A Brief History of the Celts (21 page)

The Celtic god of smiths seems to bear a single name throughout the Celtic world, represented by Goibhniu in Ireland and Gofannon in Wales. In Ireland, the smith god appears as a triune god, as
Goibhniu, Luchta and Credhne. In some texts the trinity is Goibhniu, Cian and Samhain. Goibhniu was the smith, Luchta the wright and Credhne the metalworker; all three combined to produce weapons
or wheels or whatever other artefact came from their combined skills.

In the famous battle between the children of Danu and the gods of the Underworld, the Fomorii, each of the gods made a different part of the weapons: Goibhniu made the blade, Luchta the shaft
and Credhne the rivets. Goibhniu’s weapons were always accurate and inflicted a fatal wound. Curiously enough he was also made host of the Otherworld feast in
which he
provided a special ale and those who drank of it became immortal.

In Welsh myth, Gofannon, the smith god, was the son of Dôn, the equivalent of Danu, who features in the Tale of Culhwch and Olwen.

The Celtic god is clearly the equivalent of the Greek Hephaistos, who also prepares the feast of the gods while his ale preserves their immortality, and the Roman Vulcan. Figures of smith gods
are found throughout the Celtic world but they are particularly prevalent in northern Britain. While the Continental name for the smith god does not seem to have survived in epigraphy, we may
speculate from the insular Celtic forms. There are many representations of the god Sucellus carrying a long-shafted hammer or mallet, and the name has been interpreted as ‘the good
striker’. Yet the immediate identification of Sucellus as a smith god could be an over-simplification, for his hammer might symbolise something entirely different.

Celtic craftsmen were also skilled in the production of glass and in enamelling. The Celts had learned how to make glass by the sixth and fifth centuries
BC
but it is
only from the fourth century
BC
that the first traces of Celtic glass-producing workshops survive. Glass was used chiefly in the production of jewellery and other artefacts,
particularly coloured beads and ornaments. Glass animals abound from this period. A fascinating example of how advanced the Celts were in making coloured glass figurines may be seen in the
miniature glass dog found in Wallertheim, Germany, dating from the second century
BC
. The technique used was spinning semi-molten ribbons of variously coloured glass on a
rod.

Glass beads were very popular during this period, as were glass bangles. Several statues and Celtic heads were clearly made with glass eyes, such as the figure from Bouray, Essome, dated to the
first century
AD
, who is seated in the lotus position, a torc around the neck, and with a blue and white glass eye – the only one remaining
in situ
.

The production of glass and enamel in Britain and Ireland had become extremely sophisticated by the first century
BC
. The enamelling technique
would eventually influence the gospel illumination of the Christian period in these areas.

In 1987 archaeologists uncovered a spectacular third-century
BC
sword at Kirkburn in Yorkshire. It is now in the British Museum in London, and demonstrates the high
degree of craftsmanship among the Celts. It is of iron, bronze and enamel with patterns engraved on it, and the pommel is of horn. It was found to have been assembled from over seventy components,
each item crafted with considerable skill. The overall length was 697 millimetres with a blade of 570 millimetres.

Enamelling was also carried out among the Continental Celts. The craftsmen had learned how to fuse the glass on to the surface of copper alloys, creating a true enamel working. They used a
variety of colours but the favourite was red. A typical example of this type of work is the late-fourth-century
BC
bronze helmet from Amfreville-sous-les-Monts, Eure,
France, which is stylistically decorated with gold and red enamel. Another example, from a bronze belt chain of the second century
BC
, is a pendant in the shape of a
dragon-type animal, which has red enamel inlays. This was found in Nové Zámky, in the Czech Republic.

Some of the most outstanding examples of Celtic art may be found in the mirrors, especially as represented by the Desborough, Northamptonshire, bronze mirror, dated to the end of the first
century
BC
. The bronze back surface is engraved with fascinating Celtic designs that could only have been achieved with the aid of a compass. The Holcombe, Devon, mirror of
the same period is similar in style. Very few Celtic mirrors have survived on the European mainland but we are lucky in having a whole series of insular Celtic mirrors found mostly in Britain from
East Anglia across to Cornwall.

