Considering how little is known about them, the druids have been oddly pervasive in British life at all levels of society. The Queen has been a druid since 1946 when she was inducted into the Welsh Gorsedd of Bards, which organises the National Eisteddfod, and the present Archbishop of Canterbury followed suit in 2002. Druids hang around the new-age fringe, celebrating solstices at Stonehenge and annoying the archeologists with their historically baseless rituals. Somewhere in between are the respectable middle- aged men who preside over the Gorsedd in white robes, looking to the untutored eye like a pagan branch of the Rotary Club. In the 16th century, scholars wrongly credited druids with founding Cambridge University and, in the late 19th it was a test case involving a druid, William Price, that established the legality of cremation. But what a druid is, who historic druids were and what they have to do with the druids of today are questions to which there are no easy or uncontroversial answers.

All the difficult and contentious answers are now assembled in Ronald Hutton’s erudite, humane and compelling study in which he applies the methods of the academic historian to the unreliable evidence of the two millenniums and more since the Iron Age, when the historic druids first emerge.

He is no respecter of persons. Delving into the earliest accounts, he points out that Pliny is “a mine of misinformation” and that Caesar, the only writer who might have seen the original druids, is “an unusually devious and self-interested” witness. There is not, it transpires, a single fact, artefact or image that can be securely related to druidry before the early modern period. We know nothing about the original druids at all.

What the classical sources have left is a legacy of contradictory but evocative impressions. In some accounts the druids are ferocious warrior priests screaming abuse at invading Romans, in others brutal practitioners of human sacrifice or, yet again, nature-loving wise men associated with oak groves, mistletoe and some sort of symbolic egg. From the 16th century onwards, succeeding generations picked and mixed these elements according to their own preoccupations. Druidry became by turns a precursor of Christianity, a polygamous pagan cult and the basis of modern Germany. Then in 1740, the antiquary William Stukeley added one of the most potent elements to the cocktail by crediting the druids with building Stonehenge. It was always a tenuous claim, virtually disproved by the time druids began to celebrate the solstice there in the early 20th century, but it is immovably fixed in the national imagination.

Stukeley’s book, Stonehenge, ushered in what Hutton calls “the druid century”, a flowering of scholarship, art and poetry. Blake’s Jerusalem and Wordsworth’s Prelude both feature druids and in 1774 a musical, Masque of the Druids by John Fisher, ran for several months at Covent Garden. Such widespread enthusiasm sometimes made historians extravagant with the truth. William Borlase’s account of Cornish druidry of 1754 added five-sided shoes to the traditional outfit, and gave a lurid account of nude druidesses and sacrificial orgies that did wonders for antiquarian interest in Cornwall.

The great transforming influence, however, was Edward Williams. An amateur scholar, failed shopkeeper and enthusiastic laudanum addict, Williams also transformed himself, becoming Iolo Morganwg or Glamorgan Eddie. In this guise he produced the outline for a History of the British Bards and Druids as well as quantities of supposedly druidic verse — all of which, it transpired only much later, he had written himself. By the time the extent of Iolo’s forgeries was fully recognised in the 1920s, it was too late to untangle him from history. The improvised ceremony that he first held on Primrose Hill at the autumn equinox in 1792 had grown into the modern Gorsedd of Bards.

Nowhere else in Europe, with the exception of Brittany, which has its own tradition, did druidry take root as it did in Britain. In considering the reasons for this, Hutton perhaps underestimates the influence of romantic philosophy but he is surely right to identify the main impetus as the Act of Union. Before 1707 the idea of Britain as a united island was as mythical or metaphorical a construct as the druids themselves. Afterwards, druidry offered a shared history, and a pedigree for that elusive concept, “Britishness”. Despite which, as Hutton shows, Scottish, Welsh and English druids were always significantly different and to some extent at cross-purposes. The Scots, who had adopted a druid history first and independently in the 16th century, dropped it when druids lost their exclusivity and became popular in Wales, where they were taken up late but enthusiastically in their most benign guise as wise, ancestral bards.

It was in England, though, in the King’s Arms in Poland Street in Soho, a pub that survives today, that the decisive step was taken from merely studying ancient druids to becoming modern ones. Here in 1781 Henry Hurle founded the Ancient Order of Druids, which still flourishes and once included Winston Churchill among its number. The Ancient Order started as little more than a gentlemen’s drinking club. Later on, revived druidry often took the form of friendly societies, and Georgian druids spent much of their time drinking toasts to each other and organising burial clubs. With the passage of time, however, the empire grew and England increasingly dominated Britain. The druids’ image as a fiercely indepen-dent native race resistant to occupying powers became more appealing to the Welsh and less attractive to the English, who began rather to go off druids and to emphasise the savagery and inefficiency of “primitive” peoples, preferring to see themselves as latter-day Romans.

Today we are, according to Hutton, living in the twilight of the druidic revival, despite which there are a bewildering number of modern druid orders. They include GOD, the Glastonbury Order of Druids; SOD, the Secular Order of Druids; and OBOD, the Order of Bards, Ovates and Druids. The first two were formed late in the last century with the specific aim of establishing the right of access to Stonehenge at the summer solstice. This has been granted since 2000 and last year more than 30,000 people came to celebrate a tradition that, although it goes back only some 90 years in history, also plumbs the very depths of the British psyche.

Yale £30 pp491

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