Chapter V: The Early Iron Age (2)

It must not, however, be supposed that the same level of culture had been attained in every part of the island. The Scottish specimens of Late Celtic workmanship are for the most part later than the Claudian conquest;[1106] and it is probable that in outlying districts even of England and Wales iron tools in pre-Roman times were rare or unknown. No objects of the Early Iron Age which are regarded as purely British have been found in Lancashire;[1107] and even on Cranborne Chase, where one might have expected that continental improvements would have been adopted at least as early as in the far western settlement at Glastonbury, the searching exploration of Pitt-Rivers could detect no signs of any interval between the Bronze Age and the period of the Roman occupation.[1108] Indeed the association of late bronze implements and weapons with iron harness-rings and bridle-bits at Hagbourne Hill[1109] suggests that some of the deposits which are assigned to the Bronze Age may have belonged either to a period of transition or even to the time when, in South-Eastern Britain, the use of iron was universal.[1110] Readers of the _Commentaries_ would see nothing surprising in this. Caesar was told that the people of the interior for the most part did not grow corn, but lived on milk and flesh-meat and clothed themselves in skins.[1111] This information was somewhat misleading; for remains of four different kinds of corn were counted at Hunsbury; and since cloth and linen were worn in Yorkshire by the well-to-do even in the Bronze Age,[1112] it is not to be supposed that their successors had lost the arts of spinning and weaving. Still, Caesar’s statement points to an ascertained truth. It has been well observed that the western and northern uplands held out far longer against the Roman conquest than the central, eastern, and southern lowlands, and that they were never really Romanized at all.[1113] From the earliest times their inhabitants had been less open to continental and civilizing influences; and one of the gifts which Nature had bestowed upon Britain was that the regions more accessible from over sea were also more fitted to sustain an industrial population.[1114] Later on, however, we shall find reason, in the juxtaposition of old and new sepulchral rites, to believe that even in Kent such influences had not prevented the survival of the earlier culture.[1115]

[Sidenote: Intertribal war and political development.]

Moreover, notwithstanding the progress in material civilization, intertribal fighting was of course still frequent even in the south, and even after the Belgic tribes had settled down in the territories which their swords had won, and established themselves as the dominant people of Britain. Both Caesar[1116] and Tacitus[1117] spoke of these wars; but if they had been silent, the numerous strongholds which were still occupied, permanently, or as occasion required, the weapons that have been found in them, the beach-rolled pebbles, the round chipped flints, and the bullets of baked clay which lie heaped in and near them would tell the same tale;[1118] nor indeed is it necessary to insist upon a fact which is universal in the stage of culture in which the Britons then were. What is worthy of remark is that war was probably entered upon from motives other than those which had caused the struggles of earlier ages. Raids were no doubt still undertaken, especially in the poorer and less settled districts, by mere plunderers and cattle-lifters. But clans were tending to become welded, not only by the voluntary combination which was necessary for defence, but also perhaps by the sword of the ambitious captain, into the larger communities which Caesar called _civitates_[1119]; and successful chiefs were assuming the state of petty kings. As trade increased, and with it wealth, the king of a tribe which was fortunately situated would seize opportunities of acquiring dominion or overlordship over others. Though forest or mountain or fen might enable even small tribes to hold their own, and though the success of a strong king might not endure, it is possible, as we shall see, to discern in Caesar’s memoirs signs that attempts were already being made to achieve such sovereignty as might eventually lead towards political union, and we may suppose that in Britain also there were astute princes who, like the Aeduan Dumnorix, saw that they could strengthen their position by diplomacy or marriage.[1120]

[Sidenote: Instances of female sovereignty: the condition of women.]

We all learned in childhood that the Britons admitted the sovereignty of women. In the middle of the first century Cartismandua was queen of the Brigantes;[1121] and a few years later, when the Iceni revolted against Rome, their general was Boudicca, who is better known by the barbarous misnomer of Boadicea.[1122] The Gauls may have had the same institution; and perhaps it would hardly be worth noticing if it were not apparently inconsistent with what Caesar tells us about the status of Gallic wives. They were indeed permitted to own property. The bride brought a dowry to her husband; but he was obliged to add an equivalent from his own estate and to administer the whole as a joint possession, which, with its accumulated increments, went to the survivor.[1123] On the other hand, the husband had the power of life and death over his wife[1124] as well as his children; and when a man of rank died his relations, if they had any suspicion of foul play, examined his wife, like a slave, by torture, and, if they found her guilty, condemned her to perish in the flames of the funeral pyre.[1125]

[Sidenote: Political and social conditions of Britain and Gaul compared.]

When we try to form an idea of the political and the social conditions of Britain in the later days of its independence, we naturally turn to Caesar’s account of Gaul in the hope of supplementing the scanty and scattered scraps of information which he has left about the country which was less known to him. We must, however, bear in mind that Britain had not yet come under the two currents of influence, German and Roman, which had profoundly affected Gaul, and in some measure prepared it to accept Roman dominion; and also that even the south-east was in a more rudimentary stage than the neighbouring country, though perhaps not more than the backward parts of Belgic Gaul.

