:> ■Wiwf I' . ? In GIFT OF MICHAEL REESE EARLY BRITAIN. CELTIC BRITAIN. BY J. RHYS, M.A., PROFESSOR OF CELTIC IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD; FELLOW OF JESUS COLLEGE; AND LATE FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE. WITH TWO MAPS, AND WOODCUTS OF COINS. HLMLISHED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE TRACT COMMITTEE. LONDON : SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE, NORTHUMBERLAND AVENUE, CHARING CRCSS, W.C. ; 43, QUEEN VICTORIA STREET, E.C. ; 48, PICCADILLY, VV. ; AND 135, NORTH STREET, liKIGHTON. NEW YORK : E. & J. B. YOUNG & CO. 1882. ^ OF TH "' EARLY BRITAIN. CELTIC BRITAIN. BY J. RHYS, M.A., PROFESSOR OF CELTIC IN THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD ; FELLOW OF JESUS COLLEGE; AND LATE FELLOW OF MERTON COLLEGE. WITH TWO MAPS, AND WOODCUTS OF COINS. HLKLISHED UNDER THE DIRECTION OF THE TRACT COMMITTEE. LONDON : SOCIETY FOR PROMOTING CHRISTIAN KNOWLEDGE, NORTHUMBEKLAND AVENUE, CHAKING CkOSS, W.C. ; 43, QUEEN VICTORIA STREET, E.C. ; 48, I'lCCAUILLV, W. ; AND 135, NORTH STREET, URIGHTON. NEW YORK : E. & J. B. YOUNG & CO. 1882. ^^fv^-- '4^ WYMAN AND SONS, PRINTERS, GREAT Q-UEEN STREET, LINCOLN'S-INN FIELDS, LONDON, W.C. PREFACE. These are the days of little books, and when the author was asked to add one to their number, he accepted the invitation with the jaunty simplicity of an inexperienced hand, thinking that it could not give him much trouble to expand or otherwise modify the account given of early Britain in larger works ; but closer acquaintance with them soon convinced him of the folly of such a plan— he had to study the subject for himself or leave it alone. In trying to do the former he probably read enough to have enabled him to write a larger work than this ; but he would be ashamed to confess how long it has occupied him. As a student of language, he is well aware that no more severe judgment could be passed on his essay in writing history than, that it should be found to be as bad as the etymologies made by historians are wont to be ; but so essential is the study of Celtic IV CELTIC BRITAIN. names to the elucidation of the early history of Britain that the risk is thought worth incurring. The difficulty of writing anything intelligible on the sub- ject arises not only from the scarcity of the data handed down by ancient authors, but also in a great measure from the absence of the information neces- sary to enable one rightly to connect those data with one another. Take, for instance, the allusion by Ammianus Marcellinus to the Verturiones as one of the nations of the north of Britain : one cannot be said to be much the wiser for it, until one finds that their memory is perpetuated in the history of Albari in the rule-right name of the Men of Fortremi. Identifications of this kind will, it is hoped, do some- thing to bring the history of early Britain out of the quicksands into which historians' etymologizing has helped to steer it, and to make up for the short- comings of the work. These will probably be found to be of two kinds : the errors into which any one unaccustomed to writing on historical subjects can hardly avoid falling ; and the crudities of certain theories which further research may show to be untenable. For it is unavoidable that much of the reasoning should be of a highly hypothetical nature, PREFACE. V of Avhich the reader will in due time be reminded by the changes rung on such hard-driven words as appears and seems, as probably, possibly, Vir\'ith — two Celtic and one pre-Celtic ; and one of the great difficulties in writing the history of early Britain arises from the circumstance that the ancient authors on whom we have to rely for our information, seldom troubled themselves to make nice distinctions between thes£ races, though they were probably in different stages of civiliza- tion from one another. We shall, therefore, proceed at once to give the substance of what they have put on record respecting this country, and make what use we can of ancient coins or other relics of the BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS CESAR. 5 past to supplement that information about the island, seizing as we go on every opportunity of distinguishing between the different races peopling it. When the reader has thus become acquainted with the leading facts, something will be added by way of a more detailed account of our ethnology. No such, islands as Britain and Ireland were known to Herodotus in the fifth century before the Christian era; but some time afterwards one of the Scipios c -Rome visited Marseilles^ and Narbonne to find ou whether trade could not be established with the region beyond southern Gaul, so as to injure tlic Carthaginians, whose sailors used to bring tin, not only from Spain and the Cassiterides or the tin islands on the north-west of that peninsula, but also from Gaul. The Roman could not, however, get any information about the north, but the idea of a voyage of discovery took form among the merchants of IMarseilles, and the result was, that they fitted out an expedition accompanied by an eminent mathemati- cian of that city, with whose name the reader should be familiar as that of one of the most intrepid ex- plorers the world has seen. This was Pytheas,- who lived in the time of Alexander the Great and Aris- totle, the latter of whom died in the year 322 B.C., while the year 330 is guessed as the date of the floruit of Pythcas. The publication of the history ' Strabo, ^, 2, i (C. 190). ' For a fuller account of Pytheas see Elton's "Origins of Eng. Hist." (London, 18S2), pp. 13, «S:c,, and the extracts at the end of that volume. i tc m 6 CELTIC BRITAIN. of his travels is supposed to have taken place soon after the death of Aristotle ; and fragments of the diary of his voyage have been preserved to us in the works of various ancient authors. He sailed round Spain to Brittany, and thence to Kent and other parts of Britain ; next he set out from the Thames to the mouth of the Rhine, and thence he rounded Jutland, proceedin|^east so far as the mouth of the yistula : he turn^Jb:f?:k from there and coasted orway until he reached the arctic circle, whence he made for the Shetlands and the north of Scotland. 'Tho^^ returned to Bri^^ay, wl||nce he reached the mouth of the Garonne, ^^h||y^HDuhd an overland ro^l home to Marseilles. Thu^^heas was in Britain tu^^, and paid more attention to it than any of the other countries he visited ; but he does not seem to have been so far as the tin districts in the west, and it is remarkable that he gives no hint which would lead one to suppose that there was any communica- tion between them and the Continent. That inter- course, it would seem, was confined to the south-east of the island, where the Channel was narrowest. Pytheas took a great many observations in Britain ; but, owing to the nature of the instruments which were then in use, they are of no value. It is quite otherwise with regard to what he says of the in- habitants : he saw plenty of corn in the fields in the south-east, and he noticed that the farmers gathered the sheaves into large barns, in which the threshing was done. They had so little sun that the open threshing-floors of the sunnier south would not still the Celtic word for^^^ ijA; now makes aa'r;/^^^ ^Tus we have arnpl^^^^ itury before our era tht^^H BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS C/ESAR. 7 have done in a land of clouds and rain like Britain. He likewise found that they made a drink ^ by mixing wheat and honey, which is the mead still known in certain parts of Wales ; and he is supposed to have been the authority for their use of another drink, which Greek writers^ speak of as made of barley, and drank instead of wine. The name by which it was known to them is still the Celtic word for beer : it was formerly curmi, an^ in Irish, and civrtv in Welsh. evidence that in the fourth century before our era the' Aryan farmer had made himself thoroughly^^iome in Britain. Nowi|^^x^^ion of Pytheas iWrbeen got up for practic^Bl^^es by his fellow-citizens, the Greeks of Marseilles, and it^resulted undoubtejp in the extension across Gaul of their trade, directly or indirectly, to the corner of Britain nearest to the Continent. Some light, it may be added, is shed on this by the fact, that the first coins supposed to have been struck in the island, long as that happened after Pytheas's time, were all modelled after Greek coins made during his time. This points to a trade then opened with the north. "^ Some two centuries later another Greek of note extended his travels to the island and visited Belerion,^ as he called the district in Cornwall where ' Strabo, /i, 5, 5 (C. 201). ' Among others, Athena^us and Dioscoridcs : see Diefenbach's " Oiigines Europceae," s. v. ceruesia. ^ See Evans's " Coins of the Ancient Britons," p. 24. * Diod. Siciilus's " Bibliotheca Ilislorica," v. 21, 22. 8 CELTIC nRITAIX. tin was found. This was Posidoniiis, with whom Cicero studied at Rhodes. Besides his description of the people and their method of working the tin, Posidonius is supposed to have been the authority of Diodoriis Siculus^ for stating, that the inhabitants of Britain Hved in mean dwelhngs made for the most part of reeds or wood, and that harvest with them meant the cutting off the ears of corn and storing them in pits undeM^ound, whence were fetched day y day those that Tiad been longest in keeping to be dressed for food. This appears to have been a way Q^oreparing the cereal for food, which was well unde^ood in the last century i^^e Western Islands of Scotland, where one proceecHr so skilfully to pre- paAthe corn with the aid of a flame, that it might be dressed, winnowed, ground, and baked within an hour after reaping.^ Posidonius would seem to have been speaking of a part of the country mere remote than the south-east corner, to which the words of Pytheas probably applied. But we have now come down to the time when the Romans began to acquaint themselves with the island in a very tangible fashion. Late in the summer of the year 55 B.C., Julius Ccesar resolved to cross over to Britain," from which he understood the Gauls to have had repeated help in ' "Bibl. Hist.," V. 21, 22. ^ See Elton's "Origins of Eng. Hist.," p. ;^2j where he quotes from Martin's "Description of the Western Islands of Scotland," published in 1703, a passage illustrative of this practice. See also, with regard to Ireland, Tylor's " Primitive Culture," {2nd ed.) i. p. 44. 3 Cresar, "De Bello Gallico," iv. 20-38. BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS C/ESAR. 9 their wars with him. The season for waging war was, it is true, nearly over for that year, but he thought it desirable to visit the island, to see the people, and ascertain, so to say, how the land lay before him. So he tried first to extract information from traders about the size of the island, and the kind of people that lived there, together with their mode of warfare and manner of life ; also as to what harbours they had for a number of ships of the larger size ; but it was all in vain, and he says that no one but merchants readily crossed over, and that they only knew the coast and the districts opposite Gaul. He therefore sent Volusenus, oner of his officers, out in a war-ship, to get as much information as possible respecting the coast of Britain, whence he was to return as soon as he could. In the mean- time Caesar collected vessels from all parts, together with the fleet which had been engaged the summer before against the A'eneti, to a port in the country of the IMorini, from which the passage to Britain could be most readily made. News of this had been at once carried across, and ambassadors from many of the states in the island came to C^sar, whicli shows that there was a much readier and more inti- mate communication between it and Gaul than Caisar's words would have led one to anticipate. The ambas- sadors promised him hostages, and that their states would obey the Roman people. Caesar, after making liberal promises and exhorting them to continue of that mind, sent them home, accompanied by Com- mios. This man was one of the Atrebates, whom Csesar had made king over that Belgic people when i lO CELTIC BRITAIN, they were conquered by the legions^ and whose rule he afterwards extended to the Morini. Commios was chosen for his supposed fidelity to Roman interests, and because he had great influence in the south of Britain, where a portion of the people of the Atrebates had settlements. He had also, in Caesar's opinion, proved himself a man of valour and prudence. His orders were to visit as many states as possible, and to exhort them to embrace the alliance of the Roman people ; but no sooner had Commios landed, and his business become known, than he was placed in bonds. On the return of Volusenus with such information as a man who had not ventured to land was able to pro- cure, Ceesar, at midnight on the 24th of August or one of the two succeeding days, embarked with two legions or about 12,000 men, in about eighty ships, together with a number of galleys, leaving eighteen ships de- tained at a neighbouring port by a contrary wind : these were to follow with the cavalry as soon as they could. Caesar reached the British shore betimes in the morn- ing, but, finding the point touched ^ not a favourable place to land in the face of the enemy that mustered in force on the cliffs around, he coasted about seven Roman miles to a spot where there was an open beach and a level strand. The native cavalry and charioteers, closely followed by the rest of the British forces, were there in time to contest the landing of the legions. A severe engagement followed, in which the Roman soldiers showed considerable hesitation, and were thrown into much confusion by the British charioteers, with whose movements they were not BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS CESAR. II familiar. Gradually, however, as the Roman soldiers got a firm footing, they forced the natives to retreat ; and Caesar bewails the absence of his cavalry, which he required to complete his victory. After that ambassadors came to him to sue for peace, with Cofn- mios, released from bonds, at their head. They laid the war to the charge of the multitude^ and begged Caesar to forgive those who knew no better : he met this with the truly Roman complaint, that, after they had sent ambassadors of their own free will to him on the Continent, they had attacked him without cause ; but he granted their request with a demand for hostages. Some were given on the spot, and others were to come from a distance in a few days, while the leading men surrendered themselves and began to send their troops home. While this was going on, the eighteen ships bringing the cavalry across appeared, when such a storm arose that they were all forced in the face of night to turn back to the harbour they had left, after a narrow escape for some of them from being wrecked on the coast west of Caesar's camp. Moreover, as it was full moon, there followed such a tide that the tempest filled with water the war-galleys which had been drawn up on shore, and dashed togetiier the transport ships that lay at anchor, so that many were wrecked or made unfit for immediate use. By dint of hard work and with the aid of the timber and the bronze of the vessels that had been wrecked, Caesar was able to get all but twelve passably refitted, wliile he sent to Gaul for the things that were wanting. As soon as the 12 CELTIC BRITAIN. British chiefs saw what Iiad happened to the Roman cavalry and to the ships, and when they had reckoned from the size of the camp how few soldiers it con- tained, they began to combine and secretly to muster their forces again, as well as to stop sending in hostages, hoping as C?esar thought, that they could prolong the war into the winter, and thereby cut off his whole army, as a caution to all future in- vaders. Their first move was to post cavalry and chariots in good positions near the spot vvhere alone there was corn still standing, to which the Romans must come. In due time one of the legions came, and as soon as the men had set to work in the fields, a well-directed onslaught was made on them, and it would have gone hard with the legion, as it was attacked on all sides, had not Ccesar, who was on the alert, brought them aid. The attack then ceased, but he was only able to conduct a retreat. Then bad v;eather is said by him to have kept both sides quiet for several days, during which the British forces seem to have received reinforcements. They now advanced to C?esar's camp, which was by this time provided with thirty horses that Commios had brought over : a battle ensued, in which the Romans prevailed and slew a considerable number of the enemy in their retreat. After the soldiers had duly laid vvaste the country around, and destroyed everything they could, am- bassadors came the same day to sue again for peace, which was readily granted, with a demand for twice the number of hostages asked for the DIMTAIN IX THE TIME OF JULIUS C/ESAR. 13 time before ; for the general was getting impatient to return to Gaul, the reason assigned being the lateness of the season and the frail nature of his ships. He had probably seen that he could not do much in the island without a larger force, especially of cavalry. He left shortly before the equinox, so that he had been here nearly a month according to some calcu- lations, or a little over a fortnight according to others, but without having; been able to advance a mile from the place of landing. The hostages were to be sent after him, and those of two states reached him, but no more. Nevertheless, the Roman senate, on learn- ing by letter from him what he had achieved, thought right to decree twenty days of public thanksgiving. Ca^sar^ gave orders that more ships and of a more suitable kind should be got ready for the ensuing summer for a second campaign in Britain ; and such was the eagerness with which the soldiers went to work, that by the time he returned in June from Illyricum and Italy, they had got nearly 600, new and old, almost ready to be launched. Thus it would appear, that what they had seen of the island had filled tlieni with thoughts of valuable plunder : the same feeling is proved also by the privateers, which those who were able fitted out to accompany the army across the Channel. Among other things it was thought that British waters would be found to produce abundance of precious pearls, an idea got rid of, no doubt, in time, though we read of British ' "Bell. Gall.," V. 1-23. 14 CELTIC BRITAIN. pearls adorning a corselet which Ccesar was pleased to dedicate in the temple of the Goddess of Victory at Rome. AVlien all was ready he embarked at Portus Itius, which was probably the harbour whence he had sailed before, with five legions and 2,000 cavalry : the number of vessels of all kinds was over 800, though 60 built on the Marne, in the country of the Meldi above the Parisii, had failed to join the expedition, owing to a storm which drove them back. This year Caesar was resolved to begin in season : accordingly he set sail, it is sup- posed, late on the i8th of July or, according to others, a day or two later, but by daybreak he found his fleet carried by the current past the South Fore- land, and it was with great labour that he got back to the spot which the summer before had been ascertained to be the best place for landing : this, together with the choice of a site for the camp, took up the rest of the day. During the night, however, he set out with the army, except the force he thought needful to leave in charge of the camp and the ships moored near it, in quest of the enemy that had not this time thought it of use to contest the landing of such a force, but rather to take up an advantageous position inland. Caesar, after marching about twelve miles in the night, came in sight of the Britons, and soon found them advancing to attack his men from a higher ground. On being repulsed by the Roman cavalry they withdrew into a place excellently fortified by nature and art, with all its entrances blocked up with felled trees : it appeared to have been made BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS C^SAR. 1 5 during one of their civil wars. The legions made themselves in due time masters of it, but Ccesar would not venture to pursue the enemy far that day. Next morning, as he was sending cavalry and infantry after the retreating Britons, news arrived from the coast that nearly all his ships had been dashed to pieces on the shore during the night. He called back his men and marched to the coast, w^here he found that about forty ships had been wrecked, but that the rest might be repaired with great labour : this is done, and they are all hauled up on shore to be included within the lines of the camp. About ten days are taken up by this work, during which word is sent to Ca3safs lieutenant in Gaul to have as many ships as possible got ready and sent over. When at length the general returns to seek the enemy he finds him mustering in much greater force under the command now of a single leader named Cassivelaunos, whose country lay north of the Thames, being in all probability that of the people called Catuvelauni. This prince, though he had in previous years been at constant war with the other states, had now the sole command given him by the consent of all, whence it would seem that they acknowledged him to have been their ablest and most tried general. What gave Ccesar most trouble would seem to have been the quick and sudden movements of the British cavalry and charioteers, who fought bravely with the Roman cavalry ; they were as dangerous when retreating as when advancing, for when they got the cavalry of the Roman army away from it, the combat- I 6 CELTIC BRITAIN. ants alighted and fought like foot soldiers. On one occasion the charioteers rushed upon the Roman soldiers, when they were engaged in fortifying their position, and fought so strenuously with the outposts before the camp, that two of the first cohorts from different legions had to be called out ; but when they had taken their places with small spaces between them they were terrified by the enemy's charioteers, who dashed through their midst in safety and with the utmost boldness. It was only after one of the military tribunes had been killed, and more cohorts had come forth, that the enemy retreated. They never fought in close order, but they arranged outlying detachments that harassed the legions in relays. So the next day no less than three legions are sent out together for the purpose of foraging ; but, owing to the Roman cavalry being then better backed than before by the infantry, severe losses were inflicted on the skirmishers ; and the British auxiliaries, who had mustered in great number, straightway withdrew ; nor did Cassivelaunos after that hazard a battle on a large scale. Consequently Caesar marched towards his territory and crossed the Thames, somewhere above London, with great diffi- culty, but with much alacrity on the part of the ) soldiers, who had had as yet little chance of getting much booty. Cassivelaunos sent away most of his forces, but retained about 4,000 charioteers to harass Caesar's march and to clear the country where he was likely to come : his tactics greatly narrowed the Roman area of devastation, and made the business BRITAIN IN THE TIME CF JULIUS C/.:SAK. 17 of burning and destroying much more laborious than the soldiers could have wished ; so their general speaks almost pathetically of their being only able to do it in the midst of the toils of marching. This was, however, not to last long; for the power- ful people of the Trinovantes, who inhabited the modern county of Essex and a part of Middlesex, from beyond the Lea to the Stour, sent in the mean- time to Cassar to ask for peace, a course which they were led to take partly, no doubt, to escape the ravages of the Roman army, and partly perhaps to avenge themselves on Cassivelaunos, who had killed their king. The son of the latter, who was called Man- dubratios, had succeeded in making his way to Csesar in Gaul, and in securing his protection ; the Trino- vantes, therefore, not only asked Caesar to accept their submission, but also to send Mandubratios to rule over them, and to save that prince from Cassivelaunos. Caesar complies, and demands forty hostages from them, together with corn for the army : they bring both, and their territory is protected from the soldiery. The work of conquest was now easy; for the example of the Trinovantes was followed by other tribes, namely, the Cenimagni, Segontiaci, Ancalites, Bibroci, and Cassi, while the invader was told that the strong- hold of Cassivelaunos was not far off, where he would find a large number of men and cattle brought to- gether. This he discovered to have been admirably fortified by nature and art, the latter in Britain con- sisting of a defence of wood, with a rampart and trench drawn round it. But it was not long before the c 1 8 CELTIC BRITAIN. Roman soldiers got possession of the place^ together v/ith the large number of cattle it contained, while many of the men were cut down in their flight. But Cassivelaunos was also active, and while these things were going on in his own territory, he ordered the kings of Caution or Kent, of whom there were four, to storm Caesar's camp by the sea, which they at once proceeded to do ; but they were driven back with a considerable loss, one of the leaders being captured by the Roman soldiers. At the news of this failure, and especially of the defection of the Trinovantes and the other states that followed them, Cassivelaunos decided to sue for peace through Commios, the Atrebat. Rumours from Gaul, not to his liking, had reached Caesar, and because he had his former views as to the lateness of the season, he seized the opportunity of bringing the war to a close at once, by demanding hostages, and fixing the sum which Britain was to pay as a yearly tribute. He also gave Cassivelaunos strict orders, that cost the giver little, to keep his hands off Mandu- bratios and the Trinovantes. Since it was near the equinox when Caesar left, his stay here must have been about two months. Of course he did not depart empty-handed, for he took with him not only the hostages, but also a great number of captives, the sale of whom was to fill Roman coffers with gold. From CcTsar's departure in the year 54 B.C. down to the invasion of the island under Claudius in a.d. 43, that is to say, for pretty nearly a century, we have very little of its history, except what may be made BRITAIN IX THE TIME OF JULIUS C/ESAR. 1 9 out by means of the coins, which began to be stamped with letters soon after Caesar's conquest of Gaul. The coinage of Britain had been modelled in the first instance after that of Gaul, which in its turn can be traced to the Phoca^an Greeks of Massilia or Marseilles, through whom the continental Gauls became ac- quainted in the latter part of the fourth century before Christ with the gold stater of Philip 11. of Macedon. This was a fine coin, weighing about 133 grains and having on one side the head of Apollo wreathed with laurel, while the other showed a charioteer in a biga, with Philip's name underneath. It was imitated by the Gauls fairly well at first, but as it got further removed from the original in time and place, the figures degenerated into very curious and fantastic forms. It has been calculated by John Evans, the greatest authority on the subject, that the inhabitants of the south of Britain must have begun to coin gold pieces of this kind from 200 to 150 b.c.,^ and the information he has collected makes it probable that this took place first in Kent ; next follows the coinage of the other tribes inhabiting the south of England, as far as the borders of Dorsetshire. It is also worthy of remark that coins of several types are found to have been current on the south coast, concerning which it is hard to decide whether they should be regarded as belonging to Gaul or to Britain. Money appears to have circulated as far as Cornwall, though there is no satisfactory evidence that any tribe west ' Evans's " Coins of the Ancient Britons "(London, 1864), p. 26. C 2 20 CELTIC DRITAIN. of the Durotriges of Dorset had a coinage of its own. Between Dorsetshire and the Worcestershire Avon, there were probably more than one tribe that had an early coinage. So had the Catuvelauni, whose territory stretched in a north-easterly direction from the Thames to the neighbourhood of the Wash, and also the Trinovantes, who lived between them and the North Sea in Essex and Middlesex. But there is no satisfactory evidence that any tribes north of these, not even the Eceni, who occupied what is now Norfolk and Suffolk, had a coinage of their own when Caesar landed in this country ; nor does it appear that any British tribe whatever had then begun to have its coins lettered. It is not certain that silver or bronze coins had as yet been struck ; but it is probable that in any case they came into use much later than the gold ones. Ccesar, however, is usually made to say that no money was current in Britain, but only bronze or pieces of iron of a fixed weight to supply its place. The passage,^ however, is hope- lessly corrupt, and the manuscripts differ greatly, some of them ascribing to the Britons the use of coins of gold, and some of bronze. Whatever Caesar wrote there can be little doubt about the gold currency : he probably mentioned it, though he saw little of it, as may be gathered from the correspon- dence- of one of his officers ; and it is by no means improbable that ingots of bronze or bars of iron may have been used for money among the tribes who had 1 " Bell. Cxall.," V. 12. 2 That of Cicero's brother to Cicero ; see "Monumenta Hist. Brit.," pp. Ixxxvii., Ixxxviii, URITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS C/ESAR. 21 no coinage, and that Ca2sar was aware of that fact. AVhen he goes on to say that iron was found on the sea-coast of Britain, but that the supply was small, he probably alludes to the iron-mining in the weald of Kent and Sussex, which Prof. Boyd Dawkins believes to have been carried on before Caesar's landing, as it certainly was during the Roman occupation, and for many centuries afterwards.^ There is no reason, how- ever, to suppose that the great wealth of the country in iron ore had been discovered by Caesar's time, and the little already found had possibly been pointed out by some one who had seen iron worked on the Con- tinent. Ccesar tells us that the bronze used in the island was imported, which is a pretty good proof that copper was not yet worked here, bronze being a com- pound of copper and tin. The importation of bronze, and the exportation of tin must have formed at this time the most important items in the trade of Britain. We have now come to an age when the coins of Britain began to appear with letters on them. This is found to have taken place first in Kent, or else a little to the west on the southern shore, where the Belgic tribes kept up an active communication with Gaul. Here we find one or two coins of Commios, and a great many of three princes who • The last forge appears to liave been blown out only in the year 1825, though the growing scarcity of fuel had driven several of the ironmasters to South Wales so early as the time of Henry VIII. See a paper by Prof. Boyd Dawkins in the Transactions of the " Internat. Congress of Prehist. Arch." for 1S6S, p. iSS. 22 CELTIC BRITAIN. called themselves sons of Commios. Who this Commios was is not known, but he and his sons seem to have held sway in much the same part of Britain in which the Commios of whom Caesar speaks had so much influence ; and, on the whole, it is not improbable that the latter is also the Commios of the coins. He appears to have gone back with Caesar to Gaul, as we find him left with some cavalry to keep watch the year after over the Menapii, who seem to have lived on the coast between the Morini and the Rhine, while the general sets out against the Treveri. But in 52 B.C. so strong was the desire of the Gauls to drive out the Romans, that Commios became one of the leaders against the latter ; and so dangerous was he considered, that Labienus, Caesar's lieutenant, tried to have him killed by treachery ; but he got away, though severely wounded. He is said some time afterwards to have had a very narrow escape from Caesar himself, which he effected by betaking himself to his ship, and having its sails spread as though he had it already afloat, which it was not : the pursuit was given up, and he had time to get away to Britain. He figures, however, in 51 B.C. again, as one of the chief organizers of opposition to the Roman rule in Gaul, and when the other chiefs had given in their submission, he still held out. It was again attempted to murder him, and that by means of the same officer as before, but the latter had the worst of it, and Commios escaped, when he sent in his submission to Antony, then acting under Caesar in Gaul, and made it a condition that he BRITAIN IN THE TLME OF JULIUS C/tSAR, 23 should be allowed to go where he should not set eyes on another Roman. He seems to have been an active man in the prime of life, and since we hear no more of him it is not unlikely that he came over to Britain, and that his hatred of the Romans had been sufficiently proved to his kindred here to make them forget his having once been one of Caesar's tools, if, indeed, they ever took an unfavourable view of that part of his history. But we need not suppose that his influence here had to be acquired all anew, as the Atrebates and the other Belgic tribes of Britain had probably been induced by him to join the league he and others had organized of their kins- folk, the Continental Atrebates, the Bellovaci, and other powerful peoples. As far as can be gathered from the places of finding the coins in question, the rule of the Commian family did not extend beyond the district represented by Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Hants, and, perhaps, a part of Wilts. According to Mr. Evans the lettered coinage of this part of the island may be supposed to have appeared some time before 30 e.c.^ At his death his territory seems to have fallen to his three sons, Tincommios, Verica, and Eppillos, who are supposed to have exercised a sort of joint rulership over it, at the same time that each had probably a district which was more completely under his own control ; that is to say, Eppillos ruled over the Canlii in Kent, Tincommios over the Regni, whose territory may, roughly speaking, be supposed ' Evans's " Coins of the Ancient Britons," pp. 154, 155. 24 CELTIC BRITAIN. to have been that which became the Saxon kingdom of Sussex, and Verica over the eastern portion of the country of the Atrebates, who appear to have in all possessed what is now Surrey, Berkshire, and a part of Oxfordshire reaching so far north as Ald- chester and Bicester. The names of the three brothers are found together on one coin, but Tincommios, who seems to have been the eldest, appears to have died before the others, as some coins occur with their joint names without his. There are reasons for sup- l)osing Eppiilos to have survived Verica, of whose territory, together most likely with that of Tincom- mios, he may have become sole ruler : at any rate, he appears, so far as one can judge from the abbreviated forms used on some coins, to call himself king of Calleva, which has been supposed to be Silchester in Hampshire, but this identification is not certain, as there seems to have been another Calleva, situated at Haslemere in Surrey. There is no indication that Commios or Tincommios called himself king of any people in Britain, but Eppiilos and Verica certainly take the title on some of their coins, whence it would seem that Commios had placed himself in a position of authority in South Britain as the head of a league organized for a special purpose, and that he so far consolidated his power as to be able to pass it on to his sons, while Eppiilos and Verica appear to have thought themselves safe in taking the title of kings. That was probably not done without opposition, and it is not impossible that Eppillos's position among the Cantii w^as altogether acquired by BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS C/ESAR. 25 conquest, either in his father's time or soon after, as it seems doubtful whether Kent came within the circle of the original influence of Commios, whose direct connection would rather seem to have been with the Atrebates and the other Belgic tribes west of Kent. We appear to fall in with one of the princes who got the worst of it in the struggle with the Commian family, in either of the British refugees who are said on the monuments^ recounting the events of the reign of Augustus to have sought his protection. The coins of Commios, and some of the earlier ones of Tincommios, continued the degenerate imitations of the Macedonian stater without showing any Roman influence ; but it was not long after Augustus became emperor, in the year 30, that Tincommios copied the Latin foranula, in which the former styled himself Augustus Divi Films or the son of his adoptive father, Julius Ccesar, who had now got to be officially called Divus or the god. So Tincommios had in- scribed on his money the legend — Tiuc. Conuui F., or even shorter abbreviations, meaning Tincommios, son of Commios ; and the grotesque traits derived from the stater soon disappear in favour of classical designs of various kinds, proving very distinctly that the influence of Roman art was beginning to make itself felt in the south of Britain. ^Vith the sons of Commios the coinage of the western portion of their territory seems to have ceased, whereas in Kent it would appear to have continued later. This is • That of Ancyra in Asia Minor; see the Berlin "Corpus Inscr. Lat.," iii. pp. 7S4, 785, 798, 799. 26 CELTIC BRITAIN. supposed to be accounted for by the influence of the trade with Gaul, where everything was fast being Romanized under Augustus ; but it would hardly explain why a native coinage should continue longer in Kent, which was after all the nearest part of Britain to Gaul. It is rather to be supposed that the western part of Eppillos's kingdom fell after his day under the power of the encroaching Catuvelauni, and that we have to look for the coins representing it later among those of that people. Now most of the latter are found to have been issued by a prince, whose name occurs Latinized as Tasciovanus, Tasciovanius, and Tasciovans (genitive Tasciovantis), the Tenuantius of Geoffrey of Mon- mouth, and by his sons Cunobelinos and Epaticcos.** The father's capital was A^erlamion or Verulam, near St. Albans, and the name of the town appears on many of his coins, as does that of Camulodunon or Colchester, which was Cunobelinos's capital, on his. The great variety of Tasciovant's coins seem to show that he must have had a long reign, and some of them at any rate were struck so late as the year 13 B.C., as they are found to have been modelled after coins of Augustus, which were not current till then;^ but it has been supposed that he lived a good many years later, and only died after the beginning of our era. Others of his coins show that he reigned for some time during the life of Eppillos, but at what date he began we have no means of finding out, though it has been supposed to have been so ' Evans's " Coins of the Anc. Brit.," p. 223. BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS C/ESAR. 27 early as the year 30, when Augustus was made em- peror, and some of the coins would seem to point even to an earlier date. This would bring Tasciovant suffi- ciently near Cassivelaunos in point of time for him to have been his son or a brother's son ; but possibly we should rather say a grandson. In either case, there is no reason to suppose that there had in the mean- time been a revolution or a change of dynasty, es- pecially as we find Cunobelinos, the Cymbeline of Shakspere, styling himself on some coins rex or king ; and we seem to be at liberty to assum.e in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that the people of the Catuvclauni had been guided by the more or less ^ uniform policy of one dynasty in their treatment of neighbouring states. This appears on looking into the scanty data at our disposal to have been one of conquest and aggression. Thus C?esar mentions how the king of the Trinovantes had been slain by Cassivelaunos, when his son Mandubratios fled to him. How long the losses which Cassivelaunos and his people suffered during C?esar's campaign inclined them to leave the Trinovantes alone cannot be made out, but we learn from the coins that Cunobelinos ruled there and had made Camulodunon in the heart of their country his capital, which probably happened during Tasciovant's life and with his help. Possibly Mandubratios was left unassailed so long as he lived; but the coinage of the country of the Trinovantes bears evidence to the rule for a time of a prince whose name was Dubnovelaunos, and who is men- tioned on the Augustan monument, already referred to, as one of the two British princes who sought the 2 8 CELTIC ERITAIN. emperor's protection. But his history is rendered somewhat difficult by the fact that his coins are also found in Kent (and those so far as can be guessed his earlier ones) whence it would seem that he ruled over a certain extent of territory on both sides of the Thames. From his southern position he may have been driven by Eppillos, with whom he appears to have been contemporary, and from the northern one some time later by Cunobelinos. It is not impossible that the territory of the Trinovantes originally com- prised a part of the southern coast of the estuary of the Thames, and certain it is that both the Isle of Thanet and that of Sheppey are placed opposite the Trinovantes by Ptolemy, who may, perhaps, have regarded them as belonging to that people. Between the Catuvelauni and the North Sea there were, besides the Trinovantes, the people of the Eceni, occupying the country between them and the Wash. When the former had been reduced by the Catuvelauni, the turn of the latter, in case it had not gone before, could not be very far off: so it may be that we have them heading Ccesar's list of the states which, after the example of the Trinovantes, deserted Cassivelaunos in the hour of need. But that is by no means certain, since the name appears in the manu- scripts of Ccesar as Cenimagni, Cencmagni and Ceno- manni, which may possibly be considered mutilated forms of some such longer title of the nation of the Eceni as Ecenimagni or the like. The others men- tioned were the Segontiaci, Ancalites, Bibroci, and Cassi, all probably Belgic tribes, living near the Thames BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS CESAR. 29 or between its basin and the Severn, and included as it may be supposed under the more general name of Atrebates. Such the Bibroci appear to have been, whose name reminds one of the town of the Remi, called Bibrax, and of Caesar's statement, that almost all the Belgic peoples of Britain bore the name of the Continental state they had come from ; but the exact locality of neither the Bibroci nor of the Ancalites can be said to be known, though nothing serious stands in the way of the guess which identifies the name- of the former with the Berroc, whence the modern name of the county of Berks is derived. The Segontiaci are identified with the neighbourhood of the Silchester Calleva by the finding there of a Roman inscription in honour of a divinity styled the Segon- tiac Hercules, and as some of Tasciovant's coins bear the name of this people, or of one of its towns, we may conclude that they had been forced into an alliance with the Catuvellauni. This does not stand alone ; for the coins of Epaticcos seem to prove that he held sway south of the Thames, in what is now the county of Surrey. The name of the Cassi would be lisped in Gaulish and then spelt CADDI or CAOOl, which less accurately written in Latin letters may be detected in the Cattl of coins found in Glou- cestershire and the neighbouring county of Monmouth. They were either a branch of the Atrebates, or else, perhaps, of the people of the Dobunni, to whom they were near neighbours. The latter occupied most of the tract between the two Avons and between the Severn and the states of the Atrebates and the Catu- 30 CELTIC BRITAIN. velauni, while Dion Cassius in speaking of Aulus Plautius operating in that district in the year 43 gives one to understand that either the whole or a portion of the people of the Dobunni was subject to the Catuvel- auni at that time. The inland tract between the Catuvelauni and the Dobunni on the one hand, and the Brigantes of the north beyond the Humber and the Mersey on the other, was inhabited by two peoples, that of the Coritani in the lower part of the valley of the Trent and the district between it and the North Sea, and the Cornavii to the west of the Coritani, and reaching from about the Worcestershire Avon to the mouths of the Dee and the Mersey. Of these peoples exceedingly little is known, and they play no appreciable part in the resistance offered to the Roman arms in the time of Claudius, whence we may, perhaps, infer that they were virtually conquered with the Catuvelauni, as having been for some time the allies or subjects of that state. In that case the Catuvelauni may be regarded as the Mercians of those days, which would be aptly illustrated by the fact that they chose to call themselves by a name meaning battle-rulers or war-kings, like that of the Caturiges of Gaul ; and it is in their aggressiveness that we have probably to look for the secret in the first instance of the influence of Commios in Britain, which Ccesar has left unexplained. The Belgic tribes of the Thames Valley were, we may take it, hard pressed by the Catuvelauni ; they send to ask their kindred in Gaul for help, and Commios comes over to aid them with his council, and possibly with armed BRITAIN IN THE TIME OF JULIUS CAESAR. 3 1 men ; but whether that was so or not, for there is no evidence, there would be nothing very surprising in a man of his ability having organized such re- sistance as would stay for a time the advance of the Catuvelauni. It may, indeed, be that he was not the first to come over for that purpose, but that some- thing of the kind had happened already in the time of Diviciacos, who, as Ccesar was informed, had been king of the Belgic people of the Suessiones within his time, and not only possessed more power than any other man in Gaul, but it also extended to Britain.! However that may be, Commios may have seen that the advance of the Catuvelauni could not be long stayed, and that it was his reason, or at least one of his reasons, for taking an active part in Caesar's invasion. If so, it may be that the losses which Caesar inflicted on the Cantii and the Catuvel- auni, resulted in their relieving the Belgic states of all immediate fear of their neighbours, and in adding to the popularity of Commios. In that case he had little or no trouble in making himself the head of a league directed against the Catuvelauni, when he was forced to leave Gaul, whence he brought with him also the credit of intense hatred of the Romans. All this would agree well enough with the fact that it was probably among the people of Kent that he was detained in bonds, when he landed as Caesar's envoy; and it has already been suggested that it was possibly by force of arms that his son Eppillos asserted his power there some time afterwards. ' "Cell. Gall.," ii. 4. 32 CELTIC BRITAIN. CHAPTER II. BRITAIN DOWN TO THE CLAUD IAN CONQUEST. For a good many years preceding the Claudian in- vasion in the year 43, Cunobehnos was the most con- spicuous figure in Britain, and Suetonius, who wrote his history of the Ceesars some seventy or eighty years later, speaks of him as Rex Britannorum ^ or king of the Britons. From this, together with other indications, it would seem that his power reached to the southern coast, though it is hardly probable that he had removed all the princes of the states south of the Thames. It is more probable that he was satisfied with forcing them to an alliance with him, and allow- ing some of them to rule in their own states subject to some kind of supremacy on his part. Whether the fugitives who sought the aid of Augustus were able to induce him to assist them we are not told, but historians state that Augustus once meditated an expedition against Britain, and it may be that it was their representations which led him thereto. This never came to anything, for the princes of Britain hastened to send ambassadors to him to prevent war, and some of them, we are told, gained his friendship. We may take it that Cunobelinos, the Suetonius, " De Vita Cwsarum," Caligula, 44. PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. ^^ most wealthy and powerful of them, was the most suc- cessful in winning the emperor's good graces, and if the exiles ever returned it was probably subject to certain conditions he thought right to indicate. Strabo, who wrote not many years after the death in 14 B.C. of Augustus, goes on to say that the British princes who were on friendly terms with the emperor, dedi- cated their ofierings in the Capitol at Rome, and brought the island well-nigh to a state of close connection with the Roman power. This is quite in harmony with what we learn from Cunobelinos's coins. His father's, which were much on a level with those of EpiMllos, show far less of the in- fluence of Rome, while it is unmistakable on those of Cunobclinos, with the exception of some few of his early ones, which are purely British, and belong to the series derived from the Macedonian stater. The workmanship improves, and a variety of classical figures, such as Jupiter Ammon, Apollo playing on the lyre, Hercules with his club or with the trophies of some of his labours, Janus, Diana, Cybele on a lion, Victory in several attitudes, and many other mythical personages of the same class, together with sphinxes, griffins, and the like monsters of southern mythology, take the place of the clumsier forms on the more purely British money. The coinage of Gaul was now becoming Roman, and the improve- ment in that of Britain was no longer perhaps so much a matter of taste as of commercial expediency, on which some light is thrown by the fact that Augustus thought proper to commute the yearly D 34 CELTIC BRITAIN. tribute for a light export and import duty on the trade between it and Gaul. This, so far as it goes, would indicate that the trade was not inconsider- able. In any case, we are not to suppose the emperor capable of despising any source of income which could be made to bring money into his coffers. Augustus was succeeded by Tiberius, who died in the year 37 without having troubled himself in any way, so far as we know, with the affairs of Britain. He was followed by Caligula, who was emperor until his death in the year 41. In his time Britain appears again in history, as follows : — In the year 40 a son of Cunobelinos, called Adminius by Suetonius, who gives the account, surrendered himself with a small number of followers to Caligula in Gaul, having been banished for some reason or other by his own father. Thereupon the emperor sent a letter to Rome de- scribing in fine language how the island of Britain had been added to the Roman power, the messengers being charged to deliver his message to the senate only in full assembly in the Temple of Mars. This freak of imperial madness corroborates the view that Cunobelinos was at that time, in the opinion of the Romans, the only British king who was worth con- sidering, and explains why Suetonius calls him king of the Britons. But as to his son, who made this cheaj) surrender of his father's kingdom to Caligula, nothing further is known, excepting that he was possibly the same person w^hose name is written Amminus on some coins of this time, the finding-place of which tends PREVIOUS TO THE erAUDIAN CONQUEST. 