There’s some debate about how closely connected, culturally or linguistically, the ancient Britons and ancient Gauls really were. But what is clear is that when a Gallic empire briefly broke away from Rome in the 3rd century, it included provinces on both sides of the Channel; later, both would be part of the same imperial “prefecture”. A short sea crossing was an inconvenience, sure – but hardly more so than many journeys over land.
Not true of Roman times, but before and after the 26 miles of the Channel were almost certainly easier than a 26 mile land journey…..
If that’s the best he can come up with to promote his book, it suggests it’s not worth reading.
The stupidest bit is the suggestion that colonial life under the British or the French was much the same. Really not the case.
Funnily enough, on a business trip last year, I met a man from Uganda who reckoned that if you were going to be colonised it was best to be colonised by the British, on the grounds that we left in an orderly fashion, didn’t loot the place blind and left decent infrastructure in place.
But, again, I find myself pointlessly engaging with some twat who is really just moaning about Brexit.
….the first hundred years war was fought to assert surprisingly plausible English claims to the French throne
Tiresome bozo in the guardian
“It is a strange fact, but it is unquestionably true, that almost any English intellectual would feel more ashamed of standing to attention during “God Save the King” than stealing from a poor box”
George Orwell
Seems the Frogs have been dumping those they didn’t want on poor old Britain for at least a couple of thousand years. Since he mentions those Normans.
They didn’t react too well when the Normans attempted to take back Frogland back then either. The Frogs fought for 100 years to make sure they didn’t have to take back those illegals.
He looks like a young Robbie Coltrane (Blackadder version).
It’s an amusing enough appearance in context but shouldn’t be followed in real life.
the first since the drowning of Doggerland around 6500BCE
You know someone’s not worth listening to when they start using wanky politically correct calendar notation instead of The Year of Our Lord.
There is no “Common Era”, you fat fool.
the 26 miles of the Channel were almost certainly easier than a 26 mile land journey…..
There is a theory that back in pre-Roman times SE coastal England the adjacent coastal France shared a common culture for exactly that reason. Trade. It’s very hard for us to get our heads round how difficult travel would have been in a forested land without roads. Burdened by goods, you’re probably talking about an average of less than 1 mph. If you doubt that, try going to the parts of France still have large swathes of virgin forest & give it a go.
John:
“He looks like a young Robbie Coltrane (Blackadder version).
It’s an amusing enough appearance in context but shouldn’t be followed in real life.”
Exactly so. My first thought was: “I didn’t know Coltrane had done a biopic about Beethoven!”
. . . a forested land without roads.
I saw Carry On Cleo but ancient Britain was a bit more advanced than that, especially in the south. The Romans invaded a populous place with advanced agriculture and internal trade, which required a transport network. Caeser wouldn’t have faced armies with war chariots if those weren’t able move about.
@PJF: there’s a good, or at least a fascinating, book by Graham Robb about pre-Roman Gaul. He points out that they must have had a decent network of roads and bridges because (i) They relied heavily on wagons and war chariots, which are no good on boggy tracks, and (ii) The speed with which Gaulish and Roman armies moved makes no sense without a decent network.
Of course if you build with wood and the Romans with stone the evidence of your network will vanish PDQ especially if, as Robb believes, the Gauls were fine surveyors – so that the Romans often just copied the directions of their roads.
(The Gauls’ educated class – the Druids – had learnt geometry and astronomy from the Greeks who had first settled at Marseilles about 600 BC, he suggests.)
If I remember rightly a particularly persuasive point is that after the Gaulish invasion of northern Italy – the one that gave you the Cisalpine Gauls – the Romans adopted all their horse/wagon/chariot gear, even down to the names for the component parts.
Apparently no ancient writer ever referred to the population of the British Isles as “Celtic” – or if anyone did the writing didn’t survive.
BIS,
I read something about Armagnac and the writer suggested that the reason that Cognac became the much bigger spirit is that it’s a short, easily navigable river from Cognac or Jarnac to the sea, where it was a lot further and more difficult to get out from Occitaine. If you go to the town of Jarnac, Hine and Courvoisier are right next to the river.
So, Cognac developed and improved faster because it could sell more of it to England and elsewhere back in the 18th to 19th century.
dearieme said:
“The Gauls’ educated class – the Druids – had learnt geometry and astronomy from the Greeks who had first settled at Marseilles about 600 BC, he suggests”
Oh, not from Atlantis?
