Professor John Robertson OBA

Back in 1990, I did research into history teaching across the UK and Europe. You’ll not be surprised to know that the history curriculum in Croatia then was a bit blood and soil but across eastern and central Europe it was still pretty ethnic nationalist, uncritically lauding their own heroes and damning their neighbours. Only Germany looked to be really shaking off these darker aspects as they fought to recover from the horrors of World War II.

In Britain including in Scotland, the victories against Napoleon, the Kaiser and Hitler were still dominant topics.

While there were many important events and processes uncovered in a shrinking time allocation, one absence struck me and I’m reminded by this is the Guardian today:

Iron age hoard found in North Yorkshire could change Britain’s history – One of the biggest and most important iron age hoards ever found in the UK has been revealed, potentially altering our understanding of life in Britain 2,000 years ago. More than 800 objects were unearthed in a field near the village of Melsonby, North Yorkshire. They date back to the first century, around the time of the Roman conquest of Britain under Emperor Claudius, and are almost certainly associated with a tribe called the Brigantes who controlled most of northern England(sic).*

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2025/mar/25/iron-age-hoard-melsonby-north-yorkshire

Who were the Iron Age people in Britain at this time? What language did they speak? What was their culture called? What did the Romans call them? Keltoi, Celts. The word does not appear in the Guardian report. Their languages were clearly related to other Celtic languages across Europe and of course in Ireland. Their culture – art, jewellery, buildings, religion, weapons, hierarchies, warfare methods – are all clearly Celtic.

For a long time, the inhabitants of the British Isles were referred to as Celts after the linguistic similarities were first exposed. Historians, for some time, believed that they had been defeated first by the Romans and then, after they left (3-400D), Angles, Saxons and Jutes, sweeping across what is now England to ‘cleanse’ and corral the Celts in the west and north of the islands. The reality was more complex but the Celts were still recognised as having been the identifiable cultural group across Britain until then.

In my research and increasingly in academic and popular literature, in England especially, the word ‘Celt’ has been replaced by ‘Iron Age’. No doubt flaws were found in the term’s applicability to all of the tribes living in pre-Roman Britain, leading some academics to call for a re-framing and this cultural shift, disappearing the Celts.

Why has it happened?

Cultural shifts are often highly complex and uncertain in their roots and developments, but might it be a consequence of changing attitudes to invasion and ethnic cleansing. Victorian and earlier academics, along with the public, misreading Darwin, were content that the replacement by sword and fire of weaker, corrupted, Celtic peoples by more vigorous Angles and Saxons was just a natural evolutionary process leading to the better, stronger civilisation England now had, having conquered Ireland’s Celts and ‘cleansed’ those in the North of Scotland. They felt as did the whites in the USA, of the indigenous tribal people they ‘cleansed’ there, or as some Israelis do of Palestinians today, that the horrors are justified by some higher reasoning.

Academics, indeed most people today in the UK, I think, are less comfortable with that kind of supremacist thinking and the presence of Celts on the fringes of the UK is a daily reminder of that.

How to deal with that? Just rename the Celts of those times ‘Iron Age’, spread the new name across curricula and schoolbooks and, hey presto, we can relax. Just as the English love to imagine they were never conquered, they love to think they have never done terrible things like the Germans, the Russians or the Americans.

The National curriculum in England: history programmes of study provides a comprehensive, 2 000 word guide to what should be taught. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-history-programmes-of-study/national-curriculum-in-england-history-programmes-of-study

The word ‘celt’ does not appear once and even is Boudica is just ‘British’. The Romans, the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons merit extensive study but then there is no sense of loss of homeland in Italy nor in Scandinavia to make anyone uncomfortable.

Maybe the Celts were just insignificant? No empire, not even stone buildings. Is there anything they were good at? Anything that, in these times, we might like to think well of?

Treatment of disabled children?

There was no such thing as an illegitimate child in the Celtic world. All children were raised by the tribe. Under Celtic law, a man was required to care for her elderly parents. https://nicoleevelina.com/2013/04/15/children-in-celtic-law/

Ancient Celtic laws show there was a well developed medical service and that each individual tribe was responsible for caring for  the sick, and wounded people and those with learning  disabilities. https://langdondownmuseum.org.uk/the-history-of-learning-disability/idiots-imbeciles-and-intellectual-impairment/

What about those so civilised Romans?

The Twelve Tables included a law that said disabled children should be put to death, usually by stoning.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disability_in_ancient_Rome#Roman_laws_on_disability

The role of women?

Plutarch, writing in the Second Century AD, tells us that there was a long-standing Celtic tradition of women acting as mediators or judges in political or military disputes. Caesar tells us that Celtic women were free to choose their own husbands, that property was equally shared between them, and that full inheritance went to either partner after the death of the other. Plutarch’s account of the life of Marius includes a description of Celtic women of the Ambrones tribe taking up arms when their menfolk retreated before the Romans, and attacking not only the Romans as the identified enemy but also their own menfolk as traitors. Both Caesar and Tacitus give us descriptions of Celtic women present at battles, usually standing on or near the supply waggons and yelling encouragement to their tribesmen, sometimes being wounded or killed in the action. https://www.worldhistory.biz/ancient-history/57672-women-in-ancient-celtic-society.html

Why don’t we tell our children some of that to qualify all the lauding of their straight roads, their conquests, their toilets and baths?

I have a friend who worked with a Classics teacher in North-East Scotland in the 1960s, who grouped the learners, based on ability as Greeks, Romans, Saxons (!) and, least able, the Picts!

*The Brigantes controlled most of Northern England, many centuries before it ever existed? The Brigantes used to be Celts.