The Goths

"The book I recommend is The Goths by a man called Peter Heather. It’s a general survey of all the different Goths. There is a chapter about the Visigoths in Aquitaine called “The First Successor State” – to the Roman Empire in the west, that is. This was a straightforward example of defeat by a military power – by the Franks, another barbarian nation which had invaded Gaul. There was a great battle near Poitiers, at a little place called Vouillé. The Visigoths were defeated and they retired from Aquitaine over the Pyrenees. They took over Spain, and there were nearly three centuries of the Visigoths in Spain. One of the curious things is that the only monument to Alaric, the Visigoth king killed by Clovis the Frank, is in Madrid. These twisted, contorted memories is one of the themes I deal with in my own book. That’s a good question. When the Visigoths were defeated, how many stayed behind to serve the Franks? The identity of a state is very fluid, and a lot depends on the fate of the people – what happens to the people when one country is conquered by another. Anglo-Saxon England is a perfect example. Before the Anglo-Saxons came there was no England. They came into Roman Britannia and they took over the lands of Britain. They slaughtered and drove out British leaders. The story is that the British retreated and made the Western peninsula their home – what we now call Wales. And it now seems that the Welsh founded Glasgow. You see, the whole of our island used to be Celtic, British. There were no Anglo-Saxons until they came over the sea. The Scots came from Ireland and gradually took over the north of the island, which we now call Scotland. Scotland was formed in the ninth century. The Anglo-Saxons came over from the east and they created England. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . But before Scotland or England existed, there were a number of false Roman native kingdoms of which the culture and civilisation was Celtic, or what the English called Welsh – which is a very nasty word, meaning alien. The Germanic peoples, who couldn’t talk with these Celts, called them Welsh – aliens. And the indigenous population of the region where Glasgow is – Strathclyde, as it’s called now – was Welsh. The chief hero of medieval Scotland was William Wallace. Wallace means Welsh. The Scots don’t tell you that. They had this theory that William Wallace’s family came from Shropshire, which is how they try to explain how a Welshman could be in what they thought of as Scotland. They didn’t know that these Welsh of the north were not intruders from Wales, they were there long before the Scots."