Although history appears to be out of fashion today, many people are still familiar with its broad outlines and its prominent players, both historical and mythical. Thus, the fact that Julius Caesar invaded Briton several decades before the birth of Christ is well known, as is his description of the Britons as savages. "Most of the tribes in the interior do not grow corn," he wrote, "but live on milk and meat, and wear skins. All the Britons dye their bodies with woad, which produces a blue colour, and shave the whole of their bodies except the head and upper lip. Wives are shared between groups of ten or twelve men, especially between brothers and fathers and sons."
Tacitus, in 110 A.D. wrote: "Who the first inhabitants of Britain were, whether natives or immigrants, remains obscure; one must remember we are dealing with barbarians."
Cassius Dio, about 210 wrote: "They [Britons] can endure hunger and cold and any kind of hardship; for they plunge into the swamps and exist there for many days with only their heads above water, and in the forests they support themselves upon bark and roots"
Herodian really piled it on around 240 by writing that "Most of Britain is marshland because it is flooded by the continual ocean tides. The barbarians usually swim in these swamps or run along in them, submerged up to the waist. Of course, they are practically naked and do not mind the mud because they are unfamiliar with the use of clothing, and they adorn their waists and necks with iron, valuing this metal as an ornament and a token of wealth in the way that other barbarians value gold. They also tattoo their bodies with various patterns and pictures of all sorts of animals. Hence the reason why they do not wear clothes, so as not to cover the pictures on their bodies. They are very fierce and dangerous fighters, protected only by a narrow shield and a spear, with a sword slung from their naked bodies. They are not familiar with the use of breast-plates and helmets, considering them to be an impediment to crossing the marshes. Because of the thick mist which rises from the marshes, the atmosphere in this region is always gloomy."
Here is what Caesar actually found in his failed 55 B.C. invasion: "In chariot fighting, the Britons begin by driving all over the field hurling javelins, and generally the terror inspired by the horses and the noise of the wheels are sufficient to throw their opponent's ranks into disorder. Then, after making their way between the squadrons of their own cavalry, they jump down from the chariots and engage on foot. In the meantime, their charioteers retire a short distance from the battle and place the chariots in such a position that their masters, if hard pressed by numbers, have an easy means of retreat to their own lines. Thus they combine the mobility of cavalry with the staying power of infantry; and by daily training and practice they attain such proficiency that even on a steep incline they are able to control the horses at full gallop, and to check and turn them in a moment. They can run along the chariot pole, stand on the yoke, and get back into the chariot as quick as lightning."
Caesar was escorted out of Britain by these same chariots!
The kings of Britain were of distinct lineage and could trace that lineage back to the Kings of Rome who were overthrown in popular revolts in the 6th Century B.C. One of the British Princes had turned traitor and had to leave Briton with his retinue after Caesar failed his invasion attempt. When Claudius invaded a hundred years later, he ran into similar trouble and chose to cement alliances with the British Kings, offering a daughter in marriage to one and, upon capturing Caradoc, the High King as a result of further treachery, brought Caradoc and his entire family back to Rome and placed them in a palace on the Esquiline Hill called the Palatium Britannicum. He subsequently adopted one of Caradoc's daughters who married one of his relatives bringing, by the time of Septiumus Severus in 193 A.D. British blood into the royal chain of command. Caradoc's offspring also were instrumental in bringing Christianity to Britain in the 1st Century A.D. so that Christianity was well established by the time Constantine, himself a Briton, proceeded to convert the entire empire in the 4th Century.
Throughout the Roman Empire, Britain was never a province of Rome, it was a trading partner, provisioning Roman legions on the continent. In exchange, Roman legions protected the Britons from their enemies to the North, the Picts, against whom Hadrian built and Severus expanded what's now known as Hadrian's Wall.
King Arthur in reality was a 6th Century British king who became High King during a period when Briton was continually being threatened by outsiders. All of these facts were known and taught in Britain though the 18th Century. The lineage of the British kings, including their addition to the bloodlines of the Roman Emperors, and even the fact that Constantine himself was of British descent, is set forth in Welsh manuscripts and, in fact, the Welsh were the British. There is plenty of evidence available that Britain was not only highly civilized before the time of Caesar's attempted invasion, marrying the nobility of Britain, especially into a succession of Roman Emperors, was considered a link to Rome's long banished ruling elite.
