V. THE EARLY IRON AGE…

V. THE EARLY IRON AGE

[Sidenote: Iron probably introduced into Britain by Gallic invaders.]

Iron-working was of course familiar to the people of the Mediterranean and even to the continental Celts long before it was introduced into Britain;[966] but, it need scarcely be said, everywhere until the Middle Ages, the metal was not cast, but only wrought. Not far from Hallstatt, the only place in Europe where the gradual transition from the use of bronze to that of iron can be traced, were the iron mines of Noreia, which were certainly worked at a very early period, and from which, some archaeologists still insist, the use of iron spread to all European lands.[967] Since iron tools and weapons of the later Hallstatt type, ranging from about the beginning of the sixth to the end of the fifth century before the Christian era, are almost entirely wanting in Britain, the earliest products of our Iron Age can hardly be older than the later of these dates. Were they introduced by immigrants or in the ordinary course of trade? Among the round barrows on the Yorkshire Wolds are two, situated in the parish of Cowlam, each of which contained the skeleton of a woman. The appearance of these mounds was not different from that of many others, most of which belonged to the Bronze Age and a few perhaps to that of stone: the skeletons were interred in the contracted position which had been common for many centuries; and the pottery exactly resembled the domestic pottery which is associated with bronze. The practised explorer who opened the barrows confessed that but for the presence of a brooch and certain ornaments of the Iron Age he would unhesitatingly have assigned them to the older period; and he accordingly concluded that no new people had come in with iron.[968] But the conclusion is not warranted except perhaps for the particular district to which these graves belong. The use of iron might have spread by barter to Yorkshire after it had been introduced by new-comers into lands nearer Gaul; and the prevalent opinion is that it was introduced about the beginning of the fourth century before Christ by Gallic invaders who spoke a Brythonic dialect.[969]

[Sidenote: The Belgae preceded by other Brythons, who began to arrive about 400 B.C.]

Caesar knew nothing of any Gallic invaders of Britain except the Belgae, who, as he gathered, inhabited the maritime districts, evidently of the south-east and south: the people of the interior, according to his informants, were aborigines. This statement, however, made no distinction between the real aborigines and the round-headed immigrants who found them in possession. It is impossible to say certainly which of the tribes in Caesar’s time were Belgic, except the Belgae, the Catuvellauni, and the Atrebates, none of whom possessed territory north of the basin of the Thames;[970] but the names of tribes and of places mentioned by Ptolemy and other late writers show that the greater part of England and Wales and at least a considerable part of Southern Scotland were in the first century of the Roman occupation inhabited by Brythons; and it is morally certain that they did not arrive after Caesar’s departure. Evidently, therefore, the Belgae had been preceded by other Brythons. But when did the first Belgic invaders appear? Those who are not content to take on trust the widely different dates which have been assigned by archaeologists will find that it is impossible to achieve any definite result. Dr. Arthur Evans has at different times conjectured that the invasion began about two hundred,[971] about one hundred and fifty,[972] and about three hundred years before the birth of Christ.[973] It would appear, however, from the time that must have been required for the gradual evolution of the successive types of British coins which will be noticed hereafter, that the prototype was introduced not less than a century and a half, possibly two centuries, before the Christian era; but it is impossible to prove, though it is generally assumed, that money was coined by the first Belgic invaders. The date of the commencement of the earlier Brythonic invasion is equally uncertain. It is now provisionally fixed about 400 B.C.[974]

[Sidenote: Ethnology of the invaders.]

Classical writers are practically unanimous in describing Celts as a tall stalwart people with fair or red hair; and physical anthropology confirms the general accuracy of their statements. But this science shows that the Celts, Goidelic and Brythonic, who successively invaded Gaul were mixed themselves, and that the population whom they found there were composed of two intermingled elements--a small dark people who resembled the older neolithic inhabitants of our own islands, and a short sturdy people, also dark but round-skulled, who began to enter Gaul in the Neolithic Age. Doubtless the Belgae as well as the earlier Brythonic invaders of Britain were an amalgam of all these elements, the tall red Celts whose ancestors had introduced the Celtic language into Gaul being the most conspicuous. But it is remarkable that although Strabo emphasizes the great stature of the Britons, such sepulchral evidence as we possess does not bear out his description. The skeletons of the Early Iron Age that have been exhumed in Britain are mainly those of small or middle-sized men, who to an untrained eye seem hardly distinguishable from the neolithic race, but whose skulls, although they too are long and narrow, generally differ from theirs in the sight of an expert. Even the skeletons that have been found interred with war-chariots are unlike those of the cemeteries of North-Eastern Gaul. Unfortunately the chariot-burials of Britain are very few: many of the later British interments of the Early Iron Age were made by cremation; and it can only be concluded that the evidence which might have enabled us to recognize the Celtic conquerors of the classical type has perished or has not yet come to light.[975]

[Sidenote: The order in which the various tribes arrived unknown.]

Attempts, based upon the geographical positions of the various Brythonic tribes, as they were defined by Caesar, Ptolemy, and other ancient writers, have been made to determine the order in which they arrived. Thus it has been supposed that the Britanni, coming from the country near the mouth of the Somme, crossed the Straits and took possession of Kent; that the Atrebates sailed up Southampton Water and pushed inland till they reached those parts of Hampshire and Berkshire in which they were afterwards found; that the Trinovantes, who in Caesar’s time occupied Essex, steered for the mouth of the Thames; that the Catuvellauni, arriving a little later, were obliged to move higher up the valley and content themselves with parts of Middlesex, Hertfordshire, and Oxfordshire; that the Eceni, whose settlements were in East Anglia, came later still; and after them the Coritani, who dwelled beyond the Wash, the Parisi, who seized the region of the Humber, and the Brigantes, who held the greater part of Yorkshire and Durham. The Cornavii of Cheshire and Derbyshire, whose name seems to mean the inhabitants of the horn or peninsula, are accordingly assumed to have landed between the Mersey and the Dee. Last of all, we are told, came the Votadini, who took to themselves the tract between the Tyne and the Firth of Forth.[976]

It would be surprising if these conjectures did not attain some measure of truth; but those who will not accept guesses even from the highest authority without testing them will perceive that they bristle with difficulties. It is not certain that the obscure Britanni, who are known to history only as a Gaulish tribe and are not even mentioned by Caesar, ever invaded Britain at all: the same writer who tells us that they were the first comers tells us also that they were Belgic, and that the Belgae were preceded by other Brythons;[977] and the Belgae, although they were last in the field, were not forced to seek distant abodes, but conquered the best parts of the country which were nearest to the Continent. We know nothing and can learn nothing of the history of the Belgic or the earlier Brythonic settlements.

[Sidenote: ‘Late Celtic’ art.]

The Brythonic invaders introduced the first beginnings of the so-called Late Celtic art, which, remotely connected with that of Central and Southern Europe, attained its highest development in the British Isles. It was partly an outgrowth of the culture which on the Continent is called after the Helvetian settlement of La Tène, a village built on piles in a bay of the lake of Neuchâtel. This culture, which owed much to that of Hallstatt, has also been traced to classical and even to Oriental sources; but in the century which preceded the Roman conquest of Britain, while the Continent was dominated by the influence of Rome, its offspring asserted its own individuality.[978] The Belgic conquest, which brought Britain into closer connexion with the Continent, gave a powerful impetus to the spread of Late Celtic art. The study of its details and of the evolution of its various types belongs to archaeology; but a general knowledge of its main features is essential to the understanding of British history.

Late Celtic works of art are in general as easily recognized as those of the Bronze Age, although only an expert could assign a given specimen to its proper period; but they are far more difficult to describe. While the chevron is the characteristic feature of the older culture, that of the younger is the curve. Rectilinear patterns, inherited from the Bronze Age, appear on many Late Celtic objects, but generally combined with those of curvilinear form.[979] Anthropomorphic and zoomorphic designs occasionally occur; and although the examples which best illustrate this tendency--two bronze-mounted buckets found at Marlborough[980] and Aylesford[981]--were imported from Gaul, a bronze shield, dredged up from the river Witham, which is decorated with the figure of a boar, was undoubtedly of British workmanship.[982] Geometrical designs are associated with representations of natural forms; and in certain cases one may see the latter becoming so conventionalized that they are tending to pass into the former. The scroll-like curves which hang from the mouths of the pair of confronted animals on the Marlborough bucket represent twigs on which they are supposed to have been browsing: certain scabbards are embellished with undulating curves, of which the original motive was an attempt to depict foliage; and everywhere the effect of successive copying was to transmute forms suggested by nature into sinuous lines, the origin of which is veiled by their very beauty. The ultimate result was a system of decoration which has been likened to the flamboyant,--the flame-like tracery of decadent French Gothic architecture.[983]

[Sidenote: Coral and enamel.]

The Late Celtic artist was not content with merely devising graceful lines on metal, wood, or earthenware: he often adorned his creations with coral and enamel. Coral, which was imported from the islands of Hyères, was no longer used in Gaul after the middle of the third century before our era; but in this country it remained in vogue until a much later period.[984] The art of enamelling, which had been practised long before in the Caucasus, was already known in Gaul before coral fell into disuse. The centre of the industry was the Aeduan town of Bibracte, on Mont Beuvray near Autun, where the crucibles, moulds, and polishing-stones of the workers have been discovered; but the enamellers of Britain elaborated the art to a far higher pitch of perfection. Enamels of many colours were produced at a late stage, but in pre-Roman times only red.[985] Originally, as on a bronze helmet found in the Thames by Waterloo Bridge, the enamel was let into parallel or crossed grooves scored on the surface of the metal;[986] but afterwards, by the champlevé process, a bed was scooped out for the reception of the fused material, and thus, by the covering of larger surfaces, the brilliancy of the effect was enhanced. The earlier British enamels, which show no vestiges of Roman influence, are found principally upon bridle-bits and harness-rings.[987]

[Sidenote: Swords and scabbards.]

But Late Celtic art may be studied on many other objects besides those which have been already mentioned. Though British swords of the Early Iron Age are rare, and belong for the most part to dates subsequent to the Belgic invasion, a beautiful specimen of La Tène type was found in its bronze sheath in the village-stronghold of Hunsbury near Northampton;[988] and several have been recovered from the Thames, the scabbard of one being ornamented with a basket-pattern and open-work and an S-shaped scroll, another with transverse bars like examples from La Tène and Somme Bionne.[989] Late Celtic swords, which invariably had bronze handles,[990] were not, like those of the Bronze Age, leaf-shaped: their edges were nearly straight, and only tapered slightly near the point. Some late specimens, more than three feet long and with blunt points, intended not for thrusting but cutting, correspond to the description of Tacitus;[991] but others are much shorter. A dagger-sheath, found in Oxfordshire, is noticeable for its unusual decoration,--minute punched ornament between two pairs of ribs, which follow the outline of the edge, and not a single curve;[992] while a scabbard from the Thames at Wandsworth is adorned with mock spirals and lozenges enclosed between parallel ribs.[993]

[Sidenote: Mirrors.]

The reader who has been taught to regard his British forefathers as savages would not expect to find that they used mirrors; but although some of those whose pre-Roman age is certain are quite plain, a beautiful specimen which was found at Trelan Bahow in Cornwall, where to the last Roman influence was hardly felt, is probably representative of many which were made in the century before the Roman conquest, even though its own date may be later than the time of Claudius. Unlike the primitive mirrors, which were of iron mounted with bronze, it is made entirely of the brighter metal, and ornamented on the back with three circles, which enclose patterns of engraved scroll-work, filled with cross-hatching.[994]

[Sidenote: Brooches and pins.]

The fibula or brooch--the prototype of the modern safety-pin--which had come into use on the Continent in the earliest period of the Hallstatt culture, was not known in our island before the Iron Age. Brooches of the successive La Tène types, in all of which the pin was straight and the body curved like a bow, have been found in considerable numbers; one of the earliest, from Water Eaton in Oxfordshire, being engraved with scrolls and the familiar ring-and-dot pattern, while another, from Avebury, was set with coral.[995] Some brooches discovered in the stronghold of Hod Hill, near Blandford, had been modelled upon an Italian pattern of much earlier date.[996] Pins, however, were still used for fastening the dress. Plain ones, which may be as old as the fourth century before Christ, have been found at Hagbourne Hill in Berkshire, and on the site of a pile-dwelling at Hammersmith, and others, which are hardly distinguishable in shape from a modern scarf-pin and belong to the period immediately preceding the coming of the Romans, in various parts of Scotland;[997] but one which lay among the relics in a grave near Driffield was far more elaborately designed, its head being a miniature chariot-wheel with four spokes, curiously inlaid with shell.[998]

[Sidenote: Ornaments.]

Of our Late Celtic ornaments many are undatable; and while the torques and richly decorated collars which are familiar to all antiquarians are common in early Gaulish graves, those of this country which are most characteristic of Late Celtic art appear to belong to the Roman period:[999] but bronze bracelets set with paste were worn even in Yorkshire; and a penannular bracelet with small tooth-like projections, which closely resembles far earlier specimens from Hallstatt, belongs to the same district.[1000] Of less costly trinkets lathe-turned bangles of Kimmeridge shale,[1001] glass armlets,[1002] and glass beads[1003] can hardly perhaps be classified as works of art; but it is noteworthy that the beads, yellow, green, and blue, with their zigzag patterns and wavy white lines, which have been found at Glastonbury and in Yorkshire barrows, are utterly different from those of the Bronze Age, and belong mainly to a late period of the La Tène culture, though some had analogues in the cemetery of Hallstatt. As Glastonbury has also yielded pieces of glass slag and of crucibles, the beads were probably manufactured on the spot.[1004] For some reason which has not been explained gold ornaments were apparently far rarer both in this country and in Gaul than in the preceding period.[1005]

[Sidenote: Woodwork.]

Among the finest examples of woodwork are bronze-mounted tankards which have been found in Suffolk[1006] and Merionethshire,[1007] the former being ornamented with circles enclosed between bronze bands, and each containing the mystic three-limbed figure, called the triskele, which seems to have been akin to the swastika; while the handle of the latter is notable for its flamboyant tracery. Specimens of a different kind include a beautiful bowl from Glastonbury, the sweeping curves incised on its surface expanding into circles and trumpet-like projections which enclose diagonal cross-hatching, and a rectangular object from the same site, which has no curves but is engraved with a step-like pattern shaded with cross-hatching of double diagonals.[1008]

[Sidenote: Pottery.]

Not less interesting is the Late Celtic pottery, which is generally very different from that of the Bronze Age, and the distinctive forms of which were first classified a few years ago by the explorer of the cemetery at Aylesford. Since then numerous examples of the same types have been found in other parts of Kent and in Essex; but the influence was felt as far north as Northamptonshire, and as far west as Dorsetshire. These vessels were turned upon the wheel and were much finer in quality than those of the Bronze Age. The most characteristic of the cinerary urns, which in outline may be likened to a truncated pear, stand upon narrow pedestals and are generally divided into zones by ridges and corresponding grooves; while a few are incised on the bottom with concentric circles. They closely resemble urns found in Belgic cemeteries near St. Valéry-sur-Somme and in the lower valley of the Seine, which are nearly contemporary with them, belonging to the latest period of Gallic independence; but vases of the same form had been deposited three centuries earlier in the cemetery of Somme-Bionne, where the bodies had all been simply interred, whereas the urns of Aylesford were filled with cremated bones. The type, however, was not indigenous in Gaul. Its descent has been traced to vessels of earthenware found in North Italian graves of the fifth and fourth centuries before Christ, which were in their turn derived from bronze vases common on both shores of the Northern Adriatic. The cordons on the bronze vessels were simply survivals of wooden rings that compacted a frame of staves to which metal plates had been riveted.[1009]

Pedestalled vases were not the only pottery found at Aylesford and the analogous sites. There were others, bowl-shaped or with low globular bodies, some of which were also cordoned, while a few had the triangular decoration characteristic of the Bronze Age.

Domestic vessels of wholly different forms have also been recovered, some with handles on either side, and perforated bases, which were perhaps used for draining honey-combs, and others which are more easily recognized as Late Celtic by their flamboyant decoration. A fragment of this ware was taken from the same cavern near Torquay which had been used as a dwelling-place in palaeolithic times. Household pottery was still commonly made by hand; and while some specimens were without any ornament, others had rectilinear patterns of such a kind that, but for the associations in which they were found, they would have been referred unhesitatingly to the Age of Bronze.[1010]

[Sidenote: The noblest creation of Late Celtic art.]

