In Our Time - The Druids

Episode Date: September 20, 2012

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the Druids, the priests of ancient Europe. Active in Ireland, Britain and Gaul, the Druids were first written about by Roman authors including Julius Caesar and Pliny, who described them as wearing white robes and cutting mistletoe with golden sickles. They were suspected of leading resistance to the Romans, a fact which eventually led to their eradication from ancient Britain. In the early modern era, however, interest in the Druids revived, and later writers reinvented and romanticised their activities. Little is known for certain about their rituals and beliefs, but modern archaeological discoveries have shed new light on them.With:Barry Cunliffe Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at the University of OxfordMiranda Aldhouse-Green Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff UniversityJustin Champion Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway, University of LondonProducer: Thomas Morris.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello, the earliest known case of religious persecution in these islands took place 2,000 years ago in the 1st century AD. The oppressors were the occupying forces of the Roman Empire, and their victims were the druids,

an ancient religious order which was ruthlessly eliminated from Roman Britain. The druids were active in Britain, island and gall and flourish for many centuries. They were reasonably well chronicled by ancient authors, including Julius Caesar and Posidonius. Much later, thanks to a revival of interest in the 17th century, they inspired a wealth of literature and art. But because the druids were on oral culture and left no written records of their own, comparatively little is known about their beliefs and practices. And the reinvations of the druidical traditions by romantic writers have resulted in much misconception and myth.

With me to discuss the ancient druids are Justin Champion, Professor of the History of Early Modern Ideas at Royal Holloway, University of London, Barry Cunleve, Emeritus Professor of European Archaeology at the University of Oxford, and Miranda Oldhouse-Green, Professor of Archaeology at Cardiff University. Justin Champion, who were the Druids, and where did they live? The druids really, I think, flourished between the late 4th century BC and the end of the second century AD.

they're predominantly map onto the late Iron Age culture called Latene. They're very eminent in England, in Britain, in Wales, and in Brittany, in Gaul. So they cover that period. The problem we have is that the sources, the literary sources that expose their traditions are very, very fragmentary, their palimpses written over earlier traditions. We know Druids existed in this culture because we can look at place names, we can look at the spread of Celtic language. But actually identifying the key areas is quite difficult.

One of the problems we have is that they were a determinedly oral culture. Can you tell us why they were and what there is the consequence of that is? Well, one of the problems is that they are a priesthood of some sort and they believe that they understand deep secret knowledge and that they pass it on to people of their own ilk. That means that they don't leave artefacts and texts for us to study as modern historians and archaeologists. One of the problems is,

is trying to coordinate the reportage of druids in figures like Caesar and Pliny later with some of the archaeological temples and buildings that we know. And certainly later on in the period of 17th and 18th century, there's huge amounts of speculation about connecting that oral culture. Of course, there are traditions in the early medieval periods that somehow draw from an oral tradition, particularly in Ireland,

and those again are exploited by 17th and 18th century figures. But it's a very, very mysterious business. Can we just go back for a moment or not go back? Go to this oral tradition idea because many, many civilizations are remote from us because of their insistence on an oral tradition, which is fascinating. You said they were priesthood,

they wanted to give it among themselves. But in a way, I think it, I've read, anyway, it's more extensive and deeper than that. Can you just dwell on that for a moment to do? I think one of the things that we have difficulty with is, of course, Christianity became so dominant, even in the early centuries after Christ, and that one of the projects that the Roman Empire

alongside Christianity has was to actually obscure many, many aspects of that oral culture. It has to be sort of destroyed. It hasn't got to the point of why they insisted on it all. I've read it's because they thought that, that the writing was lazy, that they thought that writing was open to misinterpretations which oral culture wasn't. And are these any...

