Celtic tribes of the British Isles

Before the spread westwards of Angles, Saxons and Vikings, Britain and Ireland were inhabited by tribes speaking Celtic languages. Who were they? Their origins probably go back to about 2,400 BC, when the first Bell Beaker material appeared in the British Isles. Genetically their predominant signature is Y-DNA R1b-L21 and its parent and subclades. This has been overlain to varying degrees by Germanic genetic markers, for example R1a1a, which in the British Isles correlates particularly well with the areas settled by Vikings from Norway.

Since the Celts were illiterate in pre-Roman days, it was ancient Greek and Roman authors who first recorded the names of tribes. The famous Geography of Claudius Ptolemy, written in Greek c. 150 AD, provides the framework of our knowledge. It is a shaky scaffolding by comparison with a modern atlas. Yet it was revolutionary in its day. Ptolemy relied on the work of an earlier geographer, Marinos of Tyre, who continually updated his work as new information became available.¹ The conquest of Britain from 43 AD added to Roman knowledge of the island. The Romans turned tribes into civitates, with a Roman-style town as a civic centre. Ptolemy gives the names of Roman towns. Yet he retained the old names for the islands: Albion for Britain, and Ierne (Latinised as Hibernia) for Ireland. The island group had long been known collectively as the Pretanic or Britanic isles. As Pliny the Elder explained, this included the Orcades (Orkney), the Hæbudes (Hebrides), Mona (Anglesey), Monopia (Isle of Man), and a number of other islands less certainly identifiable from his names. The post-conquest Romans used Britannia or Britannia Magna (Large Britain) for Britain and Hibernia or Britannia Parva (Small Britain) for Ireland.² The Irish retained Alba as a name for Britain. It reappeared in the Gaelic Kingdom of Alba in Scotland,³ and the Gaelic word for Scotsman - Albannach. It seems to have retained some currency within Britain too, since the Albiones are mentioned on a Latin memorial within that part of Spain which was settled by Britons in the Post-Roman period. See Celtic Tribes of South-West England.
Naturally the Geography could not record tribal movements and changes over the centuries. Clues to some of these are scattered around in place-names and pedigrees, coins and commentaries, itineraries and inscriptions. Memoirs, annals and legends have been pored over by generations of scholars trying to piece together a picture of these shifting polities. None of this material can reveal the deeper past of the Celts, which vanishes into prehistory - the province of archaeologists. The latter have particular problems with the British and Irish Iron Age. In Ireland and Northern Britain indigenous pottery vanishes in this period. That makes it more difficult to distinguish between different groups of people. Yet the sudden appearance of high-quality pottery in Atlantic Scotland with broch-builders is all the more significant against this background. Foreign links are clear.⁴ The same is true for the first wheel-thrown pottery in Britain, associated with the Belgae.

Landscape

Prehistorians often look to the landscape for ideas on where tribal boundaries might have fallen. Seas, rivers and mountains form natural barriers. Yet a tribe could inhabit the whole of a river valley, using boats to cross from bank to bank. Water might provide the easiest transport routes in some terrain. Tribes could be linked by the sea. Man's own marks on the landscape provide stronger evidence of divisions. Massive linear earthworks stretching miles across the countryside could only have been built by many people banded together. Such effort speaks of an urgent purpose. Massive defensive structures may not halt an army for ever, but they prevent chariots and horsemen from conducting lightning raids into neighbouring territory. Those in Ireland and some in Britain date from the pre-Roman Iron Age.⁵
Hill-forts are another indication of tribal friction. Since warfare itself is often invisible in the archaeological record, it became fashionable in the latter part of the 20th century for archaeologists to dismiss the defensive role of hill-forts and see them purely as displays of status. However a mass burial at Fin Cop Hill Fort in Derbyshire presents a darker picture. The fort was destroyed c. 400 BC before completion. The walls were thrown down into the surrounding ditch along with the bodies.⁶ Once the Romans came into in contact with Celtic tribes in Gaul and Britain, their writings reveal warfare between specific tribes, for example the attacks of the Catuvellauni on their neighbours. However most hill-forts were built long before. In Central Europe hill-forts first appear in the Early Bronze Age, though built in greater numbers from the Urnfield period onwards. Those in Britain and Ireland generally date from the Late Bronze Age and the Iron Age.⁷

