Chapter VIII: The Results of Caesar’s Invasions of Britain (4)

The prevalent view in this country is, I am aware, that the Celts were a brachycephalic people; but it is begotten of sheer confusion of thought. Professor Ripley[1963] remarks that ‘there is practically to-day a complete unanimity of opinion among physical anthropologists, that the term _Celt_, if used at all, belongs to the brachycephalic darkish population of the Alpine highlands’; and he adds that the only dissentient is M. G. de Lapouge.[1964] But Dr. Beddoe,[1965] whom he counts among the professors of the orthodox faith, has emphatically recorded his opinion that, at the time of the Roman conquest, the Celtic-speaking people of Southern Britain ‘partook more of the tall blond stock of Northern Europe than of the thick-set, broad-headed dark stock which Broca has called Celtic’; and the ‘unanimity’ (which is far from being ‘complete’) upon which Professor Ripley pins his faith is due partly to misunderstanding or misinterpretation of Broca’s famous essay, _Qu’est-ce que les Celtes_, partly to the desire of establishing a uniform connotation, and partly to the fact that some physical anthropologists have neglected to supplement their scientific researches by the study of classical texts. Broca found the term ‘Celt’ used in a multiplicity of senses, and he attempted to put an end to confusion by attaching to it one limited, conventional, and, as we shall see, misleading signification. When, in the essay to which I have just referred, he endeavoured to prove that the Celts were a dark brachycephalic people, he expressly limited the term ‘Celts’ to the population of that part of Gaul which, according to Caesar,[1966] was inhabited by ‘a people who call themselves Celts and whom we [the Romans] call Gauls’. ‘There is no proof,’ he insists, ‘that the existence in the British Isles of a people bearing the name of Celts has ever been authoritatively affirmed’:[1967] according to him, the invaders of Britain who spoke the so-called Celtic languages were the Belgae,[1968] for he knew nothing about Goidels or pre-Belgic Brythons; and, although he allowed himself to be persuaded that the tall Round Barrow race spoke Celtic, he denied ‘that there is any other affinity except that of language between the brachycephali of the round barrows and the real Celts of Gaul’.[1969] When he insisted that ‘the Celts’ were a dark brachycephalic people, he did not mean that darkness and brachycephaly were characteristic of the conquerors who introduced the Celtic language into Gaul: he meant that they were characteristic of the great mass of the mixed population whom Caesar called _Celtae_,[1970] who were in the main descended from neolithic invaders, and whose uppermost stratum, so to speak, consisted of invaders whom Broca, speaking as a physical anthropologist rather than a philologist, called ‘Kimris’.[1971] That the name _Celtae_ did not belong to the people of Gaul until it was introduced by these Celtic-speaking ‘Kimris’ is evident from the fact that it belongs to the Celtic tongue:[1972] in other words, the Celts, anthropologically speaking, were originally identical with the invaders who introduced the Celtic language first into Germany and then into Gaul.[1973] These invaders were tall and mesaticephalic or dolichocephalic; and the Celtic-speaking conquerors of Britain belonged to the same stock.

‘The radical errors in Broca’s definition of the “Celts of history” [so I wrote some years ago[1974]] are these:--first, he calmly assumes that no classical writer’s testimony, except Caesar’s, is of any value; and secondly, he fails to see that Caesar, by saying that the people who called themselves “Celts” were called by the Romans “Gauls”, makes it as clear as noon-day that for him and for his countrymen, as for Polybius and Pausanias, the words “Celt” and “Gaul” were synonymous. Broca admits that the older population of Gallia Celtica was conquered by men of the same race as the Gauls or Celts who captured Rome. Therefore it is absolutely certain that the Celtae of Transalpine Gaul were called after their conquerors. The truth is that Broca, while he aimed at putting an end to confusion, only made confusion worse confounded. Moreover, throughout his discussion, _he simply ignores the Helvetii, who, according to Caesar, were included among the Celtae_.’

Since the foregoing paragraph was written, I have lighted upon a passage[1975] in which Broca himself justifies my argument and uses the word ‘Celt’ in the sense which I attach to it. The Celtae of Gaul, he remarks, ‘were already mixed before the arrival of the Kimris [or Gallo-Brythonic invaders], since the name [Celtae] under which they appeared for the first time in history had been imposed upon them by the conquering race of the Celts properly so called, which, like the Kimris and the Germans, came from the east, and, like them, was dolichocephalic.’[1976]

Professor Ripley appeals to the German ethnologist, Johannes Ranke,[1977] whose arguments, he insists, are ‘decisive’. But any one who will take the trouble to read the chapter which Ranke devotes to the Celts will see that his argument does not support Professor Ripley’s contention. Virchow, he reminds us, has pointed out that wherever the Celts are known to have penetrated dark peoples are now to be found. But, as he fully admits, Virchow himself said, ‘I am not on that account inclined to assume that the original Celts were ... dark,’ and reminded his readers that the ancient writers described the Celts as fair. Ranke points out, further, that wherever the Celts originally dwelled in Central Europe we now find the people not only dark but also brachycephalic; but at the same time he warns us to bear in mind that in certain Celtic districts of Britain dolichocephaly is unmistakable, and that there is evidence that on the Continent _the Celtic invaders found a dark brachycephalic people in possession_. In other words, Ranke does not commit himself to any theory as to the physical characters of the Celts properly so called,--the invaders who introduced the Celtic dialects into Germany, Gaul, Britain, and other countries which they subdued. The reader will also bear in mind that the writers who identify the tall brachycephalic Round Barrow race with the Goidelic Celts unanimously maintain that they were fair.

