sacrifice as being a part of Celtic religion. One thing we do know, the Celts revered human heads. Celtic warriors would cut off the heads of their enemies in battle and display them as trophies. They mounted heads in doorposts and hung them from their belts. This might seem barbaric to us, but to the Celt the seat of spiritual power was the head, so by taking the head of a vanquished foe they were appropriating that power for themselves. It was a kind of bloody religious observance.
The Celts at War. The Celts loved war. If one wasn't happening they'd be sure to start one. They were scrappers from the word go. They arrayed themselves as fiercely as possible, sometimes charging into battle fully naked, dyed blue from head to toe, and screaming like banshees to terrify their enemies. They took tremendous pride in their appearance in battle, if we can judge by the elaborately embellished weapons and paraphernalia they used. Golden shields and breastplates shared pride of place with ornamented helmets and trumpets. The Celts were great users of light chariots in warfare. From this chariot, drawn by two horses, they would throw spears at an enemy before dismounting to have a go with heavy slashing swords. They also had a habit of dragging families and baggage along to their battles, forming a great milling mass of encumbrances, which sometimes cost them a victory, as Queen Boudicca would later discover to her dismay. As mentioned, they beheaded their opponents in battle and it was considered a sign of prowess and social standing to have a goodly number of heads to display. The main problem with the Celts was that they couldn't stop fighting among themselves long enough to put up a unified front. Each tribe was out for itself, and in the long run this cost them control of Britain.
If the physical makeup of the Welsh people owes more to the Beaker People, Welsh culture is largely a Celtic one. The warlike Celts, with their reverence for martial heroism, left an indelible mark on the folk tales and cultural myths of Wales.