When Caesar came to Gaul, revolutionary forces were at work to which there are analogies in the earlier history of Greece and Rome. Many of the states had expelled their kings, whose authority had passed in some cases into the hands of annually elected magistrates, while in others perhaps the council of elders kept the government to itself. But these oligarchies were never long secure. The magistrates were fettered by rules, jealously framed, which weakened their executive power. Like the Tarquins, the banished kings or their descendants looked out for opportunities, which Caesar’s policy offered to them, of regaining their position; while eloquent nobles who had contrived to amass wealth summoned their retainers, hired mercenaries, surrounded themselves with desperadoes or with the discontented poor, whose grievances they promised to redress, and occasionally succeeded, like Pisistratus of Athens, in making themselves tyrants. Celtillus, the father of the great Vercingetorix, had acquired a kind of supremacy over the whole of Celtican Gaul; but he was dogged by the jealousy of his brother nobles, who put him to death on the charge of plotting to revive the kingship. Monarchy and oligarchy had each their partisans: everywhere there were adventurers who hoped to make their way to fortune by Roman aid, while others, eager to oust their rivals, were ready to welcome German invaders; and thus every state, every clan, every hamlet, nay, every household was riven by faction.[1126] But in Britain there is no sign that either oligarchy or tyranny had yet anywhere supplanted monarchy. Still, there were doubtless many points of resemblance. We may suppose that in Britain, as in Gaul, the tribal king was assisted by a council of elders; that the British, like the Gallic nobles, had their devoted retainers and perhaps also dependents who had fallen into their debt;[1127] that only those who became their dependents could expect protection, and that only those lords who were strong enough to protect could count upon obedience. In Britain too we may be sure that the masses were in the state of semi-serfdom which Caesar regarded as the condition of the Gallic populace; and that political power was monopolized by the nobles and the Druids.

[Sidenote: Religion.]

But, besides improved communication, developed commerce, and constant intercourse with their Continental kinsmen, there were other forces making slowly and feebly for unity,--common religious ideas and, to some extent, common ecclesiastical organization. On the other hand we may suppose that the religious union which existed together with much diversity was an effect as well as a cause of political association: when clans found it expedient to combine, the similar deities of each, which the others had before regarded with hatred and jealousy, would tend to become fused, while those which were peculiar would be worshipped still.[1128] Old superstitions of course continued to flourish side by side with those which the Celtic invaders had brought with them. The spirits of springs, of lakes, of rivers, of mountains, and of woods--of every weird and awesome dell, or cavern, or rock--were worshipped in the Iron Age as they had been for centuries before, and as they continued to be after what was called Christianity had become the official creed.[1129] The _Dea Arduinna_ who hovered over the forest of the Ardennes and Abnoba, the goddess of the Black Forest, had their counterparts in Britain. These deities, however, may have been comparatively recent; for the conception of a god whose realm was a forest was of course later than that of the spirit of a single tree.[1130] Even the terror that impelled the pristine savage to propitiate demons was not yet dead: near Newcastle-on-Tyne was erected by some Roman or Romanized Briton an inscription _Lamiis tribus_--‘to the Witches three’--who, it has been truly said, ‘were doubtless as British as the witches in _Macbeth_’.[1131] But the cult of wood and water and the dread of devils are common to all primitive peoples and to the ignorant among many who are called civilized;[1132] and such survivals in Celtic Britain may well have been common to the pre-Celtic population and to the Celts who conquered them. Moreover, it is likely enough that the greater gods whom the Celts worshipped and who, variously imagined and with various names, were the common heritage of the Aryan-speaking peoples, were in part descended from deities who were not Aryan, and were adored in Britain in a somewhat different spirit before the first Celt landed on the Kentish shore.[1133]