That the Celtic-speaking invaders of Gaul and Britain were commonly dolichocephalic or mesaticephalic is not only attested by the skulls of warriors of the Iron Age, but is either attested or at least not disproved by the results of modern observations of existing Celtic-speaking peoples[1978] and of the country which was formerly inhabited by the Gallic Belgae.[1979] When Sergi[1980] tells us that the Gauls who captured Rome were ‘composed of brunet Celts and blond Teutons’, he makes an assertion which, as it is absolutely unsupported by any evidence, calls for no refutation; and it would be useless to ask him who were the ‘blond Teutons’ who were the ancestors of the red-haired Gauls of the Perthshire Highlands.[1981] As Dr. Beddoe[1982] puts it, the Gauls of Scotland are probably descended from ‘Iberians’ crossed with ‘a long-faced, harsh-featured, red-haired race, who contributed the language and much of the character’.[1983]

3. The late Mr. Charles Elton,[1984] referring to Professor A. H. Sayce’s _Science of Language_,[1985] affirmed that ‘a Finnish idiom has been traced in several of the British languages’, and inferred that the tall builders of the round barrows were Finns. The idiom in question may, for aught that I know, have been traced by some philologist who had determined to find it, but not by Professor Sayce nor by any one to whom Professor Sayce refers. Mr. Elton’s argument is as obsolete as that which Professor Rhys founded upon his imaginary tracing of Basque in the language of the Picts.

4. Much may be said for the theory of the late Professor Rolleston, that the tall people of the round barrows came from Denmark or some of the adjoining islands, if it be duly modified. On the coast near Flamborough Head are remains of earthworks, which, as has been demonstrated by General Pitt-Rivers, who excavated them, were erected by invaders fighting their way inland; and, as he remarks, ‘it is unlikely that any but Northmen should have landed in this spot.’[1986] Thurnam himself admits that there is ‘a great resemblance’ between the characteristic Round Barrow skulls and those from ‘the Giants’ Chamber at Borreby [in the island of Falster], and from other Scandinavian megalithic tombs’;[1987] and his testimony is confirmed by Rolleston[1988] and Dr. Beddoe.[1989]

Dr. A. H. Keane[1990] argues, in opposition to Rolleston’s view, that if any of the Round Barrow invaders had come from Scandinavia, ‘they must have spoken some Low German dialect, of which there are no clear traces in the tribal and place-names of the Bronze Age.’ The answer is, first, that, as Mr. C. H. Read[1991] suggests, they may have spoken not a Low German but a pre-Aryan dialect; and, secondly, that we know absolutely nothing about either the tribal or the place-names of Britain in the Bronze Age. Assuming that Low German tribal or place-names existed in Britain before the Celtic invasion, they would for the most part have been superseded by Celtic names, just as the Celtic invaders of Gaul generally substituted their own tribal and place-names for those of their predecessors, and just as in certain parts of Scotland Celtic names of rivers gave place to Norse names.[1992]

5. Messrs. J. Gray and J. F. Tocher infer from their observations of the physical characteristics of the population of West Aberdeenshire that ‘a tall, broad-headed, dark-haired, light-eyed people’, whom they regard as ‘the descendants of the men of the Bronze Age’, formerly inhabited Aberdeenshire, but were driven inland by later blond immigrants, who were shorter and had narrower heads, and whom they identify with North Germans.[1993] The resemblance of the tall dark people to modern Dalmatians[1994] is, they say, ‘significant when taken in conjunction with the fact that bronze first came into the British Isles from South-East Europe.’

‘The fact!’ But is it the fact? Archaeology has certainly shown that Britain, in the Bronze Age, was commercially connected with Northern France, which, as Mr. C. H. Read[1995] says, was ‘supplied to a certain extent from Italy’. But no archaeologist supposes that bronze was carried all the way from Italy, still less from Dalmatia, into Britain or even into Northern France by Italians or Dalmatians. It came through the methods of primitive commerce. Moreover, as we have already seen,[1996] ‘the men of the Bronze Age,’ by whom Messrs. Gray and Tocher mean the tall brachycephalic people of the round barrows, were still in their Stone Age when they began to invade Britain. A direct immigration from the coasts of the Adriatic into West Aberdeenshire or even Southern Britain is inconceivable; and if it had taken place gradually across the Continent, we should find that the immigrants had left traces of their presence on the way, which is not the case. Notwithstanding the thoroughness with which Messrs. Gray and Tocher conducted their investigation, I fear that it throws no new light upon the ethnology of Ancient Britain. After the successive invasions and immigrations, the internal migrations, and the intermarriages of 3,000 years, it is utterly impossible to establish by dint of even the most elaborate census of a living population the fact that the people of the Bronze Age even in West Aberdeenshire were ‘tall, broad-headed, dark-haired, and light-eyed’; and if they were, why only in West Aberdeenshire?

6. The Honourable John Abercromby maintains that the brachycephalic invaders, or some of them, came at the beginning of the Bronze Age or in the period of transition between the Neolithic Age and the Bronze Age from the neighbourhood of the middle Rhine or from some intermediate district between it and Britain.[1997] Remarking[1998] that ‘the recorded finds of the last hundred years are sufficient to establish the fact that the beaker [or drinking-cup] is the oldest form of fictilia in the Bronze Age of this country’, he argues that the immigrants who introduced the oldest drinking-cups of the kind which Thurnam designated as ‘type β’ must have belonged to a tribe who at one time lived in the valley of the Rhine, because between British and Rhenish specimens of this type ‘there is a substantial agreement’ both in form and ornament, which ‘seems too great to be the result of pure accident’; and he points out[1999] that ‘the type exists not only in the central Rhine, but also near its mouth’, though the intermediate stages cannot be traced. The Rhenish cups belong to the Neolithic Age; and it seems impossible to prove that the earliest British examples were not made before any objects of bronze were manufactured in or introduced into Britain:[2000] but Mr. Abercromby has certainly established a very strong probability in favour of the locality to which he refers their origin.[2001]

