lotes, and some to St. Paul himself. Others, again, have attributed it to such inferior personages as Aristobulus, who is incidentally mentioned by St. Paul, Joseph of Arimathea, and the disciples of Polycarp. Some of these accounts would imply that British Christianity is as old as the apostolic age; but all that can be regarded as well established is, that at a comparatively early period Christianity found its way into the British Islands. Before the close of the first century Christian refugees may have fled thither from the Continent to escape persecution, and Christian soldiers and civilians may have accompanied the invading armies. The destruction which had befallen the teachers of the old or Druidical religion, would facilitate the progress of Christianity, and the wars between the Romans and the natives allow it to go on unchecked. The monastic writers decorate their history of the first centuries of the British church with the legend of King Lucius, the son of Coilus, who, according to their account, was king of the whole island, was baptized, and became so earnest for the conversion of his people that he sent to Eleutherius, Bishop of Rome, for assistance in the important work. It is possible that, in this monkish legend, we see dimly shadowed forth some petty British king or chieftain, in vassalage to Rome, who, with the aid of Roman missionaries, effected the conversion of his tribe. In Tertullian's work against the Jews, written A.D. 209, he says that "even those places in Britain hitherto inaccessible to the Roman arms have been subdued by the gospel of Christ." This expression, however, may very possibly refer to Ireland, which was then accounted part of Britain. During the Diocletian persecution, St. Alban, the first martyr of our island, perished, with many others whose names have not been recorded. Bede says this event took place in A.D. 286; but if it really happened in the great persecution under Diocletian, a date at least seventeen or eighteen years later must be assigned to it. In the year 314, Eborius, Bishop of York, Restitutus, Bishop of London, and Adelphius, Bishop of Richborough, attended the council at Arles; and as three bishops formed the full representation of a province, it appears that Britain was thus placed on an equality with the churches of Spain and Gaul. In the fourth century, according to Gildas, Arianism was very prevalent in our island; but, on the other hand, St. Jerome and St. Chrysostom frequently allude, in their writings, to the orthodoxy of the British Church. In the fifth century the opinions of Pelagius were zealously disseminated by his countrymen, Agricola and Celestius; and, says Bede, the British ecclesiastics, in great alarm, and unable to refute them, implored assistance from the bishops of Gaul. The latter sent two of their number, who arrived in Britain about the year 429, and completely silenced the Pelagians by their arguments. But the baffled Pelagians again raised their heads, and again, in 446, Germanus, Bishop of Auxerre, accompanied by Severus, Bishop of Treves, came to Britain, and this time not only silenced the Pelagians, but procured the banishment of their leaders from the island. After the Christian church had been established, the same results were exhibited in Britain as in other countries; and while the Italian or Greek infused into the Christian faith the classical paganism of his fathers, the Briton leavened it with his ancestral Druidical superstitions.' It should appear that the order of monks soon became numerous, though they were obliged for a long time to procure their subsistence by manual labour. Even the British bishops, partly through the poverty of the country, and, perhaps, still more through the partial conversion of the people many of whom still remained attached either to the Roman paganism or to the Druidical worship-were, and long continued to be, very poor. When the successor of Constantine offered to maintain the bishops of the West from the imperial revenues, only those of Britain acceded to The the proposal, while the rest rejected it. number of churches and houses of religion seems to be only matter of conjecture; but it is pretty certain that, even at the time when the Romans abandoned the island, many parts of it had never heard of the Christian gospel. 1 Southey, Book of the Church. CHAPTER IV.-HISTORY OF SOCIETY. CÆSAR'S INVASION TO THE ARRIVAL OF THE SAXONS.