35 to connect him with some part of Kent. Cunobelinos had other sons, but the only ones known to history were Togodumnos and Caratacos, who ruled over their deceased father's kingdom when Claudius sent Aulus Plautius here. So he must have died be- tween the years 40 and 43, at a very advanced age, and after having carried into effect with con- siderable success the family policy of reducing the neighbouring states under the rule of the Catu- velauni. A variety of coins, of which neither the exact date or place of issue nor the sequence has been satisfac- torily made out, are assigned to the country of the Dobunni ; but, on the whole, none of them are thought to date before the Christian era, while some appear to be as late as the time of Claudius, whose reign dates from the year 41. They tend to show that some of the Dobunni were so far indepen- dent of the Catuvelauni as to have a coinage of their own. It may be, however, that the latest of them were struck after the death of Togodumnos in 43 and the conquest of his people by the Romans, that is, in the interval before the reduction of the country in the neighbourhood of the Bristol Avon by Ostorius Scapula in the year 50. They all belong to the series of imitations of the Macedonian stater, and show hardly a trace of the influence of Rome, excepting that two or three of the names are given in a Latin rather than in a Gaulish spelling. One group, that of the Catti, a word already mentioned as being probably the name of a people, the Cassi of Caesar's D 2 36 CELTIC BRITAIN. Commentaries, is remarkable as showing no trace of the name of any prince or king. The next region distinctly indicated by the pecu- liarities of its coinage is the country of the Eceni, consisting approximately of the modern counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. Trade and the east wind travelled westwards, leaving the Eceni on their penin- sula to defy a little longer the Roman influence to which Cunobelinos and his people had been giving way, and which now reached the land of the Dobunni on the banks of the Severn. The Eceni seem, from what we read of them afterwards, to have been a remarkably hardy and warlike race, but, just as tliey may have been among those who deserted 'Cassivelaunos in order to make their own terms •with Caesar, so their old jealousy and fear of the ■power of the Catuvelauni when Cunobelinos had succeeded in combining with it that of the Trino- vantes, were partly, no doubt, the cause which led them in 43 to make an alliance with the Romans, which they soon began to regret. The earliest group of coins which has been supposed to belong to them bears the name of Addedomaros ; but it is by no means certain, that the prince so named ruled over the Eceni rather than some neighbouring tribe, among whom Cunobelinos found the means of supplanting or succeeding him. His coins would be the only gold ones of the Eceni with any reading on them, and, had they really been theirs, it is hardly probable that they would have reverted to uninscribed ones, for such they certainly seem to have had after his time, both PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 37 in gold and silver. But along with their uninscribed silver coins they used inscribed ones, some of which are remarkable as showing the name of the people in the abbreviated form of ecen without a trace of that of any prince or king accompanying it,, which calls to mind the coins of the Catti. It would seem, then, that at this time the Eceni had no kings. Their latest coins, however, show the name of one Antedrigus, who may have been king or else chief magistrate of a state where there was no king — there are no means of deciding. But if the following facts be put together, to wit, that Antedrigus, the name of this man, appears a little later, sometimes ia its Celtic spelling and sometimes Latinized, on coin^ in the land of the Dobunni; that Dion Cassius^ men- tions one Bericos, who, driven out of Britain by an insurrection, went to persuade Claudius to send out an expedition against it, which was done in- 43 ; and lastly that, when the Romans came, the Eceni entered into an alliance without fighting, though they were by no means a likely people to have shrunk from the horrors of war, their history may be guessed, though no more than guessed, and summarised thus : — The Eceni had had a revolu- tion, which put an end to the kingly power among them ; the state became the prey of two factions, headed by Bericos and Antedrigus respectively ; their dispute may have been of the same nature as that which Julius Caesar was called upon to decide ' "Roman History," Ix. 19, 23. 38 CELTIC BRITAIN. among the ^dui,i between two nobles, each of whom insisted that he was the duly elected king for the year ; Antedrigus prevailed, and issued coins with his name on them ; and Bericos fled to Claudius to ask him to invade the island, promising him the aid of his friends and of the state of the Eceni if he placed him in the position occupied by his rival. When the Roman forces arrived, Bericos and his friends made a handle of the Eceni's jealousy of the power of the Catuvelauni to induce them to enter into an alliance with the Roman power; he obtained his desire, and Antedrigus had to flee, but was hospitably received by the Dobunni, among whom he organized resistance to the Romans for some years afterwards, much in the same way as Caratacos did among the Silures after having to leave his own people in the power of the conqueror. All this, though only a conjecture, would agree best with the view that the Eceni never were reduced by Cunobelinos ; and he certainly can have had no hand in regulating their coinage, which betrays no trace of the influence of Roman art or of the Latin language, except in so far as the Gaulish orthography used in this country at that time was a sort of mixture of Greek and Latin letters. Nothing can be said to be known as yet of the coinage of the Cornavii and the Coritani, though it is not improbable that both peoples may have had for a short time coins of their own make. In fact, it ' "Bell. Gall," vii. 32, 33. PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 39 is thought that it was througli tlie latter that acquaint- ance with money was first made by the people on the northern shore of the Humber, whose coinage is the rudest of all, and the one most like that of the Eceni, though it is impossible to trace it directly to the latter. This coinage, moreover, appears to have been the latest, being apparently of the time ot Claudius or in part later; it may be supposed to have come to an end about the time when the Brigantes, whose sway extended over much of the country, from the Humber and Mersey so far perhaps as the Cale- donian Forest, submitted to the Roman yoke soon after the year 69. In vain, however, one scans the coins in question for any of the historical names of that people, such as Cartismandua, Venutios, or Vello- catus ; in fact, there is no reason for supposing them to have belonged to the Brigantes so much as to a people inhabiting the districts now known as Holder- ness and the Yorkshire "Wolds — possibly the whole coast from the Humber to the Tees. In Ptolemy's Geography, a great work published about the year 120, they are called Parisi, which makes it probable that they were a branch of the Parish on the Seine, who have left their name to the city of Paris. Their town, called Petuaria, appears to have been at Hedon, close to where Kingston-upon-HuU now stands, and he places them around what he calls the Fair-havened Bay, referring probably to the once important harbour of Hornsea. We find other towns of theirs besides Petuaria in the Delgovicia of the ancients, which was probably Market Weighton, and in Dervcntio, some- 40 CELTIC BRITAIN. where on the Derwent, probably Kexby or Elvington. Some of the barrows of this people, containing the remains of war-chariots and other things of the Iron Age, also connect them with Market Weighton, Beverley, Pocklington, and other localities in the East Riding. But when did the Parisi arrive in this country? was it before the Brigantes, so that the latter had to land on the coast north of this district ? or did they come after the Brigantes, and succeed in seizing a corner of their territory by main force ? and, if so, how late did they make their appearance in the Humber? These are questions one has at present no means of answering ; but it is clear that at the time in question the Parisi were suf- ficiently independent of their powerful neighbours to have had a coinage of their own. Some of the pieces extant are, moreover, interesting as giving the title granted to the person in whose name they were issued. Thus one Volisios styles himself sometimes Domnocoveros and sometimes Domnoveros, which may possibly have meant the guardian of the state, or the man of the people. At any rate it has been observed that the same term occurs on a coin of Dumnorix, the ^duan, whose great popularity^ with the common people Ccesar dwells upon more than once. This, in fact, was one of the reasons why he was distrusted and ordered to be cut down when he refused to follow Caesar on his second expedition to Britain. On another of these northern coins the 1 "Bell. Gall./'i. 3, o, 18, 20. PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 4 1 person who issued it gives himself a title, which, if correctly read Senotigirnos, would literally mean the old lord or old monarch, whatever the exact official signification of that may have been among the Parisi. Unfortunately, the relation of these two kinds of coins to one another in point of time is not known ; should they turn out to be of the same date, they might be taken to prove the state to have been divided into two parties, the one clinging to the representative of a dynasty, and the other rallying round one who gave himself out as the friend of the people. If we do not misunderstand their coins, the Parisi may briefly be said to have been in the condition of a people who were either struggling to cast away the kingly yoke, or who had succeeded in doing so, and were threatened with a tyranny of a different kind — that of the adven- turer who seeks power by hoodwinking the crowd. A very doubtful exception is to be made as to the language being Gaulish, in the case of a group of coins with the letters vep corf, which are possibly to be treated as Latin, standing for vep. cok.f., mean- ing " Vepotalos son of Correos," or the like. In that case they might reasonably be regarded as the last native money coined in early Britain. Pomponius Mela, a Spanish writer of the first century, states that the further a British people was from the Continent, the less it knew of any other wealth than flocks and land ; but some of them probably made use of ingots of bronze, of bars of iron, such as Ccesar alludes to, and also, perhaps, of rings or pellets of gold, as a medium of exchange. Nor did 42 CELTIC BRITAIN. the coined money of the southern states fail to get admission to others far away from them. Thus there is an instance on record of a coin of the Dobunni being found so far north as Dumfries, while several of theirs have been discovered in Monmouthshire, that is to say, in the land of the Silures, who would seem to have been the people meant by Solinus, w^hen he states that the inhabitants of what he calls the Island of Silura would have nothing to do with money^ at a time not before the first century, but possibly a good deal later. A study of the early money of Britain also throws some light on the paths of intercourse between it and the Continent. The shortest of these, and probably the earliest in use for trade, was between Kent and the neighbouring coast of Gaul : it always continued, no doubt, to be the route along which the trade with the south-east of Britain was carried on. Nay, according to Pliny" quoting from Timaeus, who wrote about the middle of the fourth century before our era, and got his information probably from Pytheas, Thanet would seem to have been the island at high tide, to which the tin of the west w^as brought in coracles by the natives for sale to the merchants who came for it from Gaul. The coasting voyage seems to have taken the former six days to make. But there was another line of communication, the use of which was probably never discontinued from the time w^hen Belgic tribes first settled in the island. The Belgse ' "Solinus," edited by Mommsen, p. 114. "" "Hist. Nat.," iv. 16 (30). PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 43 advanced westwards into Gaul, being pressed forward probably by the Teutonic peoples in their rear. When they got familiar enough with the sea to cross the Channel, some of them continued the westward course of their race, and may be supposed to have landed in the harbours between Dungeness and the mouth of the Dorsetshire Stour. There is no evidence that either the Cantii on the one side, or the Durotriges and the peninsular tribes behind them on the other, should be considered Belgic. From the intervening line of coast they spread to the Thames and pressed westwards to the Severn Sea ; while the territory of those who retained the name of Belgae in Britain lay between that of the Regni, the Atrebates and the Dobunni on the one hand, and the line on the other of the Dorsetshire Stour and the Mendip Hills, beyond which were the Durotriges and the Dumnonii. The early coins on the Belgic seaboards of Britain and Gaul are far from easy to distinguish, and bear ample evidence to the truth of the tradition reported by Caesar that Belgic tribes had made themselves a home in the south of the island. How far their line of communication became also the route for trade it is hard to say : possibly some of the tin of Cornwall was brought into their territory, and then conveyed to some place near the mouth of the Seine. There is also numismatic evidence of a connection between the British coast and the Channel Islands, which probably extended itself to the opposite coast of Gaul : the coins in question point to the time of Claudius, but the intercourse they indicate may have begun 44 CELTIC BRITAIN. much earlier. No inscribed money seems to have been coined by the tribes west of the Belgae, but it is possible that the Durotriges may have had an unin- scribed coinage ; and they seem to have had the coins of other tribes in circulation among them, both in- scribed and uninscribed ones at the same time, so that they were in that respect somewhat more back- ward than the Eceni. Whether the Durotriges be- longed to the earlier or to the later Celtic invasion is not quite certain, but on the whole they may be classified with their neighbours, the Dumnonii, the remains of whose language in Devon and Cornwall leave us in no kind of doubt that they were of the earlier Celts or Goidels, not Brythons. Nor is it improbable that, in point of civilization, they were behind the inhabitants of the south-east of the island, with the exception of the people of the tin districts, which in ancient times were chiefly Dartmoor, with the country around Tavistock, and that around St. Austell, including several valleys looking towards the southern coast of Cornwall. In most of the other districts where tin existed it is supposed to have lain too deep to have been worked in early times. In the Scilly Isles, which have been_some- times erroneously identified with the Cassiterides of ancient authors, neither is tin worked now, nor are the old workings there either numerous or deep. The information which we have about this part of the country is scanty : some uninscribed coins that were current among the Durotriges and on the Belgic coast of Britain have been found in Corn- PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 45 wall, Avliicli would again suggest a trade in tin along the southern coast in the direction of Thanet. Then we come to a contemporary of Cicero's, the Greek geographer Posidonius, to whom we have already alluded as having extended his travels to Cornwall, which he called Belerion, a name given afterwards by Ptolemy to the Land's End : his account of the countries he saw has been preserved to us by Diodorus, who wrote a little later. That author tells ^ us, among other things, that the inhabitants of that promontory of Britain called Belerion, were very fond of strangers, and that from their intercourse with foreign merchants they were civilized in their manner of life. According to him, they prepared the tin by working very skilfully the earth in which it was found : the ground was rocky, but it contained earthy veins, the produce of which was ground down, smelted, and purified. The metal, we are further told, was made into slabs shaped like knuckle-bones, and carried to a certain island lying off the coast of Britain, called Ictis. During the ebb of the tide the intervening space was left dry, and to that place they carried over abundance of tin in their waggons. And, after a few words about such islands at high water, he goes on to say, that in one of them the merchants bought the tin from the natives and carried it over to Ciaul ; and that, after travelling overland for about thirty days, they finally brought their loads on pack-horses to the outlet of the Rhone, that is to say, to the meeting of » Sec "Libl. Hist.," V. 22, and Elton, p. ^6. 46 CELTIC BRITAIN. the Rhone and the Saone, where the wharfs for the tin-barges were erected. Diodorus further states, after mentioning the tin brought from the Cassiterides, that much was also carried across from Britain to the opposite shore of Gaul, and was thence brought on horseback through the midst of the Celtic country to Marseilles, and also to the city of Nar- bonne. All this refers to the tin of the Dumnonian peninsula, and shows that quantities of it were then carried to an island lying to the east, whence the passage to Gaul was short. But the island itself can hardly have been St. Michael's Mount, as has sometimes been supposed, since that does not seem to have been an island at all in old times ; nor was it the Isle of Wight for that was never acces- sible on foot : in all probability it was no other than Thanet,^ which must formerly have corresponded completely to the description already cited. This would, moreover, completely explain Caesar's singular statement that British tin came from the inland parts of the country.^ In earlier times the tin seems to have been brought from the west in boats, if one may trust the somewhat obscure account given by Timaeus. So we may infer that between his time and that of Posidonius and Caesar some considerable improve- ment had been made in the matter of roads in the south of Britain. > See "Bibl. Hist.,*' v. 38. ^ See this question discussed in Elton's book, i. pp. 34, &c. 3 "Bell. Gall.," V. 12. PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 47 Was there, then, any trade in tin carried on directi)- between Cornwall and the Continent, continued from the time of the Carthaginians or Phoenicians ? There is not a scrap of evidence, linguistic or other, of the presence of Phcenicians in Britain at any time, and the supposed proof (in the writings of Festus Avienus, a somewhat confused poet of the fourth century) that Himilco, in the flourishing times of Carthage, carried his voyage of discovery so far as this country, is exceedingly unsatisfactory. Had there ever been Carthaginian commerce with the tin districts of west Britain, it would probably have been con- tinued by the Veneti, in whose hands the trade with this country was in Caesar's time. These last traded in tin, which they landed at the mouths of the Garonne and the Loire, whence it was carried across to Marseilles and Narbonne ; and at one time they probably landed British tin at the mouth of the latter river, but they had to fetch it most likely from the south-east of Britain. If there was any direct trade in tin between the tin districts of Britain and the Loire, it must have been utterly unknown to Caesar, which is not likely to have been the case had it existed. Besides, the fact that the Dumnonii had no coinage of their own, nor appear to have made much use of money at all, strongly suggests the inference that they lived practically much further from the commerce of the south of Europe than did the British peoples to the east of them : however fond they may have been of strangers, they would seem to have bartered their tin mainly for the trinkets of the Mediterranean and 48 CELTIC BRITAIN. Other such ornamental rubbish as a barbarous people is wont to delight in. But this must not be understood to prove that there was no communication between the Dumnonii and the nearest part of Gaul during the Venetic period : in fact, Dumnonia was probably the part of Britain in which the Gaulish students of druidism mentioned byCassar usuallylanded: possibly, however, this communication is not to be regarded as being then of very old standing. The Carthaginians had extended their trade in tin from Spain to Gaul, and some stream-works of the Bronze Age are known to have been carried out in localities, among others, in the Morbihan ^ or the country of the Veneti. It is to this contact with the Carthaginians we are, no doubt, to trace the beginning of the naval power of the Veneti, who, at the end of the second Punic War and the downfall of the Carthaginian power in Spain, succeeded so completely to their trade in tin, that there is no record of any interruption in the supply to the markets of the Mediterranean. They landed the metal at the mouth of the Loire and of the Garonne, some of which they brought from the Cassiterides or tin-islands in Vigo Bay, on the coast of Spain. The trade with the latter had been kept in such mystery that no Roman could find out anything respecting it until Publius Crassus,^ one of Caesar's lieu- tenants, succeeded in personally ascertaining all about it, after the conquest of the Veneti and of Aquitania had been effected. Had they been in the habit of ^ Boyd Dawkins's "Early Man in Britain," p. 403. "" Strabo, r, 5, II (C. 176). PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 401 carrying the tin of Britain directly from where it was found to the mouth of the Loire, it is probable that Ca^sar^ or some one of those who acted under his. command, would have got wind of it. Ccesar's account^ of the marine of the Veneti shows that it had made a deep impression on his mind : their ships, he says, were of a large size, and stood so higli out of the water that the Romans could not well attack them with their missiles, and even when they raised turrets on their galleys they were not so high as the poops of the Venetian ships. They were made of solid oak, with decks a foot thick, fastened with bolts of iron as thick as a man's thumb, while the metal used in making the ships in which Ccesar passed into Britain is mentioned as being bronze. _ The former vessels had sails of hides, and their anchors were fastened by means of iron chains instead of ropes, and the beaks of the Roman galleys could do their hulls no harm. When, however, they had to manoeuvre within a small space, they had the worst of it as soon as the Romans bethought them- selves of sharp hooks with long handles to cut their rope^and render the sails, on which they depended, use- less. Up to their unsuccessful contest ^yith Csesar in 56, the Veneti not only carried on most of the trade with Britain, or levied a tax on all others who took part in it, but they counted among their allies all the maritime tribes from the Loire to the country of the Morini and Menapii, and they drew help also fron\ ' "Bell. Gall," iii. 13. £ 5© CELTIC BRITAIN. Britain, whence it may be gathered, as they mainly relied on what they could do at sea, that the ships of all the members of this Armoric or maritime league, were much of the same make, whether in Gaul or in Britain ; and some idea of their number may be formed from the fact that the Veneti managed to get together on their own coast south of Brittany about 220 vessels fully manned to oppose Csesar's fleet, as soon as it sailed out of the Loire. They were, as already suggested, not fitted for war, but for trading on a sea which Csesar ever and anon dwells upon as vast and exposed, where the difficulty of navigation seemed to him, who never knew exactly what to make of the ebb and flow of the tide, to be extreme, and where the harbours were few and far between, or hardly existed at all ; in other words, he seems to have regarded them as eminently qualified for long voyageSc But how far those ancient sailors of the Armoric league, who had not the mariner's compass, ventured out in the open sea where they had no coast-line to guide them, we have no means of ascer- taining, but, as a rule, they may be supposed to have hugged the shore. The most important elements in the Veneti's trade with Britain in Caesar's time were, as already mentioned, the exportation of tin and the importation of bronze, together, doubtless, with a variety of articles to be worn as ornaments and amulets. But, when Strabo wrote some seventy or more years later, the imports included the following things, in the order he gives them : — pottery, salt, and articles of brass or, more correctly speaking, PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 5 1 bronze ; and then he groups contemptuously together ivory rings, necklaces, red amber, glass-ware, and suchlike trumpery. But still more interesting is Strabo's account of the things produced in the island, namely, corn, cattle, gold, silver, and iron : these, he writes, were all exported to the Continent, together with skins, slaves, and dogs fitted for the chase and for war as carried on by the Gauls. The exportation of corn and cattle would seem to imply that the country had enjoyed a period of considerable prosperity after Caesar's departure, and the mention of gold and silver is interesting, but not so much so as the fact that by this time iron, which was very scarce when Caesar was here, was now found in suffi- cient quantities to become an article of export. Where the slaves chiefly came from is not indicated, but it was probably from the more remote parts of the island, and possibly also from Ireland ; a still more important question about them must likewise be left unanswered, and that is whether they were wholly or mostly captives taken in war. But, by way of summarising these remarks, one may say that there is no reason to think that the conquest of the Veneti and the Armoric league by Caesar caused the art of ship-building, such as they had learnt it from the Carthaginians of Spain, to be lost on the shores of Gaul and Britain ; indeed, his breaking down their monopoly may have had quite the contrary effect, and it is not improbable that the ships of the Veneti became the pattern for all vessels used afterwards by the Romans in British E 2 52 CELTIC BRITAIN. waters, so that our marine of tlie present day may be regarded as, in a manner, deriving its descent through the shipping of the Veneti from that of the Cartha- ginians and the proud merchants of Tyre and Sidon. In other respects, the connection with the Roman world into which Caesar brought Britain gave a powerful impetus to the trade between them, and opened a door for the Roman influence evidenced here by the way some of the coins, to which atten- tion has been called, were got up, as well as by the beginning, to which they testify, of the use of Latin as the official language of this country. Looking, then, at its inhabitants from this point of view, and as they were just before the Claudian invasion, one may say that those of the south-east were the most civilized, and that some of those of Brythonic or Gaulish descent, occupying the tract from the Severn Sea to the Isle of Thanet, and from the Channel to the Tees, had progressed so far as to have money of their own coining. Of the Goidelic branch, it appears that the Durotriges may have had a letterless coinage, that the Dum- nonii, without actually excluding coins from their country, showed probably a marked preference for the nick-nacks of INIediterranean workshops, while barter was the only way of doing business understood by the Silures and the other Goidelic tribes of the remoter parts of the island. Let us now leave the coins and commerce of the early Britons, to take a somewhat more comprehen- sive view of their habits. Coesar, who penetrated PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 53 Rorth of the Thames, had ample opportunities of observing the appearance of the country, and of learning much about the inhabitants, but there is no reason to suppose that he saw any representatives of the older Celtic settlers, or of the non-Celtic abori- gines, excepting possibly as slaves. He considered the country very thickly inhabited, and the abundance of cattle to have been great. The buildings he saw resembled those of Caul, and were very numerous, but according to him the British idea of a town or fortress was a place with a tangled wood round it, and fortified with a rampart and ditch ; inside this they would, as Strabo tells us, build their huts and collect their cattle, but not with a view of remaining there long. Cresar regarded the pcu]:)le of Kent, whom he thought by far the most civilized, as only slightly differing from those of Caul ; and Diodorus draws a contrast between the simple and frugal habits of the Britons and the luxurious way of living, consequent on riches, with which he was familiar. The thickness of the population in the south-east, and the habit of harvesting the corn in spacious barns, would naturally lead one to suppose that it was largely and successfully grown there even then ; but the population was probably more sparse and corn less extensively grown in the districts where the ears reaped were stowed away in holes underground until wanted to meet the needs of the day ; and when Caesar goes on to say, that most of those in the interior sowed no corn, but lived on flesh and milk, and wore skins for their clothing, we have, doubtless, to do 54 CELTIC BRITAIN. with statements which were in the main true, though one has no means of fixing to a nicety on the tribes to which they apphed. But, in making them, he had probably nothing to go upon but the vague hearsay reports, which may have been current among the more civiHzed people of the south-eastern part of the island, with regard to the backward state of some of the inhabitants of the remoter regions of the west and the north. The same remark ajoplies to Strabo, when he states that some knew nothing about gardening and other things relating to the farmer's life ; but when he mentions that, with abundance of milk at their disposal, there were some who were too ignorant to make cheese, his statement is at least illustrated by the negative evidence of the Welsh word for cheese, caius, which, like its English equivalent, is nothing but the Latin caseits bor- rowed. It is somewhat otherwise when Caesar says that all the Britons painted themselves with woad : one could hardly have expected this to have been in vogue among the inhabitants of the south-east; but he wrote probably from the evidence of his own eyes, so it must be accepted as true even of them. After all, it may have meant no more than painting the face for battle or certain religious rites, a habit not to be confounded v/ith the much more serious one of tattooing, which prevailed in parts of the north of the island dow^n to a comparatively late period. The poet Ovid, of a later date, sings of the painted Britons. The custom may be regarded as one which once prevailed very widely. Some PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 55 authors allude to the Agathyrsi and Geloni as practising it, others in the same way to Sarmatians and Dacians, and Herodotus to the Thracians, while Sidonius, Bishop of Clermont in the fifth century, graphically describes how some Saxons he had seen daubed their faces with blue paint, and pushed their hair back to the crown, to make the forehead look larger.^ Caesar further tells us thai the Britons shaved all except the upper lip ; and the hair of the head was allowed to grow long. But no statement of his has attracted more attention than what he says about the morals of the people, to the effect that ten or twelve men living together, and con- sisting especially of brothers, or fathers and their sons, would have their wives in common, the children being reckoned those of the man to whom the maid was first given in marriage in each case. So far from this having been the custom of the Celts of Britain, it is not certain that it can have been to any great extent that of any Aryan people whatsoever. If one could be sure that this singular statement was not a passage from some Greek book of imaginary travels among imaginary barbarians, which Caesar had in his mind, it would be possible to point out the facts to which it bore a kind of relation. In the first place, one might suppose that he had heard and misunderstood some description of the families of the Britons to the effect, that it was usual for ten or twelve men, together ' See liis letter to Lampridius, in the 8th hook of his "Epistles." 56 CELTIC BRITAIN. Avith their wives and children, to live together under the patria potestas or power of one father and head, a kind of undivided family well known to the student of early institutions, and marking a particular stage 'in the social development of most Aryan nations. And in the next place it is probable that the Britons of the south-east of the island, and some of the Gauls of the Continent, were acquainted with a report that there were tribes in the remoter parts of Britain, -whose view of matrimony was not the one usual among Aryan nations. A statement, similar to that made by Csesar, is mentioned and doubted by Strabo,^ but by his time this manner of living had to be sought in Ireland, and Dion Cassius,^ who wTOte at the beginning of the third century, makes it of the people of Scotland. Later still, it entered into the picture drawn, but in a far less hideous form, of 'the pauper king of the Hebrides, by the interpola- 'tors of Solinus,''^ and it is repeated of the grass-eating folks of Thule, where it might have been appropriately allowed to drop, but that St. Jerome and others •thought they had reasons to associate it with the name ■of the Scotti and the Atecotti, which suggests that both Britain and Ireland contained down to a comparatively late date non-Celtic peoples, who * Strabo, 5, 4 (C. 201). * See his Roman History (abridged by Xiphilinus), book Ixxvi. 12 ; also Ixxvi. 16, for Argentocoxos' wife's well-known reply to Julia Augusta, when she found fault with British •morals. . ^ Mommsen's Edition, pp. 234-5. PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 57 were not altogether Celtic or Aryan in their family arrangements.^ The political condition of the people of Brythonic Britain towards the end of the early Iron Age and the close of their independence, is best studied in connection with that of Gaul as described by Ceesar. The Celts, like all other Aryan nations, were once under the rule of kings resembling those of early Rome, or those of Greece in the Heroic Age, as depicted in Homer's Iliad. But this kind of personal rule came to an end among various Aryan nations at different times, owing to the action of the chiefs subordinate to the king seizing his power and making it temporary and elective in their own class This led the same man to govern and obey in turns, and thereby formed, no doubt, a very distinct step in advance. In this way the kings had been superseded in the yth century before our era, nearly throughout the whole of Greece and the Greek Colonies ; and in every instance it was an oligarchy or the rule of a class that rose on the ruins of the kingly power ; so also at Rome when the Tarquins were driven out, practically all power was seized by the patricians. A similar revolution, though no Gaulish Herodotus or I.ivy was found to commit it to the pages of history, had taken i)lace in Gaul before Caesar came there, though not very long before, since he appears to have found almost everywhere the sulk- ing and plotting representatives of the fallen dynasties, ' See also Stc^kes's note in the " Kevuc Cellique," v. p. 232. 58 CELTIC BRITAIN. and to have readily turned them into use, either in bringing him information about what was going on in the senates of the peoples who had expelled their ances- tors from the office of king, or in keeping their states in subjection by appointing them kings in the room of their fathers and under Roman protection.^ This was notoriously the policy of Rome at all times, and it was exceedingly distasteful to the people of Gaul, for their detestation of kings was, perhaps, not a whit less intense than that of the Romans themselves ; thus we find- that the intriguing ^duan, Dumnorix, knew of no readier way of filling the ^duan senate with hatred for Caesar, than by quietly suggesting to them that he had been given the office of king over them. The punishment fixed by law among the Helvetii for trying to secure supreme power was that of being burnt alive, and to escape it Orgetorix was believed to have committed suicide before his trial came on."' But, though the oligar- chical form of government was an advance on the old monarchy, it could not, as a rule, last long, for the very important reason, that it was wont to do nothing for the bulk of the people. At R.ome, the difficulty was solved in a peculiar way, by unwilling concessions on the part of the patricians, but in Greece the immediate outcome was a plentiful crop of despots, who prevailed for a time. The same thing had begun to take place in Gaul, although it ' See, among other passages in point, "Bell. Gall,," i. 3: iv. 12 ; V. 25, 54. = lb., V. 6. '-> lb., 1.4. PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 59 had been foreseen, probably, in every state, and stringently legislated against. The ^dui,^ for in- stance, had enacted that neither of the chief magi- strates, elected to discharge the office of a king for the space of a year, could be of the same family as one who had previously held the office, in case the latter was still alive : they could not even be mem- bers of the senate at the same time. We said neither of them, because Caesar's narrative, supported by the evidence of Gaulish coins, proves that the ^dui had not one chief magistrate whose office they called vergobreios or the administrator of justice, but two,- whose position may be supposed to have been analo- gous to that of the consuls at Rome. This dual office, which does not seem to have been confined to the ^dui, survived as the duumvirate for administering the law in the cities of conquered Gaul, and helped the Gauls, doubtless, to accommodate themselves to the municipal customs of Rome. But the common people in Caesar's time continued to occupy indi- vidually a position which appeared to him to have been 1 ''Bell. Gall.,"vii. 33. 2 Caesar's words occur at i. 16, and read in the manuscripts : •'Divitiaco et Lisco qui summo magistratui prceerant quern vergobretum appellant /Edui." The editors, however, always Y)r\x\\.prcserat, as they find a difficulty, probably, in reconciling this passage with Ccesar's account of the quarrel mentioned by him invii. 32, 33, where he must, we think, be supposed to have been speaking of the election to only one of the two offices — possibly the two were not filled at the same time of the year. The question is one recently and admirably started by ^I. Mowat in the " Revue Celtique/' v. pp. 121-4. 6o CELTIC BRITAIN. hardly better than that of slaves, and in order to protect themselves against the tyranny of the more powerful members of the community they had to become the clients of some influential nobleman, and to add them- selves to the number of those wlio were tied to him hand and foot by tlie bonds of debt. The condition of these men reminds one of that of the bankrupt plebeians of Rome before the secession to the Mons Sacer. The great man, however, lost his influence over his clients the moment he failed to protect them. This being so, one is prepared for Caesar's further asserting that every state was torn asunder by factions. Some of the leaders succeeded in making themselves masters of their states, and the designs of a good many more were cut short by the advance of Roman arms. The despots, as we may call them, for the sake of dis- tinguishing them from the old kings, appear to have belonged to somewhat different stages of political development, the lowest being those who adopted the simple plan of hiring troops^ to overpower the senate of the oligarchy ; but there were others who were more wary and showed more outward regard for law : these thought it needful to enlist the populace on their side, which they proceeded to do by eloquence and bribes. In fact, there is every reason to suppose that the common people were collectively beginning to acquire influence, and already, here and there, to understand their own power, though they had not as yet taken the initiative. But their temper was the ' "Bell. Gall.,"ii. i. PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 6 1 first thing to be considered by any adventurous noble- man who desired his own advancement ; and Ambiorix, one of the most powerful Gaulish leaders at the head of a formidable alliance opposed to Caesar, once ex- cused himself by saying that the multitude had no less power over him than he had over them.^ Without trying to define the capacity of the ancient Gauls for political development, we may say that they are seen only as it were for a moment, and that in one of the most critical periods in a nation's history. Indeed the flip- pant generalities formulated about them, from the days of C^sar to our own, seldom do them more justice than if the independence of Greece had closed with the rise of the tyrants, and we based our estimate of the Greek character on the little that happens to be known of the struggles between the tyrants and the oligarchies. Nor is it quite an accident that the nation descended mainly from the Gauls forms at the present moment a great and prosperous community, consisting neither of the grumbling tenantry of an aristocracy nor of the unwillingly drilled liverymen of a Caesarism. The state of things, politically speaking, which existed in Gaul, existed also most likely among the Belgic tribes in Britain, when Commios (supposing the Atrebat of that name to have been the same man as the Commios of the British coins) was enabled to procure sovereignty for himself in the island and to transmit it to his sons. So much may also be gathered from the excuse, which the ambassadors, ' "Rell. Gnll.," V. 27. 62 CELTIC BRITAIN. who came to ask Csesar for peace soon after his first landing in Britain, made for having put Commios in bonds, namely, that it was the act of the multitude that knew no better. Now, whether it was the real cause or not, it is clear that it was a possible cause, which might be pleaded by those among whom Commios had landed, but not with any show of dignity, if we supposed them to have been under the rule of a king of the old type, who brooked no med- dling on the part of the common people. Here we have apparently to do with a people to the east of the Belgic tribes, namely, the inhabitants of Caution or Kent, among whom Commios and the ambassadors returning from Gaul had probably landed. These according to Caesar's account of his second expedi- tion had no less than four kings acting in obedience to Cassivelaunos as commander of the organization against the Romans : the probability is that not one of the four in a country so near Gaul was a king of the old description. The same conclusion is likewise indicated by the coins of the Parisi, which have already been alluded to, and by those of the Catti, which seem to show only the name of the state, as do also some of those of the Eceni. But as the most advanced people of Britain were old-fashioned enough to paint themselves and to rely so much in war on their chariots, it is not surprising to find that kings, and those probably of the old sort, were not extinct by any means among them. One of the most powerful states was that of the Catuvelauni, who may have been too much occupied in war with PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 6^ iheir neighbours to have paid so much attention to the form of government under which they lived as they might otherwise have done. The Trinovantes also had been living under kings, until the last of them before Caesar's raids had been slain by Cassi- velaunos. The remaining Brythonic peoples of Britain have left the historian no means of making out anything definite about their form of govern- ment so far as ^ye know ; but it is not improbable that the kings and queens of the Brigantes were of the old description. As to the earlier Celtic inhabitants of the island we have no evidence that any of them had got beyond the rule of kings of the older kind. The series of the old kingships may be supposed to have been com- pletely interrupted or profoundly modified in Britain by the Roman occupation ; consequently little is to be learned as to their nature from that of the king- ships which rose after the Roman legions left for good. The earlier ones, however, may be presumed to have been most likely of the same type as those of Ireland, where the series were never broken by Roman rule. As among the Greeks the king of the ancient Irish legends may be said to have reigned by divine right and by divine favour, so he must not be dis- figured by any blemish ^ or have lost a limb. The mythical Irish King (in reality the Celtic sea- god) Nuada, said to have had his hand cut off in battle, was, we are told, compelled to resign ' See the "Senchus Mor," i. 73. 64 CELTIC BRITAIN. his office until a western .-^sculapius provided him with a wonderful hand of silver with motion in every finger. Moreover, as the man who criticised the kings before Troy was found to be the ugly Thersites, so the usurper of the power of the rightful king: in Irish lesrend is sometimes described as a cat-headed monster with the displeasure of Heaven attending on his footsteps ; for the land in his time yields no corn, the trees no fruit, the rivers no fish, the cows no milk. When, however, the rightful king, that is to say, the king of the right stock, recovers his power, the seasons become tranquil, the cows give milk in abundance, the earth is fruitful, the rivers teem with fish, and the trees bend heavy-laden under their crop of fruit.^ The Goidels of Britain entertained the same opinion ; for we catch a glimpse of it among the descendants of the ancient Silures so late as the 1 2th century in the belief recorded by Giraldus, that the birds of the Lake of Savaddon, near Brecon, would all begin to sing at the bidding of the rightful prince of Wales — the story relates how Griffith son of Rhys got them to warble and to beat the water wdth their wings for sheer loyalty after refusing to obey the Norman barons, who were then masters both of Griffith's person and of his land.- A king of the old sort was responsible to nobody, but he ' See "The Four ^Masters' Annals of the Kingdom of Ireland," A.M. 3303, 3310, 3311; A.D. 14, 15, 76; also the " Scnchus Mor," iii. 24, 25, * Giraldus's " Ithierarium Kambrlce," I. ii. (p, 34 of the Rolls Edition). PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAX CONQUEST. 