The great mistake that has been made in discussing the question is the not uncommon assumption that the brachycephalic immigrants who buried their dead in round barrows arrived in Britain at one time and came from one place. Some of them certainly appeared before the end of the Neolithic Age: others may have introduced bronze implements or ornaments; others doubtless came, in successive hordes, during the course of the Bronze Age. Some of those who belonged to the Grenelle race, who certainly came from Eastern Europe and possibly from Asia,[2002] and whose centre of dispersion was the Alpine region,[2003] may have started from Gaul;[2004] others could have traced their origin to some Rhenish tribe; and I am inclined to believe that those who belonged to the characteristic rugged Round Barrow type crossed over, for the most part, from Denmark or the outlying islands. That the first Celtic-speaking invaders landed in Britain before the end of the Bronze Age I do not deny; and if they came from that part of Gaul which was inhabited by the Celtae, I have no doubt that many of them were brachycephalic. But it is nevertheless certain that among these invaders the dominant element, who were Celtic in blood as well as in speech, and whose physical type was that described by the ancient writers, were not brachycephalic but mesaticephalic or dolichocephalic. And if I am asked where the Celtic skulls of the later British Bronze Age are to be found, I answer, Nowhere: they were reduced to ashes by cremation.[2005]

It is interesting to find that, according to Huxley, of the skeletons that were found in the famous Heathery Burn Cave, near Durham, which was inhabited in the closing period of the Bronze Age, not one belonged to either of the brachycephalic types, but all to ‘the same race of rather small and lightly-made men with prominent superciliary ridges and projecting nasal bones’[2006] which is represented by the river-bed skulls of England and Ireland.[2007]

IX. THE CELTS

1. Little can be added to what has been said in the previous section about the physical characteristics of the Celtic invaders of Britain. Some Celtic scholars, as we shall presently see,[2008] deny that any Goidels reached this country before the Roman conquest; but, assuming that some did so, there is no reason to suppose that they differed much physically from the Brythons. If Strabo[2009] was right in saying that the Britons generally were less fair-haired than the Gauls, the inference would seem to be that the Celtic invaders of Britain had intermarried more freely than those of Gaul with the descendants of the aborigines; nor would this inference be weakened by the fact that, according to the same authority,[2010] they were conspicuously taller than their Gallic kinsmen.[2011] I believe, however, that Strabo’s statements were based upon nothing more than his own observation of the few Britons whom he says that he himself saw in Rome, supplemented perhaps by hearsay evidence derived from Roman soldiers or traders who were not trained observers; and that his testimony is worth neither more nor less than that of Lucan, who speaks of ‘the fair-haired Britons’.[2012] Dr. Beddoe[2013] has concluded, from his observation of the modern inhabitants of ‘those parts of Scotland and the north of England where Kymric blood may well be supposed to remain in large proportion,’ that the Belgae who invaded Britain as well as those of Gaul were on the whole somewhat dark: but his arguments, which I have examined fully elsewhere,[2014] do not prove that the dominant Celts among the Belgae were dark, but simply that, before they invaded Britain, they had become largely intermixed with an older dark population, and that, since they reached this country, they and their descendants have intermarried with people darker than themselves.[2015]

2. Professor Rhys has more than once changed his opinion about the Celtic invaders of Britain since he began to handle the subject. In the second edition of his _Lectures on Welsh Philology_[2016] he argued that they were not ‘two distinct nationalities, speaking two distinct languages’; in other words, he maintained that the Goidelic and Brythonic dialects had been evolved within the British Isles after the Celts had entered them. In the preface to _Celtic Britain_, however, which was written in January, 1884, he recanted; and his old view is now obsolete. For many years past he has maintained that the earliest invaders were Goidels, or, as he now prefers to call them, Celticans;[2017] and that the later comers were Brythons. But whereas until a recent date he held that the only Brythonic invasion was that of the Belgae, and that Pytheas, who visited Britain towards the end of the fourth century B.C., ‘is not likely to have found any Brythons here,’[2018] he now holds, or at all events held a few weeks before the time when I am writing, that the first Brythonic invaders ‘appear to have settled here before the middle of the fourth century B.C., for Pytheas ... gives indirect evidence to their presence’.[2019] To this view I hope he will firmly adhere. There is, indeed, no direct evidence that any Brythonic immigrants landed in Britain before the Belgae. But indirect evidence there is; and that of two kinds. The first has been already noticed in the section on the Picts. There are good grounds for believing that the authority whom Diodorus Siculus followed in his notices of Britain was Pytheas.[2020] Diodorus speaks of the British Isles as Πρετ(τ)ανικαὶ νῆσοι;[2021] and the _P_ in Πρετ(τ)ανικαί (if that reading is certain), shows that Pytheas learned the word from lips which spoke a Brythonic, or Gaulish dialect. M. d’Arbois de Jubainville asserts that his informants were Gauls:[2022] but that is simply his opinion; it is open to any one to argue that Pytheas probably learned the name of the Britons as well as the facts which he reported about them and their country in Britain, and not in Gaul. Be this, however, as it may, it is, as we shall presently see, certain that during the earlier period of the Roman occupation, the greater part of England and a considerable part of Scotland were inhabited by Brythons; and, as we shall also see, it is extremely improbable that they were all of Belgic origin. The question of the chronological order of the various Celtic invasions is, according to Professor Rhys,[2023] answered by the present geographical distribution of the Celtic-speaking peoples of the British Isles: ‘it may be regarded,’ he says, ‘as fairly certain that those who are found driven furthest to the west were the earliest comers.’ The argument might be sound enough (though the word ‘driven’ begs the question) if we were considering the British Isles as a whole, and not merely Britain;[2024] and even those who maintain that there were no people of Goidelic descent in Britain in the time of Caesar could hardly answer Professor Rhys unless they assumed that the Goidelic invaders of Ireland came from Spain, or that they dared not risk a contest with the Southern Britons; for otherwise it is hard to believe that they would not have directed their immigration towards Britain, the nearer country.