Languages

By the time the inhabitants of the British Isles were producing literature of their own, five languages were spoken within the islands, as Bede recorded: Latin, English, British, Irish and Pictish.⁸ Latin was the language of the Church in Bede's day. It had arrived in Britain with the Romans. Latin was probably widely spoken in southern Britain by late Roman times. In other parts of the former Roman Empire, Latin developed into the Romance languages, such as French. Perhaps people would be speaking a similar language in England today, had the Angles and Saxons not burst upon the scene, bringing English - the language of the Angles. What happened to the Latin-speakers? Some may have perished on Saxon swords. Some may have adopted the language of the incomers. But it is intriguing that the Celtic which survived in the British highland zone developed a Latin accent at around this time, as though a rush of Romance refugees had arrived and shifted back to Celtic.⁹
The Irish spoke Gaelic, the more archaic form of Insular Celtic. We can picture this language gradually developing from an early form of Celtic spoken in the Bronze Age. Bede assumed that Gaelic arrived in Scotland with Irish people forming the early medieval Kingdom of Dál Riata.¹⁰ His view was unquestioned until the end of the 20th century, when the lack of archaeological evidence for it was pointed out. To the contrary the evidence suggests movement from Britain to Ireland from the Iron Age onwards. Ewan Campbell suggested that Gaelic simply remained in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland from early times, cut off by the Grampians from linguistic developments further south.¹¹ Yet Scottish, Irish and Manx Gaelic all descend from a common ancestor, attested in ogham inscriptions of the 5th and 6th centuries AD. Its spread into Scotland cannot be much earlier than this.¹² Even so the vision of an Irish invasion of Argyll c. 500 AD has given way to more subtle readings of the scraps from the edge of history. Dimly a picture emerges of Britons drifting into northern Ireland over centuries, adopting Gaelic and introducing it to their kin across the water. One means would be intermarriage. The origin myths of the Picts preserved by Bede in 731 includes the idea that the Picts had taken Irish wives, promising that they would choose their kings from the maternal line.¹³
In the earliest phases of this process, there was so little difference between the Insular Celtic languages that we could compare them to British and American English. From 300-700 AD Gaelic and the British Celtic languages diverged much more sharply.
British (or Brythonic) and Pictish fit into a family of Celtic languages in which the kw sound of Indo-European had shifted to a p sound. P-Celtic probably developed about 1100 BC. There is written evidence of it in Northern Italy from 600 BC and it was spoken in Gaul. So we can deduce that this sound-change arrived in Britain with Iron-Age migrants from Gaul. The surviving form of it is Welsh. Another form - Cornish - survived in Cornwall into Tudor times. Cumbric was the form spoken in what is now northern England and Lowland Scotland as far north as Dumbarton (Dùn Breatainn, fort of the Britons) during the Early Middle Ages. It was closely related to Welsh. As Anglian settlements advanced, Cumbric was replaced by English and its Scottish variant - Lowland Scots. Pictish, the language of the eastern Highlands, was similar to Cumbric. An historian writing in 1140 declared that Pictish had vanished. Certainly the language of the Scottish court changed to Gaelic when the Gaelic and Pictish kingdoms were united into the Kingdom of Alba, north of the Forth-Clyde isthmus. In the 10th and 11th centuries Alba expanded to include the Kingdom of Strathclyde, formerly part of Cumbria, and Lothian, formerly part of Anglian Bernicia. The enlarged Alba became the Kingdom of Scotland.¹⁴