-B.C. 55-A.D. 449. Derivation of the names Albion and Britain-Cæsar's account of the island-Britain peopled by two distinct races -Cæsar's account of the inhabitants-Personal appearance of the Britons-Their painted skins-Strange marriage institutions of the Britons-Their habitations-Their handicraft ingenuity-Their war-chariots, baskets, furniture, dress, ornaments-Their means and modes of subsistence-Their form of government-Disunion of the tribes, and their mutual wars-Their towns and fortifications-Roman civilization, and its effect on the Britons. ÆSAR'S own account of the island and its inhabitants, as given in his Commentaries, shows that he spent but a brief period in his British invasion, and thus its results were indecisive. It was not a conquest, but a mere hostile landing; and the account which he has given us of the ancient Britons was perhaps little more than he might easily have learned from the Gaulish traders, whom he consulted before he commenced the expedition. Still, his brief notices are valuable, characterized as they are by his wonted sagacity and power of observation, and also by their forming the first introduction of the British people into the records of accredited history. of plunder, or to make war, had crossed over from among the Belgae, and who, in nearly every case, retain the names of their native states, from which they emigrated to this island, wherein they made war, and settled, and began to cultivate the ground." Taking this statement in connection with the whole tenor of antiquarian discovery among the earliest ages of Britain, we find that its first inhabitants were Celts, children of that large Asiatic family who emigrated during the primitive ages into Europe, and afterwards, under the names of Gauls and Cimbri, carried such terror into Italy and Greece, and secured so many fair European settlements, among which Britain was not the least important. In process of time, however, according to Cæsar's intimation, they had formidable rivals in the Belgæ, a Gothic race, located in Gaul, and renowned for their superior valour and activity, who, crossing the narrow sea, obtained possession of the south-eastern coast of Britain, and drove its Celtic population In a former chapter we had occasion to notice the names, first, of Samothea, and afterwards of Albion, by which the island was distinguished. We also adverted to the historical legends in which they are said to have originated. These sources, however, were unsatisfactory to our ear-into the interior. In this way two distinct races, liest antiquaries, who turned their inquiries to another source, and they have derived the name of Albion from alb or albus, signifying white, which is supposed to have been given to the island from the whiteness of its cliffs, as seen from the opposite coast of Gaul. That of BRITAIN, by which name the island was first known to the Romans, is still more doubtful in its origin; so that, while some of our antiquaries, at the head of whom is Camden, have derived it from brit or brith ("painted"), in allusion to the blue painted skins of the natives, others, with Carte, suppose it a corruption of a British word, prydhain, but of the true meaning of which they are uncertain. From this unprofitable investigation about names, we gladly turn to the account of the island itself, as given by Julius Cæsar. "The iuland part of Britain," he says in his Commentaries, "is inhabited by those who, according to the existing tradition, were the aborigines of the island; the sea-coast, by those who, for the sake and one considerably superior to the other, as well as later in its arrival, are recognized as occupying the island at the commencement of the Roman invasion. Some additional information upon this important head might have thrown much light upon our primitive history, and explained those perplexing anomalies of civilization, combined with barbarism, which the ancient relics of our island present to the study of the antiquary. But Caesar, although the most observant and intellectual of conquerors, was not the conqueror of Britain, and his hostile advance into it never appears to have exceeded eighty miles, commencing at the east coast of Kent, and terininating at the capital of Cassivellaunus, supposed to have been afterwards the ancient town of Verulam, in Hertfordshire. The tribes dignified with the name of nations, with whom he successively came in contact in his hasty inroad, were the people of Cantium, the Trinobantes, the Cenimagni, the Segontiaci, the Ancalites, the Bibroci, and the Cassi-clans sufficiently numerous within so short a compass, and probably living in the old Celtic fashion, either of isolation or downright hostility; but the different localities they occupied is now a matter of mere conjecture. It is worthy of remark, also, that he has not mentioned the name of a single British town in the whole course of his expedition. From this very limited account of the island, we pass to that which he has given of the inhabitants; and here his brevity is sufficiently characteristic of his limited knowledge of the subject. "The population," he says, "is very great, and the buildings very numerous, closely resembling those of the Gauls: the quantity of cattle is considerable. For money they use copper, or rings of iron of a certain weight. Tin is produced there in the midland districts, and iron near the seacoast; but the quantity of this is small. The copper which they use is