How the Celts Saved Britain

[Sìle]

Is anybody else watching this two-part programme on BBC4? It is viewable (within the UK) on BBCi Player.

[Tegernacus]

I'll wait to see both before giving you a verdict.

My current thinking runs along the lines of "Yes... but..." and ANOTHER show ruined by the complete un-acknowledgement of Wales and Cumbria, the Old North and Cornwall.

"Romans left... here come the Saxons! woo-hoo! the Irish! oh, btw some Britons lived in Wales.. but nevermind them..." - Same as every other history show I've ever seen.

Saying that, what they did show was well based and pretty spot-on.

I think where they are going with it is : if it wasn't for the Irish, we wouldn't be reading or writing or have books or Christianity or stuff? But.. we already had that in Wales, even without the Irish. Oh... when you say "we", you mean the English. As usual.

/nationalistic rant over, sorry

[megli]

quite.

[Sìle]

Yes ... did notice brief mention of Wales and Cornwall and then dismissal of them. Probably won't be able to watch the follow-up though.

[Tegernacus]

not dissing it completely, we need more quality historical shows like that on TV. And I understand that it's quite difficult to squeeze 500 years of history into a couple of hours. BUT it is falling into the same Anglo-Centric trap that most history productions fall into. We really need a show like this from the perspective of the Britons - this show hinted at it, then went off on a tangent. Perhaps we should write one

[Tegernacus]

part 2:

"He follows in the footsteps of Ireland's earliest missionaries as they venture through treacherous barbarian territory to bring literacy and technology to the future nations of Scotland and England."

what, they didn't bring to to Wales? awww... starting to feel unloved here

[megli]

that is more or less true though.

[megli]

I thought it DID show things from the perspective of the Britons--Patrick was one after all, and it went on about him a lot!

[megli]

The priest in Gleann an Diabhail is a halfwit though. He clearly knows nothing about the historical Patrick at all.

[littleraven]

May 29, 2009 11:51:23 GMT -1 megli said:

that is more or less true though.

Whilst the evidence may indeed suggest this, IMHO it simply doesn't make sense from a people perspective.

The idea that everybody became illiterate when the Romans left holds no water as a practical eventuality. Legions here or not, the government officials who remained who would have undoubtedly used latin for their official duties would have continued to do so. With the lack of Rome it's entirely plausible that writing would have been applied to the native langauages phonetically as Latin faded.

But then I've not seen the prog so can't really comment too much.

[megli]

Hang on, you've misconceived here. You've fallen into the error that we jump down people's throats for--confusing 'England' with Britain. The Irish missionaries (Aidan, Columba etc) brought literacy to the anglo-saxons, i.e. to the kingdoms that eventually made up Englalonde, and to the never-romanised Picts. Neither of whom were literate.

It makes perfect sense from a people perspective. The irish didn't need to evangelise the already Christian, literate Brits --who in a sense had, via Patrick, evangelised them in the first place-- who were already jammed into Cornwall and Wales or on their way to Brittany by this stage. It's very important to grasp that *Christianity requires literacy*, because you have to be able to read the Mass and the Bible. There was continuity of literacy among the Britons--the inscribed stones of subroman Wales tell us that quite explicitly (the Catumanus stone, for example) -- but that's not what we're talking about.

[littleraven]

You're right, I misconcieved. I'll get me coat ...

[megli]

[Francis]

I've got my coat ready too as this isn't an area I claim much knowledge about - and I'll admit to being on more than one occasion a sucker for the Victorian romantics view!

Jun 1, 2009 9:07:20 GMT -1 megli said:

It's very important to grasp that *Christianity requires literacy*, because you have to be able to read the Mass and the Bible.

Certainly true of the Christianity brought back to Britain's eastern shores by Augustine 600 A.D.ish. For me Constantine's construction of the Bible, shackling its core to the dry, dusty Middle East, banished any possibility of rational, soul-deep, communion with its essence for any born on our islands.

It's my belief that much of the specifically "Christian" message (as opposed to "Biblical" message, and most importantly Biblical context) did persist in the west of Britain - and free from the anchor/millstone of many written texts. The legions left in 410, the bible in the form familiar to us was probably less than 20 years old at the time (Carthage 397).

I imagine that in the West of Britain the "christian" message was pretty unfettered by "the bible", the dust of the Levant and the childish early behaviour of a jealous, vengeful mountain god- If only through a lack of physical written old testament texts.

How uniform do we expect the Mass was around 400A.D. - were liturgical "books" common (relatively) in the west of Britain?

Christianity post Councils of Niceae and Carthage certainly does require literacy - but I wonder if the pre-Augustinian Christianity of Wales, Cornwall, Cumbria and the Fylde did?