If archaeologists were invited to name the noblest creation of Late Celtic art, I think that with one consent they would point to the bronze shield which was lost in the Thames, and found after it had lain there some nineteen hundred years. Oblong with rounded ends and gently contracted in the middle, the outline forming an endless curve, it is adorned with three successive circles of repoussé work, a large central one and two smaller, connected by sinuous lines, within which lesser circles are contained. The central piece of each greater circle is a boss enclosing enamelled swastika designs and surrounded by curves, S-shaped and C-shaped, which begin and end with the same mysterious device. Yet, though the beauty of form remains, the glory of colouring is gone; and one can only now imagine how, when the shield hung upon the forgotten warrior’s arm, gleaming bronze and raised curves and red enamel combined to produce their due effect. Like Stonehenge this was the work of a master: not one detail could be altered, or removed, or added without impairing its perfection.[1011]

[Sidenote: Imported objects of art.]

Among the products of Late Celtic art that have been found in Britain are some of foreign manufacture, which testify to the increased commercial activity that followed the Belgic invasion. Besides the bronze-mounted bucket, already mentioned, the Aylesford cemetery yielded a bronze flagon, which had been made in Northern Italy:[1012] an elegant Graeco-Italian two-handled cup of black glazed earthenware with white foliated ornament encircling its inner margin was discovered in the rick-yard of the Manor Farm at Dorchester in Oxfordshire;[1013] while the Marlborough bucket is adorned with figures of sea-horses which are common on Gallic coins of the neighbourhood of Rennes, and which warrant the conjecture that it was imported from North-Western Gaul,[1014] perhaps in one of the vessels that plied between the Loire and Ictis. What else besides tin the Britons in the days of their independence exported in return for such articles we do not know; but in a later chapter we shall see that a long list of their exports and imports was compiled by Strabo.[1015] The carrying-trade was for the most part in the hands of Gallic ship-owners; but some cargoes were perhaps loaded in British bottoms. The British envoys who presented themselves in Caesar’s camp in 55 B.C. may indeed have crossed the Channel in a Gallic merchantman, and so may the hostages who were sent to him after his first invasion of Britain; but it is unlikely that the maritime Belgic tribes, who must have set out from Gaul in ships of their own, built none after they had settled in Britain, or that the numerous British adventurers who reinforced Caesar’s Gallic enemies depended for their transport upon the latter. The only British vessels, however, which are expressly mentioned by our authorities were light coracles of lath covered with hides, which Caesar observed when he was in Kent and afterwards copied when he was fighting in Spain against Pompey’s lieutenants,[1016] and which are still used by Irish fishermen off the coast of Connaught.[1017] These boats were doubtless employed in coastal navigation and on inland waterways; but much of the intertribal traffic must have been carried on along trackways, [Sidenote: Trackways.] which are still traceable, and the prehistoric antiquity of which is proved by their association with hill-forts. Most of them, like the Pilgrim’s Way, which is known to all who have tramped the high grounds of Surrey and Kent, ran along ridges or the slopes of downs which were generally unencumbered by forest or morass. If their origin could be traced, we should find that they were formed by the earliest settlers who felt the need of communication, along the lines of least resistance which nomadic hunters had followed when they passed from one temporary settlement to another;[1018] and doubtless attempts were made to render them more suitable for wheeled traction when the Cornish miners began to convey their tin in wagons to the coast, and the invaders of the Iron Age brought their chariots from Gaul. Even then, however, wheel-less vehicles, like those which Sir Arthur Mitchell noticed a few years ago in Strathglass and Kintail, must have been used for carting timber down steep hills or over heaths where no wheeled carriage could have moved.[1019]

[Sidenote: Coinage.]

Foreign commerce as well as domestic trade were greatly stimulated by the introduction of coinage and by the development of a ruder form of currency. Towards the end of the fourth century before the Christian era the Greeks of Massilia had introduced into Gaul gold coins of Philip of Macedon, which bore on the obverse a representation of the head of Apollo wreathed in laurel, and on the reverse a charioteer driving a pair of horses with the name Philippos stamped underneath. On these coins the Gallic coinage was modelled, and the British coinage was derived mainly from that of Gaul or through Gaul from a Macedonian stater; for certain peculiarities are noticeable on our earliest coins which distinguish them from those of Gaul.[1020] Evidently a considerable time must have elapsed before the new art travelled from Southern to Northern Gaul, and again before it crossed the Channel; and it is only natural to find that the oldest and heaviest British coins weigh no more than a hundred and twenty grains, or thirteen grains lighter than the Philippus, although, on the other hand, they are heavier than Gallic coins which belong to the latter half of the second century before Christ.[1021] Until about a quarter of a century after Caesar’s invasion the British coins were uninscribed: indeed uninscribed coins were still current during the earlier years of the Roman occupation.[1022] Their weight gradually diminished; and gradually, owing to successive copying, the head of Apollo and his wreath, the charioteer, the chariot, and the horses became more and more conventionalized and degraded, the head in certain cases passing ultimately into a cruciform pattern or even into a four-leaved flower, the charioteer being evolved into pellets, and the pair of horses becoming first one, then more and more grotesque until it lost all resemblance to a quadruped. Die-sinkers (who were doubtless few) would use the same dies or follow the same general type during their working career; and new types appeared when their successors came to engrave new dies. By estimating the time which would have been required for these successive alterations, it has been calculated that the earliest British coins must have been struck about a hundred and fifty or perhaps two hundred years before the birth of Christ.[1023]

For many years the only coins of Britain were gold of two values, the smaller being a quarter of the weight of the larger;[1024] and it may be gathered from the testimony of Strabo[1025] and Tacitus[1026] that they were made, at all events in part, from metal extracted from the alluvial deposits of the Cornish peninsula. Coins of silver, bronze, and even tin were afterwards circulated, but probably not before the era of redoubled commercial activity which began when the British islands became more closely connected with the Continent in consequence of Caesar’s invasion: indeed many of the silver coins are little earlier than the time of Claudius.[1027] Specimens of all these metals are much scarcer than those of gold. Only two British tin coins are known to exist; and in the western counties no bronze coin has ever been found.[1028]

Specimens of the prototype of British gold coins have been found more frequently in Kent than in any other county; and it may be inferred that, as might have been expected, they were first struck in the more civilized district which was nearest to the Continent.[1029] For a long period indeed the gold currency was confined to the southern and eastern districts: before Caesar’s time there is no evidence that any tribes coined money except those whose territories lay south of a line drawn from the Wash to the Bristol Channel; and even from these the peoples of Gloucestershire, Northern Somersetshire, and Northern Wiltshire must probably be excluded.[1030] Uninscribed coins have indeed occurred as far north as Yorkshire,[1031] and as far west as Cornwall;[1032] but they had found their way thither from other tribes.[1033]

Many coins of British origin which have been discovered in France, especially in the Belgic territory,[1034] and many Gallic coins in South-Eastern Britain, bear further witness to the development of international trade.[1035]

[Sidenote: Iron currency bars.]

But coins were not the only medium of exchange. Caesar, in his description of the manners and customs of the Britons, remarked that some of them made use of iron bars of specified weights as a substitute for coins.[1036] Until a very recent period antiquaries were waiting for some lucky find which might corroborate the accuracy of Caesar’s statement, not knowing that the evidence was before their eyes and only needed interpretation. Within the last eighty years a large number of iron bars have been unearthed in Berkshire, Northamptonshire, Worcestershire, Gloucestershire, Somersetshire, Dorsetshire, Hampshire, and the Isle of Wight. Many of them were found on well-known sites of the Early Iron Age, such as the lake-village of Glastonbury, and the forts of Hod Hill and Spettisbury; and some of the hoards comprised very numerous specimens--amounting in two cases to about one hundred and fifty, and in a third to three hundred and ninety-four--which had been buried deep in the ground. A tiro might take them for swords; but to the experts who compare them with the known swords of the Late Celtic Period it is evident that they contain too much metal; and, moreover, they may be arranged, according to their weight, in three groups, the heaviest being twice as valuable as the intermediate, and four times as valuable as the lightest. Not a single specimen has come to light in the eastern and south-eastern counties, in which coins are most abundant.[1037]

[Sidenote: Mining.]

The British iron-mines of which Caesar speaks were situated in the Wealden Forest; and although they were not finally abandoned before the nineteenth century, it is probable that some of the pits which mark the site of the works were excavated by British miners.[1038] But the iron from which some of the currency-bars were wrought was obtained, in the opinion of an eminent metallurgist, from the Forest of Dean,[1039] and, as we shall presently see,[1040] those which were found in Northamptonshire may have been manufactured on the spot. Mining indeed was one of the principal industries of Britain. Tin was still exported, if not in [Sidenote: About 100 B.C.] Caesar’s time, at least as late as that of Posidonius;[1041] copper was still needed for bronze ornaments, horse-trappings, sword-sheaths, and other objects, and indeed in certain districts for cutting-tools;[1042] and although the numerous ‘pigs’ of lead which have been found in Staffordshire and Cheshire belong to the time of the Empire, the discovery of leaden celts and sword-pommels of the Bronze Age[1043] raises the presumption that the mines of those districts, of the Mendip Hills, Flintshire, and the neighbourhood of Matlock may have been worked even by the Britons.[1044]

Looking at all these tokens of industrial enterprise, one is prepared to find evidences of increased comfort and more [Sidenote: Agriculture.] settled conditions of life. Since the Bronze Age agriculture had undoubtedly made a notable advance. It is impossible to tell whether the Britons, like the Gauls, recognized private property in land;[1045] but archaeology has furnished abundant evidence, which confirms Caesar’s statement, that at all events in the south-eastern districts corn was grown in plenty. When he made his first expedition to Britain, his army, numbering at least twelve thousand men, reaped enough wheat in the near neighbourhood of Walmer to supply its wants for a fortnight or more; while in the following year he requisitioned from the people of Essex grain for four legions with their auxiliaries and seventeen hundred cavalry, which was delivered within a few days.[1046] An iron sickle and a ploughshare found in Bigbury camp near Canterbury;[1047] traces of terrace cultivation on the Sussex downs;[1048] grain of several kinds stored in Worlebury Fort, in the Glastonbury lake-village, and in Hunsbury, where also were found fragments of stone querns in such profusion that every family may well have possessed its own, bear witness to the industry of the British farmers.[1049] So also perhaps do the famous dene-holes of Kent, Essex, and Norfolk, whose purpose has been a theme of voluminous controversy, but of which the most satisfactory explanation seems to be that they were for the most part subterranean granaries, which may have been used as refuges in time of danger, and that the chalk extracted in the process of excavation was used, as Pliny says, for manuring fields.[1050] Under the necessity of cultivating fresh land considerable progress must have been made in clearing the forests; and axes, saws, and bill-hooks, with which the woodmen worked, are still to be seen.[1051] It is true that even in the more civilized south the great Wealden Forest, in which swine, guarded by fierce dogs, fed secure among wolves and foxes, badgers, and deer, still extended beyond the chalk downs from the neighbourhood of West Hythe to the eastern border of Hampshire, reached northward as far as Sevenoaks, and skirted the Surrey Hills; while great parts of Essex were overgrown with wood; another forest overshadowed the valley of the Kennet from Hungerford to Windsor; and the Isle of Ely was surrounded by broad meres, swelled by the heavier rains which fell in those days.[1052] But even in Essex much timber must have been removed to make room for the cornfields from which the Trinovantes supplied Caesar’s legions, and in Kent to form the denes in which cattle grazed; while of those myriad homesteads which Caesar passed on his devastating march not a few must have been built upon reclaimed land.

[Sidenote: Dwellings of the rich.]

The researches of the eminent scholar who has so greatly enlarged our knowledge of Roman Britain have led him to suggest that among these homesteads there may have been, besides the round Celtic huts, dwellings, belonging to the rich, which might almost be described as country houses. Under Roman administration the rural parts of Britain, as of Northern Gaul, were parcelled into estates, the owners of which let out the greater part to cultivators who were in a state of semi-serfdom, while their demesne lands were tilled by slaves. The houses belong to two types, known as the Corridor type and the Courtyard type, neither of which exists anywhere save in Britain and the north of Gaul. The corridor house consisted of a row of rooms with a passage running along them: the other of three such rows, which formed three sides of a quadrangle. Since there is little resemblance between either of these types and those of Italy, it may be assumed that the extant examples of both, although they had been made luxurious by Roman mosaics and hypocausts and baths, were but modified representatives of the chieftains’ houses which Caesar saw.[1053]

[Sidenote: Towns.]

Nor were petty hamlets and isolated cottages the only places of abode. Town-life was beginning to emerge. The Britons, like the Gauls, had large fortified villages, which afterwards gave place to the flourishing Romano-British towns whose secrets are being revealed by pick and shovel. Camulodunum, or Colchester, the chief town of the Trinovantes, and Verulamium, hard by St. Albans, the chief town of the Catuvellauni, each of which had its mint before the Roman conquest, were doubtless tribal centres before Caesar came.[1054] So too, probably, was Corinium, the capital of the Dobuni, which stood upon the site of Cirencester;[1055] and Calleva, now Silchester, the excavation of which has been pursued for many years with illuminating results, was surrounded by a rampart which had evidently defended the capital of the Atrebates in pre-Roman times.[1056] London, which, if we may trust Ptolemy,[1057] was in the territory of the Cantii, was probably not less ancient; for Augusta, the name which Roman officialism endeavoured to impose upon it, was unable to resist the vitality of the Celtic appellation.[1058] Imaginative historians have pictured British London in the midst of a vast lagoon;[1059] but although the site of Westminster Abbey was an island surrounded by a marsh, and the Walbrook, where it flowed into the Thames, was little less than a hundred yards in width, it was proved during the construction of a sewer in London Wall that the land on the north side of the city had in Roman times been as dry as it is to-day.[1060]

[Sidenote: Hill-forts.]

The tribal capitals were of course fortified; but the old hill strongholds of the Neolithic Age and the Bronze Age had not been abandoned; and new ones were doubtless constructed as occasion required. Among those that have yielded remains of the Late Celtic Period the most famous are Worlebury, which crowns a headland just north of Weston-super-mare; Hod Hill, which rises sheer above the valley of the Stour, four miles north-west of Blandford; Bigbury Camp, through which runs the Pilgrim’s Way; and Winkelbury Camp in South Wiltshire, Mount Caburn, overhanging Lewes, and Cissbury Camp, already mentioned for its neolithic factory, which have been excavated by General Pitt-Rivers. Worlebury is the most remarkable of the few stone forts in the west of England. Unlike the great earthworks it has no ditch, because it needed none; and on its northern side a limestone precipice rendered fortification superfluous. The rampart is a vast wall, compacted with rubble and faced on either side with dry masonry; and, to prevent an enemy from demolishing it, the outer face was buttressed by heaps of loose stones. Many of the modern walls in the neighbourhood of the fortress are indistinguishable from it in structure.[1061] At Winkelbury large openings were left in that part of the rampart which is contiguous to the plain, probably to enable cattle to be driven in rapidly when marauders were near; while another rampart, which bisects the camp, may have been designed to separate the cattle-pound from the quarters of the garrison.[1062] Cissbury, the principal fort on the Sussex Downs, was one of the few British strongholds which appear to have had access to a permanent supply of water: about a mile and a half off, at a place called Broadwater, is a spring, abundant enough for an army, which is connected by a trackway with the southern entrance.[1063] The most characteristic feature of Mount Caburn is the number of pits which, as at Worlebury, are contained within its area. In both camps these pits are so small that they could not have been ordinarily inhabited, although, during a siege, they might have afforded shelter: probably they were used as store-rooms, for some of them contained corn.[1064] Dwellings, however, were connected with them; for the remains of a clay wall were discovered on Mount Caburn, impressed with marks of wattle-work; and it may be inferred that many such huts, which have left no trace, once existed within the ramparts.[1065] Bigbury was probably one of the entrenchments of which Caesar was thinking when he said that ‘the Britons apply the term fortress to woods difficult of access and fortified with rampart and trench in which they are in the habit of taking refuge from a hostile raid’.[1066] The familiar sentence was a stumbling-block to Pitt-Rivers; for, as we have seen, the British forts were as a rule constructed upon treeless heights, and the presence of trees upon the slopes would have been incompatible with the designs of the engineers: but Caesar’s observations must of course be accepted; and we can only suppose that the entrenchments which he described were exceptional even in the region which was the theatre of his campaign.[1067] May we conjecture that they had been erected in the Iron Age by Celtic immigrants, and that their lack of finish was due to the lazy shrinking from the hard labour of fortification which Caesar regarded as characteristic of the Gauls?[1068]

The fort of Pen-y-Gaer, which overlooks the valley of the Conway, is remarkable as an almost unique specimen of ancient military engineering. A storming-party which had succeeded in passing the two outer ditches would have fallen, in attempting the next, under the missiles that showered from the rampart, on to chevaux de frise of pointed stones.[1069]

[Sidenote: Some permanently inhabited.]