imported. There is timber of every kind that is found in Gaul, except beech and fir. They reckon it unlawful to eat the hare, the hen, and the goose. These animals, however, they breed for amusement. The country has a more temperate climate than Gaul, the cold being less intense." After several geographical statements, which are irrelevant to our purpose, Cæsar thus continues his account of the Britons:-"Of all the natives, those who inhabit Kent (Cantium)-a district the whole of which is near the coast are by far the most civilized, and do not differ greatly in their customs from the Gauls. The inland people for the most part do not sow corn, but subsist on milk and flesh, and have clothing of skins. All the Britons, however, stain themselves with woad, which makes them of a blue tinge, and gives them a more formidable appearance in battle. They also wear their hair long, and shave every part of the body except the head and the upper lip. Every ten or twelve of them have their wives in common, especially brothers with brothers, and parents with children; but if any children are born, they are accounted the children of those by whom each virgin was first espoused." their personal appearance. The physical qualifications of those rude warriors, who fought with the greatest of Roman conquerors, and who, of all his enemies, reduced him to the honours of a doubtful victory, could have been of no ordinary character. The strength and courage of these half-naked, scantily armed, mustachioed warriors, were well attested by the stout resistance they offered to the Roman legions. Their large correspondent stature is mentioned by Strabo, who tells us he had seen some British youths at Rome half a foot taller than the Gauls, who in turn were superior in height to the Romans. This writer adds, that they were not gracefully and strongly formed in proportion to their great stature, and that they did not stand very firmly upon their legs; but it must be remembered that these juvenile specimens were perhaps longer in attaining to full maturity than persons of a smaller size and warmer climate. As for their painted skins, with which the Britons endeavoured to dismay their enemies, the idea prevailed among the Romans of Caesar's day, that this was nothing more than a mere painting or staining with the juice of woad-something, in deed, like the warpainting of the Red Indians when they prepare for fight or festival. But instead of this mere surfacecolouring, which may be washed off at pleasure, we learn from several ancient Roman writers that it was a permanent tattooing, like that of the South Sea Islanders, which, once impressed, could never be eradicated. The process, they inform us, was effected in early youth, by puncturing the skin with a sharp-pointed instrument, and squeezing out the juice of certain herbs upon the punc Woad Plant, Isatis tinctoria. Such is the brief account of Julius Cæsar concerning that strange people, of whom his own countrymen appear to have but vaguely heard, until he landed an army in the island, and over-tures, which were made to represent the forms ran part of it in two campaigns. So little interest, however, did the Romans feel about Britain, or so difficult had a conquest of it been reckoned, that an interval of nearly a century followed before another invasion was attempted. The superior opportunities for information which were then acquired by his successors, not only sufficed to give a general confirmation of his statements, but also materially to enlarge their amount. The first circumstance that arrests our attention in these notices of the ancient Britons, is of animals, and that these pictures, which assumed a blue colour, grew with the growth of the body, and descended with it to the grave. When the first steps of Roman civilization introduced a more abundant clothing, this rude fashion soon disappeared in South Britain, and was retained only in the still unconquered north, where it continued to form almost the only kind of dress and ornament, and whose inhabitants were therefore called Picti (or painted men) by their Romanized brethren of South Britain. ID this simple way we can casily account for the sudden disappearance of the Caledonians in history, which has so sorely puzzled our antiquaries: instead of being utterly exterminated, as has sometimes been supposed, they only reappear under the nickname of Picts. It is worth noticing, by the way, that in their practice of tattooing, and their adherence to the pastoral life, the ancient Britons closely resembled two classes of the most hopeful and energetic of our modern savages. These, it will at once be seen, are the inhabitants of the South Sea Islands and the Caffres of South Africa. But what shall we say of that strange form of the marriage institution which Cæsar declares to have prevailed among the Britons? It appears so gross and revolting, and so opposed to that exclusive possession which forms the