Chapter 25

The history of brigandage in Spain is very similar. It may be said to have been endemic in and south of the Sierra Morena. In the north it has flourished when government was weak, and after foreign invasion and civil wars. But it has always been put down easily by a capable administration. It reached its greatest heights in Catalonia, where it began in the strife of the peasants against the feudal exactions of the landlords. It had its traditional hero, Roque Guinart, who figures in the second part of Don Quixote. The revolt against the house of Austria in 1640, and the War of the Succession (1700-1714), gave a great stimulus to Catalan brigandage. But it was then put down in a way for which Italy offers no precedent. A country gentleman named Pedro Veciana, hereditary _balio_ (military and civil lieutenant) of the archbishop of Tarragona in the town of Valls, armed his farm-servants, and resisted the attacks of the brigands. With the help of neighbouring country gentlemen he formed a strong band, known as the Mozos (Boys) of Veciana. The brigands combined to get rid of him by making an attack on the town of Valls, but were repulsed with great loss. The government of Philip V. then commissioned Veciana to raise a special corps of police, the "escuadra de Cataluna," which still exists. For five generations the colonel of the escuadra was always a Veciana. At all times in central and northern Spain the country population has supported the police when the government would act firmly. Since the organization of the excellent constabulary called "La Guardia Civil" by the duke of Ahumada, about 1844, brigandage has been well kept down. At the close of the Carlist War in 1874 a few bands infested Catalonia, but one of the worst was surprised, and all its members battered to death with boxwood cudgels by a gang of charcoal-burners on the ruins of the castle of San Martin de Centellas. In such conditions as these brigandage cannot last. More sympathy is felt for "bandoleros" in the south, and there also they find Spanish equivalents for the "manuténgoli" of Italy. The tobacco smuggling from Gibraltar keeps alive a lawless class which sinks easily into pure brigandage. Perhaps the influence of the Berber blood in the population helps to prolong this barbarism. The Sierra Morena, and the Serrania de Ronda, have produced the bandits whose achievements form the subject of popular ballads, such as Francisco Esteban El Guapo (Francis Stephen, the Buck or Dandy), Don Juan de Serralonga, Pedranza, &c. The name of José Maria has been made familiar to all the world by Merimée's story, _Carmen_, and by Bizet's opera. José Maria, called El Tempranillo (the early bird), was a historical personage, a liberal in the rising against Ferdinand VII., 1820-1823, then a smuggler, then a "bandolero." He was finally bought off by the government, and took a commission to suppress the other brigands. Jose Maria was at last shot by one of them, whom he was endeavouring to arrest. The civil guard prevents brigandage from reaching any great height in normal times, but in 1905 a bandit of the old stamp, popularly known as "El Vivillo" (the Vital Spark), haunted the Serrania de Ronda.

The brigand life has been made the subject of much romance. But when stripped of fiction it appears that the bands have been mostly recruited by men who had been guilty of homicide, out of jealousy or in a gambling quarrel, and who remained in them not from love of the life, but from fear of the gallows. A reformed brigand, known as Passo di Lupo (Wolf's Step), confessed to Mr McFarlane about 1820 that the weaker members of the band were terrorized and robbed by the bullies, and that murderous conflicts were constant among them.

The "dacoits" or brigands of India were of the same stamp as their European colleagues. The Pindaris were more than brigands, and the Thugs were a religious sect.

AUTHORITIES.--The literature of brigandage, apart from pure romances, or official reports of trials, is naturally extensive. Mr McFarlane's _Lives and Exploits of Banditti and Robbers_ (London, 1837) is a useful introduction to the subject. The author saw a part of what he wrote about, and gives many references, particularly for Italy. A good bibliography of Spanish brigandage will be found in the _Reseña Historica de la Guardia Civil_ of Eugenio de la Iglesia (Madrid, 1898). For actual pictures of the life, nothing is better than the _English Travellers and Italian Brigands_ of W.J.C. Moens (London, 1866), and _The Brigands of the Morea_, by S. Soteropoulos, translated by the Rev. J.O. Bagdon (London, 1868).

(D. H.)

BRIGANDINE, a French word meaning the armour for the _brigandi_ or _brigantes_, light-armed foot soldiers; part of the armour of a foot soldier in the middle ages, consisting of a padded tunic of canvas, leather, &c., and lined with closely sewn scales or rings of iron.