The relics that have been collected from the hill-forts of the Iron Age prove that the forts themselves, like those of Gaul, were not merely places of refuge but permanent abodes. Those that were situated on heights extremely difficult of access or remote from water were of course very sparsely inhabited in time of peace; but others were analogous to the Gallic fortresses which Caesar called oppida, and which were evidently distinct from the refuges, such as Aduatuca, which he designated as castella.[1070] Pottery, it is true, would have been indispensable even during a few days’ siege; and the stone lamp, resembling that of Grimes’s Graves,[1071] and blackened by use, which was recovered from Castle Law in Perthshire,[1072] might well have been needed at such a time. But when we find bill-hooks, ploughshares, bridle-bits, and fragments of querns among the objects that had been left in the forts which have been mentioned, it is clear that they were occupied by an industrial population: iron slag, which lay among the deposits on Hod Hill, was evidence of metallurgy; while the loom-weights which were collected on the same spot, the bone weaving-combs of Cissbury and Mount Caburn, and the spindle-whorls which abounded not only in these comparatively civilized settlements but also in a stone fortress on far St. David’s Head show that among the inhabitants were women who pursued their ordinary domestic avocations.[1073] This Welsh stronghold was almost identical in construction with Carn Brea,[1074] and the hut-circles which the two contain are exactly alike; yet the time which had elapsed since the Cornish ramparts were thrown up was as long as that which separates us from Alfred the Great.[1075]

Although many of the Scottish forts can be referred to the Early Iron Age, it would perhaps be impossible to prove that the relics found in any of them were earlier than the time of Caesar’s invasion;[1076] but two have an interest of their own as being the only examples that have yet been observed in Britain of fortifications constructed, like the Gallic walls which he described,[1077] conjointly of timber and stone. In one of them, situated at Burghead near Elgin, wooden logs were actually discovered in the stone walls;[1078] while at Castle Law, which stands upon a hill commanding a view over the Tay, as it winds through the carse on the west and loses itself in its eastern estuary, the outer face of the wall contained rectangular openings, which had manifestly been designed for the reception of beams.[1079]

[Sidenote: Hunsbury.]

While the hill-forts were probably only inhabited permanently by comparatively small numbers, and, like Gergovia, the mountain-city of Auvergne, where Vercingetorix defeated Caesar, may have sheltered thousands of fugitives in time of need, one stronghold at least of the other group was a town in the strictest sense of the word. Hunsbury, the most celebrated representative of this class, which stands upon high ground about two miles south-west of Northampton, might never have surrendered its precious relics if the iron ore which was known to underlie the site had not attracted the prospector. About thirty years ago a company was formed to win the iron; and navvies accidentally did the work which would have been better performed under scientific direction. Hunsbury is so small that it could hardly have been a tribal centre: the entrenchment encloses only four acres,--less than the twelfth part of the area of Hod Hill. Not the faintest trace of Roman influence could be detected among the remains, which are now arranged in the Northampton Museum; and the experts who examined them concluded that they belonged to the time of Caesar’s invasion. They were found in pits, resembling those of Mount Caburn, about three hundred of which had been dug inside the rampart; and here too there was evidence that the dwellings had been huts of wattle-work. The townspeople were well armed: they kept horses and chariots, wove their own cloth, sawed their own timber, made their own earthenware, and grew their own corn; and heaps of slag showed that they had smelted the ore, which lay thenceforward undisturbed for nineteen hundred years.[1080] One of several skulls which were found just outside the town was perforated with three holes, which suggest that the British Celts, like the Gauls and their neolithic predecessors, made amulets out of the remains of their own dead.[1081]

[Sidenote: Inhabited caves; pit-dwellings; ‘Picts’ houses’; beehive houses; and brochs.]

But perhaps not many British settlements were of this comparatively advanced type. In the Late Celtic Period, and indeed long after its close, caves were still inhabited, as throughout the prehistoric ages, in some cases by outlaws, who made a precarious livelihood by robbing wealthy travellers.[1082] Pit-dwellings in small groups, which apparently differed little from those of the Neolithic Age, have been found stored with Late Celtic relics;[1083] and doubtless it was from habitations of this class that the thatched huts of mud and wattle-work which Strabo[1084] describes, and the remains of which have been already noticed, were evolved. Such cottages, as Caesar[1085] testifies, were much the same in Gaul and Britain. Posidonius was made welcome in them when he travelled in Gaul. He tells us how his hosts, seated on straw round low tables, took their meat in their fingers and tore it like lions or chopped it in pieces with their pocket-knives, and washed it down with draughts of beer from earthenware or silver beakers; how the meal was sometimes interrupted by a quarrel, when the disputants sprang to their feet and fought till one was slain.[1086] In the far north and in the Cornish peninsula men lived in underground dwellings, commonly called ‘Picts’ houses’, which generally consisted of a paved trench lined with dry masonry, roofed over with slabs, and terminating in a round chamber; while in some Scottish examples rooms were grouped on both sides of the gallery.[1087] Related to these structures are the Scottish mound-dwellings or bee-hive houses, specimens of which in the island of Lewis were still inhabited in the nineteenth century. They may be looked for in places such as the Hebrides, where branches large enough to form roofs like those of pit-dwellings were not to be had. In some a central chamber was connected with others which opened out of it: a hole, which could be closed at will, was left in the roof for the escape of smoke; the chinks between the stones were stuffed with grass or moss; and the roof was covered with turf, which adhered to the interstices and made the structure compact. It is impossible to assign a precise date to these huts. Some of them contained querns and were certainly occupied in the time of the Romans; but probably many had been built before, while others are comparatively modern.[1088] The most elaborate buildings of this type were the brochs, whose range extends from the Orkney and Shetland Isles, which contain nearly a hundred and fifty, to Berwickshire, but which do not exist outside the Scottish area. These buildings, which were really small forts, represent the art of dry-walling at its zenith. They were round towers about sixty feet high and fifty feet in diameter. If an enemy succeeded in forcing a way in, he found himself in an inner court open to the sky and enclosed by a commanding wall, pierced by numerous apertures, which formed the windows of encircling galleries, from behind which the defenders were prepared to shoot.[1089] The relics which have been found in them belong for the most part to the close of the Roman occupation and even later; but some which have been excavated in Caithness contained painted pebbles like those of the late palaeolithic cavern of Mas d’Azil; and it is possible that they may have existed in pre-Roman times.[1090]

[Sidenote: The Glastonbury marsh-village.]

The most interesting, however, of all the Late Celtic settlements is the far-famed marsh-village of Glastonbury. Besides those of Holderness, which have been already mentioned, there are several lake-dwellings in Great Britain which belonged to the Early Iron Age; but almost all seem to have been built after the commencement of the Christian era.[1091] Glastonbury, on the other hand, was first inhabited more than two centuries before the Roman conquest. The peat-moor on which it stands was then surrounded by a shallow mere, and is now covered by low circular mounds which mark the positions of the former huts. Timber and brushwood, surmounted by layers of clay and stones, were laid upon the peat to serve as foundations, and retained in place by piles fixed round their margins. The huts were then built of wood, filled in with wattle and daub; and the entire village was protected by a palisade. The foundations were, however, so unstable that they gradually sank; and in order to keep the floors dry, fresh timber and clay were periodically added. When this was done, the old hearth-stones were left undisturbed; and their presence attests the construction of the successive floors. Among the numerous relics which excavation has revealed, and which prove that skilled agriculturists, potters, weavers, wood-carvers, and coopers lived in the village, there is hardly a single weapon: the sling-bullets evidently served only for killing game. Dozens of coloured pebbles, similar to others which have been found on Hod Hill, were perhaps used in some indoor game;[1092] and the spur of a cock may suggest to those who remember that the Britons thought it impious to eat poultry that the pastime for which, as Caesar says, the birds were reared was cockfighting.[1093] It is hardly necessary to mention the weaving-combs, the spindle-whorls, the querns, the harness-buckles, and the other objects which are common in Late Celtic settlements, though it is curious that the bridle-bits were made of deer-horn; but the explorers were astonished to find a bronze mirror, tweezers, rouge, and other exotic objects, which showed that continental luxury had invaded this remote region.[1094]

[Sidenote: Dress.]

The arts of the toilet had indeed been elaborated not only in the more civilized south but even in places which, like the Yorkshire Wolds, had no direct communication with foreign lands.[1095] The tunics, the cloaks which men and women alike wore, fastened on the right shoulder with a brooch, the breeches which were common to Brythonic Celts in Britain and Gaul, and the use of which seems to have been borrowed by the Continental Celts from the Scythians,[1096] the kilts which, as we may perhaps infer from stone monuments,[1097] were the national garb of the Goidels, were made, like the modern tartan, of many-coloured cloths; while the men whom Caesar encountered, although, like the Gauls, they wore their hair long, and cultivated moustaches, carefully shaved the rest of their faces and even their bodies.[1098] The chieftain driving his chariot, his brilliant cloak clasped by a coral-studded brooch, his sword clanking in its decorated scabbard, his bronze shield gleaming like gold and adorned with enamel, his horses’ bridle-bits showing enamelled cheek-pieces, and their harness jingling with open-work bronze ornaments,[1099] was perhaps only a splendid barbarian; but his weapons and his trappings were not mere products of a factory:--they were true works of art.

[Sidenote: Reading and writing.]

Nor indeed are indications wanting that Britons of the upper class--not Druids only--had some tincture of letters. The Druids of Gaul, and presumably also of Britain, used Greek characters in official documents and private correspondence.[1100] Diodorus[1101] affirms that it was common among the Gauls to throw letters, addressed to the dead, on to the funeral pile. The Romans, after they had defeated the Helvetii, found in their encampment a schedule, on which were recorded in Greek characters the numbers of the armed men, the women, and the children who had migrated into Gaul.[1102] A few years later, when Caesar was marching through the territory of a Belgic tribe to relieve a besieged camp commanded by Quintus Cicero, he wrote him a letter in Greek characters--possibly in Greek[1103]--which he entrusted to a Gallic trooper. Unless he made his interpreter write the letter in Celtic, he evidently had reason to fear that, if it were intercepted, some of the Belgae would be able to read the Latin; in any case that some of them knew how to read. Is it not reasonable to infer that a British Belgian here and there was as good a scholar as his kinsmen over the water? At all events the British inscribed coins, the earlier of which at least must have been the work of native die-sinkers, are evidence that before the birth of Christ there were Britons who had mastered the art of writing, and had even acquired some slight knowledge of Latin.[1104] But the origins of Celtic literature, sacred and profane, were of course purely oral. Bards, who were apparently Druids of an inferior grade, sat at the tables of the great; accompanied them with their harps to festivals; sang their praises and satirized their enemies; and recited poems in honour of valiant warriors who had fallen in battle.[1105]

[Sidenote: Inequalities in culture.]

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

[Sidenote: Intertribal war and political development.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Sidenote: Religion.]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Sidenote: Sepulchral usages.]

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

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

[Sidenote: The Druids.]

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

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

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

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

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

[Sidenote: Ties between Britons and Gauls.]

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

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

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

VI. CAESAR’S FIRST INVASION OF BRITAIN

[Sidenote: Caesar obliged to secure his rear before invading Britain.]

Before Caesar could venture to undertake so difficult an enterprise as the invasion of Britain, it was necessary for him to secure the country in his rear. His first two campaigns had been directed against enemies who were as dangerous to Gaul as to Rome. Cavalry levied from friendly Gallic tribes fought side by side with the Roman legions against the Helvetii and against Ariovistus: after the defeat of the Helvetii envoys came from all the tribes of Central and Eastern Gaul to congratulate the victor; and after the defeat of Ariovistus the legions took up their quarters for the winter in Gallic territory without resistance. There was probably not a single tribe in which Caesar had not opponents: but the prestige of Rome and of his own victories, the factious spirit and the intertribal jealousies of the Gauls, and above all the sagacity with which he played off party against party, and selected the chiefs who, for their own purposes, were able and willing to serve him, prevented open opposition. Thus, although the seeds of future troubles were even then germinating, he could safely use Celtican Gaul as his base of operations when he crossed the Marne in the following year to encounter the Belgae. The series of victories which he gained in this campaign intimidated his opponents for the time and increased his renown, but had little effect upon the remote maritime tribe of the Morini, on whose coast was the harbour from which he must sail.

[Sidenote: He contemplated invasion as early as 56 B.C.]

Caesar’s first mention of Britain occurs in the chapter that follows his narrative of the operations by which he destroyed the invading hordes of the Usipetes and Tencteri, crossed the Rhine, and chastised the tribe which had given an asylum to their fugitives:--‘Only a small part of the summer remained; and in these parts, the whole of Gaul having a northerly trend, winter sets in early: nevertheless Caesar made active preparations for an expedition to Britain; for he knew that in almost all the operations in Gaul our enemies had been reinforced from that country.’[1279] But even if we had not Strabo’s explicit statement, it would be unnecessary to argue that Caesar could not have undertaken so momentous an enterprise upon the spur of the moment. Strabo says that the Veneti, who in 56 B.C. formed a coalition of the maritime tribes of North-Western and Northern Gaul against Caesar, made war upon him because they were determined to prevent him from invading Britain, the trade with which was in their hands.[1280] The statement is intrinsically probable, and is supported by facts for which we have the authority of Caesar himself. The alliance which the Veneti headed included almost all the maritime tribes between the Loire and the Rhine; and auxiliaries actually came from Britain to join them. It is not credible that the Britons would have crossed the widest part of the Channel, or that the Morini, whose country lay between the Somme and the Scheldt, and the Menapii, whose seaboard reached the Rhine, would have supported the remote Veneti, if they had not had reason to believe that their own interests were imperilled. Moreover, Caesar tells us that among the ships which he assembled for the invasion of Britain were galleys which he had used in the naval action with the Veneti. This action took place off the coast of the Morbihan, the nearest harbour to which was in the estuary of the Loire;[1281] and it is needless to argue that the galleys were not there when Caesar sent for them. If only ‘a small part of the summer’ remained when he began to prepare for the invasion, there was no time for his messengers to travel from the neighbourhood of Coblenz, where he had crossed and recrossed the Rhine, to the mouth of the Loire, or for the galleys to make the voyage of six hundred miles from the Loire to the north-eastern coast of Gaul. When Caesar’s messengers set out, the galleys must have been within a short distance of the port from which he set sail,--probably in the mouth [Sidenote: Campaign against the Veneti necessary in order to secure command of the Channel.] of the Seine or of the Somme. The war which he waged against the Veneti was a necessary prelude to the invasion of Britain. For he could not safely embark his army unless he had command of the Channel; and at the time when he planned the invasion the masters of the Channel were the Veneti. They had a powerful fleet of large vessels, the model of which had, we may suppose, been originally borrowed from that of the merchantmen of the Carthaginians, whose commerce in the Atlantic and in British waters they had inherited. This fleet enabled them to close the ports not only of their own territory in Western Brittany, but also of the western seaboard at least of Northern Gaul; and no one was permitted to use those ports except on condition of paying them toll.

[Sidenote: 57 B.C.]