Professor Rhys, in his _Celtic Britain_,[2025] endeavours to trace the distribution of the Brythonic and Goidelic peoples, as he believes it to have existed at the time of the coming of the Romans; and in so doing he uses materials on which he founds another argument to show that there were Goidels in Britain at that time. These materials are Goidelic inscriptions which have been found in North Wales, in Cornwall, and in Devonshire:[2026] but not one of them belongs to an earlier date than the fifth century of our era. With the exception of the districts in which they occur, of the greater part of Somersetshire and Dorsetshire, of South Wales and the adjoining parts of England which lie between the Severn and the Teme, and of Cumberland, part of Westmorland, the Isle of Man, Dumfries, Kirkcudbright, Wigtown, Ayrshire, Renfrew, and part of Lanarkshire, the professor regards the whole of Britain south of the Firths of Clyde and Forth as Brythonic; and he prints a list of proper names, most of which are certainly Brythonic, in support of this conclusion.[2027] The northern part of the island he divides, for reasons which have been already examined, between Goidels and aboriginal tribes, whom he identifies with the Picts properly so called.[2028] It will, however, of course be understood that when he speaks of Goidelic and Brythonic tribes, he means tribes who spoke the Goidelic and Brythonic dialects. The former he regards as mingled largely with the aborigines, and the latter with both Goidels and aborigines. But it is difficult to understand how he has been able to maintain that the Dumnonii of Cornwall and Devonshire were Goidels in the face of the fact that most of the British emigrants who invaded Brittany came from the Cornish peninsula,[2029] bringing the name _Dumnonii_ with them, and that he himself formerly insisted that the Dumnonii who inhabited what is now Renfrew and Ayrshire were Brythons.[2030] I say ‘formerly’, because this is one of the many opinions which the professor has felt obliged to discard: ‘the southern portion’ of the Scottish Dumnonii have just been transformed by a stroke of the pen into ‘Goidels who adopted Brythonic speech’.[2031] However, as M. d’Arbois de Jubainville says, referring to the inscriptions upon which Professor Rhys relies, ‘To conclude from the fact that five Goidels were buried, during the period which elapsed from about 400 to about 700 A.D., in the territory of the Dumnonii, that the entire population of that territory was Goidelic seems extremely rash;’[2032] and, he asks,[2033] ‘if they were Goidels, how came it that they brought a Brythonic dialect into Brittany?’ Further, he asks why Professor Rhys maintains that the Novantae of Galloway were Goidels when he admits that the Trinovantes of Essex were Brythons;[2034] and the only answer which the professor vouchsafes to this question is that the name _Novantae_ was ‘given them probably by Brythons’.[2035] What are the grounds of his opinion, he does not say. I may add that while he explains[2036] that ‘the consonantal combination of _cs_ or _x_’ is Gaulish, that is to say, Gallo-Brythonic, he says[2037] that it is ‘remarkable’ that ‘most of the early names with _x_ belong to districts which have before been pointed out as non-Brythonic’. When we look for these districts, we find[2038] that they were those of the Taexali, the Vacomagi, the Scottish Dumnonii, the Selgovae, and Cumberland. When we ask on what grounds the inhabitants of these districts had been ‘pointed out as non-Brythonic’, we find[2039] that the Taexali and the Vacomagi were Pictish, that is to say ‘no doubt’ aboriginal; that the Dumnonii, according to the professor himself,[2040] were ‘undoubtedly Brythons’, and remained so until, discovering perhaps that he had inadvertently given his case away, he changed them by his enchanter’s wand into ‘Goidels who adopted Brythonic speech’;[2041] and that the Selgovae are asserted to have been, like the Novantae, ‘in a great measure ... most likely a remnant of the aboriginial inhabitants.’[2042] Why? Because they were afterwards included under the name _Atecotti_, which ‘appears to have meant old or ancient’, and was ‘possibly given to them by the Brythons’.[2043] Doubtless they were ‘in a great measure’ aboriginal, as were doubtless all the British tribes; but seeing that _Uxellon_, the name of a town in their country, is Gaulish, the natural conclusion is that their Celtic masters were not Goidels but Brythons.

3. Professor Kuno Meyer holds that ‘no Gael ever set his foot on British soil save on a vessel that had put out from Ireland’;[2044] and his words are echoed by Dr. Macbain.[2045] Professor Meyer points out that ‘we have the concurrent testimony of Irish and Welsh tradition that from the second century of our era till the sixth a series of partial conquests of Britain took place’.[2046] Dr. Beddoe[2047] has indeed argued that it is extremely improbable that ‘the Romans would have allowed the Irish Gael to acquire by violence possession of a large portion of one of their provinces’; and Professor Meyer, who admits the difficulty, says that he will not attempt to explain it away. He might have noted that the author of the panegyric which was addressed A.D. 296 to Constantius Chlorus[2048] expressly affirms that such invasions did take place. Professor Meyer also points out that the Gaelic inscriptions which have been found in Southern Britain belong almost exclusively to South Wales, the quarter to which the invasions may be assumed to have been directed, very few having come to light in North Wales, Devonshire, and Cornwall.[2049] On the other hand, it will be admitted that the record of these invasions is no proof that Goidels had not settled in Britain in pre-Roman times.

4. M. d’Arbois de Jubainville holds, as we have already seen,[2050] that Goidels, or rather a people who spoke ‘the Celtic dialect from which Goidelic was evolved’,[2051] were masters of the British Isles in the time of Pytheas, and that between his time and that of Caesar Britain was conquered by the Cymric Brittones. So far he is substantially in agreement with the view which, until a recent date, commended itself to Professor Rhys,[2052] who, as the reader knows, now believes that there were two successive Brythonic invasions.[2053] The more important differences between the two scholars lie partly in their views, which have been already examined, of the Pictish question; partly in the fact that M. d’Arbois is unable to accept the evidence which satisfies Professor Rhys that in Caesar’s time and later Goidelic tribes still remained in Western and Northern Britain. He holds that many of them had been driven by the Belgae into Ireland, and that in Britain they only survived as a vanquished people who had been forced to adopt the language of their Gaulish conquerors.[2054] I am inclined to believe, from the analogy of Gaul,[2055] that in Caesar’s time Goidelic was still spoken in remoter parts of the island.