What do we know about those gods? The Celts were the first inhabitants of Britain about whose religious views definite information has been handed down to us, as distinct from what we may infer from sepulchral discoveries and from ethnography; but it is hardly an exaggeration to say that of the spirit of their religion we know little more than of that of the people who built the chambered tombs. Some five-and-twenty writers, from Timaeus, who wrote three centuries before the birth of Christ, to Ammianus Marcellinus, who was contemporary with Julian and Valens, have contributed to our knowledge; but most of them have left only a few sentences derived from hearsay or from nameless authorities of whose credibility we know nothing. They wrote of Celts who lived in widely distant countries, among various populations, and at different epochs; and very few of them referred to the Celts of Britain.[1134] Supposing that official Christianity were to become extinct, what could the historian of the fifth millennium learn of the manifold doctrines preached by English clergymen if he were obliged to extract his materials from passages referring to mediaeval Catholicism, Calvinism, Methodism, or the orthodox faith which thinly disguises the Shamanism of Russia, and scattered in the works of writers who began with à Kempis and ended with Spurgeon? Coins, Gallic and British, in so far as they are not merely imitative, appear to be fraught with religious symbolism; but the ingenuity which has spent itself in the effort to explain the symbols has yielded little certain result.[1135] Geographical names testify to the cult of various gods without telling us anything of their attributes; and sometimes we may fancy that we can detect the presence of divinity when we have only to do with the name of a Roman _gens_.[1136] Inscriptions and altars supply names of deities which are names and nothing more, or bewilder us by coupling as surnames with the name of a Roman god a multiplicity of Celtic gods. Anonymous statues are attributed to divers deities by divers archaeologists, though some of them may not be deities at all. Inscriptions, altars, and statues alike belong to the period of the Roman Empire, when the introduction of Roman gods and goddesses had thrown the Celtic pantheon into wellnigh inextricable confusion; and the monuments of Britain, for the most part, were apparently the outcome of the devotion either of Romans or of Gallic, Batavian, Dacian, and other officers of auxiliaries. Nor can we tell how far British religious ideas had become estranged from those of Gaul by contact with aboriginal cults, or how far the religion of the British Goidels (if indeed they existed) differed from that of the Brythons. If we turn to the _Mabinogion_, to the _Triads_, or to Irish mythology, we are checked by the reflection, which our foremost Celticist was forced to make even while he was fascinated by the quest, that ‘the gulf of ages’ separates ‘the literature of the Celtic nations of the present day from the narrative of the writers of antiquity and the testimony of the stones’.[1137]

Cannot then Caesar help us? His evidence is of course valuable; but he did not write for the modern student of religion. Disregarding minor and local deities, perhaps ignorant of their existence, he recorded the names and summarized the attributes of the five principal Gallic gods; but,--the names are Roman. Mercury--the inventor of all arts, the pioneer of communication, the patron of commerce--was the most reverenced of all:[1138] then follow the names of Apollo, Mars, Jupiter, and Minerva.[1139]

Now we do not know from whom Caesar derived his information; but assume that it came from the best authority, his friend and political agent, the Aeduan Druid, Diviciacus, who was also an honoured guest of Cicero.[1140] Then Caesar was in the position not of Lafcadio Hearn, who made his home in Japan, gave his life to the study of all things Japanese, and at last confessed that the more he tried to learn the more he realized his ignorance; not of Sir Alfred Lyall, who, prepared by discriminative reading, devoted all the time that he could command to the observation of Oriental creeds; but of some Anglo-Indian administrator who, in his scanty leisure, should jot down the heads of a conversation with a Brahmin, and offer them as an outline of Hindu religion. Only the Anglo-Indian could speak Hindustani; and Caesar was obliged to employ an interpreter. One of the most learned and sane of modern Celtic scholars has related that when the musician, Félicien David, was invited at Cairo by the viceroy to instruct his wives, etiquette compelled him to give the lessons to a eunuch, who passed them on as best he could.[1141] Caesar, he remarks, was in the position of the eunuch. And if we could certainly identify the five great Roman gods with their Gallic counterparts, how much more of Celtic religion should we know?

But let us learn what we can. Celtic religion, in so far as it was descended from the religion of the undivided Aryan stock, was fundamentally one with the religions of Italy and Greece; and we might expect that it would resemble most closely the religion of the Italians, to whose tongue Celtic was most nearly akin. But our imperfect knowledge of the classical religions hardly helps us more to understand the religion of the Celts than the remark of Caesar, that about their deities ‘they have much the same notions as the rest of mankind’.[1142] For the religion of Rome had been deeply tinged by contact with the Etruscans and the Greeks, just as the religion of the Celts had been affected by their fusion with the aboriginal peoples of Central Europe, Gaul, Spain, and Britain; and the Celts were in a less advanced state of civilization than the Romans. What is certain is that, like every other polytheistic religion, that of the Celts, except perhaps in so far as it was moulded by Druidical doctrine, had no definite theology, but was an ever-expanding, ever-shifting, formless chaos,--the same in its main developments in Britain, Gaul, and Spain, yet differing in every tribe and household, and in every age;[1143] that, on its practical side, it was a performance of traditional rites; that its aim was not the salvation of souls, but the safety of the state; and that it concerned the individual most as a member of a family, a community, or a tribe.[1144] Like all other polytheists too the Celts were ready to believe in gods who were not theirs: in the reign of Tiberius the boatmen of Paris set up an altar on which, side by side with their own Esus and Tarvos Trigaranus, were figured Jupiter and Vulcan.[1145] The theory, which has been defended with vast if somewhat uncritical erudition, that the king was regarded as an incarnation of the sky-god, may possibly be true both of the Celts and of other Indo-European peoples.[1146] Perhaps the Celts, like the Romans, gave more thought to the ritual by which their gods might be persuaded to grant them their hearts’ desire than to the persons of the gods themselves.[1147] Doubtless to the Celt, as to the Roman, however little his religion may have fostered nobility of life or contrition for sin, dread of the mysterious was a salutary discipline.[1148] But what we want to apprehend is this,--wherein the spirit of Celtic religion differed from that of the religion of ancient Latium, of Greece, of the Semitic tribes; and if the effort is not wholly vain, we may only hope to attain a distant and hazy view. He who desires to understand the subject will work at it for himself. All that I can hope to do is to put him on the road and to set up a sign-post here and there. The reader who has absorbed what is valuable in the teaching of Tylor, Boissier, Lyall, Frazer, Robertson Smith, Reinach, and Camille Jullian will be best able to discern what is suggested by the texts and monuments that preserve a few fragments of Celtic faith.