But Caesar attempted to gain his object without fighting. After his campaign against the Belgae he sent the 7th legion under Publius Crassus, the younger son of the wealthy triumvir, to winter in the valley of the lower Loire; and all the tribes of Brittany submitted to him and gave him hostages. It was probably about this time that Crassus made his celebrated voyage to the tin-producing districts of Cornwall;[1282] and it seems not unreasonable to conjecture that it was the news of his mission which gave the alarm to the Veneti. They arrested two officers whom he had sent to make a requisition of corn: the other maritime tribes of Brittany and Normandy threw in their lot with them; and an embassy was sent to Crassus to demand the restoration of the hostages. Messengers were promptly dispatched to inform Caesar, who had gone to Illyricum. He sent orders to Crassus to have a fleet of war-galleys built in the estuary [Sidenote: 56 B.C.] of the Loire, to summon oarsmen from the Roman Province of Southern Gaul, and to impress seamen and pilots. Meanwhile the Veneti were engaging fresh allies, and reinforcements were hastening from Britain to join them. The allied fleet was speedily assembled on the coast of the Morbihan. Caesar hurried back to join his army, and on his arrival made all the necessary dispositions for preventing the spread of the insurrectionary movement. Crassus was dispatched southward into the country of the Aquitani, from whom, it is true, little danger was to be expected: another general, Titurius Sabinus, was sent northward into the peninsula of the Cotentin, to prevent the tribes of Northern Brittany and Western Normandy from joining the Veneti; and Labienus, Caesar’s most capable lieutenant, marched eastward through the heart of Gaul to the neighbourhood of Treves, with orders to watch the Belgae and repel the German tribes, who were believed to be in communication with the Gauls, in case they attempted to cross the Rhine. Labienus appears to have had little trouble; but Crassus and Sabinus encountered and defeated their respective enemies. Caesar himself invaded Venetia, and entrusted Decimus Brutus with the command of his fleet. During a great part of the summer Brutus was detained in the mouth of the Loire by stormy weather; and Caesar spent the time in endeavouring to reduce the strongholds on the Venetian coast. These operations were fruitless; but on the first fine day the struggle was brought to an issue. The decisive battle was fought in Quiberon Bay.[1283] The allied fleet numbered two hundred and twenty sail, while the Roman galleys were reinforced by ships lent by friendly tribes who inhabited the maritime districts south of the Loire. The ships of the Veneti and their allies were so heavy and so stoutly built that it would have been useless for the galleys to attempt to ram them; and they stood so high out of the water that the legionaries were unable to throw missiles with effect. But the Roman engineers came to the rescue as they had done in the First Punic War. Long poles had been prepared, armed at one end with sharp-edged hooks. The galleys swifter and more mobile than the Gallic ships, which had no oars.[1284] When the fleets approached each other, two or more galleys ran alongside one of the enemy’s ships; and the halyards were seized by the hooks. Instantly the rowers pulled away: the halyards snapped, and yards and sails fell down, leaving the helpless hulk to be boarded by the legionaries. ‘Thenceforward,’ wrote Caesar, ‘the fight turned upon valour, in which our soldiers easily had the advantage.’[1285] When several ships had been captured, the Veneti abandoned the fight and made haste to escape. But their ships had hardly been put before the wind when they were becalmed; and the galleys, running swiftly in and out among them, captured them one after another, all but a few which contrived to reach land when darkness fell.

The Veneti surrendered unconditionally. Caesar was determined to teach the Gauls that ‘the rights of envoys’[1286] must be respected in future. The Venetian senate were put to death; and all the tribesmen who failed to escape were sold into slavery.

[Sidenote: Campaign against the Morini.]

It remained only to subdue the Morini, who had never yet acknowledged the supremacy of Rome. Caesar marched against them: but the season was too far advanced; and he found it impossible to strike a decisive blow. The Morini would not risk a battle, and took refuge in their forests. Caesar allowed himself to be surprised on the outskirts and lost a few men, though he succeeded in punishing his assailants; and after the legions had spent some days in cutting down trees, capturing baggage, and driving off cattle, stormy weather set in, and rain fell so heavily and continuously that they could no longer live safely in tents, [Sidenote: Its failure leaves Caesar’s base not quite secure.] and were forced to abandon the campaign. Owing to this failure, which Caesar hardly atoned for by ravaging the cultivated lands as he retreated, the base of operations for the expedition which was to take place in the following year was still insecure. On the other hand, the maritime tribes between the Somme and the Pyrenees were effectually subdued; and Caesar was absolute master of the sea.

[Sidenote: 55 B.C. Caesar determines to sail from the Portus Itius (Boulogne.)]

When the campaign of the following year against the Germans was over, Caesar marched westward into the country of the Morini, ‘because,’ as he tells us, ‘the shortest passage to Britain was from their coast.’[1287] Probably he had already ascertained what was the best port to sail from; but any competent cavalry officer could have procured the information in a couple of days. Between the Scheldt and the Somme there was only one harbour which would satisfy all his requirements. Calais did not then exist: Sangatte, on the east of Cape Blancnez, was at best a mere roadstead; and the sandy waste between Cape Blancnez and Cape Grisnez, from which the village of Wissant derives its name, though it possessed two tiny creeks formed by rivulets, offered no shelter for a fleet and no facilities for building or repairing ships, or for provisioning an army. The Canche, the Authie, and the Somme, if at that time they were used as harbours, were too far from Britain. But the estuary of the Liane, on whose right bank stood Gesoriacum, the village whose site is now covered by Boulogne, combined every advantage. Caesar, Latinizing its Celtic name--the port of Icht, or ‘the Channel harbour’--called it the Portus Itius. Gallic merchants sailed from it to the ports of Kent: from the time of Augustus it was the Roman port of embarkation for Britain, and at a later period the naval station of the Roman Channel Fleet. The estuary, longer, wider, and deeper than it is now, was protected from every gale by the bold bluff of land which on the west throws out the promontory of Alprech, and which then projected northward considerably beyond its present limit.[1288] Vessels of light draught could enter the harbour at low tide. Shipyards lined its banks. Roads connected it with the interior; and timber in abundance could be floated down the river from the forest of Boulogne. The heights that look down from the east upon the harbour, about half a mile south of the column which commemorates the assemblage of Napoleon’s ‘Grand Army’, offered an excellent site for the encampment of the force that was destined to protect the communications; and perhaps a detachment may have been posted on the opposite bank of the river.[1289] If the distance in a straight line to Britain was a little longer than from the creeks of Wissant, the passage, owing to the set of the tidal streams and the prevalence of south-westerly winds, was more convenient. Caesar therefore gave orders that vessels should be collected from the adjacent coasts, and assemble, along with the galleys which had been docked after the war with the Veneti, in the Portus Itius.

[Sidenote: He attempts to obtain information about Britain from Gallic traders.]

The summer was now far advanced; and Caesar saw his first expedition must be a mere reconnaissance: but, as he tells us, ‘he thought that it would be well worth his while merely to visit the island, see what the people were like, and make himself acquainted with the features of the country, the harbours, and the landing-places.’[1290] Though on a clear day he could see beyond the straits those ‘astonishing masses of cliff’ which haunted the imagination of Cicero,[1291] he was about to venture into an unknown land. The Italians of that time knew hardly anything of the island which they vaguely regarded as the end of the inhabited world, except that it produced tin, some of which found its way to the markets of the Mediterranean.[1292] Perhaps Cicero and other cultivated men had read extracts from the journal of Pytheas: but Pytheas was a discredited writer; and, after all, his description of the Britons who lived in the time of Alexander the Great would have been little more useful to Caesar than Bernier’s account of the empire of Aurangzeb would be to a traveller who intended to spend a winter in India. Caesar sent for traders from all parts of North-Eastern Gaul, and questioned them about the island:--How large was it? What tribes inhabited it? What were their methods of fighting, their manners and customs? What ports were capable of accommodating a large fleet? He failed to obtain the information which he required. Many commentators have insisted that the traders could have told him all that he wanted to know; and certainly it seems difficult to understand how they could have professed ignorance of the harbours without manifest contumacy: but at least as regards the other questions, the reason which Caesar assigns for their silence is sufficient:--‘even they know nothing of Britain except the coast and the parts opposite the various regions of Gaul.’[1293] Moreover, it must be remembered that Caesar asked them what harbours could shelter a large fleet; and as they were only acquainted with the harbours of Kent, none of which would fulfil this requirement, it is quite intelligible that even on this point they should have been unable to enlighten him. Still, they could have given valuable information about the Kentish coast; and the passage in which Strabo accounts for the hostility of the Veneti suggests that they kept silence from interested motives.[1294] They could not foresee that Caesar’s expeditions would powerfully stimulate British trade.

[Sidenote: Gaius Volusenus sent to reconnoitre the opposite coast.]

Thrown back upon his own resources, Caesar sent a military tribune, named Gaius Volusenus, in a galley to reconnoitre the opposite coast. Volusenus had distinguished himself in a campaign, conducted by one of Caesar’s generals, against the mountaineers of the upper Rhône: he possessed, as his later history proved, not merely a keen eye for the features of a country, but daring of that kind which characterized the sons of Zeruiah; and how highly Caesar thought of him is evident from the fact that he was the only military tribune whose name is mentioned with honour in the Commentaries.[1295]

[Sidenote: Envoys from British tribes sent to Caesar to promise submission.]

All this time trade was going on as usual between Gaul and Britain; and Gallic merchants had informed their clients in Kent that the long-expected invasion was about to take place. While Volusenus was cruising in the Straits of Dover a ship with envoys from various British tribes on board sailed into the Liane. Presenting themselves in Caesar’s camp, they announced that their principals were prepared to submit to the Roman People and to give hostages. Caesar received them courteously, exhorted them to adhere to their resolve, and dismissed them. But they were not to return alone. Two years before, during the campaign against the Belgae, Caesar had gained over Commius, whose connexion with Britain[1296] he had perhaps already ascertained, and, in accordance with the policy which he often followed, had established him as king over the Atrebates. He had doubtless learned much from him about British politics, and had concluded that, just as in Gaul he had taken advantage of tribal disputes and had found it politic to support the Aedui and the Remi against their rivals, so in Britain his best course would be to side with the Trinovantes against the aggressive Catuvellauni. He had formed a high opinion of the energy and judgement of Commius, and believed him [Sidenote: He commissions Commius to return with them and gain over tribes.] to be thoroughly loyal. Accordingly he charged him to approach all the British chieftains with whom he had any influence, engage them on the side of Rome, and give them notice that he himself would shortly visit the island. Commius took with him a troop of cavalry, composed of thirty of his retainers.

[Sidenote: Volusenus’s voyage of reconnaissance.]

Meanwhile Volusenus had been carrying out Caesar’s instructions. His galley, manned by trained oarsmen, not only made him comparatively independent of wind and tide, but, owing to her superior speed, would enable him to keep clear of any ships which Gauls or Britons might send against him. We do not know what part of the coast he reconnoitred first: but it is probable that his coasting voyage did not extend beyond Lympne, or, at the furthest, Rye on one side and the North Foreland on the other; for within those limits the port and the alternative landing-place of which he was in search were to be found. The port was indeed too small for such a vast armada as would be required to transport the grand army with which Caesar purposed eventually to invade Britain, but not for the comparatively small fleet that had been collected for the preliminary expedition: if Volusenus had sailed westward in quest of the great harbour which he could not have found until he had reached the coast of Sussex,[1297] he would have turned back when he saw the inhospitable forest of the Weald, or the Fairlight Down; and, moreover, he knew that Caesar intended to cross the Channel in its narrowest part. While he was still some miles from the British coast he could see the low but precipitous chalk cliffs, backed by a commanding range of heights, that hem in the rock-strewn shore of East Wear Bay: the inlet of Folkestone was plainly too small to accommodate the Roman fleet; and the first sight of the hills that guarded the coast from Folkestone to Hythe and of the wooded uplands that overlooked the tide-washed flat which is now Romney Marsh,[1298] must have warned him not to advise the great captain whom he served to land beneath them. It was a maxim of ancient warfare, never disregarded without urgent necessity, to avoid engaging an enemy who had the advantage of higher ground; and there was not a foot of land in the whole extent of coast between Shakespeare’s Cliff and Lympne which a Roman soldier would not have described as a most unfavourable position. The hills behind Hythe were, indeed, pierced by three valleys: but it was evident that they ascended to high, broken, and wooded ground, where cavalry would be useless, and an invading army would be encompassed by manifold perils;[1299] and for such disadvantages the narrow pool harbour which extended opposite Hythe, between the hills and the long bank of shingle, through a gap in which it might be entered at high tide,[1300] promised no compensation. Eastward of Shakespeare’s Cliff Volusenus saw that he must look for the place of disembarkation. There, sheltered in the valley between the cliffs, was old Dover harbour, in which we may suppose that Gallic merchants used to discharge their freight.[1301] But even this haven would be useless if the landing were to be opposed; and it was necessary to look for some broad expanse of open beach which would give easy access to the interior. None such was yet visible. The galley ran on under the Castle Cliff, round the Foreland and past the coomb within which lies St. Margaret’s Bay, past the cliffs, still precipitous but diminishing in height, which end at Kingsdown. About a hundred yards further on the ground was seen rising again; and the tribune observed a low rampart of cliff extending and gradually sinking towards the north till it finally terminated just south of the spot where Walmer Castle rises amid embowering trees. Stretching northward for several miles from this spot he saw the open beach for which he had been looking. Not a sign of high ground was visible. Once the legions had succeeded in forcing their way on to dry land, they would find no difficulty in following up their advantage; and the cavalry would be able to ride down the beaten enemy. The slope upon which Walmer Church now stands would afford a suitable site for the camp. But it was of course impossible to see far inland; and, as Volusenus could not venture to disembark and run the risk of falling into the hands of the natives, he was unable to find out all that he wished to know. The nature of the inner country, the comparative density of the population, the water-supply,--of all these things he remained ignorant. But Caesar had chosen him because he was the fittest man that he could find; and we may assume that he did not neglect precautions which any competent officer would have taken, and that he did not overlook what no observant man could have failed to perceive. He spent three entire days in British waters; and his time must have been fully occupied. We may be sure that he bore in mind that the beach was of shingle; that he took soundings all along the coast between Walmer and Deal as close inshore as he could venture to go, and tested the character of the anchorage; and that he noted the phenomena which twice daily obtruded themselves upon his attention,--the rise and fall of the tide, and the movement up and down the Channel of the tidal stream. Perhaps indeed he went as far north as Sandwich, and concluded that a landing might still more advantageously be effected between that point and Sandown, where, even in those days, the beach must have shelved more gently than at Walmer or Deal.[1302] One other feature, if it then existed, cannot have escaped his scrutiny,--the Goodwin Sands, perhaps only half-formed, or the long low bank of London Clay, which, as some geologists believe, may then have occupied their place.[1303] On the fourth day following that of his departure he returned to the Portus Itius, and presented his report to Caesar.

[Sidenote: Kentishmen prepare for resistance.]

The Kentishmen, on their part, knew what they had to expect. The Roman galley had of course been watched; and though Caesar was coming professedly to receive them under the protection of Rome, his visit would portend the loss of their independence. If they chose to resist, they would not be embarrassed by having a long line of coast to defend. The movements of the galley indicated where the fleet of which she was the forerunner would probably arrive; and, moreover, those who lived by the sea were aware that the invaders could not attempt to land except at a few points within a strictly limited range. War-chariots would be helpful in checking them when they attempted to advance through the surf: accordingly the horses were exercised on the beach until they became accustomed to enter the waves.

[Sidenote: Certain clans of the Morini spontaneously promise to submit.]

The Portus Itius was thronged with shipping, and the preparations for the expedition were nearly complete; but the base of operations was still insecure. The Morini had hardly felt the weight of Caesar’s hand, and might give trouble to the garrison which he intended to leave for the protection of his communications: but the end of August was approaching; he was anxious to set sail; and he had no time to reduce the tribe to submission. Fortune, however, as usual, befriended him. The various communities of the Morini were accustomed to act independently. Envoys from some of them appeared in Caesar’s camp, and excused themselves for having resisted the Romans in the two previous years. He of course accepted their excuses, and ordered them to give him a large number of hostages, who were promptly brought to the camp.

[Sidenote: 55 B.C. Caesar’s expeditionary force.]

And now all was ready. The expeditionary force consisted of two legions--the 10th, which had gained renown on many fields and was regarded by Caesar with special favour, and the 7th, which had played a conspicuous part in the famous battle with the Nervii--besides about five hundred cavalry, raised from various tribes of Gaul, slingers from the Balearic Isles, and Numidian and Cretan archers. The entire army numbered about ten thousand men. A small squadron of galleys and about eighty transports were assembled in the harbour; and on the 25th of August[1304] the legionaries embarked on the transports, while the galleys were assigned to the archers, slingers, and artillerymen. The catapults which they carried would be worked, in case they were required, under the protection of movable turrets, which could be erected, at short notice, on their decks.[1305] Caesar omitted to mention the class of ‘long ships’ to which they belonged: but his narrative shows that they were shallow; and it may be doubted whether any of them had more than one bank of oars.[1306] The transports had of course been carefully selected, and were all excellent sea-boats: but they had not been designed for disembarking troops on an enemy’s coast; and in case it should prove necessary to land on an open beach, the troops whom they carried would find themselves, on entering the water, almost out of their depth. They were probably sailed by their native crews; and the galleys, which were severally placed under the command of the quaestor, the two generals who commanded the legions, and the auxiliary officers, were doubtless handled by the seamen and Provincial oarsmen who had manned them in the preceding year. The fleet included some small fast-sailing vessels of light draught, which were commonly used for reconnoitring, and would now be called scouts. Eighteen other transports were lying in the little harbour of Ambleteuse, between five and six miles to the north,[1307] having been prevented by contrary winds from reaching the Liane; and, as the wind was now favourable for the voyage to Britain, and Caesar could not afford to wait, he sent his cavalry by road with orders to embark on these vessels and follow him. As the expedition was to be of such short duration, no heavy baggage was taken, and only sufficient supplies to last for a few days. A general named Sulpicius Rufus remained with an adequate force to guard the camp and the harbour; [Sidenote: Sabinus and Cotta sent to punish the recalcitrant Morini and the Menapii.] while Titurius Sabinus, who had commanded a division in the war of the previous year, and Aurunculeius Cotta, who had served with distinction in the campaign against the Belgae, were directed to march with the remaining legions against those clans of the Morini which had not submitted, and their neighbours, the Menapii.

