Review: ‘Coins and Power in Late Iron Age Britain’

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I don’t usually post book reviews on here but John Creighton’s Coins and Power in Late Iron Age Britain certainly deserves its own post. It is an extremely brave attempt to reconstruct the political and social reality of Britain on the eve of Roman annexation on the basis of the very limited evidence available. The book is chiefly noteworthy for its interdisciplinary character – Creighton ransacks history, archaeology, linguistics, numismatics and other disciplines in a determined search for the truth about Late Iron Age Britain. I very much admire this determination, which demonstrates an abhorrence of the archaeologist’s usual agnostic shrug. We might as well make the best possible use of the evidence that is available, and Creighton certainly does this.

Creighton makes many fascinating suggestions, always ensuring that they are not seen as factual claims. For instance, he suggests that the imagery on the British coins of series A-Q are inspired by trance imagery. The mysterious spots, rings, hatchings, vortices and crescents characteristic of these designs are, apparently, components in the trance experience. Creighton wonders whether such experiences were so prevalent in British society that die engravers were inevitably influenced by what was, effectively, a cultural platitude. I find this partially convincing, although it is also true that certain designs are characteristic of certain tribes and could almost be considered ‘tribal emblems’ – the back-to-back crescents of the Iceni, the horse-made-of-crescents of the Corieltauvi, etc. How would a common trance experience explain these regional differences? However, I should like to subject the Icenian series N to an analysis in the light of Creighton’s theory – he is only interested in the coinage of the major powers, the Atrebates/Regni and Catuvellauni/Trinovantes.

Creighton’s suggestion that the myth of Brutus in Nennius might actually be a pre-Roman survival is astonishing – after all, even Camden and the early antiquaries concluded that Geoffrey of Monmouth and most of the early events recorded by Nennius were tosh constructed for etymological reasons. However, Creighton’s arguments that these myths fit into a world in which British princes were trying to be ‘more Roman than the Romans’ do make sense.

Creighton’s linguistic arguments are almost entirely speculative yet fascinating nevertheless, although I should have liked more information on the reconstruction of *Brythonic. If there was one omission in Creighton’s book, I would say that he does not make enough of the names of Iron Age princes as evidence of their relationship to Rome. Cunobelinus, for example, was named for Belenus the British equivalent to Apollo – and Creighton thinks Tasciovanus, the ‘father’ of Cunobelinus, was educated in Rome under Augustus, whose patron god was Apollo. This could have been a brittanicised nod to the Roman cult on the part of Tasciovanus.

I do not entirely agree with Creighton that pre-Roman Britain was a relatively peaceful place – we have the evidence of the re-use of hillforts, etc. But his cashing out of Roman overlordship of Britain in terms of kings seeking approval from Rome seems eminently plausible. I would contend, however, that the struggle for Roman recognition may have generated war – perhaps this was the key to the apparent conflict between the dynasties of Tasciovanus and Addedomarus in Essex – each of them claimed a legitimacy derived from Rome. Creighton’s thesis reminds me of a Steven Plunkett’s remark that the Bretwealdas of the heptarchy may have similarly claimed some sort of Roman legitimacy – the so-called pre-Roman and post-Roman world were both latinocentric – Rome was seen as the centre of the cultural and political world even by non-Romans, which according to Creighton is evidenced by the adoption of classical mythologies about their own land by British princes.

While I was reading the book I could not help thinking that everyone until Creighton has been doing things the wrong way round. Creighton looks at Rome, and travels in the Roman imagination to the Britain of Roman (or pre-Roman) times; most historians travel from the Britain of today to pre-Roman Britain. This is a fundamental mistake; in the same way that an Anglo-Saxonist travels, through a study of Beowulf, from ancient Denmark to early Saxon England, so we must make an eliptical journey to Rome and then back to Britain. We occupy the same geographical space as the ancient Britons, but the cultural space we occupy has virtually nothing in common. Historians of Iron Age and Roman Britain cannot take the linear approach of historians of, say, Saxon England. Albeit the Vikings intervened, the England of today is, geographically and culturally, fundamentally the principal inheritor of Saxon England. Roman Britain was the inheritor of Iron Age Britain, and Roman Britain was part of a European Empire without the national boundaries with which we are familiar in the post-Roman historical narrative; it was effectively a ‘globalised’ society. The Roman and pre-Roman history of this island is different in kind from the post-Roman, because there is a fundamental discontinuity here. In Ireland, where the Iron Age culture overlapped with the arrival of literacy, no such discontinuity exists. Similarly, Wales and Scotland have Y Gooddin, but England has nothing to link these disparate elements.

Something else that struck me when reading Creighton’s work, and indeed other books on the Iron Age, has been the importance of academic authority in those zones of history where evidence is so scant. Van Arsdell, Allen and Cunliffe command respect for the rigour of their academic methodology rather than the plausibility of their findings – since after all, the evidence is so little that any hack could fit it to an interpretation that is not contradicted by the available evidence. So the mediaeval concept of scholarly authority does not seem entirely dead in the realm of Iron Age studies.

The key difficulty until Creighton’s work has been trying to fit the brilliant, classicised images on Cunobelinus’ coins into the world of muddy roundhouses that we usually imagine Iron Age Britain to have been, and Creighton bites the bullet to suggest that this was not what Britain was like. To a large extent, I agree – and I think this book is the most plausible introduction to Late Iron Age Britain, as well as a springboard of much further research.

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