Why was the god whom Caesar equated with Mercury honoured above all others by the Continental Celts? Did the Britons share their devotion? And is Caesar’s statement confirmed? Some centuries earlier, when the Celts were a host of warriors, the war-god had been the most conspicuous figure in their Olympus; and his subsequent inferiority to Mercury is regarded, perhaps justly, as an indication of the progress which they had made meantime in the arts of peace.[1149] Possibly Lug, the Irish representative of the Gaulish Lugos, whose name appears in Lugudunum, or Lyons, in Luguvallum, or Carlisle, and in Lugotorix, a Kentish chieftain,[1150] and who in an Irish legend figures as a carpenter, a smith, a harpist, a poet, and a musician, may have been the British Mercury;[1151] but we cannot tell whether he ranked higher than Mars. Assuming that votive stones in some measure reflect the faith of the native Celts, Mars was deeply reverenced in Britain. He appears with various epithets, the names of Celtic deities, one of which, _Camulus_, meaning ‘the god of heaven’,[1152] was commemorated in Camulodunum, and perhaps bears witness to his former greatness. It is remarkable, in view of Caesar’s statement, that in British inscriptions the name of Mercury is far less common than that of Mars;[1153] but if the discrepancy is at all connected with the comparative backwardness of British civilization, it must also be remembered that the organization of Britain under Roman rule was military.[1154] One religious custom indeed, of which Caesar himself witnessed examples, proves that Mars, however inferior he may have been to Mercury, had still many fervent worshippers in Gaul. When the warriors of a Gallic tribe had made a successful raid, they used to sacrifice to Mars a portion of the cattle which they had captured; the rest of their booty they erected in piles on consecrated ground. It rarely happened that any one dared to keep back part of the spoil; and the wretch who defrauded the god was punished, like Achan, by a terrible death.[1155] Another British epithet of Mars, Toutates,[1156] appears with Esus and Taranis in a famous passage of Lucan,[1157] where they stand out as representative deities, in whose honour dreadful rites were performed. None of the three, save Esus,[1158] is mentioned in Gallic inscriptions, whereas Epona, the goddess of equitation, a minor deity, whose statues, representing a woman riding upon a mare, or seated between foals, have been found both in France and Britain,[1159] appears ten times; and accordingly a distinguished French archaeologist concludes that they were insignificant objects of local worship.[1160] But it is not credible that the devotee who composed his inscription to Toutates should have unwittingly ascribed to a mere local god the qualities of Mars. Again, if Taranis was not one of the greater gods, it is surprising to find in Britain an inscription in honour of Jupiter Tanarus,[1161]--Jove the Thunderer. Nor is it likely that Lucan should have learned the names of the trinity whom he made famous unless their worship had been national.[1162] But it does not follow that Tanarus was the Jupiter of the independent Celts. Tanarus, being the Thunderer, was assimilated to the Roman Jupiter; and perhaps the Jupiter Tanarus whose inscription was found at Chester may have been an outcome of the Roman Jupiter and of a Gallic divinity who is known as the god of the wheel.[1163] Statues have been discovered in France, representing a god with a wheel on his shoulder, in his hand, or at his feet; and this god was assimilated in imperial times to Jupiter. Altars on which wheels are represented have also been found in the north of England; and miniature wheels of gold, silver, bronze, and lead--alone, or forming parts of ornaments or helmets, or stamped on coins--have been met with in scores both in France and England. Probably they had a religious meaning; and it has been supposed that they are symbolical of sun-worship, and that the god with the wheel was the god of the sun.[1164] Traces of sun-worship are still discernible in the May and midsummer festivals which are kept up in our own island and in many European lands.[1165]

Of the other great deities Minerva appears in Irish legend under the name of Brigit[1166], possibly the same goddess as Brigantia, in whose honour several inscriptions were erected in Britain,[1167] although in Gaul, unless perhaps in the name of the town Brigantium, there is no trace of her worship;[1168] while Apollo was assimilated by Roman or Romano-British devotees sometimes to Maponus, whose name survives in the familiar Welsh Mabon[1169], sometimes to Grannos, in whose honour an inscription was set up near Edinburgh.[1170] There are also vestiges of the cult of a god who resembled Neptune. At Lydney, on the western bank of the Severn, in the country of the Silures, a temple was built in Roman times to Nodons, whose name reappears in Welsh legend as _Lludd_ and again in our Ludgate Hill. The marine scenes which are depicted in mosaic on the floor seem to show that he was a god of the sea;[1171] while the structure of his temple may justify the conjecture that he was likewise a Jupiter, even as the Italian Jupiter was god of sea as well as of storm and sky.[1172] In Gaul he was unknown; and an eminent Celticist has assumed that he was peculiar to the Goidelic Celts.[1173] On the other hand, Toutates, Taranis, Epona, and Belisama were apparently unknown on Goidelic soil.[1174] But it profits little to dispute about names. It does not follow that the Goidels did not recognize somewhat similar deities akin to these; and Belisama was simply the goddess who in Roman Gaul was identified with Minerva.[1175]