65 usually consulted the chiefs beneath him (who, in the case of Gaul, survived the kingship to form the senate under the oligarchy in each state), and when he had discussed his views with them he declared his plans to a larger assembly and published his decrees by means of it. " In this government," says Mr. Grote,^ speaking of the Greek king as de- scribed in epic poetry, " the authority, which pervades the whole society, all resides in the king. But on important occasions it is exercised through the forms of publicity ; he consults, and even discusses, with the council of chiefs or ciders — he communicates after such consultation with the assembled Agora, — who hear and approve, perhaps hear and murmur, but are not understood to exercise an option or to reject." This would all apply to ancient Ireland if only for the Greek Agora or the market place we substitute the Irish Aenach or the fair ; and presumably also to the Goidelic portions of Britain generally about the time we are speaking of. The old idea of kings and gods probably placed them on somewhat parallel lines, and, as there were gods and goddesses, so there were royal persons of both sexes. In the case of the ancient Gauls this is indicated by the fact that the Gaulish word rix entered into the composition of names not only of men as Orgetorix and Dumnorix, but also of women as Visurix and Biturix, It is etymologically the same vocable as the Latin rex, king, which may possibly have also once been epicene, ' " History of Greece" (the ed. of 1862), ii. 223 ; see also i. 457, 461. F 66 CELTIC BRITAIN. custom having afterwards ruled in fLivour of calling a king's wife a reghia or royal person of the other sex. The old Irish ri, genitive rig, king, and rigan, queen, would be analogous, while the Welsh r/iian, the equivalent of the Irish rigan^ is mostly a poetic term for a lady, and conveys no sense of royalty. Whether any of the king-ruled Brythons of Britain were so far rid of the patriarchal idea of monarchy as to let a woman exercise the power of king, seems doubtful ; and the history of Boudicca, queen of the Eceni and widow^ of a king given them pro- bably by the Romans, does not prove it : still less decisive is the case of Cartismandua, queen of the Brigantes, who is described as married or marry- ing. There is no reason to think that among the older Celtic peoples of Britain a woman could hold supreme power either in the state or in the family. But as the old kingly rule was above all things mainly a large type edition of the power of a father over his household, and as the wife probably occupied a place of authority and respect by his side, so the queen may be supposed to have been similarly placed with regard to the king : the system would have been regarded as incomplete without her, whether we have in view Britain or the sister island. We have an illustration of this in a very curious Irish tale which relates how a king of ancient Erinn was compelled to marry because the magnates of his realm with one accord flatly refused to hold the great periodical feast of Tara under the presidency of a king who had no wife, so that he was obliged to PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 67 marry.^ And as to personal rule altogether, nothing, perhaps, illustrates more compendiously and clearly the difference, between the Brythons and the Goidels than the history of an early Celtic word meaning power or authority, which has yielded the Welsh their ^«'/^^ in the sense of the state or the country, while in Irish it has taken the form oi flaitJi^ which means a lord or prince : the signification had begun to set strongly in that direction so early at least as the tenth century. Exceedingly little is said by ancient authors about the religion of the people of Britain. There is, how- ever, no reason to suppose that, in so far as they were Celts, they had not the same sort of religion as the Gauls, and as the Italians, or the Greeks, and other Aryan nations. Cassar found the Gauls given to the worship of gods, whom he roughly identified with those of Rome, namely, Jove and Minerva, Apollo and Mars,^ and, above all, Mercury, whom they honoured more than the others. Much the same gods were probably worshipped by the Celts in Britain ; and among them must have been the sea-god Nodens, who was of sufficient importance to have, during the Roman occu- pation, a temple built for him at Lydney on the western side of the Severn, while the Irish formerly called the divinity of the Boyne his wife.' Every locality had its divinity, and the rivers were specially identified ' See \ViiKlisch'.s "Irische Tcxte," pp. 118, &\ ^ See O'Ciiny's " Manners and Cust. of the Anc. Irish,"' iii. p. 156, and a remarkable passage in tlie Book of I.cinster, fob 1 86/'. F 68 CLLTIC BRITAIN. witli certain divine beings, as witness the streams that still bear the name of Dee and kindred ones. The Dec or Dcva of North Wales had another name, Avhich appears in Welsh literature as Aerven or the genius of war ; and so late as the time of Giraldus it retained some of its ancient prestige : it was still supposed to indicate beforehand the event of the frequent wars between the Welsh and the English by eating away its banks on the Welsh or the English side, as the case might be. The name of another river marks it out as one that was formerly considered •divine, the Belisama probably, our Ribble : the name ■occurs in inscriptions found in Gaul as that of a god- dess equated with the Minerva of Italy.^ This was an elastic system of polytheism, or perhaps, more strictly speaking, not a system at all; and possibly the priesthood it implied did not form a class distinctly marked off from other men; but we have no data, and must pass on to the non-Celtic natives, who had another religion, namely, druidism, which may be sur- mised to have had its origin among that race. Druid- ism possessed certain characteristics which enabled it xo make terms with the Celtic conqueror, both in Gaul and in the British Islands:^ in the latter this applies probably to the Goidelic Celts alone, for there is no ' See Orelli, Nos. 1431, 1969, and de Belloguet's "Ethno- genie Gauloise," i. p. 375 : she is to be traced also at Carleon on the Usk. See Lee's " Isca Silurum," p. 19. ^ A somewhat analogous case may be cited from Scandinavia ■in the fact, that the word for a Finn or Lapp is synonymous in »0. Norse with sorcerer: see Vigfusson's "Icelandic Diet." ;.s, V. Finnar ; also Milton's "Par. Lost," ii. 665. PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 69 evidence that druiclism was ever the religion of any Brythonic people. Thus the men of Britain might perhaps be classified, so far as regards religion, into three groups : the Brythonic Celts, who were poly- theists of the Aryan type ; the non-Celtic natives under the sway of druidism ; and the Goidelic Celts, devotees of a religion which combined Aryan poly- theism with druidism : here again our data are want- ing, and one is at a loss to know what people Pliny^ had in view when he wrote that the wives and daughters-in-law of the Britons attended certain reli- gious rites without their clothing, and with their bodies painted as if in imitation of Ethiopians. Nor have ancient authors told us much about their most influential order of men, the druids, excepting those of Mona, who witnessed the landing in their island of Suetonius and his troops : these, Tacitus gives one to understand,- stained their altars with the blood of human beings, sought auguries in the entrails of their victims, and practised some, at least, of their cruel rites in groves which the Romans took to cutting down. Something is also to be learnt from the use made of the Celtic words for druid in ihe Celtic literatures of later times. Among the oldest instances in A\'elsh poetry' of the use of the word dencyddon, druids, is one where it is applied to the Magi or Wise Men, who came with presents to the infant ' "Hist. Nat.,"x.\ii. i (2). 2 "Ann.," xiv. 29, 30. ^ See an obscure poem in tlie Book of Taliesin in Skene's "Ancient Books of \\'ales," vol. ii. p. 174. 70 CELTIC HRITAIN. Jesus, and its Irish cognate driii is not only used in the same manner, but is usually rendered into Latin by ma^us^ a magician. Now and then also, point is given to this term by making the druid into Simon Magus, whose appearance on Celtic ground is other- wise inexplicable. The Goidelic druids accordingly appear at times under the name of the School of Simon Druid :^ they were soothsayers, priests, and medicine men, but their principal character was, per- haps, that of magicians. Thus the lives of St. Patrick describe the druids of the king of Ireland striving to surpass that saint in working miracles : among other things, one of them causes snow to fall so thickly that men quickly find themselves neck-deep ; and at another time he brings over the plain darkness that might be felt, so that all trembled with fear. But, like Moses with Pharaoh's magicians, Patrick always has the best of it. Indeed, so completely did the Irish recognize the similarity between their magicians and those of the Nile, that a writer of glosses on a ninth century manuscript of St. Paul's Epistles explains to the Irish reader that Jannes and Jambres were the names of tw^o Egyptian druids.^ The same v»^as pro- bably the character of the druids of Britain : it cer- tainly was that of those at the non-Celtic court of the Pictish king in the sixth century. A life of St. ' A curious passage about Siuion dmi and his School, kindly pointed out to the writer by Mr. Stokes, occurs in O'Mulcorry's Glossary in MS. H. 2, i6 (col. Ii6) in Trin. Coll. Library, Dublin. ^ " Glosscy liibernicw, ed. Zimmer, " p. 1S3. PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 7 I Columba, written in the seventh century^ mentions the saint's contests with one of those wizards of the North, who is described as bringing on thick dark- ness and a great fury of the elements just at the time when he found the saint setting sail on Loch Ness.^ Nor is it quite certain that the notion of a druid as magician was not the one uppermost in the mind of the fervent writer of an ancient hymn ascribed to St. Columba, who is therein made to say : Christ the son of God is my druid. ^ Such being the character of the druids in the north of the island in the sixth century, we may suppose that in the more southern parts they were much the same about the time of Caesar's invasions, namely, a powerful class of men monopolizing the influence of sooth- sayers, magicians, and priests. But in Gaul, under the faint rays of the civilization of Marseilles and other Mediterranean centres, they seem to have added to their other characters that of philosophers discours- ing to the youths whose education was entrusted to them, on the stars and their movements, on the world and its countries, on the nature of things and the power of the gods. The same influence had also probably been operating to soften and moderate the pristine grimness of their practices, and this may be supposed to have been the reason why Gaulish students came to this country to perfect themselves in the druidic system. Here in the western parts of the island it still retained perhaps its most rugged and ' Reeve's " Adaiv.nan's Life of St. Columba," p. 149. 2 Ibid., p. 74. 72 CELTIC BklTAlN. horrible features, unmodified by the Aryan ideas which may have been telling on it in Gaul. It is hard, how- ever, to accept the belief, recorded by Caesar, that druidism originated here, and was only imported into Gaul : the probability rather is, that the Celts found it both there and here to have been the common re- ligion of the aboriginal inhabitants from the Baltic to Gibraltar. Some of the customs of the pagans of these islands may be detected in the observances of their Christian descendants : thus among many nations a mild form of mutilation is found to have been the symbol of slavery, and the minimum consisted not un-^ frequently in cutting off some of the hair of the head. Among the Brythons we find in the Welsh romances called the Mabinogion a youth, who wished to become one of Arthur's knights, having his hair cut^ off by the king with his own hand, but this practice is now best known in the Roman church, where the priest, literally regarded as a semis del or God's slave, has his crown shaven. The Celtic languages bear ample evidence to the same idea among the Celts : thus, the Welsh word for a hermit, which is meiidzuy, means God's slave, and such an Irish name as Maelphadraic signifies the bald or tonsured slave of Patrick, and is found Latinized into Calvus Patricii^ in the ninth century. The tonsure usual in Britain and Ireland was the same, and it was merely a druidic survival ; so, when the Church of Rome insisted on the Christians ^ Guest's "Mabinogion," ii. 204: the mistranslation comes at p. 258. * Nigra's " Reliquie Cehichc," p. 19. PREVIOUS TO THE CLAUDIAN CONQUEST. 73 of these islands conforming more completely with its practices, the druidic tonsure was one of the differences which it wished to be rid of. The Irish Church began to conform in this matter of hair-cutting in the year 630, but the British Church held out till 768. There is an exceedingly curious, though some- what confused passage in the Second Epistle of Gildas, possibly not a part of the original, but written, at any rate, before the druidic tonsure had disappeared, and it is to the following effect :^^ — "The Britons, contrary to all the world, and hostile to Roman customs not only in the mass but also in the tonsure, are, with the Jews, slaves to the shadow of things to come rather than to the truth. The Romans say that the tonsure of the Britons is reported to have originated with Simon Magus, whose tonsure embraced merely the whole front part of the head from ear to ear, in order to exclude the genuine tonsure of the Magi, whereby the front part alone was wont to be covered. But the originator of this tonsure in Ireland is proved by Patrick's discourse to have been the swineherd of King Loigaire macNeill, from whom the Irish nearly all adopted it." The nian meant by Loigaire's swineherd (a mis-translation of viacai) was Dubthach maccu Lugir, who was chief poet of Ireland, at the head of a large number of i)upils ; and the legend relating how Patrick sought the "materials of a bishop" among his pupils, throws some light on the meaning ' Haddan and SUiLbs's "Councils and Eccl. Doc," i. pp. 1 12-3 : see also Reeves's notes to his " Columba," p. 350, and above all Bxda's '' Hist. Eccl.," v. 21. 74 CELTIC BRITAIN. of the tonsure among the Celts : — " Find for me," said Patrick, ''a man of rank, of good family, and good morals, one who has one wife and only one son." — " Why," said Dubthach, " askest thou that, for a man of that sort ? " — " To put orders on him," said Patrick. — '' Fiacc is the man," said Dubthach : '• he is gone on a circuit in Connaught." But just while this conversation is going on Fiacc returns from his circuit, and Dubthach says, " Here is he of whom we spoke." — "Be it so," said Patrick; '• but suppose that what we said were not pleasing to him." — " Let preparation be made," said Dubthach, " for tonsuring me, while Fiacc is looking on." Now, as soon as Fiacc saw that, he asked what they were preparing to do. " To tonsure Dubthach," said they. — '-'That is idle," said Fiacc, "for there is no poet equal to him in Erinn." — "Thou wouldst be accepted in his stead ? " said Patrick — " The loss of me to Erinn," said Fiacc, " is less than that of Dubthach." So Patrick shore his beard then from Fiacc, and great grace came upon him thereafter . . . so that a bishop's rank was conferred on him, and so that he is archbishop of Leinster thenceforward, and his successor after him."i A great deal more might be said on this subject of early Celtic religion; but, as it is a matter of inference rather than of history, it would take up too much of our space to speak of it at length ; some points, however, connected with it wtII again come under the reader's notice as we go on. ' The original, of which this is a free rendering, will be found in Stukes's " Goidelica," p. 126, and a shorter version at p. 86. UNDER THE ROiMANS. 75 CHAPTER III. THE ROMANS IN BRITAIN, AND HOW THEY LEFT IT. The first part of this chapter will be devoted to the successive steps taken by the Romans to bring the island into subjection, as well as to the principal events of the Roman occupation ; but only so far as it tends to throw light on the position of the Celtic peoples inhabiting it and their relations to one another, since the Roman administration of the government of Britain is to be treated of at length in another volume of this series. For nearly a century after Caesar's last invasion no attempt was made to bring Britain under real subjec- tion to Rome, but his expeditions had the effect of bringing it into a sort of connection with the Roman world, the influence of which we have already pointed out. In the year 43 Claudius Co^sar resolved to send Aulus Plautius with an army to conquer the island. The same political changes seem to have been going on then in Britain, which Julius Caesar found at work in Gaul years before, and it is hinted that the nominal connection between Britain and Rome was in danger, owing to exiles from the former being sheltered and protected by Claudius C^sar. To these we may suppose the Bericos, mentioned 76 CELTIC BRITAIN. in the previous chapter, to have belonged. He used all his influence to induce Claudius to invade the island, a course which seems to have readily recommended itself to the emperor, who happened to be anxious to find an excuse for enjoying a triumph at Rome. The Roman general is supposed to have landed without opposition, but where it is hard to say. The last view published on the subject is that of Dr. Hiibner,^ who would bring him along the path of the Belgae to land in the neighbourhood of Southampton, and make him then march northwards to Winchester and Silchester in quest of the enemy. The first mention of an en- gagement is that of one in which Dion Cassius- tells us that Plautius defeated Caratacos and Togodumnos, the sons of Cunobelinos, who had died not long be- fore. Togodumnos was probably king in the place of his father, with Caratacos ruling over the western portion of the territory over which the Catuvelauni held sway : it was in this district probably that they were defeated ; and their flight resulted in bringing the Dobunni who were subject to the Catuvelauni into submission : a Roman force was left among them. Then we read of a series of engagements extending over two days, in which the Britons offered stout resistance to the advance of the Romans, but owing greatly to the skill and bravery of Vespasian, who had been sent over to be the general's lieutenant, ' See his elaborate article entitled " Das Romische lleer in Britannien," Hermes, xvi. p. 527. ^ "Roman Hist.," Ix. 20, 21. UNDER THE ROMANS. 77 the invaders ultimately got the best of it, though the British charioteers had selected positions of great strength near a deep river, which the Gaulish auxiliaries were the first to cross : they succeeded in wounding the chariot horses of the enemy and in otherwise giving much trouble. AVhether that river was the Thames or not, we next read of the native army south of the tidal portion of that river, and escap- ing from the Roman legions by crossing it. The Gauls as readily swam across as their insular kins- men had done, while the Romans crossed higher up the stream by means of a bridge. They gain some advantages over the native forces, but pressing forward too rashly they lose many of their men, while the fall of Togodumncs has the effect of com- bining his people to avenge his death. Plautius now takes steps to secure the part of the country he had conquered, and advances no further, but sends word to the emperor in accordance with the instructions he had received. The latter accord- ingly comes in person, and finds the Roman le- gions awaiting him near the Thames. He crosses the river, and takes Camulodunon, which had been the capital of Cunobelinos. Then followed the sub- mission of several tribes, and Claudius, after spend- ing sixteen days in the island, hastened to Rome to enjoy his triumph, and to amuse the Romans with spectacles in which Britain was represented. The operations in Britain up to the time of the emperor's departure resulted in bringing the Catuvelauni and the states that had been dependent on them under 7 8 CELTIC i;ritain. Roman rule, together with the district between the Thames and the coast, from the mouth of that river to the neighbourhood of the Isle of Wight. Within this area Rome shortly found a princely tool called king Cogidumnos, to whom certain cities were given, and who, Tacitus^ tells us, con- tinued faithful to his imperial masters for many years afterwards. It is not merely an accidental coincidence, perhaps, that an inscription" has been found at Chichester, mentioning a king of that name. This may have been he or a descendant of his, and the existence of his regmun or kingdom is possibly the key to the name of the Regni, who inhabited what is now Sussex, and may be supposed to have been his subjects. Plautius was left in Britain with orders to carry on the work of conquest, but he appears at Rome in the year 47, to receive an ovation for having managed the war with ability. Several historians also dwell on the deeds of Ves- pasian, who they assert engaged the enemy no less than thirty times both under Plautius and the emperor. He also reduced the two most powerful peoples of Britain, together with more than twenty towns and the Isle of Wight.'^ His son Titus also served here, and is mentioned as having once rescued his father when hemmed in by the enemy on all sides. Who the two most powerful peoples ' "Agricola," 14. ^ The Berlin "Corpus Insc. Lat.," vol. vii. no. ii. ^ Suetonius, "Vespasian," chap. 4. UNDER THE ROMANS. 79 of Britain subdued by Vespasian may have been we are not told, but they were most Ukely the Belg?e and the Dumnonii, who occupied nearly the whole of the south-west of the island, including the tin districts, which cannot have escaped the attention of the Romans, whose operations here, up to the time of the departure of Plautius, are spoken of as having emphatically made Britain a part of the Roman emi)ire. According to Tacitus, the principal authority on the later Roman conquests in Britain, the command of the legions here was given to Ostorius in the year 50. He at once adopted active measures against the tribes who were openly defiant, and dis- armed those whom he suspected of being disaffected. Among the consequences of his policy may be reckoned the revolt of the powerful people of the Eceni, who had hitherto accepted the alliance of the Romans and escaped the bitter experiences of war. They now succeeded in persuading * neighbouring states to join them, and chose a strong position, which they fortified in a skilful fashion and afterwards defended with great valour, but in vain. After humbling the Eceni, Ostorius leads his men across the island until they reach a point not far from the sea which looks towards Ireland, in the territory of a people called, according to the best conjecture, the Decangi ^ : these may have inhabited Cheshire, or more probably the part of North Wales between the Dee and the ' Tacitus, "Ann.,"xii. 32. So CELTIC BRITAIN. Clwyd. The Decangi did not face the legions in the open field, but they harassed their plundering parties, and were at length rid of them, because the news of discord among tlie Brigantes induced the general to lead his men in that direction. The relation in which the Brigantes stood to the Romans at this time is a matter of uncertainty, but they were possibly a kind of allies. With a view both to overawe the conquered tribes in the east of the island, and to have a reserve to fall back upon, Ostorius establishes a strong colony of veterans at Camulodunon. The Silures now come to the foreground as a people whom neither severity nor clemency could induce to put up with Roman rule. They occu- pied the eastern half of the country between the lower course of the Severn and Cardigan Bay, the rest of it being the land of the Demetae. The middle of Wales, north of these peoples, was occupied by the powerful state of the Ordovices, who probably be- longed to the later Celtic settlers, or Brythons, while the Silures and Demetae were undoubtedly of the earlier Celts, and also represented by assimilation and absorption whatever non-Celtic tribes had man- aged to remain in that part of the country. The Silures were less civilized than the Brythons to the east of them, but they were also more intrepid and indomitable ; their territory probably bordered on that portion of the country which had been under the rule of Cunobelinos's son, Caratacos ; so we find him, after resisting the Roman arms for nearly nine years UNDER THE ROMANS. 8 1 ^vith various results, which gave him pre-eminence over all other native leaders, actively engaged among the Silures, to whom he may be supposed to have brought superior skill in the operations of war, and in whom he found braver warriors than in his own land. The sequel is so well known that w^e need not give Tacitus's account^ in detail, as to how he led his forces into the country of the Ordovices, how he chose an advantageous position and fought bravely but unsuccessfully against Ostorius, how he escaped to the Brigantes, and was given up to the Romans by their queen, Cartismandua, and how his manly bearing struck the Romans and obtained for him and his family the emperor's pardon, guilty as he was of the crime of fighting for his own. But while the idlers of Rome crowded to behold the man who had defied the legions for so many years, and the senators compared Ostorius's victory to the most remarkable successes of Roman generals in previous ages, Ostorius found that he had by no means done with the Silures ; for we read of them very soon afterwards inflicting severe losses on the forces left in their country. So persistent did they prove in their opposition to Roman rule, that there was once a talk that they were all to be cut off; but in the middle of this Ostorius died, and his enemies boasted that, though he was not slain in battle, still it was the worry of the war that carried him away. His successor, Aulus Didius, personally took no very active part ' Tacitus, "Ann.," xii. 33-7. G 82 CELTIC BRITAIN. in the operations ; but he had to deal not only with the Silures, but also with the Brigantes, whose king, Venutios, was the most able native leader since Caratacos had been taken. He had been faithful to the Romans for some time, but a disagreement with the queen, Cartismandua, who was his wife^ but pre- ferred his armour-bearer, brought him into collision with the Romans, who interfered successfully to save the queen from Venutios ; but their victory led to nothing further, Didius was followed in command by Vcranius in 57, but he died the next year without having effected anything except ravaging the land of the Silures. Nothing had been done since Ostorius's death to extend the Roman conquests, but Suetonius Paulinus, whom Nero sent here in 58, led the legions into Mona or Anglesey, which is described as being a receptacle for fugitives. He ordered flat-bottomed boats to be got ready, in which the foot soldiers were carried across the Menai, and the following is the account which Tacitus^ gives of the scene: — " On the shore stood the forces of the enemy, a dense array of arms and men, with women dashing through the ranks like furies ; their dress funereal, their hair dishevelled, and carrying torches in their hands. The druids around the host, pouring forth dire im- precations, with their hands uplifted towards the heavens, struck terror into the soldiers by the strange- ness of the sight ; insomuch that, as if their limbs ' "Ann.," xii. 36, 40; "Hist.,"iii. 45. ^ " Ann.," xiv. 29, 30. UNDER THE ROMANS. 8^ were paralysed, they exposed their bodies to the weapons of the enemy without attempting to move. Aftenvards, at the earnest exhortations of the general, and from the effect of their own mutual importunities that they would not be scared by a rabble of women and fanatics, they bore down upon them, smote all that opposed them to the earth, and wrapped them in the flames themselves had kindled. A garrison was then established to overawe the vanquished, and the groves dedicated to sanguinary superstitions destroyed ; for they deemed it acceptable to their deities to make their altars fume with the blood of captives, and to seek the will of the gods in the entrails of men." While Suetonius was thus occupied in Mona,^ news reached him that the rest of the province, left denuded of troops, was in revolt. This was headed by Bou- dicca, the widow-queen of the Eceni, whose husband, Prasutagos, had probably been set over that people after their unsuccessful rebellion some eight years pre- viously. Prasutagos, who was known for his opulence, had thought it prudent for the safety of his family to make the emperor joint heir with his own daughters to his wealth. The Roman officials, however, re- garded this as an excuse to treat his goods as the spoils of war : the queen was flogged, her daughters were ravished, and the chief Ecenians were treated as slaves. Boudicca, who would not quietly suffer, organized a revolt, which was joined by other tribes, ' "Annals," xiv. 31, iScc. G 2 84 CELTIC BRITAIN. and especially by the Trinovantes, who were robbed of their land by the colony established at Camulo- dunon. The result is well known : some 70,000 Romans were killed by the enraged Britons, and Suetonius is supposed to have retaliated by killing 80,000 of the natives, when he returned. There is not much then to record about Britain till Vespasian, who was well acquainted with it, seized on the Roman empire in the year 69 ; he sent here successively at least three great generals, the first being Petilius Cerealis, who effected the reduc- tion of the Brigantes in the years 69 and 70 : they were reputed, Tacitus^ tells us, to have formed the most populous state in the island (or the province, as the Romans were now in the habit of calling it), and their subjection was brought about only after many battles had been fought, some of which were attended with great bloodshed. His successor was Julius Frontinus, who undertook the task of subduing the Silures : this, in spite of the bravery of that people, and the difficult nature of their country, he accom- plished not long probably before the advent in 78 of Vespasian's third great general, Julius Agricola, into Britain. It is, however, very remarkable that this people should have been able to resist the Roman arms with more or less success for so many years, and it may be regarded as certain that a very considerable force was left to occupy their country ; for afterwards the second Augustan legion is found ' "Agricola," ch. 17, &c. UNDER THE ROMANS. S^ permanently posted at /sea Siluruiii^ called later Caerleon (or the Camp of the Legion) on the Usk, a little above the present town of Newport, a site well known on account of its Roman remains, among them being a goodly number of inscriptions. It was the middle of the summer of 78 when Agricola arrived, and the soldiers were already thinking of their winter quarters, although a considerable body of Roman cavalry had not long before been cut off by the Ordovices, on whose frontiers they were stationed, and a great many of the natives were halting between peace and war. But Agricola quickly set out into the territory of the Ordovices, and inflicted on them such losses in this short war, that according to Tacitus^ it resulted almost in the total extirpation of that people ; but that is proved to be an exaggeration, both by their subsequent history and the extent of the wild country they occupied. This included the district north of the Silures and the Demeta^, a portion of the adjacent counties of England, to- gether with North Wales excepting, roughly speak- ing, the north-west corner within the basins of the Clwyd and the Mawddach, which, with Mona, still belonged, it may be supposed, to the earlier Celtic settlers of the Goidelic branch, for there are reasons to think that the Ordovices who had thus reached the sea on the west formed the vanguard of the later Celtic invasion. But, as regards the Romans, the Ordovices and the Goidels in their rear usually ' ."Asricola/'ch. 18, &c. 86 CELTIC BRITAIN. acted together against them, and when the legions attacked the Ordovices they seem to have considered Mona their goal, and so this time. For Agricola, after crushing the Ordovices, pushed on until he came to the shore of the Menai ; but the islanders, seeing that he had no vessels, thought they were safe. They were, however, soon convinced of their mistake ; for the auxiliary troops, who were probably Gauls or natives of the low country near the mouth of the Rhine, suddenly plunged into the channel and safely swam across. The surrender of the island followed, and Agricola now turned his attention to suppressing the abuses which made Roman rule so unbearable to the Britons, a policy attended with such success that the natives began to adopt Roman habits and customs and eventually set themselves to learn Latin. The army had been employed in the summer of 79 in harassing the natives who still held out, and it was not till the summer of the year 80 that Agricola undertook to extend the province towards the north. The lands of some of the Brigantian tribes were now overrun and fortresses erected among them, where the Roman troops, having been provided with a year's provisions, passed the winter. This, or the year after, was probably the time when a legion was first settled at Eburacon, or York.^ Agricola's fourth summer in command, or that of 81, was spent in securing the possession of these northern acquisi- ' See Hiibner, "Hermes," xvi. jp. 543. UNDER THE ROMANS. 87 tions, which were now to be bounded by the Forth and the Clyde, tlie neck of land between the estuaries of those rivers being defended by a chain of forts. In his fifth campaign Agricola directed his operations to the parts opposite Ireland, whereby Galloway was possibly meant. This he did, not because he had any fear from that quarter, but because he had a wish to conquer Ireland, for which a single legion with a few auxiliaries would have, he thought, sufficed. With that view he kept in readiness an Irish king who had been obliged to flee his own country. His sixth campaign, the year after, was directed against the tribes beyond the Forth, and the fleet sent out to explore the harbours of the north, acting in con- cert with the army, is said to have struck fear into the northern populations, lest they should now be cut off from the last refuge of the vanquished, the secret retreats of their seas. This was learned from captives and shows that even then the natives of the north knew how to turn their numerous lochs and creeks to use. They gathered courage enough to act on the offensive, but in the general engage- ment which ensued they were worsted, and the Roman soldiers now wanted to advance into the heart of the country which Tacitus calls Caledonia. The Caledonians, however, far from being cowed, determined, by sinking their mutual jealousies, to oppose a united front to the invader the summer following — that is, in 85. Agricola sent his fleet to create fear and alarm along the coast, and marched his army so far as the Tay, at the meeting of which 88 CELTIC BRITAIN. with tlie Isla, he is supposed to have found the Caledonians encamped to the number of 30,000 men. Their leader was one Calgacos, whom Tacitus describes as haranguing his countrymen in the most eloquent terms : Agricola is made to do the same with the legions, and then a terrible battle begins, in which the historian asserts that the Caledonians lost one- third of their number. Among other things, he tells us that the natives were provided with short targets and long, pointless swords, which were useless in the thick of the fight, and that the chariots helped to increase the confusion into which they fell. This battle is known as that of Mojis Grajipius or Grau- pius ; and when it had been won Agricola led his troops into the country of the Boresti, situated somewhere between the Tay and the Forth. He took hostages from the Boresti, and proceeded to winter quarters, probably south of the estuaries of the Forth and the Clyde, while the fleet was ordered to coast round the north of the island, w^hich it did -after passing the winter at a port which Tacitus terms Triicciilensis or Trutulensisy The Caledonians were molested no further, for the Roman general was now recalled by Domitian, who had been emperor since 81, and was getting jealous of Agricola's reputa- tion. Under Agricola's successor the northern part of the province became independent again, and when Hadrian came here, in the year 120, to quell an ' "A-rico'a/' ch. 38. UNDER THE ROMANS. 89 incii)ient insurrection, he found it best to draw a line from the Sohvay Firth to the mouth of the Tyne, and to defend it with a ditch, a stone wall, and an earthen rampart, together with castles and watch-towers. Antoninus, who succeeded Hadrian, found it necessary to send here Lollius Urbicus in the year 139 to subdue the Brigantes between Hadrian's Wall and the Firth of Forth : he then restored to the province the boundary fixed by Agricola, and made an earthen rampart between the Forth and the Clyde. Most ot the country of the Brigantes had now been brought under Roman rule, but not the whole ; for there were Brigantes or kindred peoples beyond the two great rivers, though they usually appear under other names, leaving that of Brigajites to be identified chiefly with their kinsmen between the Forth and the Tees, where in a later age they yielded to an Anglian kingdom its name of Bernicia. Our authority on this war is Pausanias,^ a Greek author who flourished about this time, but his words have seldom been fully under- stood. He states that the Romans attacked the Brigantes because of their having invaded a people that was tributary to Rome, and called by him // Vtvovrla ^oi^tu, the Genunian Division or Cohort. This word Genunia seems to betray itself as of Pictish origin, and of the same class as the name of a people of the Western Highlands opposite Skye, termed by a writer of the 7th century Geona Cohors,- or the Geonian Cohort. Such a singular use of //o7po and ^ Didot's Pausanias's "Description of Greece," viii. 43. ^ Reeves's *' Adamnan's Life of St. Columl)a," p. (}i. QO CELTIC BRITAIN. cohors is only to be explained by the Goidelic word it was meant to render, and the latter can have been no other than ddl^ a division or part, which was fre- quently us,ed in forming ethnic names, like Dal-Riada, Dal-Cairbre, and Dil-Cais. The Genunians, then, cannot have been Brythons, and, if that be correct, they can hardly have been any other people than the dwellers between the Solway Esk and Loch Ryan. They would, in fact, seem to be the same people that appear later as Atecotti,^ and later still as the Picts of Galloway. They were a highly indomit- able race, and seldom on good terms with their Brythonic neighbours ; so it is by no means pro- bable that they had as yet fought it out with the Romans. Their tributary condition, which may have lasted until the time when the Atecotti appear among the fiercest enemies of the province, was most likely of the nature of an alliance. This would agree well enough with the fact that their country lay beyond the southern wall, and with the usual policy of Rome, which offered the Genunians ready means of checkmating their hereditary foes, the encroach- ing Brigantes of Brythonic stock. Later irruptions into the province by the independent tribes beyond the two Firths are recorded as taking place in 162 and 182. Not long afterwards they appear again in a threatening attitude, though they had been bribed to be quiet for some years. This time they are spoken of as Caledonians and Maeatae,^ the latter ' Ammian. Marcell., xxvi. 4; xxvii. 8. ^ Dion Cassius, Ixxv. 5 ; Ixxvi. 12, 13. UNDER THE ROMANS. QT being in all probability the peoples that lived beyond the Caledonians of the Tay district. Still from Dion Cassius's account they would seem to have by his time got possession of the country adjoining the Northern Wall ; possibly they had even then gained a footing on the southern coast of the Firth of Forth. These were the two names under which the independent tribes of the North had now made their aj)pearance in history, and the state of things which they had produced was considered serious enough by Severus to demand his presence in the province. He under- took an expedition against them in 208 at the head of a larger force than had ever before threatened their home. The northern confederates sent to sue for peace, which they did not get as they had been hitherto accustomed, since the emperor had resolved to open up the country and make it passable for troops. So he set to work making roads, throwing up bridges, and clearing the country of jungles. Severus appears to have advanced as far as the Moray Firth, and to have returned through the heart of the Highlands, without having to fight a battle, though the continuous skirmishing carried on by the natives cost him the life of a very large number of his men. When he came back he re- constructed the wall between the Clyde and the Forth, but he had not long been at York when the Mseata^ were again in arms, and the Caledonii joining them.^ Severus died in 211, and his son Antoninus patched up a ^eace with the northern enemy.- ' Dion Cassius, Ix.wi. 15. ^ Zonaras, xii, 12 (612). 92 CELTIC BRITAIN. Little is known of Britain from that time to the usurpation of power by Carausius in 287, who severed the island for a while from the Roman empire. He had risen to be the head of a fleet intended to repress the Saxons and other German tribes who now ravaged the coasts of Britain and Gaul. He was at length suspected of conniving at their doings ; and when Maximus, one of the emperors, resolved to be rid of him, he revolted with his fleet and got possession of Britain, which enjoyed considerable prosperity till his death in 294 at the hand of Allectus, one of his followers. Allectus enjoyed power for three years, when he was slain in 296 in a battle with the army of Constantius Chlorus, who joined Britain again to the Roman empire after ten years of independence. In 306 he seems to have marched an army beyond the wall into the country of the Caledonians and the other Picts, supposed to be the Alasatae of previous his- torians. For it is to be remarked, here, that by this time the habit of tattooing the body had so far dis- appeared in Britain that the word pictus, or painted, was now^ used as synonymous mostly with a native from beyond the Wall of Severus. But in the year 360 the Picts were joined in their ravages by the Scotti, or Scots, from Ireland. They set out most probably from the north-east of the island. When the Romans had left the northern part of the province these invaders had their bands swelled in 364 by the Atecotti, a people inhabiting a part of the country between the walls. At the same time the coast was ravaged by the Saxons, UNDER THE ROMANS. 93 whose piratical descents were directed mostly to various points between the Wash and the Isle of Wight. Theodosius was sent against them in 369, when the Saxons retreated to the Orkneys, the Scots to Ireland, and the Picts to the country north of the Wall of Severus, which was then repaired, while the territory up to it was garrisoned and made into a province called Valentia or Valentiniana, in honour of Valentinian, who was then emperor. And as to the Atecotti, who had been more ferocious in their inroads than the others, they were enrolled in the Roman army, and stationed on the Continent, so that some of them were seen by St. Jerome, who has left on record the report that they were a British people of cannibals. The Picts, or the independent natives of the north of the island, are again mentioned^ as two distinct nations called respectively Dicalidonae and Verturiones. Under the former name, which seems to mean the people of the two Caledonias, we appear to have to do with the Caledonians proper and the IMaeat^ combined, while in later times the word Verturiones yielded in Goidelic the well-known name of the Brythons of the kingdom of Fortrcnn : they were possibly the people previously called Boresti,- but that is by no means certain. ' Ammianus Marcellinus, xxvii. 8. ^ Mr. Skene speaks of the latter as Horestii, and connects (** Celtic Scotland," i., pp. 52, 89) with them two inscriptions at Niederbieber, on the Rhine, in which he recognises IIOR and ZTas abbreviations of their name ; but Dr. Hiibner assures the author of this little book that the one is a part of the word 94 CELTIC BRITAIN. We are now come to the time of Maximus, who, having served under Theodosius, and then obtained the command of the Roman army in Britain, got himself proclaimed emperor here in 383. He had repressed the Picts and Scots in 384, but soon after, in the year 387, he led the army away, and drained the country of its able-bodied men, in order to contend on the Continent for the imperial power, a struggle which cost him his life in 388. Britain v>-as now exposed to the inroads of the Picts and the Scots, until Stilicho sent hither in 396 a legion which drove them back and garrisoned the Northern Wall once more. In 402 the Roman troops were again withdrawn, and then followed another access of devastation. In answer to the application of the Britons for aid, an army is found to have been pre- sent here in 406. In 407, however, it was led away by Constantine, never to return : he was the third emperor made by the army after the great invasion of the Roman empire (by the Vandals, the Alans, and other German peoples in the year 406) had inspired tiie soldiers with fear lest the barbarians might cut them off in an isolated province. This was dispelled by Constantine gaining a great victory over them, which soon made him master of Gaul and Spain, so that the emperor Honorius reluctantly gave him, Jiorrei, and the other of honorcin, while neither has anything to do with Britain, the Brittones mentioned in one of these being, as he thinks, a Continental people : see pages 210 and 211 of this volume, and for the inscriptions turn to Brambach's " Corpus Inscr. Rhenanarum," Nos. 692, 694. UNDER THE ROMANS. 95 usurper as he was, a share in the imperial authority. One of Constantine's ablest generals was a Brython called Gerontios, who, after a while, thinking himself slighted by Constantine and his son, set himself to work to overthrow both : among other means he adopted he had recourse to the Germans, whom he invited to invade Gaul and Britain, which they did in 409. Britain had, it is true, from the time the Saxons and the other pirates first made their appearance on her coasts, had little quiet. Most of Constantine's troops were in Spain, and Honorius, unable to render any aid, wrote letters to the cities of Britain, urging them to defend themselves. They did so, and with such vigour that in the following year, 410, they not only rid themselves of the in- vaders, but also packed away the few Roman officials, who were still here to carry on the government. Honorius, holding Constantine responsible for the loss of Britain, and the death of certain of his rela- tives, sent an army against him, when Constantine shut himself up in the town of Aries, where he was killed. This happened in 411, and was followed shortly after by the death of Gerontios. When the latter invited the Germans to invade the provinces, he probably intended thereby to secure Britain for himself; but, while the Roman force which had dis- posed of Constantine was in quest of Gerontios, his own men conspired against him and set fire to his dwelling. He defended himself for a while, aided by a servant, who was a German of the nation of the Alans, but at length he found himself forced to slay g6 CELTIC BRITAIN. his servant and his wife at their own request, and then to put an end to his own Hfe : his son fled for refuge to the Alans. Such is a summary of his history given by the contemporary writers, Olympiodorus and Zosimus. In Gerontios, one recognizes at once the unmistakable features of the Vortigern of the well-known Hengist story, which is read first in the pages of Baeda and Nennius, while only a few of its elements can be detected in the wTitings of Gildas in the latter part of the sixth century. In order to form an idea of what happened in Britain after the Roman officials were driven away, we must briefly relate how it was ruled as a part of the Roman empire. From the time of Severus the province was divided into Upper and Lower Britain ; and Dion Cassius^ gives one to understand that the legions stationed at Caerleon on the Usk and Chester on the Dee were in Ui^per Britain, while that located at York was in Lower Britain. This has been sup- posed to prove that the Romans were guided in their division of the island by the parallels of latitude rather than by the natural features of the country, which suggest a boundary marked by the Bristol Channel, the Severn, the Avon, the hills beginning between the Dove and the Derwent, and extending so far as the Tees : all east and south of such a line, including the plain in which York stands, and pos- sibly also the coast from the Tees to the Tyne, would be Lower Britain, while the country beyond from the Bristol Channel to the Solway Firth, consisting of > Iv. 27,. UNDER THE ROMANS. 97 two mountainous tracts with the level ground of Cheshire and South Lancashire lying between them, would form Upper Britain. It has, however, occurred to an Italian authority' on Roman administration, that it was the custom of the Romans to call the portion of a country nearest to Rome upper, and that further off lower; but this conclusion (suggested by the geographical accident, that few of the great rivers of Europe could be said to flow in the direction of Rome), only shows, when the facts are looked into, that the Romans, like other people, allowed the ready test of running water to de- cide what was upper and what lower. Thus they spoke of a Lower Germany at the mouth of the Rhine, and of an Upper Germany higher up that river; similarly, on the Danube, they had an Upper Pannonia and an Upper Mccsia, situated in the same relation to Lower Pannonia and Lower IMcesia ; nor do they seem to have proceeded differently in having at one time spoken of Dalmatia as Upper Illyricum, not to mention that Lower Egypt seems to have always been nearer to Rome than Upper Egypt. So it is natural to suppose that Upper Britain was mainly that part of Roman Britain which the legions had to approach by marching in the direction of the sources of the Thames, and of the streams that meet to form the Humber. In an arrangement made by Diocletian, and perfected by Constantino the Great, ' See Borghese, "Opera Omnia," iv. p. 458 : his view has been accepted by Dr. Hiibner in llic "Corpus Inscr. Lat.," vii. p. 4. H qS CELTIC BRITAIN. the two Britains were subdivided, Upper Britain into prima and secunda, or first Britain and second Britain, and Lower Britain into Maxima Caesariensis and Flavia Ccesariensis. In the case of these last pairs of adjectives, the word Britannia was dispensed with, so that it came to be more closely associated with Upper Britain. After Valentia was added as a sepa- rate province in 369, a survey of the great offices of the empire, or, as it is usually called, the Table of Dignities, gives us the names of the British provinces in the following order: Maxima Caesariensis, Valentia, Britannia Prima, Britannia Secunda, Flavia C^sari- ensis.