great principle of marriage, that modern writers have discarded the fact, by declaring such a state of society impossible. Polygamy, indeed, has prevailed almost since the world commenced, but in every case it has consisted of a plurality of wives, and not of husbands. Man, and not woman has always been the legislator, and he took care to frame the indulgence for his own especial benefit. Besides, could such a strong, healthy, and numerous race as the ancient Britons have been the produce of such promiscuous intercourse? It is also alleged that Caesar, whose testimony is quoted as the authority for such a revolting fact, was but a short time in the island, and saw little of the natives, except in actual conflict. He may have seen them, indeed, dwelling by whole families under one roof, from the want of more abundant accommodation, and thus have hastily come to the conclusion that they also lived in common sexual intercourse. But to this it may be answered, on the other hand, that no such mistake was made about the ancient Germans, who also lived by whole families in a single habitation. Cæsar, too, is not the only authority for the statement, for it was repeated by Dio Cassius and St. Jerome, when Britain was fully known to the world at large. Unpalatable, therefore, though it be, it descends to us with all the stubbornness of an historical fact. And that the ideas of the Britons upon the subject of marriage in general differed from those of other nations, is attested by the old Roman writer, Solinus, when he describes the government of the western is lands of Caledonia, afterwards called the Hebrides. Speaking of the sovereign, he states, "This prince is not even allowed to have a wife of his own; but he has free access to the wives of all his subjects, that, having no children which he knows to be his own, he may not be prompted to encroach on the privileges of his subjects, in order to aggrandize his family." Strange, also, though these British marriages were, they scarcely exceeded in guilt or extravagance the marriage institutions which prevail among the Nairs of India. Perhaps the Asiatic origin of the Celtic race who finally settled in Britain, and the strange expedients of the earliest Eastern nations to make marital jealousy a feeling not worth entertaining, might account in some measure for these matrimonial usages of the Britons, and show that they were not wholly improbable. At all events, we may hope that, like the permission given to polygamy, they were only confined to the higher classes, and not participated by the people at large; and this, too, long before the entrance of Christianity into the island, when they utterly disappeared. We have seen, in a former chapter, what kind of houses the Britons occupied on the arrival of Julius Cæsar. On that part of the sea-coast opposite Gaul, where intercourse with strangers had effected a higher civilization, the houses were like those of the Gauls, being poles set up in a circle, forming a sharp point at the top, with the interstices filled up with wattled work, and having neither window nor chimney; but far inferior to these were the common dwellings of the interior, which were little better than the holes of foxes. As for the ancient British towns, according to Cæsar they were nothing else than a cluster of these huts planted in the heart of a forest, guarded by a rampart of felled trees, and sometimes also by a dun, or fortress, composed of loose blocks of granite. As safety and the means of absolute subsistence were of more account at such a period than even domestic comfort, the principal British constructions of those days were the strongholds of princes, while those of the common people might be worn out in a year. Little better than this were the Border houses in Scotland, even so late as the fourteenth century. In their handicraft operations these islanders showed considerable ingenuity. This was especially manifested in the construction of their esseda or war-chariots, which must not only have been strong and well-poised, to encounter the rough fields over which they were driven at full speed, but also to have tasked much skill in the fabrication of the scythes with which they were armed, and the harness with which the horses were yoked. These chariots, indeed, the Britons appear to have derived from their remote Eastern ancestry, and such vehicles for the purposes of warfare occur in the earliest records of Sacred History, as well as in the poems of Homer. Even at a late period they were also occasionally used by the nations of Asia against the armies of the Roman republic, and were continued by the Britons the last of all, until they learned to imitate the military arts of their conquerors. The same ingenuity indeed, might have constructed war-canoes equal | the burial-places of women. These ornaments conto those of the New Zealanders, and made the sist of beads of granite, flint, aud pebble; amber Britons