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Racial history of British Isles thrown into total confusion
Last year a reader from Britain wrote:
Hillaire Belloc in “Europe and the Faith” deals with the question of the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon Conquest of Britain. He puts forward a very convincing case for continuity with Roman Britain—from historical evidence he argues that the barbarians only established small settlements on the Eastern coast, although these were enough to cut Britain off from the rest of what had constituted the Empire.
What gives the impression of wider conquest is the dominance of the Anglo-Saxon language. The reason he gives for this is that when St. Augustine and his missionaries arrived at Kent to “re-civilise” and “re-Christianise” Britain, they begun with the Eastern settlements, moving Westward, and so taking with them the Anglo-Saxon language and customs. To assume that the Anglo-Saxons wiped out the original inhabitants of Britain is to make an untenable jump from the evidence at hand.
If Belloc is right, then there could have been no racial difference to speak of between pre-fifth century “Celtic” Britain and post-sixth century “Anglo-Saxon” England, since very few Anglo-Saxons actually came to Britain. But how could this be the case, given the clear phenotypical differences between the “Anglo-Saxon” English on one side, and the people of Celtic fringe and of Ireland on the other? While there are several Irish types, the dominant Irish type is tall, with wide features, light skin, and reddish-blondish hair. This is what I think of as the Irish Celt (though what relation Irish Celts have to the very different-looking Gauls or Celts of France I have no idea). Look at James Cagney or Peggy Noonan, and you know immediately that that’s an Irish face, not an English face. Where, then, did the English type come from, as distinct from the pre-existing Celtic type of the British Isles, if not from the large-scale Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain, in which the British Celts were either exterminated or pushed aside and replaced by Anglo-Saxons?
If Belloc is right, the racial character of England stops making sense.
The same is even more true of the recent genetic studies which conclude that the gene pool of the British Isles is essentially what it was in the Neolithic, with the Celtic, Anglo-Saxon, Danish, and Norman additions having changed the pre-existing original gene pool very little. Again, how could this be? The Neolithic people are thought to have been of a “Mediterranean” type, petite, with dark hair, and with often strongly protruding nose. Yes, there are widespread traces of the Neolithic type in the English population today (e.g., Richard Dawkins), which, in my view, accounts for the fact that the English are so different from the Scandinavians, even though the former are grouped with the latter as Germanic peoples. Also, the “dark Irish” (e.g., Pat O’Brien, Richard Nixon) probably reflect the Neolithic population of Ireland. However, if it is true that both the Celtic settlement in the British Isles (circa 500 to 300 B.C.) and the later Anglo-Saxon conquest of England added relatively few people to the respective native populations of those times, then whence came the taller, fairer, broad-faced Celtic type of Ireland, and the taller, fairer, narrow-faced and more regular-featured Anglo-Saxon type of England, as distinct from the shorter, slimmer, darker, and less regular-featured Neolithic type?
Both the Belloc theory and the recent genetic findings conflict with everything I thought I knew, and with everything I actually see, of the respective racial types of the British Isles.
- end of initial entry -
Felicie C. writes (posted July 21):
You might want to check out this website (the Society for Nordish Physical Anthropology) regarding different European types.
It appears to be a reputable, neither a political not a neo-nazi, site, as far as I can tell.
If you go to the link I gave then click on “Brunn” and “Keltic Nordid” to see some examples of Irish types. It’s not exactly the same type you are describing, but it’s certainly a recognizable type. They also have some Anglo-Saxon examples, as well as the Scandinavians and Baltic types. I thought it was interesting.
Daniel H. writes:
I cannot cite the source—I read it in an academic Journal that I was browsing on Jstor—but I came upon a logical explanation for the near complete absence of the Celtic legacy in the English language (It is said that, excluding Irish imports of the past 200 years, there are about 10 English words that can be traced to the Celtic language). The author of the article, citing other research, asserts that at the time of the Roman conquest, England was already a proto-English speaking land. Old English was the language of the land and should be recognized not as an offshoot of Saxon German but as an autonomous Germanic language that separated from proto-German further back in time. So, Old English, then, was not brought over by the Angles/Saxons/Jutes but was already the common language. Again, I did not read the original research: this author was summarizing others’ research. One fact I do remember to support his point the author notes that in one of Caesar’s works, Caesar took note of the fact that the people of Britain spoke a language similar to one of the Germanic tribes on Gaul’s borders
If this explanation be true then it meshes with the evidence we have that the Saxons and others did not exterminate the inhabitants of England when they invaded. Interesting conjecture.