Inscriptions

Celtic personal and tribal names can be preserved in Latin inscriptions within Roman Britain. The Latin alphabet could also be used to record a complete message in Brittonic, though that is rarer. Of the hundreds of Curse Tablets of Roman Britain, many include Celtic names, but almost all are set within a Latin text. Latin continued to be used for memorial inscriptions in the Post-Roman period in British Christian areas.
The Irish language was first written in a script called ogham. The earliest surviving inscriptions date from the 4th or 5th century AD. The ogham alphabet clearly arose from familiarity with alphabetic writing. Romanised Britons could have carried the idea to Ireland. Though Ireland was never part of the Roman Empire, there was trade between Ireland and Roman Britain. Ogham inscriptions cluster in Munster and also appear in southern Wales and Cornwall.¹⁵ A few inscribed stones in Wales carry bilingual inscriptions in Latin and Ogham.
The online Corpus of Celtic Inscribed Stones database covers every non-Runic inscription on a stone monument within Celtic-speaking areas (Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Dumnonia, Brittany and the Isle of Man) in the early middle ages (AD 400-1000). There are over 1,200 such inscriptions.

Tribal names

The names of Celtic peoples can be divided into two types: the self-ascribed and those imposed from without. Within the British Isles, the terms Picti (painted ones) and Scoti were bestowed by the Romans. Celtic tribal names clearly self-bestowed are those derived from a Celtic god or tree or animal name. The animal totem type of ethnonym appears the most ancient. Other names may distinguish between arable farmers and pastoralists. For example the Silures (seeders) of south-east Wales versus the Epidii (horse-breakers) of Kintyre. Once tribes were settled, they could take a name referring to the landscape they occupied, such as the Dumnonii and Dobunni (lowland people). The tribal name could boast of fighting prowess, for example the Ordovices (hammer-warriors) of Wales and the Catuvellauni (excelling in battle) among the British Belgae.¹⁶

Ireland

The earliest references to Ireland come from Ancient Greek travellers. Yet these records come at a time when trade with Ireland was in decline, as Europe moved from the Bronze to the Iron Age. Ireland's wealth of copper (a necessity for bronze), as well as gold, had brought prosperity. Goldsmiths flourished in Bronze Age Ireland, leaving a wealth of jewellery and other art work. Leaner times were ahead. A climate change added to the woes of the Irish. More rain and less sun reduced farming in Ireland to a grim subsistence level. There was a decline in human activity and a related increase in wetlands and forest broadly from about 250 BC until 250 AD. The population must have fallen. Warfare was endemic.¹⁷
The tribal and place-names in Ireland listed by Ptolemy were Celtic, and many survive in Old or Middle Irish forms. The deduced Celtic name for Ireland - Iverio - from which its present name was derived, was known to the Greeks by the 4th century BC at least, possibly as early as the 6th century BC. The name meant the fertile land. It was Latinised to Hiernia or Hibernia. Its people were the Iverni. Significantly they were restricted to the south-west of Ireland by Ptolemy's day. Here cultural continuity can be traced from the Bronze to the Iron Age. It was the region of Ireland least affected by the incoming Hallstatt and La Tène styles. This adds up to strong evidence that Celtic speech arrived in Ireland long before the Iron Age. ¹⁸

La Tène Culture

The La Tène Culture of the Central European Celts spread into Britain in the late Iron Age. It arrived in North-Eastern Ireland from northern Britain around 200 BC and spread across the island north of a Dublin-Galway line. Along with it came the first rotary querns in Ireland. These were a particular type of beehive quern known also in northern England and southern Scotland. Although the humble quern tends not to be found on the same sites as high-status La Tène objects, they are part of the same picture. Three have been found with ornament of La Tène type. The rotary quern was a technological leap forward from the saddle quern which had been in use since Neolithic times. For millennia grinding corn was back-breaking work, using a hand stone to crush the grain on the large, concave saddle stone. Rotary querns took some of the labour out of grinding before the invention of the water-mill. The Y-DNA haplogroup R1b-M222 is found in Northern Ireland, Lowland Scotland and Northern England and may reflect the arrival of La Tène in Ireland (see Uí Néill). The swirling La Tène style continued to develop in Ireland after the Continental heartlands of La Tène and most of Britain were absorbed into the Roman sphere. As Ireland emerged from its centuries-long, climate-induced depression and embraced Christianity, the La Tène style blossomed in such masterpieces as the Book of Kells. ¹⁹