Those are good, plausible explanations. And certainly the druids, because they read nature, they read sort of deeper philosophy, want to be able to communicate effectively with their local communities. And of course, writing is open to rhetoric and to exploitation. There is one tradition, though, that says druid thinking,

is captured in this mysterious language called Ogham, little marks on wooden sticks and on stones. But of course, we don't actually know very much about Ogham script itself, and the invention of an oral tradition captured in that form is very much a 17th century tradition. Barry Cundleff, can you tell us then about the earliest chronicled references to the druids? Well, as Justin said, we've got lots of snippets of information about the druids spread across a number of classical writers.

But from about the first century BC to about the 7th century AD, most of those classical writers are quoting second-hand, third-hand, fourth-hand from other classical writers. So the game, really, is to try and sort out when the inputs of new information

about the druids sort of hit the literary world. I think one could argue that the first input of real information comes around 300 BC with the journeys of a very remarkable man called Pythias

who lived in Marseille. He was a Greek. And he made a journey, we know about this journey, he made a journey, I think he was trying to work out where the tin came from. Tim was very important

for the Greek economy and it was coming from the northwest. So he travelled through France, got into the Atlantic, probably took local boats, went to Brittany, crossed to Cornwall, up the Irish Sea, to the Northern Isles, down the east coast of Britain, down the channel, and back to Brittany, back to Marseille, where he wrote a book called On the Ocean.

Now, that was the main source of information about the northwest of Europe, the Atlantic shores of Europe. And that book on the ocean, we don't have. But lots of other people started to use it as a source, people like Timaeus, who was a Sicilian historian. And people like Eratosthenes, very interesting man around 200 BC, he was the librarian,

chief librarian at Alexandria. And people like that were using this early source. And what were they finding about Druids in his account? They were finding a lot about Britain, and they were picking up little snippets of information about druids, particularly the theme that comes over is druids as philosophers, as natural philosophers. Let's call this the early Greek tradition, the Greek or Alexandrian tradition.

And that really does focus, not on all the ritual and blood and things like that. It focuses on the intellectual quality of the druid. And the Greeks were very impressed. They compared druids rather to Pythagoras. And druids had these strange ideas that the soul was immortal and so on. Did Posidonius later, was it two centuries later, did he take up, did he build on Pythias? He was an anthropology, so did he do some original work of his own? No, Posidonius was the next sort of input of new information.

Posidonius was a stoic philosopher from Aparmeir in Syria. It was Greek. But he spent most of his time on the island of Rhodes, in the sort of university atmosphere of Rhodes. But he was writing a history of the ancient world. And like a good historian, he actually did his fieldwork. And one of the bits of fieldwork he did was to go to southern France, Gaul, when just a generation after the Romans had just taken over that southern strip of France,

ostensibly to work out how Hannibal got through the Alps and so on. He was writing about that. And he came across Celts and observed the habits of the Celts and the druids and so on. And he put a lot of new information into the pot. What are the likely origins, the deeper origins, you've mentioned Pythagoras, the claims that it goes back to Moses 13th century V.C. that it even goes back to Egypt, the Druid tradition. Now, what are we to make of that?

What do you see as the origins? Well, I think I can just take the evidence. And what we've got to live with is a remark by Julius Caesar, that the druids originated in Britain, and if you want to study the druids, you've got to go to Britain to do so. Now, we don't have to believe everything Caesar says. Why did this business of Egypt, Moses and Pythagoras, come in then? It was the later Greek writers

who were looking back... Is this Strabo and people like... No, people like Clement of Alexandria and some of the later Christians looking back on this and saying that really the beliefs of the druids were so much like Pythagoras that either Pythagoras got them from the Greeks or the other way around. Got them from the druids or the other way around. I believe being the transmigration of the cell for instance.

That's right. That's all. of thing. But where the origin of the druid belief came from, as Justin said, it's concentrated in Britain, Ireland and France. And that's where most of the place names, most of the evidence is. And I think if you look, take Caesar's view that they might have originated in Britain. Caesar, can I go across to Miranda for Caesar, do you mind? Miranda Alders.

So we've got Caesar who gives us a very, quite a detailed account, chronicle, of the Druids. Can you just tell listeners what he says about them? Yes. We take it he's a reasonably reliable historian. He was on the case. He was in Gaul for eight years. He knew about this country as well.

