- Chapter Twenty-One -
cherish their identity visually, for nothing could have been less acceptable to real
Roman visual taste than this hyper-fastidious face, more subtly sensitive than
anything purely Roman (d. the Wandsworth 'mask' shield, Figure 21.2). The
strength of surviving feeling for old Celtic ways is summed up in the head of an
antlered god with torques hanging from its antlers, named Cernunnos, on an altar
found beneath Notre Dame in Paris (Brogan 1955: 173, pI. 47a). And not for noth-
ing did the outlaws in Gaul in the 280s band together, choosing a Celtic title
Bagaudae, 'the valiant'.
In rural Roman Britain many Britons continued to live in round-houses, as
EinzelhoJe, or grouped in more communal settlements or hill-forts, and occasional
pieces of artwork tell us something about the status and lifestyle of inhabitants. At
Coygan on the south-west Welsh coast (where we have already looked at earlier
inhabitants, see p. 393) a round-house on a defended promontory (first used in the
third-second century Be, see above p. 393) yielded from second-third century AD
occupation debris a simple iron dagger with ball hand-grip (Wainwright 1967) and a
small twisted double-snake bead of bronze, apparently from a collar of Lambay type
Gope and Jacobsthal in press: pIs 259-61; d. Beswick et al. I990), showing such
'lairds' at home with their status markers in immediate context. And the inhabitants
of a small rural establishment at Lower Slaughter in fourth-century Gloucestershire
did at least have table-and window-glass, and two fine little statuettes hidden away
in a nook with three little altars to show their rustic taste; and votive tablets were in
a well filling (O'Neil 1961; note that the famed earliest of the ogams (Chapter 37)
came from a well of this age at Silchester).
In Caledonia, for instance, romanization did not penetrate very deeply into the
ways of a native society, which might retain old individual ways. Terrets, the
rein-guide rings on paired-draught vehicles, could illustrate this, for during the
second-third centuries AD a group of distinctive designs (e.g. 'Donside'; Simpson
1943: 78 -9; Jope and Jacobsthal in press: pI. 291) have a distribution extending
northwards far beyond any other items of evidence for wheeled vehicle use at this
time (linchpins, bridle-bits, etc.). There terrets must therefore presumably have been
non-functional (and indeed some have little brazed-on loops for hanging), but
emblematic of some legal rights, e.g. territorial, hunting or judicial Gope and
Jacobsthal in press: pI. 291 notes), giving at last a window on the ways of old Celtic
administration in a pre-literate society.
The art of writing was itself a mark of social distinction (Prosdocimi and Kruta,
in Moscati et al. 1991: 51-9, 491-8) in Celtic Europe, to be found from the third
century Be onwards. In Britain there was little evidence of it before romanization,
for coins hardly counted in this context.
SOCIAL CHANGE INTO THE FIRST MILLENNIUM AD
We must now see what continental Celtic art can tell us about the changing social life
and structure during the first six centuries of the Christian era. Celtic lands and life,
once autonomous, were much eroded by Roman domination, first in Gaul (from
early first century Be) and the rest of Europe, then in Britain from AD 43 onwards,