Balkanized Great Britain

Where, before the 19th C, did Brythons and Gaels share an identity besides 'we would like to make it clear that we're not those English bastards'? I'm curious.

Well, I'm no expert on the Breton culture (that's for sure), but the link is basically that both cultures see themselves descendants of the Celts who existed at the time of the Romans. That said, it's a very broad link; The Bretons, the Cornish and the Welsh are like one sub-group of Celts and the Irish and Scots make up the other.

You should understand something here, I'm not in favour of this idea of Celtic unity between Bretons and the Irish; as I said I consider us two sub-groups of a bigger cultural set. When people suggest Celtic empires made up of Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Cornwall and Brittany I tend to role my eyes. Historically, only a Irish-Scottish duel nation or Welsh controlled Cornwall are the only alternative nations were plausible without some major cultural change happening.


But does the fact that being a Gael was a very ethnically-defined identity necessarily mean that people accepted the modern and never ubiquitous notion of nation = state?

I think if you look back through Irish history there's near constant major attempts to form a state; I believe the old qoutable was the Irish attempted statehood "Six times within 300 years" between from the 16th Century onwards. Before the Tyrone's Rebellion of from 1594 to 1603 there was a major fragmented Ireland because we were under the thumb of the English, but if you go back before that domination, to before Strongbow's invasion, basically every single major Clan in Ireland was looking to unify the Island, much like Alfred the great did in England.


I thought it took until the Black Death? And yes, where most Normans became 'more Irish than the Irish themselves' (this varied with time though and the distinction between Gael and Hiberno-Norman lasted at least into the late 17th C), but the Norman arrival was the moment after which there was a permenant English stake in the island. Even a small region under actual English vassalage in practice gives them a stake in what goes on.

The Normans assimilated in the sense that they spoke Irish, observed Irish customs, intermarried with Irish families and generally behaved like their Irish brethren. That said, within the country Norman descended families were still referred to as "The Old English", whereas the original Irish clans were referred to as the "The Old Irish". The third group of people in the land were "The New English", who were the people who occupied "The Pale", the area in the east of the country that the English directly controlled and taxed. That's the type of thing that didn't die out til the 17th century, by at which point the "The Old English" had inter-married so much they just couldn't say they were in any way distinct from the Old Irish anymore.

Being Old English was more a prestige thing as I understand it. It was more about being able to say you're descended from nobility outside the small pool of noble clans in Ireland rather than being anything culturally different to the Irish.
 
If you put another minority in place of Cornish, you would all be a lot more carefull about how you are phrasing this argument, but apparently we don't exist, have never existed but have always been English, longer than the English themselves.

Give me a break. You're putting completely false words in other people's mouths in order to play the victim card. When has anyone on here said the Cornish didn't exist?

Perhaps you feel similar sympathy for those poor Viking Yorkshire men, who were conquered by the Anglo-Saxon English, and are now being denied their cultural identity?

The truth is that the vast, vast majority of Cornish men and women feel and identify as both Cornish and English, see no tension between the two, and have done for centuries. This is the fundamental crux of the matter, and one you can't refute, so you ignore it and play the victim instead.
 
Well, I'm no expert on the Breton culture (that's for sure), but the link is basically that both cultures see themselves descendants of the Celts who existed at the time of the Romans. That said, it's a very broad link; The Bretons, the Cornish and the Welsh are like one sub-group of Celts and the Irish and Scots make up the other.

But there wasn't a notion of 'Celts' at that time: the Brythons living in, well, Britain were more connected to the Gaulish and, after the conquests of Gaul and then Britain itself, Roman worlds than to the Gaels in Ireland. In sub-Roman times, certainly, they regarded themselves as Romans and the Gaels as savage invaders like the Germanic peoples (and the Picts, who the consensus is were probably just Brythonic-speakers beyond the Forth who weren't 'Roman').

'Celt' was a Greek exonym which referred pretty indiscriminantly to northern European peoples, and I believe there was a marked fluidity in Roman writings about 'Celt' and 'German': a German was essentially one living outside Rome's frontier. The whole idea of being a 'Celt' dates, as far as I can tell, to the latter 1800s.

I remember an account of a Highlander and a Welsh women meating in a tavern in 18th C England and immediately feeling an affinity for each-other - not because they were 'Celts' but explicitly because they weren't Saxons.

