Celtic Mist over the South

Abstract

THE ETHNIC EXPLANATIONS FOR THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE BRITish Isles that were fashionable a hundred years ago have recently fallen into disrepute. Only shadows of them still linger in conventional speech. Thus although the term for the small enclosures into which Dark Age farmsteads were divided is too well entrenched for archaeologists or historians to abandon, it is now only a shorthand term devoid of specific ethnic significance. Such enclosures were used not only by Celtic Britons both before and after the Roman conquest but also by their Anglo-Saxon conquerors for some four hundred years after their arrival from the continent. As enclosures were supplanted by the quite different system of open fields and compact villages between 850 and 1350, mainly in the English Midlands, it was not a matter of Celtic culture giving way to English but rather of practical adaptation to such circumstances as greater rainfall, population pressure, a new technology of plowing, and the capacity of various soils and terrain. Some of the earliest evidence for open fields comes, indeed, from indisputably Celtic Wales and Cornwall; most places in England outside the Midlands, and some within, never gave up the enclosed system. In other respects as well, what a leading historian of early medieval Scotland calls the between the supposed free-peasant agrarian society of AngloSaxon England and the supposed aristocratic pastoral society of Celtic and upland Britain has been almost entirely discredited. I A version of that distinction has nevertheless been recently resuscitated to account for cultural differences between the American North and South. The improbability of analyzing sectionalism in the New World as a survival of phenomena no longer believed to have existed