Yes, he was in Gaul for about sort of eight or nine years in the 50s BC. He was a Roman general, and he wrote a war commentary called the Gallic Wars, or de Bello Gallo-Gallico. And he, most of the books, there are seven books written by him in his lifetime, and then one posthumous one. But in book six, he digresses from his normal war diaries where he's talking about conquering different tribes and polities in Gaul, and he digresses to talk about customs and practices

of Gauls and Germans and Britons to an extent. And there's quite a long piece in book six about the society in Gaul at the time he was writing. And he says very tellingly that there were only two lots of people of any account, the knights and the druids. And he's obviously far more interested in the druids than any of the druids. or else. He says they're in charge of all religious practices, that they are judges, they are teachers, they are natural scientists, they study the cosmos, and they were immensely influential

in all political and religious matters. And Caesar is quite clearly quite impressed with them. We learned later on, or not actually earlier on in the commentaries, that he had a very good friend called De Vickyakas, who was the leader of a Burgundian tribe called the Idui. It's a Romanised name of a Celt. Of a Celtic triad, De Vicarcos, yes, indeed. And he was a leader, but he was also in charge of religion. And Cicero picks up De Vicaros, who visited Rome in 60 BC, and Cicero meets him and talks about what an impressive person he is

and how good he is at divining the future, how good he is at Auguri, and he was a druid. So Caesar has this powerful, ally, de Vickyarchus, who Cicero picks up on. And the general impression you get from Caesar is that they are impressive intellectuals, they are worthy of Caesar's interest. He also picks up on this business about oral tradition, Caesar, and he says quite clearly there are two reasons for lack of writing.

One is secrecy and the need to keep knowledge to the few. And the second is for to train memory and to make quite sure. think the whole idea about the druids is that they are keepers of ancestral tradition. They are, in a sense, the keepers of the culture of the communities in which they operated. Is there any corroboration? I mean, the interesting thing about Caesar's Chronicle, apart from its interest for what he says, is that his detail. He claims an awful lot.

He makes a very grand claim for the druids. Is there any corroboration? Is he alone? What reasons do you have for believing him? I think partly because he was surrounded by fellow Romans of similar status to himself. He was writing his commentaries specifically to justify what were slightly dodgy actions in Gaul. He didn't really have a mandate from the Senate for what he was doing in Gaul. And I think part of the commentaries, part of the purpose of the commentaries was to legitimise what he was doing.

But he had people with him like Cicero's brother Quintus. and I think had he sort of made it all up, I think people might have actually rumbled him and said something. So although some of it may be sort of flannel and embroidery, I think he's one of our best sources because the great thing about Caesar is he's writing at the time when the druids were particularly prevalent. What evidence did he put forward, if he put forward any evidence,

that this had begun the origin of the thing in Northwest Europe was in Britain? He actually says it is thought that druidry began in Britain and was exported to Gaul. And that's actually quite interesting because later on Pliny, who is another source of the druids, Pliny the Elder. Pliny the Elder actually says exactly the opposite. So who knows? After Caesar, are there any classical authors who are as detailed and as convincing? Not as detailed, but Pliny is quite, he's quite interesting. the later writers in the first century AD

there's a subtle change in how druids are regarded by Romans. So Caesar is fairly complimentary about them. People like Pliny, Tacitus and Lucan in the first century AD are fairly anti them. And what you're getting now is the barbarian, the savage, human sacrifice is talked up. Is it propaganda or do you think it's a more realistic, a more truthful analysis?

Well, a bit of both, I think. Because the Romans were coming to that, but the Romans found the Druids as an obstacle when they came to this country. I think, yes, I think the Romans found the Druids a bit of a pain, partly because they were very highly nationalistic and were clearly

focuses of sedition and rebellion. So when you are annexing a province, the last thing you want is druids in people's ears going, no, we don't want that. And of course, it's in the druid's best interests for Rome not to succeed because the whole of their power base would go. Druid's power depends upon Gallic society

in British society being hierarchical, highly stratified. Once you bring Romans into the mix, the whole of society falls apart and is reinvented, and there is no place for druids in that. So we're talking about the beginnings of a sort of propaganda. Before we were going, what do you say, Davidiarchus met Cicero in Rome? Which languages are they speaking?