Caesar, in a familiar passage,[1176] tells us that the Gauls regarded themselves as descendants of Dis Pater, who was conspicuous in the old Latin pantheon as the god of the dead, although in Caesar’s time he had been dethroned by the Pluto who was imported from Greece.[1177] Several Gallo-Roman images, the best known of which is on an altar discovered at Sarrebourg,[1178] represent a god with a hammer: a bronze statue of the same deity has been found in England;[1179] and eminent French archaeologists believe that this was no other than Dis Pater.[1180]

But we must not imagine that these gods had always been distinct, or even that in Caesar’s time their physiognomies were sharply outlined. When we see that the Germans whom he encountered worshipped Sun, Moon, and Fire,[1181] and that those whom Tacitus described had their Mars and Mercury,[1182] we may be inclined to suspect that Celtic ideas, under classical influence, had undergone a like transformation.[1183] In polytheism divers attributes of deity tend to become separate deities.[1184] Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus were, it would seem, only specialized forms of the same god;[1185] and some of the Celtic epithets which are attached to Minerva, Mars, and the rest may mean that they were assimilated by this or that tribe to topical divinities.[1186] Dis Pater was certainly near of kin to Saturn,--that old Italian chthonian divinity;[1187] and Dis Pater and Toutates, ‘the god of the people,’ who was perhaps primarily conceived as a kind of Saturn,[1188] may once have been one; indeed there seem to be indications that from one point of view Dis Pater was Jupiter,--a Jupiter of the nether world.[1189] Again, if Toutates in Britain remained Mars, while in Gaul the Romanized Celts seem to have hesitated whether to identify him with Mars or Mercury, one is tempted to conjecture that he may have been the common ancestor of both.[1190]

No deities were nearer to the hearts of Celtic peasants than those who were known as _deae matres_,--the mother goddesses. Once they were thought to belong to Germans and Celts alone;[1191] but their statues have been found in numbers at Capua; and, slightly modified, they survived into the Middle Age. Generally figured in groups of three--a mystic number[1192]--their aspect was that of gentle serious motherly women, holding new-born infants in their hands, or bearing fruits and flowers in their laps; and many offerings were made to them by country folk in gratitude for their care of farm and flock and home.[1193]

Besides the gods whose cult was common to all the Celtic peoples or to one or the other of the two great stocks were local deities innumerable. We know that the Gallic cities, Bibracte[1194] and Lugudunum,[1195] had their divine patrons; and it is probable that every British town had its eponymous hero.[1196] The deities, however, from whom towns derived their names were doubtless often worshipped near the site long before the first foundations were laid: the goddess Bibracte was originally the spirit of a spring reverenced by the peasants of the mountain upon which the famous Aeduan town was built.[1197] Perhaps we shall not err if we also suppose that the heads of his slain enemies, which the Celtic brave religiously treasured and fastened upon the walls of his cottage, were offered to his household gods or to the spirits of his ancestors.[1198]

The worship of animals, to those who have not felt the fascination of anthropology, appears merely unintelligible and absurd. Animals were worshipped because they were formidable or wonderful; because men fancied that they were incarnations of deity; because they might be tenanted by the souls of heroic forefathers;[1199] and animal-worship, or a relic of animal-worship, which may perhaps, in some cases, have been a survival of totemism, has left vestiges in Celtic art. The boar was especially sacred. Bronze figures of boars have been found alone and on the crests of helmets: the Witham shield, as we have seen, was decorated with the figure of a boar; and so are numerous coins, both Gallic and British.[1200] Like the Romans, the Gauls and doubtless also the Britons had military standards: like the Romans also, they carried not a flag but the figure of an animal, and with them this animal was always the boar.[1201] A reminiscence of animal-worship is probably also discernible in the horned head of Cernunnos, a god who is figured on one of the well-known altars of Paris, and in Tarvos Trigaranus--‘the bull with the three cranes’--which fills the back of another.[1202]

