Part 3

The Greek letters were used by the Druids for keeping the public or private records, the only matters which they reduced to writing. The Druid schools and seminaries were held in the caves such as we have already described, or in the recesses of the sacred groves and forests of Britain. The most eminent academy is said to have been in the Isle of Anglesey, near the residence of the Arch-Druid; and there are still two spots there called "the Place of Studies," and "the Astronomer's Circle." The British youth, separated from their parents, were under Druidical instruction until they were fourteen, and no one was capable of a public employment who had not been educated by a Druid. The Roman invasion, however, greatly improved the Druidical plan of instruction; since Julius Agricola was careful that the sons of the principal Britons should be taught the liberal sciences. His endeavours were considerably assisted by the expulsion of the Druids, which took place about this period; and also by the ability of the British youth, whom he declared to excel the Roman. The ranks of the priests were recruited from the noblest families of the early Britons: their education, which often extended over a period of twenty years, comprehended the whole sciences of the age; and beside their sacred calling, they were invested with power to decide civil disputes. Their dwellings and temples were situated in the thickest oak groves, which were sacred to the Supreme Deity.

No sculptured stones or storied bricks have ever been found of this period; nothing but weapons of stone, of bronze, and lastly, of iron, remain to attest the slow progress of a rude people towards a higher stage of civilization, in the arts relating to the chase and to war. As the Gauls used to ornament their shields and helmets with brass images of animals and horns, it is not improbable that some rude endeavour decorated the armour of the Britons. Whatever their skill might be, it was, doubtless, greatly improved by the Romans, since their bas-reliefs and effigies have been found in different parts of the kingdom; and as early as A.D. 61, not twenty years after the invasion of Claudius Cæsar, a statue of Liberty was erected at Camulodunum, or Colchester.

The early custom of painting the body has been incidentally mentioned. The Southern Britons stained their bodies with woad, deep blue, or a general tint; the Northern Britons added something of design by tracing upon their limbs figures of herbs, flowers, and trees, and all kinds of animals. It is doubtful whether in these arts they were improved by the Romans; since the delineation of deities, which Gildas mentions, on the walls of the British houses, are said by him only to resemble demons.

Although Cæsar describes the natives of Britain as a hardy race of shepherds, whose simple wants were provided for in their own country, even then the commerce of Britain was of considerable importance; since the tin of Cornwall, and the hides of the vast flocks of cattle, had already induced the merchants of Phoenicia to visit and settle on our southern shores. They are believed to have supplied the Eastern world with Cornish tin, of such important use in the manufacture of bronze tools, weapons, and helmets of antiquity.[6]

The principal and most ancient exports from Britain were, besides its famous tin, lead and copper; but lime and chalk, salt, corn, cattle, skins, earthenware, horses, staves, and native dogs, which appear always to have been held in great estimation, were also carried thence. The largest and finest pearls, too, are said to have been found on the British coasts; and the wicker baskets of Britain are celebrated by Martial and Juvenal as luxuries in Rome. And from Rome, the Britons received ivory, bridles, gold chains, amber cups, and drinking glasses.

There are few remains of the ornaments in use amongst the Britons at a very early period: there are many relics, however, of that just preceding the Roman Conquest. We find torques or chains for the neck and wrists coarsely manufactured, like curb-chains. Beads were also in use. Many of the most ancient ornaments were cruciform. With the Roman Conquest came in the Roman ornamentation. This does not seem to have been modified by its introduction into Britain. The Romans imported Rome bodily into Britain, as was their custom in all the conquered countries, and the Britons were too uncivilized to make improvements on what was presented to them. For this reason it is that there is the greatest difficulty to distinguish between pure Roman and Anglo-Roman ornaments.

That the Britons both understood and practised the art of working in metals, is ascertained from the relics of their weapons, as axes, spear and arrow heads, swords, &c. which are yet extant; and it is supposed that tin was the first ore which they discovered and refined. Lead they found in great abundance, very near the surface. The British iron was of uncommon occurrence, and was much prized, since it was used in personal ornaments, and was even formed into rings and tallies for money. This then precious metal has contributed more than any other to the greatness of England in those mighty works of our own times, her railways and vast ships of passage and war.