Ah, Latin. Right. So the druid's new Latin. Okay. Well, enough. If you can talk to Cicero, you're not doing badly. No, indeed not. Okay. Justin, Justin Champion.

Let's develop the idea of the druids in society in Britain. We know quite a bit now, so you just developed that. How powerful were they? The word power has been mentioned by Miranda. I think once again we've got to be very cautious because we're drawing from these little fragments of sources and sort of stitching them together. If we believe Caesar, the druids are very highly organised.

They have annual meetings, they're arch druids, they elect, they sort of confer and communicate across Gaul and Britain. within those societies, though, as Miranda said, that they are judges, their teachers, they're motivators in some sense, and I think that's one of the reasons why the Romans have difficulties with them. The doctrine of the transmigration of the souls,

I think it Caesar says, makes men very brave, because if you know you may come back, then you're not going to be afraid to die in a war defending your own sort of community. So I think we can think of the druids as experts They're not quite priests, they're more than priests. Certainly, as Pliny and the later sources expound and an embroider on, they're involved with medical practice, their judges,

they're people who will negotiate between strife within communities. So they're very powerful figures. Caesar describes two sorts, knights and druids. Certainly I think after the Christian era, druids are more and more marginalized. and are starting to be thought of as sort of slightly odd magicians. You know, they retreat perhaps out of communities. So they're very powerful figures that we don't quite have a modern equivalent for, I think. Any what do we know about the druid's beliefs and rituals then, Barry Kahnler?

Well, strangely, very little. We can pick up bits of it. The druid has, if you're, if you're commuting, communicating as an ordinary person with the gods, you can only do so through the druid. So the druid is an intermediary to start with. I want to do that's one at a point I was, stumbling of, but we're just in a...

Let's take it with you. Was it a prime source of their power that they were, your word, the intermediaries between the gods and then they could do it, they could take you to God, they could tell you what God wanted to do and what God was going to do, and that was the real keystone of their power? Absolutely right. As it is of most priesthood.

The priesthoods maintain their power because you as an ordinary person can't communicate with the gods without their presence. And Caesar actually is quite specific about this. He says that they can prevent you from communicating with the gods. In other words, excommunicate you. No one will speak to you and you'll just fall apart and have to go away. So they have immense power because they are the only way

that you can contact the gods. So you say we don't know much about that beliefs, but Christians began to claim that they in some ways prefigured Christianity. Was that much later? Yes, that comes later when people are trying to bring these two things together. But we see them in as the intermediaries. There is one famous bit of ritual. In fact, it's the only decent bit of ritual we've got,

which Pliny talks about, which is the famous cutting of the mistletoe with a golden sickle. and he explains this in quite a lot of detail how you have to have the right time of the moon. The moon mustn't be too strong, it mustn't be too weak, so you choose your time, and that's one of the other aspects of the druids control, that they controlled our knowledge of time,

when is an appropriate time to do things, when isn't an appropriate time to do things. Very powerful, that is. And then you had to dress in, the priest had to dress in white robes, that the mistletoe growing on the oak was particularly powerful and you cut it with a golden sickle, it fell on a white cloth,

you sacrificed white oxen and so on. So you've got a sense of the complexity of belief and ritual. Why mistletoe? I don't know what the particular power of mistletoe is, but the power of their belief in it was obviously very strong. They said it was all curing. But they also, and the same bit of Pliny, shows how very important their knowledge of plant law was

and healing and the science of plants. So we just get that little glimpse from Pliny. Miranda Alters Green, let's talk about the druids now and the occupying Roman power. In come the Romans. There are the druids. There's a clash.