[Sidenote: Caesar’s voyage.]

It was just five days before the full moon;[1308] and high tide that evening was about six o’clock. About midnight the moon set, and we may suppose that, like the ships of William when he sailed to encounter Harold, each vessel carried a lantern.[1309] Soon afterwards the signal was given to weigh anchor,[1310] and the ships stood out to sea and steered against the ebb tide, which, however, was moving at less than one knot an hour,[1311] for Dover harbour.[1312] As they passed Ambleteuse, there was no sign that the cavalry transports had [Sidenote: His cavalry transports fail to put to sea in time.] yet got under way. About half an hour before sunrise the stream turned eastward; and by that time Cape Grisnez had been left behind. But at some period of the voyage the wind must have shifted to an unfavourable quarter,[1313] for [Sidenote: Aug. 26.] it was not until the fourth hour of the day, or about nine o’clock in the morning,[1314] that the galleys approached the Dover cliffs; and at that time the transports, which were slower sailers and had no oars, were far behind. Above the white precipices, ranged on the undulating downs behind, Caesar descried an armed host of the enemy. ‘The formation of the ground,’ he observed, ‘was peculiar, the sea being so closely walled in by abrupt heights that it was possible to throw a missile from the ground above on to the shore.’[1315] To attempt a landing in the harbour or below the cliffs on either side of it was of course out of the question; and [Sidenote: He anchors off the Dover cliffs.] Caesar determined to remain at anchor until the rest of the fleet should arrive. The reader who is familiar with the Commentaries, and can comprehend their implied meaning, will perceive that the vessels must have been grouped in the bay somewhere between the Castle Cliff and the South Foreland, the one on the extreme right being about a mile westward of the latter.[1316] Caesar summoned his generals and tribunes to come on board, communicated to them the substance of the report which he had received from Volusenus, and instructed them how to handle their ships and troops when the landing-place should be reached, warning them above all to bear in mind that rapid and irregular movements were of the essence of seamanship, and to be prepared to obey orders on the instant. When he was satisfied that all understood what was required of them, he sent them back to their ships. Between three and four in the afternoon the infantry transports arrived; and although Caesar does not expressly say so, it seems reasonable to assume that he communicated with their officers as well.[1317] Between four and five the stream, which, for about six hours, had been running down the Channel, turned towards the east, and, as the wind was now blowing from a favourable quarter, Caesar gave the signal to weigh anchor.[1318] A few minutes later galleys, transports, and smaller craft, with all sail set, [Sidenote: Late in the afternoon he sails on to Walmer--Deal.] were running in an extended line past the Foreland, while the British chariots and cavalry, followed by their infantry, were hurrying across country to intercept them. In about an hour the armada was off the coast between Walmer and Deal, heading straight for the shore; and, while the galleys were held ready for emergencies, the transports were run aground.

[Sidenote: The landing vigorously resisted.]

Caesar now saw crowding upon him the troubles that were due to his lack of preparation. All along the beach a multitude of painted warriors,[1319] with long moustaches and hair streaming over their shoulders, were drawn up ready for action. The transports were immovable in water so deep that the men, crowding in the bows, shrank from plunging in; and when some of them overcame their hesitation, they found themselves staggering and slipping, over-weighted by their armour and encumbered by the shields on their left arms and the javelins which they grasped in their right hands; while the Britons, standing securely on the beach, and the charioteers, driving their trained horses into the sea, harassed them with missiles to which they could not reply. Old soldiers as they were, they felt unnerved by difficulties which they had never encountered before. Caesar promptly sent the galleys to the rescue. Driven through the water at their utmost speed, they were ranged on the right flank of the enemy, who, alarmed by the long low rakish hulls, the like of which they had never seen, and distracted by the measured stroke of the oars, suddenly found themselves assailed by slingers and archers, and enfiladed by strange artillery. Unable to use their shields unless they changed front, they ceased to press their attack, stood still, and presently began to give ground. But few of the legionaries had yet ventured to enter the water; and the rest still hesitated to take advantage of the respite. Then the standard-bearer of the 10th legion, calling upon the gods for aid, turned to his comrades, and cried, ‘Leap down, men, unless you wish to abandon the eagle to the enemy. I, at all events, shall have done my duty to my country and my general.’ Springing overboard, he advanced alone, holding the eagle above his head. The men plucked up courage, and, calling upon one another not to bring the legion to shame, leaped all together from the bows. Encouraged by their example, the men in the nearest vessels followed, and the fight became general.

But the advantage was still with the defenders. The galleys could not be everywhere at once. The Romans, though they could not get firm foothold, tried hard to keep their ranks and follow their respective standard-bearers; but they soon lost all formation. As men entered the sea from one ship or another, they attached themselves in bewilderment to any standard they came across; and the enemy on the shore, whenever they saw a few legionaries dropping one by one into the water, drove their horses in, and surrounded and attacked them before they could join their comrades; while others planted themselves on the exposed flank of a disordered unsupported group,[1320] and showered missiles into their midst. Jarring with the shouts of the disciplined soldiers, resounded the harsh Celtic yell,[1321] the clangour of the Celtic trumpet,[1322] and invocations uttered in strange language to strange gods.[1323] Caesar now manned his scouts and the boats belonging to the galleys, and sent them in different directions to assist all who were overmatched. Gradually the foremost bodies of legionaries fought their way on to the beach: the rest followed quickly [Sidenote: Caesar’s victory indecisive owing to want of cavalry.] in support; and now, closing their ranks and drawing their swords, they charged the enemy with exultant cries, and put them to flight. Want of cavalry, however, made it impossible to complete the victory.

[Sidenote: The Romans encamp.]

It was now near sunset. The site which Volusenus had noted for the camp was close to the sea; and while fatigue-parties were sent out to cut wood and the outposts took up their appointed places, the rest of the troops fell to work with pick and shovel along the lines which had been marked out for them. The galleys were hauled up on the beach; but the transports were necessarily left at anchor. Until the cavalry should arrive it would not be prudent to venture into the interior; and we may suppose that a galley was sent back to the port of Ambleteuse, to inform their captains about the landing-place for which they were to steer.

[Sidenote: British chiefs sue for peace.]

It would seem that the resistance which the Britons had opposed to the disembarkation was purely local, and that no defensive league had been organized. The men of East Kent were disheartened by failure, and on the next day sent envoys to sue for peace. Some days before, when Commius had just landed and was formally communicating Caesar’s mandate to the chiefs, he had been arrested and imprisoned. The envoys, who brought him with them, begged Caesar to pardon this outrage, for which, they said, the ignorant rabble were responsible. He replied that their countrymen had made an unprovoked attack upon his army although they had spontaneously sent an embassy to Gaul to proffer submission; but he promised to accept their excuses on condition of their giving hostages. Part of the required number were handed over there and then, the envoys promising that the rest, who would have to be fetched from considerable distances, should be brought within a few days. The Britons who had fought at Walmer were ordered by their leaders to return home; and within the next few days tribal chiefs arrived from various districts, and formally surrendered.

[Sidenote: The cavalry transports dispersed by a gale.]

On the morning of the 30th of August the long-looked-for cavalry transports were descried in the offing. They had sailed from Ambleteuse with a light breeze; but as they were approaching the British coast a sudden gale prevented them from keeping on their course. ‘Some,’ wrote Caesar, ‘were carried back to the point from which they had started, while the others were swept down in great peril to the lower and more westerly part of the island. They anchored notwithstanding; but, as they were becoming waterlogged, they were forced to stand out to sea in the face of night, and make for the Continent.’[1324] The brief sentences tell a tale which cannot be mistaken. The ships which were swept down past the Foreland and the Dover cliffs scudded before the north-easterly gale;[1325] and, although they were evidently in no danger of being driven ashore, they were in great peril because only the most watchful steering could prevent them from broaching to: if a heavy sea struck the stern, it might swing the vessel round, and in a moment she would be overset and founder. The ships which were carried back to the point from which they had started were of course handled differently. A sailing-vessel, caught by a gale, must either run before the wind or lie to. With these vessels the latter course was adopted. Carrying only just enough sail to keep them steady, they were laid to on the port tack; and once they had drifted past Cape Grisnez into comparatively sheltered water, they were able to stand in for the shore and make the port of Ambleteuse.[1326] Not one of the eighteen vessels, not a single man among their crews, was lost; and this fact, which Caesar was careful to record, bears witness to the skilful seamanship of the Gauls.

[Sidenote: Caesar’s fleet partially wrecked.]

But on the shores of East Kent the gale was still raging; and the moon that shone out that night through the fleeting clouds was at the full. Caesar’s officers and, it would seem, Caesar himself were ignorant of the connexion between tide and moon; but if he had ever had leisure to study the writings of Pytheas or of Posidonius,[1327] he would have known what he might expect. His Gallic pilots indeed could certainly have enlightened him; and there will always remain a doubt whether he did not know more than he chose to admit. It was high water about an hour before midnight; and the seas that came rushing over the shingle before the north-east wind rose as high as a spring tide. The galleys which had been hauled up, as Caesar supposed, above high-water mark, were swept by the waves; the transports were driven ashore. Soldiers and crews could only look helplessly on. Several vessels were totally wrecked; and the rest lost their anchors, cables, and other tackle. No provision had been made against the chance of such a disaster; and the tools and materials that were needed for repairs were on the other side of the Channel. The whole army was seized with panic. Men asked one another how they were to subsist when they had no grain, and how they were to get back to Gaul when there were no ships to carry them.

[Sidenote: The British chiefs prepare to renew hostilities.]

The British chiefs who were still in the camp saw their opportunity. The coincidence of the shipwreck with the full moon was a good omen.[1328] They knew that Caesar had no supplies; and although they did not know exactly the strength of his force, they saw that his camp was very small, and concluded that his troops were correspondingly few. Besides, his want of cavalry would place him at a disadvantage. Accordingly, they determined to recall their tribesmen, to prevent the Romans from getting supplies, and to harass them by an irregular warfare, in the hope that they would be able to starve them out, or at any rate prevent them from re-embarking until wintry weather should have set in. One by one they moved away from the camp without attracting observation.

[Sidenote: Caesar labours to retrieve the disaster.]

Meanwhile Caesar was doing his best to retrieve the disaster; and, although the chiefs managed to keep their plans secret, he suspected that they meant mischief. Moreover, the hostages who were still due did not arrive. The crops were ripe; and troops were detailed every day to get corn. A galley was sent back to Gaul to fetch everything that was required for repairing the ships. Twelve of them were so badly damaged that it was impossible to patch them up even for one voyage; but their timbers and bronze were utilized for the repair of the rest. All the legionaries who had any knowledge of carpentry or metal-working were employed as shipwrights, and worked with such good will that within a few days the fleet had been made tolerably seaworthy.

[Sidenote: The 7th legion surprised and attacked while cutting corn.]

All this time natives were daily passing in and out of the camp; and no one in the Roman army suspected that trouble was brewing. At a considerable distance from Walmer there was a wood, close to which was a field of standing corn. Everywhere else the crops had been already cut; and to this spot the 7th legion was dispatched. The officer who commanded it neglected to send out scouts; and the troops laid aside their arms, and went to work securely with their reaping hooks. It is true that the only cavalry were Commius’s thirty retainers; but they might have done good service. It would seem that even the ordinary precaution of keeping some of the cohorts under arms was neglected.[1329] Suddenly the enemy’s chariots and cavalry emerged from the wood, and swept down upon the unarmed and scattered reapers. The chariots careered at full gallop all over the field, the warriors who stood beside the drivers hurling javelins[1330] or slinging stones at the legionaries as they were running to seize their arms, and intimidating them, as Caesar said, ‘by the mere terror inspired by their horses and the clatter of the wheels:’ presently the drivers passed into the intervals between the troops of their supporting cavalry; horsemen and charioteers charged together;[1331] and while the warriors leaped from their chariots and fought as infantry, the drivers moved off to a safe distance, ready to receive them in case they were hard pressed. Meanwhile two cohorts were on guard as usual outside the gates of the camp;[1332] and some of their number reported to Caesar that an unusual amount of dust was rising in the direction in which the 7th had gone. His suspicions were aroused; and, ordering the two cohorts[1333] to accompany him, two others to take their places, and the remaining cohorts of the 10th legion to leave their work, arm, and follow him immediately, he marched towards the corn-field. He had advanced some little distance before he came in sight of the legionaries, who were evidently unable to hold their own. Huddled together in a small space, with ranks disordered, they were surrounded by cavalry and charioteers, missiles flying into them from every side. Caesar was just in time. When the enemy saw reinforcements approaching they suspended their attack, and the 7th recovered from their panic. But if the enemy had no mind to renew the combat, Caesar did not feel able, without cavalry and with only two legions, one of which had just been so roughly handled, to strike an effective blow. ‘The moment,’ he afterwards explained, ‘was not favourable for challenging the enemy and forcing on a battle.’[1334] Accordingly he contented himself with maintaining his ground, and, after a short interval, withdrew both legions into camp.

[Sidenote: Military operations suspended owing to bad weather.]

The tribesmen who had not yet rejoined their chiefs were on the way: but during the next few days stormy weather prevented the Romans from going out of camp and the enemy from attacking them. Such was Caesar’s statement; and it is not difficult to fathom his meaning. He would not attack a mobile enemy whom it was difficult to bring to action, but preferred to wait until they should attack him on his own ground, before his impregnable camp: on the other hand, the ground was so miry that for the time their chariots could not act. The Kentish chiefs, however, were not idle. Messengers scoured the country, assured all who still remained passive that the Roman army was contemptible, and urged them to seize the opportunity of plundering their camp and securing their own independence for ever. A large body of horse and foot speedily assembled, and advanced towards the coast. If they had been commanded by one skilful leader, and had adhered to the simple plan of harassing the Romans when they were endeavouring to embark, they might have achieved something. But they were a mere aggregate of tribal levies under tribal chiefs; and greed and impatience worked their ruin. The one thought that troubled Caesar was that their speed would enable them to escape the consequences of defeat. They [Sidenote: The Britons, attempting to rush Caesar’s camp, are defeated with heavy loss.] made a wild attack upon the camp, and the legions, which were drawn up outside, of course scattered them. Commius’s horse were of some slight service in the pursuit; and the legionaries, who exerted themselves to the utmost, killed many of the fugitives, and burned all the buildings which they had time to reach.

[Sidenote: Caesar compelled by the approach of the equinox to return to Gaul.]