5. Mr. Nicholson has recently attempted to prove that all his predecessors are entirely mistaken even on the few points on which they are agreed. According to him, the earliest Celtic invaders of the British Isles were Brythons, whom, however, he prefers to call Kymri; after them came a horde of Goidels; in the third century before Christ the Picts, who were also Goidels, invaded Scotland; and finally came the Belgae, who were Goidels too! The result was that ‘apparently the great majority of the tribes inhabiting Roman Britain were Goidels’,[2056] although ‘of the later Kymric recovery and victory in Wales and some other parts there is no manner of doubt’.[2057] It will, at all events, be admitted that a victory, however late, gained by a small minority, was no mean achievement.

How does Mr. Nicholson set about proving this revolutionary theory? He tells us that ‘on the map of Roman Britain’ he can only see one ‘certainly Kymric geographical name’[2058]--Pennocrucium (now Penkridge) in Staffordshire. The long lists of Cymric names which have been drawn up by Professor Rhys, Dr. Whitley Stokes, M. d’Arbois de Jubainville, and Dr. Macbain do not move him at all. When he is confronted with geographical, tribal, or personal names belonging to Pictland--names such as _Argentocoxos_, _Epidii_, _Gartnait_, the _Ochil_ Hills, and the prefixes _aber_ and _pet_--he either ignores them or, as his opponents would say, explains them away.[2059] Professor Rhys’s list[2060] is disposed of with the same breezy self-confidence. _Corstopiton_, _Epeiacon_, (Mons) _Graupius_, _Leucopibia_, _Maponi_, _Parisi_, _Petuaria_, _Prasutagos_, _Rutupiae_, _Toliapis_,--these names are either left out of account or explained as Goidelic by the simple method of affirming or ‘suspecting’ that the _p_ in each case is ‘Indo-European’.[2061] The reader will form his own opinion if he can; only he will bear in mind that the weight of authority is all on one side. When doctors disagree, the patient must decide for himself which is the quack.

So much for the assertion that the Goidels, who, according to Professor Kuno Meyer and Dr. Macbain, were non-existent in Britain at the time when the Roman conquest began, formed then ‘the great majority’ of the population. What is the evidence for the theory that they came later than the Brythons?

There is no doubt that the Celts who first entered Gaul were Goidels[2062] (assuming that Goidelic was then a distinct dialect[2063]), and that the latest Celtic invaders of Gaul as of Britain were Belgae.[2064] If the Belgae had been Goidels, we should then have to admit that Gaul was invaded first by Goidels, then by ‘Cymri’, and finally by Goidels again. Is this likely? And is it not likely that if Goidels were the first Celts who invaded Gaul, they were also the first who invaded Britain?

Mr. Nicholson offers the following arguments in favour of his theory. Remarking that the Menapii were a Belgic tribe, he says[2065] that ‘the Isle of Man(n) [which Caesar calls _Mona_] is called _Monapia_ by Pliny (iv, 103)’; and that the Gaelic dialect which is spoken in the island is evidence that its inhabitants in Pliny’s time were Goidels.

Now I ask, first, is it certain that Pliny’s _Monapia_, rather than Caesar’s _Mona_, was the name by which the Isle of Man was known to its own inhabitants? Is it not probable that the name _Monapia,_ which is, at all events presumably, Brythonic, came to Pliny from a Brythonic source?[2066] Secondly, assuming that the names _Monapia_ and _Menapii_ are etymologically connected, does it necessarily follow that _Monapia_ was a name peculiar to the Belgae, seeing that the tribal name _Ceutrones_ occurs not only in Belgic Gaul but in the Alps?[2067] Thirdly, is Mr. Nicholson prepared to prove that the Isle of Man was not colonized by Goidels after it had received the name _Monapia_ from Brythons? Lastly, since Mr. Nicholson himself affirms[2068] that although the name _Aremorici_ is ‘certainly Kymric’, it nevertheless ‘is no proof that the Aremoricans were Kymric’, why does he insist that the fact, if it is a fact, that _Monapia_ was Goidelic proves that the Belgae were Goidels?

Again, he says that the Parisi, who lived near the mouth of the Humber, were Belgae,[2069] and he believes that ‘their name preserves Indo-European _p_’.[2070] But Caesar did not include the Gallic Parisii among the Belgae, and did include them among the Celtae.[2071] Mr. Nicholson’s belief, that the _p_ in their name is Indo-European, is not shared by any other Celtic scholar.

Thirdly, he argues that the Atrebates, who were certainly Belgae, were Goidels; for, he says,[2072] ‘With one exception, no ogam-inscription has ever been found in these isles outside territory which is known to have been once in Goidelic occupation. The single exception is that of the stone found at Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester).’ But, according to Mr. Nicholson himself, ‘the great majority’ of the British tribes were Goidelic: yet in only a small minority of their territories are ogam inscriptions forthcoming; and that minority, with the possible exception of the Atrebates, is in the west of England. What then is proved by the solitary inscription at Silchester? The individual who erected it was doubtless a Goidel:[2073] but if it is to be regarded as a proof that the Atrebates were Goidels, then the existence of synagogues in Great Britain proves the truth of that widespread delusion which Professor Tylor[2074] has described as ‘abject nonsense’,--the ‘Anglo-Israel theory’.[2075]

Fourthly, Mr. Nicholson remarks[2076] that between the Parisi and the Iceni, the name of whose king, Prasutagus,[2077] he regards ‘as containing Ind.-Eur. _p_’, while all other Celtic scholars regard it as Brythonic, dwelled the Coritani.[2078] ‘From their position on the coast,’ he says, ‘they should belong to the same Picto-Belgic family, and I submit that their name is simply Qṛtanoi, Cruitni.’ In other words, Mr. Nicholson submits that a single tribe, which he assumes to have been Belgic, called itself by the same name which, on his own showing,[2079] had been given to the entire population of Great Britain[2080] long before the Belgae set foot in the land!