^ Here as elsewhere in the Western Empire the sequence was not intended to be that of locality, but of the dignity"- of the governors of the respective provinces, and we learn from the same source that the men in charge of Maxima Ccesariensis and Valentia were of consular rank, while those at the head of the other three, being of lower rank, were (ztM^^l prcesidcs or presidents. No less than three other lists exist of the provinces of Roman Britain, and two of them, at least, are still older. -^ In all of them the order varies, but always so as to keep the two Britannias together. Roman Britain was sometimes spoken of as a province, but technically it was a diocese, consisting of five provinces under the rule of a ' "Notitia Dignitatum," ed. Otto Seeck, pp. 105, 107, in, 172. 2 See Mommsen in the " Abhandl. d. Ak. d. Wissenschaften zu Berlin," 1862, pp. 510, 511. ' See Mommsen's paper just referred to. UNDER THE ROMANS. 99 vice-prefect or vicar, as he was called. The vicar of Britain was responsible to the pretorian })refect of the Gauls, who had under his authority the vicars also of Gaul and Spain, so that his power reached from the Firth of Forth to North Africa. This had to do with finance and the administration of justice, while the military command was divided between three generals, called the Count of Britain, the Count of the Saxon Shore in Britain, and the Duke of the Britains. This last was so called because pro- bably he had to do mainly with the two Britannias or provinces of Upper Britain, but towards the close of the Roman occupation the forces under his command were located in places which were mostly, if not all, in the northern part of the territory in- trusted to him for its defence, especially the stations on the Southern Wall ; and for military purposes it is probable that the part of Lower Britain north of the Humber soon got to be treated as a part of Upper Britain. The Count of the Saxon Shore had under his command the troops stationed at various points between the Wash and the Isle of Wight, the coast which was most exposed to invasion from Saxons and kindred Germans. As to the Count of Britain, the entire diocese was under his control, and his command does not appear localized like that of the other two. On the whole, his position seems to have been analogous to that of the Count of Italy in the neighbourhood of the Alps, and of the Count of the Territory around Strassburg : both of these had districts in their charge, which H 2 lOO CELTIC BRITAIN. were subject, like Britain, to the inroads of the Germans.^ In the course of the Roman occupation, which lasted more than three centuries and a half, most of the Celts of the province had both become Christians, and grown familiar, to some extent, with the working of municipal institutions which here and there pro- bably survived the hurried departure of the officials of the empire, who were, doubtless, highly unpopular wherever they settled. It may further be supposed that the Latin tongue was beginning to make rapid conquests : not only was it the official language of the province, but also, in all probability, the ordinary means of communication over a considerable area of the south and east of the island, where, more than else- where perhaps, the descendants of the motley popu- lation that had followed the Roman standards hither formed the nucleus of a Latinizing party. Among its strongholds may safely be reckoned York, Lincoln, Colchester, and London, which was even then so ancient a town that the Roman attempt to change its name for ever into Augusta has so far failed that it is •now known to few. But, whatever Roman refinement and institutions survived here, the study of the Roman inscriptions found in the province cannot fail to show that, as compared with most of the other portions of the empire, Britain was remarkable for its military character and the little consideration, rela- tively speaking, it allowed the civil element. This ^ "Not. Dig.," pp. iSo, 182, 209, 173, 179. UNDER THE ROMANS. lOI arose in the first instance probably from the warlike temper of the people, together with the time and trouble it took to subdue them, and later, from the necessity of being constantly prepared to ward off the outer barbarians, who granted the province no repose. At all events, it is from the military jjoint of view that one sets out with most hope of being able to pick up the thread of transition that should guide one through the mazes of the dark period of history extending to the latter part of the 6th century. It would be a mistake to take for granted that the people of Roman Britain, as soon as they were rid of the officials of the empire, resolved themselves into small communities or tribal states independent of each other — a stage which the Britons had pretty well left behind them before the Roman Conquest, and it is not to be believed that the prolonged lesson of imperial centralization had been altogether lost on them. Did they proceed, then, to choose an emperor or a sole king ? There is no indication whatever that anything of the kind occurred to them, and they seem rather to have simply persisted on the lines of the military leaderships which the Romans had made a reality among them. Though the office of the Count of Britain would appear to have ceased, there are reasons to think that those of the Uuke of the Britannias and the Count of the Saxon Shore continued, doubtless in a modified form, to exist long afterwards. How that should have come to pass is by no means hard to see. Even when Maximus 102 CELTIC BRITAIN. took away the army in 387, it is not improbable that he placed a small native force to defend the north of the province against the Picts and Scots, and another to watch the south-eastern coast. It is very probable that the commander of the legion that came here afterwards and left in 402 did the same thing on a larger scale. And, as to the final departure of the legions for Gaul under Constantine in 409, we are told by Gildas that the Romans, when on the point of going away, not only urged the Britons to defend themselves, but that, in order to help them in so doing, they had a wall built for them in the north, and gave them the fortifications to garrison, while on the south- eastern shore, which had been guarded by a Roman fleet, they built towers at intervals within sight of the sea, which were also to help, the inhabitants in their defence of the country. This implies that the Britons were to have an army in the north and another in the south-east ; and that these armies wTre a reality is proved by their successfully repel- ling the Germans in 410, and by the comparatively small extent to which the Picts from beyond the Firths w^ere, in the long run, able to settle them- selves in the country between the Walls. Those armies took possession, doubtless, of the quarters left by the Roman troops, and it is highly probable that their leaders were regarded as the regular successors of the Dux Britaji7iiarum and the Comes Litoris Saxonici, and as having a right to those titles. The difference between a conies or count, and a diLx or leader, was only an unimportant one of imperial UNDER THE ROMANS. IC3 etiquette in favour of the former; the office of both was called a ducaius, and both cofnes and dux appear to have been rendered into A\'elsh by the term Gwkdig, a ruler or prince, which is the title always given in Welsh literature to Maximus, who was pro- bably Duke of the Britannias before he made himself emperor. It is a significant fact, that those who seem to have succeeded to supreme power here when the Romans left are always styled in Welsh Gwledig, instead of being described by any title signifying emperor or the familiar office of king. The man to whom Gildas and Nennius, together with Welsh tradition, generally point as the one who succeeded to the command of the Count of the Saxon Shore, or, as we may put it, the one who be- came the Gwledig of Lower Britain, appears under the name of Ambrosius Aurelianus or Aurelius Ambrosius, while in Welsh the name becomes Emrys. According to Gildas^ wlio vrrote not more than one hundred and fifty years after the time of Ambrosius, and Avho loudly sings his praises, he was descended from a Roman family which had enjoyed the purple of office, but his relations had been killed in the contests with the Saxons, or some of the other Germans who harassed the coast : possibly Nectarides, Count of the Saxon Shore, who was slain by them in 364, was of his family. So far as his history can be made out, Ambrosius was a very fit man for his work, and one calculated to enlist on his side the lively sympathies of the Romanizing party. But Nennius darkly hints that there was opposition to him, and 104 CELTIC BRITAIN. that he had to figlit with a certain Guitolin, who was possibly the head of a faction opposed to the Romanizing element. It would seem to have been overcome, for we find the title of Gwledig confined to Ambrosius, who, according to Gildas, was the leader of the Britons in their successful effort to drive away the Germans. These, however, must have soon returned, as one finds them gradually seizing on one portion after another of Lower Britain. How much of this Ambrosius lived to see cannot be ascertained, but the following are the names of the English states which rose south of the Humber, together with their traditional dates, which will do well enough for our purpose : — In 449 the Jutes had established themselves in Kent, the country of the ancient Cantii, and they also possessed themselves of the Isle of Wight, together with the nearest portion of the mainland. The setting up of the kingdom of the South Saxons, now represented by the County of Sussex, and surrounded then by the great forest of Anderida, is ascribed to the year 477: this was the country of the ancient Regni. In 495 another and greater Saxon power, that of the West Saxons or Wessex, is represented as springing up in what is now Hamp- shire, and rapidly enlarging itself at the expense of the old inhabitants of the Belgic districts : the German invaders found these at home in their own country, and called them Welsh or strangers, while the latter gave them their own national name of Saxons, which slightly changed into Saeson, has come UNDER THE ROMANS. I05 to be the Welsh word for Englishmen generally. Some time in the sixth century there arose an East Saxon kingdom, the name of which survives in that of the County of Essex, once the land of the Trinovantes, and of the Roman colony of Camu- lodunon : it is this colony, in fact, that has yielded the English town its name of Colchester. The dis- trict between Essex and the Wash, where the Eceni formerly dwelt, was taken by the Angles, who formed a South Folk and a North Folk. Other Angles seized on the coast between the Wash and the Humber, which formerly belonged to the Coritani. In time these Anglian settlers came to be included in the great kingdom which rose last into prominence and power, that of the men who went up the Trent into the heart of the country and fixed, against the Welsh, the frontier or march, from which the whole came to be known to historians by the would-be Latin name of Mercia. Besides this it took in the West Saxon conquests north of the Thames, and most of the region covered by the Midland Counties of modern England. Welsh legend associates the name of Ambrosius mostly with the southern portion of Lower Britain, especially with Ambresburh or Amesbury in Wilt- shire, a part of the country where the contest with the West Saxons was probably very severe. About the middle of the sixth century Gildas, a Welsh monk, to whom we have already alluded, denounced in the bitterest style of the Hebrew prophets the princes of his race and time ; but of the five he preaches at Io6 CELTIC BRITAIN. only two ^ seem to have belonged to Lower Britain, Constantine, king of Dumnonia, in modern terms, ■ Devon and Cornwall, and Aurelius Conan, as to whose territory Gildas gives no hint, though it may be guessed to have been the country v/hich happened to be still in the possession of the Brythons east of the Severn Sea. Gildas appears to have been well acquainted with the descendants of Ambrosius Aure- lianus : he gives one to understand that they were still in power ; and perhaps Aurelius Conan was their head, a view to which his name lends some support. Welsh tradition calls him Kynan, and gives him the title of Gwledig, but the charge Gildas brings against him, of thirsting for civil war, would seem to imply that he was unable to maintain his supremacy with- out using force. What portion of the original power of the Gwledig still belonged in reality or in theory to his family, we have no means of making out ; but it w^as probably under its head that the great battle of Mons Badontciis, of uncertain site, was fought in the year 520, when the Welsh gained an important victory, which is sometimes attributed to Arthur. After this the West Saxons seem to have remained quiet till the time of Ceawlin, who began to reign in 556, and fought against the Welsh, both along the Thames and the Severn, winning a gi"eat victory over them at a place called Deorham in 577. This battle in which fell three Welsh kings (called in the Saxon Chronicle Conmaegl, Condidan and Farinmaegl) was ' Haddan and StubLs's "Councils," tS:c., i. pp. 49-51. UNDER THE ROMANS. I07 followed by Ceawlin taking possession of the im- portant towns of Bath, Gloucester, and Cirencester, whereby the West Welsh, as those of the peninsula south of the Severn Sea came to be called, were com- pletely severed from their kinsmen. After the death of Condidan, in whom one recognizes^ the Kynddylan of Welsh literature, which connects him with what is now Shropshire, his country was fearfully ravaged by Ceawlin, and his court at Pengwern or Shrewsbury given to the flames.- These northern conquests were lost by Ceawlin, owing to a serious defeat at Fethanleag, supposed to be Faddiley, on the bor- ders of Cheshire, in the year 584 ; but it is to him that we have to ascribe the advancement of the Saxon boundary on the south to the Axe, while what still remained in the possession of the Welsh of the country east of the Axe and the Parret appears to have been conquered by the Saxons under Cenwalh, who died in 672. In the eighth century Ine of Wessex seems to have succeeded in advancing the Saxon boundary' to Taunton, though he had to fight with a ,very able prince of the Brythons of those parts, whose name appears in Welsh literature as Geraint, and we read of Devon being under English rule in the time of Ecgbyrht, who ravaged Cornwall in 8 15. Still the Welshmen of that peninsula do not seem to have been wholly subjected to English rule until the time of ^thelstan, who fixed on the Tamar as their eastern boundary. It is needless to add that they continued ^ Green's "Making of Englanil," pp. 128, 206. ' Skene's **Anc. Cooks of Wales," ii. pp. 279, Sec. Io8 CELTIC BRITAIN. to be Celtic for a long time afterwards, and that their language finally died out only one hundred years ago. Now that we have very briefly shown how the English mastered Lower Britain, the question arises, how far the old inhabitants were allowed to remain. It has sometimes been supposed that, so long as the conquerors continued to be pagans, they gave the former no quarter ; but a more humane treatment may be expected to have prevailed with them after their adoption of Christianity : some of the principal dates implied are the following: — Eadwine, King of Northumbria, was converted in 627; Cynegils, King of Wessex, was baptized in 635, and his son in the following year ; Mercia was pagan until Penda's death in 655, but under his sons it became Christian. The conquests by these states after those dates need, therefore, not imply a complete displacement of the previous population, and there are not wanting indications that there were even so late as the time of ^thelstan in the tenth century patches of country, especially in Wessex, which were under English rule, but still inhabited by the Welsh, who only ceased to be such by being gradually assimilated to the Saxons around them. The subject, which is a difficult one, will be found discussed in another volume of this series ; but, on the whole, one may take it, that it still remains to be proved that the ancient inhabitants were not to a certain extent allowed to remain as slaves and tillers of the ground, even in the south and the east, and districts where they did not succeed in maintaining themselves in their towns UNDER THE ROMANS. I09 until the conquerors became Christians. On the other hand, those who are inclined to think that the Celts and Romanizing populations were cut clean off the ground must not make too much of the negative argument, that English in its earliest stages contains next to no words borrowed from Celtic ; for if the language of a considerable portion of the south and east of the island had become Latin by the time of the English conquest, as it well may be supposed to have done, what they should rather ask is, how many Latin words there are to be found in the earliest known specimens of English that can be said to afford adequate materials for studying the question. Much the same remarks apply, of course, to Upper Britain, with which we have next to deal. I lO CELTIC BRITAIN. CHAPTER IV. THE KYMRY. Let us no\v see what became of the people of Upper Britain when the Romans went away. Before that event the Picts and Scots had more than once been able to carry their plundering expeditions into the heart of the province ; but the fact may be taken as proving the native army, which undertook the defence of the north, to have been not wholly inefficient, that the only settlement worth mentioning which the northern tribes were able permanently to make within what had been Roman Britain vras that effected by the Picts on the southern side of the Firth of Forth. It is called in AVelsh Manaw of the Gododin, to dis- tinguish it from another INIanaw beyond the Forth, as well as from the Isle of Man, which appears in the same language as the Island of IManaw. This Pictish settlement took in the part of Lothian in which Edinburgh is situated, and a portion of the Pentland Hills, a name in which we are supposed to have a corruption of Pehtland, the land of the Peht or Pict. These, however, were not the only Picts south of the Northern Wall : the district on the Solway, between the Nith and Loch Ryan, was inhabited in Bceda's time by a people whom he terms Picts, THE KYMRY. Ill while he adds that they were also known as Nidiian, or men of the Nith."^ They are more usually called the Plots of Galloway, who had probably been there from of old, and were merely a remnant of the Atecotti, v.'hich signifies that they agreed with the other Picts in tattooing themselves, and in being always ready to help against the Brythons. Nor is there any reason to think that any very considerable portion of Upper Britain was seized immediately after the departure of the Romans by German invaders, though it is possible that small German settlements had been made on certain points of the coast between the Tyne and the Forth at a comparatively early date. But the time usually fixed on as that of the rise of a regular state on that sea-board is 547, when Ida is said to have commenced his reign, in the course of which he fortified Bamborough to be his capital. Some think that there were Jutes or Frisians in the neighbourhood of the Firth of Forth ; but, even if that be true, the state as a whole, and as known to history, was an Anglian one, and remarkably enough the people were known in Bai^da's time by a name derived from that of the ancient Celtic Brigantes. For he speaks of them in Latin as Bernicii, a word made from the Anglo-Saxon B?ernicas, which appears to have been the English pronunciation ' of the "Welsh equivalent BrcenuycJi or Breiineich ; and this in its turn is to be traced to the same origin as the ' See Breda's "Life of St. Cutlibert," chap. xi. : the pas- sage is quoted with interesting remarks in Skene's "Celtic Scotland," i. p. 133. 112 CELTIC BRITAIN. name of the Brigantes : thus the term Bernicii would seem to have meant the people of the Brigantian land, which, in this case, was mostly that of the ancient Otadini, or Gododin of Welsh literature, together with a part probably of that of a kindred people, the Dumnonii. Another Anglian people had seized on the country of the ancient Parisi between the Humber and the Tees. Like the northern Angles, but unlike the other Angles and the Saxons, they also got to be known by a name of Celtic origin. In Latin they have been called, from Baeda's time, Deiri, and their country Deira, both suggested by the English pronunciation of one or more forms derived from the same source as the Welsh name of the district or of its old inhabitants : this was Deivr, which has probably come down from early times, though it is not read in any ancient author. It is not known at what date Bernicia extended itself southwards to the Tees, so as to have a common boundary with Deira ; nor is much known at all about the latter, till the time of ^thelfrith, a king of the Bernicians we shall have to mention again : he died in 617. He had taken possession of Deira and made himself king of both states, and thenceforth Deira and Bernicia were some- times separate and sometimes united. In the latter case the whole is known as Northumberland, or else in quasi-Latin as Northumbria, which may serve to prevent the thoughtless from confounding the whole with the part that forms the county bearing the former name. But even after the encroachments, briefly described THE KYMKY. I 13 as including in time the whole seaboard from the Humber to the Firth of Forth, the tract of country still in the possession of the Celts of Upper Britain was very considerable, comprising all the west of the island from the Severn Sea to the Solway Firth and thence to the Clyde. But was it anything more than a tract of the island in the meagre geographical sense, and did it contain any of the political essen- tials of a state ? That would seem at first sight to admit of no other than a negative answer, and its length of indefensible frontier would have led one to expect that it would be divided in a short time into two or more pieces. But, as a matter of fact, we find that it kept together for more than two hundred years ; that when it was permanently cut in two, in consequence of the defeat of the Welsh at the great battle of Chester and the events that followed, it roused them to a fierce struggle ; and that, when this ended unfavourably to themselves, it was regarded as the destruction of all their aspirations and the rudest shock ever given their traditions. Neither had Upper Britain the advantage of being the patrimony of a single and homogeneous race ; for not only were there Picts in Galloway, but the north-west of the Principality of Wales, and a great portion of the south of it, had always remained in the possession of a Goidelic people, whose nearest kinsmen were the Goidels of Ireland. As to the other Celts of Upper Britain, that is to say, the Britons proper or Brythons, they were no doubt in the ascendant, but there were also Brythonic communities elsewhere, some north of I 114 CELTIC BRITAIN. the Forth, about whom httle is known, some south of tlie Severn Sea, and some in a Britain of their own in Gaul. Yet the ties of union between those of Upper Britain proved so strong and close, that the word Kymry, which meant merely fellow-countrymen, acquired the force and charm of a national name, which it still retains among the natives of the Princi- pality. This name is better known to Englishmen in connection with Cumberland, or its Latinized form of Cumbria and the still more distorted one of Cambria. Nor was a common name the only or most important outcome of this feeling of unity ; for the Kymry developed a literature of their own, differing from that of the other Brythonic communities : above all, the destruction of their state in the seventh century is the burning theme of many a Welsh poem, sung in a language now but imperfectly understood. But since this union of the Kymry seems to have been neither dictated by reasons of geography and frontier, nor clearly defined for them by considerations of race, we have now to look for the historical accidents which served to determine it in the first instance and to invest it afterwards with an intelligible form. This takes us again back to the last years of the Roman occupation. The Romans were in the habit of forcing the natives of Britain, like those of their other provinces, to enrol themselves in the imperial army, and at first it was, doubtless, the rule for them to serve on the Continent, far away from kith and kin ; but as danger ceased at length to be apprehended from the THE KVMRY. I 1 5 provincials themselves, and came to be expected from without, some of the native troops were allowed to serve in Britain. Inscriptions and other documents give us the locality and official name of a few such regiments posted in the northern part of the pro- vince. Both during the absence of the Roman troops previous to 410, and after the final departure of the officials of the empire in that year, the work of defence devolved on the inhabitants, and it is by no means probable that any corner of the country wont to be under the charge of the Dux Britanniarum would be excused from supplying the native army with its quota of men that were to fill the place of his soldiers, any reluctance which may have here and there shown itself being promptly borne down by the pressing necessity of acting in concert for the defence of the country against the barbarians, who were pushing their way southwards. So it may be gathered that it was the fact of being under the charge of a single general, the Dux Britanniarum, that had the effect of marking oft" from the other Brythons those who afterwards gave themselves the name of Kymry, and first taught them, perhaps, in some measure to act together ; but it was probably the violence of the invader from witliout that sup- plied the force which was to weld them more closely together. The area of the country to which this applies was most likely coextensive with the military authority of the Dux Britanniarum, but unfortunately the boundaries of that can only be guessed, partly as already hinted, and partly from the indications we I 2 Il6 CELTIC BRITAIN. have as to the territory which the Kymry called their own after Britain was severed from the empire. The earliest of their native rulers, so far as we know, was a man called Cunedda about whom Welsh literature has a good deal to say, though not enough to give us a comprehensive view of his history. His name was Celtic, and tradition, which makes him a son of a daughter of Coel, speaks of him as a man from CoeUn.^ This would connect him with the North, where Coel's country seems to have been the district since called Kyle, in the present county of Ayr. It is from the North also, from Manaw of the Gododin, that Nennius describes him and his sons as coming into Wales, and, for anything we know, he may have been the head of one of the noble families of the Brigantes ; but it is not improbable that he had also Roman blood in his veins, for we find that the names of his father and grandfather were ^ternus and Paternus, whose father was named Tacitus. Further, some of his ancestors had very probably worn the official purple under the Roman administration, a view which de- rives support from the fact that the Welsh pedigrees- always give Paternus or Padarn the epithet of Peisrudd or him of the red tunic. All this would, no doubt, greatly help Cunedda into a position of in- fluence and authority : the following things are in ^ See the elegy on Cunedda in the Book of Taliesin in Skene's "Ancient Books of Wales," ii. pp. 200-2; also the "lolo MSS.," pp. 120, 121, 126. 2 See the Harleian MS., 3859, fol. 193/', at the British Museum. THE KVMRV. II7 point, and more or less clearly asserted by Welsh tradition : — That Wales was under his sway and that of his sons ; that his power was supreme from Carlisle to Caer Weir (supposed to be Wearmouth) on the eastern coast, where the territory of the Angles was not destined to become suddenly continuous ; that he had his court at Carlisle;^ tliat his retinue on the wall consisted of 900 horse ; - that he wore the badge of office of the Dux Britanniarum, which, as in the case of other duces under the Empire, consisted of a gold belt,"^ to which an obscure passage in a Welsh poem ^ seems to allude as Cunedda's girdle ; and that he was the ancestor from whom a great number of the more remarkable saints of Wales traced their descent. The allusion which Nennius ^ makes to Cunedda states that he and his sons came to Wales from Manaw of the Gododin 146 years before the reign of ]\Iaelgwn, the most powerful of his descendants. This would seem to allude to the time ' " lolo MSS.," p. 147, where Cunedda the Gwledig is styled king of the Island of Britain. ^ This is alluded to in the elegy already mentioned. ^ Gibbon's " Roman Empire" (Smith's Ed.), ii. p. 320 (chap, xvii.). ^ It is the elegy already cited, and the word used is crys, which now only means a shirt ; but it seems to have meant a girdle in another old poem given in Skene's "Anc. Bks. of Wales," ii. p. 267, &c., and the cognate Irish criss always meant a girdle, while the intermediate meaning of the Welsh word as that of an upper dress is attested by passages in " The Mabinogion" (Guest's Ed.), ii. p. 13 ; iii. p. 266. ■* See San-Marte's " Nennius and Gildas," p. 72. I I 8 CELTIC BRITAIN. when the Picts succeeded in possessing themselves of a part of Manaw, and it settles the date as falling somewhere very near the departure of the Romans from Britain. Nennius, in speaking of Cunedda's sons, says that they were eight,^ but later versions of the legend add to their number and trace to their names those of various districts in Wales. Among other things we are told that the eldest son died before leaving the North, that his son inherited among his^ uncles, and that his name, which was Meirion, clung to the district, still called Meirion or Merioneth; but another story, preserved by Geofrey of Monmouth, makes ]\Ieirion, whom he calls Margan, brother to Cunedda, who slays him in battle in the land bearing his name. Keredig, another son of Cunedda, left his name to Keredigion, our Cardiganshire; and similarly in the case of others of his sons, who are said to have left their names to districts lying more towards the north-west of Wales. With the exception of a part of Merioneth, this probably represents the en- croachments of the Brythons on the territory which had belonged to the old inhabitants of the Goidelic branch, the Scotti of Nennius. These he mentions as driven out of the country with terrible slaughter by Cunedda and his Sons, the limits of whose terri- tory in Wales are afterwards variously stated to have been the Dee and the Teivi.- the southern boundary of Cardiganshire, or the Dee and a stream called the ^ See San-Marte's "Nennius and Gildas," p. 72. 2 Harleian MS., 3859, fol. 195 (Z. THE KYMRY. i TQ Gwaun,^ which reaches the sea at Abergwaun or Fishguard in Pembrokeshire. The centre of gravity, so to speak, of the power of Cunedda in Wales was in the country of the Ordovices, a Brythonic people that does not seem to have resisted his rule. Nor do we find a clue to any complication with the Silures of the south-east of Wales; so it may be presumed that they also acquiesced in the supremacy of Cunedda- How, then, was his power established here in the first instance ? The only answer we can suggest is that his rule was recognized as that of the Gwledig, or perpetuator of the command of the Dux Britanniarum; that this gave him the means of making his sons kings of various districts in Wales; and that, the Goidels of the south and the north-west showing signs of a desire to assert their own independence, his sons gratified the Brythons by giving them considerable portions of the Goidelic land. Probably Cunedda, while enjoying the power of the Gwledig down to the Severn Sea, identified himself more closely with the part of his charge north and east of the Dee ; nay, it is even possible that he never visited Wales in person at all. But, in any case, he found the means of bequeathing to his descendants power of two kinds, that is to say, power over the special districts which they then treated as their own, and the power of the Gwledig, which they seem to have jealously kept among them- selves for centuries afterwards. We have, however, no knowledge who were the * "Lives of ihe Cam. -Brit. SS.," p. loi. ] 20 CELTIC BRITAIN. Gwledigs of the Kymry for more than a hundred years after Cuncdda's time ; but about the middle of the sixth century we have again the help of the writings of Gildas, in which he denounces five princes of his time:^ three of these appear to have had their homes in Wales. Their names were Vortiporios, which in the Welsh pedigrees becomes Guortepir;- Cuneglasos, later Cinglas or Cynlas ; and Maglocunos, a name better known in Wales in its later form of Maelgwn. Now Gildas, while bringing against Maelgwn very grievous charges, of the grounds of which we have no means of forming an opinion, gives one to understand that he had for a time been a monk and had for instructor one of the most accomplished men in Britain, who, it may be inferred from a life of St. Cadoc, was no other than that philosophizing saint himself.'^ Gildas not only represents Maelgwn as a great warrior, and superior in stature to the other princes he names, but he alludes more than once to the fact of his standing far above them also in point of authority and power. Cuneglasos or Cynlas is not described in such a way that one can be sure where he ruled, but the name was borne by a grandson of Cunedda's son Einion, of whom Maelgwn was also grandson, while a story recorded in the lolo Manuscripts ^ mentions Cynlas as lord of Glamorgan and father of St. Cadoc, which differs in this particular ' Hadd. and Stubbs's " Councils," &c., i. pp. 50-56. 2 Harleian MS. 3859, fol. 193^. 3 See the "Lives of the Cam.-Brit. SS.," p. 52. * "lolo MSS.," p. 171. THK KVMRV. 12 1 from the usual account. But it by no means fol- lows that we are to reject it, as the history of St. Cadoc is a most difficult one, there having been, as it would seem, more than one saint of that name or similar ones. Then as to Vortiporios, whom Gildas terms tyrant of the Demeta^, or the people of Dyved, he was probably king of the portion of Demetia which had not been included in Keredig's territory : if he was not a member of the Cunedda family, he pro- bably reigned subject to the head of it, a view which derives support from the fact that Keredig's grandson, St. David, was about this time establishing himself as bishop in that region. Now the head of that family was, at this time, undoubtedly Maelgwn, whose authority reached to every corner of Wales. His own kingdom, however, was that of Venedot, Gwyndod or Gwynedd, the last of which is a name that now means all North Wales ; but it appears at one time to have denoted, more strictly speaking, that portion of it, approximately, which is covered by the Vale of Clwyd and the district west of it, and north of the Mawddach. The ancient Goidelic inhabitants within that area had been wholly reduced by one of Maelgwn's predecessors not long before his reign : thenceforth he and his successors drew their best and doughtiest troops from this region, and became them- selves known as kings of Gwynedd. Gildas gives us no clue to the history of the Kymry from the Dee to the Clyde, and most other sources of information on the point have long since been closed by the disappear- ance of Welsh and \\'elsh traditions in Cumbria. But 122 CELTIC BRITAIN. what Gildas tells us about the many princes Maelgwn had overthrown, as well as the obscure allusions in Welsh poetry to Maelgwn and his hosts in the North, together with the later history of the Kymry, would tend to show that whatever princes reigned over them north and east of the Dee, must have done so subject to Maelgwn as Gwledig or whatever the leadership had by his time got to be called. Brave and intrepid in war as Maelgwn undoubtedly was, his authority was certainly not altogether the direct result of his success in the field : it was in part at least due to the standing rule of the princes of the house of Cunedda, whereby one of them obtained the office of Gwledig, or, as it might now be termed, that of over-king. This is very clearly seen, so far as regards Wales, in a story invented afterwards to account for his supremacy : it occurs in some of the manuscripts of the Welsh Laws,^ and is to the following effect : — The nation of the Kymry, after losing the crown and sceptre of London and being driven out of England, assembled by agreement to decide who should be chief king over them. The place of meeting was Maelgwn's Strand, near the mouth of the river Dovey, whither came the leading men of all parts of Wales ; and there Maeldav the Elder (lord of Moel Esgidion in Merioneth, according to one version, but of Pennardd in Arvon according to another) placed Maelgwn in a chair cunningly made of birds' wings. So, when the tide rose, it ' See the 8vo edition of 1841, vol. ii. pp. 49-51; also the "loIoMSS.," pp. 73-74. THE KVMRY. I 23 drove all away except Maelgwn, whom his chair enabled to stay, and thereby he became chief king, and his word and law paramount over the other princes, without being himself bound by theirs, while Maeldav for his services on the occasion obtained cer- tain privileges for his own lordship. This legend, whatever else it teaches, clearly shows that Maelgwn's supremacy was the result in some way or other of the suffrages of the other princes of the Kymry. We have no means of ascertaining how the selection was usually made ; but as a rule the most shrewd and powerful member of the family of Cunedda managed to get himself declared head or over-king, and it may be supposed to have not unfrequently been the cause of quarrels and civil wars. Not only was Maelgwn beyond doubt the greatest prince of the Kymry from the time of Cunedda, but he succeeded in so strengthening the position of his family that the over-kingship remained afterwards with his descendants. This will appear from a brief outline of their history. Maelgwn's son Rhun, who inherited his father's power, had only a portion of his ability, and the manuscripts of the Welsh Laws ^ speak of Gwynedd being devastated in Rhun's time by the Men of the North, and of his successfully carrying the war into that region, where the men of Arvon distinguished themselves in the van of his hosts in crossing the Forth. Rhun had a son Beli, of whom nothing is known : he may have died before his father, W. '. p. 104. 124 CELTIC BRITAIN. but he left a son lago, who fell with several other Welsh princes in the battle of Chester in 613. For anything known to the contrary, he may have for a short time enjoyed the position of over-king of the Kymry and acted as their general on that occasion ; but a superficial reading of the oldest allusion to that battle, namely in Bseda's Ecclesiastical History,^ has sometimes led to the supposition that the man who acted in that capacity was Brochvael, the only Welsh prince whose name he gives. What Baeda, however, says is, that very many priests, belonging mostly to the monastery of Bangor Iscoed, had come after a three days' fast to pray for success to their nation in the contest which was about to take place, that the priests had some soldiers to defend them, a little apart in a secure place, under the command of Brochvael ; that ^Ethelfrith, on hearing of this, resolved to begin by making an onslaught on the priests ; and that Brochvael and his men took to flight, when about 1,200 of the monks were slain, only fifty escaping. This was afterwards regarded by the English as a judgment on the Kymry for having refused to join Augustine in Christianizing their nation; he had some years before met on the borders of Wales the bishops and learned men of the Kymry under the lead of Dunawd, or Dinoot as Baeda calls him. The pride and arrogance of Augustine filled with anger the men whose assistance he had come to seek. Baeda tells us little about the battle which ' Book ii. chap. 2. THE KYMRY. I 25 followed the massacre of the monks and Brochvael's flight ; nor do we know whether the latter took any part in it. The historian, however, says that the Anglian king did not gain his victory without great losses to his own army ; and the reason Brochvael was told off to guard the priests is not far to seek : he was pro- bably lord of the country around Bangor as well as nearly connected with Dunawd, its abbot ; and, seeing that his death is not recorded to have happened till the year 662, he may be supposed to have been hardly old and tried enough to have had the command of the whole army intrusted him in the presence of not a few princes, who probably were more experienced than he could well have been. The chief of these we have supposed lago to have been, a view not dis- countenanced by the likelihood that his son Cadvan, who followed him as king of Gwynedd and died about the year 616, was also over-king of the Kymry. But even this, favoured though it be by Welsh tradition, cannot be said to be proved. It seems, however, to be the key to the flattering language of Cadvan's epitaph, which happens to be still existing at the Anglesey church of Llangadwaladr close to Aberffraw, where the kings of Gwynedd lived, probably from the time of Maelgwn. Llangadwaladr is thought to be so called from Cadvan's grandson Cadwaladr, who appears to have died in 664. The church was built by him, or in his honour, and the old letters of the inscription rudely cut on a rough piece of stone, have quite the appearance of being of the seventh century : the words are — Catamanus rex sapieiitisimns opina- 1 26 CELTIC BRITAIN. iisinius oniniiiin 7-egiim — King Cadvan, the most wise and renowned of all kings. Lastly as to Cadvan's son and successor Cadwallon, and the latter's son Cadwaladr, there is no room for doubt concerning the union of all the Kymry under their leadership in the closing struggle with the Angles of Northumbria ; but we must turn again to the battle of Chester. ^thelfrith was at first king only of Bernicia ; but, at the death of his kinsman y^Ue of Deira, he suc- ceeded in adding that to his own kingdom, and thus he became the first king of all Northumbria ; while file's young son Eadwine with his friends sought refuge in other states, among which may be men- tioned Gwynedd, where Welsh tradition speaks of him as being brought up for a time at the court of Cadvan in Mona.^ There is probably some truth in this, and it is possible that it was the cause of y^thelfrith's ex- pedition to Chester. At any rate, it is quite in keeping with his later conduct as described by Basda ; for Eadwine, according to this author, found refuge soon after the battle of Chester at the court of Raedwald, king of the East Angles, and ^thelfrith, hearing of it, offered gifts to R^edwald to compass Eadwine's death : he sent a second and a third time, adding the threat of w^ar in case he persisted in turning a deaf ear to his wish. As Raedwald did not comply, yEthelfrith set out with an army to execute his threat. Raedwald and Eadwine met him and fought a battle in which the Northumbrian king fell, so that ' See the " Myv. Arch " (Gee's reprint), ^. 393, triad 81. THE KYMRV. I 27 Eadwine succeeded him as king both of Deira and Bernicia : this took place in the year 617, or about four years after the battle of Chester. But, whatever may have been the cause, u^thelfrith's advantages were not vigorously followed up, although Baeda gives him the credit of being a most brave and ambitious prince, who harassed the Welsh more than any other English king, and seized on more of their country than any one before him : possibly the Kymry offered him some kind of submission, and promised no longer to harbour Eadwine. It v/as partly due, perhaps, to the losses suffered by his own army, which were so serious that Bieda mentions them as great, and that Welsh tradition has construed them into a vic- tory for the Kymry; it was owing partly, perhaps chiefly, to y^thelfrith's anxiety to be free to watch Eadwine's movements. The battle of Chester left the city desolate, never to be afterwards haunted by its Kymric dwellers, and it was probably the first time for the Kymry to find the whole force of the Angles north of the Humber arrayed against them ; and, on the whole, the battle seems to have had the decisive character which it has of late been the fashion to ascribe to it. Something much more de- cisive, however, was shortly to follow : it was the succession of Eadwine to ^uhelfrith's place as king of Northumbria. He is said to have subdued all the English princes to his rule except his father-in- law, the king of Kent ; the Kymry also suffered from his power. Among the first of them were probably those of the small kingdoms of Loidis and Elmet, 128 CELTIC BRITAIN. the former of which has left its nanie to the town of Leeds, and the latter to Barwick-in-Elmet and Sherburn-in-Elmet in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Their land was annexed to that of Deira, on the confines of Avhich they lay ; but Eadwine did not stop here, as we read in Bseda's history of his having conquered the islands of Man and Mona, the latter of which came henceforth to be known in English as Anglesey, or the Isle of the Angles. This is significant, for Anglesey was, as it were, the home and stronghold of the kings of Gw^ynedd : in fact, both this circumstance and the utterances of Welsh tradition would lead one to suppose that the Kymry wxre for some time wholly at the mercy of the Northumbrian king, w^hile Cadwallon, w^ho appears to have succeeded his father Cadvan, about the same time as Eadwine attained to powder, had at one period of his life to seek refuge in Ireland ; but we have no sure indication as to the date of this event. The Northumbrian king, how- ever, became Christian in 627, and was baptized by Paulinus, a bishop who followed the former's Christian queen, who was daughter to the king of Kent, and that missionary has usually the whole credit of converting the Northumbrians given him ; but Nennius claims it for a Welshman named Rhun, son of Urien, and the Welsh Chronicle dates his efforts in the preceding year. So it may be supposed that the Kymry w^re during those years under the Northumbrian king's yoke, and that they joined in the work of converting his subjects to Christianity. Next, the Chronicle THE KYMRY. I 29 above mentioned speaks laconically of King Cad- wallon being besieged or blockaded in the year 629, in the island of Glannog, now better known as Priestholm or Puffin Island, opposite Beaumaris on the coast of Anglesey. This was probably done by Eadwine's fleet, and it may be taken as possibly marking the close of the drama which ended with Cadwallon's escape to Dublin. Again Welsh tradition speaks of several battles fought by Eadwine, which we cannot date, one near the Conwy and also one on Digoll or the Long Mountain in Shropshire, with which the Triads connect a fierce struggle known as one of the Three Discolourings of the Severn -.^ these engage- ments possibly took place before Cadwallon's flight. Lastly, Cadwallon returns- after a time to recover his power, and is introduced by Bseda as rebelling against Eadwine in conjunction with Penda, the pagan king of Mercia: a battle followed, in which Eadwine fell and his army was cut to pieces, in the year 633, at a place called Hethfeld and Meiceren in the Saxon and \\'elsh chronicles respectively : this spot is supposed to be Hatfield, in the neighbourhood of Doncaster. The year after, 634, Eadwine's son, Osric, then king of Deira, tried to besiege Cadwallon in the city of York, and was slain with his men in a sally made by the Kymry. Then all Northumbria was for a whole yeai- under Cadwallon, who now killed Eanfritli, /Ethel- ' Skene's "Anc. Bks. of Wales," ii. p. 206. 2 Gee's "Myv. Arck," pp. 393 (triad 75); 397 (triad 41); 399 (triad 60); see also .Skene's "Anc. Dks. of Wales," ii. pp. 277-9, 442. K 130 CELTIC BRITAIN. frith's son, who had been in exile during Eadwine's reign, and had come back after his death to be king of Bernicia. This was followed by Eanfrith's brother, Oswald, collecting a force and giving Cad- wallon battle, in which the former gained a great victory at a place called Hefenfelth and Catscaul by Baeda and Nenniiis respectively. It was fought near the Roman Wall and the present town of Hexham in 635, and both those writers and the Welsh Chronicle assert that Cadwallon then met with his death, though the more legendary tra- ditions of the Welsh speak of him as living many years afterwards. Under his successor and son, Cadwaladr, the Kymry seem to have continued to act with Penda of Mercia against Northumbria, both kingdoms of which were now ruled by Oswald. This contest resulted in 642 in a battle, which proved Oswald's last, at a place called Maserfelth by Baeda, but Cocboy by Nennius and the Welsh Chronicle. Bernicia and Deira became again separate kingdoms, the former under Oswiu, a brother of Oswald, and the latter under Oswine, a cousin of Eadwine, but Oswiu got rid of Oswine by foul means and possessed himself of both kingdoms. He could, however, get no peace from Penda, who is said to have been bent on extirpating the Northumbrians ; and according to Baeda he was offered royal orna- ments and gifts innumerable by Oswiu, if he would go home and leave off harassing his people, while Nennius's somewhat confused account of this transac- tion goes further and would lead one to the following THE KYMRY. 