This success came just in time to enable Caesar to leave Britain with some show of credit. His departure could not be postponed. It was about the middle of September: the dreaded equinox was near; and, with his unsound ships, he would need a fine night for the voyage. He must therefore have been relieved when, on the very day of their defeat, the chiefs sent envoys to sue for peace. He ordered them to find twice as many hostages as he had demanded before; and, as he could not wait for them, the chiefs were to send them in their own or the merchants’ vessels to Gaul. Before he embarked he may have personally reconnoitred the coast north of Walmer: anyhow he decided that, when he returned in the following year, his best landing-place would be the sandy flats between Sandown and Sandwich, where, as we have seen, the seaward slope was gentler than [Sidenote: Causes of his partial failure.] that of the Walmer shingle.[1335] But otherwise the objects for which he had undertaken the expedition had not been attained. The time for preparation had been too short. Owing to the excessive draught of the transports, the disembarkation had entailed unnecessary loss: by neglecting to bring over supplies Caesar had exposed the 7th legion to the risk of a defeat which would have been calamitous; while the unfortunate absence of the cavalry had made it impossible to obtain any information about the nature of the country, and had weakened the effect of the final victory. The troops were embarked without opposition, and, taking advantage of a fair breeze, Caesar set sail just after midnight. The [Sidenote: Two transports fail to make the Portus Itius: the troops whom they carried attacked by the Morini.] fleet reached the opposite coast safely; but two of the transports, which perhaps were in worse condition than the rest, kept a little too far out to sea, and, failing to make the mouth of the Liane, drifted a few miles further down the coast and reached land somewhere north of the mouth of Canche. The soldiers who had disembarked from them, numbering about three hundred, were marching northward to join their comrades when they were intercepted and attacked by a band of the Morini, who belonged to one of the clans which had submitted a few weeks before. As the Romans were considerably outnumbered, they were obliged to form in a square; and, hearing the shouts of the combatants, large numbers flocked to join in the attack. The three hundred defended themselves with vigour; and four hours later, when Caesar’s cavalry came to the rescue, they were still unbeaten. The assailants speedily dispersed; [Sidenote: Punishment of the Morini and Menapii.] but next day Labienus marched against them with the two legions which had just returned from Britain, and almost all were taken prisoners. Titurius and Cotta, with the other legions, had been punishing the Menapii. Finding that they had taken refuge in their forests, they mercilessly ravaged the open country, cutting the corn and burning the hamlets. Thus, when the legions went into winter-quarters in the country of the Belgae, Caesar might feel that in the ensuing summer his base of operations would be secure. ‘Thither,’ he wrote dryly, ‘two British tribes and no more sent hostages: the rest neglected to do so.’[1336]

[Sidenote: 55 B.C.]

When Caesar’s dispatches reached the Senate, they ordered [Sidenote: Thanksgiving service at Rome for Caesar’s success.] a thanksgiving service of twenty days to be held in honour his exploits. No one who is versed in Roman literature and gifted with historical imagination will regard the decree as ironical. For Caesar’s countrymen may well have felt that he had opened the way for the conquest of a new world.

VII. CAESAR’S SECOND INVASION OF BRITAIN

[Sidenote: 55 B.C.]

Caesar had learned the lessons which failure had taught [Sidenote: Caesar builds a fleet for a second expedition.] him. In the winter he was obliged, as usual, to go to Cisalpine Gaul, partly in order to discharge judicial and administrative business, partly to safeguard his own political interests in Italy. Before he left Belgium he ordered his generals to employ the legions in repairing the old ships and building a new fleet for the second expedition. He drew up minute instructions for their guidance. Two thousand cavalry horses, besides transport cattle, were to be conveyed across the Channel; and, as the campaign would probably be protracted, it would be impossible to leave all the heavy baggage behind, and imprudent to trust again for supplies to the resources of the country.[1337] The ships were to be somewhat shallower than those which were commonly used in the Mediterranean, in order to facilitate the work of loading and to enable them to be hauled up on the shore: on the other hand, to make room for troops and freight, they were to be rather broader in the beam. Their low freeboard would admit of their being constructed for rowing as well as sailing;[1338] and Caesar, who had noticed that the waves in the Channel were comparatively small, thought that it would involve no danger. But this shallowness, combined with unusual breadth, entailed a disadvantage which he had perhaps not foreseen: it would cause the vessels, unless the wind were right aft or on the quarter, to make a great deal of leeway.[1339] It was of course impossible to build such a large flotilla in one port. Some of the ships were to be constructed in the mouth of the Seine: others doubtless in the Portus Itius itself; others probably in the Canche, the Authie, and the Somme, possibly even on the Marne, far from the sea-coast.[1340] The legionaries were ill provided with appliances for ship-building: but they might be trusted to do their best; and the tackle necessary for rigging and equipping the fleet was to be imported from Spain. The cost of the expedition would be very heavy: but Caesar was amassing wealth for himself and his lieutenants by plundering Gaul; and he certainly hoped to do more in Britain than recover his expenses.[1341]

News of these preparations must of course have flown swiftly across the Channel; but it is hardly surprising that the British chieftains did not take advantage of the time that was given them to mature a scheme of defence. Cassivellaunus was still intent on self-aggrandisement; and in the struggle with his neighbours, the Trinovantes, he slew [Sidenote: Mandubracius flees from Britain and takes refuge with Caesar.] their king, whose son, Mandubracius, contrived to escape, took ship for Gaul, and presented himself--the first of a series of British exiles who invited Roman interference--in Caesar’s camp. The exact date of his flight cannot be given: it is sufficient to know that he was with Caesar when the time arrived for the Roman army to embark.

[Sidenote: Caesar winters in Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum.]

Caesar did not start for Italy until the middle of November,[1342] and after he had fulfilled the civil duties which awaited him in Cisalpine Gaul he was obliged to travel to the further shore of the Adriatic in order to punish a tribe which had been making devastating raids upon Illyricum. In the early spring he was again in Cisalpine Gaul, clearing off arrears of [Sidenote: His correspondence with Cicero.] work, and preparing to recross the Alps. Cicero for whom he had an unfeigned admiration, and whom he was always endeavouring to conciliate, was now upon the best of terms with him; and his correspondence throws a ray of light upon the hopes which had been awakened in Italy by the preparations for a fresh expedition to Britain. Caesar was of course beset with letters of recommendation written by public men on behalf of friends who hoped to acquire riches in Gaul or Britain; and Cicero wrote one, as he alone knew how to write, begging him to do something for a young lawyer, named Trebatius, who was destined to achieve distinction as a jurist. Caesar, however pressed with business he might be, received all such applications, when they came from men whom he cared to conciliate, with good humour. ‘Just as I was speaking,’ wrote Cicero, ‘to our friend Balbus at my house, a letter from you was handed to me, at the end of which you say: “Rufus, whom you recommend to me, I will make King of Gaul.... Send me some one else to provide for!” ... I therefore send you Trebatius.’[1343] The confiding lawyer wanted to make a fortune without having to work for it: but Cicero banteringly told him to moderate his expectations. ‘I hear,’ he wrote, ‘there is no gold or silver in Britain. If so, I advise you to capture a war-chariot and come back in it as soon as you can.’[1344] He ended his letter by telling Trebatius that if he wished to cultivate Caesar’s friendship, he must take the trouble to make himself useful. Caesar bestowed upon him the rank of tribune, exempting him from military duty, for which he was manifestly unfit; but, after a short experience of camp life, he made up his mind that the expedition would involve more hardship than profit, and preferred to remain in Gaul. But Caesar had gained another adherent who turned out a real soldier. Quintus Cicero, the orator’s younger brother, had consented to serve on his staff as a legatus, or general of division;[1345] and a few words from a letter in which this consent is alluded to illustrate the gracious tact which helped Caesar to gain adherents. ‘Caesar,’ writes Marcus Cicero to his brother, ‘has written to Balbus that the little bundle of letters in which mine and Balbus’s were packed was so saturated with rain when it was delivered to him that he was not even aware that there was one from me. However, he had made out a few words of Balbus’s, to which he replied as follows:--“I see you have written something about [Quintus] Cicero, which I have not deciphered: but as far as I could guess, it was of a kind that I might wish, but hardly hope to be true.”’[1346] On the 30th of April Quintus was with [Sidenote: Cicero’s hopes and fears about the second British expedition.] Caesar at Blandeno, a small town near Placentia. Marcus knew of course that Quintus was to accompany the expedition to Britain; and he indulged the fancy that Caesar’s exploits would furnish him with a theme for a heroic poem. ‘Only give me Britain,’ he wrote to Quintus, ‘to paint in colours supplied by you, but with my own brush.’[1347] But he must have soon received discouraging news; for early in June[1348] he wrote to Atticus:--‘The result of the British expedition is a source of anxiety. For it is notorious that the approaches to the island are ramparted by astonishing masses of cliff; and, besides, it is now known that there isn’t a pennyweight of silver in the island, nor any hope of loot except from slaves; and I don’t suppose you expect any of them to be a scholar or a musician.’[1349]

[Sidenote: Caesar returns to Gaul.]

By this time Caesar and his new lieutenant, having posted across Gaul at the rate of fifty miles a day or more,[1350] must have reached the country of the Belgae; and there is no more conclusive proof of the hold which he had already obtained upon the Gallic tribes than the fact that he was able to count, as securely as in Italy, upon finding horses ready for each successive stage. He immediately proceeded to inspect the various shipyards, near which the troops were encamped, and was well satisfied with the manner in which his instructions had been executed. ‘Thanks,’ he wrote, ‘to the extraordinary energy of the troops, and in spite of the extreme deficiency of resources, about six hundred vessels of the class specified and twenty-eight ships of war had been built, and would probably be ready for launching in a few days.’[1351] Caesar, who knew the stimulating power of discriminative praise, bestowed hearty commendation upon officers and men, and gave orders that the ships, as soon as they were ready for sea, should all assemble in the Portus Itius. For this purpose he detached an adequate [Sidenote: He is obliged to march to the country of the Treveri.] number of troops. Meanwhile his presence was urgently required in the country of the Treveri, a powerful tribe who inhabited parts of Luxembourg and Rhenish Prussia, and whose name survives in that of the modern Trèves. A squadron of cavalry furnished by this people had served on his side in the battle with the Nervii, and had deserted in a body at a moment when it seemed that he was doomed to defeat. Since that day the Treveri had refused to send representatives to attend the councils of Gallic magnates which he periodically convened; and he was now informed that they were making overtures to the Germans. Unless he recalled them to obedience, it was more than probable that while he was absent in Britain, Gauls and Germans would raise a rebellion in his rear. Accordingly, he marched against the malcontents with four lightly equipped legions and eight hundred cavalry. Fortunately for him the Treveri were not unanimous. Two rival leaders, Indutiomarus and Cingetorix, were struggling for supremacy. Cingetorix at once threw in his lot with Caesar, and gave him full information of all that was going on. Indutiomarus began to raise levies, and prepared to resist; but, finding that most of his fellow chieftains were going over to the stronger side, he sent envoys to Caesar, and endeavoured to explain away his conduct. Unwilling to lose time, Caesar feigned to accept his excuses, and contented himself with taking hostages for his good behaviour.

[Sidenote: Returning to the Portus Itius, he finds fleet and army assembled.]

It was near the middle of June when he returned to the camp on the Liane. More than eight hundred vessels of all sorts were in the harbour, including numerous small craft, constructed by rich officers who desired to make the voyage in comfort, by merchants who had dealings with the troops, or by adventurers who, we may suppose, had been attracted by stories of the wealth of Britain;[1352] but sixty of Caesar’s ships had encountered contrary winds, and failed to arrive.[1353] The entire Roman army, comprising eight legions, perhaps about thirty-five thousand men, besides slingers, archers, and four thousand Gallic cavalry, were assembled on the spot. The notables from all the tribes had also repaired [Sidenote: He resolves to take Gallic chiefs of doubtful fidelity as hostages to Britain.] thither in obedience to Caesar’s summons. He was aware that there was much smouldering discontent among them, and he intended to take all but the few on whose fidelity he could depend, as hostages across the Channel. Among these was one whose name, as written by Caesar, was Dumnorix, and whose coins, bearing the legend DUBNOREIX,[1354] still testify to the authority which he exercised. He was the most powerful chieftain of the Aedui, the most powerful Gallic tribe, whose territories, corresponding with the Nivernais and Western Burgundy, gave access to all parts of Northern and Western Gaul; who, from the time when the legions first entered Transalpine Gaul, had borne the honorary title of ‘Friends and Allies of the Roman People’; and whom it had been Caesar’s constant policy to treat with special favour. Dumnorix was the leader of the anti-Roman faction which existed in this as in almost every other Gallic tribe. He was a man of boundless ambition, the vehemence of whose character was out of all proportion with his judgement: he had amassed great wealth, which enabled him to maintain an army of retainers; and he had great influence not only with the lower orders in his own country but also with the Gauls of every tribe who wished to rid themselves of the Roman dominion. For the last four years his intrigues had caused anxiety to Caesar. He had been secretly in league with the Helvetian invaders at the time when Caesar marched to encounter them; and in the early part of the campaign his own brother, the famous Druid, Diviciacus, as well as the chief magistrate of his own tribe, had advised Caesar to beware of him. At that time Caesar had not felt sufficiently secure in his new position to punish him; he had simply given him a severe reprimand and a stern warning, but had ever since employed spies to watch his movements. It was now reported that Dumnorix had announced in the Aeduan tribal council that Caesar intended to make him king, and that the announcement had been received with alarm and indignation. There are writers who believe that Caesar had really offered him the throne in order to purchase his support: but it is hardly credible that he would have made such a gross miscalculation; and there is more reason in concluding that Dumnorix had spread a false report in order to estrange the loyal Aeduans from Caesar’s side. At all events he was irreconcilable; [Sidenote: Dumnorix resolves not to go.] and he determined that to Britain he would not go. He began by imploring Caesar to allow him to remain behind, pleading that he was not accustomed to the sea, and dreaded it, and insisting that he was debarred by religious obligations from leaving the Continent. Finding Caesar obdurate, he approached his brother chieftains, and adjured them to join him in refusing to go, assuring them that Caesar only wanted to get them out of Gaul in order that he might safely put them to death. Caesar did his utmost to keep him quiet, at the same time informing himself through his agents of all [Sidenote: The fleet weatherbound.] that he said and did. Meanwhile the fleet was lying idle in the harbour. All the preparations were complete: but continuous north-westerly winds made it impossible to sail; and we may safely presume that the troops, who might be required to row the transports, were employed in learning to use their oars. The two Ciceros were in constant correspondence; and the elder brother was impatiently waiting for the announcement that the campaign had begun. On the 2nd of July he wrote to Atticus, ‘Judging from my brother Quintus’s letter, I imagine that by this time he is in Britain. I am anxiously waiting for news of his movements.’[1355] The fleet had been weatherbound then for about three weeks; and the chief of Caesar’s commissariat, who succeeded in feeding forty thousand men for so long a period in an unfriendly country, must have possessed rare powers of organization. At length the wind shifted; and infantry and cavalry began to embark. Suddenly, while every man in the force had his thoughts concentrated on the work in hand, Caesar received news that Dumnorix and his Aeduan troopers had gone. Instantly he stopped the embarkation; and a strong detachment of cavalry was soon riding in pursuit with orders to bring Dumnorix back, or, if he resisted, to kill him on the spot: for, as Caesar afterwards said, ‘he thought that a man who disregarded his authority when he was present would not behave rationally in his absence.’[1356] [Sidenote: The fate of Dumnorix.] Adjuring his retainers to be true to him, Dumnorix resisted desperately; but he was surrounded and slain, passionately crying with his last breath that he was a free man and a citizen of a free country.

[Sidenote: Caesar sets sail, leaving Labienus in charge of Gaul.]