LA replies:
Well, in that case, there wasn’t a replacement of peoples, and the Celts remained the main people of Britain. But then how is it that the Celtic English are such a distinct type from the Celtic Irish?
Patrick H. writes:
You wrote:
“Where, then, did the English type come from, as distinct from the pre-existing Celtic type of the British Isles, if not from the large-scale Anglo-Saxon conquest of Britain, in which the British Celts were either exterminated or pushed aside and replaced by Anglo-Saxons?”
Perhaps the “English type” was already there, and the phenotypic differences from east/south to West/north predate the Anglo-Saxon conquest, even by millennia. The “English type” does seem, at least superficially, to be unique to England, and somewhat different from the German/Dutch/Scandinavian types it would resemble were it purely of Anglo-Saxon genetic stock.
LA replies:
Alright,so if we put together your theory and the idea of another reader [Daniel H.] that a form of Old English was already spoken in southern Britain before the Anglo-Saxon conquest, then the Anglo-Saxon conquest brought neither people nor language to Britain!
You know, it’s funny, I’ve never seen anyone compare the Anglo-Saxons to the actual Saxons of Germany. Do they look alike?
Patrick replies:
Unlike the the other reader, I was referring only to the “English” physical type, the phenotype. There is a particular kind of “English” face, for example, not that common among the Dutch and Germans. The Angles, Saxons and the somewhat mysterious Jutes (and Frisians, too), came into an “England” (i.e., southern and eastern Britain) whose people were already very genetically similar to today’s English (and perhaps, not as dissimilar to the ASJs themselves as was previously thought). These people were not wiped out, but were subjugated and their language replaced (I’m not sure what your other correspondent is saying about this). I have no doubt that the ASJs were more numerous than the Normans, but their genetic effect on the Isles was somewhat similar: aristocratic replacement, together with rather more (than the Normans) genetic input via males breeding with local females. They didn’t replace the existing “English” type, they modified it.
I believe the Saxons of Germany are quite different than the Anglo-Saxons. I read something to that effect quite recently, but I’ll have to dig to find it.
Philip M. writes from England:
Take a look at the Blonde Map of Europe, which distinguishes different areas by the percentage of blondness in the population.
As you can see, there is a division right across mainland Britain. Maybe what you thought of as a “traditional” British type was only typical of certain areas, or even classes. I had not heard the theory about Anglo-Saxon language and customs spreading with Christianity. I had wondered whether the Angles, although numerically smaller, were militarily stronger and had enslaved the native Brits who had been weakened after being looked after by their Roman masters for so long. They were then in a position to impose their language and culture on them. I started wondering this when I learned that the word “Welsh” is of Germanic origin and means both “slave” and “outsider.”
Alan Levine writes:
Some comments on “Racial History of the British Isles.” This is a subject I know a bit about and, by coincidence, I have been reading about sub-Roman/Early England recently.
1) The idea that the Anglo-Saxons were only a small aristocratic elite imposing their language and customs on a fundamentally Celtic British population has become quite common in the last few decades. (Belloc’s ideas were wholly atypical of his time.) This seems to have originated among some nationalistic archaeologists like TC Lethbridge in the early post-World War II period who wished to believe that the English were not closely related to the Germans, but it became a “big deal” because it fitted in with a much larger. left-associated ideological preconception in the archaeological profession involving the downplaying of all diffusion and migration at least up to modern times.
The problem with this, as has been well said, is that if the ancestral English-speakers were a minority, we ought to be speaking Welsh! There are situations in which a minority invading elite can impose its language and customs on a native majority, but they did not obtain in Dark Age Britain, and nothing like this occurred in any other part of the Western Roman Empire conquered by the Germanic invaders. Except in a relatively small area right by the Rhine and Danube, Latin survived. If anything, it is even more improbable that the Britons were “converted” in this way, as the historical record such as it is shows that they put up a hell of a fight, much more so than any other people in the Roman West.