131 conclusions : — Penda and the kings of the Brythons had led a large army to the neighbourhood of the Firth of Forth against Oswiu, who seems to have had the Picts of that region then subject to him; Oswiu found himself forced to withdraw into a town which Nennius calls ludeu,^ whereby he may have perhaps meant Edinburgh, and eventually to give up to Penda, as the price of peace, all the treasure and booty which he had there with him. This was distributed by the Mercian king among the kings of the Brythons, and Nennius gives one to understand that it was known in Welsh as Atbret ludeu, or the restitution of ludeu. But soon after came the end, in the year 655, at the great battle of Winwaid, or, according to Nennius, the slaughter of Gai's Field, which would seem from its name to have been in the Pictish part of Manaw. There Penda is stated by Bseda to have had thirty legions under the command of most noted leaders ; but the result, nevertheless, was that they were de- feated, and that Penda was slain then or soon after, for Oswiu is represented as now ending the war in the region of Loidis, seemingly Lothian, after most of the princes helping Penda had fallen. According, however, to Nennius, the King of Gwynedd, whom he calls Cada- vael, had escaped with his army by night, which may have been the cause of Penda's defeat, and which certainly gained for the Welsh prince the name of Cadavael Cadommedd, or the battle-seizer who battle ' This was, originally, perhaps, luden, though there is no denying that it is Ituhii in the MSS. in the British Museum. K 2 132 CELTIC BRITAIN. declines. He may have been no other than Cadwaladr, and Nennius's words would only require as their key that we should suppose him to have been known till then in the language of alliterative flattery as Cadwaladr Cadavael ; but he may have been a brother of the king. After the battle, all that is known with tolerable certainty about Cadwaladr is that he died during a plague which raged in Britain in the year 664 ; still some of the Welsh legends re- present him as not dying till the 20th day of April 689, at Rome, a date taken from what appears to be the true account of Ceadwalla, king of Wessex. After his victory, Oswiu grew in power and became ruler of the Mercians three years after Penda's death, as he also did of other English peoples towards the south of the island, not to mention that Bseda speaks of his subjecting the greater part of the nation of the Picts to the sway of the Angles. And, as to the Kymry, their state in its older and wider sense had now practically come to an end after a history extending over more than two centuries. In the struggle between the Kymry and the Angles after the battle of Chester, the kings of Gwynedd, doubtless, considered that both their dig- nity and their power were at stake. This is spoken of in Welsh literature as the Crown of Britain ; for the Dux Britanniarum had not only passed into the Gwledig of Britain, but the latter had come to be spoken of as king or monarch of Britain. This last title would seem to have begun to get into use before the middle of the sixth century, when Gildas described Maelgwn THE KYMRY. 1 33 as insularis draco or the island dragon, the island being probably Britain, and not Mona, as is some- times supposed ; and here we have an early instance of the habit so common in Welsh poetry of calling a king or great leader a dragon, as when a mythical Gwledig of Lower Britain is always called Uthr Bendragon, or Uthr Head-dragon, the reputed father of King Arthur. The Welsh words are draig and dragon^ which, like the English dragon, take us back to the Latin draco, draco?iis, a dragon, and these in their turn to the Augustan era of the Roman empire, when dragons^ came to be figured in purple on the standards of some of the legions and to be borne before military leaders : the custom then extended itself to the emperors in time of peace ; and the Welsh words make it highly probable that this practice was among the Roman traditions cherished by the Kymric Gwledigs or over- kings, whom the bards sometimes styled Kessar- ogion ^ or Caesarians, and men of Roman descent ; nor have we to look elsewhere for the explanation of the fact that the Red Dragon, which figures in the story of Vortigern and Merlin, has always been the favourite flag of Wales. From the Maelgwn of Gildas we now come to Bceda's Cadwallon, whom that his- torian usually styles rex Britto?iiini, or king of the Brythons, though he once approaches the old technical title of that ducatus or leadershii) by speaking of him ' See the elaborate article and the copious references s. v. draco, in Ducange's Lat. Die. (Paris, 1S42). ^ See Skene's "Ancient Books of Wales," ii. p. 212. 134 CELTIC BRITAIN. as Brettonum dux} According to the legends put together by Geofrey of Monmouth, this title was an important point in the dispute between Cadwallon and Eadwine : the latter is represented as demanding the former's permission to wear a diadem in the east of the island as Cadwallon did in the west, and to cele- brate the great festivals as he did. These words contain an allusion to the fixed meetings at which the feudal lord received the homage of his men. There is probably some truth in Geofrey 's account, and it is in harmony with the fact that Eadwine solved the difficulty by driving Cadwallon out of Britain, and the latter in his turn by taking the government of Northumbria into his own hands for a while after Ead wine's death. It is also in a measure corroborated by Baeda's words about the seven English kings who exercised a sort of leadership beyond the limits of their own kingdoms. He draws no formal distinction between them, while an eighth is added to their number (in the person of Ecgbyrht, the first king of all England) in the Saxon Chronicle, the manuscripts of which give them all the same title, whether it be Bretenanwealda or Brytenwealda, that is to say, Britain-wielder or ruler of Britain, or else Bretwalda," which meant Briton-wielder, ruler of the ' Baeda's "Hist. Ecc.,"iii. chap. i. ' Bretwalda is the form in the oldest MS., and its meaning is clearly seen in the longer Bretenanwealda, the latter part of which is anwealda, which meant a lord, and was accordingly applied to God ; it was otherwise written anwalda, onwealda, &c., nor is it to be severed from amveald or onwealdy dominion, authority, power: see Sweet's ''Anglo-Saxon Reader," pp. 4, THE KYMRY. '35 Brythons, or Bretionum Dux as Boeda once terms Cadwallon. The leadership, already mentioned, of the first four kings in Baeda's list was exercised in Lower Britain as a continuation, probably, of the office of the Gwledig who succeeded the Count of the Saxon Shore, and there is no reason to think that it was ever known as that of Bretwalda or Brytenwealda : it survives possibly in the functionary called the Warden of the Cinque Ports. But that of Bretwalda was most likely an exclusively Northumbrian title assumed first by Eadwine after conquering the over- king of the Kymry in the person of Cadwallon, and then by the other Northumbrian kings, Oswald and Oswiu. Here it may be remarked that in ivalda^ 7i>ealda, anwealda, we have early English words which happen to be of the same meaning and etymology as the Welsh givledig, or w/eiic as it would probably be spoken in the seventh century, which makes it hard to avoid thinking that the English were in some measure guided in their choice of these terms by that which was in use among the Welsh. It is further worthy of note that Eadwine was the first English prince described 27, 120. But it does not follow that the scribes of the later MSS. were merely guessing the signification of the Bretwalda of the earlier MS., for they were not wholly without other sources — witness their Conmagl and Farinnntgl^ as compared with the much later forms in the oldest existing MS., and with Bxda's Brocmailus. The explanations that aim at dissociating Breten, Bryic'Hy and Bret, from Britain and Britons, are forced, and dictated by the wish to keep clear of what is thought an historical difficulty. 136 CELTIC BRITAIN. as wont to have, according to Baeda's^ account, a standard borne before him wherever he rode, as was the habit of the Caesars of Rome, and probably also of the Caesarians of the Kymry after them and their example ; but what device Eadwine had on his, whether it was like theirs a red dragon or not, we have no means of finding out ; nor can we stay to inquire whether the tuft carried before him when he was pleased to walk consisted of a triad of plumes used in the same way by the Gwledig, and to be regarded as forming a middle term between the insignia of office of the Dux Britanniarum and the Prince of Wales's Feathers. The disgrace the Kymry felt at losing the Crown of Britain and whatever that somewhat indefinite expres- sion implied, was probably nothing in comparison with their bitterness at being robbed of one piece after another of their country. We have already alluded to Ead- "wine annexing Loidis and Elmet to his own kingdom of Deira ; but far more fatal to Kymric independence Avas the appropriation by the Angles of the district of Teyrnllwg, described by Welsh tradition ^ as reaching from the Dee to the forests of Cumberland and the neighbourhood of the Derwent, which was once the boundary of the old diocese of Chester : the tract consisting of the level part of Cheshire and South Lancashire must have been taken from the Kymry soon after the battle of Chester, possibly before. Their loss of the plains of Teyrnllwg cut their state in two, ' " Hist. Eccl.," ii. 16. 2 io]o MSS., p. 86. THE KYMRY. 1 37 and everything was calculated to rouse them to the highest pitch of fury and to the utmost exertion to rid themselves of their encroaching neighbours, to both of which Welsh poetry abundantly testifies. The struggle, of which the bards continued to sing^ long afterwards, was no longer a struggle for mere glory ; it had become an effort on" the part of their race to expel the Angles from the country and to drive the EUmyii or Alle- mans, as they were sometimes termed, bag and bag- gage into their ships in quest of another home. It is in the heated atmosphere of this period that one can realize how closely the parts of the Kymric state clung together, or what a cruel wrench it was felt to be when it was torn in two ; and it is only in the lurid light of this all but forgotten context that one can read what the Brython meant, who first found that name too vague and began to call himself a Kymro, that is to say, Cym-bro (Combrox) or the compatriot, the native of the country, the rightful owner of the soil, which he thought it his duty to hold against the All-fro (Allobrox), as he called the invader who came from another land, the devastating foreigner with whose head the fierce muse of his time and race loved to behold him playing football. Neither was this fire of hostility towards the intruder confined to the Kymry, for it seems to have more than once been spread by them to the other Celts,- from whom the ' See for instance Skene's " Ancient Bks. of Wales," ii. pp. 123-9. ' See among others the poems in Skene's " Anc. Bks. of Wales," ii. pp. 205-13. 138 CELTIC BKITAIN. bards represent them as drawing active assistance — from the Brythons of Dumnonia and Armorica, from the Goidels of Dublin and Scotland ; nor does it by any means appear improbable that all these peoples, excepting perhaps those of Armorica, were repre- sented in the motley host led by Penda of Mercia to the North, where the curtain fell with Oswiu's victory and the Welsh leader's inglorious flight in 655. From that time, or rather from the occupation by the English of the plain of the Dee and the Mersey, the Kymry dw^elt in two lands, known in quasi-Latin as Cambria, in Welsh Cymru, which denotes the Principality of Wales, and Cumbria or the king- dom of Cumberland ; but for a considerable time previously their territory must have been considerably narrowed in the direction of those rivers, for even Ceawlin of Wessexhad carried his conquests along the eastern bank of the Severn into the heart of what is now Shropshire, leaving on his right a peninsula of Kymric country, reaching probably to the Avon : this was afterwards acquired by the English tribes of Mercia as the result of many a minor struggle lost to history, though a careful study of place-names in that district might still perhaps enable one to form an idea of the spots where the old inhabitants were able to keep their ground. As to the country west of the Severn, the kings of Wessex appear to have made incursions into South Wales from time to time, and gained, possibly, a per- manent footing on the west bank of that river ; but it was not till the time of Offa that the English TH^-iCYMRY. 139 frontier was materially advanced towards the west. He reigned over Mercia from 755 to 794, and made it the first power in Britain ; besides his conflicts with the other English states, he had many wars with the Kymry west of the Severn, especially during the last twenty years of his reign. He encroached on them, and they retaliated by ravaging his country; so he had an earthern rampart drawn from the mouth of the Wye to that of the Dee, to divide Mercia from Wales : thus he severed from the latter a very considerable tract of country, including a large part of Powys, with the important town of Pengwern, which became English under the name of Shrewsbury. Thus the southern Cambria shrunk into the Wales of our day, for the later annexation of Monmouthshire to England has not prevented its remaining in part Welsh^ and, roughly speaking, Offa's Dyke is still regarded as the boundary between England and 'Wales, though few remains of it are now to be seen. We have thus rapidly followed the southern Kymry into Wales, and we should now leave them, but that a word or two touching their history there may serve to give its full meaning to what we have already said about the nature of their state before Oswiu's vic- tory. From that time very little is known of them for nearly a century, and it has therefore been sup- posed that for a considerable portion of that in- terval they were under the domination of the English. But, when at length we read a little more about them, we find them still ruled by kings of the race of Maelgwn ; and the A\'elsh Chronicle in recording, 140 CELTIC BRITAIN. under the year 754, the death of Rhodri, grandson of Cadwaladr, styles him Rex Brittonum, or king of the Brythons. His son, Kynan, left only a daughter, who was married to Mervyn, said to have come, like Cun- edda, from Manaw in the North. Mervyn became king of all Wales, and was followed by his son, Rhodri the Great, who was also king of all Wales, till his death in 877. Rhodri divided Wales between his three sons and made arrangements for the eldest to be over- king, for it is worthy of note that this office seems never to have been lost sight of, and even in the period of confusion which followed the death, in the year 948, of Rhodri's grandson, Howel the Good, it seems to have had charm enough to make "con- fusion worse confounded." What with the wars of the Welsh princes with the English, with the Danes, and with one another, the web of Kymric history after the Norman Conquest is not easy to disentangle ; but the kingdom of the Welsh is spoken of as having finally fallen in 1090, when Rhys ab Tewdwr was slain in battle by the Normans, who seized on most of South Wales. From that time forth no Welsh leader, who rose above his peers, was usually called king of the Brythons, or even king of all Wales, but merely Prince of Wales. This was the case, for instance, when the death of Llewelyn, the last Prince of Wales in any sense descended from Maelgwn and Cunedda, opened the way for the King of England to juggle the title into his son's lap. But, to go back to an earlier and more interesting fact, not only did the bards continue for ages to sing the praises of the THE KYMRY. I4I Welsh princes who protected them, in such terms as had ceased to be applicable from the time of Cadwaladr, but we meet with a curious relic of the same past in the tenth century edition of the Welsh Laws, where they specify certain occasions on which the household bard of the King of Gwynedd was to sing before his hosts a lay of which the subject only is given : it was the significant one of the Monarchy of Britain,^ the last indistinct echo of the long-forgotten office of the Uux Britanniarum. We must now say a few words about the other Cambria or Cumbria, for in point of origin we have but one and the same word in both, Kamhria was regularly used for Wales by such writers as Giraldus in the twelfth century, and Geofrey somewhat, earlier had found an eponymous hero called Kamber, to account for it, just as he had likewise ready to his hand a Locrinus ~ to explain Lloegr, the Welsh word for England, and Albanactus to be the ancestor of the Albanach, the Gael of Alban or Celtic Scot- land. But the fashion was not yet established of dis- tinguishing between Cambria and Cumbria as we do. ■ Thus St. Petroc, who was probably a native of Wales, is called in one old lifc"^ a Cumber, according to an- other version, a Cimber. On the other hand Joceline, who wrote his Life of St. Kentigern in the twelfth century, speaks of the land of the Northern Kymry or > Vol. i. p. 34. ^ This is the Locrinc of Milton's " Comus," wliich sec. ^ See Capgrave's " Legenda Anglix," p. 266; and the " Acta Sanct.," June 4, i. p. 400. 143 CELTIC BRITAIN. Cumbria, as Cambria, and uses the adjectives Cam- brensis and Cambrinus accordingly; and ^thelweard in his chronicle, written in Latin about the end of the tenth century, mentions the Northern Kymry under the name of Cumbri, So it may be supposed that both countries of the Kymry were for some time indifferently called Cambria or Cumbria, the Welsh word on which they are based being, as now written, Cymru, which means exclusively the Principality, and is there pronounced nearly as an Englishman would treat it if spelled Kumry or Kumri. It is needless, therefore, to say that Cambria is a less correct form of the word than Cumbria, and that, in the language of the Saxon Chronicle, it became Cumerland or Cumberland^ and also Cumhralatid — the land, as it were, of the Cionbras, the Cumbri or Kymry. The latter consisted in the North of a considerable number of small tribes, many of the princes of which claimed descent from Coel, or from a Roman ancestor, and among them some from the Maximus who was able for a time to possess himself of the imperial throne of Rome. The relations in which the former usually stood to one another and to the Gwledig cannot clearly be made out, but their wars were mostly directed against the Angles of Bernicia, while Urien, Rhydderch, and others who warred with Hussa, king of Bernicia from 567 to 574, figure very conspicuously in old Welsh poetry ; afterwards Urien and his sons are represented as also fighting with valour, but varying success, against Theodric, who reigned over Bernicia from 580 to 587, and was probably THE KYMRY. 1 43 the devastator known in Welsh Hterature as the Flame-bringer.i Hitherto CarUsle had no doubt been far the most important town of these Northern Cumbrians, but, in consequence of a great battle fought by their princes with one another in the year^573 at a place called Ardderyd (supposed to be the Knows of Arthuret, on the banks of the Esk, about nine miles from Carlisle), that city had much of its importance shifted to a more northern point. The cause of this war is not known, but the prince w^ho came out victorious, with the aid probably of the Gwledig, was Rhydderch: he thereupon fixed his head-quarters on a rock in the Clyde, called in Welsh, Alclud, whence it was known to the English for a time as Alclyde, but the Goidels called it Diinbrettan or the fortress of the Brythons, which has prevailed in the slightly modified form of Dumbarton. The fact also contributed eventually in some measure to the importance of that part of Cumbria, that Rhydderch, after firmly establishing himself there, prevailed on Kentigern to return from Wales and take the primacy of that district as bishop of Glasgow. For a long time after Oswiu's victory the Cumbrians, like the other Kymry, remained under English domination, until, at length, in the year 686 Oswiu's son, Ecgfrith, the king of Northumbria, was defeated and slain at Diin Nech- tain, supposed to be Dunnichen in Forfarshire. The Angles only retained their power over the Picts of ' See Skene's " Anc. Books of Wales," ii. pp. 189, 199. 144 CELTIC BRITAIN. Galloway and the Cumbrians south of the Sol way, with the city of Carlisle, which Ecgfrith shortly before his death had given, together with some of the land around it to St. Cuthberht. The Cumbrians north of the Solway became independent, and had kings of their own again, of whom one is recorded as dying in 694, and another in 722. But, the Picts of Galloway continuing under the yoke of the Northumbrians, the king of the latter managed in 750 to annex to Galloway the district adjoining it on the north and west, which was then a part of the land of the Cumbrians, though it may have long before belonged to the Picts. In the same year a war took place between the former and the Picts of Lothian, who suffered a defeat and lost their leader, Talargan, brother to the King of Alban, in a battle at a place called in the "\^'elsh Chronicle Mocetauc, supposed to be in the parish of Strathblane, in the county of Stirling; but in 756 we read of the Picts and the Northumbrians joining, and pressing the Cumbrians very hard. After that little is known of them (excepting that Alclyde was more than once destroyed by the Norsemen) until we come down to the end of the ninth century, when w^e meet with a Welsh tradition that the Cumbrians who refused to submit to the English were received by the King of Gwynedd into the part of North Wales lying between the Dee and the Clwyd, from which they are made to have driven out some English settlers who had established themselves there. How much truth there may be in this story is not evident, THE KYMRY. 1 45 but it is open to the suspicion of being based to some extent on the false etymology which connects the name of the Chvyd with that of the Clyde. It is needless to say that the latter, being Clota in Roman times, and Glut in old Welsh, could only yield Clud in later Welsh. Harassed and weakened on all sides, the Cumbrians ceased to have kings of their own race in the early part of the tenth century, when a Scottish line of princes established itself at Alclyde, and in 946 the kingdom was conquered by the English king Eadmund, who bestowed the whole of it from the neighbourhood of the Derwent to the Clyde on the Scottish king Maelcoluim or Malcolm, on condition that he should assist him by land and sea, the help anticipated being intended against the Danes. So Cumbria became what historians are pleased to call an appanage of the Scottish crown, which led to various complications between the English and Scots for a considerable time afterwards. Into these we cannot enter, and it will suffice to say that William the Red made the southern part of Cumbria, including the city of Carlisle, into an earldom for one of his barons ; and thus it came to pass that the name of Cumberland has ever since had its home on the English side of the border, while the northern portion, of which the basin of the Clyde formed such an important part, is spoken of in the Saxon Chronicle as that of the Strathclyde Welsh- men. It may here be added tliat this was still more closely joined to the Scottish crown when David became king in 1124 ; but its people, who formed a L 146 CELTIC BRITAIN. distinct battalion of Cumbrians and Teviotdale men in the Scotch army at the battle of the Standard in 1 130, preserved their Kymric characteristics long afterwards. How long the Welsh language lingered between the Mersey and the Clyde we have, however, no means of making out, but, to judge from a passage in the Welsh Triads, it may be surmised to have been spoken so late as the fourteenth century in the district of Carnoban,^ wherever between Leeds and Dum- barton that may turn out to have been. * See Gee's " Myvyrian Archaiology," p. 401, Triad 7. CELTIC BRITAIN. I47 CHAPTER V. THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. To the remarks made in the last chapter on the Picts of Galloway, we may add, that we read of the Bry- thon, whom Baeda calls Nynias, labouring to convert them to Christianity about 412, and building a church dedicated to St. Martin, at a place called in the Saxon Chronicle Hwiterne, now Whitehorne or Whithern, in the south-eastern part of Wigtonshire. They were, as a rule, little disposed to be friendly to- wards their Brythonic neighbours, but they appear, nevertheless, to have taken part with them in the war against Oswiu, when, as the result of his triumph, they became subject to the Northumbrians, who pro- ceeded to incorporate their country with their own kingdom. Nor did the defeat and death of Ecgfrith in 686 enable them to free themselves ; for the Northumbrians are found to have set up a bishopric at Whithern in 727, and Baeda speaks of a man, whose name was Pecthelm, acting as their bishop there in 731 ;^ the bishopric, however, seems to have ended with another, whose name was Beadwolf, in the year 796 or thereabouts. This marks the beginning of a time when the hold of the Angles on Galloway grew ' "Hist. Eccl.," V. 23. L 2 148 CELTIC BRITAIN. feeble, and Northumbrla itself fell into a state of con- siderable disorder and confusion. But Galloway and Northumbria remained connected, after a fashion, long afterwards — probably until the former was bestowed with Cumbria on the king of the Scots by the English king Eadmund. Not only did these Picts so far retain the individuality of their race as to be known by that name so late as the twelfth century, forming a division of King David's army at the battle of the Standard, where they claimed the right of leading the van of his numerous hosts ; but there is no lack of evidence that they still clung, some four centuries later, to their Goidelic speech, which Scotch authors used to call Ersch or Irische, as they rightly identified it with the Celtic language of Ireland and the Highlands. Allusion has also been made to the Picts on the south coast of the Firth of Forth, but a few words more must be devoted to them before w^e pass be- yond the bounds of what was once Roman Britain. The whole seaboard from the Southern Wall to the Lammermoor Hills fell, as already mentioned, into the possession of the Angles, but the tract looking seaward from that range to where the Avon empties itself into the Forth or thereabouts, and commonly known as the Lothians, was occupied by a considerable mixture of races, as may be gathered from the place-names there. Thus the district north of the Lammermoors, forming the peninsula over against the county of Fife, would seem to have been Celtic, though it is not easy to say whether the Goidel or the Brython prevailed there : THE riCTS AND THE SCOTS. 1 49 seemingly it was the former. But on the upper course of the northern Tyne, which drains this region parallel to the Lammermoor range, one comes to a place called Pencaithland, a name which is in part decidedly Brythonic. A little higher, however, the head-stream of the same Tyne is called Keith Water, not to mention the parish there called Keith-Humbie, which, together with Dalkeith, between the two Esks, shows that we have to do with a district not peopled by ' Brythons ; but by whom ? This is a difficult (iuestion, as will be seen from the following facts which have to be taken together : — The Keith and Caith men- tioned cannot well be severed from other place-names into which they enter at various points in the east of Scotland from Keith Water to Caithness ; among these are Inch Keith in the Firth of Foith, and Keith Inch at Peterhead, the most eastern point of Scotland; in the former, Keith is probably to be identified with the town in the middle of the Firth of Forth, called by B?eda Urbs Giudi; and it is, moreover, on record that the Irish formerly called the Firth of Forth, the sea of Giudan^ or the Giuds, to which may be added that the legendary son of the eponymous Cruithne or Pict repre- senting Caithness is variously called Cait, Gatt, and Got, and that a Welsh form of another Pictish name here in point is given by Nennius as ludeu, that is the name he gives the town to which Oswiu withdrew before Penda, though there is no need to suppose that Judeu was the same place as Bteda's Giudi; and. ' Reeves's " Cuklees," p. 124. 150 CELTIC BRITAIN. lastly we seem to have a trace of the same form in the Welsh Chronicle, sometimes called Annales Cambriae, when it calls Menevia or St. David's Mo7ii Iitdeorum. We need not here be troubled by the lost Ten Tribes of Israel, but it might be argued that under these names we have to do with Jutes, and it would be hard to prove the contrary ; on the whole, however, it is more probable that we meet here with a Pictish people of non-Celtic descent. In that case the Pictish country reached at least from the upper course of the Tyne to the range of mountains called Pentland, which is, as already hinted, only a corrup- tion of Pehtland. Following their direction towards the sea Ave reach what was once the stronghold of the Picts, namely, Edinburgh, which, owing to its con- quest by Eadwine, has its name sometimes made into Edwinesburg. The inland boundary of this Pictish district is indicated by the Brythonic name, Penicuick, borne by a place on the upper course of the more northern of the two Esks. How far the Picts occupied the country beyond the Pentlands is not evident, but probably up to the river Almond at least. Beyond that we seem to reach a district which was in part Brythonic : thus the place where the northern wall ended on the Firth of Forth was known in Baeda's time by the Brythonic precursor of Penn-guaul, or, as Welshmen would now write it, Pen-Gv/awl, that is, the Wall's End. That would be the name as it was probably pronounced in Welsh, with the modification usual in most of the Brythonic dialects o( u or w into gu or gw ; but Baeda says that the Picts called it THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 151 Peanfahel, or, as it might perhaps be represented in a more modern speUing, Penn-vaeL The latter also was substantially the same Brythonic name, but the Picts must have learnt it — and this is significant — from the Verturian Brythons of the opposite coast, in whose dialect w does not seem to have ever been made into gw. And the Pictish pronunciation so far prevailed as to prove the basis of the English name given by Baeda as Pennel-tun, or the Wall's End Town, which cannot well have been derived from the Welsh Penn-guaul. But by the time when certain of the manuscripts of Nennius were written a purely Goidelic form of the name had been arrived at in the form of Cennail, now written Kinneil. The non- Celtic Picts, when we find them coming southwards, seem to have been fast adopting the Celtic language of the Caledonians who acted with them ; so the contest of languages in the maritime district south of the Forth came in time to be mainly between Goidelic and English, which no doubt found a footing there in the time of Eadwine. Nay, the reader should know that some believe it was firmly established on that coast as early as in Kent by a branch of the same Jutish people : we are, however, by no means sure that this has been satisfactorily made out. When Eadwine became master of the stronghold of Edinburgh he probably did so only after reducing the whole country between the Lammermoors and the Avon, which may be supposed to have made his dominions continuous from the latter river to the Humber ; but when Pen da and his Celtic allies 152 CELTIC BRITAIN. appeared in the north all the non-Anglian inhabitants of Lothian were probably induced to join them, so that when Oswiu proved victorious he not only reduced them under his power but extended his conquests into the country beyond the Forth, as the Picts there may have taken part with their kinsmen against him. But the yoke of the Angles must have been thrown off at the defeat of Ecgfrith in 685 ; after his time we read of wars between them and the Angles, and among other battles of one fought in the plain of Manaw in the year 710 or 711 : then in 729 a battle is mentioned as having been fought between the Picts from the north of the Forth and the Picts of Manaw : after this, little is known about the latter till the year 844, when the Goidelic element became supreme in the North. Now the battle on the plain of Manaw is specified to have been fought at a place between the rivers Avon and Carron : this serves in some measure to fix the position of the region called in Welsh the land of Manaw, and by the Goidels Manann, a name which survives in ^\?iinannaii Moor, in which the river Avon rises, in the county of Linlithgow, and also in C\:ic^ima7i?ia?ij which shows that another piece of Manaw lay north of the P^orth, both having probably been included in the territory of the people whom Ptolemy calls Dumnonii. Their country had two seaboards, that of the Firth of Forth, and that of the Firth of Clyde or the Irish Sea, and a certain part of it came to be called by the Welsh the Manaw of the Gododin : these were the people whom Ptolemy THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 1 53 called Otadini, and placed on the coast from the Firth of Forth to the confines of the land which he considered the Brigantes (in a restricted sense) to have occupied as their own. Before leaving this district south of the Forth, it may be mentioned that next to nothing is known as to the relation in which the Picts of Lothian and of Gallo- way stood to their kinsmen in the north ; but an unidentified son of the eponymous Cruithne is called Fidach, a name doubtlessly representative of the people or region called in Welsh poetry Goddeu : it was possibly Lothian but more likely Galloway ; for we seem to detect a cognate of Fidach or Goddeu in the latter part of the name Galloway as Latinized into Galweidia. This has usually been derived by main force from Gall-Gaedhel, the name which the Irish in later times gave the Picts of Galloway, whereby they meant to describe them as Goidels or Gaels who adhered or submitted to the Gall or the stranger who came on his piratic visits from Denmark or the fiords of Norway, rather than with any allusion, as it is supposed, to the Anglian stranger who ruled that district as a province of his own for a long time. We must now go beyond the limits of what was once Roman Britain, and say something of the Picts who remained outside the Northern Wall ; but it will lead to somewhat less com})lication if we first speak very briefly of the Scots who settled in Britain. They took up their abode in Cantyre and the island of Islay, the part of Ireland from which they came being the 154 CELTIC BRITAIN. nearest district to Cantyre and known as that of Dal- Riada The migration began during the last years of the fifth century, under a prince called Fergus mac Ere ; and it was not long before the new comers spread them- selves overmuch of what is now known as the county of Argyle. They were then separated from the Picts north of the Forth by the great mountain chain which forms a part of the boundary of the west of Perthshire, and used to be termed Dorsum Britan7iicB or Drumalban, which means the ridge of Britain or of Alban. But the king of the Picts, whose name was Brude Mac Maelchon, drove them back about the year 560 to Cantyre, and slew their king. Now the Scots were Christians, while the Picts ruled over by Brude were still pagans ; and it is supposed that the mission of St. Columba to that king's court had as one of its ob- jects the bettering of the position of the Scots as against their powerful neighbours. Columba, who was connected with the royal family of the Dalriad Scots, came over from Ireland in the year 563, and made the islet of lona, near the coast of the island of Mull, the home of himself and his followers shortly after- wards : he succeeded in converting Brude and his Pictish subjects to Christianity; but this does not seem to have prevented their further pressing the Scots, whom we read of as losing their king and many of his followers in a battle fought in Cantyre, in 574. St. Columba at this point interfered in the succession, and chose as king of the Scots a great-grandson of Fergus mac Ere, whose name was Aedan, and then he took him to Ireland to a meeting THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 1 55 known as the Council of Drumcett, where he obtained the concession that the Dalriad Scots of Britain should no longer have to pay taxes or tribute to the mother state in Ireland, though they were to continue bound to take part in its hostings and expeditions. So Aedan became the first independent king of the Scots, and he appears to have strengthened his position by bringing a fresh colony back with him from Ireland, and we read of him and Baetan mac Cairill, king of the Dal-Fiatach ^ and over-king of Ulster, driving the English out of Manaw, the over-kingship of which is said by Irish tradition to have belonged to Baetan. He died in 581, and two years later Manaw was left by the Goidels, which seems to mean that the forces from Ireland left Aedan to carry on the contest alone with the English, that is to say, the Angles of Bernicia ; so we read of him fighting a battle about this time in Manaw, though nothing is known about it, excepting that it turned out in his favour. Then we learn from Adamnan, who wrote the biography of St. Columba in the seventh century, that Aedan fought a great battle in which several of his sons fell, in what he calls the war of the Miati f this battle, in which Adamnan ascribes a sad victory to Aedan, is otherwise known as that of Circinn, which took place in 596 : it helps to identify Magh-Girginn, or the plain of Cir- cinn, the name of which was reduced to Moerne, ' Another warlike tribe of the north-eastern corner of Ireland, located in what is now the county of Down. ' Reeves's " Adamnan's Life of Columba," pp. ^t^, 36. 156 CELTIC BRITAIN. and Mernis or Mearns in Broad Scotch, with the territory of the ancient people of the Maeatae : the Mearns are now roughly speaking repre- sented by Kincardineshire. But after this we find Aedan again helped by soldiers from Ireland under Maelumi, the son of Baetan, namely, at the great battle which was fought in 603, at a place called by Baeda^ Degsastan, supposed by some to have been Dawstone near Jedburgh, and by others Dalston near Carlisle, if not Dawstone Rigg in Liddesdale. Aedan had a very large army, consisting of his Scots, the Picts of Manaw, and his allies from Ireland, and it is not improbable that the Brythons of Cumbria had readily joined him in a great struggle against the Angles, whose king was the aggressive y^thelfrith, of whom we have already spoken ; but he obtained a complete victory over Aedan and his combined forces. Aedan died in 606 ; he was a Dalriad Scot, but something more, for he is traditionally said to have been the son of a daughter of Brychan, the ancestor of one of the three holy families of Welsh hagiology, who is sup- posed to have left his name to Brycheiniog or Breck- nock. It is by no means clear what all Aedan's wars were about, but it would, perhaps, be not far wrong to assume that they were mainly directed against the Angles and the Picts beyond the Forth and Clyde. Aedan's sons took a more or less active part in the affairs of Ireland, and so did his grandson Domnall Brecc or the Freckled ; but he also fought several ' "Hist. Eccl.," i. chap. 34. THE nCTS AND THE SCOTS. 157 battles in Britain. One of them took place in 634 at a place called Calitros, supposed to have been near the Avon : it was probably an unsuccessful attempt to drive the Angles back over the Pentlands. In 638 we read of Edinburgh being besieged and of another attempt made by Domnall, who was again defeated. On what terms he had hitherto been with the Brythons of Cumbria we do not know, but now a war took place between him and them, in which they were victorious and he slain, in the upper part of the vale of the Carron. The kingdom of the Dalriad Scots of Argyle seems to have never flourished much after this time. As to the Picts or Picti, their name referring as it does to the habit of colouring the body which pre- vailed among them after it had disappeared in most of the region under the Romans, was never, per- haps, distinctive of race, as Brythons and Goidels seem to have been sometimes included under it as well as the non-Celtic natives to whom the term probably most strictly applied at all times. So historians speak geographically of these peoples as northern and southern Picts, meaning by the latter the dwellers of the country stretching from the Forth to the neighbourhood of Aberdeen and drained by the Forth, the Tay, and the two northern Esks. Its inland boundary may be described as a sort of semi- circle of mountains, comprising the Mounth or that portion of the Grampians which runs across the country to end near Stonehaven, on the north, and Drumalban on the west, beyond which dwelt 158 CELTIC BRITAIN. those whom it has been customary to call the northern Picts, excepting that the Dalriad Scots had taken possession of a part of Argyle from the end of the fifth century : it is more accurate to speak of them as the Picts on this side of the mountains and those beyond them. Now, the former, in the loose sense here suggested, were partly Celtic and partly non-Celtic, while the Celtic element was of two kinds, Brythonic and Goidelic ; for, when the earlier Celtic invaders, the Goidels, had presumably seized on the best portions of the island, their northern boundary on the eastern sea-board must have in- cluded most of the district drained by the Tay and the rivers that join it A long time afterwards the other Celts — those of the Brythonic branch — came and drove the Goidels before them, as the latter had done with the aborigines. There is no evidence, however, that they had coasted beyond the Firth of Forth, though there is that they got possession of a good deal of country north of the river. The outlying tribes of the Dumnonii had pushed themselves as far as the skirts of the great Caledonian forest, and laid claim to most of the tract probably between the Forth and the Almond except the peninsular part of Fife. Ptolemy assigns them three towns, namely, Alauna, which may have been at Ardoch near the Allan ; Lindon, supposed to have been at Delginross, near Comrie, on the Earn ; and Victoria, possibly situated at Strageath on the same river. They were probably the Verturiones of ancient authors, and their name yielded that of the men of Fortrenn of Pictish history, THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. T59 which makes Menteith, Strathearn, and Fothreve, or the western portion of Fife, parts of their kingdom. So situated, these Brythons had around them on the north and the east a zone of GoideUc territory, com- prising the provinces of Athol in the Perthshire highlands, and Gowrie, together with the eastern part of Fife. The north-east corner of this Cismontane Pictland, the region of the twin Esks, belonged to those of the aboriginal Picts known as Mseatse from the beginning of the third century down to the time of Adamnan in the seventh, who records practically the same name in the forms of Miati and Miathi. Their country is mostly known in history as Mearn, to which may be added probably most of the province of Angus. They correspond pretty nearly to the counties of Forfar and Kincardine respectively. This land, from Stonehaven to Stirling, and from Drumalban to the North Sea, with its three contend- ing races of Brythons^ Goidels, and non-Celtic Picts, is the theatre where most of the known history of the Pictish kingdom was acted. The Pictish kingdom, we said, for historians are wont to speak of it in the singular ; and, on the whole, the facts of the case warrant it, especially if its head be looked at as an Ard-ri or high-king, holding a position somewhat like the Gwledig among the Kymry. Moreover, the kingdom is rightly called Pictish, and not Goidelic or Brythonic; but this leads on to the question as to its probable origin, and what became of the Caledonians, who were the most powerful people that Agricola and his legions met l6o CELTIC BRITAIN. with in the north. Agricola found and fought the Caledonians on the banks of the Tay, and there, no doubt, they continued as the people of Athol and Gowrie in later times. But for some reason or other they seem to have not long afterwards lost their foremost position : possibly this began with the tremendous defeat the Roman general was able to inflict on them in the year 86, since it possibly gave a rival people that had not taken part in the war with the legions, or only a subordinate part, the start it wanted in the race for the foremost place in inde- pendent Britain. What people that was, we know from the subsequent history of Scotland. It was not the Boresti, or the Brythons between the Tay and Forth, for their country had most likely been over-run, and Agricola took hostages from them on his return from the banks of the Tay ; but it was the aboriginal inhabitants, including those called Mseatae in later ages, from the land of the Caledonians of the Tay basin to the Moray Firth. And on this point some- thing may be learnt from Ptolemy's Geography, which was published about thirty-four years after the great defeat of the Caledonians in S6. Beyond the Dumnonii, whose outposts reached the neighbour- hood of the northern Almond, and between them and the Moray Firth he mentions only three peoples, and of these far the most widely ranging was that called by him Vacomagi. Their country, so far as can be made out from the data he supplies, extended from the river Ness to the upper course of the Dee and the Don, and from the Moray Firth into the THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. l6l heart of Perthshire. He ascribes them four towns : the first, called the Winged Camp, is supposed to have been on the promontory of Burghead on the south side of the Moray Firth ; the second, called Tuessis, near Boharm, on the Spey ; the third, called Tamea, on an island in the Tay called Inchtuthill ; and the fourth, called Banatia, at Buchanty, on the Almond. The most eastern point of vScotland is called by Ptolemy Taexalon, and the people of that district were the Taexali, the bulk of whose territory is represented by the modern county of Aberdeen : they had a town called Devana, which has been supposed to have been in the strath of the Dee, near the Pass of Ballater, and close to Loch Daven. The rest of the eastern coast Ptolemy leaves to the people whom he calls Vernicomes or Venicones, and who were probably the Mseatae of later authors : their country, at that time would seem to have comprised Mearn, Angus, and the east of Fife ; while their town., called Orrea, is supposed to have been somewhere near the meeting of the Almond with the Tay at a place known as Grassy Walls. In the main we take all those peoples to have been non-Celtic, but their territory would seem to have completely included that of the Caledonians whom Agricola fought on the banks of the Tay, with the exception, perhaps, of a part of Athol, which may still have belonged to them. Ptolemy makes the Caledonians extend across the island from the neighbourhood of Loch Long to the Beauly Firth, which was pos- sibly a mistake on his part, the country they most M 1 62 CELTIC BRITAIN. likely occupied being one which reached from sea to sea, not, however, as he puts it, but from the neigh- bourhood of Loch Long to the Tay, and down its basin to the North Sea. If we accept his statement, how- ever, that they reached to the Beauly Firth, we have to regard their territory in that district also as pro- bably overlapped by the conquests of the Vacomagi soon after he wrote. The extension of the power of the Vacomagi, not only across the Tay, but to the Brythonic country on the west of it, together with that of the Vernicomes into Fife, was probably of recent date ; in any case it only meant that the Goidelic and Brythonic peoples had come under the power of the aboriginal tribes beyond them, and not that they had been displaced by them, at least, to any consider- able extent; for the later history of the Pictish kingdom compels us to regard the central region, especially the land of the Caledonians on the western banks of the Tay, as always occupied by the most purely Goidelic race in the North. Among the strategic points of prime importance which the Vacomagi would seem to have won from the latter, may be mentioned that of Dunkeld, rightly termed the gate of the Highlands. The ec- clesiastical history of Dunkeld began comparatively late, but the fact by no means proves that it had not been considered a point of great import- ance from the earliest times. It could hardly, however, have got its present name if it had not once been in the possession of the Caledonians, since in its Gaelic form of Diincelden or Diinchallann THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 1 63 it means the town or stronghold of the Calidones or Caledonians. The non-Celtic tribes may have occupied a sub- ordinate position in the league of the Caledonians against Agricola ; but we have supposed them soon afterwards to have taken the lead, and this is quite in keeping with what we read about them in 201, when the Maeatae, not the Caledonians, threaten hostilities against the Roman province, with the Caledonians preparing to assist them, contrary to promises the latter had made to keep the peace. So w^hen the governor of the province, in consequence of failing to get the necessary reinforcements from the Continent, was obliged to buy peace from the intrepid northerners at a great price, it was the Moeatae he seems to have had to negotiate with. This clearly suggests that they were then the leading power, and that they had ready access to the frontier of the province. The original strength of the independent aborigines no doubt lay in the country of the Maeatae and the Taexali, and the part of the land of the Vacomagi consisting of the district near the Moray Firth, which is still remarkable as one of the most fertile regions of Scot- land. So one sees several reasons why Severus, when he arrived in 208, bent on crushing the northern enemies of Rome, does not appear to have stayed his march until he had made his way through the Maeatae and Taexali to the shores of the Moray Firth, and why he then seems to have thought it necessary to return through the heart of the Vacomagi's territory.