Cruthin

The Irish annals from the 6th century AD refer to British people - Cruthin or Cruithni in Gaelic - in Ireland, particularly the north-east. ²⁰ The last use of the term Cruthin in Irish annals is in 773 AD. Were these the descendants of La Tène arrivals centuries earlier? We would expect newcomers to blend into Irish culture after a few generations, so that the sense of them as foreign would be lost. Perhaps there were successive waves of British arrivals in north-eastern Ireland, the earliest of which brought La Tène, but only the most recent of which were considered Cruthin in the 6th century AD. If so we should not expect to see the latter on Ptolemy's map. Nor do we. Cruthin dynasties of Ulster included the Dál nAraidi of southern Antrim and their offshoot the Uí Echach Cobha of the Iveagh area of County Down. The Annals of Ulster distinguish between the Cruthin and the Ulaidh, who vied for power in Ulster. ²¹ A Y-DNA haplogroup which seems to have arisen in the Celts of Britain and is rare in Ireland (I2a2a1-M284, formerly known as I2b1a) has been found in McGuinness and McCartan men, descended from the Uí Echach Cobha.²²
Related dynasties were the Loígis, who gave their name to County Laois in Leinster, and the Soghain of Connaught. Both claimed descent from Conall Cernaich, renowned as one of the Red Branch Knights of the Ulster Cycle tales, and also claimed as an ancestor by the Dál nAraidi.²³

Five provinces

Early Irish literature preserves a tradition of the division of Ireland into five provinces or kingdoms (cúige - literally meaning fifth part), four of which are familiar from historic times: Connachta, (Connaught), Laighin (Leinster), Mhumhain (Munster) and Ulaidh (Ulster). Generations of scholars have been bemused to see so little correspondence between Ptolemy's map and this early medieval political structure. Of the kingdoms, only Ulaidh (Ulster) can be equated with one of Ptolemy's tribal names. Certainly there was considerable political change in Ireland post-Ptolemy. Boundaries were fluid. Dynasties rose and fell. The Irish annals record defeats of the Cruthin by the Uí Néill. These descendants of Niall, so prominent on the map of Ireland by 800 AD, gained their ascendancy from around the 6th century AD. ²⁴ Yet one boundary is centuries older than Ptolemy's record. The Black Pig's Dyke is an intermittant linear earthwork that seems to mark the ancient boundary of Ulster. One stretch of it in Co. Monaghan has been dated between 500 BC and 25 BC BC. Surviving stretches link natural boundary or defensive features such as rivers, lochs and bogs, creating one long deterrent to invasion or cattle raiding.²⁵
Specific Celtic tribes of Ireland now have their own page.

Britain

Scotland and Wales did not exist as separate countries in pre-Roman times, but for simplicity the present country names are used in the tribal lists for Britain. The climatic downturn at the Bronze to Iron Age transition naturally hit Britain as well as Ireland, yet did less damage to agriculture in Britain. Some upland in Wales was abandoned, along with some lowland prone to waterlogging in Central Southern England. The overall picture though is one of continuity.²⁶

