Blood & Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain

by Ronald Hutton

At some point in the period between 1681 and 1699 the courtier and diplomat Sir William Temple drafted a history of England, in which he hailed the Druids as teachers of ‘justice and fortitude’, living simply in the woods: ‘their food of acorns, berries or other mast; their drink water: which made them respected and admired, not only for knowing more than other men, but for despising what all others valued and pursued, and by their great virtue and temperance, they were suffered patiently to reprove and correct the vices and crimes, from which themselves were free’.

To Toland, ‘the history of the Druids, in short, is the complete history of priestcraft’ (his emphases), and functioned as a warning against the impostures and deceits of clergy in his own time. By understanding the way in which these ancient priests had starved their flocks of knowledge, terrorized them with the threat of excommunication, and appropriated their wealth, he believed, people would be able to reject clerical power and pretension in the present.

the Lake District had become one of the four great regions of the nation – the others being Cornwall, Wales and Wiltshire – into which Druids had become especially integrated as figures of the poetic and scholarly imagination.

There, between 1820 and 1850, their administrators engaged in a series of well-publicized campaigns against Hindu customs that they had come to regard as pernicious. Three, in particular, made a deep impression on the British public. One was sati, or suttee, the burning of a widow alive upon the funeral pyre of her husband. The second was human sacrifice, represented in particular by the cult of thagi or Thugee, in which travellers were ritually murdered as offerings to the goddess Kali, by devotees of her cult based at the temple of Bindhachal. The third was the practice of offering oneself as a sacrifice by committing ritual suicide before the image of the god Krishna in the city of Puri. The traditional method was to throw oneself under the wheels of the carriage bearing the huge statue of the god, known as the Juggernaut, as it was dragged in procession through the streets. The efforts to suppress the last two customs have made a permanent impact on the English language, in the words ‘thug’ and ‘juggernaut’.

Two of these were to make an impact on national politics, in the persons of John Guest and Benjamin Hall. Both supported the reforming Whig Party, and won themselves titles, Guest as a baronet and Hall as a baron, taking the name Lord Llanover. Hall was to earn a different kind of enduring fame by gaining direct responsibility for the rebuilding of the Palace of Westminster and having the bell of the new clock tower named after him. It has come to chime out time for the British nation, as Big Ben.

In 1851 he became the first known person ever definitely to expel a Bard permanently from the official company of those initiated at a gorsedd. The victim had committed the sin of accepting a cash prize in an eisteddfod held at Dowlais, site of the Guest family ironworks. Evan Davies declared him ‘excommunicated through the tail of the serpent [of the rocking stone complex], and driven to the brook, and from the brook to the river Taff, and from the river Taff to the sea, and from the sea to the state of evil, and from the state of evil to Annwn, and from Annwn to the water closet of Lucifer’.

What altered this situation was the humiliation the Danes received following the Napoleonic Wars, when they ended up on the losing side and handed over (to Sweden) another of their great traditional possessions, Norway. Being thus shamed and weakened, and with their southern borders menaced by the growing power of Prussia, the Danes embarked on a frenetic new attempt to fan the flames of patriotism, by reinforcing a sense of their own distinctive past.

The former Grand Lodge closed down altogether for twenty years, which dramatically confirmed the devolution of power. In its place provincial lodges became the dynamic parts of the order, and one of the most successful was the Albion, based at Oxford. It secured as its patron a prominent aristocrat, the Duke of Marlborough. This gave it an especially notable publicity coup on 10 August 1908, when it held a ceremony under a group of oaks in the park of the Duke's seat at Blenheim, in which it initiated his relative, the future Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who had already made his mark as a soldier, author and politician.

There was one final aspect of the British preoccupation with Druids during the late Georgian and early Victorian periods which was to have significant consequences in the early twentieth century; and it was one that developed even as that preoccupation was waning. It arose from three of the strongest impulses in Victorian culture: a desire for increased knowledge of, and control over, the world; a yearning for continued faith in an original divine plan for the universe and a special divine revelation to humanity; and a continued joy in clubs and societies with a controlled membership. These features came together, from the 1860s, in the foundation of organizations dedicated to the recovery of ancient wisdom, and especially of a kind, already represented by the traditions of Freemasonry, that was alleged to have been handed down in closed circles of initiates. Two of these have already been mentioned: the Societas Rosicruciana and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. The Theosophical Society was another.

Into this world erupted the new wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, specific archaeological discoveries that made a huge impact on the world imagination can be linked to individual commodities: indigo dug up Troy and Mycenae, papermaking helped to uncover the Minoan civilization of Crete, and marmalade excavated Avebury.

A major landmark in Neolithic studies was the publication in 1995 of English Heritage's collation of all the data concerning Stonehenge, which laid out and analysed the available evidence to a standard never attempted before. The result confirmed that there were no structures of any sort on the site or beside it that could be dated to the Iron Age. There was little material present of any sort from that period, and relatively little sign of activity during it in the neighbourhood. A small quantity of pottery had been found, deposited at long intervals, and a young man had been buried in a ditch beside the site. These remains added up to a picture of sporadic and occasional visits to the location; there was absolutely no evidence that Stonehenge was regarded as a monument with any particular meaning, or that any sustained activity took place there during the time in which the Druids are recorded as having been active.