2) Genetic studies are a tricky business as far as resolving this problem is concerned, since it is likely that the whole population of the lowland parts of Western Europe is closely related and always has been. There was no particular racial difference between the native populations of what is now England, the Low Countries, Germany and France, before or after Rome, so any mass migrations within that area in the Dark Ages would not show any particularly spectacular traces. Actually, some recent genetic studies examining subtle traits seem quite compatible with the old idea of a mass migration from Germany to England swamping the native Britons. There are some references to these matters in Donald Henson’s “Origins of the Anglo-Saxons” and on online materials referenced at the Wikipedia article on the Anglo-Saxons.
It seems to me that the predominant type among the Irish does look a little different from most other Western Europeans, but you would expect Ireland, relatively isolated, to have some peculiarities.
3) To be fair to Belloc, he was probably writing in reaction to a nineteenth century mania for insisting that the Germanic invaders had entirely wiped out or chased the Britons out of England. This was a ridiculous idea which there was never any reason to believe and which no one now holds, as there has always been plenty of evidence that many Britons remained in England and were absorbed by the invaders.
4) You referred to the old idea that the “original” native population of Western Europe in the Neolithic were dark Mediterranean types or like the “Black Irish.” There doesn’t seem to be much evidence in favor of this, or for any major migration of fairer people from the east,
I have never seen any explanation for the prevalence of darker people in parts of Ireland and Wales (and a few other places) but I would hazard a guess that it is they, not the fairer types, who are descended from an “intrusive” element. I would speculate that they originated as seaborne migrants carrying farming along the coasts of Western Europe from Spain or Morocco or even inside the Mediterranean at the same time that the main wave of agriculture spread northwest from the Balkans.
5) By the way, James Cagney was half-Norwegian!
LA replies:
You make many interesting points, but could you add a little more, sort of tying your points together?
Alan Levine replies:
Am not quite sure what you want, but:
My main point is that there is not much genetic difference between most Western European peoples, and one would not expect to see any huge evidence for migrations within the region, but there is some, and contrary to what has become fashionable to believe in the last few decades thanks to politically correct trends in interpreting prehistory, it supports the traditional idea of a large-scale migration from across the North Sea that swamped and absorbed, without “exterminating” the Roman Britons, which also fits the historical data and parallels from other places.
By the way, if there was no mass migration from the mainland, it is difficult to explain the archaeological record in Germany, which shows the near desertion of the coast between the Weser and the Elbe in the sixth century, the complete disappearance of the Angle tribe, and the takeover of Jutland by the Danes. Where the hell did all those people go, if not to England?
Alan Levine continues:
In response to the comments you printed:
1) I have never heard anyone claim that there was any important Germanic presence in Britain, or at least southern Britain, before the Romans came. (Some archaeologists believe that a small part of northern Scotland was inhabited by a group that may have originated in Scandinavia and presumably spoke a Germanic language.)
I think confusion on this point has been created by the fact that the Belgae, a Celtic group inhabiting both sides of the Straits of Dover, were known to stem from a mixture of Celts and Germans,—Caesar refers to this—but they and the rest of the Britons were Celtic speakers. Also, some archaeologists thought that the Saxons began to settle in Britain as “foederati” already in the second or third centuries A.D. and that the Romans’ “Saxon Shore” forts were supposed to hold down these people as well as defend against raids from across the North Sea. This view is no longer widely held.
I just cannot figure out how the Saxons, if only a small elite, could have imposed their language and customs on the natives, who hated their guts. As for their spreading Christianity, the Britons were Christians, not the Saxons, who took some time to accept the Christian religion. In fact, the Venerable Bede’s criticisms of the Britons was based partly on his belief that they had deliberately refused to convert his ancestors to the true faith!
Bruce B. writes:
I read Bryan Sykes’ recent book “Saxons, Vikings and Celts” (I haven’t been able to get Stephen Oppenheimer’s similar book) a while back. Based on Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA analyses, he concludes that there’s a solid bedrock of Neolithic and Mesolithic ancestry but that ancestry is modified to various extents depending on what part of Britain we’re talking about. In Orkney, the modification is quite high, in East Anglia it’s somewhat lower. In the Western part of Britain, it’s still lower, etc. This says that the Brits are largely an indigenous people but doesn’t tell us what they look like.
