THE EARLY HISTORY OF BARLICK (4)

[Stanley]

THE EARLY HISTORY OF BARLICK (4)

16 October 2001

It's time we had a look at what the belief system was for our Barlickers in 1500BC. I keep calling them Barlickers which is wrong of course, the name Barnoldswick is a long way into the future but it’s as good a label as any so I’ll stick to it. There is another name we have to look at as well, the Celts.
As you have probably realised by now, the story of the people of the Isles is basically one of migration and the assimilation of cultures and ideas from continental Europe. Remember that the story of Europe is essentially the same, the original settlers in the furthest reaches of pre-history came up from India and we suspect that originally they came from Africa. This is all too far in the past for our story but makes the point that there was this constant westwards flow of people and ideas.
At some point around 1,500BC we start to give these people a clear and separate identity based on their language and culture. The first people to do this were the Greeks, they described the people of Eastern Europe as Keltoi which means strangers. The Romans called the same people Galli as they lived in those parts of western Europe they called Gaul. The Greek name gave us Celts and the Roman name was transferred to the language they spoke, Gallic or Gaelic. This grouping was the predominant race over much of mainland Europe including parts of Italy, the Balkans, the Atlantic coast of Portugal and the whole of what is now France, Belgium and the Netherlands.
By about 800BC their culture was distinctive enough to be recognised in the archaeology but we should remember that this is simply our first known evidence. What we can be sure of is that they were alive and well long before this. We first find them in the upper reaches of the Danube, Rhone and Rhine rivers. Excavations at Hallstadt gave the name to the first identifiable strain of the culture around 800BC and further digging at La Tene lent its name to another phase around 450BC. Later, we find them in Slovenia, Silesia and upper Poland. They were a very successful culture and were the dominant force in Europe and the Isles for almost a thousand years until 100AD when they were finally subdued by the Romans.
Where the Celts concern us is that they started to permeate The Isles somewhere round about 1,000BC and by 600BC they were the dominant race. The Hallstadt Celts migrated directly to Ireland by sea and the La Tene branch to southern England. We think that this fact explains the difference between the language spoken by the Irish and that of the Welsh. This influx wasn’t an invasion, it was a migration. I was always taught at school that each tribe that entered The Isles conquered the existing people and drove them westwards, we now know that it wasn’t like this, the process was one of intermingling and adoption of the new culture by the natives. It's quite possible that pockets of pre-Celtic culture lasted until well after the coming Roman invasion.
What effects did this influx have? The first was probably on the language. We can’t be sure about this because we have no written records and it is quite possible that the original natives were speaking a variation of Gaelic before the Celts arrived. They seemed to have no difficulty trading with the continent and this seems to indicate that their language was similar to that of the Keltoi or Galli. The Celts on mainland Europe didn’t only expand westwards at this time. In 390BC a group of them crossed the Alps and after sacking Rome settled in what is now northern Italy. Another group sacked Delphi in Greece in 279BC. The explanation for this need to expand might be that good weather and high productivity had stimulated population growth and they were simply looking for more and better land. We shall see this pattern repeated later.
Back to Barlick now, how long was it before the Celtic culture reached us? We can’t put a precise date on it but if we say about 800BC we won’t be far wrong. What difference did it make to the original Barlickers? Intermingling would have affected the language, customs and probably the belief systems. Again we can't be certain of any of these influences but common sense tells us that this must have happened. One big change was that Celtic tribal organisation seems to have been more advanced than the native model. We are quite certain that there was a dominant tribe in the north of England at this time, the Brigantes. There are two versions of where this name originated, one is that it comes from the Celtic 'briga' meaning hill, therefore, the hill folk. Another version is that the name derives from Briga or Brigid an Irish Celtic goddess, take your pick! This tribe was a confederation of several separate tribes, we know the names the Romans gave to some of them because they wrote them down. Remember these are not the names they called themselves but the Roman equivalents. The Lopocares, Corionototae and Tectoverdi were around the Tyne valley. Barlick was part of the Setani tribe who controlled most of what is now Lancashire. The main headquarters of the tribe was at Stanwick Hill in Yorkshire, it covered 750 acres and so we are talking about an important centre.
You will have noticed that I have mentioned a Celtic goddess. We have to have a look at the belief systems now and try to separate myth from reality, this is not going to be easy. The first thing to do is to forget anything you have read about Celtic deities, Druids and bards. We have absolutely no written evidence about any of these and in another article I’ll tell you exactly why but it's too big a subject to tackle this week.
