Artifacts: From Medieval Europe by James B. Tschen-Emmons

Author:James B. Tschen-Emmons
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781610696227
Publisher: Greenwood

SIGNIFICANCE

Although the raiding of religious houses by people professing the same faith seems odd, this pocket of Europe, while it shared in many aspects of medieval European culture, was also in many ways quite different. These “Celtic” regions (Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and Brittany on the northwest coast of France) interacted with and in some cases had been part of the Roman world, but they shared more in common with one another. Like the Romans, they professed Christianity, but they retained many of the traditions and political systems that their ancestors had in the La Tène period. Known to the Greeks as early as the sixth century BCE, the “Keltoi,” as the Greeks called them, were well known to the Classical world, not only as enemies, but also as skilled craftsmen, teachers, and poets. Much of what we know of early Celtic history comes from Greek and Roman sources, but these are often prejudiced. We know that the Celtic regions shared much culturally, but were divided politically. Most La Tène Celts were ruled by kings who relied upon a warrior caste, were sustained by peasant farmers, and looked to a formal intellectual class, the famous druids, for everything from education to history, from law to medicine. Feared for their valor, various Celtic armies had so terrorized the Greco-Roman world, most notably sacking Rome in 390 BCE and Delphi in 286 BCE, that the Romans eventually conquered one major enclave, Gaul (now France), and enrolled her warriors in the army.

Roman dominance over much of what remained of the Celtic world, Ireland and northern Scotland excluded, plus the encroachment of Germanic tribes, did much to make Celtic Europe marginal by the sixth century CE. Celtic culture, however, survived, not only in those areas never conquered, but also in Britain and northern France, which while Romanized, then Germanized, had retained much of Celtic culture. Sulpicius Severus (d. ca. 425 CE), for example, could still find speakers of Celtic in the Gaul of his day. Celtic Europe, however survived longest in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland, British Celts having either fled to Brittany in France or been subsumed under Roman and then Germanic overlords during the course of the fifth and sixth centuries. King Arthur, most famous as a chivalric king in the literature of the High Middle Ages, was probably one such British king who attempted to restore order and fend off the incoming Germanic peoples when the Romans left Britain in the fifth century.

Ireland too wrestled with invaders, particularly Scandinavian Vikings, but these raiders often settled and became part of Irish society. Many of Ireland’s cities, such as Dublin, were the products of Viking settlement, a process completed by the eleventh century. At this time, Irish and Viking leaders intermarried, became allies, and fought one another as rivals. Brian Bóruma, who was killed at the Battle of Clontarf in 1014, is often credited with “driving out the Danes,” but many of his allies were Vikings and the battle was not to drive “foreigners” out so much as it was to cement his power over subjects who wished to be independent.

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