^ ' See Skene's " Celtic Scotland," i. p. 87, &c. M 2 164 CELTIC BRITAIN. Then, when Constantius Chlorus marched beyond the Northern Wall, he is described by a Roman panegy rist as reaching the forests and swamps of the Cale donians and the other Picts ; for, though he probably did not get beyond the land of the Vertiiriones, these words were probably in a manner warranted by the latter being then more or less subject to the Picts.^ Ammianus, however, writing of the irruption of the northern populations in 364, says that they were then divided into two peoples, the Verturiones, whom we have already found to have been Brythons, and the Dicalidonae,^ a name for the Caledonians and non-Celtic peoples acting together and treated as one power. The word, however, is as old, at least, as the time of Ptolemy, who used it, in an older form, as the basis of the adjective which he applies to the ocean on the west of Scotland, when he terms it /\uvr)Ka\r]c6vioc, or, as it might be transcribed, Dvicalido7iios. But, to return to the Verturian Brythons, it would seem that their country had not then so completely fallen under the power of the non-Celtic races as that of the Caledonians, or the Goidels of the central part of Cismontane Pictland ; but the former had sufficient command of the whole country beyond the Forth to have had ready access to the Roman province. Some of their hordes came down from the direction of Dunkeld with many Caledonians among them, anxious to join in their plundering expeditions; some came from ' Amm. MarcelL, xxvii. 8. THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 165 Mearn and from the land beyond the Mounth, and all met among the Verturian Brythons, who willingly joined them, no doubt, and then steered them clear of the end of the Roman Wall, the Brythonic name of which they then taught them for the first time. And Gildas, though probably possessed of no close acquaintance with the geography of the northern part of the island, cannot be said to have inaptly described the Picts as a transmarine people, emerging from their coracles to attack the province from the north-east.^ This would be about the time when the Romans left Britain to its fate : after that little or nothing is known about the Picts until the time of St. Columba in the sixth century, when the peoples of the north appear again, occupying the same position, politically speak- ing, with regard to one another as before, that is to say, the aboriginal race was still dominant. Baeda^ tells us that they were then ruled by a most powerful king, called Brude mac Maelchon, who was in the ninth year of his reign when Columba came over from Ireland, about the year 563. Adamnan, a suc- cessor of St. Columba and his biographer, gives us to understand that the saint, on finding at Brude's court the regulus of the Orkneys, whose hostages were in Brude's hands, asked the latter to commend to the protection of his vassal certain monks of his community, who were then on a voyage in the direction of those islands. So much as to the extent northwards of Brude's ' San-Marte's " Nennius and GiUlas," p. 143. ' *' Iliit. Eccl.," iii. chap. 4. 1 66 CELTIC BRITAIN. power, which had its head-quarters at a place some- where near the site of Inverness; southwards we know that it was too great for the Dalriad Scots of Cantyre to contend with, a circumstance which probably had a good deal to do from the first with Columba's mission to the king of the Picts. Then there remains Cismon- tane Pictland, from the Forth to the neighbourhood of Stonehaven. We are nowhere expressly told that this was under the government of Brude, but there is hardly room for doubt. The whole subsequent history of the Pictish kingdom implies it, and espe- cially the fact that Gartnait, who succeeded Brude as king, and that without a revolution so far as one knows, fixed his head-quarters at a place on the Tay, which is supposed to have been Abernethy, whither Columba thought it expedient to follow him. Thus we seem to have to do with a kingdom which had not as yet one fixed capital, and, though the southern part was in the long run certain to win the preference, the fact, that the head-quarters of the king were once in the north, clearly proves that the course of conquest had not been from the Tay north- wards rather than from the Ness towards the sunnier south. Further, there is a characteristic of the Pictish kingdom, which very clearly points in the same direction of the Ness, in the neighbourhood of which it always existed, and where it was last heard of : Ave allude to the so-called Pictish succession, which was vested in the mother, while the father did, so to speak, not count. Among the results of the working of this custom, as observed in the history of the Transmontane Picts, THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 167 may be mentioned the fact that the sons of the same woman succeeded one another, and that, when they failed, the sovereignty passed to the sons of a sister : also that no son of a previous king of the Picts is re- corded to have ever been made king by them, vrhile his race on the father's side did not matter, there being among the kings whose names are preserved a Welsh- man and an Angle. Such a law can hardly be regarded as the outcome of any other than a low view of matrimony, which must have at one time prevailed among them, and of a backward state of society, in which a man's paternity was normally uncertain ; in fact, it would appear to have been the natural growth of some such a system of polyandry as that so often alluded to by ancient authors, in various startling terms, as existing in Britain, In touching on this custom, we have already hinted that in all probability it can hardly have been Celtic, but that it is rather to be attributed to the descendants of the aborigines of the island. With regard to the Pictish succession this may be asserted with still more confi- dence ; for it may even be doubted that it was at any time Aryan, while it is certain that outside the Pictish range there is in the Celtic world no trace of it known to the history either of Brythons or of Goidels; and so strange did it appear to the Irish, that a legend had been invented by them to account for it some time before B?eda wrote his History, in which he mentions it, to the effect that the Picts, having come in a few ships from Scythia without women, succeeded in persuading the Goidels to give 1 68 CELTIC BRITAIN. them wives, on the condition that the Pictish succes- sion should, in case of doubt, be vested in the mother rather than in the father.^ From the time of Brude mac Maelchon, who died in 584, down to the beginning of the eighth century, our knowledge of what passed in the Piclish kingdom is very slender and imperfect ; and in the first place we are met by the difficulty which attaches to the history of the indefatigable Aedan the Scot, whom Columba had made king of his Dalriad people in Britain. On the whole it appears that he was bent on strengthening the power of the Dalriads by giving them the lead of the Celts opposed to the Angles, and in the next place by compelling the Picts to make concessions to them. This is probably the explana- tion of the fact, that he is recorded to have made an expedition to the Orkneys in 580 or 581, and also of his part in the war of the Miati, when he seems to have fought a battle in which he lost more than one of his sons and a great number of his men ; it was that of Circin, in Mearn, in 596. This was, it may be guessed, a struggle on the part of the Goidels of the Tay, to- gether, possibly, with those of the Brythons of For- trenn, against the domination of the non-Celtic Picts, and so it must have offered Aedan and his Scots an ■oj^portunity of dealing a blow at their power : he may, however, have been at the same time following up personal claims of his own, of which nothing is known, except that his presence in Mearn looks like the first • "Hist. Eccl.," i. I. THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 1 69 of the series of attempts which eventually made his descendants masters of the kingdom of the Picts. He died in 606, and peace seems to have prevailed for a long tirnc afterwards between the Picts and the Dalriad Scots, of the former of whom we have nothing of importance to say till we come to the great victory of the Northumbrian Oswiu in 655. It is not improbable that they had joined the Celtic hosts who acted with Penda ; so, when he was defeated and slain, wc find Oswiu shortly afterwards making himself master of the greater part of the Picts, as Bceda tells us, meaning probably the inhabitants of Cismontane Pictland. In 672 the latter were aided in an attempt to throw off the Anglian yoke by a large force from the Picts north of them, but they did not succeed. The Picts then had for king a prince named Brude, son of Bile, who was on the father's side a Welsh- man from Alclyde, and we hear of him operating in the extreme north, where there would seem to have been a partial revolt : he besieged a place in Caithness in 680, and devastated the Orkneys in 682. His activity had, however, not been confined to the north, as he laid siege to Dunnottar, in Mearn, in 681, where he was probably engaged against the Angles ; then we read of him meeting with success in Fortrenn in 683, when he appears termed king of the Brythons of that region. At length Ecgfrith, who found the Picts assisted by the Dalriad Scots, and probably suspected that they derived aid from Ireland, sent an army across, which cruelly ravaged the Irish coast from Dublin to Drogheda in 684, and in the following year 170 CELTIC BRITAIN. he led an army in person to the country of the Cismontane Picts. The result was the battle of Diin Nechtain, supposed to be Dunnichen, in Forfarshire, in which he was slain, with nearly all his army ; and so ended the Anglian rule over the region beyond the Forth. Brude lived till the year 693, and the next Pictish king of any note was Nechtan, who began to reign in 706, and brought the ecclesiastical affairs of his kingdom into great prominence. We left Columba among the Cismontane Picts, at the head-quarters of Gartnait, by whom he is said to have been so effectually supported as to silence all opposition among the tribes on the banks of the Tay.- What the nature of that opposition may have been we are not told ; probably it arose not more from those who were still pagans than from men who mixed paganism with Christianity. In so far as the Goidelic and Goideli- cizing people of that region were Christians at all, their religious ideas had been derived from the teaching of such previous missionaries as Nynias or Ninnian, who laboured also among the Picts of Galloway so early as the year 397 ; and even when Columba was busy among the Picts on the Tay his contemporary and friend, Kentigern appears to have gone on a mission beyond the Mounth ; and that Welsh mission- aries had carried on a work of a lasting nature among the Transmontane Picts is proved by a group of dedi- cations in the upper valley of the Dee, among which ^ See O'Beirne Crowe's "Amra Coluimcille " (Dublin, 187 1 ), pp. 29, 63, with Skene's remarks on the same in his " Celtic Scotland," ii. pp. 136, 137. THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 171 are found Kentigern's own name and that of Ffinan, whose church in Anglesey is called Llanffinan, while that of his in Scotland gave its name to Lumphanan, a place of some note in Pictish history. As to Columba, his successors continued his work, and they had no doubt by the eighth century gained great influence in the kingdom; but it w^as a Scottish church under the rule of the abbots of lona, and it probably succeeded to a considerably less degree among the Brythons of Fortrenn than in other parts of Cismon- tane Pictland, among the Goidelic populations. Of the latter, those who were most devoted to it were probably the people near the Tay, where the founder himself had laboured under royal protection. The Columban Church had also done a great work in Northumbria, but it had come to an end there in 664, when the Angles conformed to Rome. The .same thing was now threatening it in Pictland, under Nechtan.^ Now Nechtan was at peace with the' Angles of North- umbria, and, with their example before his eyes, he ordered the observance of Easter and the tonsure of the clergy to be regulated by the then practice of the Church of Rome. This took place in the year 710 at Scone, which is supposed to have by this time become the capital and possessed of the coro- nation stone now at Westminster. The king had the ' As to this name it is to be remarked that it was in Welsh Neithon, written Naiton by B?eda ; for it is characteristic of the mixture of races among the Picts, that the names of some of their kings are handed down to us in a Goidelic form, and some in a Brythonic one. 172 CELTIC BRITAIN. assistance of Anglian priests to carry out the change, and the Columban clergy refusing to obey were expelled in 717, when they crossed Drumalban to the country of their Scottish kinsmen. It is highly probable, however, that they had many powerful friends among Nechtan's subjects who sympathized with them and began to oppose him. At any rate we find the king himself becoming a cleric in 724, possibly not altogether from choice, as he is found to have been succeeded by a king called Drust, who was supported by a party opposed to Nechtan. Both Nechtan and Drust were, we think, non-Celtic Picts ; but the former seems to have derived his principal support from the country beyond the mountains, where the expulsion of the Columban clergy was perhaps less keenly felt, while the latter appears more identified with the Cismontarie Picts of Angus and Mearn. The quarrel between the Picts is noteworthy as the prelude to the fall of the power of the aboriginal race in Cismontane Pictland, and the signal for the two Celtic peoples to compete for the succession. The leading events in point were, briefly speaking, the following:^ — In 725, Nechtan's adherents took a son of Drust prisoner, which was avenged by Drust putting Nechtan in chains in the year following. Then comes a revolution and drives Drust from his throne, which is seized by a king called Alpin, in ^ We have in the main followed Mr. Skene in his "Celtic Scotland," vol. i. chaps. 6, 7, and part of the succeeding one. THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 173 Welsh, Elphin. On his father's side he was a great- grandson of Domnall Brecc, the grandson of Aedan, king of the Dalriad Scots of Argyle ; but his name, which is possibly not Celtic, suggests that his mother was of the royal fiimily of the Picts. At the same time that he ousted Drust, his brother Eochaid secured tlie throne of the Dalriad Scots for himself; but in Cis- montane Pictland Nechtan again emerges into secular life to win back his throne, and the complication goes on growing by the coming forward of another competitor for power in the person of Aengus or Angus, son of Fergus, or, as he was called by his Brythonic subjects, the men of Fortrenn, Ungust, son of Wurgust. He was undoubtedly a Brython, while Alpin may be surmised to have identified himself with the Caledonians or Goidelic peoples of the central part of Cismontane Pictland, and to have possessed whatever claims to power among them, if any, Aedan, the Dalriad Scot, had long before him. The first encounter was in 728, between Ungust and Alpin, at a place not far from the meeting of the Earn and the Tay, where Ungust won the day and possession of the whole district west of the latter river. Alpin and his Goidels were afterwards totally defeated by Nechtan at Scone, when llie latter found himself again king; but in 729 a battle took place between the hosts of Ungust and Nechtan, when the latter suffered so great a defeat that Ungust then became king of the Picts. The place where this happened being on the banks of a loch formed by the waters of the Spey indicates that Nechtan counted on the men of that district as his most faithful sub- 174 CELTIC BRITAIN. jects. The next was a battle between Ungust and Drust, in which Ungust was again victorious, and Drust killed. Then Ungust's son, Brude, defeated Talargan, son of Congus, one of the leaders of Alpin's party, and forced him to flee to the Scots in Argyle. But Dungal, king of the Dalriad Scots, happening to find Brude in a church on Tory Island, near the coast of Donegal, violated his sanctuary and made him prisoner, which drew on the Scots an invasion by Ungust, who put Talargan to death, and forced Dungal to flee, wounded, to Ireland. Two years later, in 736, Ungust devastated the whole country of the Scots, destroyed their capital, together with other places, and made several of their princes prisoners. Such were the straits to which the Scots were brought that Alpin, who had fought against Ungust and Nechtan in Pictland, was forced to lead the portion of the nation of the Scots, of which he was the head, into the land of the Picts of Manaw, with a view probably of drawing Ungust away from Dalriada. But he was met by Talargan, brother to Ungust, at the head of the men of Fortrenn and there defeated with a heavy loss to his forces, at a place near the Avon. It is not very clear what the exact meaning may have been of Alpin and his Scots burst- ing forth into Manaw ; but it has been supposed that Ungust, as king of the Picts beyond the Forth, had stirred the Picts of Manaw and Galloway to revolt against the Angles of Northumbria, whose king, Eadberht, is mentioned as engaged in war with the Picts in 740, when the king of Mercia took advan- THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 1 75 tage of his absence to lay waste a part of his kingdom ; so it may be that the Scots had been encouraged by the Northumbrians to invade Manaw by a promise of their co-operating with them. After his defeat, Alpin was king of the Scots for four years, which brings us to 740, when, after leading his men into Galloway and completely devastating it, he there met with his death in the neighbourhood of Loch Ryan, in 741. Ungust then completed the crushing of the Scottish kingdom, and the country thenceforth formed a de- pendency of the Picts. The part of the Scots now seems to have devolved on the Cumbrians of Strath- clyde, which appears to require as its explanation that we should suppose them to have arrayed themselves on the side of the Scots against the Picts and the Angles, who were now at one with the Picts. It may be that the Cumbrians had also received among them the remains of the army of the Dalriad Scots when they were finally dispersed, and that they found directed against them the power of Talargan, Ungust's brother, on the southern coast of the Firth of Forth. At any rate, we read of a battle in 744 between the Picts of Galloway and the Cumbrians ; and the latter suf- fered a combined attack by Ungust and Eadberht, which led, in 750, to the annexation to Galloway of a part of their territory and to a battle between them — that is to say, between the Cumbrians and the Picts of Manaw under the same leader who defeated Alpin, namely, Talargan, who seems to have been the king of those Picts. The Cumbrians had the best of it, and Talargan was killed ; but in 756 the armies of Ungust 176 CELTIC BRITAIN. and of the Angles made for Alclyde, and the Cum- brians had to submit to the yoke of the Angles. In the meantime those who had supported Nechtan seem to have been gathering strength, and Ungust had to contend with a king, called Brude mac Maelchon, a namesake of Columba's contemporary, whose lineal representative, according to the Pictish law of suc- cession, he may be supposed to have been, at the same time that he was probably the heir to Nechtan's claims ; but he also was unsuccessful, and fell in a battle against Ungust, in Mearn, in 752. The death of the latter is not recorded as taking place till the year 761, after a reign of about thirty years, in the course of which he had allowed the monastery of Cennrig- monaid or Kilrymont — that is to say, St. Andrew's — to be founded : the death of its first abbot is recorded under the year 747. Ungust was succeeded by his brother Brude, king of Fortrenn, who died in the year 763. Then came Cinaeth, the son of Wredech, who had in 768 to give battle in Fortrenn to Aed Finn or the White, neither of whom appears from his name to have been a Brython. Most likely Aed was a Dalriad Scot reviving the claims of Alpin, and trying to rebuild the kingdom of the Scots in Argyle ; but nothing seems to have come of it, and Cinaeth reigned over the Picts until his death in 775. He was followed by Alpin, who was probably his brother : he died in 780, and during his reign Aed Finn also died in the year 778. At the death of Alpin, Talargan, a son of Ungust, ascended the throne ; but this was in violation of the law of Pictish THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 1 77 succession, \Yhich was probably foreign to the habits of the Brythons, to whom he belonged. So we find besides him another king, whose name was Drust, and whose strength presumably lay among the Trans- montane Picts that clung to the female succession. He survived Talargan, who was slain in 782 and is described by one chronicler as king of the Picts this side of the Mounth. Drust, who reigned, no doubt, beyond it among the other Picts was un- doubtedly not a Brython, and was succeeded by one who seems to have been a Goidel — Conall, son of Tadg, who was attacked in 789, or the year after, by the Brythonic king of Fortrenn, whose name was Constantine, son of Ungust. The latter, succeeding, became king of the Picts, while Conall fled to Argyle, where he tried to establish himself; but in 807 Con- stantine asserted his sway over that region. And here it may be added that the hopes of restoring the Scottish kingdom of the Dalriads in Cantyre or Argyle had been fast vanishing : Fergus, the brother of Aed Finn, had died in 781, while three years later, in 784, the bones of the founders, the Sons of Ere, were carried away from lona to be buried with those of the kings of Ulster at Taillten in Meath ; and now the Scandinavian pagans made their appearance on the coasts of the British Isles in 793, which was followed by such terrible devastation, that the Columban community of lona, which was supreme over the Columban churches, both in Britain and Ireland, betook itself partly to Kells, in Meath, and partly to Dunkeld, on the Tay, where N lyS CELTIC BRITAIN. Constantino built a church for them. He died in 820, and was followed by his brother Ungust, who had rule underd him for some years over the province consisting of the old kingdom of the Dalriad Scots of Argyle. He died in 834, and was succeeded, in violation of the Pictish rule, by the son of a previous king, namely Drust, son of Constantine : so we find another king reigning at the same time with him, supported probably by the Transmontane Picts, as usual with them in such cases : his name was Talargan son, of Wthol. They reigned three years, but a competitor arose in the person of Alpin, a descendant probably of the previous Alpin, and the champion of the claims of the same house. He was victorious in a battle in 834, but before the end of the year he was defeated and slain ; and tradition locates the contest in the Carse of Gowrie and Fife. After Drust and Talargan came Uven or Owen, son of Ungust, who had ruled for thirteen years over the Scots of Argyle. As he was the son of a previous king, he probably reigned only over the Cismontane Picts, and that only for three years, from 836 to 839 ; for now there came a great change over the affairs of Pictland, which was led in by the Danes, who had been engaged in plundering Leinster and parts of Ulster. They now crossed to the north of Britain, and succeeded in giving the men of Fortrenn a battle, in which the latter suffered a crushing defeat. The man who reaped the advantages of this expedi- tion, and probably the one who had planned it, was the son of Alpin, the Scot defeated and slain in 834 : THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 1 7/; his name was Cinaeth or Kenneth, and he is usually known as Kenneth mac Alpin. He followed up the defeat of the men of Fortrenn with such success that he soon became master of the Dalriad province in Argyle, where probably there were still many of his Scottish kinsmen, and after a few years' struggle he made himself king of the Picts, his first year being reckoned to have been 844. He died in 860, leaving his family firmly established in possession of the kingdom. One may say, that for more than one hundred years, beginning with the victory of Ungust in 728, no Goidel had before been able to possess himself for any great length of time of the kingdom of Scone, as that of the Picts is sometimes called ; so that Kenneth's reign may be said to have commenced a new era, that of the supremacy, not so much of the Scots as of the Goidels generally over the Brythonic popula- tions and the aboriginal peoples of the country. The changes which accompanied this revolution were important — Kenneth completed, among other things, the reinstating of the Columban clergy. It had been begun by Constantine when he gave Dunkeld to the family of lona, but now a church was built there for the relics of the founder, St. Columba; and the abbot of Dunkeld was placed at the head of the Northern Church. The first of that description is styled bishop of Fortrenn and abbot of Dunkeld, and is recorded as dying in the year 865. All this had, no doubt, been well earned by the Columban clergy, as they may be supposed to have been active supporters of the cause N 2 I So CELTIC BRITAIN. of his family from the time of the earlier Alpin to liis own triumph. Lastly, it may be mentioned, that, whereas the kings of Fortrenn, who were also over-kings of the Picts, had usually been on good terms with the Angles of Northumbria from the time Ungust made peace with Eadberht, Kenneth is described as repeatedly invading Saxony, which meant the territory of the Angles, where he burned Dunbar and Melrose. As to his other wars, we read of the Brythons, probably the Cumbrians of Strath- ■clyde, destroying Dunblane, and of the Danes devastating Pictland as far as Dunkeld. Before leaving this reign it may be added that v>Titers of a subsequent period term Kenneth the first king of Scots who reigned over Pictland, and his father Alpin is likewise called by them king of Scots. So historians have set themselves the task of discovering whence the said Scots came, and have guessed that there was a general rising everywhere of the remains of the Dalriad Scots in favour of Kenneth. It must be readily granted that he was on the father's side a Dalriad Scot entitled to be king of the Scots in the narrower sense of the word, and that some of them were probably to be found both in their old territory and elsewhere, who may have readily joined him. But surely the Scots sought for, were always in the heart of Pictland on the banks of the Tay, the warmest adherents of the Columban Church, and the lineal descendants of the men who had undergone defeat with the earlier Alpin in 728. We hear of Kenneth and Alpin's Scots mostly because writers who used THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. l8l the Latin language called them Scotti. The proper rendering of the latter, however, is Gaels or Goidels, and the chronicles not written in Latin call them such, as does also the Pictish chronicle, though written in Latin, when it speaks of Goedeli instead of Stvtti, in^mentioning the succession established by them in the person of Kenneth's brother.' The acces- sion of this family means, in a word, the supremacy of the Caledonian Goidels over the other nations of Pictland, the Verturian Brythons, and the non-Celtic Picts, the former of whom now began rapidly to disappear, as a people, from history. Kenneth was succeeded, not by his son, but by his brother Domnall or Donald, which was in accordance with the Celtic rule of succession known by the name of tanistry, whereby Kenneth's son only came in after his Other's brother. The establishment of this law is spoken of in the Pictish chronicle as first effected in the time of Donald, and it is referred to in the passage already mentioned as the rights and laws of the kingdom of Aed, in allusion to the Dalriad Scot of that name who died in 778, after trying to set up the old kingdom of the Scots Argyle. Donald's reign was a short one, as we find that Constantine, son of Kenneth, began to reign in 863. Passing by quarrels with the Cumbrians, and struggles with the Norsemen, we find Constantine defeated by the Danes in a great battle in which he fell in the year 876, together with a great many of ' Skene's " Chronicles of the Picts and Scots," p. ?. 1 82 CELTIC BRITAIN. those who were most loyal to his house. He was succeeded by his brother Aed who died in 878, killed, it is said, by his own people, a statement which intro- duces a contest for the throne, in which the Brythonic clement won again for a time a kind of victory. This took place in the person of Eochaid, son of Rhun, king of Alclyde, for the mother of Eochaid — his name is not recorded in its Brythonic form — was sister to Constantine and daughter to Kenneth ; but Avith him was associated, as his tutor and governor, a man whose name was Girg, given also as Giro, Grig, Girig, and Ciric. Whether he ever filled the office of king tradition does not clearly state, but it is note- worthy that it connects him with the district of Mearn, while Eochaid was probably supported by the Brythons of Fortrenn. Bernicia appears to have been now overrun by the Picts and the monastery of Lindis- farne plundered. Girg is said to have reannexed to the kingdom of Strathclyde the Cumbrian district south of the Solway, and also to have Hberated the Picts of Galloway from the yoke of the Angles ; but none of these things are authenticated, though they may well have taken place at this time, as North- umbria, after Eadberht ceased to reign in 758, and his son and successor shortly fell at the hands of his own people, passed out of the power of Ida's family into confusion, which was afterwards grievously deepened by the Danes. As to the Pictish kingdom, we seem to have now to do with a coalition against the dynasty of Kenneth mac Alpin, and the real relation in which Girg probably stood to Eochaid was that of a IHE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 1 83 non-Celtic king of Mseatic descent, wielding the power of the Pictish nation, with Eochaid ruling among the Brythons of Fortrenn more or less subject to him. Lastly, these two kings of Pictland are represented as trying to strengthen their position by conciliating the Scottish Church, which they freed from the various exactions and services to which it had till then been liable. Even this, however, did not avail them against the Scottish, or, more accurately speaking, the Goidelic party, and they were expelled in 889, when Donald, son of Constantine, became king, and the succession was firmly established in the male line of Kenneth mac Alpin. Kenneth and his successors had hitherto been called kings of the Picts, while the country over which they ruled was the kingdom of Scone, or else the land of the Picts, for which a Latin name, Fidavia, was invented by the chroniclers ; but in Donald's time, or not long after, this seems to have begun to get out of fashion, and we find one chronicle^ in recording his death, which took place in the year 900, calling him king of Alban. The next king was Constantine, son of Aed, who was brother to Donald's father. He reigned forty years, during which he tried to consolidate his kingdom by putting the different churches on a footing of equality as to their privileges and rights, at the same time that an end was made of the supremacy of Dunkeld, while the bishop of Kilrymont or St. Andrews came to be called the bishop of Alban. Now at length ' The Annals of Inisfallen, Skene's " Chr. of the Picts and Scots/' p. 169. 184 CELTIC BRITAIN. Constantine's subjects began to get some rest from the Norsemen and the Danes; but they were destined ere long to have to fight with the king of England, for as soon as v^thelstan, who began to reign in 925, found himself firmly established on his throne, he set about annexing Northumbria to his other provinces, and in 926 he got possession of Deira, whence he expelled the Danish prince who had the upper hand there. The latter sought the alliance of Constantine ; but ^thelstan anticipated this by invading Alban by land and sea in the year 933, when his land forces are said to have made their way so far north as Dunnottar in Mearn and another place called Werter- mor, whereby was probably meant the plain of Fortrenn. Thus they would seem to have ravaged two of the most important provinces of Alban ; but three years later Constantine and his men, together with the Cumbrians and the Danes from different parts of Britain and Ireland, met in the north of England at a place called Brunnanburh, and fought a great battle with y^i^thelstin in 937, Avhen they were utterly defeated by the English, ^thelstan died in 940, leaving his throne to his son Eadmund, and Constantine was succeeded in 942 by Maelcoluim or Malcolm, son of Donald. He began his reign by trying to assert his power over the peoples beyond the river Spey, where considerable portions of the country had long been subject to the Norsemen. But a more important event was yet to come : North- umbria had for some time been in the power of- Danish princes, who were kings of Dublin, and THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 1 85 in the habit of deriving assistance from tlieir kins- men in Ireland. They had access to Northumbria through the country of the Cumbrians, who seem to have only been too willing to help them against the Angles, as were also probably the Picts of Gallov/ay. So Eadmund harried Cumbria in 945, and gave it together with Galloway to Malcolm, on the under- standing that he, who was connected by marriage with Anlaf Cuaran, the most irrepressible of the Danish wikings who troubled the country at this time, should give assistance to the English by land and sea against the Danes. In 946 Eadmund was suc- ceeded by Eadred, who proceeded to reduce North- umbria under his power; and, after various contests in that kingdom, we read of it accepting Eadred's rule in 954, who then makes it an earldom. As to its extent towards the north, the Pictish Chronicle tells us that, in the reign of Indulph over Alban, from 954 to 962, the English gave Edinburgh up to him, so that he now ruled so far south on the eastern side of the island as the Lothian river Esk. Dut, instead of one earldom of Northumbria, Bernicia was made soon after 966 into an earldom and Deira into another. Then Kenneth, son of Malcolm, who was king of Alban from 971 to 995, among the first things he did, invaded the more northern earldom so far as the confines of Deira : this he repeated the year after, carrying the earl away as his prisoner ; and it has been asserted that Eadgar, the king of England, gave a great part of Bernicia to the king of Alban as a lief of his crown. But of this there is no proof, and the 1 86 CELTIC BRITAIN. only fact which is pretty clear is, that those northern kings \Yho were in the -habit of invading it, must have believed that they had some sort of hereditary right to it, the grounds of which are no longer known. In the year looo ^thelred, king of England, ravaged the country of the Cumbrians, but did not suc- ceed in wresting it from the king of Alban ; and we find them giving valuable aid to Malcolm, son of Kenneth, who reigned from 1005 to 1034, and con- tinued his family's practice of invading Bernicia. This he did first in 1006, when he laid siege to Durham, and suffered a serious defeat. But now a great event occurred in the year 1014, the battle of Clontarf, near Dublin, where the Danes of Ireland, and their allies from Britain and the smaller islands, met with a crushing defeat. Their power was con- siderably reduced in consequence not only in Ireland but in Britain also ; and Malcolm was at length able to extend his sway towards the north and north-west of Scotland. So in 10 18 he succeeded, with the aid of the Cumbrians, in bringing to the field such a force for the invasion of Bernicia, that he gave battle to the Northumbrians at Carham, near the Tweed, and defeated them so completely that all the land of the Angles north of that river was ceded to him, and it became for the first time the boundary between England and the northern kingdom. For this pro- vince he is said to have done homage in 1031 to Cnut, the king of England. Malcolm died in 1034, and with him died the last male descendant of Kenneth mac Alpin. THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 1 87 The kingdom then devolved on Donnchad or Dun can, the son of a daughter of Malcolm. He was an unfortunate prince, whose troubles began with an attempt by the earl of Bernicia to recover the dis- trict ceded by his predecessor to Duncan's grand- father, and by his invading Cumbria in the year 1038, which induced Duncan to lead a large army to lay siege to Durham, where he met with a disastrous defeat. He was still more unlucky beyond the Forth, where, however, next to nothing is known of his history. Since writers such as Simeon of Durham altogether ignore him as king of Alban, it may be doubted that he ever possessed much real power there; he died, probably in the attempt to acquire it, being slain in the year 1040 by Macbeth, the head of the Transmontane Picts, who bore the title of mormaer or grand steward of Moray. As the latter is said to have been Duncan's general, it would seem that he had tried to conciliate him, and to attach to himself one who was practically inde- ])endent of him. The circumstances under which Macbeth slew Duncan are unknown ; but, as it appears to have happened at a place near Elgin, it may be regarded as the outcome of an attempt on Duncan's part to reduce him to submission : the re- sult was that Macbeth mounted the throne of Alban and occupied it for no less than 1 7 years. For a long time the Norsemen had been in possession, not only of the Orkneys and Shetlands, but also of the north and west of the mainland ; the most powerful of them at this time was one Thorfmn, who was on the I 88 CELTIC BRITAIN. mother's side, like Duncan, a grandson of Malcolm, from whom he had received the title of earl when he was as yet very young. Now one of the first things Macbeth did was to try to force Thorfinn to pay tribute to him as king, and an old Norse story called the Jarla Saga,^ which makes no allusion to Duncan, but calls Macbeth Karl Hundason, or Karl Hound's-Son, gives an account of the war which ensued. Not only did Macbeth's repeated attempts to conquer Thorfinn completely fail, but the latter carried the war into Moray, nor did he leave off before he had cruelly ravaged the country so far as Fife, when Macbeth may be supposed to have been obliged to come to terms with him. The sagas magnify Thorfinn's power, and speak of his possessing no less than nine earldoms in Scotland ; but the details they give go to show, that he had nothing much to do after this with Macbeth's king- dom, at least until the latter wanted his aid, and that he settled down to the ordinary life of a wiking, who spent his winters in the Orkneys, and his summers in harrying the western coast of England, together with AVales and Ireland. So not only did Thorfinn con- tinue at peace with Macbeth, but he was induced by the latter to give him very valuable aid in resisting the attack which the party of Malcolm, son of Duncan, were preparing ; this resulted in a great battle in 1054, but it fell short of dislodging Macbeth, ^ A critical edition of this and the other Orkney Sngas, prepared by Dr. Vigfusson for the Master of the Rolls, has been in type since 1875, but it is not yet published : thanks to the kindness of a friend, the author has had the use of the text. THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 1 89 who seems to have had the united support of the people of Alban, and it was only in 1057 that Malcolm, after having been in possession for some time of the country south of the Forth, was able to drive him over the Mounth and to slay him in battle at Lumphanan in Marr, or the district between the Dee and the Don. At Macbeth's death, the prince who should be mormaer of Moray was set up as his successor, but he was killed after a (gw months by Malcolm at Essy in Strathbolgy, on the north-west boundary of the present county of Aberdeen. Macbeth was not of the family of Kenneth mac x\lpin, but his wife was ; for she belonged to a branch of it, the head of which it had been thought expedient by Duncan's grandfather to kill, lest he might some day stand in the former's way to the throne ; and that Macbeth made the best of his wife's pedigree appears probable from the fact, that, in a grant ^ of land by him and his wafe to the Church, they are respectively entitled king and queen of Scots. But the descent of Macbeth's wife, and the lack of all historical proofs that he was a worse tyrant than the other princes of his time, do not suffice to re- move the difficulty which historians have found in understanding how a usurper was allowed to seat himself so readily and so firmly on Duncan's throne. This is, however, a difficulty which is in a great measure of their own creating, as Macbeth was not a mere usurper ; and he himself probably considered that he inherited the rights of Brude mac Maelchon ' '-'Registr. Trior. S. Andree,"p. 114, Skene's "Celtic Scot.," i. ]x 406, and Reeves's " Culdces," pp. 125, 126. IQO CELTIC BRITAIN. and of Nechtan to the throne, a right which was even of older date than that of Kenneth mac Alpin. In the interval of nearly 200 years, from the begin- ning of Kenneth's reign to the death of Duncan, it is not improbable that the two Celtic races in Cismontane Alban had been rapidly amalgamating together : in fact, we read but little about the men of Fortrenn giving any trouble to the kings of Alban after their great defeat by the Danes and Kenneth's accession ; and it is remarkable that the crozier of St. Coiumba, which served the Goidels as their standard, is recorded to have been borne before the men of Fortrenn in a battle in which they prayed for his aid against the Danes in Strathearn and van- quished them. This was in the year 904, in the reign of that Constantine who undertook to put the churches of different origins on a footing of equality within his kingdom. By the time of Mac- beth, the Goidels and Brythons of Alban might, perhaps, practically be treated all alike as Goidels. But not so the non-Celtic tribes ; for, though the Transmontane Picts had been able to rule down to the Forth, the Celtic kings on the banks of the Tay were scarcely ever able to exercise much power be- yond the mountain barriers, and, though the Goidelic language may have been steadily gaining ground among the nearest non-Celtic tribes, the process of amalgamating the two races must have been a com- paratively slow and tedious one. This is fully borne out by what we read ; for every now and then one finds the men of Mearn acting as it were in the van- THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 191 guard of the Transmontane Picts against the princes of the Kenneth dynasty, who quartered themselves amongst them. Thus it was the former, probably, that put forward Girg in 878 and supported him ; then Donald, son of Constantine, falls at Dunnottar in their country, in the year 900, though we are not expressly told that they killed him ; but Malcolm, son of Donald, is distinctly stated in the Pictish Chronicle to have been slain by the men of Mearn at Fetteresso, in their country, in 954. They had also probably something to do with the death of Kenneth, son of Malcolm, which took place at Fettercairn, in Mearn, in 995, through the treachery, we are told, of Finnola, daughter of Cunchar, earl of the province of Angus : she is made to appear as the avenger of her only son, killed by Kenneth, at Dunsinnan, in the range of the Sidlaw Hills. Nor is it improbable that the men of Mearn and the other Picts took a leading part in the wars of succession of which we have glimpses in the year 997, when Constantine, son of Culen, was killed after he had reigned only three years; and in 1004, when another king of Alban, Kenneth, son of Dub, was slain. The chief of one branch of the Kenneth dynasty seems to have usually fixed himself in Fortrenn, while the other is re- peatedly idenUfied with Mearn, which he most likely tried to treat as Fortrenn had been ; but here the resistance was prolonged, probably owing to the aid the inhabitants derived from the Picts in their back- ground. In what light the dominant race regarded both Fortrenn and Mearn may be seen from certain 192 CELTIC BRITAIN. Irish legends calling them its sword-land,^ a term applied also in the Pictish Chronicle to Mearn. When at length we hear no more of the men of Mearn, the antagonism probably continued between the people of Cismontane Alban and those beyond the Mounth ; but it was no doubt a much more languid antagonism, as the authority of the kings reigning over the former was seldom able to make itself appear much more than a name in the north, which may have required of the most powerful of the northern Picts that he should content himself with the title of mdrmaer or grand steward. But several of Macbeth's immediate predecessors seem to have gone beyond this, and to have claimed to be independent of the king reigning in Cismontane Alban : thus Finlaig, who w^as killed in 1020, is called by one chronicler king of Alban ;^ while another,^ who died in 1029, is so called by another chronicler. Further, when Cnut received the homage of Malcolm, he obtained that also of the wiking at the head of a petty kingdom in Argyle, and of a prince, w^hose name is given in the Saxon Chronicle as Maelbaethe or Mealbseade, w^hich has been emendated by some into Macbeth. If, however, it is to be altered, it is only into Maelbeth, a real name of the same class as the former, and borne probably by a predecessor of Macbeth's. But, whichever of the two he was, he ' See Skene's " Chr. of the Picts and Scots," pp. 10, 319, 329. ^ See the Annals of Ulster and Tigernach respectively in Skene's " Chr. of the Picts and Scots," pp. 368, t^']'!. 'JHE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 1 93 appears to have regarded himself, and to have been regarded by the king of England, as independent of Malcolm ; and his dominions may be supposed to have taken in all Transmontane Alban except a part of Argyle, and a portion of the north which was, together with the Orkneys, doubtless in the power of the Norsemen at that time. So, apart from the relations in which Macbeth personally stood to Duncan, and of which we know next to nothing, his becoming king in his stead was not so much an act of usurpation as a forcible assertion for a time, and that not a very short one cither, of the supremacy of his people over those of Cismontane Alban. Of course the death of Macbeth and his unfortunate successor, Lulach, did not put an end to the aspirations of the northern Picts ; for a time it is true we hear little of them, but in the reign of King David, Angus, the son of Lulach's daughter, who had, according to the Pictish law of succession, become mormaer of Moray, made a formidable attempt to secure the throrue of Scotland, though it ended in his defeat and death in the year 1130. Still later in the reign of David's grandson, Malcolm, we read of severe measures being taken in 1 1 60 to reduce to quietness the people of Moray, and of grants of their lands being made by the king to the barons by whom he surrounded himself. The amalgamation already indicated of the Celtic peoples of Alban during the period of nearly two centuries from the accession of Kenneth mac Alpin to that of Macbeth must have added to the ini- portance of the Goidelic element in the kingdom ; so o 194 CELTIC BRITAIN. its heads now began to have in Latin the title of king of Scotia and of 7'ex Scottorimi, that is to say, king of Goidels, though it is oftener rendered by the ambiguous phrase of king of Scots. This, it need hardly be said, had little to do with the connexion of Kenneth and his ancestors with the Dalriad Scots, as the fashion seems to have risen only in the tenth century, and was followed in the ensuing one, among others, by Macbeth. But at the same time that the name of Goidel extended itself to all the Celts of Cismontane Alban and the province of Dalriada in Argyle, the term Cruithnig, or Picts, may be supposed to have gained in de- finiteness of meaning by becoming more closely identified with the Transmontane Picts, who probably had the most right to it from the first. To what extent Goidels had intermixed with these descendants of the neolithic inhabitants of Britain it is impossible to say ; nor is one as yet able to trace in Scotch topography the retreat, step by step, of their language, as it remains an unknown tongue. It is found, however, that in Columba's time there were men of rank on the mainland opposite the island of Skye, with whom he could not converse in Goidelic, as there were also peasants of the same description in the neighbourhood of King Brude's head-quarters near the river Ness, while there is no hint that the saint found any linguistic difficulty in making his way at that monarch's court. So it would seem that Goidelic was already asserting itself in that district, and that it was not very long before it had THE PICTS AND THE SCOTS. 