EARLY KYMRY. GAULS and BELGE. TRACES OF EARLY GERMANIC SETTLE- THE HERE has been a time when Britain was well nigh covered with forests, and was without human inhabitants. The elk, the bison, and the wild horse roamed in droves over the land; the beaver built in the rivers and fens; herds of elephants pastured in the Oxford woods; the bear and wolf, even the tiger and hyæna, lurked in the caves of Devonshire or infested the Yorkshire wolds;' and the whale gamboled in the broad waters of the Forth. The land was less than it now is; whole tracts of Lincolnshire and Cambridgeshire were a sea-bay or a lake; Kent and Norfolk were fringed with islands; and the Thames watered a stagnant Lubbock's Pre-historic Man, p. 242. Prof. Phillips, Oxford Essays, 1855, p. 198. Phillips's Geology of Yorkshire, p. 69. Owen's British Fossil Mammals, pp. 16, 25, 29, 162. How many of these species B were co-existent with a human population is of course another question. Crania Britannica, vol. i. p. 166. 2 Wilson's Pre-historic Annals of Scotland, p. 33. 64 2 EARLIEST INHABITANTS OF BRITAIN. fen below the spot where London now stands.' Gradually, men pressed by want, or driven by war, or perhaps only sea-tost, settled on the island. It is likely that they came from all quarters, from Denmark and France, even from Spain, for a canoe, found seventeen feet below the bed of the Clyde, and hewn in the rudest fashion out of an oak tree, was fitted with a plug of cork, which can scarcely have grown in any more northern climate.2 But the people were older colonists in Europe than the Kelts and Germans, who afterwards dispossessed them, and whose home in these centuries may still have been east of the Volga. The short shallow skulls which are even now disinterred in old barrows seem to indicate a Mongolian race; a people like the tribes of Central Tartary, and no doubt roaming, like them, with their flocks and herds over fields which they wanted skill and energy to break up. Some gradual advance in civilization they did attain to. Beginning with heavy bones for hammers, and sharp bones for knives, they gradually came to manufacture stone instruments and to work in horn;3 they harpooned the whale, and fought, on more than equal terms, with the wild beasts of the forest. But, before they had attained higher progress, they were surprised by invaders, stronger men with better arms, who slew them or drove them into the hills. Popular legend in England, as in every country of Europe, commemorates a race of dwarfs, a simple and kindly people, armed with stone-tipped arrows, acquainted with hidden treasures, and mostly keeping aloof from the haunts of common men. These are probably the last of the dispos 4 1 See Preface to Maps. 2 Wilson's Pre-historic Annals, pp. 36, 37. 3 Boucher de Perthes' Antiquités Celtiques, pp. 450, 451. Campbell's Popular Tales of the Highlands, vol. ii. pp. 100-110. KELTIC IMMIGRATION. 3 sessed shepherds, whom the sons of their conquerors had learned to regard without hostility, and yet as other than themselves. As the Kelts were the vanguard of the Indo-Germanic race, and occupied Gaul and Spain in the earliest historical times, the new colonists of Britain were almost certainly members of the Keltic family. With that curious vanity which induces a people to regard antiquity of tenure as the highest distinction, the Welsh declare in their native history that their ancestors sailed from the land of summer (Deffrobani), where Constantinople is, across the sea of clouds (the German Ocean) to the Isle of Honey (Britain), and found it only occupied by the bear, the wolf, and the humped ox or urus.' The legend seems at first sight to commemorate the line of journey which the Kimmerii of Herodotus may have taken in their fight before Scythian enemies; but the resemblances of names are delusive, and the tradition can only be traced to a late century, when the vain-glorious clans of West England were anxious to establish a connection with the distant and splendid Byzantine empire. We know now that the name "Kymry" only means a federation of people.' We are sure that the Kymric or Welsh tribes were never more than one among several peoples in Britain; and as they did not penetrate into the mountains of the northern principality till the fifth century after Christ,3 it is probable that the kindred Erse or Gaelic tribes, whom they dispossessed, were more anciently settled in the country. Other facts point to the same conclusion. The Erse or Gaelic language, as it still exists in Ireland and the Scotch Highlands, has earlier and ruder grammatical forms than the Welsh, as if the Gael had been the first to wander forth from the common home in Asia.1 The ancient Cornish tongue, which prevailed in the southwestern counties, is intermediate between the Welsh and Erse, as if conquest or immigration had joined the two cognate races;2 and the circumstance that the kings in historical times were connected with the ruling families of Wales seems to designate the Kymry as the intruders. Yet it cannot be assumed as certain that the Gael, even if they preceded the Kymry, had yet had time to spread over all the British isles. They may only have peopled Ireland and the West of England, where there are still traces of them, while the east may have been separately colonised from other parts of the continent. In the same way we can only point with any certainty to two districts in which the Welsh proper were settled anciently, South Wales and the province west of Leeds, between the Mersey and the Tyne, the ancient Kymry-land, or Cumberland. This position on the western coast lends some probability to the conjecture of Tacitus that they came originally from Spain, though the "curled hair" and "swart features" to which he appealed are insufficient evidence, and their very existence is now matter of dispute. It is curious that the Gael of Ireland were subdued, like their kins 2 3 Zeuss, Gramm. Celt., vol. i. p. 12. Garnett, Philological Transactions, vol. i. no. 9. In the case of the Armorican language, which stands in a somewhat similar relation to GAULS AND KYMRY. 5 men in Britain, by emigrants from Spain. In this latter case, however, the conquerors were absorbed into the native population. Only a great pressure, perhaps from Carthaginian or Roman arms, will explain the migration of a whole people across so troubled a sea as the Bay of Biscay. But the eastern and southern shores of England lie dangerously open to attack, and Europe, for centuries. before Cæsar's time, swarmed with tribes whom famine, or pressure from without, or mere ambition perpetually impelled upon their neighbours. Adventurers from Gaul probably led the way into England; and the names Brigantes and Parisi, in Durham and east Yorkshire, Cenomanni in East Anglia, and Atrebates in Berkshire, belong equally to the continental districts of Bregenz, Paris, Maine, and Arras.' There is some reason, from local names and language, to connect these Gaulish tribes with the Kymric rather than with the Erse variety of the Kelts. Perhaps they had struck out separate paths of conquests some centuries earlier, and now met again in a common home and battle-field in the far west. They seem to have regarded one another as kindred, and yet distinct; there was no firm union among them, and no inveterate enmity. At times some hero or statesman made the authority of his clan paramount, and east or west predominated; but the tribes never lost the feeling of local independence. The influence of a common faith was a more effectual bond among themselves and with the continent. Mona (Anglesey) was the sanctuary of all Britain; and Britain itself 2 'The evidence of names, however, cannot be pressed, and the general fact of colonization from Gaul rests on other evidence, tradition, a common religion, language, and civilization, not to mention natural probabilities. 2 Pritchard's Physical History of Man, vol. iii. p. 135. |