But votive altars, statues, and temples, although they embodied older beliefs, belong, as we have seen, to the period when the Celts had fallen under the dominion of Rome. The Cisalpine Gauls, if Livy[1203] and Polybius[1204] are to be believed, worshipped in temples: but the holy places of the Western Celts were groves,[1205] and perhaps stone circles which they inherited from the people of the Bronze Age. Such simplicity was of course not peculiar to the Celts and the Germans.[1206] The Pelasgian Zeus had no temple: the oldest sanctuary of Jupiter on the Alban Mount was a grove of oaks.[1207] Not a single statue of pre-Roman date has ever been found in Britain; not one in Gaul later than the close of the Palaeolithic Age. Caesar indeed says that the Gallic Mercury was represented by numerous _simulacra_; but if these were statues, it is inexplicable that none of them has ever come to light; and perhaps we may accept the suggestion that Caesar was thinking of menhirs, which had been erected long before the first Celt set foot in Gaul,[1208] but which, like the formless stones that the Greeks venerated as figures of Hermes,[1209] were, he supposed, regarded as possessed by the spirit of the great national deity. On the menhir of Kernuz in Finistère a rude Mercury was sculptured in Roman times.[1210] The conjecture may be well founded that the Druids, like the priests of Israel, were opposed to anthropomorphism;[1211] but it is not needed to explain the lack of native statues of Celtic gods.[1212] The Romans, according to Varro, had for many years no sacred images:[1213] like the Celts, like the Germans, who also, even in the time of Tacitus,[1214] deemed it derogatory to the majesty of the gods to ascribe to them human form, they were content to recognize manifestations of divine will; and even when their temples were being crowded with the works of Greek art, their ancient Vesta remained shrouded in awful mystery.[1215] But, while the Druids may have been as hostile as Israel to Gentile abominations, the Celts in general were as receptive as the Romans, and readily accepted the services of foreign sculptors.

[Sidenote: Sepulchral usages.]

The evidence of interments, from which we tried to glean some information as to the religion of the Bronze Age, remains much the same during the later period; and the noticeable changes do not seem to have much significance. British customs differed somewhat from those of Gaul. Inhumation, which had almost entirely ceased in that country in the second century before Christ, continued everywhere in Britain except in the territory of the Belgae; and even there cremation was not universal.[1216] In the more southern districts nearly all the interments which have been explored were unmarked by any tumulus; while in the cemetery of Aylesford the urns which contained the cremated remains were placed in small cylindrical pits set in what has been described as a family circle.[1217] When barrows were erected their form was still circular: but they were generally much smaller than those of the Bronze Age: they were grouped in much greater numbers;[1218] and they were never more than structureless heaps of earth or stone.[1219] Although the contracted position was still common, skeletons have been found extended in this country, as generally in Gaul;[1220] and, as in Wiltshire in the Bronze Age, the head generally pointed towards the north.[1221] On the other hand, ornaments and weapons were placed in graves more frequently than before:[1222] animals were still occasionally interred;[1223] and flint chips and stones were still sometimes deposited in or along with urns.[1224] But rites which in the Bronze Age could only be inferred are attested in the Iron Age by eye-witnesses. We learn from Caesar[1225] that it was a custom of the Gauls to immolate the dead man’s cherished possessions, even his favourite animals, on the funeral pyre; and that not long before the time of his oldest contemporaries slaves and retainers had been sacrificed.

The most remarkable perhaps of the sepulchral discoveries that illustrate this period appears to show that old persisted along with new. Hard by the family circles of the Aylesford cemetery, Dr. Arthur Evans opened three cists, each containing a contracted skeleton, the upper slab of one being pierced with a hole which may perhaps have been intended to let the ghost escape;[1226] while almost side by side with elegant Late Celtic vases he picked up fragments of the old-fashioned finger-dented ware, including a drinking-cup and a cinerary urn.[1227]

[Sidenote: The Druids.]

It would be interesting to learn whether any Celtic prophet, like the great preachers of India and Palestine, taught that mercy is better than sacrifice. If we may trust Diogenes Laertius,[1228] the Druids bade their disciples not only to fear the gods, but to do no wrong and to quit themselves like men. At all events the study of Celtic religion is inseparable from that of Druidism.

Where did Druidism originate? Caesar, in a well-known passage, remarks that it was believed to have arisen in Britain and to have been imported thence into Gaul;[1229] and some scholars accept this tradition as literally true. The earliest extant mention of Druids[1230] was made about the commencement of the second century before Christ,--not long after the Belgic conquest of Britain began; and it has been supposed that the conquerors found Druidism flourishing there, and made it known in the land from which they had set out. But the Belgae were not the first Celtic conquerors of Britain; and it is reasonable to suppose that if Druidism was of British origin, it would have been imported into Gaul long before. The common view is that on both sides of the Channel it originated among the neolithic population; and Caesar’s words are sometimes explained in the sense that in his time it was more vigorous in Britain than in Gaul, and that Gallic Druids therefore travelled to Britain in order to be initiated into its mysteries. At all events it is not unreasonable to believe that the Celts learned it from some non-Aryan people; for there is nothing to show that the Gauls whom the Romans first encountered had ever heard of it. The Germans, with whom the Celts were long in contact in Central Europe and to whom they were ethnically akin, had no Druids;[1231] and although it may be true that the intense devotion to religious observances which Caesar remarked among the mixed population of Gaul[1232] did not exceed that of other barbarians,[1233] it appeared to him to contrast sharply with the temper of the peoples beyond the Rhine.[1234] This spirit led them to connect religion with every act of life: in the chase,[1235] in all the operations of war, after victory or defeat, before undertaking an expedition, in selecting the site of a town, the gods were regularly invoked:[1236] there was no distinction between the sacred and the profane; or rather, nothing was profane. The contrast which Caesar observed supports the theory of the non-Aryan origin of Druidism.