Celtic potters had progressed to the use of the wheel from
the end of the Hallstatt period. They fired their pots in techinically advanced kilns which were designed to
allow oxygen to be introduced; the potter could thus control the colour of the vessel, depending on its clay. By the La Tène period, the potters often stamped their pots with animal designs.
Later the pots were painted with bands of red or white or black patterns such as cross hatching. This was done by applying liquid clay before firing. Some Celtic potters added graphite to the clay
to achieve a metallic appearance.

The insular Celts tended to make their pots by hand, particularly the north Britons. In fact, both the north Britons and the Irish appeared to produce very little in the way of pottery at all,
preferring, it seems, to use intricate metalwork bowls or carved wooden vessels, which were much more labour intensive but durable. The evidence shows that the Celts even used lathes to turn out
wooden bowls and tool handles.

Woodworking was advanced among all the Celtic peoples, which is not surprising as wood was their environment. Great forests covered all the Celtic lands and once iron had been introduced into
their tools the Celts fell to work with a will to fell the forests for constructional work in building their homes, towns and roadways. Celtic carpenters were as skilled as their metalworkers. The
great trees were felled with axes and split into planks using wooden wedges. From the early La Tène period some constructional timbers have been recovered up to 12 metres in length along
with a variety of woodworking tools. These included small saws and even adzes.

Celtic woodworkers were little different from their Roman counterparts in using mortises and tenons or pegged joints. There are traces of elaborate wooden structures, such as gates to towns, or
doors to buildings and so forth. There are even references in some classical works to elaborate wooden bridges being found in Gaul across the rivers.

We will deal with the construction of houses in the next chapter and have already remarked on the building of ships
and land vehicles in which carpenters played a central
role. But the Celtic woodworkers also produced an intricate range of portable objects, including metal-bound wooden buckets, or barrels, such as those found at Aylesbury in Britain or Manching in
Germany.

We have seen that the Celts were skilled in the production of fabrics, and that the British woollen cloak or
sagum
was the height of fashion in Rome in the second and first centuries
BC
. Cassius Dio, in his description of Boudicca, says that ‘she wore a tunic of diverse colours over which a thick mantle was fastened by a brooch.’
Unfortunately, fabric only survives in exceptional circumstances, but we do have a fur cape and a wrap-around skirt from the fifth century
BC
, preserved in a bog at
Huldrenose, Denmark. The skirt is of a fabric similar to tartan. Other finds from the Hallstatt period include check patterns and the colours, although faded, are reminiscent of the tartan so
characteristic of Celtic clothing according to the descriptions in classical sources. Wool and linen were the main fabrics for clothing although silks, obviously imported, have also been
discovered.

Leather working was widespread and leather sandals, shoes, belts and other accoutrements have been found throughout the Celtic world. Combinations of wood and leather were also used by the
Celtic shoemakers.

Once again, we have to conclude from the remarkable evidence left from the ancient Celtic world that the Roman descriptions of barbaric savagery are less than fair to a society highly advanced
in the field of arts and crafts.

CELTIC ARCHITECTURE

T
here are two popular views of Celtic builders and both are erroneous. The first is that the Celts constructed the great megaliths of western
Europe but, as these were built in a period long before we can safely identify a Celtic culture, we must disregard this theory. Jacquetta and Christopher Hawkes have suggested that the megaliths
might have been built by an early Indo-European people and that these people were proto-Celts, but as we simply have no way of proving this it remains an hypothesis. The second view is that the
ancient Celts lived in wattle huts, often huddled behind earth ramparts, and did not build anything substantial at all. That is how the Roman propagandists would have us see them. That also is
untrue.