Northern Europeans are quite a diverse group. The honest, though dated, work of someone like Harvard anthropologist Carlton Coon is quite interesting. You’d never get any Hitlerian ideas of purity from this type of work. What a shame that our origins can’t be studied in more detail. The SNPA seems to be a nice, non-ideological start.
Anthony O. writes:
I discovered your site by accident and found I enjoyed it a great deal.
I happened to have read Stephen Oppenheimer’s “Myth of British Ancestry” when it was published in 2006. Coincidentally, I read Hilaire Belloc’s “Europe and the Faith” this year and was fascinated with how it tracked with Oppenheimer.
My reaction to Oppenheimer was almost opposite to yours. While recognizing that there are certain predominant local types in Britain (I think especially of the fair-haired people of the eastern parts of England heavily settled by the Danes) and Ireland, I have been struck by the fact that one can encounter people in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland that look basically the same. This is true of people I have known, and who had names corresponding to their country of birth.
I grew up with the notion that one could pick out the Catholic (Irish) faces in the West-of-Scotland town where my parents grew up. When I first started trying to distinguish those faces, there seemed to be some truth in the theory. However, I found it to be of limited use. Some faces you might think were Catholic were of Protestants with Lowland surnames.
As time went on, I often found myself studying faces in other parts of Britain and seeing remarkable similarities in coloring, stature and cast of face (phenotype). I often asked myself whether the explanation might be that a strong Celtic element remained in Britain, despite the Anglo-Saxon conquest of much of the Island. However, the number of faces and types that bucked that interpretation left me perplexed. I now put more credence in the theories of Belloc and Oppenheimer.
It may be interesting to note that my ancestry is mostly Irish, and of very recent arrival in Britain. I have fairish brown hair and monochromatic blue eyes, but nobody ever guesses my ancestry and some have even questioned my assertion that I’m of Irish extraction. I’ve been told more than once that I look English, and I don’t recall anyone finding trouble associating my appearance with Scotland. I would say that I’m of a type that wouldn’t look out of place anywhere in the British Isles, and many other places besides. That could be owing to a felicitous mixture of Celtic and Nordic (very common to Ireland and the Scottish Highlands and Islands), or it could be traceable to an older strain.
LA replies:
Antony O. writes:
“While recognizing that there are certain predominant local types in Britain (I think especially of the fair-haired people of the eastern parts of England heavily settled by the Danes) and Ireland, I have been struck by the fact that one can encounter people in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland that look basically the same.”
But of course there’s tremendous mixture all through the British Isles and I’m not questioning that. Consider the English who settled in Ireland over a period of many centuries. Think of the various Scottish Protestant plantations in Ireland, consisting of people who were probably partly Anglo-Saxon. Pointing to the lack of a completely consistent system of types is easy; it’s like saying that there are mixed breeds of dogs, therefore there is no such thing as a pure-breed.
So my focus is not on the tremendous existing mixture, which is a given, but on the truly distinct types. And to me, in my non-scientific way and despite much overlap which would tend to contradict what I’m about to say, there is a distinct Irish type (or rather a distinct set of Irish types) and a distinct English type (or rather a distinct set of English types). And how does one square these facts with the Oppenheimer approach, without supposing that these distinct types had to have existed respectively in Ireland and Britain in the Neolithic, which—to me at least—seems impossible? I mean, does anyone really believe that the classic Celtic type, with the wide features and curly blondish reddish hair, which we can see in the illuminated manuscripts of the eighth century and which is still in Ireland today, existed in Ireland in Neolithic times?
To put the question more generally, getting away from the specifically “Celtic” question: were the Neolithic people of the British Isles fair-colored? Well … (I concede the possibility for the first time) maybe they were. But it seems unlikely. But maybe that’s only because it doesn’t fit my earlier conceptions. The new views seem to throw out everything we thought we knew.
Andrew O. replies:
My point is that I see what I take to be a distinct type in different parts of Britain. That type conforms to my notion of a “Celtic,” as distinct from other types that I would find more exotic, with reference to my own stock (e.g., both longer-faced and rounder faced blonds that I take to be Germanic).
There is indeed a recognizable Irish type with some range of varying features. But I can tell you that despite being “as Irish as Paddy’s market,” as my dad would put it, I don’t look a bit like the typical Irishman that, say, Thomas Nast so uncharitably caricatured or that representations of leprechauns seem to exaggerate. That said, I wouldn’t look out of place in Ireland.
