Llangelynin
With Llanrychwyn last week, I get that ‘llan’ means church, so was Gelynin a saint too? Funny you should ask that because yes, he was! In fact, he was Saint Rhychwyn’s brother, one of 12, if you recall from last week, who became monks because their father’s court was inundated by the sea. His name, however, was actually Celynin, with a ‘C’. And before you ask why the settlement is pronounced with a ‘g’, it has to do with the way certain consonants ‘soften’ within the Welsh language, depending upon what sound comes before them. Never mind, unless you are studying Welsh, you don’t want to know. Getting back to the church, the nave we see today dates to the 12th century, with the rest of it having been upgraded and added on to between the 13th and 17th centuries. Read more…
Llanrhychwyn
The Welsh prefix llan has evolved in its meaning over time, first indicating a burial enclosure, then a cemetery with a church, then the church itself, and now it refers to ‘the parish settlement around a church’. Regardless, in Wales, a placename that contains llan implies a continuous Christian locality going back centuries if not millennia. Thus, with a name like Llanrhychwyn you have ‘llan’ as the prefix and then Rhychwyn, which, as is the case with many, many churches in Wales, is the name of the saint who founded it. Read more…
Early Christianity in Wales
Question: You have a couple of novel series set in this time period, right? One is about King Arthur who’s Christian, and one has a lot of Welsh mythology. So were they Christian or pagan at this time? They were a little bit of both, actually. While many fictional accounts (though not mine) set in this time period focus on the conflict between pagan religions and Christianity, that seems to be a product of the creative mind, rather than an accurate analysis of religion in Britain in the post-Roman era. For there to be conflict there must be a power relationship as well as a degree of hierarchy and organization, and for both the pagans and the Christians in Wales after the Romans left, there were neither. As I talked about a few weeks ago, when the Romans conquered Wales Read more…
Mithras in Britain
Last week, I mentioned that the Roman religion that developed in Britain was different from what was practiced in Rome itself. This was true of the Britons, but it was also true in regard to the beliefs of the legionaries who served in Britain, mainly through their worship of the god, Mithras. Mithras, who was a god of friendship, contract, and order, started out as an Indo-Iranian deity, and once Rome conquered Iran, spread very quickly throughout the Roman Empire. Mithraism is described by scholars as a ‘mystery’ cult because worship of Mithras was secretive and involved seven degrees of initiation, each of which required the initiate to perform a task. The cult was so secretive, in fact, that few written records of the Mithras cult have survived, and virtually everything we know about it comes from carvings and statues. Read more…
Roman Religion in Britain
Question: There’s been a lot written about Roman religion. What’s different about it in Britain? While you’re right that the Roman religion is something we know a lot about, it didn’t just get transplanted to Britain whole cloth and didn’t look in Britain the same as what it looked like in Rome. The reason for this is that the Romans who conquered Britain were almost exclusively male, they were members of the Roman army, and many were not actually Roman by birth. This shaped which gods and goddesses they focused on in their worship. Secondly, as I mentioned in an earlier video, the Celtic religion syncretized to some degree with the Roman, in part because the Romans worked so hard to eliminate the druids and native religious beliefs. By the end of the first century AD, as far as the Read more…
The Hill of Tara
Tara started out as Neolithic site, with a Neolithic passage tomb, called The Mound of Hostages, built around 3200 BC and holding the graves of over 300 individuals. Then, in the early Bronze age, some thousand years later, a giant ‘woodhenge’ was built on the hilltop to surround the passage tomb. The Celtic period begins with the Iron Age, starting roughly around 500 BC. Several large enclosures were built on the hill, the largest of which, The Enclosure of the Kings, had a circumference of 1000 meters. Another two structures were built in a figure eight—one called Cormac’s house and a second that is the royal seat. It is at this point that Tara unites history and religion. In Celtic mythology, Tara was the capital of the Tuatha de Dannan, the Irish gods, and its Neolithic passage tomb was seen Read more…
The Celtic City of Glanum