Celtic architects and builders, in their northern homelands, were faced with problems which their Greek and Roman counterparts did not have to contend with when it came to constructing buildings
that would last. Nevertheless, despite the test of nature and time and the destructive intervention of subsequent generations, remnants still exist. There are
constructions
in Scotland, for example, originally built in the fifth century
BC
, which still stand to a height of 12 metres.

Early Celtic Hallstatt culture was basically rural and many of the constructions were wooden farmhouses. For the Celts, dwelling among the vast European forest regions, wood was the major source
of building material. On the other hand, the great royal centres had begun to spring up. Strongholds such as Heuneburg, in the sixth century
BC
, and Entremont developed into
cities, with a royal residence surrounded by clusters of houses and set out on street patterns with shops and other places of business.

Archaeologists call these royal sites, enclosed by fortifications,
oppida
, the plural of the Latin word for town. Built from the sixth and fifth centuries
BC
,
these
oppida
differed from early sites in their size and in the fact that they were centres of trade and crafts as well as providing means of protection in case of threat.

At the open air museum of Asparn, near Vienna, one can see reconstructions of the typical Continental Celtic farm dwellings, rectangular houses that would not be out of place among modern
Canadian log cabins. These rectangular Celtic houses varied from a single large room to great multi-room buildings with a central corridor leading to the various chambers. It was not uncommon to
have a second storey on these buildings.

There is an interesting contrast between early Continental Celtic housing and insular Celtic housing for the constructions in Britain and Ireland were mostly round houses, as demonstrated by the
recreations at Butser Farm and the Chiltern Open Air Museum. These museum constructions were based on the plan of a house excavated at Pimperne, in Dorset. The idea of the round house came from the
older Atlantic coast tradition of building. The British and Irish Celtic round houses continued into the late La Tène period with exceptionally large constructions such as that at Navan, Co.
Armagh, built about 94
BC
.

As the La Tène period progressed on the Continent we find half-timbered houses often two storeys high and sometimes even rising to three storeys. A Celtic village
excavated at Monte Bibele in the Apennines has revealed a site occupied by the Celts between 400 and 200
BC
with a possible population at any one time of 200–300
people. They lived in some forty or fifty houses, which were built of stone and timber, probably thatched, and arranged in a systematic pattern. The timbers show that they were houses of two
storeys. The excavated houses were destroyed by fire about 200
BC
and we can hypothesise that this happened during one of the Roman incursions into the area for the site
fell within the territory of the Boii tribe dwelling south of the Po River.

In the second century
BC
, the Celtic settlements throughout Europe began to change pattern and a system of cities emerged. One of the biggest was Manching, 8 kilometres
south of Ingoldstadt, Bavaria, close to the Danube. It was a walled city, with a circumference of 8 kilometres, and the walls stood up to 5 metres high, enclosing some 380 hectares. Within the
walls there was a system of well laid out streets and an orderly arrangement of the mainly timber buildings.

Manching was the capital of the Vindelici and a centre of arts and crafts, including pottery. There was even a mint for striking coins. The Romans attacked and destroyed the city in about 15
BC
. Excavations began in 1938 and still continue, and in 1988 a museum was opened on the site. Previous finds are divided between the Prähistorische Staatssammlung in
Munich and the Stadtmuseum of Ingoldstadt.

The great walls of Manching were built of a box structure of criss-cross timbers laid horizontally. A stone wall was built on both sides with the ends of the cross timbers inserted. The centre
was then filled with rubble and stones. Caesar mentions finding such great wall constructions in Gaul proper and he called them
muri Gallici
. He was particularly impressed with the capital
of the Aedui, Bibracte (Mont Beuvray), which was
surrounded by a wall 5 kilometres in circumference and 5 metres in height. Bibracte was not destroyed by the Romans for the
Aedui were initially pro-Roman. Its business life continued, with iron workers, jewellers and other craftsmen working in their shops along the main streets and its royal palace dominating the city.
Bibracte did not fall into disuse until after 5
BC
when the Romans and Romanised Celts built a new city, Autun, nearby.