BRIGANTES (Celtic for "mountaineers" or "free, privileged"), a people of northern Britain, who inhabited the country from the mouth of the Abus (Humber) on the east and the Belisama (Mersey; according to others, Ribble) on the west as far northwards as the Wall of Antoninus. Their territory thus included most of Yorkshire, the whole of Lancashire, Durham, Westmorland, Cumberland and part of Northumberland. Their chief town was Eburacum (or Eboracum; York). They first came into contact with the Romans during the reign of Claudius, when they were defeated by Publius Ostorius Scapula. Under Vespasian they submitted to Petillius Cerealis, but were not finally subdued till the time of Antoninus Pius (Tac. _Agricola_, 17; Pausan. viii. 43. 4). The name of their eponymous goddess Brigantia is found on inscriptions (_Corp. Inscr. Lat._ vii. 200, 875, 1062; F. Haverfield in _Archaeological Journal_, xlix., 1892), and also that of a god Bergans = Brigans (_Ephemeris Epigraphica_, vii. No. 920). A branch of the Brigantes also settled in the south-east corner of Ireland, near the river Birgus (Barrow).

See A. Holder, _Altceltischer Sprachschatz_, i. (1896), for ancient authorities; J. Rhys, _Celtic Britain_ (3rd ed., 1904); Pauly-Wissowa, _Realencyclopädie_, iii. pt. i. (1897).

BRIGG (properly Glanford Briggs or Glamford Bridge), a market town in the North Lindsey or Brigg parliamentary division of Lincolnshire, England, situated on the river Ancholme, which affords water communication with the Humber. Pop. of urban district (1901) 3137. It is 23 m. by road north of Lincoln, and is served by the Grimsby line of the Great Central railway. Trade is principally agricultural. In 1885 a remarkable boat, assigned to early British workmanship, was unearthed near the river; it is hollowed out of the trunk of an oak, and measures 48 ft. 6 in. by about 5 ft. Other prehistoric relics have also been discovered.

BRIGGS, CHARLES AUGUSTUS (1841- ), American Hebrew scholar and theologian, was born in New York City on the 15th of January 1841. He was educated at the university of Virginia (1857-1860), graduated at the Union Theological Seminary in 1863, and studied further at the university of Berlin. He was pastor of the Presbyterian church of Roselle, New Jersey, 1869-1874, and professor of Hebrew and cognate languages in Union Theological Seminary 1874-1891, and of Biblical theology there from 1891 to 1904, when he became professor of theological encyclopaedia and symbolics. From 1880 to 1890 he was an editor of the _Presbyterian Review_. In 1892 he was tried for heresy by the presbytery of New York and acquitted. The charges were based upon his inaugural address of the preceding year. In brief they were as follows: that he had taught that reason and the Church are each a "fountain of divine authority which apart from Holy Scripture may and does savingly enlighten men"; that "errors may have existed in the original text of the Holy Scripture"; that "many of the Old Testament predictions have been reversed by history" and that "the great body of Messianic prediction has not and cannot be fulfilled"; that "Moses is not the author of the Pentateuch," and that "Isaiah is not the author of half of the book which bears his name"; that "the processes of redemption extend to the world to come"--he had considered it a fault of Protestant theology that it limits redemption to this world--and that "sanctification is not complete at death." The general assembly, to which the case was appealed, suspended Dr Briggs [v.04 p.0566] in 1893, being influenced, it would seem, in part, by the manner and tone of his expressions--by what his own colleagues in the Union Theological Seminary called the "dogmatic and irritating" nature of his inaugural address. He was ordained a priest of the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1899. His scholarship procured for him the honorary degree of D.D. from Edinburgh (1884) and from Glasgow (1901), and that of Litt.D. from Oxford (1901). With S.R. Driver and Francis Brown he prepared a revised _Hebrew and English Lexicon_ (1891-1905), and with Driver edited the "International Commentary Series." His publications include _Biblical Study: Its Principles, Methods and History_ (1883); _Hebrew Poems of the Creation_ (1884); _American Presbyterianism: Its Origin and Early History_ (1885); _Messianic Prophecy_ (1886); _Whither? A Theological Question for the Times_ (1889); _The Authority of the Holy Scripture_ (1891); _The Bible, the Church and the Reason_ (1892); _The Higher Criticism of the Hexateuch_ (1893); _The Messiah of the Gospels_ (1804), _The Messiah of the Apostles_ (1894); _New Light on the Life of Jesus_ (1904); _The Ethical Teaching of Jesus_ (1904); _A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Psalms_ (2 vols., 1906-1907), in which he was assisted by his daughter; and _The Virgin Birth of Our Lord_ (1909).