In the absence of written accounts we have to start with common sense and the archaeological evidence. I have already told you about the grave dated 25,000BC in Wales, the Goat Cave, there was evidence of ceremony and grave goods there. This suggests that some sort of concept of a journey or an afterlife must have taken hold by then. We have already assumed that these people would use some sort of folk magic to ward off circumstances which otherwise left them helpless. It also seems sensible to assume that there would be a class of people whose job it was to recite the myths and magic and supervise whatever ceremonies or festivals they held and these people have been described as 'Druids'. We find variations of this word in Old Irish, Latin, French and Gaelic and the meaning seems to be something like wizard or 'wise one'. It’s doubtful whether the Celts would have recognised the concept of religion, they had a set of beliefs which were close to magic and so druids isn’t a bad word, let’s use it. Whatever the belief system was, it had been defined over thousands of years and the coming of the Celts added further refinement. We start to see evidence of idols and symbols that were new to The Isles.
We need to step back a pace here and look at these symbols, what we shall see proves how little we know. For a start off, the first 'Celtic' symbols we can identify are in the Carpathian Mountains in Europe and have been dated to about 3,000BC, long before the Greeks gave them a name. These were the cross in a circle, the many spoked wheel and concentric circles. We tend to think that the Celtic Cross is peculiar to the Isles but this is not the case. Other symbols are wavy lines (running water?), spirals and what appear to be footprints. Many people have speculated what these all mean. The most common consensus is that all the circular ones are connected with either the sun or the cycle of life. This element of sun worship has quite a lot going for it, it was a way of measuring time and seasons, it gave warmth and promoted growth and we know they had a festival of the Unconquered Sun in winter. St Patrick wrote in his ‘Confessio’ that all who worshipped the sun would perish eternally so he evidently thought the Celts were sun worshippers. One more symbol to confuse you, a Celtic design found on Woodhouse Crag near Ilkley has been identified as the first known use of the Swastika in Europe.
I have to demolish another hoary old myth here and I know this isn’t going to popular! There has been much written in the last fifty years about the importance of Celtic goddesses. Much of this stems from a book written by Robert Graves in 1944 called The White Goddess. This, allied with evidence from tombs of what looked like female figures has been cited as evidence of a matriarchal society and an abundance of female deities. The bad news is that the book Graves wrote was, on his own admission, pure fiction and the latest research indicates that many of the figures identified as female are no such thing. They are male figures which originally had a wooden penis and this has rotted away leaving a hole, this perhaps explains why many of these 'female' figures had no breasts.
There’s another big change coming up shortly, the advent of Christianity, so we’d better start using the word pagan to distinguish between the religions and practices. How about pagan temples? There is absolutely no doubt that these existed before Christianity. Apart from the evidence of other civilisations, we have documentary proof that at least one man, Pope Gregory the Great (540-604) was sure temples existed, that they had idols in them and that the Celts practised sacrifice and held festivals. We’ll come to this later but take it from me, the written proof exists. However, temples weren’t the only place where pagans performed their rites and sacrifices, location seems to have been just as important as buildings and we are sure that certain sites were regarded as sacred. Hill tops, clearings in woods, springs, rivers and standing water were all used as sites for worship. We know this because it was a regular practice to throw votive offerings into water. The most famous example of this is at Flag Fen near Peterborough where an amazing pile of objects were found which had been thrown in the water. Similar hoards have been found in rivers but the strange thing about these is that they were all west-flowing, none have ever been found in east-flowing rivers, could this be an indication that the setting of the sun was a symbol of the ending of life?
So, did Barlick have a temple? I can’t say, all I can tell you is that Barlickers would be practising some form of ritual and this would include votive offerings, idols, sacred places and sacrifices. We have plenty of evidence for human sacrifices from this time and for some grisly reason these were often killed three times, pole-axed, garrotted and then their throat was cut. Was this practised in Barlick? Once again I don’t know but if we are going to have a clear sight of our Ancient Barlickers we have got to accept the possibility that it might have happened.
We’ll leave Barlick now and move forward to the next big event. Sometime around 600BC the technology of iron reached The Isles. This is a really significant event as it is the first step along the road to our modern industrial world, we are still living in the Iron Age (But consider that we might be moving into the 'Plastic Age'. It doesn't have quite the same ring to it does it). Next week we have to take a really serious look at Druids, Bards and New Age beliefs, I just know it’s going to get me in trouble!

SCG/16 October 2001