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commercial intercourse one with another, though of course only in the rude and primitive form of barter;1 for stone axes and other implements are found distributed over districts very far removed from the places in which they were made. That this sort of traffic was carried on over considerable distances is also proved from the fact that axes of jade2 are found in Britain where that material was quite unknown.

§ 4. Their Social and Economic Condition.

The social condition of the people in this period seems to have been very much like that of the tribes of Central Africa at the present time. They were divided into tribal communities, generally at war one with another, though each tribe probably obeyed its own chief, "whose dominion was limited to the pastures and cultivated lands protected by his fort, and extended but a little way into the depths of the forests, which were the hunting ground common to him and his neighbours." Each community inhabited a sort of clearing in the forests that overspread the land, and grew a few patches of flax for spinning or small-eared wheat for food; but the flocks and herds must have constituted their chief

property. From the possession of such property social differences must very early have arisen; and the variation in the size and shape of their burial places goes to show that even in those pre-historic times property was by no means equally distributed.

4

The flocks and herds here mentioned consisted of pigs, sheep, goats, and oxen, all of which were domesticated in the Neolithic period. Of oxen, two or three breeds were known in Europe, though in Britain "the small, delicatelyshaped Celtic shorthorn" was the sole domestic ox as late as the English conquest. In the fields there were no less than eight kinds of cereals (including varieties of wheat, barley, and millet) and "several of our most familiar seeds and fruits [e.g., peas, apples, pears, plums] grew in the Neolithic gardens and orchards," 5 though all were 1Cf. Solinus, c. 24, speaking of the Silures of Wales in Roman times: "They will have no markets or money, but give and take in kind, getting what they want by barter and not by sale." Early Man, p. 281. 3 Ib., p. 272.

Ib., p 297.

5 Ib.,

p.

301.

smaller and nearer to their wild forms than those now known. Since this Neolithic age we have done little but progress on lines which the primitive workers of Britain and Europe began. "To the Neolithic peoples we owe the rudiments of the culture which we ourselves enjoy. The arts which they introduced have never been forgotten, and all subsequent progress has been built upon their foundation. Their cereals are still cultivated by the farmer, their domestic animals still minister to us, and the arts of which they possessed only the rudiments have developed into the industries-spinning, weaving, pottery-making, mining—without which we can scarcely recognise what our lives would be."1

§ 5. The Bronze Age and the Celtic Immigration. The Neolithic age survived in remote parts of Britain almost unchanged into Roman times, for the Silures who fought so desperately against the Romans in Wales were still in this stage of culture.2 But, disregarding these exceptional tribes, it is clear that culture, civilisation, and industry all made vast and rapid strides when the Bronze age succeeded that of stone, and the little stone axes were superseded by those of metal. Whether the Celts of the first Celtic immigration brought implements and weapons of bronze with them, as Professor Boyd Dawkins seems to think, or whether these Celts were, like the Iberians, still in the stone age of culture when they first came to Britain,* it is certain that, before the second Celtic immigration took place the bronze age had long since begun. And the bronze axe marked a new epoch. The forest trees were now more easily cut down, and further clearings were made for agricultural operations. Wild animals became scarcer with the invasion of the forests, and men had to rely less upon the chase and more upon agriculture for their food. With the progress of agriculture came a step upward in civilisation. Habitations, too, became larger and were better built; the arts of spinning and weaving both flax and wool were carried on more successfully; the harvest

5

1 Early Man, p. 308. 2 Elton, Origins, p. 138.
So Taylor, Origin of the Aryans, p. 128.
• Ib., p. 359.

3 Early Man, p. 342.

5

Early Man, p. 352.

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was now gathered with bronze reaping-hooks;1 and the smith became an important craftsman with a comparatively large array of tools.2 Mining was now more easily carried on, and it is probable that Cornish tin, and Irish and Welsh gold, were worked by the natives of Britain and found their way to the Greek and Phenician traders of the Mediterranean through Gaul to the port of Massilia. As yet these southern merchants had not yet ventured as far as our coasts, and the adventurous voyage of Pytheas (B.C. 330?) was yet to come. But the inhabitants of the Britain of this period were possessed of an appreciable degree of civilisation. "It is clear," says Elton, "that they were not mere savages, or a nation of hunters and fishers, or even a people in the pastoral and migratory stage. The tribes had learned the simpler arts of society, and had advanced towards the refinements of civilised life. They were, for instance, the owners of flocks and herds they knew enough of weaving to make clothes of linen and wool; and without the potter's wheel they could mould a plain and useful kind of earthenware. The stone querns or hand-mills, and the seed-beds in terraces on the hills of Wales and Yorkshire, show their acquaintance with the growth of some kind of grain, while their pits and hutcircles prove that they were sufficiently civilised to live in regular villages."