As you said earlier in your opening remarks, the Roman commentators changed tone markedly once the Romans get into this country. and decide they're going to make it part of the Roman Empire. Can you talk about that, please? Yes, I mean, there's an interesting episode, particularly in AD60, which is rather a key year for Romano-British history, partly because of the rebellion of Budica,

but also because it's the time when the Roman governor, Sotonius Paulinus, who was brought in by Nero particularly to, as a conquistador, as it well. And Paulinus has decided that it's time to smash the druids, and the druids have their holy of holies on the island of Anglesey. Why is that? Because Anglese is on the edge of the known world. Anglesea is an island.

Islands can be very sacred in antiquity. And it was clearly for some reason considered there was a very holy grove there, and that's where when the druids were sort of against the wall, as it were, they retreated. Suetonius Paulinus took most of his legions and his auxiliaries all the way up to Anglesea. How many people would that be? Oh, we're talking about, I would say, about at least 20,000 people. So it marched them up to Anglesea, 20,000 fully armed Roman soldiers.

March them up to Anglesea. But the Druids weren't allowed to do military training, so were they an unarmed bunch of people in Anglesea waiting to be slaughtered? Well, it wasn't they, but they were not allowed. They were exempt from military service. But we also hear from Caesar, a rather sort of pretty story, really, where if you were wanted to be arched druid you could actually fight your corner

so they obviously weren't averse to the odd bit of sword play What do you mean fight you're going to challenge the... Challenge if you wanted to be arch druid if you wanted to challenge the leadership you might actually fight it out With a sword or whatever Yeah which is a very pretty thought in your long right robes

But to go back to Anglesey We know that our greatest source for this is Tacitus who talks in quite some detail about the conquest of Anglesey And he talks about the Romans Making Flatbott and Boats they get up the Menai streets and land actually on the Anxie. And they are met there by warriors and druids

and sort of fanatical fury like women, brandishing torches and the druids are cursing. And their weaponry is words. This is, we're going back again to the oral tradition. Words, word power, satire, the ability of words and curses to turn something against the enemy. We have to remember that we always have this business that, you know, Gaul and Britain very superstitious, rather barbaric and rather primitive and so on.

The Romans were unbelievably superstitious. And the sight of these druids screaming imprecations at the soldiers trying to land would have been incredible psychological warfare. So you have this picture of this sort of dense, armed mass of people and people armed with words and people armed with swords, fighting to keep their growth safe. and bottling up 20,000 Roman soldiers in the process. But the Romans, from what I read, just slaughtered most of them.

They did, but they were interrupted. It's not quite clear whether they actually managed the entire job. Right. Because while this is going on, Paulinus gets word that Budica is busy raising Roman towns to the ground. Is there any connection, as I've read in the notes of somebody, one of you, And actually the druids wanted Bardica to do that, to divert attention from Anglesey. I think it was quite cleverly orchestrated. I am quite sure that the druids were involved in this.

There is even a possibility, it's remote, that Budik herself might have been a druid, because we know that she was herself involved in divination in sort of sacred groves in London. And I think it was highly orchestrated, surely a coincidence, that Paulinus is up in the northwest and something happens in the southeast. I didn't realize you've taken so many troops. That's a lot, isn't it? It is a lot. And one interesting thing, again, it's, you know, as Barry said, all this business is about trying to get some archaeological evidence together, together with the written sources, so difficult.

But there's one theory I have, which I really like to posit here, and that is that on the way up to Anglesea, the Roman soldiers would have had to pass a place very close to Lindo Moss, which is where Lindo Man, a sacrificed young man, probably around that time, was found in 1984. And I just wonder whether that was an aversion sacrifice to try and overt that disaster that was about to happen on Anglesey. Justin Champion, why did the druids, went into a fairly steep decline rather quickly?

Was that the... Can you tell us why? I mean, I'm pretty sure it's the result of Romanisation in both military sense, but also in a legal sense, because certainly at some point by the 60s AD, you can't be a Roman citizen and a druid, so you're narrowing down the opportunities for learned men to go into the sort of business, if you like.