All the Britons, except the Druids, were trained early to war. Their most ancient weapons were bows, reed-arrows with flint or bone heads, quivers of basket-work, oaken spears; and flint battle-axes, which are now considered to have been called _celts_, though there is no connexion between this word and the name of the nation, Celtæ. The British forces included infantry, cavalry, and such as fought from war-chariots. The southern foot soldiers wore a coarse woollen tunic, and over it a cloak reaching below the middle, the legs and thighs being covered with close garments. They had brass helmets, breastplates full of hooks, and long swords suspended from an iron or brazen girdle. They also carried large darts, with iron shafts eighteen inches long; and shields of wicker or wood. The inland foot soldiers were more lightly armed, with spears and small shields, and dressed in skins of oxen. The Caledonians and other northerns usually fought naked, with only a light target; their weapons pointless swords and short spears. The British cavalry were mounted upon small but strong horses, without saddles, and their arms were mostly the same as those of the infantry. The soldiers of the war-chariots were mostly the chiefs of the nation, and the flower of the British youth. Their chariots were of wicker, upon wooden wheels, with hooks and scythe blades of bronze attached to the axles, with which the charioteer mowed down the enemy. Other chariots contained several persons, who darted lances; both machines broke the hostile ranks, and threw an army into confusion. Their number must have been very great; since Cassibellaunus, after he had disbanded his army, had still 4,000 remaining.

Primitive British vessels have occasionally been found embedded in morasses. In 1866, there was discovered at Warningcamp, about a mile from South Stoke, in Sussex, a canoe, in widening a ditch, or sewer, which empties itself into the river Arun: although now narrow, it appears to have been, until recently, of much greater extent, and at one time must have formed an important estuary of the river, for in the soil are now seen several thousands of shells of fresh-water fish. About four feet beneath the surface the end of the canoe was found. It proved to be 13-1/2 feet long, and consisted of the hollowed trunk of an oak tree; but bears evidence of design, for having insertions cut on the edge, in which it is evident three seats had been secured for the boatmen. It is perhaps not so interesting as the canoe discovered at Stoke about twenty years ago, and now in the British Museum, because it is not so perfect. Still, it would appear of the greatest antiquity, from its extremely rude form. The canoe is the general vessel of New Zealand, the present state and people of which country are thought to exhibit more nearly than any other land the condition of Britain when the Romans entered it nearly eighteen centuries since.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] It must have been a proud day for John Aubrey, the Wiltshire antiquary, when he attended Charles II. and the Duke of York on their visit to Abury, which the King was told at a meeting of the Royal Society, in 1663 (soon after its formation), as much excelled Stonehenge as a cathedral does a parish church. In leaving Abury, the King "cast his eie on Silbury Hill, about a mile off," and with the Duke of York, Dr. Charlton, and Aubrey, he walked up to the top of it. Dr. Stukeley, in his account of Abury, published in 1743, probably refers to another royal visit, when he notes: "Some old people remember Charles II., the Duke of York, and the Duke of Monmouth, _riding_ up Silbury Hill."

[5] See Apsley Pellatt's _Curiosities of Glass-Making_, 1849.

[6] This is a much contested question among ethnologists and other authors. Mr. Craufurd and Sir George Cornewall Lewis totally disbelieve in the voyage of the Phoenicians to the Scilly Islands, through which they are imagined to have supplied the Eastern world with Cornish tin; since they are not likely to have performed the requisite voyage from the entrance of the Mediterranean, 1,000 miles in a straight line over a stormy sea; but Sir Charles Lyell considers it would have been much safer for the Phoenicians to come round by sea than trust their cargoes through Gaul, then not sufficiently safe to be a highway for trade. Nor is there any tin in the Scilly Islands; but Sir Henry James shows that the Cassiterides, where the tin was obtained, is St. Michael's Mount. Sir Henry has recently found in the bed of the harbour of Falmouth an ancient wrecked ingot of tin, of precisely that shape and weight which would adapt it as half-cargo for a horse, balanced by a similar ingot on the other side. The metal was thus conveyed along our southern coast to a favourable place for embarkation, whence the cargoes crossed the Channel and were taken overland through Gaul to the Mediterranean. The ingot discovered at Falmouth resembled in form an _astragalus_ or knuckle-bone, the shape being convenient for slinging over the back of a horse; and it is important to notice that Diodorus Siculus uses the term _astragali_ in describing the shape of the tin-blocks brought from the island of Ictis, which there could be no doubt was the same as St. Michael's Mount. The ingot weighs 120 pounds, and the form of the under-surface is such as to adapt it for resting on the bottom of a boat. Sir Henry believes, with Sir Charles Lyell, that in more ancient times, previous to the Roman occupation of Gaul, tin was conveyed to the Mediterranean round the coasts of Gaul and Lusitania; but more recently, as Diodorus Siculus states, it was carried by land after crossing the narrow part of the Channel. The miners of the present day sometimes find bronze weapons in old tin-works. It is not necessary to assume that these were imported, as there is plenty of copper in Cornwall. It is believed they were manufactured there, and that a vast proportion of the bronze weapons of antiquity were actually made in Cornwall and exported.

THE ROMANS IN ENGLAND.

"The Romans in England they once did sway."

OLD SONG.