Hallstatt and La Tène

Trade continued to thrive. The people of the British lowlands were in constant contact with the Continent in the Bronze and Iron Ages. Consequently the form of Celtic spoken in Britain by Roman times was similar to the Gaulish spoken across the Channel. The Iron Age Hallstatt Culture developed north of the Alps from about 700 BC and spread into Lowland Britain by 600 BC. It reached as far north as the Forth-Clyde line. It was superseded by the La Tène Culture from around 450 BC, which again spread to Britain. La Tène metalwork styles are widely distributed in Britain and often have close Continental parallels.²⁷
The degree to which they were spread by movements of people has been much debated. The clearest cases for migration earlier than that of the Belgae can be made for two tribes of the north notable for La Tène material, including chariot burials: the Votadini and Parisii. The chariot burials of the Arras Culture in East Yorkshire c. 200 BC have been linked to the Parisii. Unlike chariot burials on the Continent, those of the Arras Culture have dismantled vehicles, though they lie within the square barrows (mound and surrounding ditch) characteristic of burials in the Marne area of France - linked to the Continental Parisii.²⁸ It has been argued that the differences from the Continental practice rule out a migration.²⁹ However a chariot buried intact has been found in a square barrow at Ferry Fryston in West Yorkshire. This site lies within what was later the territory of the Brigantes, but seems connected to the Arras Culture - perhaps the earliest manifestation of it. The occupant of the chariot came from further afield, possibly Scandinavia, the Highlands of Scotland or Brittany.³⁰ Another intact chariot found at Newbridge near Edinburgh (Votadini territory) is also more like Continental types.³¹
Genetically the Y-DNA haplogroup R1b-U152 may provide a clue to Hallstatt and later movements of Celts into Britain, since its origin point appears to lie among early Celtic speakers north of the Alps. Within Britain the R1b-U152 subclade is found at its highest level in eastern England and Scotland, coinciding with some of the material evidence of new arrivals throughout the Iron Age, though James Wilson argues that most of it, particularly the subclade L20, closely parallels later Germanic incursions. ³²

Belgae

Caesar learned in 54 BC that the tribes of the interior of Britain had an oral tradition that they were indigenous. However oral history is seldom passed down intact for more than three generations. So Caesar's information on the more recent arrivals is more reliable. He was told that Belgae from north-east Gaul had settled along the coast, many retaining the same tribal names as their brethren across the Channel.³³ This is compatible with the archaeological evidence, if we are generous in our interpretation of the coast. From 125 BC Gallo-Belgic coins appear over the whole of south-eastern Britain. New tribal centres appeared, similar to those in Gaul. Known as oppida, these were large, fortified, lowland settlements. Among their inhabitants were craftsmen making the first British wheel-thrown pottery and minting the first British coins. Tribal coin issues and their distribution add to our knowledge of the tribes of Britain.³⁴ The Belgic tribes have their own section. Caesar's comments on the Belgae have caused confusion over their ethnicity. He describes them as different from the Gauls in language. He says that the bulk of them descended from tribes which long ago came across the Rhine from Germany, and refers to some of the tribes specifically as German.³⁵ Yet their recorded tribal, personal and place-names are Celtic (with very few exceptions), both in Britain and Belgic Gaul. They seem to have spoken a language similar to Gaulish, but even more similar to Brythonic, as one might expect from their impact on Britain. It seems that the Belgae had pushed into North-East Gaul from what had been Celtic-speaking lands east of the Rhine, under pressure from the expanding Germani. Thus their ancestry was from what the Romans called Germania, but they were Celts. They had a late La Tène Culture.³⁶
The pressure of the Germani may also explain the arrival of Belgae in Britain. They in turn may have pushed previous inhabitants further north, or even to Ireland. That might explain the occurrence of Dumnonii in three places, though unrelated tribes may acquire the same name simply by chance.
Specific Celtic tribes of Britain are listed on their own pages by region: see menu left. Further reading: Barry Cunliffe, Iron Age Communities in Britain: An account of England, Scotland and Wales from the seventh century BC until the Roman Conquest, 4th edition. Routledge (2005).

Notes

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