The Celts in France were known to the Romans as Gauls, though in their own language they called themselves Celtae and are the origin of the name that came to be applied to all the peoples who shared their language and culture. The city of Glanum was established by the 6th century BC when the villagers built ramparts on the hills surrounding their village to protect themselves from invaders. The hallmark of the town was a sacred spring known for its healing powers and was dedicated to the Celtic water god, Glanis, one of several Celtic gods worshipped in the city. Archaeologists view the city as having a vibrant Celtic culture, using characteristic pottery, cooking utensils (boiling rather than frying), and a penchant for displaying the heads of their enemies at the city gate. As with the Britons, we know Read more…
Celtic Religion
Our understanding of Celtic religion is at times a long the lines of educated guesses. Like the people living in Britain prior to 800 BC, the Celts had no written language. This makes it obviously very difficult for us to develop a clear understanding of their religious beliefs. What we do have is the writings of the Romans who conquered them, which in itself is problematic because, when victors write history, invariably they are writing from a position of their own magnificence, and by definition are seeking to downplay and barbarize the achievements and culture of those they conquered. Scholars do think there was a basic religious homogeneity among the Celts, with significant regional differences, especially since they were spread out across Europe from Czechoslovakia to Ireland. Like the Romans who came to Britain after them, the Celts were polytheists, Read more…
Neolithic Passage Tombs in Ireland
Knowth, Dowth, and Newgrange are Neolithic Passage tombs located in the Boyne Valley of eastern Ireland. They make up what archaeologist refer to as a necropolis—basically a city of the dead. Together, these three tombs are some of the oldest examples of monumental Neolithic architecture in existence. Newgrange was begun first, starting around 3200 BC. It consists of a large circular mound with an inner stone passageway and chambers. Human bones and possible grave good or votive offerings have been found in these chambers. The mound has a retaining wall at the front, made mostly of white quartz cobblestones, and it is ringed by engraved kerbstones. The passage into Newgrange is aligned for the sunrise on the Winter Solstice, which appears to have been one of the most important events in Neolithic religion. The Winter Solstice, for those for whom Read more…
Pre-Celtic Religion
Although Britain was occupied for hundreds of thousands of years, the pre-Celtic era we’re talking specifically about is the Neolithic period, which begins around 4300 BC. The Neolithic peoples of Britain and Ireland are set apart from their ancestors because they began to exhibit an increasing control over their environment. They were farmers and herders; they had villages; and they started building religious monuments, what archaeologists call ‘neolithic monumental architecture’. This includes burial mounds, stone circles, and standing stones, all of which were part of what we would view now as their ‘religious’ system. Unfortunately, we have no written documents dating to this time, so can only use evidence from the monuments themselves and artefacts that survived to make informed guesses about what prehistoric people actually believed. While there was no single or continuously developed belief system in prehistoric Britain, Read more…
Edward I and the Crown of France
King Edward as a historical figure looms large over my books, both the After Cilmeri series and my new book, Crouchback. Because in the middle ages, the King of England was also the Duke of Aquitaine, not to mention Norman, Edward had ties to France even before he became king. “France”, however, didn’t exist as we know it today, in that Aquitaine was a separate kingdom and the people there were not “French.” Aquitaine had come under the auspices of the kings of England after the marriage of King Henry II to Eleanor of Aquitaine in the late 12th century, as an addition to Henry’s already extensive “French” estates, which included Brittany and Normandy. Over the next century, the Kingdom of France wrested all but Aquitaine away from the Kings of England. Thus, when Edward left for Crusade from Aigues Read more…
The Kings of France: Louis and Philippe
The Kings of France in the 13th century, namely King Louis and his grandson, Philippe, between them ruled France with an iron hand. Both sought to centralize power within themselves while expanding the borders of their kingdom. In the process, they built extensive fortresses throughout the country, started wars, and in the case of Philippe, expelled the Jewish community from France, destroyed the Templars, and assassinated a pope. During our recent visit to France, we visited numerous monuments to their respective rule, including Aigues Mortes, Carcasonne, and Sainte-Chapelle on the Ile de La Cite in Paris. Although Charlemagne built a tower at Aigues Mortes, the founding of the city dates to 1240 during the rule of King Louis. At the time, Louis had no port on the Mediterranean, so to gain access, he did a land exchange with the Church Read more…
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