But was Druidism in Britain universal? The leading Celtic scholar of this country insists that there is no evidence that Druidism was ever the religion of any Brythonic people;[1237] and since he assigns almost the whole of Britain south of the firths of Forth and Clyde to the Brythons, he appears to restrict the area of Druidism to a narrow western fringe. This hardly accords with Caesar’s statement that Britain was the stronghold of Druidism. Moreover, when Caesar tells us that the Druids were the religious aristocracy of the Gauls, he plainly gives us to understand that Druidism was common to all the peoples who lived between the Seine and the Garonne; and it is certain that among many if not most of these peoples the Gallo-Brythonic element was predominant. Indeed, although it is commonly assumed that the Belgae had no Druids, there is absolutely no ground for the assumption. Caesar often used the word _Galli_ in a wider sense, including the Belgae; and it is not improbable that when he was describing the manners and customs of the Gauls and Druidism, which was their most remarkable institution, he intended his description to apply to the Belgae as well.[1238] Moreover, the very writer who denies that the Brythons had Druids tells us that Druidism was the religion of the British aborigines and was borrowed from them by the British Goidels; and it is certain that both the aborigines and the Goidels (if they had already reached Britain) survived in considerable numbers in the territory which the Brythons conquered.[1239] It is clear therefore that Druidism persisted within the Brythonic area; and that the Brythons held aloof from it is a groundless guess.[1240]

But concerning Druidism as it existed in Britain we have no special information, except the passage in which Tacitus[1241] speaks of the cruel rites practised by the Druids of Anglesey. Caesar described Druidism once for all;[1242] and since he says that British Druidism was the model and the standard of the Gallic Druids, we can only infer that his description applied in many respects to Britain as well as to Gaul. There the Druids formed a corporation, admission to which was eagerly sought: they jealously guarded the secrecy of their lore; and full membership was only obtainable after a long novitiate. They were ruled by a pope, who held office for life; and sometimes the succession to this dignity was disputed by force of arms. They were exempt from taxation and from service in war. They had, as the priests of a rude society always have, a monopoly of learning. The ignorance and superstition of the populace, their own organization and submission to one head, gave them a tremendous power. The doctrine which they most strenuously inculcated (if Caesar was not misinformed) was the transmigration of souls. ‘This doctrine,’ he said, ‘they regard as the most potent incentive to valour, because it inspires a contempt for death.’[1243] They claimed the right of deciding questions of peace and war. Among the Aedui, if not among other peoples, at all events in certain circumstances, they exercised the right of appointing the chief magistrate.[1244] They laid hands on criminals and, in their default, even on the innocent, imprisoned them in monstrous idols of wickerwork, and burned them alive as an offering to the gods. They immolated captives in order to discover the divine will in the flow of their blood or their palpitating entrails;[1245] they lent their ministrations to men prostrated by sickness or going forth to battle, who trusted that heaven would spare their lives if human victims were offered in their stead; and one form of human sacrifice which they appear to have countenanced--the slaughter of a child at the foundation of a monument, a fortress, or a bridge--has left many traces in European folk-lore and been practised in Africa, Asia, and Polynesia in modern times.[1246] They practically monopolized both the civil and the criminal jurisdiction;[1247] and if this jurisdiction was irregular, if they had no legal power of enforcing their judgements, they were none the less obeyed. Primitive states did not originally take cognizance of offences committed against individuals, which were avenged by their kin; and when they began to intervene they did so at the request of the injured party or his surviving relatives. What was peculiar to the Celts was that this intervention was exercised by the priests;[1248] and doubtless the outlaws who, as Caesar says,[1249] abounded in Gaul were criminals whom they had banished. Every year they met to dispense civil justice in the great plain above which now soar the spires of Chartres cathedral.[1250] Those who disregarded their decrees were excommunicated; and excommunication meant exclusion from the civil community as well as from communion in religious rites.