It was about the 6th of July, probably the day after this episode, when the embarkation took place.[1357] Commius, still friendly to Rome, was to accompany the expedition, as well as Mandubracius, the Trinovantian prince who had placed himself under Caesar’s protection. The slaughter of Dumnorix, following the temporary submission of Indutiomarus, had relieved Caesar from imminent danger: but he knew that to keep a hold on the half-subdued and restless peoples whom he was leaving behind would require all the ability of his ablest lieutenant; and there are indications in his narrative that he hoped, if all went well, to winter in Britain, and thus to find time not merely to deter the Britons from combining with the Gauls, but to conquer the south-eastern part of the country.[1358] Labienus therefore remained in charge of the camp and port with three legions and two thousand cavalry. He was to keep the expeditionary force supplied with corn, ascertain all that was passing in Gaul, and act on his own discretion according to circumstances. Among the divisional commanders that accompanied Caesar was Gaius Trebonius, an intimate friend of Marcus Cicero,[1359] who, two years before, had proposed, in the interests of the triumvirate, the law by which the province of Syria was assigned to Crassus, and the two provinces of Spain to Pompey. Late in the afternoon all was ready for the start, the flotilla lying moored in the harbour with five legions and two thousand cavalry on board. The ebb stream was running slowly down the coast. Towards sunset the hawsers were cast off,[1360] and the ships steered north by west before a light south-westerly wind. The moon was invisible,[1361] but at that time of the year there is no real night in these latitudes; and perhaps, as in the preceding year, each vessel hoisted a lantern when the twilight waned. About ten o’clock the stream began to run up the Channel, and for a time the vessels made good progress. By midnight the leading division was not far off the South Foreland, and somewhere near what is now the southern end of the Goodwin Sands; but it is probable that in steering, sufficient allowance had not been made for the current, and that the shallow flat-bottomed vessels had already drifted to leeward away from their true course. And now the wind, which had been gradually dying down, almost entirely dropped, only retaining [Sidenote: The fleet drifts north-eastward out of its course.] just sufficient force to give steerage way. Borne along by a rapid flood, the armada drifted into the North Sea; and about a quarter past three, when day broke, Caesar descried the white cliffs of Kingsdown and the South Foreland receding on the port quarter. Right opposite, but hardly discernible, was the low coast on which he had landed in the previous year. We may assume that when he saw where he was drifting he anchored for a time. Presently the stream ceased to run up the Channel, and, after a few minutes’ slack water, the ebb set in.[1362] The Romans had a system of naval signalling,[1363] and either by this means or by oral instructions conveyed from vessel to vessel, the order was given to go about and run down Channel with the stream. The soldiers on board the transports got out their oars. For some time their work was easy; but when, not far from the spot where the South Sand Head Light Vessel is now moored, the ships’ heads were turned in the direction of Sandwich, they encountered a cross current setting towards the south-west.[1364] Although the transports were heavily laden, they toiled with an energy which earned Caesar’s warm admiration, and actually [Sidenote: The landing-place, between Sandown Castle and Sandwich, reached by rowing.] succeeded in keeping up with the galleys. About noon the whole fleet had reached the landing-place; but no enemy was to be seen, and in the course of the day a galley was speeding back across the Channel with one of Caesar’s couriers on board, who carried, besides other dispatches, a letter in which Quintus Cicero informed his brother that all was well.[1365]

[Sidenote: Leaving the fleet at anchor in charge of a brigade, Caesar marches against the Britons,]

While the troops and baggage were being disembarked, Caesar chose a site for his camp, perhaps on the slight eminence near the village of Worth. Some prisoners were soon brought in by the cavalry and questioned. They stated that their countrymen had assembled in large numbers to oppose the landing, but that, on observing the huge size of the the armada, they had abandoned the shore and retreated to higher ground inland. Caesar determined to march against them that very night, and accordingly accepted the risk of not hauling his ships up on shore, an operation which would have consumed valuable time. He had not forgotten the disaster of the previous year; but, as the shore where he now left the ships at anchor was not only perfectly open but sloped very gently seaward, he felt little anxiety for their safety.[1366] He mentioned this fact in his memoirs[1367] with an emphasis which suggests that he wished to deprecate professional criticism. Moreover, the storm which had wrought such havoc before had occurred on the night of a full moon: the moon was now new; and it may be doubted whether Caesar had studied the writings of the Greek astronomers, or consulted the pilots, from whom he would have learned that the tides at new and at full moon are virtually identical. Ten cohorts selected from the various legions, or about four thousand men, and three hundred cavalry were left, under the command of an officer named Quintus Atrius, to protect the fleet. Soon after midnight Caesar set out against the enemy. We may presume that he had sent a troop of cavalry in the afternoon to reconnoitre; but he must have trusted to his prisoners for information as to the whereabouts of the British force. It was posted on high ground overlooking Durovernum, the village which stood upon the site of Canterbury, and which the Romans afterwards linked by a system of roads with their settlements at London, Reculver, Richborough, Dover, and Stutfall near West Hythe. The general direction of Caesar’s march is indicated by the road which runs across the gently undulating and somewhat featureless country between Sandwich and Canterbury. He had advanced about eleven miles when, in the early morning, he descried the enemy’s cavalry and charioteers descending from high ground towards the left bank of the Stour. The spot where he encountered them must have been somewhere between Sturry on the east of Canterbury, and Thanington on the west; and military experts who know the country will probably conclude that it was near the latter.[1368] The enemy had doubtless attempted to occupy the whole range of low hills which closes the valley of the Stour between these two points, prepared to oppose the legions wherever they might attempt to cross. It would seem, however, that their resistance was comparatively feeble, perhaps because they were surprised, and, having needlessly strung out their forces, were unable to concentrate in time. Caesar [Sidenote: forces the passage of the Stour near Canterbury,] may have sent a detachment to turn their position: anyhow they were driven from the banks after a combat which he recorded in a single sentence. Retreating to the higher ground, they took up their position in a stronghold situated in the midst of woods,--probably the earthwork, about a mile and a half west of Canterbury, through which runs the Pilgrims’ Way, and within which, as we have seen, have been discovered iron implements and weapons of pre-Roman age.[1369] The legions, pressing after them, found the entrances blocked by abatis; and when they attempted to force their way in, the Britons, issuing from the woods in small groups, assailed them with showers of missiles. It would appear from Caesar’s narrative that the rampart, or at least a part of it, extended along the edge of the wood. The 7th legion was selected for the assault. Advancing in a dense column, with shields close-locked over their heads, they shot earth or fascines into the ditch so as to form a causeway flush with the top of the rampart; and it may be conjectured that the work was performed by men who advanced between the files under the protection of their comrades’ uplifted shields.[1370] [Sidenote: and storms a fort, to which they had retreated.] In this way the entrenchment, which, like all the British forts that Caesar saw, was weaker than the great strongholds of Western Britain, was speedily captured with small loss; and the Britons were expelled from the woods. The legionaries followed up their success, but Caesar soon stopped the pursuit. He was afraid to run the risk of letting his troops get entangled in a wooded country, of the intricacies of which he was ignorant; and, as it was late in the afternoon, he was obliged to utilize the remaining hours of daylight for the construction of his camp.

[Sidenote: Next morning he sends three columns in pursuit,]

Early next morning he dispatched his cavalry in three columns, each supported by a strong body of infantry, to hunt down the fugitives. The pursuers had advanced a considerable distance from the camp, the rearguard being still in sight,[1371] when some troopers rode up to Caesar with a note from Atrius. A storm had arisen on the previous night: the ships had parted from their anchors, collided with one another, and almost all been dashed ashore and damaged. [Sidenote: but is forced to recall them by news that many of his ships had been wrecked.] Caesar sent gallopers to recall the pursuing columns, and order them to march back to the coast, defending themselves, if necessary, against a counter-attack, and started in person for the scene of the wreck.[1372] When he arrived, he found that Atrius’s report was accurate: about forty ships were totally destroyed; but, after inspecting the rest, he saw that it would be possible to repair them. In the course of the day the legions arrived. The men who had enlisted as skilled craftsmen were segregated and set to work; and galleys were sent to Labienus with a letter in which he was ordered to dispatch gangs of shipwrights from his three legions, and to employ the rest of the men in building new [Sidenote: He beaches the ships, constructs a naval camp, and repairs damage.] vessels. Caesar reluctantly concluded that the only way of preventing another disaster was to have all the ships hauled up on land out of reach of the highest spring tides. They were doubtless moved in the usual way, by capstans over greased logs, which the Romans called phalangae;[1373] and then, in order to secure them against attack, an earthwork was thrown up round them, and connected with the existing camp. The amount of labour which these operations entailed was enormous: but there were some twenty thousand willing workers; and by employing them in relays all day and all night, Caesar was able to complete the task in about ten days. The repairs of course required a longer time.

[Sidenote: Results of the disaster.]

This second shipwreck was a calamity of which the mere loss in ships formed the smallest part. It changed the course of the campaign. Why had not Caesar restrained his eagerness to close with the enemy, and employed every available man in beaching the vessels which he had constructed with that very aim? Granted that it might not have been possible to complete even the mere work of dragging them all out of reach of the waves before the storm began, he would still have done right in not presuming upon the favour of fortune. Nobody knew better how necessary it is, especially in making war upon a half-civilized enemy, to complete all preparations, even at the cost of delay, before opening the campaign, so as to lose not a moment in following up an initial success, and to give fugitives no time to recover from their demoralization. Less than two days after he set foot in Britain he had dealt the enemy a succession of heavy blows, and the game was in his hands,--when all that he had done was undone by his own carelessness. Britons saw Romans in full retreat, and concluded that they were not invincible.

[Sidenote: Caesar again marches towards Canterbury. Cassivellaunus elected commander-in-chief of the Britons.]

By the time when the naval camp was finished the season was far advanced. It was near the end of the third week in July when Caesar was able to renew his campaign. The Britons had made good use of their respite. The tribes had suspended their feuds: Cassivellaunus had been called upon by a general assembly of notables[1374] to undertake the chief command with full powers; and a large force, composed of contingents from all, or almost all, the cantons of the south-eastern district, had marched to join the men of East Kent. We may doubt whether the Trinovantes had not held aloof; but if they had been forced to join the league, they were half-hearted. It is certain that, before Caesar had been long in the island, they sent envoys, promising submission and begging him to send Mandubracius back to them as their ruler and to protect him against Cassivellaunus. He allowed Mandubracius to depart, only stipulating that the Trinovantes should give him forty hostages and provide grain for his army; and readers who can interpret the Commentaries will conclude that the embassy was dispatched before he had advanced far into the interior, and doubtless as soon as he had proved his superiority. He left the same force as before--ten cohorts and three hundred cavalry--to protect the camp, and marched once more in the direction of Canterbury. As he was approaching the valley of the Stour, the enemy’s cavalry and charioteers commenced a fierce running fight with his Gallic cavalry; but they were beaten back at all points and driven to take refuge on the [Sidenote: The Romans harassed by British charioteers.] wooded heights near the river. The Gallic cavalry, however, over-eager to pursue, and getting entangled in ground which was unknown to them, suffered considerable loss; and soon afterwards, while the legionaries, careless of danger, were engaged in entrenching their camp, the enemy suddenly swooped down upon the cohort on guard and began to overpower it. Caesar had not yet learned due respect for his enemy; otherwise he would have kept a much more powerful force, as he had done on a similar occasion in Gaul, to protect the working-parties. He sent two cohorts, however, to support the struggling guard and cut off the retreat of the assailants. These reinforcements were separated from one another by a narrow interval: the men who composed them, and who had not served in the preceding year, were unnerved by the novel tactics of the charioteers; and the enemy boldly rushed through the interval, and got back to the main body unhurt. Several additional cohorts, accompanied by cavalry, were sent to retrieve the situation. The combat was clearly visible from the camp; and Caesar saw that his troops, who had so often routed their continental enemies, were at a serious disadvantage. The Britons fought not in close order but in small groups, separated by wide intervals; and when these were tired, their places were taken by reserves. Whenever a group was hard pressed by the legionaries, the men who composed it ran away: the Romans, weighted by their heavy armour, were ineffective in pursuit; and, besides, accustomed as they were to fight in compact masses, they and their officers naturally failed to adapt themselves to new conditions. Again, when the Gallic cavalry charged the charioteers, the latter drove rapidly away; and, as soon as they had withdrawn their assailants from the support of the legions, the warriors leaped to the ground, and, supported by their own cavalry, fought as infantry, with the odds in their favour.[1375] A tribune named Quintus Laberius Durus was killed; but at length the reinforcements which Caesar sent up succeeded in beating back the Britons, or at all events deterring them for the moment from renewing their attack.

All this time Caesar was doubtless fighting to gain the line of the road or trackway by which he would have to march westward into the interior of Britain and assail the dominions of Cassivellaunus. But it was of course out of the question to begin his march until he had inflicted a crushing defeat upon the allies; and, as he saw now, their game was to avoid a general action. On the following day, however, a chance presented itself. In the morning the enemy, who had taken up a position on the heights at some distance from the Roman camp, moved down, as before, in scattered groups, and began to assail the cavalry outposts, but with somewhat diminished vigour. The outposts fell back; and presently the whole of the cavalry were sent out, along with three of the legions, under Gaius Trebonius, on a foraging expedition. Part of the force proceeded to cut grass, while the rest remained drawn up in support. Suddenly the enemy rushed down from all points on the foragers, and, made reckless by success, ‘did not even hesitate,’ as Caesar wrote, ‘to attack the ordered ranks of the legions.’[1376] [Sidenote: Trebonius routs the Britons.] The Romans charged them fiercely, and took ample revenge for the previous day. The Britons were driven from the field, hotly pursued by Trebonius and his men, until the Gallic cavalry, relying upon the support of the legions, which still followed as closely as they could, hunted them in headlong rout, cutting them down in numbers, and never giving them a chance of rallying. Not even the charioteers could get a moment’s respite, or dared to dismount and turn [Sidenote: The British infantry disperse.] upon their pursuers. This defeat was decisive. The tribal levies of foot at once dispersed to their homes; and ‘from that time’, wrote Caesar, ‘the enemy never encountered us in a general action.’[1377]

[Sidenote: War-chariots versus Roman troops.]

Cassivellaunus had learned a lesson which his kinsmen on the other side of the Channel were already taking to heart. His undisciplined foot were evidently powerless to contend against the legions on a fair field, and, except behind works, in a strong position, or in attacking small bodies which had been carelessly isolated, they were of little use. The Celtic infantry of the more warlike tribes were not indeed to be despised. The Helvetii with their allies made a stubborn fight against Caesar: the Parisian confederation under the veteran Camulogenus tested the mettle of Labienus; and the issue of the battle with the Nervii remained long doubtful. But in all these combats the Celts had a great numerical advantage; and in all they were beaten to the verge of annihilation. Cassivellaunus saw that his object was not to be attained by regular warfare. Moreover, it is certain that, during a prolonged campaign, he would have been unable to feed a large army. But he still had four thousand charioteers with the cavalry who supported them;[1378] and on them he determined to rely. The success with which he had already used them makes us wonder why the Continental Celts had abandoned the arm which their insular kinsmen wielded with such effect. Less than a century before Caesar crossed the Alps chariots had been generally employed in Eastern and in Central Gaul.[1379] Chariots have been found in scores in the great sepulchres of the Iron Age which have been opened in Burgundy and Champagne, while in the British barrows their remains are extremely rare.[1380] It is evident to every reader of the Commentaries that Caesar was at his wits’ end to know how to adapt his organization to this strange form of resistance; and it is equally evident that on his own side of the Channel he never encountered it at all. The most satisfactory explanation is to be found in a passage of the Commentaries from which we learn that the Gauls spent large sums in buying well-bred horses.[1381] Evidently they discarded chariots for cavalry when they began to import from Southern Europe horses which were powerful enough to carry big men and charge with effect.[1382] The German cavalry, it is true, had only small underbred cattle; but they were virtually mounted infantry.[1383] The British may have been well or ill mounted; but for the most part British horses were no bigger than ponies,[1384] able to draw a light car but not to gallop fast with heavy riders. Still, whoever calls to mind how in the last Samnite War the Gallic chariots routed the Roman cavalry,[1385] will perhaps doubt whether the Gauls did well to abandon chariots altogether in favour of mounted troops.

Nevertheless the reader who trusts to his first impressions of Caesar’s narrative is prone to exaggerate the successes of the British charioteers. Their object was to break up the formation of their opponents; and this they could only do when carelessness gave them an opening. The punishment which they inflicted upon the 7th legion was invited by the almost incredible negligence of its commander: the check which Caesar himself suffered in the following year befell an outpost of inadequate strength. In irregular warfare chariots could cause serious trouble; but the difficulty which Caesar found in dealing with them was partly due to the fact that his army, like all Roman armies, was weak in cavalry,--and in cavalry of the right kind. If he could have taken to Britain one of those German squadrons with their attendant light infantry which so effectively supported him in the war with Vercingetorix, he would have had less trouble in his encounters with the British charioteers.

[Sidenote: Caesar marches for the country of Cassivellaunus,]

Caesar now marched for the country of Cassivellaunus, who, as he divined, intended thenceforth to wage a guerrilla warfare. The troops must have carried in their wallets rations for several days, drawn from the magazine in the naval camp; for they could not count upon getting supplies from the farms till they reached the territory of the Trinovantes; and we may be sure that Caesar, venturing into an unexplored country and against so troublesome an enemy, dispensed as far as possible with transport. What route he followed is an interesting but perhaps insoluble question. He dismisses the story of the march, which must have occupied nearly a week, in a single sentence, which contains no clue. We know only that he started from the neighbourhood of Canterbury, and that he crossed the Thames at or not far from Brentford.[1386] It is, however, morally certain that he marched either by the trackway on the line of which the Romans of a later period made the great road called Watling Street, which crosses the Medway between Rochester and Strood, or along the southern slope of the chalk escarpment, and across the Medway at Aylesford or Halling. All the antiquities of Roman or pre-Roman age that have been discovered in Kent, west of the maritime tract which is bounded by a line drawn from Reculver through Canterbury and Lympne to Romney, have come from sites clustering alongside these routes.[1387] That Caesar makes no mention of the Medway has no significance. He must have crossed it somewhere; and it is certain that he crossed many rivers to which he never alluded unless the passage had some tactical or strategical importance. His narrative shows that his object was to inflict the greatest damage possible upon the enemy’s homesteads and farms; and we may reasonably suppose that he followed the route, leading through a fertile and populous country, which his successors selected, diverged from it somewhere near Rochester, and thence advanced by way of Bromley. But the matter is of no great consequence. Caesar demands from his readers not only attention and intelligence, but also expert knowledge; but from those who possess these qualifications he rarely withholds necessary information: when he baffles their curiosity, his silence does not prevent them from understanding what is essential.

