IT is a known fact that when we start talking about
history we begin by referring to some name, incident or
territory thousands of years back. That was not the case in
what set me thinking about our ancestral past and the names
given to people’s, clans, or the natives of a country or
part of a country.
No, what set me thinking was the expression used by a
commentator on the Wimbledon tennis championship last year
referring to top class English players being of Anglo-Saxon
stock, not that there was anything wrong with that, but then
who were the Anglo-Saxons. We have often heard the term used
in connection with English teams or people.
But let us pause for a moment and try to figure out where
the expression came from. While the ancestors of a lot of
the people from the land across the Irish sea may have their
roots in Saxony or elsewhere on the continent of Europe we
still feel that classing them as Anglo-Saxon is very
misleading. It also looks funny to me to see two Low-German
tribes referred to when we wish to indicate the
race-character to be the Celtic capital of Ireland.
We should think the way Celts spread from central Europe.
They moved south east to the border of Turkey and into the
Balkans, south into what is now France and northern Italy,
and west to the shores of the North Sea, and the English
Channel. They then moved into parts of Britain and
eventually into Ireland. There is no doubt but that it was
the coming of the Celts that changed the living standards in
Ireland and indeed a lot of what was once known as the
British Isles. This is why, we have what we call our Celtic
cousins in many places along the west coast of England and
Wales with Cornwall still deemed to be as Celtic as we are
ourselves. As for Scotland, even to the language and the
traditional game of Shinty there is the same Celtic quality
as in any part of Ireland.
If we are to believe the books on
Celtic tradition and folklore we can go ever further and
find even more comparisons with parts of England. There is
reason to believe that Lancashire, West Yorkshire,
Staffordshire, down through Rutland, Wiltshire, Somerset and
part of Sussex are as Celtic as Perthshire or North Munster.
Then Cheshire, Herefordshire, Devon, Dorset, and
Bedfordshire along with some of the Welsh counties are the
same as north Wales and Leinster while Buckinghamshire and
Hertfordshire are on a level with South Wales and Ulster.
Maybe it was the descendants of these strong Celtic groups
that the Wexford hurlers were playing when they got the name
‘The Yellow Bellies’. This is the reason why ‘Anglo-Celt’
would be a more appropriate name than Anglo-Saxon.
It is hard to find the true period of the Celts origin
but it must have been long before Christianity, they were
first mentioned under that name about 500 to 600 BC. Later
we find Herodotus referring to them as the people who lived
‘beyond the pillars of Hercules’ (Spain) and he also
mentions ‘The great river as rising in their country’. This
was almost certainly the Danube and would also point to the
centre of Europe as being their homeland. Other historians
have different views on their way of life. Some mention that
they were a friendly people while others state that they
were very aggressive and much barbarity is attributed to
them on their advances into Greece and other countries which
they conquered in their sweeps from their base in
Mid-Europe.
The Celts had dominated central and western Europe and
had spread their rule into Italy and Greece. For those who
remember the scripture’s and think of St. Paul’s ‘Letter to
the Gelatines’ we have another connection with the Celts. It
was the Celts who founded the Kingdom of Galatia in far away
Asia Minor. They had sacked Rome about 390 BC. They had
invaded Spain and Portugal and dominated most of the
Lowlands at this time. If we think of some of the paintings
of Celts by Greek artists and compare them with paintings of
the chariot warriors of ancient Ireland we find a similarity
that is compelling.
The Celts were adventurers in many ways and brought new
ideas to Ireland when they arrived at the end of the Irish
bronze age, about the sixth century BC. Their tales of
wonderful people and even greater doings soon became part of
the Irish folk scene. Later on we had stories of great
heroes of our own and stories of wonderful deeds. The
wonderful doings of Cu Chulainn, Conchobar mac Nessa, Fionn
and the Red Branch Knights, and many more.
Finds of articles from a later age, about 200 BC, such as
golden collars, war trumpets, and ornamented sword scabbards
are associated with what was known as the La Tene culture go
to prove that the Celts is linguistic, and like Greek is a
branch of the Indo-European brand of languages.
The Irish language comes from a dialect called the
Q-Celtic. The Celts of Gaul and Britain spoke what was
called P-Celtic, this would be the ancestor of the Welsh and
Breton form of Celtic. It is thought that the Q-Celts came
from Spain and that the latest Celtic people to land in this
country were P-Celts and came from Britain. The boyhood name
of Cu Chulainn was Setantae and is the same as that of a
British tribe, the Setantii, who lived on the Lancashire
coast. How the opinion is formed that the Q-Celts landed in
the south-east comes from the fact that the Belgium
‘Menapii’ appear on Ptolemy’s map of Ireland at Wexford and
are later found under the Q-Celtic form of their name as Fir
Manach (Fermanagh).
In the intervening years other groups of Celts and other
people arrived in Ireland and spread to all parts of the
country. These people eventually became completely
Celticised sharing a common culture and a common Celtic
language. About the beginning of the fourth century AD the
tide was beginning to turn regarding the raiding parties
coming from England, and it was the Irish who were carrying
out raids on the western coast of Britain. Their language
was brought into Scotland by the Dal Riata of Antrim. Niall
of the Nine Hostages won fame and power by his raids on
Britain and it is supposed to have been in one of those
raids that a young lad and his two sisters were captured and
brought to Ireland. The lad turned out to be St. Patrick who
later escaped from captivity, became a priest, and later
still brought the true faith to Ireland.
Again, will we ever know the true story of who St.
Patrick was or where he was captured. Was it in Normady
where he was staying with relatives or at his home in
Britain. But then, that is another story that may not be as
hard to solve as to who will win the 2004 Wimbledon and will
they be Anglo-Saxon.