Re: Wiktionary:Tea room/2018/July#vitrum and glastum as woad
The learned author of ‘Britannia after the Romans,’ (Bohn, 1836, 4to) says–‘in Welsh, Armoris, and Irish, the word glas signifies green, and in all these is also signifies blue. Two colours are expressed by the same word, and the meaning of the predicate must be ascertained from the subject. Thus, ‘Glas nef’ is blue sky–‘glas goed’ is green trees; but whether ‘glas gwn’ be a glue gown or a green one, is indeterminate! But the origin of this ambiguity is that glas means neither blue nor green, and is not the name of a colour, but (like indigo or saffron) of a plant. Glas is the herb glastum or vitrum, and the Romans probably borrowed the word glastum from the Gauls’ (p. lvii) Woad was used in glass-blowing as a dye, as well as an alkali. The author adds, that glas does not mean glass in any British or Gælic dialect; but that glaine, which in Welch means a glass ornament, is Irish both for glass and woad. Glastum occurs in Pliny, (xxii. 2) and the fact that vitrum in like manner meant glass and woad in Latin (Cæsar de B. G. v. 14) is exceedingly curious. The brilliancy and the vitreous fracture of amber probably caused the word glastum or glessum to be applied to it.
The derivation of the word is as obscure as its history. Its resemblance to ice (glacies) is supposed by some to have given rise to our word glass. The Latin designation (vitrum) is a name given by Romans to the plant called woad (Isatis tinctoria). which by our ancestors was called glastum, and which furnishes a blueish tint, and has also been conjectured to have given rise to the term; but the etymology is involved in mystery.
The popular image of Ancient Britons as painted warriors stems undoubtedly from Caesar (De Bello Gallico V.14), although there are other allusions in ancient sources. Caesar’s reference forms part of a digression on the geography and ethnography of Britain (V.12-14) which interrupts the account of his second invasion of the island and which, in a modern translation (Handford 1951), is not unreasonably treated as an extended footnote. Some of the information is admitted by Caesar to be hearsay, and some is checked by personal observation; it reads as if a gloss has been added to information initially compiled before the British expeditions. Section 14 may be translated as follows:
Of this section the first sentence is probably based on personal observation. The second must rest on oral or written information. It is plainly incorrect — there is ample archaeological evidence for the cultivation of cereal crops — and is suspiciously similar to his description of the Germans, as if stock phrases to describe the more uncouth barbarians are being employed. The sentence about the Britons dyeing themselves with vitrum presents several problems. It says quite specifically that custom applies to all Britons, that is including the civilised Cantiaci as well as those of the interior, but no other reference to blue-painted warriors is found in Caesar’s campaigns: had he encountered them in battle, they would surely have been mentioned. The custom of shaving the body, if it is not listed as simply another strange habit, is a non-sequitur unless, in an expanded form, the sentence originally explained that the Britons, like the Germans, wore garments with left most of their body bare. The allegation of polyandry in the final sentence may simply be a ‘bad rumour’ (Thomson 1948, 153) part of a stock of ethnographic commonplaces (Goodyear 1970, 9) since, as Killeen (1976) has pointed out, Herodotus (iv.104; iv.172; iv.180) describes similar practices elsewhere. Cartimandua’s rejection of Venutius for Vellocatus (Tacitus, Histories 3, 45) may, however, reflect such a custom, which may have survived later among the Picts (Bede, H.E.I.I.). In summary, section 14 of Caesar seems to consist of an introductory sentence based on personal observation, followed by notes of uncertain provenance which, if at all reliable, could refer to a period long before the mid-first century BC.