BRIGGS, HENRY (1556-1630), English mathematician, was born at Warley Wood, near Halifax, in Yorkshire. He graduated at St John's College, Cambridge, in 1581, and obtained a fellowship in 1588. In 1592 he was made reader of the physical lecture founded by Dr Thomas Linacre, and in 1596 first professor of geometry in Gresham House (afterwards College), London. In his lectures at Gresham House he proposed the alteration of the scale of logarithms from the hyperbolic form which John Napier had given them, to that in which unity is assumed as the logarithm of the ratio of ten to one; and soon afterwards he wrote to the inventor on the subject. In 1616 he paid a visit to Napier at Edinburgh in order to discuss the suggested change; and next year he repeated his visit for a similar purpose. During these conferences the alteration proposed by Briggs was agreed upon; and on his return from his second visit to Edinburgh in 1617 he accordingly published the first chiliad of his logarithms. (See NAPIER, JOHN.) In 1619 he was appointed Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford, and resigned his professorship of Gresham College on the 25th of July 1620. Soon after his settlement at Oxford he was incorporated master of arts. In 1622 he published a small tract on the _North-West Passage to the South Seas, through the Continent of Virginia and Hudson's Bay_; and in 1624 his _Arithmetica Logarithmica_, in folio, a work containing the logarithms of thirty thousand natural numbers to fourteen places of figures besides the index. He also completed a table of logarithmic sines and tangents for the hundredth part of every degree to fourteen places of figures besides the index, with a table of natural sines to fifteen places, and the tangents and secants for the same to ten places; all of which were printed at Gouda in 1631 and published in 1633 under the title of _Trigonometria Britannica_ (see TABLE, MATHEMATICAL). Briggs died on the 26th of January 1630, and was buried in Merton College chapel, Oxford. Dr Smith, in his _Lives of the Gresham Professors_, characterizes him as a man of great probity, a contemner of riches, and contented with his own station, preferring a studious retirement to all the splendid circumstances of life.

His works are: _A Table to find the Height of the Pole, the Magnetical Declination being given_ (London, 1602, 4to); "Tables for the Improvement of Navigation," printed in the second edition of Edward Wright's treatise entitled _Certain Errors in Navigation detected and corrected_ (London, 1610, 4to); _A Description of an Instrumental Table to find the part proportional, devised by Mr Edward Wright_ (London, 1616 and 1618, 12mo); _Logarithmorum Chilias prima_ (London, 1617, 8vo); _Lucubrationes et Annotationes in opera posthuma J. Neperi_ (Edinburgh, 1619, 4to); _Euclidis Elementorum VI. libri priores_ (London, 1620. folio); _A Treatise on the North-West Passage to the South Sea_ (London, 1622, 4to), reprinted in Purchas's _Pilgrims_, vol. iii. p. 852; _Arithmetica Logarithmica_ (London, 1624, folio); _Trigonometria Britannica_ (Goudae, 1663, folio); two _Letters_ to Archbishop Usher; _Mathematica ab Antiquis minus cognita_. Some other works, as his _Commentaries on the Geometry of Peter Ramus_, and _Remarks on the Treatise of Longomontanus respecting the Quadrature of the Circle_, have not been published.

BRIGHOUSE, a municipal borough in the Elland parliamentary division of the West Riding of Yorkshire, England, 5½ m. N. of Huddersfield by the Lancashire & Yorkshire railway, on the river Calder. Pop. (1901) 21,735. It is in the heart of the manufacturing district of the West Riding, and has large woollen and worsted factories; carpets, machinery and soap are also produced. The town was incorporated in 1893, and is governed by a mayor, 8 aldermen and 24 councillors. Area, 2231 acres.