Did the Druids owe their conception of immortality, as Diodorus Siculus[1251] and Timagenes[1252] imply, to the influence of Pythagoras? The testimony of these writers has been contemptuously rejected:[1253] but it seems not improbable that Druidism may have absorbed tenets of Pythagorean origin through the medium of the Greeks of Massilia;[1254] and this conjecture gains some support from numismatic evidence. A British uninscribed gold coin, found at Reculver, bears on its reverse side the figure, formed by five interlacing lines, which is known as the pentagram and was a well-known Pythagorean symbol.[1255] It would seem, however, that if metempsychosis was really a Druidical doctrine, it had no firm hold upon the Celts in general; and their sepulchral customs were not consistent with it. Their notion of a future life, like that of the Bronze Age, was a form of the ‘Continuance Theory’, which has had so many adherents both in primitive and modern tribes.[1256] They believed that there was an Elysium somewhere in the west, where they were to live again, feasting, carousing, and duelling, a life like that which they had lived before, but free from care.[1257] If the Druids, as Caesar said, taught that souls passed ‘from one person to another’, they meant perhaps that after death the soul entered a new body,--the ethereal counterpart of that which it had left behind. The immortality of the soul was an idea, more or less vague, common to many peoples: for the Celts the Druids made it an article of faith. Nor indeed are we precluded from supposing that some of them may have conceived or borrowed from a classic source the doctrine of future retribution. But what that theory was which, as Caesar says[1258], the Druids inculcated in regard to the origin of the universe and the nature and motion of the heavenly bodies, it is useless to inquire[1259]. We only know that, as they traced the descent of the Gauls back to Dis Pater, they regarded night as older than day, and reckoned time by nights; and that, in common with all the peoples of antiquity, they computed their years by the revolutions of the moon[1260]. The statements of Caesar and Pliny are supplemented by a calendar, engraved on bronze, which was discovered towards the end of the last century at Coligny in the department of the Ain[1261]. It has its lucky and unlucky days; certain days would be regarded as suitable for sacrifices as well as for other functions[1262]; and the regulation of these important matters would certainly have been retained by the Druids. It has been said, perhaps in reliance upon a mistranslation of the word _dryas_ or _druias_, that Druidesses taught side by side with Druids[1263]: at all events Boadicea sought to divine the issue of her campaign by observing the movements of a hare, besought the gods to bless her enterprise, and after her success offered female captives to Andate, the goddess of victory;[1264] and her joint exercise of royal and priestly functions seems to give colour to the suggestion that in primitive times Celtic kings may also have been priests.[1265] Cicero[1266] indeed relates that the Galatian King, Deiotarus, was the most skilful augur of his country. But the facts of historical import which stand out as certain are these. Like the Brahmans, who, so long as their authority is acknowledged, recognize, but regulate, the Protean manifestations of Hindu religious fancy,[1267] the Druids kept control over the manifold forms of aboriginal and Celtic worship. Being a sacerdotal caste, not, like the priests of Rome, popularly elected, but self-constituted and self-contained, they were naturally opposed to all innovation. It has been said that ancient writers regarded as peculiar to the Druids beliefs and practices which were common to them and other priests of antiquity. Certainly human sacrifice was not peculiar to the Celts: the ceremony of cutting the mysterious mistletoe was German as well as Druidical;[1268] and as the Druid sacrificed white bulls before he ascended the sacred oak,[1269] so did the Latin priest in the grove which was the holy place of Jupiter.[1270] But while every ancient people had its priests, the Druids alone were a veritable clergy.[1271] Celtic religion, in so far as it had the same ancestry as that of Rome, would easily harmonize with it; but Druidism, with its more definite theology, might be expected to counteract this tendency, and would therefore be a danger to Roman dominion.[1272] And it was British Druidism that supported and renovated the Druidism of Gaul, and formed one of the bonds of union between the two Celtic lands.[1273]

[Sidenote: Ties between Britons and Gauls.]

For, if their material culture was somewhat less advanced, the Britons, at least those of the south-eastern districts, naturally remained connected by the closest ties with the Gauls, and particularly with the Belgae. The Britons of Kent were little less civilized than the Gauls;[1274] and Belgic kings, like William the Conqueror and his descendants, ruled on both sides of the Channel.[1275] Not many years before the period of the Gallic wars, Diviciacus, king of the Suessiones, who governed directly the country round Soissons, had established supremacy not only over a large part of the surrounding Belgic territory but also over Britain;[1276] and during a period which may have coincided with his reign gold coins of certain types were used indifferently in the Belgic districts of Britain and of Gaul, and were doubtless struck for rulers who had possessions in both.[1277] But the power of Diviciacus had ended with him;[1278] and when Caesar came to Gaul, the tribes of South-Eastern Britain were divided into antagonistic groups, headed respectively by the Catuvellauni and the Trinovantes. Cassivellaunus, the king of the Catuvellauni, was the ablest and most aggressive of the British princes of his time; but his opponents were supported, it would seem, by the influence of Commius, a chieftain of the Belgic Atrebates, whose territory comprised adjacent districts of the departments of Pas-de-Calais and Nord, and who were connected with the British tribe of the same name.

[Sidenote: How the Britons were affected by Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul.]

But, if anything could induce the Britons to forget their differences, it was the news which reached them of Caesar’s movements in Gaul. The events of the first year of his proconsulship--the overthrow of the Helvetii, who had migrated into Gaul from Switzerland, and the defeat of the German invader, Ariovistus--might not affect their interests: but in the following year, when the Belgae banded together against the Roman conqueror, it was time for them to be on the alert. British adventurers crossed the Straits to assist their kinsmen; and when Caesar shattered the forces of the coalition, the leaders of at least one Belgic tribe fled over sea to escape his vengeance. Late in the autumn of that year or early in the following spring rumours reached the ports of the Channel that Caesar purposed to invade Britain.