6. I have set down the gist of the linguistic evidence which has been offered in support of the various theories about the Goidels and the Brythons in order that the reader may be able to form an independent judgement about its value. It goes without saying that on any particular question of Celtic etymology no opinion except that of a competent Celtic scholar is worth listening to: on most of the questions that concern us competent Celtic scholars differ widely among themselves: Professor Rhys differs from himself; and Mr. Nicholson, whose competence I neither affirm nor deny, differs from everybody. Even the lay reader who has studied the writings of Dr. Windisch, of Professor Rhys, of Dr. Whitley Stokes, of Dr. Macbain, of Mr. Nicholson, and of M. d’Arbois de Jubainville, and who has made much use of Alfred Holder’s _Alt-celtischer Sprachschatz_ cannot but see how few of the etymologies that relate to ethnology are to be accepted as certain. It would of course be absurd to sneer at the services which philology has rendered to ethnology and history; nevertheless the fact remains that on almost all the fundamental questions of Celtic ethnology the philologists agree to differ. And, at the risk of appearing flippant, I cannot help saying that when I read some of Mr. Nicholson’s pages, when I see how M. Salomon Reinach demonstrates, with the approval of M. d’Arbois de Jubainville and of Professor Rhys, who for once find themselves in agreement, that κασσίτερος, the Greek word for tin, must be of Celtic derivation because the root _cassi-_ is found in numerous Celtic names,[2081] I ask myself whether some future philologist will not adduce the similarity between _Tamesis_ and _Tamesi_, the name of a Mexican river, as a proof that the Celts once colonized Central America; whether he will not compare the name of Admiral Togo with that of the British prince, Togo-dumnos, and prove that ‘the Japanese Nelson’ was of Celtic extraction.[2082]

7. Caesar, in a familiar passage, states that ‘the maritime districts [of Britain are inhabited] by people who crossed over from Belgium to plunder and attack [the aborigines], almost all of them being called after the tribes from whom the invaders were an offshoot’.[2083] It is, however, impossible to define the limits of the region which, in Caesar’s time and during the period that elapsed between the date of his departure and that of the Claudian conquest, was occupied by the Belgae. The only tribal names that indicate their presence are those of the Catuvellauni,[2084] who, about the commencement of the Christian era, occupied a territory of uncertain area round Verulamium, or St. Albans, which included Hertfordshire, Middlesex, and probably parts of Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Northamptonshire; the Atrebates, who possessed parts of Hampshire and Berkshire; and the Belgae, whose chief towns, according to Ptolemy,[2085] were Aquae Calidae, or Bath, and Venta, or Winchester.[2086] Caesar’s words would certainly lead us to believe that the Cantii, the Trinovantes, and the Regni were also Belgic peoples, although their names do not occur in the list of the Belgic tribes of Gaul.[2087] Professor Rhys indeed affirmed in the second edition of _Celtic Britain_[2088] that ‘there is no evidence that the Cantii ... should be considered Belgic’; and this statement is repeated in the edition which has recently been published: one feels therefore that the evolution of the professor’s views is quite normal when one reads in an intermediate volume, published two years ago,[2089] that the earliest Belgic invaders of Britain were probably the Brittani,[2090] and that the Brittani were probably the Cantii.

8. Finally, Dr. Macalister regards certain skeletons which have been found in the War Ditches of Cambridgeshire below layers that contained traces of late Roman occupation as Anglian[2091]; and it may be that they testify to a pre-Roman immigration from Northern Germany.

X. CONCLUSION

For the sake of clearness I shall summarize the results which this inquiry has attained. No human remains, except those of Bury St. Edmunds and Cattedown, which can be certainly attributed to the Quaternary Period have been found in Britain; but it is probable that the earlier inhabitants belonged in part to the Neanderthal stock, and that towards the close of the Palaeolithic Age they were joined by immigrants akin to the Chancelade people of the Lozère valley. There is no conclusive evidence that the earliest neolithic invaders found this island inhabited; but it has not been demonstrated that even here there was a ‘hiatus’ between the Old and the New Stone Age. The source of the first neolithic influx was probably in France, in the southern parts of which at all events the latest palaeolithic and the earliest neolithic inhabitants were akin. The neolithic invaders who built the long barrows of Southern Britain and the chambered cairns of Scotland, and many of whom built round barrows also, were a branch of the ‘Mediterranean’ race, and likewise came from France, perhaps in some cases originally from the Spanish peninsula; but if they are to be called ‘Iberian’ the term must be regarded as conventional. There is no evidence that they were related more nearly to the Basques than to some other branch of the Mediterranean stock.[2092] They certainly spoke a non-Aryan language; and so probably did the earlier brachycephalic invaders, of whom the first comers landed in Britain before the end of the Neolithic Age. These invaders--the principal builders of the round barrows and the short cists--continued to arrive in successive hordes during the earlier part of the Bronze Age, some probably from Gaul, some from the Low Countries and the valley of the Rhine, and others, who settled in Yorkshire and Northumberland and perhaps in Derbyshire, from Denmark or Danish islands and possibly also from the Scandinavian peninsula. The brachycephalic Round Barrow skulls fall under two different types. Some resemble those of the French Grenelle race--in other words, the so-called Alpine race of Central Europe--and, like them, belonged to individuals of low stature; although the general superiority of the Bronze Age Britons in this respect is so great as to preclude the supposition that men of the pure Grenelle type invaded Britain in considerable numbers: others illustrate the rugged and, in some cases, almost brutal type which Thurnam and Rolleston have so forcibly described; and some of those of Yorkshire, especially Rudstone, and Northumberland exhibit these characteristics in such a degree that they may almost be grouped apart. The majority would seem to show that people of the two types intermarried, as they certainly did with the dolichocephalic neolithic population. The first Celtic invaders were Goidels, who certainly reached Ireland in the Bronze Age, and who may be supposed to have settled in Britain also before the time of Pytheas. The first Brythonic immigrants probably inaugurated the Iron Age in this country, and began to arrive a short time before the visit of Pytheas. They were succeeded by the Belgae, who, like them, came in successive hordes, the first probably in the third century before Christ. The Belgae and the other Brythons spread over the greater part of Southern Britain and many parts of Scotland. Both they and the Goidels were doubtless mixed with people of the ‘Iberian’ and Grenelle races with whom they had intermarried before they left the Continent; but the purer representatives of the two Celtic stocks--the descendants of the invaders who had introduced the Celtic languages into Gaul and of their continental kinsmen--belonged to a type different from both of the Round Barrow types, being not only tall and generally fair but dolichocephalic or mesaticephalic. A people characterized by dolichocephaly and low stature, who apparently were not descended from the Long Barrow race, but whose affinities are doubtful, were settled in the Early Iron Age in East Yorkshire, and, it would seem, nowhere else in Britain. The Picts of Romano-British history were a medley of tribes, among whom Celts were, as everywhere, predominant, but who probably included a greater proportion of the descendants of the neolithic and other pre-Aryan peoples than any other British group. It is possible that in the remoter parts of Pictland a non-Aryan dialect was still spoken when the Romans invaded Britain; but the pre-Aryan Picts as a whole had been Celticized, and the Celtic language had prevailed, although it had been largely modified by the speech with which it had come in contact. Everywhere in Britain the pre-Roman stocks have, in greater or less proportions, survived.[2093] Few Englishmen, Welshmen, or Scotsmen, if their pedigrees could be traced back far enough, would not be found to count among their ancestors men of the type who were buried in long barrows, sturdy warriors of the Bronze Age, and Celts who fought against Caesar or were subdued by Agricola.