1 95 made much progress in the region east of the Ness, though the aboriginal language may be supposed not to have died out of the country for some time after' the Danes and the Norsemen began to plunder these islands. That the Goidelic idiom vigorously spread itself in all directions under the Kenneth dynasty might be expected from the nature of the case ; and as against the Brythonic dialects this is amply borne out by the topography of Scotland. A few instances, some of which will bring us south of the Forth, will suffice to show the kind of evidence they afford. Thus Verturiones was probably the traditional form of a Brythonic word, but the later one of Fortrenn is Goidelic, and one does not even know what the later Brythonic form may -have exactly been, though we seem to have traces of it in the Wertermortmi^ already cited from the pen of Simeon of Durham,^ and possibly in the modern name of hMi(:es of Maelgwn himself, that Daniel, or, as he is called in Welsh, Deinioel, be- came the first bishop of Bangor in Arvon, whither he came from the great monastic establishment at Bangor on the Dee. We have, then, to look elsewhere for the explanation of the comparative lack of inscriptions in the Brythonic area of Wales, and we are forced to believe that it arose from a difterence in the manner of burying the dead. Among the first things to strike one is the fact that the country of the Ordovices is almost wholly devoid of those rude stone structures called cromlechs, which are found to crowd together in the same districts as the inscriptions, especially the island of Mona and the countv of Pembroke ; and the 246 CELTIC BRITAIN. conclusion darkly suggests itself that it was the same race that set up the cromlechs and erected the maenhirs or longstone monuments of the Principality; probably we should not be far wrong in considering the maenhir to be as old, to say the least of it, as the cromlech, and merely a less elaborate and expen- sive way of attaining the same object of commemo- rating the dead ; but it is a question which archaeology cannot be said to have seriously considered, or even perhaps clearly formulated, though it undertakes to distinguish the burial-places of the Celts from those of the pre-Celtic peoples of Britain, the former having the round barrows assigned to them, and the latter the long ones. This may be, in the main, correct, and it may be that the archaeologist has no data to help him to more exact results, but he should bear in mind that his study of the tombs falls short of the historian's wish so long as he cannot tell the resting-place of a Brython from that of a Goidel, and both from those of the neolithic native. Both the latter would seem from the latest archaeological investigations to have buried in long barrows, but some of those barrows contain the dead placed with care grimly to sit in their subterranean houses, while others disclose only the huddled bones of men and beasts, as though they were the remains of cannibal gorgings. Can both be ascribed to the same race? We doubt it. As to the peoi:)le, however, of the Brythonic branch who have not been given to the erection of great stone monuments, there is no difficulty in supposing them to have continued in Christian times their use of the THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 247 barrows, of Avhich so many scores are known clus- tering around the ancient temple of Stonehenge and in other parts of the country. Now, the mound of earth which we call a barrow, or a tumulus, offered no great opportunities for the writer of epitaphs, but the maenhirs did ; so it may be assumed that, when the Goidels became acquainted with writing and had the example of the Romans before their eyes, they not un- willingly began to imitate them in having their monu- ments lettered. But a survey of the latter, both in Britain and Ireland, gives one the impression that what they still chiefly thought of was the size and durability of the stone used ; it might be inscribed or not, that was an after-thought and a luxury unknown to their ancestors. But, in case any writing was indulged in, the language was usually Latin, which seems to have continued to be the official and learned tongue. In about two dozen instances, however, in this country the Goidelic language was used mostly to accompany a Latin version, and written in a peculiar character called Ogam. This last would seem to have been invented by a Goidelic native of Siluria or Dcmetia, who, having acquired a knowledge of the Roman alphabet and some practice in a simple system of scoring numbers, elaborated the latter into an alphabet of his own fitted for cutting on stone or wood. Thence, we presume, it was propagated to Ireland, especially the south and south-west ; and, on the other hand, to Devon, but hardly at all, so far as one can discover, to Cornwall, and only sparingly to North Wales, while the Ogams of Scotland need not be 248 CELTIC BRITAIN. discussed, as tliey seem to be of later introduc- tion, showing traces of the influence of manuscript writing on parcliment. Looking at the Ogam epitaphs of Ireland, of which more than 200 are said to have existed, and most of which are still extant in the counties chiefly of Waterford, Cork, and Kerry, one finds that, though they belong to Christian times, the burial-places in which they occur are commonly un- connected with churches, and used only for interring unbaptized persons, or else no longer used at all : thus it would seem that they are the old pagan burial-places, continued to be used in Christian times by a Christian people. The stones are, in many instances, the objects of a reverence bordering very closely on worship, a state of things of which we find a trace in the Welsh legend^ about St. David splitting with a stroke of his sword the capstone of the cromlech in Cower, called Maen Cetti, in order to show to the people that it had no divine attributes: thereupon they are said to have been converted to his religion. The belief, however, in such stones was probably far too deeply rooted to be readily got rid of, and the Church possibly had no diflriculty in making them arti- culate witnesses to a kind of merit recognized by a class of inscriptions in Wales, dating usually about the eighth century or later, and having nothing exactly corresponding to them in any other part of western Christendom. One, for instance, runs thus :— " The cross of Christ : Enniaun made it for the soul ' lolo MSS., p. S3. THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 249 of Guorgoret ; " and another thus : — " In the name of God the highest begins the cross of the Saviour, which Samson, the abbot, prepared for his own soul and for that of Ithel, the king," &c. Another, however, near Bridgend has been supposed to be of the begin- ning of the seventh century, and it runs thus : — " Con- belHni set up this cross for the soul of his scitUvissi." The last word is unmistakably Goidelic, and must have meant a man versed in tales, one, in fact, whose profession was that of story-telling. But this class of inscriptions is not to be severed from another which is still better known, especially in Ireland. It may be illustrated by the following specimen from Gwnnws in Cardiganshire : — " Whoever shall have read this name let him give a blessing on behalf of the soul of Hiroidil, son of Carotinn," the name alluded to being a figure forming at once a sort of a wheel-cross and the Greek monogram of Christ.^ Returning to the older inscriptions, they seem to show that by the sixth century the Ordovices had carried their Brythonic speech into the district north of the Mawddach, and even into that portion of the modern county of Carnarvon which consists of the old deanery of Eivionydd, and looks, as it were, to- wards Harlech ; but the country from the Mawddach to the north of Eivionydd was made up of Ardudwy and Eivionydd, which together are sometimes called Dunodig, from Dunod, a son of Cunedda, who is ' These are respectively Nos. 73, 62, 67, and 122 in Hiibner's " Inscrip. Brit. Christ."; sec also Westwood's " Lapid. Wallice." 250 CELTIC BRITAIN. said to have conquered it from the Goidels. How far Brythonic speech had then penetrated into the neigh- bourhood of Snowdon it is impossible to say, but ^Ye find a decidedly Goidelic epitaph so far east as the im- mediate neighbourhood of Ruthin, in the basin of the Clwyd. In South Wales most of Cardiganshire was probably still Goidelic, though it had long been con- quered by the Cunedda family under the lead of Keredig. But not only was all the country north of a line from the Wyre to the bend of the Wye near Talgarth, in Breconshire, or thereabouts, now pro- bably Brythonic, but the Goidelic country south of it seems, if we may trust the indications afforded by the inscriptions, to have been severed into two regions, of which the one lay west of the Towy, and the other on both sides of a line drawn from Brecon to Neath, in Glamorgan. More exactly speaking, the latter con- sisted of two distinct districts, a southern one between Cardiff and Loughor, and a northern one in the upper valley of the Usk, with Brecon as its central point, and taking in the old deaneries of Brecon, probably the ancient patrimony of Brychan, who has so large a place in Welsh hagiology. Both he and his nume- rous offspring may have been more Goidelic than Brythonic, though they were in various ways allied with the Cunedda family. The country east of these two districts, from the hills of Brecknock and the lower course of the Tafif, seems to have become Brythonic : when and how, it is very hard to say. It was brought about partly, perhaps, by the influence of the nearest Brythonic tribes east of the Severn, as THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 25 1 suggested by the fact that one^ of the most important inscriptions of ancient Glamorgan commemorates a prince called Bodvoci, a name at once Gaulish and Brythonic, which had been in esteem among the Dobunni, on whose gold coins it figured before they submitted to the Roman yoke. It was partly due also, no doubt, to conquests of the Ordovices in the direction of the mouth of the Severn, The history of those conquests, however, is lost, but attention has already been called to the power of Maelg^vn over all parts of South Wales, and we have possibly a proof of the southern advance of the Ordovices in Dinas Powys, the name of a place in the vicinity of Cardiff. The epigraphic map, if we may use the term, further sugsrests that the eastern Goidelic districts w^ere cut off from connection with the western one by a strip of Brythonic land, reaching from the country of the Ordovices to the basin of the Towy, and down the eastern bank of that river to the sea. This, it will be seen, would include the district of Kidwelly, from which, together with Gower, Nen- nius^ expressly mentions the driving out of the Goidels by Cunedda and his Sons. But Welsh tradi- tion sometimes ascribes the expulsion to Cunedda and Urien of Rheged, and sometimes to the latter alone ; while the districts in question are specified to have been Gower and Kidwelly, together with Carnwyllon and Iscennen, between the Tawc and the » See Hiibner's " Inscrip. I3rit. Christians," No. 71, and Rhys's " Lectures on Welsh Philology," p. 386. 2 San-Marte's " Nennius and Gildas," p. 2^^. 252 CELTIC BRITAIN. Towy, together with its tributary the Cothi.^ Nennius mentions Urien as one of the four kings of the Brythons opposed to Hussa, who began his reign over Bernicia in the year 567. The reason for his leaving the North is probably to be sought in the feuds which culminated in the great battle of Ardderyd in 573, where the combatants on both sides are inferred to have been Celts. The conquests of Urien in the land of the southern Goidels do not appear to have formed an integral part of the Cunedda legend, so we seem to be at liberty to place them in this part of the sixth century. But it is needless to say that they were hardly undertaken without the leave of the over-king of the Cunedda dynasty. This measure may have been called for by the Goidels trying to assert their independence, and Urien, who could, for some reason or other, be spared from the North, may have been made use of to crush them with his following of Brythons. In any case the result must have practically put an end for ever in South Wales to the aspirations of the Goidels, if they had any. There are other indications to the same effect, especially in the legendary life of St. David, written by Rhygyvarch, bishop of St. David's, in the latter part of the eleventh century.^ We are there told of a severe struggle be- tween the saint and the prince called Boia. This pagan chief, who was not a Brython, but is sometimes called a Scot and sometimes a Pict, was, of course, discom- ' lolo INISS., pp. 70, 71. ^ It has been alluded to at p. 226 : see also *' Cambro-Brit. SS.," pp. 1 17-143. THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 253 filed by the miracles David is said to have wrought ; and in due time both he and his wife came to a bad end, which may be taken to mean that the saint was backed to such an extent by the power of the Cunedda family, to which he belonged on the father's side, that local opposition was of no avail against him. The name of the king ruling over Demetia at the time when Gildas v.Tote, was Vortiporios, a decidedly non-Goidelic name, which appears in the Nennian genealogies in the Welsh form of Guortepir, son of Aircol, whose name must be the AVelsh reduction of the Latin Agricola. Aircol's father was Triphun, which also seems to be a non-Goidelic name, but Triphun and his sons are said to have been the princes of Demetia at the time of St. David's birth. During some part of KingTriphun's reign, Keredigion seems to have been ruled by Sanctus or Sant, the son of Keredig, and the father of St. David, accord- ing to the legendary life of whom Sant had become a monk, and gone to Demetia, when he met the nun who became the mother of St. David ; but the incident is easier to understand if we suppose him to have been at the time not only king of Keredigion, but possessed of power enough in Demetia to enable him to do there much as he liked. In either case, the king of Demetia does not seem to have had much authority left to him as against the princes of the house of Cunedda. The ancestors of Trii)hun had possibly made the best of the situation by adopting the religion of the dominant race, and allying themselves by mar- riage with the Cunedda dynasty ; but that Triphun 254 CELTIC BRITAIN. had non-Brythonic blood in his veins seems to be indicated by his pedigree, which is traced back to a Dimet, who, whether a real ancestor or the eponymus of the people of Demetia, connects him unmistakably with the Goidels of that region, or else with the non- Celtic aborigines, who gave its name of Moni ludeorum to Mynyw or St. David's. Lastly, as to David, it is important to bear in mind that he also was probably a Goidel, on the mother's side : this exjDlains at least, in part, why his labours were always directed to the Goidelic districts, and also why men from Ireland came to sit at his feet. It, moreover, gives a meaning to a curious passage in the life which describes how Gildas's preaching in Demetia was, once on a time, brought to an abrupt end by the mysterious influence of the greatness of David, even when he happened to be present only in embryo. The story seems to make too great a difference between the two men in point of age ; but the fact it dimly sets forth is that Gildas, who was a Brython of the Brythons, could not hope for the same following among the Goidels as a man, who to his connexion with a powerful Brythonic family added probably a native's knowledge of Goidelic speech, and com- plete sympathy with everything Goidelic except Goidelic paganism. But it is in Cadoc that we find David's most formidable rival. Cadoc, like his brother saint, may have been connected by blood with the house of Cunedda, but whether that was so or not, he seems to have had the support of Maelg^vn, its redoubtable head ; and, like David, he seems to THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 355 have possessed the qualifications calculated to make his ministration acceptable to the Goidels. The reputation, however, which he has left behind him is rather one for learning and wisdom ; while churclies dedicated to David are to be found here and there in all parts of South Wales, except that Avhich formed the old diocese of St. Padarn. The Brythonic people who may be presumed to have buried in barrows have left us an inscription in Alontgomeryshire, and another in Merionethshire, in both of which the deceased is said to have been placed in a barrow or mound — in tumulo : the same expression occurs also in an epitaph not very far from Edinburgh, and another at Yarrow Kirk, in the county of Selkirk. This contrasts with the great majority of the epitaphs from the Goidelic parts of Wales and Dumnonia, in which we are simply told that the deceased "lies,"y<2«V, or "lies here," Jiic jacit. There are, however, a few of the former de- scription on Goidelic ground or on its boundaries : one such occurs in Cornwall, one or possibly two in South Wales, and one in Carnarvonshire, in which the dead is said to lie in a congeries lapidum or cairn of stones.^ All these interments belonged, probably, to Brythons, or were made under the influence of the Brythonic fash- ion spreading among the Goidels. Compared with the other and more numerous epitaphs, they are on an ' See Hiibncr, Nos. 125, 131, 211, 209, 7, 52, 234, 136 : compare also Kuhn's "Beitroege," iii. p. 73, where Stokes gives Gaulish and Irish parallels, and San-Marte's '* Xennius and Gildas,"p. 78. 2^6 CELTIC BRITAIN. average longer and fuller, more in accordance with the Roman custom, and characterized by a far greater variety of formula, which would seem to show that they appertained to a people much more given to writing than the Goidels can have been, though the latter made more use of it in honouring the dead. It is probably with these Brythonic burials that we have to class the cairn, removed in 1832, in the immediate neighbourhood of Mold, in Flintshire. It was believed in the country around to be haunted by a spectre in gold armour, and when more than 300 loads of stones had been carted away the workmen came to the skeleton of a tall and powerful man placed at full length. He had been laid there clad in a finely wrought corslet of gold, with a lining of bronze : the former was found to be a thin plate of the precious metal, measuring three feet seven inches long by eight inches wide. Near at hand were discovered 300 amber beads and traces of something made of iron, together with an urn full of ashes and standing about three yards from the skeleton. The work on the corslet is believed to have been foreign, and is termed Etruscan by Prof. Boyd Dawkins.^ The burial belongs to an age when cremation was not entirely obsolete in this country, and we should probably not be wrong in attributing it to the time of the Roman occupation. On the whole, the duty of commemorating the dead among the Celts maybe sup- posed to have devolved on the bards to whom we are probably indebted for the seventy or more triplets ' See his "Early Man in Britain," pp. 431-433. THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 257 devoted to this object and preserved in a Welsh manuscript of the twelfth century.^ The last of them, which, remarkably enough, has to do with a grave in this same district of Mold, runs as follows, when freely rendered into English : — Whose is the grave in the great glade ? Proud was his hand on his blade — There Beli the giant is laid. A word now as to the people whom the Celts found in possession of the island when they came here : little is known for certain about them, though a good deal may be inferred, as we have had frequent occa- sions to suggest. From the nature of the case the first Celtic invaders, that is to say, the Celts of the Goidelic branch, were those who had most to do with the aborigines, and it may be doubted whether the Brythons ever came much in contact with them. So when they adopted Celtic speech and Celtic habits^ it was those of the Goidels and not of the Brythons : and, looked at from the opposite point of \ic\v, it is hardly open to doubt that the Goidelic race was profoundly modified in many respects by its absorption and assimilation of the indigenous ele- ment. It is here, in fact, we are to look for the explanation of a good deal of the difference of speech between the Welsh and the Irish, not to mention that the study of the skulls of the present inhabitants of the British Islands, of their physique and complexion, has convinced anthropologists that we still have among us a ' See Skene's "Ancient Books of Wales,'" ii. [•>[•. 2S-35. S 258 CELTIC BRITAIN. large number of men wlio are at least in part the de- scendants of non-Aryan ancestors. Indeed, we seem to detect their influence on the Goidels even \Yithin the narrow circle of their ancient inscriptions. The sub- ject is a difficult one, and we can only touch it super- ficially. The full Aryan proper name was of the class to which such instances as the Greek Qao-cctjpog and AojpO'Oeog belong, from Oeoc, god, and cwpov, a gift; and abundance of names compounded in the same easy way are to be found in every Celtic language ; but by their side the Goidels have others which are not compounds, and to which the other Aryan" languages offer few parallels. One of these is Maccu Deceti or Decet's Son, a name which occurs in epitaphs in Mona, in Devon, and various places in the southern half of Ireland, with Deceti spelt in such a variety of ways as to suggest a non-Celtic origin. It was probably the name of a god-ancestor or eponymus, and we seem to have it, as already observed, in a Brythonic form in the name of the people called Decant?e, in the north of Scotland, and of the Decanti of the Decantorum Ai'x or Degannwy, in North Wales, whence we are, perhaps, entitled to suppose that Decanti was one of the names the Brythons gave the Goidels in the background of the Ordovices. Still more instructive is such a name as Mael-Umi, the slave or servant of bronze, which possibly testifies to a national devotion to the sword, a weapon which the ancient Irish regarded as inspired and capable, among other things, of giving the lie to the perjurer; for w^^/ means shorn or tonsured, and THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIiY. 259 here refers, probably, to the tonsure with wliich the Goidels were familiar as denoting servitude,even before the Church introduced a somewhat different observance among them. They went on forming Christian names in the same fashion, as may be learned from such well- known instances as Mael-Phadraic, Patrick's slave, and Gille-Christ, Christ's servant, Anglicized respec- tively ATulpatrick and Gilchrist. ^ Another word used in the same way was mug or mog, a slave, as in the proper name, Mog - Nuadat, Nuada's - Slave, where Nuada — in Welsh, Nudd — was a name of the god of the sea. Irish legend makes him husband of the Boyne, and the Silurians worshipped him under the name of Nodens, or Nudens, in a temple of Roman make at Lydney, on the western bank of the Severn. To the same class belongs Mog-Neid or Mog-Net, Net's-Slave, a name in which Net was, according to Cormac, that of a god of war of the pagan Goidels. More correctly speaking, he seems to have been a war - god of the non - Celtic race in both Ireland and Britain ; for an old inscription in the county of Kerry gives the name without a case-ending, and so marks it out as a probably non- Celtic word ; and it is worthy of notice that the man's name Mog - Net, appears in the eighth century among the Transmontane Picts of Alban as evidence that the same amalgamation of the same races had begun there also. It is read Moneit, so given in one of the chronicles as the name of the father of Biceot, ' See page 72 of this volume, and compare Semilio names like Abdicl, &c. S 2 2 6o CELTIC BRITAIN. one of the officers of Nechtan when he was defeated by Ungust in 729 near the waters of the Spey. The Kerry monument^ alluded to introduces us to another remarkable class of names, for it is found to com- memorate a man called Net's- Hound son of Ri's- Hound. The latter usually becomes Roi in Irish literature, in the name of a well-known legendary hero, called Cii-Roi mac Dairi, or Roi's-Hound son of Dairi. This Ri or Roi was probably another of the sods of the non-Celtic race, as was also most likelv Corb, from whom the names of men, Mog-Corb, Corb's-Slave, and Cii-Corb, Corb's-Hound, were de- rived. Plenty more of this dog nomenclature could be produced from Irish literature, such as Cii-Ulad, the Hound of the Ultonians, and Cii-Mide, the Hound of Meath. Macbeth is also probably a name of the same kind. It was current in Ireland as well as in Scotland, and was sometimes treated as purely Goidelic, which would make it mean Son of Life ; but such an abstract interpretation is discountenanced by Maelheth, which was likewise used in both islands, and must have meant the Slave of Beth. That this last word meant some dog divinity or dog-totem, is suggested by the probable identity of Macbeth — not, as we think, Duncan — with the Hundason, or Hound's -Son, of one of the Orkney Sagas that relate to their time. In that case, Maelbeth would be a partial translation into Gaelic of the ' See Brash's *' Ogam Monuments," p. 175, and plate xvi., from which the right reading appears to be Ccmt Nctt moqvi Conu Ri, and compare the Hebrew Caleb, dog. IHE KTtlNOLOGV OF BRITAIN. 26 1 name, whicli, completely rendered into it, produced the Maelchon we have more than once mentioned in connexion with the Pictish kings ; this, at any rate, meant the Hound's Slave. Similarly Macbeth, put wholly into Goidelic, would be Mac-Con, or the Hound's Son, wliich occurs as the name of a mythical prince, whose sway was not confined to Ireland, but extended, according to Cormac, to the part of Britain in which Glastonbury stood. Mac-Con may, perhaps, be regarded as representing the whole non-Celtic race of tliese islands. It would fill too much space to go into the details of this question, but enough has been said to make it probable that the dog was a most highly respected totem or god of that race, and also to call to mind the words of Herodotus, who would seem to have heard of some such a people when he speaks of a race called the Kynesii or Kynetes ; both of these terms have the look of Greek words mean- ing dog-men. His first mention of them comes in the second book (c. 33), where he speaks thus: — "The Celts are outside the Pillars of Hercules, and they border on the Kynesii, who dwell the furthest away towards the west of the inhabitants of Europe." The other occurs in the fourth book{c. 49), where he speaks in the same way, mentioning the Celts as the furthest away towards the setting of the sun, with the exception of the Kynetes. So far as the words of Herodotus go, one might suppose that the rac^e he had in view was the non-Celtic one of Britain and Ireland ; but later writers, such as Avienus, locate them in the west of the Spanish peninsula, which suggests a still more 262 CELTIC BRITAIN. important inference — namely, that there existed in Herodotus's time a Continental people of the same origin and habits as the non-Celtic aborigines of these islands. AMiat the name of the latter was in this country we are not quite sure, but in Ireland it \Yas Ivcrnii in Ptolemy's time ; and he mentions a town there called Ivernis, and a river Ivernios. To these may be added various forms of the name of the island, such as Juvenal's lunerna^ distorted more usually by the Romans into Hiherfiia ; the Ivenia of a graffito to be seen till lately in the Palace of the Caesars in Rome ; the Irish Eriu^ accusative Erimi ; and the Welsh Iiverddoii; not to mention 'Itp''?? dis- embowelled of its V or w by Greek pronunciation, just as in Irish itself an early Tverjo has yielded Eriu, while the name of the Iveniii appears as leriii} Erni, and Erna in Irish literature, which musters them latest and strongest in Munster, though they are also made to give its name to Loch Erne in Ulster. It may be added that the fact of our having the same word as the Goidelic name of Ireland used also as that of the river Earn ^ in Scotland, suggests that one would not, perhaps, greatly err in applying the term Ivernii^ or Ivernian, to the non-Celtic natives of Britain as well as of the sister island. Their eponymous ' This important form is to be inferred from icr dieniaib (Iver de Iverniis), in " Lebar na h-Uidre," p. 99a. ^ See Berchan's Prophecy in Skene's " Chr. of the Picts and Scots," pp. 84, 88, 98 ; also a confused bit of geography cited in Reeves's "Culdees," p. 124, where sraith hi rend must refer to Stratherne. THZ ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 263 ancestor in the latter is variously called ler, lar, Er, Ir, Eber, Emer, and Heber,^ while the legend makes the whole Irish people- descend from two brothers, of whom Emer was the one, and much to their credit, Airem (genitive Eremon) the other, whose name means a ploughman ; for he represented the Aryan farmer who introduced agriculture, however rude, among a peoj^le of hunters or shepherds, and is, moreover, described as the first in Ireland to yoke cattle for work. This is all in harmonv with what is stated in the old Irish Eaws, that in P2rinn all law emanated from the Feini or the waggon - men, whence it was sometimes called Feineachus/^ As the Celt was destined to have the upper hand over the Ivernian, the legend makes Airem slay Emer, and seize on the southern half of the island, which was sup- posed to have been the latter's kingdom ; but the two races agreed in being warlike, so the two brothers are described as the sons of a soldier or warrior, whom the legend therefore calls INIiled in Irish, and Miles in Latin, whence the so-called Milesian Irish. But this phantom soldier sometimes had another name — Galajii '* or Golani, meaning likewise a warrior or a brave man, from the word gal, passion, violence, valour, and of the same origin as Galli, the alternative designation of the Continental Celts, the meaning of ' B, VI (modern bli, viJi) usually represent the sound of z'. ' See Fiacc's Hymn in Stokes's " Goidelica," pp. 127, 131. ' See the " Senchus Mor," i. pp. 52, 116. < See O'Curry's "MS. Materials of Ancient Irish History," p. 447. 264 CELTIC BRITAIN. which we have ah-eady tried to explain. But the simple division of Ireland between the two ancestors of the Irish proved insufticient for the legend-mongers, since there were descendants of Emer in the north as well as in tlie south ; so the legend got complicated with an Er or Ir, differentiated from Emer or Heber to be his son, and to be the father of the northern Ivernians. These last partly succumbed to the northern O'Neils and partly retreated beyond the Bann to what was afterwards known as the country of the Irish Picts or the Scots proper : there they stubbornly resisted the advance of the Ultonians, though some of them found it necessary to seek a home in Britain. Next to Munster this land of Dalriada, Dalaraide, and Dalfiatach re- mained probably the most thoroughly Ivernian and the least purely Celtic in the island. It was found necessary to expand the story about Miled in another direction by giving him an uncle to bear the name of Itli and account for several places in Ireland called Mag-Ithe or the plain of Ith. This was probably non- Celtic, and it entered into the name of the Scotch island of Tiree, known formerly as Tirieth and Terra Hith. It is most likely the same name which we have met in that of the Lothian town of ludeu mentioned by Nennius, and in that of the Judic people of the district around St. David's. While we are at this subject of the names of the ancient inhabitants, we may as well mention another, that of Firbolg, given them in Irish legend, and explained as meaning the bag-men or sack-men. That would be right if we had here to do with the THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 265 Irish word bolg ; but it is more probably a different one, and an Ivernian vocable, since it occurs as the epithet of a Pictish king called Gartnait, and as Bolge comes among Pictish names in the legend of St. Andrew.^ It meets us also probably in the country of the SelgovK, in the name of a place called Blatum Bulgiuui in the Antonine Itinerary, and supposed to have been situated near Middleby Kirk, not very far from the river Annan ; and also, perhaps, in the country of the Tsexali in the modern name of Strath- bolgie in Aberdeenshire, to which may be added Bolgyne from Macbeth's grant of land already men- tioned. In Ireland it enters into names like Diinbolg, near Donard, in the county of Wicklow, and Murbolg Dalriada, in the county of Antrim ; while in Wales, where the word takes the same form of bol as the Welsh for belly, we have a w^ell-established group of such place-names in the middle of Anglesey, as Cors y Bol, the swamp of the Bol, Rhos y Bol, the moor of the Bol, and Pen-bol ; also Llanol, formerly Llanvol, the church of Bol.~ At what time the Ivernian language became extinct in Ireland it is impossible to discover, but in Munster it appears to have not been long dead when Cormac wrote a sort of glossary in the ninth century, and alluded to it as the Iar?i or iron language ; for, ' Skene's " Chr. of Picts and Scots," p. 1S7. "^ There is no cliuich on the spot now, but an early inscription has been found there : see Rhys's " Lect. on Welsh Philology," p. 361 : the form Lanvol occurs in the " Record of Carnarvon," p. 63. 2 66 CELTIC BRITAIN. owing to an accident of Irish phonology, both isern-, the early form of the Celtic word for iron, and Iveru- must become ia?'7i in the later stages of the language, so that Cormac believed that in larn he had the ordinary Irish word for iron, or affected so to believe in order to proceed to explain, that it was so called on account of the difficulty of seeing through it, owing to its darkness and the compactness of its texture. He has, however, recorded two of the Ivernian words known to him, namely, fern, anything good, and ond, a stone : but these, together with Net, Corb, Ri, and others in his work that may be suspected of being Ivernian, have hitherto thrown no light on the origin of this language ; but should it turn out that those who without hesitation call our Ivernians Iberians, and bring them into relationship with the Basque- speaking people of France and Spain, are right in doing so, one could not at all wonder that Cormac considered the Ivernian a dark speech. In the north of Ireland the latter may have been extinct in the time of Adamnan ; and Columba in the sixth century cannot have known it, which, nevertheless, does not prove that there were no peasants who spoke it there in his time. However that may be, Adamnan mentions a name into which ond, a stone, possibly enters, to wit, that of Ondemone, a place where the Irish Picts were beaten by the Ultonians in the year 563 : it seems to have been near the Bann, between Loch Neagh and the mouth of that river. As for Britain, one of the most thoroughly non-Celtic portions of it south of the Clyde was probably that of the THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 267 Selgovce or hunters, in Roman times, and later the more limited Pictish district beyond the Nith, but there is nothing to prove that they had retained their non-Celtic tongue down to the sixth century, or lost it before the Roman occupation. North of the Firths it is otherwise, as we have indications in Adamnan's "Life of Columba" that the language of the aborigines was still a living tongue. Adamnan wrote a little before the close of the seventli century, and his work has come down to us in a manuscript of the eighth. Now Columba, about w^hom he wrote, came from the north of Ireland, and spoke the Goidelic language : he passed over to the new settle- ment of the Dalriad Scots in Cantyre in 563, when he was forty-two years of age. Shortly afterwards he had the island of lona given him, where he estab- lished his religious house, over which Adamnan pre- sided in a later age. Not long after Columba's coming over to Britain he crossed Drumalban on a mission to Brude, king of the Picts, who had his stronghold in the neighbourhood of the river Ness, not far, probably, from its mouth. To him and his men he appears to have had no difficulty in making himself understood. But when he was, as we are told, in the province of the Picts, probably a little later but in much the same district, we read of him preaching to peasants or plebeians by interpreter. At another time he happened to be in the island of Skye, when a boat arrived with two young men who brought their aged father to be baptized by Columba. This time also he preached by interpreter, though the convert 268 CELTIC BRITAIN. bore the Celtic name of Artbranan, and is described as the chief of the Geonians, called by Adamnan Geona Cohors, in which we seem to have the name of a people of the mainland called Cerones in the manuscripts of Ptolemy's Geography. They had their representative among the legendary sons of Cruithne in that one of the latter called Ce. The use here made of the word cohors has already been noticed as a rendering of the Goidelic word dcil, which is proved to have been applied to the people of that region by the Goidels by the name Dalar, which the Norsemen were wont to give the Western Highlands, though it has been the custom of historians to try to derive the name from the Dalriads of Cantyre. The question now arises as to what was the language of the people whom Columba could only address by interpreter. There were in Britain two groups of Celtic dialects, the Goidelic and the Brythonic ; but there is no reason to suppose that the peasants near King Brude's palace were Brythons, and still less probable is it that those who visited Columba in Skye were of that race. It has usually been supposed that they merely differed from the missionary Scot in speaking a Goidelic dialect, which was not his ; but such a view does scant credit to the devotion of the early saints of Ireland to their work, and there is no reason whatever to suppose that they could not speedily master dia- lectical differences, which at most were of no very important nature in that early age. So far from that being the case, the usual silence as to interpreters THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 269 suggests that it was not a rare thing for Goidels to master the language of the Brythons, and the latter that of the former, so far as to be able to make their way in one another's country, though it must have given them infinitely more trouble than any dialect closely akin with their own. It remains, then, that the language of the people who could not understand Columba was not Celtic, but in all probability that of the ancient inhabitants. In the district where the power of the Picts grew into a considerable state, where the remarkable succession, known as Pictish, obtained and lasted longest, it appears that Goidelic was unintelligible to the peasants in the sixth cen- tury, while in the west, opposite Skye, even men of rank among the Picts could be found who knew no Goidelic, though they had begun to adopt Goidelic names, just as, in Wales, many a John Jones has that English name, though he cannot speak English or pronounce his name in the English way. Here may also be mentioned Argyle^ as it is found variously called Oirir Gaithel, Airer Gaethel, and Arregaethel, meaning the region belonging to the Goidels or Gaelic - speaking people, just as Airer Dalriatai meant the country of the Dalriads ; so, to give the word Argyle its full meaning, it must be supposed that, at the time it came into use, the Picts to the north of the district properly so called were as yet not Goidels : that is to say, they still had a language of their own. Bceda enumerates^ the peoples of Britain, ' " Ilibt. Ecc'.,"' i, I. 270 CELTIC BRITAIN. in whose languages Christianity was taught in his day, as being the Angles, the Brythons, the Scotti (that is to say, the Goidels), the Picts, and the Latins. But so far as regards the Pictish language, the significance of his words is sometimes explained aw^ay by supposing it to have been a Celtic dialect lying somewhere betw^een Brythonic and Goidelic, but rather nearer the latter ; there is, however, no reason to suppose that was Breda's view, as, in the case of English, he w^as content to let the language of the Angles stand for all the dialects without mentioning, for instance, that of the Saxons. For a long time, probably before Pictish or Ivernian wholly died out, it was loaded with words borrowed from Goidelic ; but there is no ground whatever to suppose that it other- wise resembled it or any other Aryan tongue ; and, if what we have surmised as to the name Macbeth should turn out well founded, it w^ould tend to show that the non-Celtic speech did not become completely extinct till about the restoration for a time, in the eleventh century, of the Pictish kingdom, in the person of the king so called. The subject cannot be here gone into at length, but w^e may say that there are data which go to prove the non-Celtic aborigines to have spoken what was practically one and the same language in both Britain and Ireland, and that it wall probably be found to have been derived from the same source as Basque. Moreover, we are inclined to believe that it has left its influence on Goidelic, which W'Ould go to show that where the ancient inhabitants were unable to hold their ow-n they THE ETHNOLOGY OF BRITAIN. 271 were not extirpated by the Goidcls but gradually assimilated by them. At first the Goidel probably drove the Ivernian back towards the west and the north, but, when another in\'asion came, that of the Brythons, he was driven back in the same way ; that is, he was, forced so to say, into the arms of the Ivernian native, and to make common cause with him against the common enemy. Then followed the amalgamation of the Goidelic and Ivernian elements ; for wherever traces of the latter are found we seem to come upon the native in the process of making himself a Goidelic Celt, and before becoming Welsh or English in speech he first became Goidelic in every instance south of the Clyde. This means, from the Celtic point of view, that the Goidelic race of history is not wholly Celtic or Aryan, but inherits in part a claim to the soil of these islands derived from possession at a time when, as yet, no Aryan waggoner had driven into Europe ; and it is, perhaps, from their Kynesian ancestry that the Irish of the present day have inherited the lively humour and ready wit, which, among other characteristics, dis- tinguish them from the Celts of the Brythonic branch, most of whom, especially the Kymry, are a people still more mixed, as they consist of the Goidelic element of the compound nature already suggested, with an ample mixture of Brythonic blood, introduced mostly by the Ordovices. And as to \\'clsh, it is, roughly speaking, the Brythonic language as spoken by the Ordovices, and as learned by the Goidelic peoples they overshadowed in the Principality of 272 CELTIC BRITAIN. Wales. To this its four chief dialects still correspond, being those, respectively, of Powys, Gwent or Siluria, Dyved or Demetia, and Venedot or Gwynedd. Skulls are harder than consonants, and races lurk when languages slink away. The lineal descendants of the neolithic aborigines are ever among us, possibly even those of a still earlier race. On the other hand, we can imagine the Kynesian impatiently hearing out the last echoes of palaeolithic speech ; we can guess dimly how the Goidel gradually silenced the Kynesian ; we can detect the former coming slowly round to the key-note of the Brython ; and, lastly, we know how the Englishman is engaged, linguistically speaking, in drowning the voice of both of them in our own day. Such, to take another metaphor, are some of the lines one would have to draw in the somewhat confused picture we have suggested of one wave of speech chasing another and forcing it to dash itself into oblivion on the western confines of the Aryan world ; and that we should fondly dream English likely to be the last, comes only from our being unable to see into a distant future pregnant with untold changes of no less grave a nature than have taken place in the dreary wastes of the past. APPENDIX. ADDITIONAL NOTES ON SOME OF THE NAMES IN THE TEXT. Abbedomaros, p. 7,6. The second i)ait of tliis name, tnaros, is supposed to be the same word as the Welsh mazur, great, large, Irish mar or 7ndr, and it enters into a great many Celtic names. With regard to the other part, it is first to be observed that some of the Gallo-Brythonic Celts of antiquity lisped their ss in certain positions into (55 or l)d ; but this habit was neither general nor has it come down into Welsh. The genitive of A^'^edoinaros is read Assedomari in an inscription found in Styria (Berlin " Corpus Inscr. Lat.," iii. No. 5,291); and a Welsh name, partly identical, is met with in a Welsh ]\IS. of the twelfth century, to wit, Giiynnassed (see " Skene's Ancient Books of Wales," ii. p. 32), which would now be written Gwynasedd. But the number of Welsh words that should throw light on the meaning of asedd is somewhat embarrassing : first comes rt'^^r//, a rib, i)lural m, ribs, also the roof beams which run the length of a house ; then we have an asedd, which would, at first sight, seem to be the word wanted, but is probably a collective ])lural o^ as-en standing for an earlier rt'/zj'/A?; lastly may be mentioned aset/i, which may be a variation of the same word as asscdo : it means a spit or spear. T 2 74 CELTIC BRITAIN. Thus A^^edomaros would appear to mean one who is great as to his spear, and Gwynasedd would be, so to speak, Whitespear. The related forms are Gothic aiis^ a beam, O. Norse ass, a pole, a main rafter, a yard ; also probably the Latin asse?-, a beam, pole, or stake. It would thus appear that a^'S and ass in the name in question stand for an earlier a^is, and this has an important bearing on the interpretation of other old names. A different theory, which I am unable to accept, has been proposed by the learned professor M. d' Arbois de Jubainville, in his recently published work, entitled "Etudes Grammaticales,"pp.32"^ — 38.'^ Adminius, p. 34. The form Ammijius, which is the one on coins, shows that Adminius is a Latinizing of Amminios under the influence of the notion that the name began with the prefix ad. Alauna, p. 158. We have possibly the same name in the Welsh Ailun, borne by a stream that joins the Dee not far from Chester. Allobrox, p. 137. Allobrox, pi. Allobroges, appears as such, forming the name of a Celtic people in Gaul. It is likewise read Allobrogae, a word thus explained by a scholiast on Juvenal, viii. 233: — "AUobrogae Galli sunt. Ideo autem dicti AUobrogae quoniam hrogae Galli agrum dicunt, alia autem aliud ; dicti autem Allobroges quia ex alio loco fuerant translati " (see Jahn's "Juvenal," p. 303, and Diefenbach's "Orig. Europ.," s. V. AUobrogae). So the alio- of this name goes with the Greek aAXo-, as against the Latin aliu-s ; for the Gallo-Brythonic Celts agreed with the Greeks in making Ij (j = y in the Eng. word yes) into II; Brox, broges, and brogae are represented in Welsh by bro, a district or country. The Irish form mruig, more frequently bruig, has been ascertained to be the same word as the English march, and German mark, a boundary or district. Probably the Latin ADDITIONAL NOTES. 275 viargo, edge or boundary, is derived from the same source. The old Gaulish had made ?ur into bf, as Welsh has in bro, which enters also into the Welsh word Cyini'o^ a AVelshman, pi. Cynii'}\ for Coin-h'ox and Com-bj'oges respectively. The vowel of the second part varied in Welsh as in troed, foot, traed, feet, since the AVelsh word for a Welshwoman is Cyjuraes, and for the Welsh language Cytnraeg, implying early forms, Comhr'agista and Combragica. All this tends to show that the original combination was mrg^ which has been simplified differently in the different languages. The national name, Cyjuro, seems to have been confined to the Kymric Celts, though the Bretons sometimes give the simple bro the sense of compatriot ; and, whether the Kymry have ethnologically anything to do with the Ciinbri or not, the names have abso- lutely nothing in common, in spite of what charlatans may say to the contrary. Atecotti, pp. 56, 218. This seems to be the most correct spelling of the word, as it is probably to be resolved into Ate-cotti, the latter element being prac- tically identical with the Cornish word cotJi, Breton coz^ old or ancient. Ate is the early form of the prefix which appears in modern Welsh as ad^ at, in such words as adgas or atcas, odious, from cas, hateful. With Atecotti as meaning ancient inhabitants, compare the Irish Tuath Se?i-Chciieoil and Tuatli Sen-Ej-ann, the tribe of the Old Race, and the tribe of the Old Iver- nians respectively, in the lists of Irish tribes in O'Curry's " Manners and Customs of the Ancient Irish," vol. i. pp. xxviii. &c. Anteorigus, p. 37. The coins give Aiitedrigus, AnteO and other abbreviations ; so I have ventured to regard the name as Ante'(Sn'giis of the U declension, though the meaning of the word is obscure. Atrebates, p. 9. It is also treated as Atrebatii^ T 2 276 CELTIC BRITAIN. which has been resolved into Ad-treb-at-, and derived from ad-trcb, whence the Irish verb attrebim, " I dwell or inhabit," and the Welsh athref in the term tir athref^ whereby was meant the land immediately around the dwelling. Thus it appears that Atrebates meant in- habitants, but probably in the special sense of farmers or homestead men. It may be added that the Welsh word tref has its equiv^alents in the English thorps German dorf, and their congeners. Belerion, pp. 45, 214. It is true that Ptolemy's MSS. read Bo/Vffjtor, and that belre is always regarded as having its first vowel long ; but that is not quite con- clusive against the equation suggested in the text. There might, however, be some difficulty in seeing how such a term could become the name of a district, and it is to be observed that the word formerly meant more than the language of a people, to wit, the customs and laws that formed the accompaniments of that language ; thus Irish law is called the Berla of the Feni in the " Senchus Mor," ii. 32, iii. 544, and similarly the Canon Law, the Gospel or Christianity, is called the Berla Ban, that is, the white or sacred Berla, in the same, i. 16. Belg.e, p. 42. The derivation and meaning of this word are unknown, but one thing is certain : neither the people nor its name had anything whatever to do with the Irish Fir-bolg. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the Belgae were Teutons. Belisama, p. 68. The meaning of the name is unknown, but in point of form the word seems to be a superlative like Uxama : this occurs in the name of a Gaulish town in Spain called by Ptolemy Uxama Barca which would in Welsh be Barca Uchaf or Upper Barca, literally, in accordance with Celtic idiom, Uppermost Barca. BiTURix, p. 65. The plural was Bituriges, and the name of the people is now perpetuated by the town ADDITIONAL NOTES. 277 of Bourges : it seems to ]ia\e meant Weltherrscher or world-kings, hitii being the same word which we have in the \\'clsh hyd, world, Irish, />////, gen. bet ho. BoRESTi, pp. 88, 94. It is difficult not to regard the first two syllables of this name as the Brythonic equivalent of the word forest, which comes to us from the Low Latin foresta. The Boresti were very pro- bably the same people as the Verturiones ; and in that case they formed the outlying portion of the nation of the Brythons, and dwelt on the outskirts of the Cale- donian Forest. Blaton Bulgion, p. 265. I have no idea what this curious name really meant, but the following notes m.ay be of interest : — The story of Branwen, daughter of Llyr, describes Bran, her brother, leading a host to Ireland and on the point of being received into a spacious palace by the Irish, when one of his men, having gone before, found that they had two hundred bags in different parts of the building containing each a warrior ready for battle : he asked the Irish whnt was in each bag {bol), and they per- sistently replied that it was meal {blawd). He went round, and quietly killed all the soldiers in the bags by squeezing each man's skull between his fingers : then he sang an e?igly?t on '' the curious kind of meal " he had found in the bags ("Mab.," iii. pp. 95, 96; 120, 121). On the Irish side we have the account of the battle o( DihiboIg\\n Wicklow, published by O'Don- novan in his edition of the "Four Masters" under the year 594, when, according to some, it took place. This story makes a provincial Irish king Bran Dub conquer the King of Erinn by passing in the night into the latter's camp with a large number of wild horses and some thousands of oxen bearing hampers on their backs. The hampers were supposed by the sentinels to be full of food for the King of Erinn, but 278 CELTIC BRITAIN. they contained armed men, who presently attacked tlie camp, and tied small bags full of stones to the tails of the wild horses to increase the confusion. The result was the utter defeat of Bran's enemies, and that the place came to be called the fort of the sacks or Dihibolg. Thus it would seem that a non- Celtic w^ord bolg^ taken to be the Celtic word of the same pronunciation, was the source of these tales ; and it is remarkable, that, \i Blaton Bulgion be treated as Celtic, it appears to yield the early forms for meal and ^^^ respectively, the identical words, in fact, which we found used in the Mabinogi of Branwen. BouDiccA, p. 66. This or Bodicca is doubtless the most correct form of the name, though it is not clear why the c is doubled : the ordinary Boadicea is the gibberish of editors. The name occurs as Bodicca in a Roman inscription found in Africa (Berlin, " Corpus Inscr, Lat." viii. No. 2877), and Bodiccnis is read in an inscription commemorating a man belonging to a cohort oi Britto7ies in Pannonia (iii. No. 3256). But Boudica or Boudicas is the spelling in a Roman in- scription found in Spain (ii. No. 455), and the name Budic was not an unusual one formerly in Brittany. It is commonly supposed that they are all of the same origin as the Welsh word hiidd^ benefit, advantage, and buddtigol, victorious, so that Boiidicca might perhaps be equated in point of meaning with such a Latin name as Victor ina. Brigantes, pp. 39, III. Some would have it that this name meant mountaineers or hill-men from the same origin as the Welsh bre^ a hill, and bry7i^ the same. But there are other words which seem to offer a better explanation, such as Welsh bri, renown, eminence, braint^ privilege, formerly written bryeint for brigeint-, representing an early brigaiitia or briga?iiio?t according as the word was fem. or neuter. ADDITIONAL NOTES. 279 From the stem brlgant- was formed an adjective brigaiit-in-, which was reduced in Cornish to braiiyn or bryntyn : it meant noble, free, privileged, the contrary of kti/i, enslaved, while in Welsh it became brcenhi/i, now brenJiin, a king, which has nothing to do with Breniius, though old-fashioned philologists fancy it has. Phonologically brij^ant- in all these words is the Gallo-Brythonic form of a common Celtic brii^e?if- which with the nasal suppressed we have in the Irish name Brigit (for Brigentis of the / declension), St. Bridget or Bride. On the whole, then, Brigantes would seem to have meant the free men or privileged race as contrasted with the Goidelic inhabitants, some of whom they may have reduced under them. Caledonia, p. 87. This was probably a word like Britannia, made by the Romans, while the native term may be supposed to have been Calido, genitive Cali- dinos, whence Caildenn in Diinchailden or ]3unkeld, and in early Brythonic Calido, genitive Calidonos, now Celyddon as in Coed Celyddon, the Caledonian Forest. Calgacos, p. ^2>. "i'his seems a preferable spelling to Galgacos, as the word if Celtic may be derived from the same origin as the Irish word colg or calg, a sword ; but another etymology is suggested by the Irish word ceig, cunning, treachery : compare the name of the Irish hero called Celtchar ?ia Ceig or C. of the Wiles, in an Irish poem to be found in Windisch's " Irische Texte," p. 215. Calleva, pp. 24, 29. This possibly meant a town in the wood, and is to be exjjlaincd by means of the Welsh collective cell-i^ a wood, a copse : the simpler form cell meant a grove as in cell ysgaw^ a grove of elder, but it has been ousted by and confounded with the other cell^ which is the Latin cella : the Irish word was colli or caill, a wood. If this guess be right, it would suggest that the first syllable of the present 2 60 CELTIC BRITAIN. name Silchester stands for the Latin word silz'a. The other Calleva has been identified with Haslemere entirely without regard to that name; but the ques- tion offers itself, whether it be an accident that, if the name be supposed to have been CoUeva or Coldeva, we should then have in the first syllable a word which meant hazel, the Welsh for that still being coll. Camulodunon, p. 26. The locative occurs on coins as Camuloduno. Duno7i is the word which makes dm, a fortress or town in Welsh, and the whole name seems to have meant the town of Camulos, who appears as one of the gods of the Gauls. His name also seems to enter into the proper name Camelorigi on an early inscribed stone in Pembrokeshire, and Camuloris^ Camiilorigho on a lead coffin found in Anglesey: see " Lect. on Welsh Phil," pp. 364, 400. Cantion, p. t8. This name is perhaps rightly explained by means of the Welsh word cant, the rim, border, or circumference of a wheel or anything round : in that case the name of the people, the Cantii, was derived from it and not vice versa : but this is very uncertain. Caratacos, p. 35. The Romans wrote Caratacus, and the editors have made it into Caractaciis, which is gibberish. Cai'at- represents the passive part, of the verb, which is in Welsh car-7{, to love, and the affix -de is frequently used in proper names. The name is very common in Mod. Welsh as Caradog, and in Irish as Carthach, genitive Carthaig, perpetuated in an Anglicized form by the Irish families that call themselves MacCa?'thy. Carausius, p. 92. The origin of this name is uncertain : it probably became popular in Britain, for we find it on an early inscribed stone at Pen- machno, near Bettws y Coed. ADDITIONAL NOTES. 28 1 Carbantorigon, p. 228. This maybe taken to be a somewhat perverted spelling of Carbantorion, much in the same way as we had Bergyoi for Iberian. ^ The geographer of Ravenna writes simply Carbantium. Cartismandua, p. 39. It is also found written Carti- mandua, and the second element seems to be the same as the first part of the name Maudubratios, and we ha\e it in such Gaulish ones as Viro?nandin and Epotiiaiiduodiu'on. Cassi, p. 28. Supposing the ss to stand here for an earlier ns, the name might be taken to be connected with the Gothic /la/isa, a band or host, German hanse^ a league, whence the name of the Hanse Towns. The word Cassi in that case appears to have meant allies or confederates : see Veneii. The tribal idea of a common ancestor had perhaps given or been giving way to the more purely political one of alliance and mutual defence : see Caiti and A^^e- domaros. Cassivelaunos, pp. 15,243. The reading adopted by the best editors of the Latin texts in which the name occurs is Cassivellaunus, but I have little doubt that the // is no more warranted here than in Uxelo- du?io?i, which see. The whole name would secn>, in accordance with what has already been guessed with regard to Cassi, to mean a ruler of the league or a tribe-king ; for Velaunos probably meant a prince or one who reigned, the root being the same as that of the Welsh ^'7t'/rt'^, Irish Jiaith (pp. 67, 135), English, 7c>ie/d, German, ivalten^ to rule, and probably also that of the Latin valere, to be strong. The epigraphic instances in point are the following : — (i.) Vellav- Nivs in an inscription at Caerleon (Berlin *' Corpus Insc. Lat." vii. No. 126). (2.) Catvallavxa, de- scribing the nationality of a woman married to a Palmyrene husband and buried at South Shields 2 62 CELTIC BRITAIN. (" Ephemeris Epigraphica," iv. p. 212, No. jiSa): the inscription commemorating this Catuvelaunian lady is in somewhat rustic Latin, and the compound has dropped the formative vowel of the first element in the compound, so that Catu-velauna is here read Cat-vallauna. (3.) Velavni, the name of an Alpine people (''Corpus Insc. Lat.,"v. No. 7817,45). (4-)'^^- LAVNis, the nominative of a man's name in two inscrip- tions found in Spain (iii.Nos. 1589, 1590). (5.)Valamni, the genitive of a man's name on an Ogam-inscribed stone from the county of Cork, and written in Mod. Irish FoUamhaiii in the family name O' FoUamham^ which English spelling simplifies into G Fallon. The forms with val for vel represent probably a somewhat later stage of pronunciation among the Brythons than the others do, and the Goidelic Valaiimi further suggests that they and the Gauls had already begun to soften mn into 77/, so that it would, perhaps, be more correct to write Cassivelavnos. Welsh tradition before the time of Geoffrey of Monmouth probably knew little of Cassivelaunos : his name was shaped after the analogy of Cadwallon and the like into Caswalloji, which was then not unfrequently substi- tuted for the former in quasi-historical writings. Cadwallon., however, is most likely a name very differently formed, standing, as it may be supposed for Catiiveljo., genitive Catiivcljonos ; and a Brythonic veljo., veljonos, would in Irish be somewhat of the form felin., fele?in or foliu^ folann, and we have a derivative from it in the Irish verb follnaiin., I reign. Besides an early Brythonic veljo, there was probably a velatros^ of the same meaning, which is postulated by the Welsh name Cadwaladr. They are, most likely, to be kept distinct from the valos implied by such a name as Cadival, identical with the German HathovulJ\ and meaning battle-wolf, where Welsh wal'vs, to be equated ADDITIONAL NOTES. 283 witli the7C'c>//so common in German and English proper names : this 7lU7/, in its turn, yields derivatives in $■ came to disappear, would be dfmeo, liable to become dunio. This last may be compared with the latio of an early inscription in South Wales, which would be the rule-right equivalent of the Latin geni- tive lateris (Rhys's " Lect. on Welsh Phil.," p. 398). From dime or duni, which would thus be the base for the oblique cases, nothing would be more natural than for the word, seeing that it was neuter, to take the form coviioy and duniuin^ in the writings of Greek and Latin authors, in case it had not been ADDITIONAL NOTES. 293 Brythonicized into dunoii before reaching them. The Peutinger Table gives the name of a town fifteen miles from Isca Dunuionioriim as Ridujuo, to be read an ablative Ridu7iio; but the name is probably incom- plete, and it has been proposed to take it as standing for Mon'diniio, and as indicating Wareham. Moridu- nion would mean the sea-fort ; and it was probably also the name of Carmarthen on the tidal part of the Towy, though it is only called Mariduuo7i by Ptolemy. A Moriduiiion at Wareham would just fit the order in which the anonymous geographer of Ravenna gives the name of a town he calls Moriduiuuu. But, if any regard be had for the positions indicated in the Peu- tinger Table, Ridunio should rather be a mutilated form of the full name of our Dn7iion^ and this should then perhaps be completed into Dnridunion, as the antecedent of the modern name Dorchester. This matters little, of course, so far as regards the question of dunioii versus dunon : see also Uxelodiinoii. DuROLiPONs, p. 225. This has been supposed to have been situated at one of the three places, Ramsay, Cambridge, or Huntingdon. The Antonine Itinerary gives it in the ablative as Duroliponte, so that there cannot be a doubt that the Romans thought they detected in the name their word pons, a bridge ; but it is quite possible that this was only a guess ; and it is remarkable that the next station in the Itinerary has the name Durohj'ivcv, which, seeing that hriv- meant a bridge (being, in fact, the Celtic cognate of that English word. An. -Saxon hrycg^ just as "Welsh 7vy is in English cg^, would have had, practically, the same meaning as Durolipons, for duroli would have to be regarded as a derivative from duro ; and DurobrivLV is all but the same name as that mentioned in another route as Durocohriv-is^ with a derivative duroco by the side oi duro: compare Dojuriovcros and 2 94 CELTIC BRITAIN. Douiuocoveros. So it is quite possible that the Romans were mistaken, and that the name in question is to be divided Duro-lipoiis^ with the same lip as in the personal name Ciinalipi^ a genitive in an early in- scription recently discovered in Carnarvonshire. As ^ to the other element diiro^ so often met with in Celtic names of places in Britain and Gaul, it appears to mean door, gate, or porch, and to be of the same origin as the Welsh dor and drivs, Irish dorus^ a door, and the English word and its congeners. Duroco in Dm'ocohrivis is probably the same word as the highly interesting duorico of a Gaulish inscription, in which it seems to have meant some kind of a portico (De Belloguet's " Ethnogenie Gauloise," i. p. 300). But, though the etymology of ^/-rr^ in Celtic names is tolerably clear, it is not very evident what it exactly meant : did it refer mostly to the gates or entrances of strongholds, or to those of temples, as in the case of the Gaulish Iron-Door mentioned in the life of Eugendus (Act. SS., Jan. i, vol. i. p. 50, and "Lect. on Welsh Phil.," p. 26)? Lastl)^ the etymology of the word suggests the possibility of some of the duro names being of the same kind as Foriun Jiili, Forum VocoJit, and the like in Gaul, Spain, and Italy. DuROTRiGES, pp. 20, 214. The meaning of the name is obscure, but the compound would seem to resolve itself into Duro- and trig-es : it is remarkable, however, that the name seems to admit of being equated with that of the Irish people, called Dart- raighi^ who have left their name to Dartry, in the county of Leitrim. Ebud^, p. 221. This name has been so treated in later times that it has passed through Hebudes into Hebrides, and attached itself to the islands north west of Scotland. ADDITIONAL NOTES. 295 EcENi, p. 28, see Ceiiimagiii. Epaticcos, p. 26. This name seems derived from the Gallo-Brythonic word for a liorse, which must have been epo-s^ whence the A\'clsh cbol^ a colt ; but the termination, with its double r, reminds one of Boudicca. Epeiacon, p. 225. The affix dc would give the name the force of a word meaning a place abounding in, or in some way associated with, that which is denoted by the preceding syllables. The base, which we have here as epei^ would imply a noun epeio-s, -a, or -71 derived from epos, a horse ; but whether the deriva- tive meant some kind of a horse, or a horseman, is impossible to decide. The word Vei'eda (of which Voreda, the other form in the MSS., would be a some- what later one) also referred to horses, as it can- not be severed from the Welsh word goncydd, a horse, which would imply a masculine Teredos. Possibly, while I'CJ-edos was a horse, a feminine vereda meant a col- lection of horses or cavalry. Compare the Greek, '/-TTOf, liorse, and // "nrr^or, cavalry. Veredos is the word which became in Late-Latin veredits, whence the hybrid paraveredus., the original of pa/frey and the German ^/y^;-^, a horse. Eppillos, p. 23. It is remarkable that in this name the p appears always double, which can hardly be deemed etymological, as it is probably a derivative from epos. The double / in such names seem to stand for /plus J (the semi-vowel j). Epillos would be exactly the Welsh word elnll, an auger, a chisel, the key of a harp, though literally it ought to mean a little horse. Galli, pp. 2, 263. Here the double / is of the same origin as in Eppillos and Allobrox : the nomi- native singular would be Gallos for Galjos. The root- word gal meant any thrill, passion, or rage, no nice 296 CELTIC BRITAIN. distinction between violence and valour having been attempted. The feminine Gallia is probably of Roman creation. Gangani, p. 230. Ptolemy mentions the headland of the Gangani as VayyavCov uKooy, and this is to be traced later in Pentir Ganio7i^ or the headland of Ganion, the home of a Goidel, mentioned in a pas- sage in the " Mabinogion" (ii. pp. 208, 209), where he is spoken of under the title of arderchawg Prydein^ or prince of Prydein. Here Prydcin is, as elsewhere not unfrequently, an error for Prydyn or Pictland, and so the name must have been once applicable to a part of Carnarvonshire. Besides the Pictish Gangani of Wales, Ptolemy places a people of the same name in the west of Ireland. I should gather from the Welsh Ganion that the early form was Gangnanes or Gangnones. Gerontios, p. 95. This is the name which has yielded in Welsh Gereiiit and Geraint^ borne by the man alluded to on p. 107. Compare Amhrosius becoming Emreis^ though more commonly Emrys. IvERNA, p. 262. Dr. Neubauer, who looked for the graffito last year, found that it had been effaced by the weather ; but a few years before it was care- fully examined by the Rev. John Wordsworth, who has kindly communicated the following reading to me : — Bassus Cherronesiia et Tertius Had7'U7neti7ius ct Concessns Iverna, The names appear to be those of three slaves, and the fact that the one from Ireland was called Concessus is remarkable ; for, though that name seems to have been uncommon in Britain, it can be matched by a Co7icessa, to the use of which, in this country, we have testimony in the later form Conchess, the traditional name of St. Patrick's mother. Co7icessus, Co7icessa, Concessaiuis, and the like, are found to have been by no means unusual names in other parts of the Roman world ; but the only form of ADDITIONAL NOTES. 297 this group known in the Roman inscriptions of Britain is Co?iLessi?iii{S on a stone found at Hexham (vii. Ko. 481). M/EAT.t, pp. 90, 155, 159, 168. The name, as it occurs in Reeves's ''Adamnan's Life of St. Columba" is Miati and MiatJii. The meaning of the word is unknown, but there is no reason whatever to think that it has anything to do with the GoideHc word mag^ a plain or field, as some take for granted, who have no notion of perspective in language. Maglocunos, p. 120. This name has been suc- cessively softened down into Mailcon or Mailcun, and Maelgwn — not Maelgwyn. It is not to be con- founded with the Irish Maelchon, for Brythonic ?naglo-, is in Irish nnil, a prince or hero, while Irish viae/, a tonsured (slave), is in Welsh" vioel, bald or bare. The elements of this compound also made a name Cinwmaglos : the genitive C(^ ;/d7;;/<7^// occurs ("Lect. on Welsh Phil.," p. 369), and the Modern Welsh is Cyn- vael. The accentuation would seem from the modern forms to have once been Maglocihios and Ciitioinaglos, which is confirmed by the doubling of the / in such Irish forms as Conall of the same composition as the Welsh Cynwal^ and represented by the Cuiiovali of an inscription found in Cornwall (Hiibner's '' Inscr. Brit. Christ.,"' No. 2). Maponos, p. 225. The monument to Apollo Maponos, found at Hexham, stands about four feet high, and the lettering is said to be of the finest de- scription ; but there are two other inscriptions wliich refer to this god. The one was found in the parish of Ainstable, in Cumberland (vii. No. 332), while the other had been cut on a fine piece of sculpture, made pro salute of the persons concerned, and dis- covered at Ribchcster, near Bkickburn, in Lancashire (vii. No. 2 1 8). The name Maponos or Mabon is de- 29S CELTIC BRITAIN. rived from mapo-s, in Old Welsh iiiap^ now niah, a boy, a youth, a son, and is formed like Welsh ^'■uvt?;/, a hero (from ^wr^ a man). Mabon means a boy, and is best understood by looking at the Greek representations of Apollo, according to which he was ever young and vigorous, and by calling to mind that in Irish mytho- logy the solar hero Ciichulainn was always beardless, which his admirers of the other sex sometimes ex- cused by pretending to believe that he was young. Beside the youth of Maponos and his concern for the health and safety of his worshippers, we learn the following things of him as the Mabon of the " Mabi- nogion": — He is a great hunter, who has a wonderful hound, and he rides on a steed as swift as a sea-wave; when he was three nights old he had been stolen from between his mother and the wall, no one knew whither ; numberless ages afterwards it was ascer- tained by Arthur that he was in a stone prison at Gloucester, uttering heart-rending groans and under- going a treatment with which Apollo's bondage in the house of Admetus could not compare ; Arthur and his men succeeded in releasing him to engage in the great hunt of Twrch Trwyth, that could not take place without him ("Mabinogion," ii. pp. 225-6, 234-5, 286-7, 300-1); and, lastly, he is always called son of Modron, the name probably of his mother, since Modron implies a stem modr, the reflex of the Latin mater, Eng. mother. Moreover, Modron is the exact equivalent of the Gaulish word Matrona, the name of the river (more correctly perhaps of the god- dess of the river) now called the Marne. Apollo and Leto or Latona, with the corresponding Celtic duad Mabon and Modron, suggest the interesting question, how far the place of the Madonna and Infant Jesus in Greek and Latin Christianity had been prepared for them by the Aryan paganism that went before. ADDITIONAL NOTES. 299 Welsh haglology has very little to say about saints of the name of ^laboii : it is quite possible that one or another of them is simply Apollo Maponos in a Christian garb. From the order in which Maponi comes in the lists of British places given by the anonymous Ravennas, his temple would appear to have been somewhere in the south of Scotland or the north of England. Ordovices, pp. 80, 215. The plural Ordovices seems to be an adjectival formation from a simpler word Ordoz'O-s, which is Latinized into Ordous in Corba- lengi's epitaph : the plural would be Ordovi, which we seem to have in the name of a farmhouse, near Rhyl, in Flintshire, to wit, Rhyd Orddivy or the ford of the Ordovi. The further advance of the Ordovices is also marked by the strong position now called Dinorwig in the neighbourhood of Carnarvon, being, as it seems, formerly called Di?io?-dd7cn'g, the fortress of the Ordovices: see Duppa's "Johnson's Tour in N. Wales," p. 198, where it is spelt Dinon-ddivi^. But still more significant is the fact learnt from the frag- ment on boundaries in the " lolo MSS," pp. 86, 477, which gives the district between the Dovey and Gwynedd the name Cantref Orddwyf or the Hundred of the Ordovi : I have not succeeded in tracing the original, which lolo calls a book of r^Ir. Cobb's, of Cardiff; but the fact speaks for its genuineness, that neither he nor his son, who undertook the translation into English, understood it; and the addition of/ to Orddivy^ as it were after the analogy of Dyf)duyf^ is probably due to the former. The district aj^pears to have got to be called Y Canircf or the Hundred par exceUerice^ so that the distinctive word Orddwy ceased to be repeated. Others would explain these names by means of the ^^'elsh word gorddicy, violence or oppression ; but violence was so general in former 300 CELTIC BRITAIN. days as considerably to disqualify the word for topo- graphical use. The etymon is probably to be found in the Welsh \\ord. gordd, a hammer or sledge-hammer, which was in Old Welsh ord as it has always been in Irish. The Ordovices were originally the hammerers, and the kind of hammer meant was probably the formidable axe-hammer of stone, of which specimens have been found in different localities in Britain : archaeologists believe it to have been meant for war and used down into the Iron Age. Pennocrucion, p. 226. This name consists of pennO'S, head or top, crTicio-^ which became in Welsh cruc^ now (Tn/g, a heap or mound; the whole would mean the top or head of the mound or barrow, possibly the top mound. It is now Penkridge, and an intermediate form Pencrik occurs in an eighth century charter of ^thilhard of Wessex: see Kemble's "Codex Diplo- maticus," No. Ixxvi. Pencrik represents the Welsh pronunciation which would then have been Pencruc^ just as nearly as regards the narrow u as Baeda's Dinoot does the personal name, which in his time was Dufiot, later Dunawd, being no other than the Latin Donaius in a Welsh form. The English having afterwards made Peiicrik into Penkridge, nothing was more natural than to divide it in the wrong place into Penk-ridge : hence it is that the river close by is called the Penk. Petuaria, pp. 39, 226. This would be the word for fourth, agreeing with a feminine noun which is not given : the exact modern equivalent is the Welsh pedvvaredd, quarta, which suggests that the old form was \)xor\ouncQ^d. petiuarija. Regni, p. 23. If the word is of the origin sug- gested, it would probably have been more correctly written Pegnii, a derivative from the Latin word regnu?n. To the Regni most likely belonged the ADDITIONAL NOTES. 30I town of Regentium mentioned by the anonymous Ravennas. Remi, p. 29. Reini was the name of the leading Belgic people, and it would seem to be of the same origin as the Welsh word rJnvyf^ a king, Irish riani^ before, and the Latin p?i//ius, first ; compare the English first and the German ////'i-/, a prince. The name of the Remi would thus be of the same flattering description as that of the Caturiges and others. SciTLivissi, p. 249. The viss of this word is pro- bably of the same origin as the Irish verb fess, was known, fissi, "sciendum," and the English word wise. The other part, scitli, is closely allied with the Old Irish seel, a story, news, and so-scele, good news, gospel. The Welsh equivalent is chzuedl, for an older clnuetl, of the same meaning as the Irish seel. The two taken together prove the common Celtic stem to have once been sqvetl. If this is to be treated as standing for s(e)qv£tl, as suggested by Prof. Zimmer, we have to do with a word of the same origin as the English say and the German sage?i. The reduction by the Goidels of original sqzf to se, and by the Brythons to si- (whence Welsh elnu) may prove of some use in distinguishing between the Celts of the two branches of the family; since we have it in other Welsh words, such as ehwydii, to vomit, Irish seeith, and Welsh ey-eJmyn, to start, Irish, seiud, flew, sprang, started. Segantii, p. 217. The alternative Setantii is given in Ptolemy's Geography, and, similarly, the name of the river is either Segeia or Seteia : probably the former is to be preferred, as of the same origin as other genuine old names such as that of the Segontiae Hercules at Silchestcr, and of the people called — Segontiaci, p. 17, who came to make peace with C?esar. To them must also be added the name of the Roman fortress near Carnarvon, called Segontiofi, 302 CELTIC BRITAIN. which is made in Welsh into Seionl, and even into Saint in the name of the river flowing by. The syl- lable sc-^ in these words is probably of the same origin as the German sit"^, victory, and its congeners, and Segeia was most likely not so much the name of the Ribble as of the divinity of the river. Selgov.e, p. 2 1 8. This is explained by the Irish word selg^ hunting, the chase, as in coiii seilge, a pack of hounds, Welsh cwn hela: the Old Welsh word for Jnmt was helgha, now helia and hela. Senotigirnos, p. 41. No coin gives more than Seuo in one part and tigiripr tigip) in another. Seno- tigirnos would be in Welsh hen-d'eyrn^ from //lem." Greek, however, has no parallel to v-^T]X(jc, but the Celts have one in the Welsh adjective I'sel, Irish, ise/j low, from the old preposition m (in Mod. Welsh y/i), of the same origin and meaning as the English in and the Latin in, which in its deri- ADDITIONAL NOTES. 307 vative iimis (for irismus ?), lowest, comes to the same meaning as the Welsli superlative of ise/, to wit, /saj, lowest, the comparative being Is, lower. This element enters possibly into the name of the Ifisiibres, and of the British towns of Isurion and Isubrigatition. The s of the stems iip-s and in-s implied in the Greek and Celtic words raises an interesting question which cannot be discussed here. Veneti, p. 9. The v/ord is most likely of the same origin as the Anglo-Saxon wine, a friend, and meant allies : the Irish fine, a tribe or sept, is most likely related, and so may be the Welsh Gwyiicdd ; but the latter is inseparable from Giuyndod, which is of the same meaning. They probably represent an early form Vcnedas, genitive Vefieddtos or Venedofos, Guiy?iedd being from the nominative, and Givyndod from the stem of the oblique cases. Venedotos is made in Latin into Veiiedotis in an inscription at Penmachno, near Bettws y Coed : Hiibner's Inscr. Bfif. Christ., No. 135. The Veneti have left their name to the part of Brittany called by the Bretons Giie7ied, Vannes, and it is this name probably that laid the foundation for the tales which trace an army of Kymry from Gwynedd to Guencd. Vereda, p. 225 : see Epeiacon. Vergobretos, p. 59. The analysis of the con> pound would suggest an adjective qualifying the name of the magistrate, and meaning efficax Judicii, working or executing judgment. For the hrst part, vergo, seems identical with the Old Breton word guerg " efficax," and akin with Welsh, cy-weirio, to mend, to dress, or put in working order, Irish, do-airc-i or iai7ri *' cfficit, i)arat," a verb of the same origin and conjugation as the Greek (jICm, tfjcio, I do or make, Gothic vaurkjan, to work. The other part brcto- is identical with the Welsh biyd, mind, intention. X 2 3^8 CELTIC BRITAIN. dcd-ffyd, a verdict ; Irish, bj'eth, judgment, hrithem^ genitive hrithenion^ a judge, Anglicised breJi07i. All these words are connected with the root her^ to bear, and the standing Irish law phrase for giving judgment is to " bear a hreth^^'' which literally means to bear a hearings or bear a bh'th^ and seems to point to some kind of supposed inspiration, brought about in a way similar, perhaps, to that whereby the Irish druids were believed to obtain visions of things to come. See Cormac's Glossary, s. v. imbas forosnai, and O'Donovan's "Battle of Magh Rath," pp. 46, 47, also Scott's " Lady of the Lake," canto iv. 5. Verturiones, pp. 93, 220. This is usually written Vecturiones^ which I had tried in vain to understand, but on converting it into Goidelic, according to the usual rules of phonology, I found that it would yield Fechtreiin or FocJitreim, which at once suggested a real name Fortrenn. On turning to Eyssenhardt's edition of Amm. Marcellinus, I was delighted to find that Veduriones only comes from Gelenius, who lived in the sixteenth century, and that it has no manu- script authority whatever. The name is of the same origin as Verterce, mentioned as one of the places where the Dux Britanniarum had some of his men quartered. It is found to have been at Brough-under- Stanmore, in Westmoreland ; and Broiigh {i.e. bu?-/i, a fortress) is a translation, probably, of Vertem, for the latter is represented in Welsh by the word gwerthyr^ a fortification, and Y WertJiyr occurs as the name of a house in Anglesey, situated near the remains of considerable earthworks and a large cromlech. The Chronicles usually speak only of the Plain of Fortrenn or of the Men of Fortrenn ; so Fortrenn., which is a genitive, is almost the only case of the word which they give : the nominative in its old form would probably have been Fortriu or Foirtriu, later Foirti-e. INDEX. Adamnan, 71, 89, 155, 165, 239, 266, 297 A'SLiedomaros, 36, 273, 274 Adminius, 34, 274 Adrian, Pope, 238 Aed Finn, 176, 177 Aedan, 154, 155, 156,168, 173 Aedui, 38, 40, 58, 59 Aenach, Ir. , 65 Aerven, 68 yEschylus, 201 /Eternus, 116 ^thelfrith, 112, 124, 127, 129 /Ethelstan, 107, 184 ^thelvveard, 142 yEthilliard, 300 Agricola, 84-86, 160, 103, 225,253 Agrippa, M. Mcenius, 241 Aircol, 253 Airem, 263 Airer Dalriatai, 269 Airer Gacthel, 269 Alauna, 158, 274 Alban, 183, 202, 203 Albion, 200, 201, 202 Albiona, 201 Alclyde, 143, 145 Allectus, 92, 235 Ail-fro, W., 137 Allobrox, 137, 274 Alpin, 172-178, 196 Alun, 274 Ambiorix, 6 1 Ambresburh, 105 Ambrosius, 103, 104 296 Ammianus Marcellinus, 90, 93, 164, 237, 291, 308 Amminus, 34, 274 Ancalites, 17, 28, 29 Anderida, 104 Angus, 173, 193 Anlach, 242 Anlaf Cuaran, 1 85, 243 Ansa, 289 Antec^rigus, 38, 275 Antonine It., 225, 229, 292, 293. Antoninus, 89 Antony, 22 Apollo, 19, 33, 67, 225, 287, 297, 298 'Apximrog, 305 Ardderyd, 143, 252 Argyle, 269 Armorica, 224 Arrcgaelhel, 269 Artbranan, 268 Arthur, 72, 133. 231, 298 Arthuret, Knows of, 143 Assedoniari, 273 Atbret ludeu, 131 Atecotli, 56, 90, 92, III, 21 S, 230, 235, 275 310 CELTIC BRITAIN. Atrcbates, 9, 23, 24, 25, 29, 43, 275, 276 Augustine, 124 Augustus Ccesdr, 25, 26, 27, 33, 203 Aulerci, 284 Aulus Didius, Si Aulus riautius, 30, 35, 75, Aurelius Conan, 106 Avienus, 47, 261 l^JEDA, 96, 129-136, 167, 169, 171, 195, 269, 270, 300 Baetan mac Cairill, 155 Banatia, 161 Barrivendi, 305 Bead wolf, 147 Belerion, 45, 214, 276 Belgce, 42, 79, 276 Belinos, 287 Belisama, 63, 276 Bellovaci, 23 Bergyon, 201, 28 1 Bericos, 37, 38, 75 Bernicia, 89, in, 112, 126 Berroc, 29 Beth, 260 Bibroci, 17, 28, 29 Biceot, 259 Biturix, 65, 276 Blaton Bulgion, 265, 277, 278 Boia, 226, 252 Bol, Cors y, 265 Bolge, 265 Bolgyne, 265 Boresti, 88, 93, 160, 219, 277 Boudicca, 66, 83, 226, 278, 295 Bourges, 277 Boyd Dawkins, Prof., 21, 48, 256 B yne, 67, 259, 265 Bran, 277 Ijran Dub, 277, 27S Branwen, 277, 278 Breennych, III Breiz, 210 Brennus, 279 Bret, An. -Sax., 135 Bretain, 204, 285 Brethonec, 205 Bpirrai'ot, 204 Bretwalda, 134, 135 Brezonek, 205 Brigantes, 30, 40, 63, 66, 80, 84, 89, 90, III, 116, 278, 279, 285 Brigit, 279 Britain, 135, 203, 206 Lesser, 205 Lower, 96, 98 Upper, 96, 98, 109, 113 Britannia, 200, 203, 204, 206, 279 Briton, 3, 205 Brittia, 210 Brittones, 205-208, 210, 278 Brochvael, 124 Brough, 308 Brude, MacMalclion, 154, 165, 176, 189, 194,. 267 Brude, son of Bile, 169 son of Ungust, 174 Brychan, 156, 250, 256 Bryten, An. -Sax., 135 Brythoneg, 205 Buddwalan, 283 Cadavael, 131, 132 Ca'SSi, 29 Cadoc, 120, 254 Cadommedd, 131, 132 Cadvan, 125, 126, 128, 304 Cadwal, 282 Cadwaladr, 125, 130, 132, 140, 141, 282 INDEX. 311 Cadwallon, 126, 130, 245, 282, 304 Ca-sarians, 133, 136 Caledonian Forest, 39, 222, 277, 279 Calgacos, 88, 225, 279 Calidoncs, 163, 227 Caligula, 34 Calleva, 24, 29, 279, 280 Calvus Patricii, 72 Cambrensis, 142 Cambria, 138, 141, 142 Camulodunon, 26, 27, 77, 80, 84, 105, 280 Camuloris, 2 So Camulos, 2S0 Caugos, 287 Cantii, 23, 24, 43, 104, 280 Cantiori, 290 Caratacos, 35, 38, 76, 80, 2S0 Carausius, 92, 235, 280 Carbantorigon, 228, 281 Carini, 221 Carnoban, 146 Carnonacce, 221 Carron, 157 Carthacb, Ir., 280 Carthaginians, 5, 47, 51 Cartismandua, 39, 66, 81, 82, 281 Cassi, 17, 28, 35, 281, 283 Cassiterides, 5, 46 Cassivelaunos, 15-17, iS, 27, 28, 281, 2S2, 290, 291 Castra Exploratorum, 241 Caswallon, 243, 282 Catscaul, 130 Catti, 29, 35, 37, 62, 2S3 Caturiges, 30, 283, 301 Catuvelauni, 15, 20, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 35, 38, 76, 77. 283 Ce, 26S Ceawlin, 106, 107, 13S Celta;, 2, 2S3 Celtchar, 279 Cclyddon, 222, 279 Cenimagni, 17, 28, 2S3 Cenwalh. 107 Cerones, 221, 26S Cicero, 20, 204 Cimbcr, 141 Cimbri, 275 Cinaelh, 176, 179 Cinglas, 120 Claudian, 237 Claudius Cxsar, 18, 35, 39, 43, 76, 77 Clota, 145 Clwyd, 85, 145, 287 Clyde, 87, 143, 145 Cnut, 186, 192 Cocboy, 130 Coel, 116, 142 Cogidumnos, 284, 305 Columbn, St., 71, 154, 165, 166, 168, 171, I79> 194. 266-269 Conall, 177, 297 Conbellini, 249, 284 Concangion, 230, 285, 303 Concessus, 296 Conchess, 296 Condidan, 106 Congii>, 174 Conmcegl, 106, 135 Constantine, 94, 95, 97, 177 Conslantius Chlorus, 164 Coritani, 30, 105, 217, 2S5 Cornavii, 30, 217, 221, 285 Corstopiton, 225 Creones, 221 Cruilhne, 149, 153, 236, 26S Cruithnig, 236, 237, 240, 241 Cuchulainn, 29S Culdee, 28S Culen, 191 Cumbria, 13S, 141, 142, 145 312 CELTIC BRITAIN. Cunalipi, 2S6, 294 Cunchar, 191 Cunedda, 116, 117, 122, 123, 140, 243-245, 249, 250 Cuneglasos, 120, 286 Cunobelinos, 26-28, 32-35, 38, 76, 77, 80, 285-287 Cunomori, 286 Cunovali, 286, 297 Cuthberht, 144 Cymbeline, 27 Cymraes, 275 Cymro, 137, 275 Cynfelyn, 286 Cynvael, 297 Cynwa], 286, 297 Dairi, 260 Dal-Araide, 241, 264 Dal-Cais, 90 Dal-Cairbre, 90 Dal-Fiatach, 155, 241, 264 Dal-Riada, 90, 154, 240, 264 Dalar, 268 Daniel, 245 Dartraighi, 294 Dartr)% 294 Decangi, 79, 80, 230, 285, 2S7, 303 Decanta^, 227, 258, 287 Degsastan, 156 Deira, 112, 126, 184, 185, 287 Delgovicia, 39 DemetK, 80, 85, 121, 215, 288 Derventio, 39, 288 Deva, 68, 288, 289 Dicalidonce, 93, 164, 290 Digoll, 129 Dinoot, 24, 300 Dinorwig, 299 Diodorus, 8, 45, 46, 53, 203 Dion Cassius, 37, 56, 16, 91, 96 Diviciacos, 31, 290 Divico, 290 Dobunni, 29, 30, 35-38, 42, 43, 76, 251, 291 Domnall Brecc, 156, 173 Domnoveros, 40, 290, 305 Donald, 181 Donald Ban, 198 Dorchester, 293 tiL.ovr]Kd\i]Cibvi.oc, 290 i^ovviov, 214, 292, 293, 306 Drumalban, 154, 157, 222 Drust, 172-174, 177, 178 Dub, 191 Dubnovelaunos, 27, 290-292, 304 Dubthach, ']i, 74 Dumbarton, 143 Dumnonii, 44, 48, 52, 106, 112, 152, 158, 214, 229,291, 292 Dumnorix, 40, 58, 65, 290, 292 Dunawd, 124, 300 Dimbolg, 265, 277, 278 Diinbrettan, 143 Duncan, 187, 260 Dungal, 174 Dunkeld, 162, 164, 177, 223, 279 Dunocatus, 305 Diin Nechtain, 143, 170 Durobrivoe, 293 Durocobrivis, 293 Durolipons, 290, 293 Durotriges, 20, 43, 44, 52, 214, 294 Dux Britanniarum, 102, ii5j 117, 132-136, 141, 308 Dyfrdvvy, 2S8, 299 Eadberht, 174, 175, 180, 1S2 Efldgar /Etheling, 198 INDEX. 313 Eadmund, 1S4, 197 Eadred, 185 Eadvvine, loS, 126, 129, 130, 134-136, 151 Eanfritb, 129, 130 Earn, 262 Eber, 263 Ebudx, 56, 221, 227, 294 Eburacon, 86 Eceni, 28, 37-39, 6-, 66, 79, 83, 105, 226, 2S3, 284, 295 Ecgbyrht, 107, 134 Ecgfrith, 143-144, 152, 169 Ellmyn, 137 Elmet, 127, 128 Elphin, 173 Elton, Mr., 5, 8, 45, 46 Emcr, 263, 264 Emrys, 103, 296 Eochaid, 173, 182 Epaticcos, 26, 29, 295 Epeiacon, 225, 295 Epidii, 220, 221, 227 Epidion, 221 Eppillos, 23, 24, 26, 28, 31, 33, 295 Er, 263, 264 Ere, sons of, 177 £rinn, 66, 74, 262 Erne, 262 Ersch, 148 Eumenius, 235 Evans, Mr. John, 7, 19, 23, 206 Farinm.egl, 106, 135 Feineachus, 263 Fcini, 263, 276 Fergus, 173 Ffichti, 236 Ftinan, 171 Fiacc, 74 Fidacb, 153 Finlaig, 192 Finn, 234 Finnola, 1 91 Firbolg, 264, 276 Flavia Cxsariens's, 98 Follanihain, O', 282 Fortrenn, 158, 177, 179, 190, 191, 195. 308 Forum Juli, S:c., 294 Four Masters, the, 64, 277 Gael, 3 Gai's Field, 131 Galli, 2, 263, 295 Gangani, 230, 285, 296 Gartnait, 166, 170, 265 Geloni, 55, 240 Genunia, 89, 218 Geofrey, 118, 134, 141, 2S2 Geona Cohors, 89, 268 Geraint, 107, 232, 296 Gerontios, 95, 96, 296 Geryon, 201 Gildas, 96, 103, 105, 120, 132, 133, 165, 232, 241, 25^, 253, 2S6 Giraldus, 64 Girg, 182 Glannog, 129 Glasgow, 196 Glastonbury, 202, 261 Goddeu, 153 Gododin, no, 116 Goidel, 3, 239, 240 Golam, 263 Granpius Mons, 88, 225 Green, Mr., 107 Griffith, son of Rhys, 64 Grote, Mr., 65 Guened, Bret., 307 Guidi, urbs, 149 Guortepir, 120, 253 Gwaun, 119 Gwledig, 103, 119, 135, 159 Gwyddel, 239, 240 14 CELTIC BRITAIN. Gwynasedd, 273, 274 Gwyndod, 121, 307 Gwynedd, 272, 307 IIaddax and Stubcs, 73, 106, 120, 238 Hadrian, 89 Haslemere, 24, 2S0 Hatfield, 129 Hatho\n.ilf, 282 Heber, 263, 264 Hefenfelth, 130 Helvetii, 58 Hengist, 96 Herodotus, 5, 55, 261, 262 Hethfeld, 129 Hibernia, 239, 262 Himiico, 47 Hi rend, 262 Honorius, 94, 95 Hiibner, Dr., 76, 86, 93, 97, 210, 244, 249, 251, 255, 307 Ier, 262, 263 Indulph, 185 Insubres, 307 loloMSS., 117. 120, 122, 248, 252, 299 Irische, 148 Isca, 85, 293 Isidore, 237, 239 Isubrigantion, 307 Isurion, 307 Ith, 264 Ithel, 249 ludeu, 131, 149, 264 Ivcrna, 262, 296 Ivernia, 291 Ivernii, 262 Jambres, 70 Jannes, 70 Jarla Saga, I SB Jerome, St., 93 Joceline, 141 Johnson's I'oin-, 299 Jordanes, 289 Jubainville, M. d'Arbois de, 274 Julius Caesar, 8-23, 27, 28, 203, 235, 243, 290, 301, 303 Julius Front inus, 84 Juvenal, 206, 262, 274 Keith Inch, 303 Kells, 177 Kemble's Codex Dip., 285, 300 Kenneth mac A., 179, 189, 193, 194, 196, 19S, 199 Kentigern, 141, 143, 170, 171, 195' 245 Keredig, 118, 121, 216, 245, 250 Kessarogion, 133 Kilrymont, 176, 183 Kinneil, 151, 195 Kymry, the, no, 114, 120, 121^ 142, 275 Kynesii^ 261 Latona, 298 Leucopibia, 227 Liger, 20 1 Liguria, 200 Llanffinan, 171 Lloegr, 141 Locrine, 14 1 Loidis, 127, 131 Loigaire mac Neill, 73 Lollius Urbicus, 89 Lossie, 229 Loxa, 229 Lugi, 221 Mabixogiox, 72, 225, 296, 298, 304 Mabon, 225, 297, 298 INDEX. 315 ^^acCnrthy, Sc'c Carthach. Mac-Con, 261 Mac-Decet, 22S Macbeth, 1S7, iSS, 193, 194, 196, 260, 265, 270 Maccu Deceti, 258 Manatee, 90, 93, 155, 156, 159, i6r, 163, 16S, 220 Maelbcea'tSe, sec Maelbeth Maelbeth, 260 Maelchon, 261 Maelcoluim, see IMalcolm Maelgwn, 117, 120-123, 132, ^33, 139, 140, 243, 245, 254, 297 Maelpliadraic, 72, 259 jNIaelumi, 156, 258 Magh-Curginn, 155 Magh-Rath, battle of, 308 Mag-Ithe, 264 Magi, 69 Maglocunos, sc^ Maelgwn Maid of Norway, 196 Malcolm, 145, 184, 18S, 1S9, 193-198 Manann, 152, 219 Manannan, 292 ManavA', no, 116, 117, 131, 140, 152, 219, 292 Manawyildan, 292 Mandubratios, 17, iS, 27, 2S1 Mapbriih, \V., 207 Maponi, 225, 299 Maponos, 225, 297, 29S Margaret, 197, 198 Maridunon, 293 Marne, 29S Mars, 67 Martial, 206 Maserfelth, 130 Matrona, 298 Maxima Cxsariensi?, 98 Maximus, 94, lor, 142 Mawddacli, 85, 215 Mearn, 168, 190 Meiceran, 129 Meirion, 118 Mcldi, 14 Mcnapii, 22, 49 Menevia, 150 Mercia, 105, 108 Mercury, 67 Merlin, 133 Mcrnis, 156 Mervyn, 140 Miathi, sec Masatce Miati, sre Mceatae Miled, 263, 264 Milesian, 263 Milton, 141 Minerva, 67, 6S Mocetauc, 144 Modron, 29S Moernc, 155 Mog-Corb, 260 Mog-Net, &c., 259 Mog-Nuadat, 259 Molpa, 89 ATommsen, Prof, 56, 98, 289 Mona, 86, 128, 215 Moneit, 259 Moni ludeorum, 150, 226, 254 Moridunum, 293 Morini, 9, 10, 22, 49 Morvran, 304 Mounth, 189 Mowat, M., 59 Mulpatrick, 259 Murbolg, 265 Mynyw, 226 Myvyrian Arch., 126, 129, 146 Naitox, 171 Narbonne, 47 Neclitan, 170-174, 176, iro, 260 Nectariiles, 103 Ncithon, 171 i6 CELTIC BRITAIN. Nennius, 96, 103, 116, 117, 128, 130, 131, 232, 243, 251, 252, 264 Nero, 82 Net, 259, 260, 266 Neubauer, Dr., 296 Niduari, iii, 218 Nigra, Com., 72 Ninnian, 170 Nith, 196, 218, 267 Nodens, 67, 259, 302 Notitia Dignitatum, 98, 100, 226, 231, 242, 306 Novantce, 217, 228, 230, 242 Novios, 196, 217 Nuada, 63, 259 Nudd, 259 Nynias, 147, 170 O'CURRY, 6^], 263, 275 O'Donovan's " Four Masters," 277 Ochil Hills, 229 Octapitaron, 226 Odin, 283 Ofifa, 138, 139 Ogam, 212, 247, 248, 260 Oirir Gaithel, 269 Oisi'n, 234 Olympiodorus, 96 Ondemone, 266 Orddwy, Rhyd, 299 Ordous, 216, 299 Ordovices, 80, 85, 86, 119, 215, 244, 245, 249, 251, 258, 271, 299 Orgetorix, 58, 65 Orrea, 161 Osney, 289 Osric, 129 Ostorius Scapula, 35, 79, So, 81 Oswald, 130, 135 Oswine, 130 Oswiu, 130, 131, 132, 135, 138, 139, 143, 147, 152, 169 Otadini, 112, 153, 219 OviK\bviOQ, 303 Ouse, 2S9 Owen, 178 Padarn, 255 Paraveredus, Lat., 295 Parisi, 39, 217, 226 Parisii, 14, 39, 41, 62 Paternus, 116, 216 Patrick, St., 70, 74 Paulinus, 128 Pausanias, 89 Peanfahel, 151, 195 Penbol, 265 Pencrik, 300 Penda, 108, 129, 130, 131, 132, 138, 151 Penguaul, 151 Pengwern, 107^ 139 Penkridge, 226, 300 Pennocrucion, 226, 229, 230, 300 Pentland, 150 Petilius Cerealis, 84 Petrianae, 224 Petroc, 141 Petuaria, 39, 226, 300 Petueriensis, 226 Philip II., 19 Piccardach, 236 Pictavi, 236 Pictavia, 183 Pictavis, 240 Picti, 235 Pictones, 236, 240 Pictores, 236 Picts, no, 118, 194, 235, 236, 240, 264 Pihtes lea, 285 Pliny, 69, 200, 201, 210 Pomponius Mela, 41, 201, 202 INDEX. 317 Tortus Itius, 14 Posidonius, 8, 45, 46 Powys, 139, 251, 272 Presidium, 224 Prcetorium, 224 Prasutagos, 83, 226 Procolitia, 224 Procopius, 210 Pr}'dain, 203, 296 Prydyn, 236, 296 Ptolemy, 152, 161, 164, 196, 225, 226, 229, 230, 242, 262- 268, 276, 2S9, 293, 303-305 Publius Crassus, 48 Pytchley, 285 Pytheas, 5-8, 204 R^EDWALD, 126 Ravennas, 293-299, 301-306 Reeves, Dean, 73, 149, 202, 262 Regentium, 301 Regni, 23, 300 Remi, 29, 301 Rex Brittomim, 133, 140 Rhodri, 140 Rhun, 123, 12S, 182 Rhydderch, 142, 143 Rhygyvarch, 252 Rhys ab Tewdwr, 140 Ri, 260, 266 Ridumo, 293 Ritupias, 226 Roi, 260 Rutupix, 226 Saint, 302 Sais, 104, 229 Samson, 249 Sanctus, 253 Savaddon, 64 Scipio, 5 Scillivissi, 301 Scotia, 194, 239 Scott, 197, 308 Scotti, 56, 92, 236-238, 240, 243, 270 Scylhia, 239 Segantii, 217, 219, 301 Segeia, 217, 301, 302 Segontiaci, 17, 28, 29, 301 Segontion, 301 Seiont, 302 Selgovx, 218, 22S, 230, 242, 265, 267, 302 Sen-Cheneoil, Tuath, 275 Sen-Erann, Tuath, 275 Senchus Mor, 63, 64, 263, 276 Senemagli, 304 Senomagli, 304 Senotigirnos, 41, 302 Serrigi, 243 Setantii, 301 Seteia, 301 Servus Dei, 72 Severn Sea, 52 Severus, 91, 92, 163 Sidonius, 55 Silchester, 24, 29, 2S0 Sihilanus, 302 Sikira, 302 Sikires, 42, 52, 64, 80, 82, 215, 302 Silvianus, 302 Simeon of Durham, 187, 195 Simon Magus, 70, 73 Sirigi, 243 Sitric, 243 Skene, Mr., 69, 93, 107, III, 172, 221, 2S6 Smertce, 221 Solinus, 42, 56, 302 vSpinis, 224 Stilicho, 94 Stokes, Mr., 57, 70, 74, 207, 255> 263 Stonehenge, 247 Strabo, 5, 7, 50, 54, 56 iS CELTIC BRITAIN. Strageath, 15S Strathbolgie, 265 Strathclyde, 145 Stratherne, 262 Stuart Glennie, Mr., 233 Suetonius, 32, 34, 78, 82, S^ Sulpicius Severu.s, 302 Sweet, Mr., 134 vSylinancis, 302 Tacitus, 79, 82, 87, 88, 303 Taexali, 161, 163, 220, 229, 303 T^exalon, 161 Talargan, 144, 174-178 Tamea, 161 Tasciovant, 26, 27, 29, 303, 305 Taximagulus, 303 Te'StSicnius, 304 Tegeingl, 287 Tegid, 304 Teilo, 226 Tenigenonia, 304 Tessignius, 304 Teviotdale, 146 Teyrnllwg, 136 Thanet, 52, 205 Qtodcopoc, 25S, 305 Theodosius, 93, 94, 230 Theodric, 142 Thersites, 64 Thorfinn, 187, 1S8 Thule, 56 Tiberius, 34 Tincommios, 23-25, 304 Tiree, 264 Togodumnos, 35, 76, 304, 305 Toliapis, 226 Toutiorix, 290 Trenacatus, 305 Trenagusu, 304 Trenegussi, 304 Treveri, 22 Triads, the, 129 Tringad, 305 Trinovantes, 17, 18, 23 27, 28, S|, 291, 305 Triphun, 253 Trucculensis Portu?, 88, 303, 305 Trutulensis Portus, 88, 305 Tuessis, 161 Twrch Trwyth, 29S Tyssilio, 304 Tyssul, 304 Ungust, 173-178, 2G0 Uriconion, 229, 306 Urien, 128, 142, 251, 252 Use, Usan, 2S9 Uven, 178 Uxacona, Sec, 230, 306 Uxama, 276 Uxelodunon, 230, 241, 281, 293 Uxella, 229, 306 Uxellon, 230, 306 Vacomagi, 160, 162, 163, 220, 222, 229 Valamni, 282 Valentia, 93, 98 Velauni, 2S2 Velaunos, 281 Vellavnivs, 281 > Vellocatus, 39 Venedot, 121, 272, 307 Veneti, 9, 47-50, 307 Venicones, 161 Venutios, 39 Vepotalos, 41 Vereda, 225, 295, 307 Vergobretos, 59, 307 Verica, 24 Verlamion, 26 INDEX. 319 Vcrnicomes, 161, 162, 220 Verterx, 30S Verturiones, 93, 15S, 164, 1 81, 195, 219, 229, 277, 30S Vespasian, 76, 78, 84 Vexalla, 229 Vibius Sequester, 201 Victorina, 278 \'igfusson, Dr., 68, iSS \'irgil, 240 Viromandui, 28 1 Visurix, 65 Volisios, 40 Volusenus, 9, 10 Vortigern, 96, 133 Vortiporios, 120, 121, 253 Wertermorum, 195 Werthyr, Y., 308 Westwood, Prof., 249 Whitehorne, 147 Windisch, Prof., 67, 279 Winged Camp, 161 Win\va.xl, 131 Wordswortli, Rev. John, 296 Wredech, 176 Wthol, 178 Wurgust, 173 ZiMMER, Prof., 70, 301 Zonaras, 91 Zosimus, 96 THE END. WYMAN AND SONS, I lUNTliKS, GK!i\T QLEEN STREET, LONDON". '> 14 DAY USE - -?• o C Z) D o =5 m CD c J) o ;=! Z s. o J] o - — CD m o o o. O D o i 2 o5- c 1 r" 1— 05 1 r-^ i- r- d- O — ^ T Q 03 a =° ^ ? > C/) D :d ^ < cj — i Tl 03 > o r- H < ■NOV 1 8 mST 4 9- RECD i.Er«V7(&54BJ'l GENERAL LIBRARY ■ U.C. BERKELEY B00Q313dQ3 V:- '•'jvm^ j>^ y' UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA LIBRARY