Nope, Mr Robb is entirely silent on the subject of Atlantis. He may be idiosyncratic but he’s not bonkers.
Wokeypedia: ‘A genetic study conducted in 2011 found that 4% of the inhabitants of Provence belong to the haplogroup E-V13 lineage, which is especially frequent among Phocaeans (19%), and that 17% of the Y-chromosomes in Provence may be attributed to Greek colonization. According to the authors, these results suggest “a Greek male elite-dominant input into the Iron Age Provence population”.’
No sign of Atlants haplogroups, eh?
“a Greek male elite-dominant input into the Iron Age Provence population”.
Snigger
And being Greek, input into the boys as well as the girls presumably, hence the use of the word “population”.
In one theory a forest was the kings hunting ground and didn’t necessarily mean that it was wooded, it took that meaning later. This would have made navigation easier.
“ Another theory traces it through Medieval Latin forestis, originally “forest preserve, game preserve,” from Latin forum in legal sense “court, judgment;” in other words “land subject to a ban” [Buck]. Replaced Old English wudu (see wood (n.)). Spanish and Portuguese floresta have been influenced by flor “flower.””
https://www.etymonline.com/word/forest
“In one theory a forest was the kings hunting ground and didn’t necessarily mean that it was wooded”: that was the case in both Scotland and England. And eventually not only the King’s but the Earl’s, the Abbot’s, …
You’ve only to visit surviving old forests to see that they are not all woodland – often, not even principally woodland. The pollen records usually confirm that that has typically been true for many centuries. Hell, there’s substantial chunks of Forest above the tree-line, even above where the tree-line was in the Medieval Warm Period.
After all the reason landlords and tenants were pissed off when King wanted to introduce or extend Forest was that they could no longer legally keep the bloody deer off their pasture and arable.
@Steve
Whenever using BCE, spell it out as Before Christian Era. It drives all the right people nuts.
In ancient times,
Hundreds of years before the dawn of history,
Lived an ancient race of people, the druids.
No one knows who they were,
Or… what they were doing…
MG – + A&Ω
Bloke in North Dorset said:
“In one theory a forest was the kings hunting ground and didn’t necessarily mean that it was wooded”
Isn’t that later? I thought that sort of restrictive forestry law only came in with the Normans.
Back in the ‘either side of the Romans’ era there’d still have been a lot of primeval wild wood around – ‘forest’ in the modern meaning (and not the Forestry Commisson type with everything in lines either).
Welsh copper (from Anglesey) and Cornish tin found their way all over Europe before there were any recognisable countries.There was a lot of trade. That is how we had a bronze age.
“there’d still have been a lot of primeval wild wood around”: the landscape historian Oliver Packham reckoned that half the wildwood had vanished by the early Iron Age.
He believed (if my memory is right) that that would apply to both Britain and Ireland.
While googling around I found this little gem.
The accepted view of Irish woodlands is that Ireland was covered in trees until the English came and chopped them down. While admirable in its brevity, this interpretation is inadequate regarding the actual management of Irish forests from the later Gaelic era to the close of the eighteenth century. The author focuses on the fundamentally pragmatic and commercial view of trees adopted by much of Gaelic civilization, and the attempts of the various Anglo-Irish administrations to introduce more conservative woodland practices. By the late seventeenth century, the re-afforestation of Ireland had become a paramount badge of respectability for Irish landowners,
@WB
Yes rivers are important factor. Trade networks will by preference grow along them & their valleys. So you get trade where it runs with the geography & less or no trade across the grain. And if you look at the distribution of the pre-Roman British tribes they coincide with watersheds.
@dearieme
Is there any actual evidence they used chariots for actual warfare? It seems so unlikely. For a chariot you need wide expanses of unbroken grassland or something equally flat. Or all your opponent has to do is get himself behind something like a small streambed & he’s out of your reach. And they’d be no use on unmettalled roads. If anyone’s driven cattle along it, cows tend to put their feet where the cow in front put there’s. So when the ground’s soft you get a series of ridges & hollows crossing the road build up. Known to the off highway rallying community as a washboard. You hit that at any speed, even with pneumatic tyres & good suspension it’ll break an axle. Sythia or somewhere in the middle east maybe. But not Britain apart from somewhere like the Downs with thin soil over chalk. Even an ox drawn wagon would be slow & difficult going.