My view of what Celtic looks like has been colored by the predominant types in the West of Scotland, which includes a large measure of formerly-Gaelic speaking people from the Western Highlands and Islands, as well as a large infusion of Irish who began arriving since Glasgow became a center of the industrial revolution. The people I refer to are highly distinguishable from a shorter, darker type that is common in Glasgow area. Taken together, these people tend not to look like the “leprechaun” Irish type. I have always taken that to be a subtype. Perhaps this type much more common in areas south of where my ancestors come from (Donegal, Sligo and elsewhere in the north, at least in recent times. My surname is spread about Ireland, but it is most closely associated with Donegal and environs).
My puzzlement arose from seeing so many people in England that I thought exemplified that Celtic look, even though there were other types that one might recognize as being clearly more Germanic (to say nothing of the variety of types in London even before it became a center of Asian and Caribbean migration, owing to its long cosmopolitan history).
Given this point of view, I see less rather than more difficulty in the wake of reading Oppenheimer and Belloc. One would expect to see a considerable amount of mingling between Irish, Scottish and English types in the British Isles because of the various known migrations, invasions and commercial relationships. One wouldn’t expect to see someone who looked conspicuously “Celtic” (pale skin, fair-ish hair, pure blue eyes, a certain cast of face) in my conception of the type, in the south or west of England.
If the conventional narrative of English history were right, one wouldn’t find so many people who look so similar in such definite ways. Those who survived the Saxons’ ethnic cleansing were all supposed to have been driven off to the “Celtic Fringe.” If occasional intermingling were the cause, the examples I saw wouldn’t be so pure, so to speak—their defining characteristics would tend to be blunted by assimilation.
-Anthony
P.S. Just to add an amusing gloss on my notion of the Celtic look: the police organization in my parents’ home town of Dumbarton (and perhaps all of Strathclyde) had a height requirement of six feet. The result was that the constables tended to be of the taller, fairer Highland & Island stock from the traditionally Gaelic speaking part of the West of Scotland. It was common to see one of these big lads handily escorting some drunken “wee shug” of the shorter, often darker complected (at least hair and eye color) type. Not that it was uncommon to see tall, Highland drunks, but one saw the stark contrast of phenotype in these situations.
LA replies:
Ok, do you believe then that the “Celtic” type has been in Britain since the Neolithic, since agreement with both Belloc (the Anglo-Saxons did not displace the then existing Celts) and Oppenheimer (the British are largely indigenous going back to Neolithic) would require that conclusion?
As for the “leprechauns,” that seems to be one of the distinct Irish types, different from the “Celts,” and the “Neolithics.”
Anthony O. writes:
I certainly entertain the possibility that this “Celtic” type has been in the British Isles since Neolithic times. “Belief” would be a strong term, but it does fit some facts better than the conventional narrative.
Whether these people are Celts by race or just by culture, is another matter. Oppenheimer cast doubt on much that has been said about Celts, but there is a clear Celtic linguistic genealogy. I’m not sure where that fits in time relative to, say, late Neolithic times. I’m not sure whether anybody else really knows either, but I think conventional wisdom on that score is that the Celts arrived in northwestern Europe long after it was already populated. Oppenheimer’s theory puts people in these territories during the Ice Age, when what became Britain wasn’t separated from the continent by the North Sea.
What is clear is that the Scots (from whom the modern country gets its name) were Gaels who arrived in Scotland in the 5th century from Ireland. Not that I’ve looked so hard, but I’ve never come across any conclusive identification of the people whom the Romans called the Picts. Maybe they were Brythonic Celts like the Britons (and late the Welsh) or maybe they were something else, sharing that common ancestry that makes up the lion’s share of British genetic material (Oppenheimer says they are of the same stock as the Basques).
Perhaps people of this stock were on both sides of the Irish sea but had diverged linguistically. Perhaps they spoke another language before the different branches of Celtic took root in the respective geographies. Perhaps non-stop traffic over many centuries mingled people in this little piece of land and sea beyond distinction, including an admixture of Norsemen, who ruled various parts of the Hebrides over a few centuries. All I know for sure is that I find it hard to distinguish between the people I descend from in Ireland and those in the Western Highlands and Islands, and I have come across many people in different parts of the Britain that look more or less the same.