Constantine's mother, a British Queen and devout Christian, influenced Constantine immensely and therefore Briton can be considered one of the most important contributors to the spread of Christianity.
Thus Britain, from prehistoric times, was ruled by a well-defined royal family lineage and it was a major force in the spread of Christianity.
Why, then, was I taught that Britain was a den of savages in the dark ages and it was only with the arrival of St Augustine in the 7th Century that Briton was brought out of the dark ages by the introduction of Christianity?
It is obvious from Julius Caesar's account that when he was referring to barbarians, he was referring to the Picts, as was Tacitus, Cassius Dio and Herodian. Why did British historians and educators decide to cloud over the actual history of Britain, which was and is quite extraordinary, in favor of promulgating a fictitious picture of Briton with no coherent history, no educated class, no culture, no writing, no nothing but savage barbarians? Why in fact, do British historians insist that the first ruling dynasty of Briton was the Saxon dynasty starting in 801?
The answer is found in the establishment of the Hanoverian dynasty in 1714 and the consolidation of the Anglican Church after the travails that occurred leading up to the Hanoverian dynasty. The Hanoverians, starting with George I, were Germans and in fact George I didn't speak English, brought over a German court to care for his needs and was even the grandfather of the famous German, Frederick the Great.
Going back to the year 260 A.D., a little known division occurred in the Roman Empire. For two centuries, Briton had been provisioning the Roman Legions that occupied Gaul, Germany and Spain and had actually taken over and staffed the legions stationed in Briton. In 260, Briton, Gaul, Germany and Spain broke away from the Empire and established the Gallic Empire. Britain, with its historic claim on Gaul and its ability to field its own legions as well as provision the legions on the continent, was the dominant player in this Empire. When Emperor Aurelian restored the empire in 274, a high English king, Carausius, remained in control of Briton and Gaul.
Diocletian took over from Aurelian and, in an effort to consolidate control, named Maximian as co-emperor with the title of Augustus of the West, and this Agustus made a trade pact with Carausius. Thus, Briton was the dominant influence, not only in the western empire, but also in the entire empire. In 293, Constantius was named co-emperor with Maximian, married the British queen Helen, produced Constantine, who became Constantine the Great, taking over the entire empire and converting the empire to Christianity.
Thus, Germany, which at the time was little more than a collection of tribes, played a minor role in history against the dominant role played by Briton, and George I and his band of Germans was not about to allow a history to continue that favored someone other than themselves. Further, it was in George's interest to consolidate the Anglican Church over the Catholic Church, and the Anglican Church did not want any history of Briton to include it being an important player in the establishment of the Christianity that became Catholicism.
The history of early Briton was preserved in Welsh manuscripts, and these manuscripts were suppressed, Welsh scholarship abandoned and the history ignored, or when it was revealed in Latin texts, denied or dissembled.
King Arthur was not only a very real person, and not a myth, he was a direct descendent of Constantine and Helen. His kingdom was real, although many romantic myths have grown up around him. The reality, however, is that King Arthur has survived only as a myth, his kingdom obliterated by English scholarship toadying to a foreign ruling class. Our Anglo Saxon heritage is definably German in its outlook in so far as portraying knowledge of the actual Briton prior to the 7th Century arrival of St Augustine.
Putting ourselves in the context of the times, it is clear that the leaders of society didn't hesitate to falsify history to their own benefit. Richard III, in 1476, banned the printing press from Wales in order to cripple Henry Tudor's claim to the throne. Henry VIII, when the Pope refused to grant him a divorce, simply changed the religion of England. Later, after the Hanoverians occupied the throne, the Welsh language, in which the history of England had been written, was banned.
It was standard practice to make up stuff and then claim that made-up stuff was in fact real stuff. England operated on the principle of creating stories that had no basis in reality in order to hide actual reality, a practice we euphemistically term creating legends today.