BRIGHT, SIR CHARLES TILSTON (1832-1888), English telegraph engineer, who came of an old Yorkshire family, was born on the 8th of June 1832, at Wanstead, Essex. At the age of fifteen he became a clerk under the Electric Telegraph Company. His talent for electrical engineering was soon shown, and his progress was rapid; so that in 1852 he was appointed engineer to the Magnetic Telegraph Company, and in that capacity superintended the laying of lines in various parts of the British Isles, including in 1853 the first cable between Great Britain and Ireland, from Portpatrick to Donaghadee. His experiments convinced him of the practicability of an electric submarine cable connexion between Ireland and America; and having in 1855 already discussed the question with Cyrus Field, who with J. W. Brett controlled the Newfoundland Telegraph Company on the other side of the ocean, Bright organized with them the Atlantic Telegraph Company in 1856 for the purpose of carrying out the idea, himself becoming engineer-in-chief. The story of the first Atlantic cable is told elsewhere (see TELEGRAPH), and it must suffice here to say that in 1858, after two disappointments, Bright successfully accomplished what to many had seemed an impossible feat, and within a few days of landing the Irish end of the line at Valentia he was knighted in Dublin. Subsequently Sir Charles Bright supervised the laying of submarine cables in various regions of the world, and took a leading part as pioneer in other developments of the electrical industry. In conjunction with Josiah Latimer Clark, with whom he entered into partnership in 1861, he invented improved methods of insulating submarine cables, and a paper on electrical standards read by them before the British Association in the same year led to the establishment of the British Association committee on that subject, whose work formed the foundations of the system still in use. From 1865 to 1868 he was Liberal M.P. for Greenwich. He died on the 3rd of May 1888, at Abbey Wood, near London.

See _Life Story of Sir C. T. Bright_, by his son Charles Bright (revised ed. 1908).

BRIGHT, JOHN (1811-1889), British statesman, was born at Rochdale on the 16th of November 1811. His father, Jacob Bright, was a much-respected Quaker, who had started a cottonmill at Rochdale in 1809. The family had reached Lancashire by two migrations. Abraham Bright was a Wiltshire yeoman, who, early in the 18th century, removed to Coventry, where his descendants remained, and where, in 1775, Jacob Bright was born. Jacob Bright was educated at the Ackworth school of the Society of Friends, and was apprenticed to a fustian manufacturer at New Mills. He married his employer's daughter, and settled with his two brothers-in-law at Rochdale in 1802, going into business for himself seven years later. His first wife died without children, and in 1809 he married Martha Wood, daughter of a tradesman of Bolton-le-Moors. She had been educated at Ackworth school, and was a woman of great strength of character and refined taste. There were eleven children of this marriage, of whom John Bright was the second, but the death of his elder brother in childhood made him the eldest son. He was a delicate child, and was sent as a day-scholar to a boarding-school near his home, kept by Mr William Littlewood. A year at the Ackworth school, two years at a school at York, and a year and a half at Newton, near Clitheroe, completed his education. He learned, he himself said, but little Latin and Greek, but acquired a great love of English literature, which his mother fostered, and a love of outdoor pursuits. In his sixteenth year he entered his father's mill, and in due time became a partner in the business. Two agitations were then going on in Rochdale--the first (in which Jacob Bright was a leader) in opposition to a local [v.04 p.0567] church-rate, and the second for parliamentary reform, by which Rochdale successfully claimed to have a member allotted to it under the Reform Bill. In both these movements John Bright took part. He was an ardent Nonconformist, proud to number among his ancestors John Gratton, a friend of George Fox, and one of the persecuted and imprisoned preachers of the Society of Friends. His political interest was probably first kindled by the Preston election in 1830, in which Lord Stanley, after a long struggle, was defeated by "Orator" Hunt. But it was as a member of the Rochdale Juvenile Temperance Band that he first learned public speaking. These young men went out into the villages, borrowed a chair of a cottager, and spoke from it at open-air meetings. In Mrs John Mills's life of her husband is an account of John Bright's first extempore speech. It was at a temperance meeting. Bright got his notes muddled, and broke down. The chairman gave out a temperance song, and during the singing told Bright to put his notes aside and say what came into his mind. Bright obeyed, began with much hesitancy, but found his tongue and made an excellent address. On some early occasions, however, he committed his speech to memory. In 1832 he called on the Rev. John Aldis, an eminent Baptist minister, to accompany him to a local Bible meeting. Mr Aldis described him as a slender, modest young gentleman, who surprised him by his intelligence and thoughtfulness, but who seemed nervous as they walked to the meeting together. At the meeting he made a stimulating speech, and on the way home asked for advice. Mr Aldis counselled him not to learn his speeches, but to write out and commit to memory certain passages and the peroration. Bright took the advice, and acted on it all his life.