[Sidenote: whose chariots harass his cavalry.]

During a great part of the march Cassivellaunus dogged the Roman column. Caesars object was to strike terror; and despoil the inhabitants of their chief source of wealth,--their flocks and herds. But Cassivellaunus soon taught him a lesson of caution. He succeeded in ascertaining what route the Romans intended to pursue, and sent messengers to warn the inhabitants to drive their cattle into the woods and to fly for refuge thither themselves. Knowing every inch of the country, and having the advantage of superior mobility, he would conceal his force in some wooded spot, and when he saw the Roman horsemen diverge from the column and ride forth to plunder, swoop down upon them and inflict heavy loss. Caesar was compelled to keep his cavalry, who were terrorized by these unforeseen attacks, in constant touch with the infantry; while the legions, whose powers of endurance were taxed to the uttermost, moved off the road from time to time, and burned and ravaged whatever they could reach.[1388]

[Sidenote: Caesar crosses the Thames.]

Caesar had ascertained that the Thames, in that part of its course which formed the southern boundary of the territory of Cassivellaunus, was only fordable at one spot; and since the time of Camden it has generally been supposed that this was close to Halliford,--the only place, it is said, between Hurleyford, about two miles west of Great Marlow, and the sea, whose name preserves the memory of an ancient ford.[1389] Evidence, however, has lately been adduced which makes it more probable that Caesar was describing Brentford; for, though the name may only have denoted a ford over the Brent, in this part only of the lower Thames have piles been discovered in dredging operations which could reasonably be identified with the obstacles that threatened the passage of the Roman army.[1390] When the column descended into the valley, Caesar found that Cassivellaunus had anticipated him. The further bank was fenced by a row of sharp stakes, behind which were massed Cassivellaunus’s tribesmen; and Caesar learned from prisoners and deserters that similar stakes, concealed by the water, were planted in the bed of the river. He sent his cavalry behind cover to swim the stream close by; and at the right moment the column of infantry plunged into the water, and advanced to the attack. Caesar had calculated that the British levies would be distracted by the onset of the cavalry upon their flanks and rear; but the infantry were determined to have the credit for themselves. We may suppose that, while they were removing the stakes, the slingers and archers harassed the enemy.[1391] ‘The infantry,’ wrote Caesar, ‘advanced with such swiftness and dash, though they had only their heads above water, that the enemy, unable to withstand the combined onset of cavalry and infantry, abandoned the bank and fled.’[1392]

[Sidenote: Cassivellaunus orders the kings of Kent to attack the naval camp.]

But Cassivellaunus did not despair. Before Caesar crossed the Thames, he had sent mounted messengers to order the four petty kings of Kent to raise all their tribesmen instantly and make a sudden attack upon the naval camp.[1393]

Meanwhile Caesar was moving eastward into the country of the Trinovantes. Cassivellaunus haunted his line of march as before, and pursued the same harassing tactics; but the legionaries succeeded in doing considerable damage. [Sidenote: Caesar enters the country of the Trinovantes, who furnish hostages and grain.] When, however, they crossed the frontier of the Trinovantes, Caesar was careful to restrain them from committing any act of violence. The Trinovantes punctually handed over the hostages and delivered the grain which Caesar had required from them; and several other tribes which had joined the defensive league, seeing that they had been rewarded for their [Sidenote: Five of the confederate tribes submit.] submission, sent envoys to announce their surrender. These tribes were the Cenimagni, the Segontiaci, the Ancalites, the Bibroci, and the Cassi. The last three do not reappear in history: they were evidently dependent tribes, and nothing is known about their geographical position except that they lived somewhere in the basin of the Thames, on the west or possibly on the north of the Trinovantian territory in Essex.[1394] The territory of the Segontiaci, judging by coins, may have been conterminous with, and was probably north of that of the Atrebates,[1395] who occupied parts of Hampshire and Berkshire.[1396] The Cenimagni may have been the people who dwelt in Suffolk and Norfolk,[1397] and who, under the name of Eceni or Iceni, rose in revolt under Boadicea, a century later, against the Romans. The envoys told Caesar that the stronghold of Cassivellaunus was not far off, and that a large number of the inhabitants with their flocks and herds had taken refuge in it. Possibly it was Verulamium, near St. Albans,[1398] which was in later times the capital of the son and successor of Cassivellaunus, though Caesar seems to imply that there was no permanent settlement within the fortress: at any rate it was not far west of the river Lea, which formed the boundary of the Trinovantes. When Caesar arrived, he found that the stronghold was protected by woods and marshes, and fortified with a rampart and trench: but the legions, advancing on two sides, speedily carried the place by assault: many of the Britons, as they were endeavouring to escape, were caught and killed; and all their cattle were taken.

[Sidenote: Attack on the naval camp repulsed.]

Meanwhile the counter-attack which Cassivellaunus had ordered had been delivered. The extent of the naval camp, enclosing as it did several hundred vessels, might appear disproportionate to the slender force to which Caesar had entrusted its defence; but he had made no miscalculation. Probably the entrenchment was protected at intervals by towers like those which he used to strengthen his lines at Alesia, and from which artillery could play upon the flanks of the assailants. A chieftain named Lugotorix was chosen to lead the assault; but the garrison made a sortie, beat off the Britons with considerable loss, and captured their commander.

[Sidenote: Caesar’s hurried journey to the coast and its significance.]

It was perhaps just after this event that Caesar, accompanied by a flying column, made a journey to the coast, of which he omits all mention in the Commentaries. His silence, which can hardly have been unintentional, certainly suggests that the news of the attack--perhaps the information that it was about to be delivered--caused him serious anxiety. On the 5th of August (the 1st of September of the unreformed calendar) he wrote a letter from the naval camp to Marcus Cicero. A service of dispatch vessels had been organized, which plied from time to time between the Kentish coast and the Portus Itius. Caesar had found time to write at least once before; and the younger Cicero had sent a long series of letters to his brother, whose allusions to them reveal something of the inner history of the campaign. In the first week of August he replied to the one which had described the safe arrival of the armada:--‘How I rejoiced at your letter from Britain. I was nervous about the sea and the coast of that island. I don’t underrate what you have still to do; but there is more ground for hope than fear.’[1399] On the 1st of September he dispatched a long letter, written in instalments, in which he acknowledged the receipt of four successive letters:--‘I gather from yours,’ he said, ‘that we have no occasion either for fear or exultation.’[1400] The letter to which he here alludes--the first of the series--was written before the 16th of July, that is to say, while the construction of the naval camp was still going on. Caesar’s first letter was written in a spirit so friendly that it gave him the keenest pleasure, mingled with pain; for he knew that Caesar could not long remain in ignorance of the death of his daughter, Julia, the wife of Pompey. Towards the end of the letter of September 1 he says, ‘Caesar wrote me a letter on the 5th of August, which reached me on the 31st, satisfactory enough as regards affairs in Britain, in which, to prevent my wondering at not getting one from you, he tells me that you were not with him when he reached the coast.’[1401] Caesar did not, it would seem, write again until the 29th of August, after which about a fortnight elapsed before he quitted the island; and it is hardly credible that he should have spent more than five weeks inactive at the sea. The only conclusion is that he had some urgent motive for leaving the main body of his army and undertaking a journey of seventy miles, and that this journey was connected with the attack upon the camp. Perhaps he desired to see for himself that the defences were secure against any future attempt, to reinforce the garrison, and to ascertain what progress had been made in the repair of the fleet.[1402]

[Sidenote: Cassivellaunus sues for peace.]

But Cassivellaunus had by this time begun to lose heart. His country had been harried without mercy; his people had been dragged off by hundreds to be sold as slaves; and--what he valued most of all--his cattle had been taken away from him. Discredited by reverses, he had not been able to hold his ill-assorted confederates together; their defection left him powerless to retrieve his fortunes; and his last great stroke had failed. He therefore sent envoys to the Roman camp to propose surrender, and requested Commius to negotiate for him.[1403] Caesar, on his part, was glad to be able to leave the island with a semblance of success. He had originally intended to winter in Britain and renew the war in the following spring. But Labienus had just warned him that the outlook in Gaul was threatening: the season for campaigning was nearly at an end; and he was aware that Cassivellaunus could still maintain a guerrilla warfare. He was obliged therefore to content himself with demanding hostages, fixing a sum which the tribes that had belonged to the league were to pay annually as tribute to Rome, and admonishing Cassivellaunus to leave the Trinovantes and their king unmolested.

[Sidenote: Caesar and his army return to Gaul.]

The hostages were handed over without delay; and Caesar, with his army and his train of captives, marched back to the coast. He found all the ships which it had been possible to repair ready for sea: but the number of those which had been condemned was not inconsiderable; and, as the prisoners were very numerous, he determined to effect the transport in two successive trips. With the first convoy went one of his couriers, bearing letters from him and Quintus to the elder Cicero. Their purport is preserved in one of Cicero’s letters to Atticus:--‘On the 26th of September I received letters from my brother Quintus and from Caesar, dated from the nearest coasts of Britain on the 29th of August. They had settled affairs in Britain, received hostages, and imposed tribute, though they had got no booty, and were on the point of bringing the army back.’[1404] Caesar expected that when the empty transports returned, they would be accompanied by sixty ships, which had just been launched by Labienus; but only a few either of the old or the new vessels arrived, the rest having been driven back by contrary winds. Day after day Caesar waited for them with increasing anxiety; for the equinoctial gales might soon be expected. At length he made up his mind that he could wait no longer. The few available vessels were inconveniently crowded: but the sea was perfectly smooth, and, leaving the Kentish coast between [Sidenote: About Sept. 15.] nine and ten at night, the fleet rowed into the harbour at break of day. In spite of all the perils to which they had been exposed in their numerous voyages, not a man had been lost at sea, not a ship had foundered in either year.

While Caesar was still in Britain he had begun to collect materials for a description of the island and of the manners [Sidenote: Caesar’s description of Britain.] and customs of its inhabitants. Partly, indeed, it may have been based upon the account of the Greek historian, Timaeus, who had himself derived material from the journal of Pytheas;[1405] but certain sentences embodied the results of his own observation. What specially struck him as he marched through the country was the density of the population and the superiority in material civilization of the people of Kent. ‘The population,’ he wrote, ‘is immense: homesteads, closely resembling those of the Gauls, are met with at every turn; and cattle are very numerous.’[1406] His curiosity was excited by the statement, which he had seen in one of his Greek authorities, and the origin of which we have already endeavoured to trace,[1407] that in some of the islands off the mainland there was continuous night for a month about the winter solstice. ‘Our inquiries,’ he tells us, ‘could elicit no information on the subject; but by accurate measurements with a water-clock we ascertained that the nights were shorter than on the Continent.’[1408] It would be useless to guess from what authority he derived the puzzling statement that groups of ten or twelve men had wives in common, brothers sharing with one another and fathers with their sons;[1409] in other words, that one of the British customs was polyandry. Thoughtless commentators have condemned the passage as simply untrue: it has been explained as the outcome of a misunderstanding; and an eminent scholar, with a theory that needed every support, has insisted that it was merely a blundering description of the primitive institution of matriarchy, which he believed to have survived among the Picts of a later time.[1410] We can only be sure that neither matriarchy nor polyandry existed among the dominant Celts; but it is permissible to suppose that certain primitive communities in remote districts had some usage which gave colour to Caesar’s statement. But perhaps the most remarkable feature in his description was the approximate accuracy of his estimate of the size of the island. He was told that its circumference was two thousand miles; and this information was certainly not derived either directly or indirectly from Pytheas, whose estimate, if Strabo has reported it correctly, was monstrously exaggerated.[1411] On the other hand, Caesar, although, like Pytheas, he placed Ireland in its true position, imagined, in common with other geographers who derided Pytheas’s teaching, that the Gallic coast, from the Rhine to the Pyrenees, was roughly parallel with Southern Britain.[1412]

[Sidenote: Review of Caesar’s invasions of Britain.]

The story of these invasions is not without interest for students of military history. In Britain Caesar was confronted by tactical problems of an entirely strange kind; and he did not dissemble the difficulty which he had experienced in attempting to solve them. The Roman soldiers had been trained to encounter an enemy who fought in close order; if ever, in the stress of unforeseen circumstances, such as those which beset the foragers of the 7th legion, they found themselves cut off from the standards which they were accustomed to rally round, they felt that they were but the units of a mob.[1413] It was not perhaps that they lacked the intelligence which enabled the German soldier in 1870 to adapt himself to new conditions. The coolness with which, in the fearful combat with the Nervii, each legionary shook off the effects of his surprise, and, disentangling himself from the press, ‘fell in by the standard he first caught sight of,’[1414] and fought as steadily as under his own centurion, shows that in Caesar’s soldiers no moral, as no physical, military qualification was wanting. But encompassed by those rushing chariots, assailed by those nimble groups of skirmishers who would not come to sword’s point with them, they found themselves helpless. And when they advanced with ranks closed--for the enemy never succeeded in breaking their formation--the charioteers could easily keep out of the way and concentrate the whole weight of their attack upon the cavalry, which they had lured away from their support. Cassivellaunus handled his levies with commendable skill; and if he did not deserve from Caesar the admiration that makes itself felt in the terse chapters which mirror the tremendous personality of Vercingetorix, he was a leader of no ordinary capacity, raised to his high place by merit alone. For the mistake which gave Trebonius the opportunity of dealing him that staggering blow near the banks of the Stour--the rush of his tribesmen, intoxicated by success, upon the ranks of the legions--not his lack of judgement but their lack of discipline was responsible. And if, instead of disbanding his infantry and following Caesar’s march with his chariots, he had then had the hardihood to let Caesar go his way, and, leaving his cattle, his homesteads, and his granaries to their fate, had hurled his entire force, combined with the levies of the Kentish kings, against the little garrison which held the naval camp, it might have gone hardly with Caesar. For, like the weak cohorts with which Galba strove to hold his camp in the Valais against a host of mountaineers, the garrison would have been compelled to defend themselves without respite against assailants whose numbers enabled them to fight and rest by turns; and if, like Galba’s men, they had attempted to disperse their enemies by a sortie, they would have been attacked in flank and rear by the charioteers and cavalry. Perhaps, indeed, Cassivellaunus saw what to do, but was not sufficiently master of his countrymen to do it. He who can keep in hand an aggregate of levies, shattered by defeat in a regular combat which they should never have fought, must needs be a king of men. Caesar understood the weaknesses of half-civilized tribes, and knew what risks he might fairly run. Just as Vercingetorix was compelled by his tribesmen to let go his hold upon the country of the Bituriges, where he barred Caesar’s advance, and to leave the way open to him by returning to succour their farms, so Cassivellaunus, we may be sure, would not have been able to withstand the clamours that would have bidden him go to the rescue of the threatened dominions of the Catuvellauni and their allies, even if, by sacrificing them, he could have cut the invaders’ communications, and detained him a prisoner in Britain. One may be allowed perhaps to speculate whether Caesar, if he had himself had much experience of British tactics in his first expedition, would have been able, without sacrificing the advantage of discipline, to train his troops in the intervening winter to adapt their formation to the methods of attack which they had to expect; or whether it would have been possible for him then, as it was two years later, to enlist the invaluable aid of German cavalry: but in his second campaign he speedily corrected the mistakes which his sanguine temperament had led him to make; and in his mode of conducting the war he conformed so closely to the maxims which the foremost British soldier of our time, himself an enthusiastic admirer of the Commentaries, has laid down for generals who have to command against uncivilized enemies,[1415] that one might almost suppose those maxims to have been derived from a study of the campaign. By marching in the night to seek out his enemy after his disembarkation, he gained the advantage which is the reward of a secretly-planned, sudden, and swift movement against an undisciplined foe. Instantly following up his success, he taught the fugitives that the strongholds which kept their own countrymen at bay were of little avail against Roman soldiers. As soon as he was free to advance into the interior, he demoralized his enemies by rapidity of movement and incessant energy; and by ruthlessly destroying their crops, seizing the stores upon which they depended for subsistence, and driving off the cattle, which were their most valued possession, he succeeded, within a few weeks, in bringing the campaign, which fortune would not permit him to continue, to a successful conclusion.