This is the environment in which, in the 18th Century, the systematic search for the nature of reality called science began. While the Royal Society was originally set up to test the nature of practical inventions, for instance, it spent many of its early years attempting to improve the springs used to smooth a coach's ride over the rough English roads, its venture into answering questions related to the solar system channeled the search for natural answers into the mathematical methodology as a result of Newton's attempt to legitimize his notions about the nature of gravity and light.
The search for the nature of reality then became a contest as to whose narrative of reality would be accepted. Newton started off with the notion that gravity is a property of and proportional to matter. That was not something he concluded after examining facts. That was his starting notion. When it came time to "prove" his narrative, he pointed to mathematics, which is certainly an objective system of measurement, but which is incapable of doing anything but proving or disproving notions about actual physical reality, the dimensions of the hard edges of our existence. Gravity is not a hard edge. It is invisible. We can't nail down its source and we certainly can't put its mechanics, how it works, under a glass case in a museum. All we can do is see its effect, something dropping.
Once Newton had his narrative and his methodology, everything else had to follow. All matter had to be uniformly made up of identical particles because otherwise he wouldn't be able to mathematically compute the amount of gravity the Earth and the moon produced. Of course, all matter is not uniformly made up of identical particles, so Newton was in error right out of the starting gate. Then, in order to mathematically compute the force of the gravity on the moon, Newton had to assume the moon would be going in a straight line but for the force of gravity. There is no evidence that this is true and, in fact, there is nothing in our reality that would lead us to believe anything would go in a straight line but for the force of gravity. Actually, the force of gravity makes things go in a straight line. Just drop a bowling ball above your foot.
When later scientists realized Newton's errors, they didn't say, well, Newton's notion must have been erroneous, gravity is not proportional to and a property of matter. They said, we know Newton's notion is right, we just have to figure out where he went wrong. They concluded that instead of using the amount of matter in the planets to compute the orbits of the planets, they had to use the orbits of the planets to compute the amount of matter in the planets. Of course, this doesn't mathematically demonstrate Newton's notion that gravity is a property of and proportional to matter, but then everyone knows that to be a fact, so why bother proving it. As to the moon moving in a straight line, Newton's notion that God came back every once in a while to give the moon its momentum was clearly wrong, but because the motion is clearly circular, the solar system condensed out of a swirling mass of gas.
Newton's statement that gravity is a property of and proportional to matter is no different than the conclusion that Julius Caesar found a race of barbarians when he landed in England. There is no support for the statement and a world of evidence disputing the statement. However, the statement is used to shape all subsequent reality.
This is the empirical way. White light contains all colors is a bald statement with no evidence to back it and a lot of evidence to dispute it, yet it controls how we think of just about everything from radiation to rainbow parties. Young sought to prove light was analogous to a water wave, and to this day, in the face of massive evidence to the contrary, it still is. Faced with massive evidence of a worldwide flood, empirical science created the myth of the ice age and it controls all our thinking about history, and apparently about our future on this planet. Smith inadvertently created the notion of uniformitarianism, and massive evidence to the Earth's violent past is absorbed in any number of eclectic narratives. Darwin stumbled over the notion of species evolution and now empirical science makes up any crazy narrative to save the notion. Michelson and Morley attempted to use the water wave myth of light to measure the absolute motion of the Earth and ended up imbuing the world with the insanity that time speeds up and slows down.
The list goes on and on and on and on and on and on and, well, and on.
Popper's test of falsification is absurd because everything in empirical science, built on untested and untestable notions, is falsified from the start.
To read the complete story of the Arthurian saga, pick up a copy of The Holy Kingdom by Adrian Gilbert, the man who, amusingly invented the idea of using Newton's faulty notion of precession to date the pyramids.
Peter Bros is the author of the 9 volume Copernican Series and is President of The Far Museum of Dallas, an actual history museum, which will house its collection of 50,000 rare Eastern Mediterranean manuscripts and artifacts together with actual history displays and tours in a full-sized replica of the Egyptian Temple at Dendera to be built in the Dallas Ft. Worth area. Email:peterbros@therealskeptic.com