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The Bronze age was succeeded by that of Iron, but the pre-historic Iron Age in Britain was probably of much shorter duration than that of bronze.5 "It is represented principally by the contents of an insignificant number of tombs, and by numerous isolated articles." But now the small isolated communities of the Neolithic age are becoming welded together into larger bodies, obedient to one rule; civilisation becomes much higher, and commerce

1 Early Man, p. 360.

3 lb.,

p. 421.

2 lb., p. 385.
4 Origins, p. 145.

5 Dr Evans places the beginning of the bronze age in Britain between 1400 and 1200 B.C., and thinks that iron swords were used in the south of Britain soon after the fourth or fifth century B.C. In the third or second century B.C. bronze had practically fallen into disuse for cutting implements.-Evans, Ancient Bronze Implements, pp. 471, 472.

6 Early Man, p. 426.

increases, till at length we come out of the mists of antiquity into the clearer dawn of history, and the pre-historic period is at an end.

§ 6. Résumé: The Peoples of Early Britain.

We have thus seen that originally, during the greater part of the stone age, Britain was inhabited by the short, dark, Iberian race, and that towards the end of that period it was invaded by a tall and fair Celtic people, who either brought with them, or before long acquired, implements and weapons of metal.1 It is also probable that there were two Celtic invasions of Britain, the first that of the Goidels, who spread into Scotland and Ireland, often amalgamating with the aborigines, and the second that of the Brythones, who seized the more fertile portions of the island, in the south and south-east, and drove the others before them into the west and north. These Brythones included the Gaulish tribes mentioned by Cæsar3 as having crossed over from Belgic territories into Britain not very long before his own invasion of that country, "though there are signs that an immigration from Belgium had been proceeding for several generations" previously. There were thus, for some time before the Roman invasion of Cæsar (B.C. 55), peoples of three different stocks living together in Britain. There were the more or less civilised Gauls in the eastern portions, who had come over long before the Roman period, and gradually, both before and during the Roman occupation, spread across the island in a northerly and southerly direction. Then there were, in the north and west of the island, the civilised Celts of an older migration, whose territories stretched from the Gaulish settlements to the Irish Sea, and included both Goidels and Brythones. And, lastly, here and there in many localities, among the other tribes, we constantly come upon survivors of the older and pre-historic tribes of a much remoter period.

§ 7. Their Social and Economic Condition.

It must not, however, be imagined that any uniform 1 Taylor, Origin of Aryans, p. 80. 2 Rhys, Celtic Britain, p. 213, and map. 3 B. G., ii. 4, and v. 14. 4 Elton, Origins, p. 102.

description will apply to the industrial or social development of these different races. They were all in various stages of civilisation, and though commercial, and possibly social, intercourse between them was not uncommon, they remained for centuries with their distinguishing features unobliterated. The oldest races were in the pre-metallic stage;1 the British Celts were in the later Bronze period on their first arrival, and possibly became acquainted with the use of iron later, while the more recent Gaulish arrivals were certainly familiar with iron implements and weapons. We are prepared, therefore, to find great dissimilarity of culture among the varied population of Britain in the preRoman period. The oldest races were really little other than savages in their mode of life-at any rate, in those remote regions to which they had retreated before the successive Celtic invasions. Where they had come in contact with their more civilised neighbours they were, however, probably not so wild or degraded as the descriptions of Greek and Roman writers of that day seem to imply.2 But they do not seem to have had regular towns, houses, or fields, though they kept flocks and herds. They depended very largely on hunting for their subsistence, and also on the natural products of the woods, such as wild fruits and nuts. Dion Cassius mentions their strange refusal to eat the fish with which British rivers were at that time swarming, and it is curious to notice, as showing how pre-historic customs have persisted into our own time, that in certain Irish and Highland localities this prejudice still exists.3

§ 8. The Celts in the time of Pytheas.

The condition of the Celtic invaders has already been alluded to in the remarks made above on the industries of the Bronze Age, but we may here briefly add the information derived from the observations of the Greek explorer Pytheas, who started from the Greek colony of Massalia (Marseilles) about 330 B.C. to explore "the Celtic countries" of the north. He was commissioned by a committee of the 1 Elton, Origins, p. 122.

2 Cf. Dion Cassius (Xiphiline), lxxvi. 12; Solinus, c. 4. 3 Elton, p. 165.

Claudian, B. Getic, 417; 4 Above, p. 8.

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