Pagan Britain by Ronald Hutton – review

  • The Guardian,
  • Jump to comments ()
Uffington White Horse
The Uffington White Horse on the Berkshire Downs. Photograph: Skyscan/Corbis

In 2007, the novelist Alan Garner showed Ronald Hutton some curious symbols that had been carved on to bridges spanning the main railway line between Manchester and Crewe. They included erect penises, interlocking Vs of a kind often found in the hearths and attics of old houses, and prints of square-toed shoes of a design that was already obsolete when the railway was built in 1840. These markings – designed to ward off evil – were found wherever the structure had to bear the greatest strain.

  1. Pagan Britain
  2. by Ronald Hutton

Were the men who carved these symbols into the fabric of Victorian rationalism the heirs to an ancient tradition? Was this the visible proof that pagan practices could be traced back in an unbroken line to the witches of the Middle Ages and the masons of ancient Rome, who covered their monuments with sturdy phalluses as a form of supernatural scaffolding? In a rare moment of speculation, Hutton suggests that "there is some sort of connection to be made".

Historians should be "prepared to stand back and let the public dream its own dreams", Hutton says. Members of that public who venture into this dense, erudite work in search of dream-fuel will have many sleepless nights. But, for Hutton, flimsy speculation is the enemy of truth, and in this, it seems, archaeologists are almost as guilty as credulous neo-pagans. In fact, there was probably no "organised and self-conscious British pagan religion throughout the Middle Ages", instead witchcraft was mostly a construct of theologians and magistrates. And there is no evidence "that any active pagan religion survived anywhere in the island, in opposition to Christianity, throughout the Middle Ages, let alone longer". Hutton quotes the medieval scholar Nick Higham on the imagined influence of Anglo-Saxon paganism in Britain: "Archaeologists are capable of producing an almost infinite succession of models, each of which is more or less incapable of either proof or refutation."

Further back in time, this sceptical guide leads us into boundless realms of near-total ignorance. Some Palaeolithic images that appear to represent animals, women or the hypothetical earth goddess whom primitive peoples are supposed to have worshipped may be nothing more than natural lines in the rock. The Uffington White Horse might actually have been a cat or a dog. (Approached from the north-east, it looks like a prancing hen.) No one knows what it was made for. Like the bronze age burial mounds that were copied by antiquarian Roman aristocrats, ancient sites such as Uffington, Silbury Hill, Avebury and Stonehenge probably became unfathomably mysterious within a few generations of their creation. As for the causewayed enclosures of southern England and the North Sea coast, the most we can say is that they were "special places into which people could go for special purposes at special times".

Neo-druids who congregate anachronistically at prehistoric sites, turning them into gigantic car parks, may find Hutton's demystificatory approach sacrilegious. One of the austere pleasures of Pagan Britain lies in its frequent reminders that every age invents its own past, and that "it is impossible to determine with any precision the nature of the religious beliefs and rites of the prehistoric British". For more than a century now, one of the most familiar figures of the Celtic pantheon has been the antlered god Cernunnos. But the name, which means "horned one", is a modern reconstruction of a truncated name found on a broken slab under Notre-Dame de Paris, and we have no idea what the god represented or how he was honoured. Only with the Romans do the gods become comprehensible. The functional, specialised deities of Roman Britain, however, lack the mysterious charm of their predecessors. Does any sun-god worshipper visiting the Stonehenge campsite toilet ever spare a thought for Sterculinus, the god of manure?

Even with sound archaeological evidence, Hutton argues, it is hard to distinguish ritual from practical behaviour. Did henges and hill forts serve a secular or a religious purpose, or is the distinction itself a modern invention? Apart from a few references to comparative studies of "traditional" or "tribal" peoples, Hutton does not try to formulate a definition. Instead, he picks his way carefully through the scholarship, politely pointing out the remnants of demolished theories and refusing to take sides: "It should perhaps be emphasised that no intervention in this debate is made here"; "Readers may choose whichever kind of explanation makes best sense to them, or pick and mix."

The real subject of Pagan Britain – as Hutton says several times – is not the material evidence of ancient religion but the ways in which that evidence has been processed. Hutton writes as an even-handed observer of his own discipline, and it is here that most of the solid evidence of ritual behaviour can be found. He describes academic archaeology's complex etiquette, its sacred precincts and subterranean wars, in which scholars "launch … full-scale attacks" on rival interpretations. By this account, the discipline is not in a happy state. Some subjects are too "dangerous" to be tackled head-on, and many an obscure conflict simmers on in the endnotes.

This would explain why, in more than 400 pages of text on the elusive subject of ancient religion, fewer than six are devoted to "The Problem of the Druids". There is a wealth of contemporary information on the iron age druids. The "problem" is that even now the ancient druids continue to exert an occult influence on academic careers. It simply isn't "safe" to write about them, just as it used to be "dangerous" to mention the use of solstitial measurements in the alignment of tombs, temples, streets and roads. According to Hutton, the importance of the druids was "very much a product of Renaissance humanism". But if this is so, why were the druids outlawed by three imperial decrees? Why did Julius Caesar devote a long, detailed section of commentary on the Gallic wars to the druids, describing their education system and their scientific and political expertise? And is it immaterial that Diviciacus, the Gaulish scholar and diplomat who addressed the Roman senate, was a druid?

No analysis is offered of the many texts that describe the druids, presumably because this philological task is the prerogative of a different academic discipline. Even within the same discipline, according to Hutton, specialists in different periods "do not normally converse with each other". Nor do they appear to spend much time debating the research of academic tribes on the other side of the Oceanus Britannicus.

Long before the Romans, there were, as Hutton notes, strong and lively cultural and trading links between Britain and mainland Europe. Given the almost empty landscape of pagan Britain, the spectacular discoveries of French archaeologists are at least worthy of more than a fleeting mention. In the 1980s, excavations of iron age sites in northern France revealed complex wooden temples with ambulatories. "Hollow altars", aligned on the solstice or the equinox, contained the rotting remains of sacrificial victims. Other victims, including human beings, hung from the outer palisades.

Whether the bones were those of dead enemies or of honoured war veterans, says Hutton, "is anybody's guess" – but there is a great deal about these excavations that is known. No corpse-adorned temples have been found in Britain, but the peculiar subrectangular enclosures that do exist have been studied by European scholars, and it would be useful to have some discussion of their findings.

It is significant that the apotropaic markings of the Manchester-Crewe railway line were shown to Hutton by a novelist (and mentioned only in an endnote). They belong to "a flourishing world of early modern folk magic" that "has hitherto fallen between the disciplines of history, archaeology and folklore studies, and so been largely neglected by all". The sub-disciplines described by Hutton sound like the chapels of a holy sepulchre in which pedants take refuge from paranoid neo-pagans and from each other. No wilfully credulous lover of all things ancient and mysterious will be converted by this long and detailed survey of "the power politics of knowledge in the modern age". Hutton's portrait of institutional scholarship obsessed with its own rituals is in some ways more sinister than good old human sacrifice.

• Graham Robb's most recent book is The Ancient Paths (Picador).

Today's best video

Today in pictures