Haven't seen the programme so will stop banging on without clear purpose! I visited the old church at Llanrhychwyn yesterday and had a good experience there.

www.snowdoniaguide.com/llanrhychwyn.html

A non-biblical, non-cannonical christian message with a spirituality and mysticism of its local geography and history. And no mention of the mountain-prat-deity that idiot Abraham so feared... er I mean loved.

[Tegernacus]

Didn't the A/S, on the event of them becoming Christian, employ Britons to do their scribing (on account that they could read/write Latin, whereas the Saxons couldn't) ?

Yeah, I understand that the Britons already had literacy, Christianity, Rome-ness, so they didn't need it. Didn't they refuse to baptise Saxons on account of them being no-good heathen land-grabbers (or somesuch)?

By beef was the title and premise: the Irish didn't "save Britain". They may have helped civilise the Angles and Saxons, but that's a different thing. If anything, by their very... Vikingy.. attacks on Britain, followed by their conversion and teaching of the Saxons, they helped destroy it. (Spoken as someone who still thinks he lives in the 5th century lol) Something that would come back and bite them in the ass 1000 years later

[megli]

Christianity with no bible is a contradiction in terms and always has been, even pre-Constantine. It is certainly true that the canon of the Bible was not fully formed until fairly late, as a gradual process extending into the 4th century AD, but this is largely a question of debate about the status of the apocrypha: it's not that they can't decide whether scripture is important (it is), but rather they're not sure if The Proto-Gospel of James is canonical or not. But everyone from the 1st century onwards wd have used the Septuagint, the four gospels, Paul's Letters, and Acts. The order of the books was also a bit unclear: the order wasn't fixed until the advent of the bound book, really--before that, your 'books' (which is what 'Bible', ta biblia, means) would be rolls of papyrus kept in a book cupboard. Further, as Christianity grew out of Judaism, the books of the Jewish Bible (in Greek translation) were always held to be sacred by Christians, even in the 1st century. (Irenaeus upbraids a heretic called Marcion for suggesting that Christians don't need the Old Testament.) So a 'non-biblical' Christian message is as impossible as a 'non-numerical' mathematics. The Bible (despite debate over the fine details of what went in it) was the absolute core of the christian faith. (The so-called Bryennios List of c. 100AD gives a list of OT books which we still recognise.)

This was also so in Britain. Take Patrick--a 5th century Romano-Briton, brought up in the kind of pre-Augustinian Christianity which should, if what you say is right, Francis, be so non-biblical, and non-literate. And yet his works are saturated, absolutely drenched, in Biblical phrases: it obviously formed the core of what education he had received by the time he was captured by Irish slavers in his teens, because his Latin is awkward. So not only did his parental Christianity require literacy: such literacy was grounded in the Bible (the so-called 'Vetus Latina', the 'Old Latin' Bible in use before Jerome's Vulgate.) So we know his family had biblical books--and which can even tell which 'edition' they had! Such texts wd have been essential for the liturgy and for the instruction of Christians.

The Mass always required celebrants to be able to read, as well as readers for the scriptures that were read out in Church: indeed, 'reader' is one of the traditional grades of the church hierachy in the early medieval period:

doorkeeper
reader
exorcist
subdeacon
deacon
priest
bishop

etc

The huge corpus of writings left by the early fathers (e.g Origen, Irenaeus) and other very early Christian writings (e.g. 'the Shepherd of Hermas') show that Christianity was, and always has been, profoundly rooted ('fettered' as you put it) in literacy and the Bible. This was just as true in Britain as anywhere else.

[megli]

Oh dear Teg, are we doing 'sins of the fathers' now? :S

yes, Bede in the 8th century says the Brits got what was coming to them because a) they were decadent, and b) they had the Christian faith and yet refused to teach it to the pagan saxons (which from Bede wd mean that his ancestors were burning in hell, of course, because the selfish old britons hadn't obeyed the biblical injunction to preach the gospel to all nations.)

[megli]

I don't see how 'converting' the saxons helps to destroy Britain, personally. There was no britain any more, by this stage. There were smallish kingdoms, some A-S, like Mercia or Northumbria, and some British like Powys or Rheged or Gododdin, some Irish, like Dal Riata, and then Pictavia. All fought amongst themselves and alliances were made across the briton-Saxon, irish-Briton, divide. And before we start blaming the Irish, remember that the classic example of a 'raider' in the supposedly Irish mould was a Briton: the King Coroticus (i.e. Ceredic) whom Patrick ticks off for stealing away his baby Christians in raids conducted on Ireland! It cut both ways, over an irish sea region that was multi-lingual and under several different kinds of political rule.

[Tegernacus]

methinks you should have written this program