But after Mona, after the destruction of Anglesea... Anglesea called Mone. It's quite clear that druidism is trying to be dissoned. destroyed in all sorts of cultural ways. And we don't really know that much into the early Anglo-Saxon period about what happens to them, I think. But one can imagine, combined with Romanisation, the introduction of Christianity,

even if we believe some of the 17th century accounts, even this early, is a rival tradition. I just wondered if we could perhaps add a little bit to that because there are later Roman writers who talk about druids and that in itself is interesting because it means that the druids remain in the Roman consciousness right to the 4th century

AD. We have a poet called Ossonius, a Bordeaux poet who wrote a very long treatise about his fellow rhetoricians at the University of Bordeaux and he talks about druids and by then he's talking of druids being dynastic and the mantle of druidism falling from father to son.

He actually mentions a number of people in this dynasty. Now, whether or not these are the same kind of druids that we would have found in Caesar, I'm sure they weren't. But the other interesting thing is a funny lot of documents called the Augustine Histories. These dates the third and fourth centuries AD. And there are three or four stories about the accession to the purple of emperors like Orillian, Numeryan and Diocletian,

and that is predicted by Gaulish druidesses. So, what's interesting for me about that is that however much that may have been nonsense, it means that druids are still in the consciousness. Barry, Barry Cundle, the, although I've used the word exterminated, as I picked up probably. That's not right, really. They didn't disappear entirely, and they're still continued in Ireland, unconquered by the Romans. Can you give us some idea how they drift it, and this is ridiculous, but for the next, well, say, thousand years. years after the third, fourth century,

Andy. Yes, as you say, they continued in Ireland for a while, but were gradually turned into insignificance by the rise of Christianity. But there were the bards going on. This bardic tradition, this oral tradition, was an element of druidism which continued into Irish society,

as indeed did in Welsh society. So if you're looking for any real thread of context, The bardic tradition in those two societies is as good a thread as you can find, but the religious overlay has completely been wiped up by Christianity. How reliable do you take the bardic tradition? Is it reinvented every 50 years, every two, three generations? Is there a real continuity? There is a continuity, particularly in Wales,

it had almost eyed out. At the Ice Stedford's, you're getting about six or seven turning up. When? What day do we talk about? We're talking about the... 17th century. But in the 18th century, it begins to take off again

with the whole Celtic revival, Celtic Caltomania. But still, we've missed now, have you got anything to get hold of between about 400 AD and the 16th century? Virtually nothing. So what you're saying is when it starts again

in the 16th century, they are making it up as much as taking it for as what you're inheriting it. Yes, from the 16th century onwards, people are looking at the classical texts, and they are reinventing a sort of romantic view of druidism. And you've only got these little threads of things like the Ice-Dedford, like the storytellers, which are a very pale reflection of what went before.

Justin Champion, John Orbury in the 17th century became interested in the druids. We know him from brief lives, but he was an antiquarian and some sort of archaeologist. and the interest began, which has never ceased really, and he was one of the early, let's call him, modern persons to revive it. Can you tell us about, can you tell us what he did? Aubrey, in one sense, is a great under-explored scholar and man of learning, and he represents the sort of legacy of Renaissance humanism. As Barry's just said, you know, all of these classical texts,

whether it's the historian, Augusta, or Pliny or Tacitus, are rediscovered in the 16th century and nationalist scholars, whether they're in France or in England or in Ireland, want to make a connection with those sets of primary documents and connect them to their own particular community. So we'll get defences of French druidry, English druidry, as textual things.

The step that Aubrey takes is he goes out into the landscape, to the ruins in the landscape. He's perhaps the first field archaeologist. And drawing from hints, from people like Inigo Jones who had studied Stonehenge and was pretty much convinced it was a Roman temple of some sort and reading sort of Danish scholarship

that say no no Stonehenge is a relic of a Danish conquest Orbury goes out and measures, draws, maps both Stonehenge and Avebury and then a whole series of other relics and makes the sort of intellectual leap to connect those early sort of textual sources with these real artefacts. And I think from that moment on,

we can see the invention of a whole series of druidical practices. And it's even more brilliant in one sense that Aubrey is a great draftsman. He commissions other representations. And the drawings of Stonehenge suddenly have little druidical figures popping up that he's lifted from another imaginative source.