Archæological information obtained of late years shows that at the time of the Roman invasion, there was a larger amount of civilization in Ancient Britain than had been generally supposed: that in addition to the knowledge of the old inhabitants in agriculture, in the training and rearing of horses, cows, and other domestic animals, they were able to work in mines, had skill in the construction of war-chariots and other carriages, and in the manufacture of metals; and there is evidence that British manufactures and materials were exported to certain parts of the Continent, probably in British vessels. The ancient coinage of this period is also well worthy of attention.

In connexion with the Ancient British period, it would seem that probably 2,000 years before the Roman times there had been in Great Britain a certain degree of civilization, which from various causes declined in extent. If Stonehenge may be considered as of the same antiquity as similar remains in various parts of the East--which are reckoned by good authorities to be 4,000 years old--we had in this country a degree of civilization which was contemporary with the prosperous period of the Egyptian empire; and, in times more immediately preceding the Roman occupation, we know that Britain was the grand source of Druidical illumination (whatever relation that may have had to a true civilization) to the whole of Continental Europe.

That the Ancient Britons, even after they were conquered by the Romans, had still a strength considered dangerous, is shown by the fact that upwards of forty barbarian legions which had followed the Roman standards were settled chiefly upon the northern and eastern coasts; and it is shown that a force of about 19,200 Roman foot and 1,700 horse was required to secure peace, and the carrying out of certain laws in the island.

The encampments, Roman and British, are thus described. In the Roman camp, the plan is invariably the same--a rectangular area, surrounded by a ditch, the earth thrown inwards, forming a high mound, defended on the top with wooden palisades, but of these all vestiges have disappeared: in the middle of each side the entrance, from which a way led to the opposite gate; and at or near the outer action of the two ways, was the Prætorium, the remains of which may frequently be traced. These camps are not usually found on very high hills. The Britons, on the other hand, always occupied the highest ground, frequently an isolated hill, which they surrounded with deep trenches and a series of low terraces scooped out of the side of the hill, rising one above another, not in an unbroken line, but forming, in some places, a network of flat forms, commanding every approach to the entrances, with advantageous positions for the sling, in the use of which the Britons peculiarly excelled. Every inequality of the ground was taken advantage of: the entrances sometimes opened into one of the trenches, through which the approach to the interior leads, so as to expose an enemy to an overwhelming storm of darts and stones from the heights above.

Our early historians mention four great roads by which South Britain was traversed, and these usually have been considered as the work of its conquerors; but recent researches have led to the conclusion that the Romans only kept in repair, and perhaps improved, the roads which they found in use on their settlement in the island. Along the course of the great roads, or in their immediate vicinity, are found the principal cities, which, in pursuance of their usual policy, the Romans either founded or re-edified; and to which, according to the privilege bestowed, the various names were given of colonies, municipalities, stipendiary, and Latian cities. Many other Roman roads exist.

"The old British roads, or trackways, were not paved or gravelled, but had a basis of turf, and wound along the tops or sides of the chains of hills which lay in their way. Surrey furnishes a remarkable example of such an appropriation of one of its chalk ridges; and it may be inferred that the agger called the Hog's Back presented to the earliest inhabitants of Britain a natural causeway of solid chalk, covered with a soft verdant turf, peculiarly suited to the traffic of the British chariots, and connecting the western Belgæ with the Cantii, and affording through them an access towards the continent at all seasons of the year. These advantageous peculiarities, no doubt, rendered it the grand strategic route by which an invading army would have penetrated to the westward; and Vespasian may be supposed, with great reason, to have marched along it."[7]

To return to the Roman Roads. Although inferior to the Britons of the nineteenth century in the art of spending money, if judged by the present state of science, the Roman road-makers could not be despicable engineers: their levels were chosen on different principles, but their lines of roads passed through the same counties, and generally in the same direction as our railways. A diagram in the _Quarterly Review_, exhibiting a general view of the direction of the principal Roman roads in England, shows that, on comparing one or two of our principal lines, we shall find, that the Great Western supplies the place, with a little deviation near Reading, of the Roman _iter_ from London to Bath and Bristol; the Liverpool and Manchester, and on to Leeds and York, replaces the northern Watling-street; the Great Eastern follows a Roman way, and so of the rest.[8]

Professor Phillips has thus strikingly illustrated this comparison to be made in the North of England. "As now two railways, so a little earlier two mail-roads, and far earlier two British tracks, conducted the traveller from South Britain through the sterner country of the North. This is the inevitable result of the great anticlinal ridge of stratified rocks--our Pennine Alps--thrown up from Derbyshire to the Scottish Border. This is the 'heaven water' boundary of the river drainages: on the west of it ran the line of road northward from Mancunium; on the east of it the line from Eburacum; the former nearly in the course of the North-eastern, the latter not lately deviating from the North-eastern rail. Along these routes Agricola divided his troops: these were the routes followed alike by the Pict and Scot, Plantagenet and Tudor, Cavalier and Roundhead. Wade lay on the east of these mountains, while the Stuart overran their western slopes: and Rupert swept up the western tract to surprise the besiegers of York."[9] On the whole it appears that the lines of the earlier British roads were indicated by the great features of nature; and that, for the most part, the Roman ways followed and straightened the old tracks.

