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Welsh and Cornish vernaculars but in no other source. While extant inscriptions and symbols “make it certain that sub-Roman [British] literacy included both letters and poems” 1 none of them has been found in England; just as there are almost no Syriac manuscripts dating from the Macedonian occupation of Syria, no British Celtic texts survive from either the Roman or Saxon periods. One British manuscript survives, the
Vergilius Romanus
of the early sixth century which is “the earliest British book known to us today.” 2 It is of course composed in Latin. Those who had mastered writing naturally preferred to employ the “prestige” language. No music remains and, since early British churches were constructed of wood, no public architecture.
    Yet the presence of a thousand years can never wholly die; it lingers still in the words that spring most easily and fluently to the lips, among them “kick,” “hitch” and “fudge.” Celtic words lie buried in the landscape, like their quondam speakers immured in round barrows, in such familiar names as Avon and Cotswold and Downs. The names of London and the Isle of Man are Celtic.
    The settlement of the Saxon invaders was a more gradual and intermittent process than has generally been acknowledged; new scholarly emphasis is upon assimilation rather than conquest, and, for example, Celtic patterns of farming have been found in medieval surroundings.
    There may have been some compact or understanding, then, between the indigenous population of the island and the invading Anglo-Saxon tribes of the fifth and sixth centuries. There is evidence, both in place-names and in personal names, of absorption or intermingling; there was an Anglo-Saxon term, “
wealhstod
,” meaning one who can understand and translate native Celtic (British) speech. In the bleak and forbidding landscapes of the north, the Celts (the British) were often left within their own communal areas; there seem to have been British settlements just north of the Thames, also, and in the forests of West Suffolk and Essex. It is possible that the British language was being spoken as late as the end of the seventh century, in Somerset and Dorset. There are many who claim that in Northumbria, for example, there are still Celts, distinctive in appearance and even in behaviour, among the local population.
    There are deep patterns of inheritance and transmission still to be found etched in the stone or metal of surviving Celtic objects. We need not call it “art” because it furnished the texture of life itself. Consider the characteristic motif of the spiral in Celtic workmanship both secular and spiritual; there are reverse spirals or whirls, and trumpet spirals, and “hair-spring” spirals, circling like some persistent pattern or obsessive secret. It may come as no surprising revelation, therefore, to note the presence of the same spirals, or “rings,” carved upon sandstone rocks of the earlier Neolithic period. Here, chipped with hard stone tools, are the same symbols upon cremation covers or cist covers or outcrop rock, in locations such as Broomridge and Goat’s Crag and Hare Law. They are sometimes known as “radiates,” and indeed they seem to shine from prehistory into the annals of recorded time. Some of them, marked upon stones beside burial cairns, were never meant to be seen; but they rise again, like the twelfth-century spiral markings in the church of St. Laurence Pittington, Durham.
    This is no archaeological reverie, however. The paganism of the Anglo-Saxon English, which survived for many centuries after Augustine had brought Christianity to England in 597, may in turn be traced to much earlier beliefs. The idols and demons, the spells and amulets, of the Anglo-Saxons may derive some of their power from Neolithic avatars. Just as the spirals are found within the Durham church, so concealed within the fabric of the church of St. Albans were discovered rolls which contained magical