And those representations persist. I mean, they've reproduced in many, in many, many books today, but they persist as ways of thinking imaginatively about what druids were. Miranda, let's turn to Stonehenge and William Stucley and the association that was

there for quite a while that Stonehenge was built by part of the druid's tradition and religion. Can you tell this as about Stucley? Because Stucley is it were takes us on from Aubrey. Stoley does. Stucle is very interesting

because he is born in 1686. he takes holy orders in 1729 and he becomes a clergyman who then brings together his two great interests in ancient religion and archaeology and megaliths particularly and I think when we're thinking about Aubrey and Stucley and their fellows

we have to remember that it's only comparatively recently that we managed to get a long timeline back into the remote path for Britain Before then, there was no means of talking about a deep human path for Britain. So Stucley, like Aubrey, saw Stonehenge as a pre-Roman temple. The Druids were pre-Roman priests. Therefore, Stonehenge must be associated with the druids. But Stucley goes one step further.

He goes a bit strange after a while. His sermons get more and more druidic. and he finds an alleged inscription from Dijon, which talks about a druid called Chindanax. And Chindanax was a name that Stukley adopted, and he began to sign his letters, Your sincerely, Chindanax druid. He didn't find any problem with being clergymen

and Church of England at the same time. No, no. And I think that could have been partly, if we can go back a little bit, if you wouldn't mind, to early Ireland and the interface between paganism and Christianity. We have wonderful documents such as the 7th century lives of Bridget and Patrick. And Bridget is a particularly interesting one because she grows up in a druid's household

and he becomes Christianised but remains a druid. And there doesn't seem to be a tension between Christians and druids. I think your account of Stucley is wonderful and we need to sort of really emphasise that he is doing Trinitarian archaeology. Stucle, in one sense, subscribes to Usher's view that the world is only about 6,000 years old. So you've got to fit all of these things, from Adam to Moses, to the Druids, to now, into that chronology. And he's reacting very, very much against some of the deistical accounts of the druids as wicked pagan priests. So druidism is a form of patriarchal, Abramic worship.

And it's not just Stoakley, people like Isaac Newton, supposed modern rationalists, see Stonehenge as the remnants of sort of ancient fire worship that is only then contaminated by corrupt Christianity. Barricand, Stonehenge, it's been discredited that the druids could possibly have built Stonehenge it was built. Hasn't it? No. Oh, why, I thought it is.

No, no. Well, one of you told me that. No, well, I think... Who is a guilty contributor? Yeah, there are some new ideas here we've got to explore, I think. The idea that druids are to be related with Latin culture, I think is an idea of the 50s and 60s of the last century, and most archaeologists thrown that out.

If we try and find out, if we look at the development of religious structures and behaviour in Britain, and look at what was happening in the first century BC, when there were druids, and then try and back-project those behaviour patterns, we can see that some elements of the belief systems of the druids, cosmology, for example, can be dated right back to at least 3,000 BC in Britain. Some of the practices of digging deep shafts and putting offerings in them,

again, can go back to the third or second millennium. So I think there is a good case to be made out for the belief systems of the druids from the 4th or 3rd centuries BC, are deeply rooted in the belief systems of the area that go right back into the Neolithic period. But Stonehenge is so emblematic. Can you just, you said, yes, they might, look, there's a revolution going on to my head.

I came here, all prepared to put it. You say that they could have had a hand in building it. But they could have built it, could be there. No, no, not quite. You're putting words in my mouth here. No, what I'm saying is that the religious beliefs, which later are practised, by the druids might be very deep-rooted in Britain

and might be reflected in buildings like Stonehenge. Now, whether they were calling themselves druids at that time, who knows. But we've got to look for the roots of these belief systems and the roots go back in time. Would it be fair to say then that the druids adopted Stonehenge and for you're shaking your head again? No. Strangely enough, there's no real.

you evidence, very little evidence. Well, when did the... We now think of Stonehenge and Druids together. Okay, well let's get to the hinge of it. When did that happen? Right.