an adventurous maritime people; but, as and bead necklaces; bronze pins, some of them we have already stated, they had that aversion with bone and ivory handles; and bracelets of for the sea which has characterized the whole ivory. All this, however, was poor and rude Celtic race. Next to their war-chariots, the skill enough, even at the best, and its nakedness must of the Britons was exerted in the various opera- have been keenly felt when brought in contact tions of basket-work, from the walls of a house with the wealth, grandeur, and taste of the Roand the sides of a coracle, down to the lightest man conquerors. It was natural, therefore, that utensil for household purposes. It was the same Caractacus should have burst into the exclamation, kind of ingenuity as that of the Caffres of South while he was led a prisoner through the stately Africa, who form elegant vessels of grass, so closely streets of Rome: "Alas! that those who inhabit plaited together as to hold milk and other liquids. such palaces should envy me a hut in Britain!" The baskets of the Britons were so highly admired at Rome, that the Latin word bascauda is supposed to have been of British origin. From the earliest coins we also find that the houses of the Britons were furnished with stools, like the modern crickets; while the contents of the barrows attest that, even before the entrance of the Romans, they made various kinds of pottery, such as drinking cups, jars, and cinerary urns. In the article of clothing, although the Britons of the interior wore nothing but the skins of animals at the arrival of Julius Cæsar, yet it is certain that the inhabitants of the coast opposite Gaul, in consequence of their higher civilization, and intercourse with foreign traders, were better provided. Even before this period, it is evident that the checkered cloth and bracca of the Gauls had found their way into the island, and been adopted by the wealthier inhabitants. With regard to personal The inhabitants of the island being so dependent upon their own native produce, subsisted upon the resources of agriculture, rearing of tame animals, and the chase, each pursuit being prosecuted according to the facilities of the particular district, or the advanced condition of the tribe that occupied it. In this way the inhabitants of the southern coast, and especially those of Cantium or Kent, were, like their brethren the Belgæ, addicted to agriculture; while the more inland tribes were chiefly shepherds, who were unacquainted with tillage, and lived upon the produce of their flocks and herds-or hunters, with whom the pursuit of game and wild beasts was more a necessity than an amusement. It is strange that to these three occupations fishing cannot be added, considering the plentiful supplies of food with which the rivers and coasts abounded; but Xiphilinus informs us that none of the Britons ever tasted fish. Whether this abstinence arose from a religious prejudice, or from the general Celtic aversion to the sea, it is impossible to determine. We learn from Pliny, that in agriculture the people of the south coast manured the soil, not only with the usual appliances, but with marl, a practice confined to themselves and their neighbours the Gauls alone. He informs us, also, that of this marl, one kind, which was white and chalky, was so effectual for the purpose, that ground once manured with it would retain its productive qualities for eighty years, so that no man using this to a field needed to apply it twice ornaments, the principal one worn by the Britons during his lifetime. In the pastoral life each was the torques, a chain composed of flexible proprietor had the boundary of his land marked bars twisted into the form of a rope, and clasped by a large upright stone, within which he conbehind by a hook. In its highest state of im- fined his range; but the knowledge of his occupaprovement, it was composed of links elaborately tion was so limited, that the milk of his cattle carved and ornamented. These were badges of was only useful for daily subsistence; for, accorddistinction for kings and chieftains, and, as such, ing to Strabo, the Britons were unacquainted were made of silver, and sometimes even of gold; with the making of cheese. In the hunter's life but, in the absence of these metals, they were the sacrilege of eating hares must have often been usually of bronze or iron. The Britons, also, as felt as a severe game-law, even though religion well as the Gauls, wore a ring on the middle finger. had enforced the prohibition. Such, also, may have The ornaments of the females were still more nu- been the case with the shepherd or the husbandnerous, as is attested by the remains found in bell-man in his abstinence from the hen and the goose. shaped barrows, which appear to have been chiefly TORQUES, with manner of wearing it, from the sculptures on the monument of Vigna Amendola. 1 See illustrations in vol. i. pp. 11, 12. |