"It is equally remarkable and significant that the Roman municipia and coloniæ became the centres of Saxon and Anglican strength; and if in this day of the steam-engine their relative importance is less conspicuous, it is still a matter of English history. From the top of the Brigantian mountain we may reanimate the busy world which has long passed away from life: the jealous boundaries of propriety disappear; the chimneys vanish; the thundering hammer is silent. From the midst of boundless forests of oak and pine, rise many peaks or bare summits of heaths crowned with monumental stones or burial mounds. The rivers gliding through the deepest shade, bear at intervals the light wicker boat, still frequent in Dyfed, loaded with fish, or game, or fruit. On dry banks above are the conical huts of the rude hunters, and near them the not narrower houses of the dead,--perhaps not far off the cave of the wolf. Lower down the dale, the richest of pastures is covered with the fairest of cattle and the most active of horses. Still lower, the storehouse of the tribe, the water station to which large canoes, hollowed from the mighty oaks of Hatfield Chase, have brought from the Humber the highly-prized beads and amulets, perhaps the precious bronze which is to replace the arrow, spear, and axe of stone.

"Both north and south of the Humber very different scenes appear on the high and open Wold: within the memory of man, many parts of these wild regions were untouched by plough, traversed by bustard, and covered with innumerable flocks. The more we reflect on the remains which crowd this region--the numerous tracks, the countless tumuli, the frequent dykes--the clearer grows the resemblance between the Yorkshire Wolds and the Downs of Wilts and Dorset. On opening the tumuli we discover similar ornaments, and from whatever cause, consanguinity of race, or analogy of employments and way of life, the earliest people must be allowed to have been very much the same along the dry chalk hills from the vicinity of Bridlington to the country of Dorchester. This is the region of the tumuli: on its surface are not unfrequent foundations of the British huts."

The main population did not reside on these hills, since they are for miles naturally dry. But, from below their edge rise innumerable bright streams, by which, "no doubt, were the settled habitations, the Cyttian of the early Britons, followed by the Saxon _tun_ and the Danish _by_; on the hills above were long boundary fences, and within these the raths and tumuli, the monumental stones and idols. In situations where nature gave peculiar advantages, one of the grand manufactures of the tribes was established. The fabrication of pottery, from the Kimmeridge clay about Malton, was undoubtedly very extensive in British days, and characteristic both as to substance and fashion; that of bricks and tiles at York was equally considerable in Roman days, and it is curious to walk now into the large brick-yards and potteries which are successfully conducted at these same places, on the very sites which furnished the funeral urn, and the perforated tube which distributed air from the hypocaust."

We may acquire some idea of Roman road-making from the following details:--"From the wall of Antoninus to Rome, and from thence to Jerusalem, that is, from the north-west to the south-east point of the empire, was measured a distance of 3,740 English miles; of this distance 85 miles only were sea-passages, the rest was the _road of polished silex_. Posts were established along these lines of high road, so that 100 miles a day might be with ease accomplished. A fact related by Pliny affords an example of the quickest travelling in a carriage in ancient times. Tiberius Nero, with three carriages, accomplished a journey of 200 miles in twenty-four hours, when he went to see his brother Drusus, who was sick in Germany." (_Burgess._)

The towns, and forts, and roads are, however, very far from being the only traces of Roman occupation that remain in our country. Camps, occupying well-chosen positions, occur in numbers, which testify the difficulty with which the subjugation of the island was accomplished; while the remains of stately buildings, with ornamented baths, mosaic pavements, fresco paintings and statuary, and articles of personal ornament, which are discovered almost every time that the earth is uncovered to any considerable depth, prove the eventual wide diffusion of the elegant and luxurious mode of life which it was the aim of the conquerors to introduce. Roman glass and pottery, in great variety, and frequently of the most elegant shape, abound; but the most valuable are the sepulchral urns, which betoken the neighbourhood of towns, of which perhaps no other traces now remain.

At Aldborough, in Yorkshire (the Roman Isurium), and in some of the small towns on the line of Hadrian's wall, in Northumberland, masses of the small houses have been uncovered, and their appearance leads us to believe that the houses of a Roman town in Britain were grouped thickly together; that they were mostly separated by narrow alleys, and that there were in general few streets of any magnitude; most ancient towns, even in the present day, abound with alleys.