Caesar may have provided the inspiration for two early imperial poetic allusions to painted Britons, one by Propertius (Carmina II, 18B, 1-4) and the other by Ovid (Amores II, 16, 39), but whilst Propertius refers merely to ‘painted Britons’, Ovid speaks of viridis Britannos, contrasting with Caesar’s caeruleum colorem. Pomponius Mela (de Chorographia III, 6,51) in his section on Britain seems to be quoting an independent source. He writes:
This translates as:
Pliny (Nat.XXII,ii), in a section discussing the uses to which plants may be put, provides another reference to Britons staining themselves, and is the only author to state that a vegetable dye was employed:
| * Glasto becomes glas in the modern insular Celtic languages (cf. Jackson 1953, 533); woad is glasrac in Scottish Gaelic and, despite the difficulties, the traditional translation of the word may be correct. Ekwall (1960) prefers this root for the place name, Glastonbury, first found in the form Glastingoea in 704, yet, surprisingly, the Welsh form of the name Ineswytrin, presumably by back-translation, appears to derive from Latin vitrum; the abbeys of both Glastonbury and Muchelney in Somerset were major producers of woad during the medieval period (Godwin 1978, 159). That woad was grown also in Early Christian Ireland is suggested by the story of Cormac Mac Airt’s overturning of the judgement of Lugaid Mac Con, who had pronounced sentence on a woman whose sheep had eaten the queen’s crop of woad (O’Grady 1892). |
This translates as:
Martial, writing at the end of the first century AD, also refers to sky-blue Britons. In an epigram to Claudia Rufina (XI, LII), the wife of a friend, he begins:
This translates as:
The rest of the short poem is flattering, as in an earlier address (IV, XII) thought to be to the same woman, and the mention of her sky-blue ancestors is perhaps better seen as a joke rather than as a jibe.
Later references to the custom of body painting are all specific to northern Britain, where the practice may have lasted longest. Herodian, writing of Septimus Severus’ adversaries in Scotland, says: ‘They mark their bodies with various figures of all kinds of animals and wear no clothes for fear of concealing these figures’. (Herodian III, 14,7)
He is the only author to use a verb which means ‘tattoo’ rather than ‘stain’, indicating that the effect was produced by puncturing the skin. The term Picti, first used of a confederation of tribes in Scotland in two of the Panegyrici Latini (VIII(V), II,4 and VI(VII)7,2) in the late third and early fourth century, is often taken as a descriptive, purely Latin term, meaning ‘the painted men’. Earlier, the word is used by Virgil, for example, as an adjective to describe certain northern tribes (Aeneid IV, 146; Georgics II, 115), although never as a proper name. It may alternatively be a latinised native name — the native name in the Early Christian period was Cruithni, perhaps from P-Celtic *Pretani, meaning ‘the tattooed people’ (Rivet and Smith 1979, 281) — or a Pictish word of unknown meaning.
Vegetius (De Re Militari IV, 47) describes scouting craft of the Classis Britannica as picti, saying that the sails and ropes of the ships, the sailors’ uniforms and their faces were dyed the colour of the waves for camouflage. Bede (H.E.I.I.) records a tradition that the Picts came from Scythia, and Scythians, alone with the Dacians and Sarmatians, were well known to classical writers for their tattoos. Gildas (De Excidio Britonum, 19) refers to the Pictish custom of fighting naked, but says nothing of stained or tattooed bodies, and there seem to be no echoes of the practice in Irish mythology or in the Welsh legends known as the Mabinogion.
There appears to be little to be gained from epigraphic sources. Viridius, attested at Ancaster, Lincs, to whom Trenico set up an arch (Whitwell 1970, 125-6), but otherwise unknown, may be ‘The Green Man’ since viridis is a loan word in British, becoming gwyrdd in modern Welsh (Jackson 1953, 268), or his name may be Celtic meaning ‘lively, vigorous, virile’, although there are no derivatives in medieval or modern Celtic languages. The former interpretation could hint at an agricultural deity, but it is not impossible that he was a green-painted Celtic warrior.
Pliny, the only author to specify that a plant dye was used, says that glastum resembles the plantain, Plantago, so named in Latin because its leaves look like the sole of a foot, planta. Glastum is invariably translated as woad, although the leaves of the latter do not resemble those of a plantain and yield a blue dye, whereas Aethiopum colorem would suggest dark brown or black. Such a colour could have been produced by crushing woad leaves, but the Gaulish word glastum implies a green, blue or grey colour, the name presumably being bestowed on the plant on account of the colour of dye it produced. It is just possible that the Celts believed that Ethiopians were blue. In the Irish story ‘The Intoxication of the Men of Ulster’ King Conchubur’s fool Rómit Rigóinmit is described as ‘balding, with short, black hair, bulging, great eyes — one bright — in his head, and a smooth, blue, Ethiopian face’ (Gantz 1981, 208).
