Saxons, Vikings, and Celts: The Genetic Roots of Britain and Ireland

Myths have a very long memory.

Oral myths are closer to the genetic conclusions than the often ambiguous scientific evidence of archaeology.

The gradual colonization of the west from the Irish kingdom of Dál Riata during the first half of the first millennium AD, and the consolidation of their Gaelic kingdom in Scotland following their defeat by the Ui Neill, had an immense cultural impact in Scotland.

Again starting with an unusual Y-chromosome, they noticed its occurrence in a related set of surnames that were linked to branches of the Ui Neill, the clan that had held the High Kingship at Tara, and had expelled the Dál Riata to Argyll. The Ui Neill equivalent of Somerled was Niall Noigiallach, better known as Niall of the Nine Hostages, who lived in the second half of the fourth century AD. This was a time when the Romans were beginning to withdraw from mainland Britain. According to legend, Niall raided and harassed western Britain and specialized in capturing and then ransoming high-ranking hostages, hence his soubriquet. His most famous captive was one Succat, who went on to become St Patrick. Niall’s military exploits carried him over the sea to Scotland, where he fought the Picts who were trying to retake the recent Irish colonies of Dalriada. It was during a raid even further afield, in France, that an arrow from the bow of an Irish rival killed Niall on the banks of the River Loire in AD 405. Niall was succeeded in the High Kingship by his nephew, Dathi, his father’s brother’s son. This was typical of the Gaelic tradition of derbhfine, the rules of inheritance that chose the new king from among the direct male relatives of the old. This served to ensure the patrilineal inheritance of the High Kingship itself

What began as a declaration of religious independence from Rome transformed over the years into a virulent doctrine of Saxon/Teutonic racial superiority over

the Roman historian Tacitus, who wrote in AD 98, ‘For myself I accept the view that the people of Germany have never been tainted by intermarriage with other peoples and stand out as a nation peculiar, pure and unique of its kind.’ Luther himself even managed to concoct a genealogy for the Germans right back to Adam, who for Christians like Luther was the father of the human race.

The far more dependable Bede, writing from the monastery at Jarrow, completed his Ecclesiastical History of the English People in 731. It is thanks to him that we are able to differentiate between the three tribes of ‘barbarians’, namely Saxons, Angles and Jutes. According to Bede, Jutes from the Jutland peninsula of northern Denmark occupied Kent and the Isle of Wight, while Saxons from Saxony in north-west Germany settled in southern England. They eventually differentiated into the East Saxons, in Essex, the Mid-Saxons farther west (and remembered in the now vanished county of Middlesex) and the West Saxons of Wessex, which was much later divided into Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset. The Angles, originally located in Angeln in southern Denmark, between Saxony and Jutland, took over East Anglia, as well as the Midlands, which became Mercia, and Northumbria in the north-east.

The final withdrawal of the Roman army, some fifty years later, left England completely undefended and the population unprotected. Four centuries of occupation, during which citizens and slaves alike were forbidden even to carry arms and all weapons and military equipment were in the hands of the army, had left a population unaccustomed to warfare. That is not to say that the population was necessarily completely defenceless. Everyone must have seen this coming, and there were unknown numbers of retired veterans living in the towns and countryside. There may even have been remnants of a command structure at York and around Hadrian’s Wall. The wall was not breached by the Picts, who must, therefore, have taken to the sea to attack the North Sea coasts in the great rising of 367. There were already Germanic settlements in eastern England based on former auxiliary units of the Roman army.