- Chapter Fourteen -
aspects of the evolving relationship between northern Gaul and Britain at the end of
the first millennium Be. Two very different regions of northern Gaul were routinely
involved with Britain; both had well-developed coinages of their own in the second
and first centuries BC, but their impact upon Britain was strikingly different.
The first was Armorica, modern Brittany. Here, some of the most beautifully
and independently designed of all Celtic coinages were issued first in alloyed gold
and eventually in silver and debased silver, from at least the early second century
BC onwards, to meet the internal needs of the Armorican communities. Although
the Armoricans were renowned sea-traders, and were actively involved in the distri-
bution of Mediterranean trade goods to Britain (Cunliffe 199 I: 434ff.), their coinages
were neither issued to facilitate trade, nor evidently used except very incidentally in
the course of intertribal or cross-Channel trading activity.
From the outset, therefore, Armorican coinages tend to have rather compact
and well-localized geographical distributions, seldom straying far from their commu-
nities of origin on the Continent. Compared with their abundance in Gaul itself, very
few Armorican coins have been found in Britain, despite the very well-attested and
long-standing sea-trade that went on between Armorica and south-western Britain.
In Britain, Armorican coins, mainly of the Coriosolites, who seem to have been the
most active carriers of trade goods on this route, tend to cluster in and around
Channel ports of trade such as Hengistbury Head, Mount Batten and Selsey Bill,
where foreign traders may well have resided. Elsewhere, finds of Armorican coins are
only sparsely distributed, mainly in western counties of southern England (Cunliffe
1991: 544, map). Compared with the density of distribution of contemporary Belgic
coins in south-eastern Britain, this is the merest scattering.
There is at present no reason to think that any Armorican coinage was actually
struck in Britain, and none of the Armorican coinages was directly imitated in Britain
either, although the Durotriges of Dorset (in most direct contact with Armorica) did
eventually adopt the Armorican custom of using debased silver for coinage, and a
few other central-southern communities displayed some Armorican influence in the
flamboyant design of their earliest silver coinages in the mid-first century Be. There
could hardly be a better demonstration that even centuries of trading contact with a
coin-using people was seldom, if ever, in itself of much importance in inspiring the
adoption of coinage.
For a Celtic community to do that, it had to be against a background of more
complex social involvement.
This was the case in the relationship between Belgic Gaul and Britain. Here, coast-
to-coast trading activity, although it probably went on, was only one, and by no
means the most important, of the ties that had linked the Celts of Belgic Gaul and
the Seine Basin with southern and eastern Britain for centuries. There is, for instance,
both archaeological and documentary evidence for at least some degree of direct
immigration from Gaul before and during the period when coinage was first intro-
duced to the island. Julius Caesar himself observed that the inhabitants of Kent were
almost indistinguishable from the Belgae of adjacent areas of Gaul, and that in other
parts of Britain too there were colonial settlements with the same names as their
communities of origin on the Continent (De Bello Gallico V.12.1-2, v.14.1).
Perhaps Belgic immigrants in such settlements were always in a small minority