People like Aubrey, people like Stutley came up with the idea that Stonehenge and Avebury were the temples of the druids. And that idea has pervaded scholarly and less scholarly thought

since then. Now, what I'm saying, archaeologists have come in and said, absolute rubbish, there are only druids from the 4th century BC, Stonehenge is a lot earlier than that, so it can't be. What I'm saying with a number of other archaeologists is that the roots go back deeper, and it's not impossible that rituals, similar to those of the druidic rituals,

were associated with the building and the early use of Stonehenge. I think, Barry, that's why the other figure we could talk about John Tolan is so interesting because although his critical history of the druids and a specimen of Celtic learning is probably

at the end of the day nothing more than a very very elaborate joke but a very extraordinarily learned one he represents some sort of early pre-Egyptian pre-Pythagorean druidism taking

place not just in Ireland, not just in Wales but certainly in Scotland and he confects this entire sort of early druid republic where everything is godly and virtuous. We've missed out human sacrifice, and we haven't got much time, we've got to turn to it because it's part of the story. They were accused of, well, there's been human sacrifices, so many religions, and they continue.

Can you, and it was thought by some early writers, some early commentators, was this black propaganda, and Mirandi are going to tell us, as being excessive that altars ran with blood, That sort of thing. What about human sacrifice and the druids? What do we know? I think it's fair to say that human sacrifice probably did take place.

There is some archaeological evidence for it, for example, in the bog bodies, places like Lindo Moss that I've mentioned before, and quite a lot of other evidence. But the archaeological evidence suggests that it was happening, but it was rare, and it would only happen at times of great crisis. And I think what's happened is that when Caesar talks about it, he talks about it in a very matter-of-fact way. He says it is really cited appropriate to sacrifice human beings for efficacious purposes.

They would try and use prisoners of war or criminals, but if there weren't enough, then the innocent would make up the numbers. He's very pragmatic about this. We have to remember that human sacrifice was only outlawed in Rome in 97 BC, not that long ago before Caesar. The other writers like Pliny, like Tacitus, like Lucan, they do sort of talk it up a bit. They do talk about autos running with blood. But I think human sacrifice did take place, but it was not that out of the ordinary.

It was not, you know, that bigger deal. Barry? Yes, there is evidence in Iron Age archaeology that bodies, people were sacrificed, I think. I've excavated some pits in a hill fort called Dainbury, where there are bodies thrown into the bottoms of pits with stones heaped down on them. Now that doesn't look very much like normal burial practice.

So there are hints like that in the archaeological evidence and indeed the bog bodies. But I think Miranda is absolutely right that this was an extreme. This was what you did when the going really got bad and you had to placate the gods, rather like the Carthaginians sacrificing their kids when things went bad. I think one of the interesting things is that the 18th and 19th century aren't really interested in druids as sacrifices.

They're interested in druids as recoverers of some sort of natural spirit. And the huge sort of effort into reconstructing druidical temples. And saving land. Exactly. So they're communing with nature. They're the sort of early ecological sort of warriors in one sense. Yes, they are very much so. And these holy sites become preserved sites.

And the idea of preserving sites owes a lot to that. And even to the lengths of very wealthy, as to perhaps importing from Brittany and elsewhere sacred sites and reconstructing them in their own sort of land. Well, thank you very much, Barry Cunleff, Justin Champion, Miranda Haldhaus Green. Next year we'll be talking about the ontological argument, first outline in the 7th century. Onselm, the argument is an attempt to prove the existence of God through reason alone.

Thanks for listening. If you've enjoyed this BBC podcast, why not try others such as the Forum, the discussion programme about global ideas? To find out more, visit BBC. wwwservis.com slash forum.