I agree that this type, if type it truly be, is different than the “leprechaun” (a term I use with no disrespect).
Bruce B. writes:
Anthony O. mentions the Picts:
“Not that I’ve looked so hard, but I’ve never come across any conclusive identification of the people whom the Romans called the Picts. Maybe they were Brythonic Celts like the Britons (and late the Welsh) or maybe they were something else, sharing that common ancestry that makes up the lion’s share of British genetic material (Oppenheimer says they are of the same stock as the Basques).”
In “Saxons, Vikings, and Celts, The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland,” Sykes says that the Picts were of the same ancient stock as the rest of the British and spoke a Celtic language.There’s always been fantastical speculation about the Picts.
Incidentally, Sykes takes the standard liberal tactic of excoriating all the 19th scientific racialists. They just love dirty laundry. I suppose it’s so they don’t get lambasted by the liberal media.
LA replies:
And by “same ancient stock as the rest of the British,” I assume Sykes means those tall, fair-skinned, wide-featured, reddish blondish haired, dreaming-eyed people who, we’re now told by Sykes and others, have been inhabiting the British Isles for the last 15,000 years.
But again (here I’m just thinking out loud), why not? The conventional wisdom had been for a long time that a smaller, darker haired people had lived in the British Isles prior to the entry of the Celts around 500 B.C. But if the taller, fairer type had been dominant throughout Northern Europe and particularly in Britain and Ireland for many thousands of years prior to the arrival of the Celts, what difference does it make? What hinges on it? What does it change? What it changes, indeed eliminates, is the picture of a Europe long inhabited by Mediterranean-type Neolithic people that, starting around three thousand years ago, was invaded by distinctly different Indo-European—Celtic and Germanic—peoples.
Further, since we do know that the pre-Indo-European peoples in southernmost Europe (Greece and Italy) were of a darker complexioned, shorter, “Mediterranean” type, the Sykes-Oppenheimer view would mean that for at least 10,000 years preceding the entry of the Indo-Europeans, Europe consisted of tall, fair people to the north (who resembled the later Indo-European newcomers) and shorter, darker people to the south, with neither of the two peoples displacing the other.
I’m just trying to spell out the implications of this new view, the possibility of which, as I said, I’m now conceding, though, as can be seen by the doubtful tone I’ve used here, it still seems very unlikely to me.
Anthony O. writes:
You wrote:
And by “same ancient stock as the rest of the British,” I assume Sykes means those tall, fair-skinned, wide-featured, reddish blondish haired, dreaming-eyed people who, we’re now told by Sykes and others, have been inhabiting the British Isles for the last 15,000 years.
Well, I have been told I have dreamy eyes!
But if the taller, fairer type had been dominant throughout Northern Europe and particularly in Britain and Ireland for many thousands of years prior to the arrival of the Celts, what difference does it make? What hinges on it? What does it change?
Others will probably have better insight into this, but I wonder whether it might undermine the entire Aryan hypothesis of a superior type coming from southern Russian, Asia Minor, or whatever, and dominating inferior types by spreading into Iran and India to the South and west, and Europe in the other direction. That theory is largely based on linguistic evidence (proto-Indo-European etymology).
While there is some racial resemblance of types from India to Ireland it may not be enough to sustain the theory. The Indo-European languages, including the Germanic, Romance and Celtic languages, could be of recent arrival, adopted by ancient stock, much as Spanish has been adopted by inhabitants of the Americas—or indeed as English is the language of Ireland and the Scottish Highlands today.
If skin color is an environmental adaptation, then it would be no surprise to find that ancient northern populations were fair. At the same time, fairer people may have migrated south to the Mediterranean. The Greeks and Romans seem to have been fair, compared with the natives of North Africa. There’s a saying in Italy that “anything south of Rome is Africa,” referring to the darker people to the south. I’ve heard the Greeks of today don’t resemble the ancient Greeks, owing to migrations/population shifts. Fairer people may indeed have gone southeastward to India and Afghanistan. That doesn’t mean they were merely the same people as the ancient northern European people just moving in an opposite direction.
Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 20, 2008 01:38 PM | Send
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