* * * * *

The study of ethnology is as fascinating to its votaries, partly by reason of its very difficulty, as the attempt to determine the distances of the less remote stars must have been to Bessel, Henderson, and Struve; but I can sympathize with those to whom, in both cases, the quest of knowledge for its own sake appears equally unprofitable. They may well ask the ethnologist why he does not proceed to deduce from what he knows conclusions that would interest all students of history and of human nature. ‘There are few fields,’ says Professor Bury,[2094] ‘where more work is to be done or where labourers are more needed than the Celtic civilisations of Western Europe. In tracing from its origins the course of western history in the Middle Ages, we are pulled up on the threshold by the uncertainties and obscurities which brood over the Celtic world. And for the purpose of prosecuting that most difficult of all inquiries, the ethnical problem, the part played by race in the developement of peoples and the effects of race blendings, it must be remembered that the Celtic world commands one of the chief portals of ingress into that mysterious prae-Aryan foreworld, from which it may well be that we modern Europeans have inherited far more than we dream.’ But when we have entered the ‘prae-Aryan foreworld’, how shall we map out its various provinces, and what clue shall we have gained to the solution of ‘the ethnical problem’? That is as complex as the problem, which theoretically may not be insoluble, of forecasting remote meteorological as accurately as astronomical phenomena; and its solution is more hopeless still. We want to know what contributions the various British races which we have identified made to the formation of the British character, which is so obviously different from that of any other nation, and which is, so to speak, the generalized manifestation of the characters of the English, Scottish, and Welsh peoples, and, descending the scale, of the characters of the inhabitants of every district, and finally of every man.[2095] Again, we want to trace the manifold sources from which the ‘Celtic’ character, with the idiosyncrasies of which we are all more or less familiar, is derived. But the Celtic character is not everywhere the same. Study it in Wales, in Man, in the Scottish Highlands, in Ireland, in Cornwall, in France, and you will find that while it is Celtic everywhere, everywhere it is different;[2096] that everywhere it has become what it is because it is compounded, in different degrees, not only of Celtic, not only of pre-Celtic and pre-Aryan, but also of post-Celtic elements. And all these elements have been modified and moulded by different geographical and climatic influences and by adventitious circumstances too numerous to be particularized and too elusive to be estimated.[2097] Those who know Ireland well have observed that the character of Anglo-Irishmen, whose blood is neither more nor less Celtic than that of many Englishmen, has acquired a quasi-Irish tinge, which is discernible in their children even when they have been born and bred in England; and this sets us thinking, though we think in vain. We all know the passage in which Mommsen compares the Gauls to the modern Irish: the ethnologist knows enough to see that it is as misleading as it is brilliant; but he knows too little to attempt to rewrite it. Anthropologically speaking, the Gauls (I use the word in its most comprehensive sense) were very different from the modern and indeed from the ancient Irish; and if Mommsen’s analogy were more than superficial, we should be forced to conclude that the character of the Gauls, as it is revealed in ancient writings, was that of the dominant Celts, perhaps mostly Gallo-Brythonic, alone; and that the character of the Irish is simply that of Celts, mostly Goidelic, who were once but have long ceased to be dominant. Who will attempt to differentiate the respective shares of the pre-Aryan Long Barrow race, of the few representatives of the pre-Aryan Grenelle race who settled in this land, of the tall harsh-featured Round Barrow people, of the Goidels, and finally of the Brythons in building up the character which was to be further modified by the Roman, the Saxon, the Dane, the Norman, the Fleming, and aliens of every nationality, who each and all contributed something to a result which, influenced by the Continent, by the Far West, and now by the Far East, is still in process of evolution?

