Free A Brief History of the Celts by Peter Berresford Ellis

and called it peace’.
    In the north-west fringes of Europe, Celtic kingdoms survived until the late medieval period, although their conquerors tried to disguise the fact by giving the kings a variety of titles from
duke to prince to earl. The last king of Cornwall seems to have been a Howell who surrendered to Athelstan in AD 931. James VI of Scotland, on the death of Elizabeth I in1603, agreed with alacrity to become James I of England. Llywellyn, the penultimate ruler of Wales, was killed by English troops at Cilmeri in 1282. His brother Dafydd ruled
for only a few months before being captured and beheaded and, by the Statute of Rhuddlan, in 1284, Wales was annexed to the English crown. Francis II of Brittany had to surrender to the French King
Charles VIII at St Aubin-du-Cormier; while his daughter Anne reasserted Breton independence for a while, she was inevitably faced with a marriage to Charles and the union of the crowns of Brittany
and France.
    In 1541 Henry VIII made himself king of Ireland and forced the Irish royal families to surrender their titles in a policy called ‘surrender and regrant’. The kings (the office of
high king had already vanished) had to surrender their title and lands and were then granted the title of ‘earl’ together with some of their land back as a fiefdom from Henry as feudal
king. In July 1543, for example, Murrough O’Brien, 57th King of Thomond, and direct descendant of the famous high king Brian Boru, surrendered to Henry at Greenwich. In return he was created
Earl of Thomond and Baron Inchiquin. Conor O’Brien, 18th Baron Inchiquin, still lives on the family estates.
    Other Irish kings were less fortunate. Donal IX The MacCarthy Mór, last regnant King of Desmond and titular King of the two Munsters, fought on, as did his family. They never surrendered
and so did not enjoy titles and estates. Similarly, the O’Neills of Ulster, finally defeated, had to flee abroad where their descendants still live in Spain and Portugal.
    It is worth noting that the indigenous Celtic aristocracy of Ireland, whose genealogies mostly date from twelfth-century records, is one of the most ancient in Europe. Today’s surviving
heads of the Irish royal dynasties have a traceable lineage, accepted by genealogists and heralds, going back nearly 2000 years, perhaps longer if we may put some trust in the genealogies of the
earlier periods.
    For example, the pedigree of the Uí Néill kings of Ulster starts with a descent from Eremon, the first Milesian monarch, who is said to have ruled the
northern half of Ireland in the year of the world (i.e. 1015 BC ), coming down forty-one generations to Lugaid Riab nDerg who ruled in AD 65–73.
From there every generation is listed down to Niall of the Nine Hostages, who ruled in AD 379–405. Today, the two houses of the Uí Néill dynasty, as
represented by Don Hugo O’Neill, Prince of Clanaboy, in Portugal, and Don Marcos O’Neill, 11th Marques del Granja of Seville in Spain, can trace their unbroken lines back to Niall.
Therefore, technically, they have unbroken genealogies of 3000 years. The same may be said for the current MacCarthy Mór, Prince of Desmond, whose line descends from Eber Fionn, brother of
Eremon, who ruled the southern half of Ireland in 1015 BC . The MacCarthys constituted the Eóghanacht dynasty in Ireland which ruled Munster in the south and later
Desmond (south Munster) until the late sixteenth century.
    However, while the genealogists and heralds accept the genealogies back to the first century AD , they prefer to leave aside the genealogies stretching BC as ‘unproved’, although not going so far as some sceptical scholars who dismiss them as ‘pseudo-genealogies’ and the surrounding texts as
‘pseudo-histories’.

4
    THE DRUIDS
    T here is no class of Celtic society that so intrigued the classical world as the Druids. The writings of the Greeks and Romans concerning Druids,
with all their misinterpretations