You should understand something here, I'm not in favour of this idea of Celtic unity between Bretons and the Irish; as I said I consider us two sub-groups of a bigger cultural set. When people suggest Celtic empires made up of Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Cornwall and Brittany I tend to role my eyes. Historically, only a Irish-Scottish duel nation or Welsh controlled Cornwall are the only alternative nations were plausible without some major cultural change happening.

I, though, am questioning whether our modern assumptions about 'cultural sets' (defined basically by language-groups) would have meant anything to people in the past.

I think if you look back through Irish history there's near constant major attempts to form a state; I believe the old qoutable was the Irish attempted statehood "Six times within 300 years" between from the 16th Century onwards. Before the Tyrone's Rebellion of from 1594 to 1603 there was a major fragmented Ireland because we were under the thumb of the English, but if you go back before that domination, to before Strongbow's invasion, basically every single major Clan in Ireland was looking to unify the Island, much like Alfred the great did in England.

Everyone wants to expand the power, that figures, but was it a nationally-defined imperative? After all, the statement necessarily implies that the clans are rivalling one-another.

Alfred himself, after all, defined his struggle more as Christians against pagans than ethnically (as I've noted, it's interesting that Gaels did think ethnically, so I'm quite willing to believe that the educated classes were saying their ought to be a Gaelic state; I'm just wary of purely circumstantial evidence), and the Saxons living in Scotland referred to their location as 'England, Kingdom of the Scots' into the 1200s, meaning that from a contemporary point of view the kingdom of England wasn't a 'national' state (after all, to use the word of the day, it also had the West Welsh in it, who were quite willing to team up with the Norse to get one over on the Saxons).

And Alfred, of course, didn't single-mindedly pursue a united and Saxon England. He was quite willing to let the Norse have East Anglia if they danced to his tune, which of course meant being at least nominally Christian. And the Saxon part of Mercia continued to function as semi-seperate for some time.

The Normans assimilated in the sense that they spoke Irish, observed Irish customs, intermarried with Irish families and generally behaved like their Irish brethren. That said, within the country Norman descended families were still referred to as "The Old English", whereas the original Irish clans were referred to as the "The Old Irish". The third group of people in the land were "The New English", who were the people who occupied "The Pale", the area in the east of the country that the English directly controlled and taxed. That's the type of thing that didn't die out til the 17th century, by at which point the "The Old English" had inter-married so much they just couldn't say they were in any way distinct from the Old Irish anymore.

That's not what I've read. I understood that the Old/New distinction turned on Protestantism and the Plantations, not the Pale, so that before the former events Hiberno-Normans living within and without the Pale were all Hiberno-Norman. Certainly before the Black Death, the Hiberno-Norman lords outside the Pale were liegemen of England: Robert Bruce submitted when he did partly to ally with the Earl of Ulster in order to secure his patrimony.

It was thus possible to turn from Old English into New, as the Butler dynasty ended up doing.

And several books I've read talk about the continuing distinction between Hiberno-Norman and Gael. Tyrconnel, for instance, talked dismissively about 'Macs and Os' who he didn't wish to see filling up the commissioned ranks of his new Catholic Irish army. Various histories of identities I've read, and other histories alluding to the same thing, place the final emergence of an Irishness based on counter-reformed Catholicism in the 18th century.

Being Old English was more a prestige thing as I understand it. It was more about being able to say you're descended from nobility outside the small pool of noble clans in Ireland rather than being anything culturally different to the Irish.

Like I say, not what I've read. There were also politicaly differences, apparently: Gaelic leaders during the Confederate war were much more willing to chuck the Stewarts.
 
You seem to know a lot about these identity issues IBC, so if you don't mind, I'd love to tap your brain about a few thoughts for a long planned timeline:

Firstly, how do you think Scottish identity would have gone without George IV's visit? Without the blending of highland and lowland identities, how do you think that would have affected each group's relationship to the British state?

Secondly, what sort of identity did people in Wales have, and how did it change, in the 1500-1900 period? How did it relate to being part of the Kingdom of England? I'm thinking of a timeline where a longer Whig Ascendancy causes more acceptance of nonconformism both within and outside the Church of England: what do you think the effects of that could have been?