THE NAMES ΠΡΕΤΑΝΙΚΑΙ ΝΗΣΟΙ, _BRITANNI_ AND _BRITANNIA_

Πρεττανοί, which (written with a single τ) is supposed to represent the Brythonic or the Gaulish equivalent of a Goidelic word _Qrtanoi_--the assumed progenitor of the Irish _Cruthni_[2098]--is found in certain manuscripts of Strabo[2099] instead of the more usual Βρεττανοί: Diodorus Siculus[2100] (who derived part of his information about the British Isles indirectly from Pytheas[2101]) Strabo, Ptolemy,[2102] and Marcian,[2103] appear to have described them as Πρετανικαὶ νῆσοι, for perhaps they were not responsible for the ττ which appears in manuscripts; and Stephanus of Byzantium speaks of Πρετανίας and Πρετανίδες.[2104] According to Professor Rhys[2105] and M. d’Arbois de Jubainville,[2106] the form Βρεττανικαὶ (νῆσοι), which occurs in most of the manuscripts, is to be accounted for by the fact that _Brittani_, the Goidelic name of the Brythonic invaders of Britain, which had no connexion with Πρετανοί, was eventually confounded with it: ‘the confusion,’ says Professor Rhys, ‘is to be detected in the ττ of Πρεττανική;’[2107] and he attributes it to scribes. The questions connected with all these names are very difficult. The first puzzle is this:--if, as the professor says,[2108] Πρετανικαὶ νῆσοι, ‘under the influence of the name of the Brythons, Βρεττανοί, became at last Βρεττανικαὶ νῆσοι, that is to say “Brythonic isles”,’ why did Diodorus Siculus, Ptolemy, and Marcian persist in calling them Πρετανικαὶ νῆσοι? Again, the professor’s views about the Brittani, who, he tells us, called themselves Brittones, have lately undergone a sweeping change. In 1902[2109] he regarded ‘the first of the Belgic peoples to cross over to this country’ as an offshoot of ‘the Brittani or Brittones whom Pliny seems to have found so called in the valley of the Somme’ (and whom, by the way, Pliny,[2110] whatever he may have found them called, called neither Brittani nor Brittones, but Britanni); and he considered that their name, ‘from being exclusively that of the first settlers, came to be extended to the successive hordes, so that at the last it actually denoted all the settlers here of Belgic descent.’ But the Britanni who are mentioned by Pliny were a Belgic tribe of such small importance that Caesar either ignored or had never heard of them; and, granting that some of them invaded Britain, of which there is no evidence, it is to the last degree improbable that they rather than the Belgae, of whom they would only have formed an item, should have imposed their name upon the people of the whole island. In 1902 Professor Rhys maintained that the Brythonic invaders of Britain were all Belgae. In 1904[2111] he distinguished the Belgae from the other Brythons, maintained that they were the second group of Brythonic invaders, and gave the name _Brittones_ not only to them but also to their predecessors. Whether or not he still holds that these two groups of Brittones derived their name from Pliny’s Britanni, I cannot say. If so, it is somewhat puzzling that one tribe of the so-called Brittones were the Belgae, who presumably called themselves after the Gallic group of tribes which, as a whole, was designated by that name: the professor’s theory would lead to the startling conclusion that while a single horde of the second group of Brythonic invaders were called _Belgae_ after the entire nation of which they were an offshoot, the two Brythonic groups of invaders, Belgic and non-Belgic alike, were conjointly called after the most obscure tribe of the second group! He explains the name _Brittones_ as connected with the Welsh _breithyn_, cloth, and concludes that ‘the word Brython and its congeners meant a clothed or cloth-clad people’, and that ‘the race with which the Brythons contrasted themselves to their own satisfaction, when they began to give themselves that name, was probably some of the aboriginal tribes whose home they invaded on the Continent’.[2112] But if so, it seems wellnigh inexplicable that none of the Continental Belgae, none of the other Gauls, were called either Brittones or Brittani, and that only one petty Belgic tribe, which was unknown to or unnoticed by Caesar, was even called Britanni. As Windisch says,[2113] Professor Rhys’s etymology has to contend with serious difficulties; and it must, I think, be admitted that if the Brythons were called either Brittani or Brittones, the mention by Pliny of the Belgic Britanni throws no light upon the origin of the name. It is perhaps conceivable that, as Dr. Macbain[2114] has suggested, ‘the tribe on the Somme were some returned emigrants from Britain.’

Britain, says Professor Rhys, is traceable to _Britannia_, and _Britannia_ to _Britanni_,--‘the Latin name of the people’. He observes that the Greek form of _Britanni_ was Βρεττανοί, and he adds that ‘the practical identity between the Latin and Greek forms makes it probable that it was from or through the Greeks of Marseilles that the Romans first heard of these islands. This,’ he continues, ‘is not all, for the Latin _Brittanni_, and especially the Greek Βρεττανοί, have their exact counterpart in the Medieval Irish plurals Bretain, genitive Bretan, which had at times to function as the name both of the Brythons and of the island. It is to be noticed that neither Βρεττανοί or Britanni, nor the Irish Bretain has anything corresponding to it in the dialects of the Brythons themselves. From whom, then, did the Greeks hear the word which served as the basis of their names for Britain and its people? It cannot have been from the Brythonic peoples of the south-east of the island, or any, perhaps, of the Gauls of the Continent: it was probably from the natives of the south-west who brought their tin to market, and in whose country the only Celtic speech in use was as yet Goidelic. When, however, the Romans came to Britain they learnt the name which the Brythons gave themselves in the south-east of the island, and this was not Britanni, or Brettani, but Brĭttŏnes.’[2115] On the other hand, Dr. Macbain[2116] suggests that the ‘Greek form Prettania [or rather _Pretania_, the form which is assumed to have been derived from _Priten_ or its older equivalent, and indirectly from _Qrtanoi_] gave rise to the name Britain,--a bad Latin pronunciation’. Mr. Nicholson objects that ‘in neither Greek nor Latin is _p_ known to pass into _b_’.[2117] Is it possible that the Latin pronunciation, if it was bad, may have been traceable to a bad Greek pronunciation, which gave rise to Polybius’s[2118] Βρεττανικαί (νῆσοι), and which was itself due to a defect not in pronunciation but in hearing?

THE BIRTHDAY OF RELIGION