Perhaps Linnaeus (1753) was a little unsure of the term glastum when searching Pliny’s Natural History for a generic name for the group of plants into which he wished to classify woad. The word which he adopted, isatis, occurs three times, twice in Latin and once in Greek. The two former occurrences (Nat. (26) 39; (27) 84) describes seaweeds as ‘like isatis’ and are of little value in identifying the plant; the other indicates that the plant grows in woods, which presumably explains Linnaeus’ use of the term.
Caesar’s word vitrum, usually ‘glass, crystal’ in Latin presents greater problems, but has been translated as woad since the sixteenth century (Golding 1565), when the plant was a popular source of blue dye (Thirsk 1985). Pomponius Mela uses the word, as does Pliny on two occasions, but a re-examination of Pliny’s use raises considerable doubts as to whether ‘the notorious British woad’ (Wild 1970, 81) is intended. The first reference (Nat. (34) 123): ‘color (atramenti sutorii) est caeruleus vitrumque esse creditur’, appears in a passage describing the natural occurrence of copper sulphate, the mineral chalcanthite, in Spain and is better translated as ‘is often taken for glass’. The second usage (Nat. (35) 46): ‘aut cretam Selinusiam vel anulariam vitro inficiunt’, is obscure, since both creta Selinusia and creta anularia are unknown, but, by analogy with the former reference, (blue) glass may be intended. Further reinforcement for the term vitrum referring to a copper-based pigment lies in Pliny’s use of the word caeruleum (Nat' (33) 162), the colour of Caesar’s Britons, to describe what is clearly the mineral azurite used in paint. Similarly Ovid’s (Amores II, 16 39) viridis Britannos are better understood in the context of a copper, perhaps malachite, pigment, although this interpretation would perhaps imply that his primary source was not Caesar.
The latter references to north Britons give no hints as to the likely dyestuffs employed. The Picts may have been the last to practise what had once been a widespread British custom — the word Britanni may actually mean ‘tattooed folk’ (Rivet and Smith, 1979, 281) — or theirs may have been an independent tradition. Herodian is the only author to mention tattooed designs; Pliny, Caesar and Pomponius Mela appear to be describing the application of a single colour over the whole body.
There is, however, a series of Late Iron Age coins from northern Gaul apparently showing facial paintings or tattoos (Thomas 1963, 92), although these may be no more than an expression of Celtic artist’s exuberance in wishing to leave no portion of the coin undecorated.
The archaeological record adds little to what can be gleaned from Pliny. The Tyrolean Ice Man, a mummified corpse released by a glacier in the Oetztaler Alps, discovered in September 1991 and dated to the Chalcolithic on the basis of his copper axe, has tattooed lines and a cross on his back and legs (Höpfel et al 1992). More elaborately tattooed pieces of skin come from the fifth century BC chieftains’ graves in the Altai Mountains of southern Siberia (cf. Rudenko 1970, figs 53 and 54). Needham and Bimson (1988) have recently published a pellet of Egyptian blue from a Late Bronze Age site at Runnymede on the Thames and this could have been employed in body painting; they suggest that other finds may have been overlooked. Analysis of Roman wall-painting pigments (Biek 1982) shows the frequent use of Egyptian blue, which need not have been imported. Copper-based pigments used in dyeing are likely to have also been missed in archaeological contexts, but Wild (1970, 120) notes the use of copper, perhaps applied by means of a lactate, in the dyeing of a piece of felt from a site in Basel, Switzerland.