Thirdly, what happened to the New English identity around the Pale?

Many thanks!

Socrates
 
You seem to know a lot about these identity issues IBC, so if you don't mind, I'd love to tap your brain about a few thoughts for a long planned timeline:

Cheers! :eek:

Firstly, how do you think Scottish identity would have gone without George IV's visit? Without the blending of highland and lowland identities, how do you think that would have affected each group's relationship to the British state?

Not so drastically as it might seem at first sight. Scott's trick was to combine two seemingly opposed traditions that were floating loose: Jacobite Scotland (royal symbols, medieval heroic narratives, Highland romanticism) and Covenanted Scotland (Presbyterian tradition, heroic early modern narratives, representations of the Lowlands as romantic as it is possible for representations of a miserable lot like us to be :D), removing the actual political substance - Britain was Hanoverian and England was Anglican and this was right and proper - and helping himself to the symbolism. But both of them were already there. So there would be a lot of aesthetic and cultural self-image consequences - no Lowlanders in kilts - but the relationship to Britain as an idea, I think, would remain broadly the same. North Britain as an identity failed chiefly because the English rejected our Englishness, and the rehabilitation of Scotland was well underweigh with Burns.

So, Gaels are Gaels first, are according to themselves the most authentically Scots Scots next, and our proud of their tradition of imperial service in the Hanoverian state under an elite which was by this point thoroughly within the Establishment.

Lowlanders quietly assume that Scotland has God's special blessing, but for the foreseeable future are for the most part heartily loyal to the crown and see Britain and the empire as the framework in which Scots are able to excel by reason of their superior moral fibre.

Secondly, what sort of identity did people in Wales have, and how did it change, in the 1500-1900 period? How did it relate to being part of the Kingdom of England? I'm thinking of a timeline where a longer Whig Ascendancy causes more acceptance of nonconformism both within and outside the Church of England: what do you think the effects of that could have been?

Och, I'm weak with Wales: only just recently started taking an interest. I know that in the earlier 17th century you had a mix of pride in Welsh language and culture with loyalty to the dynasty - Stewart as well as Tudor - as our boys made good and the guarantors of Welsh prosperity, so that as we know Wales was staunch for the crown. With the added complication, which I think I mentioned earlier, that North Wales and South Wales had very little physically to do with one-another: even the substantial Welsh immigrations in London and Oxford tended to split into northern and southern social circles.

After that I'm blank. I'd like to pursue the subject further, but for now you'd be best asking somebody else. Sorry. :(

Thirdly, what happened to the New English identity around the Pale?

The Protestant English in Ireland after the completion of the conquest viewed themselves very much as a colonial people: at once English, loyal to England and enjoying English rights and heritage, and a community of their own within Ireland, which they thought was a lovely country, shame about all the Irish - and further a dependency of England's imperial crown. They were frequently exasperated with England's actual mercantilist policies, but that was because they felt their Englishness was not being respected; and when the King of England in the shape of James II was trying to create a Catholic power over them, they thought he was plotting the destruction of all that was really English in both Ireland and England and, of course, a majority of English people ended up agreeing with them on that one.

They pressed repeatedly for a union with England: that England forsook them to run off with some disreputable red-headed tart in 1707, in Swift's metaphor, was what started the shift.

In the 18th C they started to lose the English angle and play up their pride in belonging to the island of Ireland under a personal union. Under Grattan they tried both to assert their commercial sovereignty and to get the Catholic elites into the tent. They still had a settler's disdain for the other inhabitants of Ireland, of course, be they the babbling Papist Gaels or the ranting Presbyterian Scotch (many of whom were, by descent, English, but they were not what was meant by 'Anglo-Irish').

And so you ended up with the whole 'English to the Irish and Irish to the English' business: patriotic about Ireland, committed to the Episcopalian church and to the personal union with Great Britain (mostly also the political union, but that's politics), and equivocal about their Englishness in spite of being closely in touch with an English political scene.

They were the 'Anglo-Irish' who were still a coherent and recognisable minority into the 1920s at least.
 
I've enjoyed reading this thread..thank guys.

As a native northumbrian.. I'm all for keeping that kingdom intact and keeping the 'angle' part out of anglo-saxon :)
 
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