The evidence for woad in prehistoric Britain is scanty and most references, for example the frequent comments upon woad-painted warriors (e.g. Cunliffe 1974, 307; Webster 1980, 78) can inevitably be traced back to often rather colourful interpretations of the doubtful passage in Caesar. Originally a plant of southern Russia and the Caucasus (Godwin 1978, 159), the earliest British record is seeds from a Late Iron Age or early Roman pit at Dragonby, Humberside (van der Veen et al 1993). Finds from medieval England and Ireland are noted by Hall (1992). On the Continent, it is recorded from the Danish Roman Iron Age (Wild, pers. comm: Korber-Grohne, 1987) and four cloth samples from Hallstatt, Austria, were dyed with blue indigotin, probably from woad (Ryder 1993, 312). However, its relative scarcity and therefore value in the north may be suggested by the inclusion of its seeds in the ninth century female royal burial in the Oseberg mound, in southern Norway (Holmboe, 1927). Taylor (1989) has recently reviewed the evidence for the use of woad in his discussion of textile dyes from Coppergate, York, and the plant has also been identified from Anglo-Scandinavian deposits on the site (O’Connor et al 1984).
Carus-Wilson (1967, 216) is more careful than most in her discussion of woad and suggests that it had been grown at least since the Saxon period, although it was also extensively imported from France. The frequent wars with France and the eventual loss of English possession on the Continent led to a demand for increased local production, which appears largely to have ceased (idem, 36). In the early 1540s, when supplies from France and the Azores were cut off, French refugees introduced its cultivation to England and it thrived to the extent that it threatened to replace grain as a cash crop, leading to its banning in 1585 and restriction on its growing until 1601 (Thirsk 1985), by which time it had begun to be replaced by imported indigo. It is in this context that the assumption that a blue colour had been obtained from woad by Caesar’s adversaries begins to make sense.
The surviving sculptural evidence of Celtic warriors, either as gods or on Roman triumphal monuments, appears to provide no evidence of body decoration, although such is as likely to have been painted on the sculpture as on its original. If Stead’s (1985, 31) reconstruction of a warrior with elaborately painted body art is to be accepted, an important corollary is the recognition of suitable equipment for the preparation and application of paint to the body. Jackson (1985) has drawn attention to a peculiarly English group of small bronze pestle and mortars which are found in Late Iron Age and early Roman contexts, but, without an unequivocal male context, these and other cosmetic or toilet sets tend to be inevitably regarded as women’s possessions.
In the area of the Hunsruck-Eifel culture, however, toilet sets, comprising tweezers, ‘nail-cleaners’ and ‘ear-scoops’, occur exclusively in men’s graves (Haffner 1979, 29). In England, from the Iron Age, only two cosmetic elements are known from male graves: one, possibly a ‘nail-cleaner’, was recovered from the Late Iron Age Welwyn Garden City burial (Stead 1967) and a further piece comes from the Queen’s Barrow at Arras (Stead 1979, 84). Other examples are either from unsexed or female graves. There are few burials with a range of grave goods known from Britain outside of the Welwyn and Arras groups, however, and even less where the sex of the individual is known. From the end of the Iron Age or early Roman period, a cosmetic set is associated with a (?) male cremation at the King Harry Lane site, St Albans (Stead and Rigby 1989, 104).
The recognition of what potentially represent mineral-based paints by X-ray microanalysis, probably using iron as well as copper pigments, on the fragments of the bodies from Lindow Moss, raises a number of problems, not the least of which is the possibility that body decoration was a widespread phenomenon in prehistory, with all its attendant problems in the interpretation of trace element analyses from less well-preserved burials. The tradition, current at least since the sixteenth century, of woad-painted Britons is open to considerable doubt and the planet, Isatis tinctoria L. is first recorded from the Anglo-Saxon period in East Anglia. Classical authors note body painting and/or dyeing among both warriors and women and the Lindow evidence might extend this to the priestly caste. The Romans, however, clearly regarded it as an archaic and barbaric practice, sometimes referring to it in the context of criticism of female use of cosmetics. If, as several classical authors maintain, the Celts habitually fought naked, then distinctive painted designs on the body would have been the one means by which the tribal affiliation of individuals could be recognised in the mêlée of battle. It remains to be seen whether it will be possible to reconstruct any patterns on the Lindow bodies. It is believed that the nature of body painting, rather than diet, of Lindow II and III, was different. It is conceivable that Lindow II and III were indeed natives of different areas and so were decorated accordingly.