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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In "The History of England, from the Earliest Times to the Norman Conquest," Thomas Hodgkin embarks on an ambitious scholarly endeavor to chronicle the formative years of English history. Utilizing a narrative style that synthesizes both historical fact and engaging storytelling, Hodgkin explores the intricate tapestry of early England, detailing the various tribes, cultures, and pivotal events that shaped the nation prior to 1066. This work not only serves as a chronological account but also engages with political, social, and cultural factors, offering insights into the lives and motivations of the early inhabitants of the British Isles, establishing a comprehensive context for understanding England's evolution before the Norman Conquest. Thomas Hodgkin (1831-1913), a prominent historian and physician, was influenced by the rich historical narratives and antiquarian studies of the 19th century. His extensive academic background, coupled with his deep-seated interest in the historical development of England, informed his meticulous approach to historical scholarship. Hodgkin's commitment to academic rigor and his fervent belief in the importance of historical literacy made him a key figure in the study of early English history, positioning him well to tackle such a significant and expansive topic. Readers interested in the foundations of England's rich heritage will find Hodgkin's work invaluable. Written with fervor and precision, this book invites not only historians but also general readers to explore the intricate connections that defined early English society. Hodgkin's compelling narrative and thorough research make this work a riveting introduction to England's historical beginnings. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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The history of England, from the earliest times to the Norman Conquest
Table of Contents
Introduction
Across migrations, faiths, and power struggles, England takes shape from scattered origins into a polity poised before a decisive threshold. Thomas Hodgkin’s The history of England, from the earliest times to the Norman Conquest offers a sweeping account of how disparate communities, institutions, and rulers gradually formed a recognizably English realm. Written by a historian best known for wide-ranging studies of early medieval Europe, this volume distills a vast chronology into an intelligible narrative arc. Without dramatization or conjecture, Hodgkin traces the longue durée, inviting readers to observe processes rather than isolated episodes and to see contingency alongside continuity.
This work is a work of historical nonfiction set in Britain, guiding readers from prehistory through the mid-eleventh century. First published in the early twentieth century, it reflects the scholarly aims and conventions of its time, and it appeared as part of a multi-volume political history of England. Hodgkin addresses the period up to the Norman Conquest, presenting political developments within their social and religious contexts. The setting ranges from Britain’s earliest communities to kingdoms that interacted across the Irish Sea, the Channel, and the North Sea, situating England within wider European currents while remaining focused on the island’s internal evolution.
The book offers a lucid, chronological survey rather than a speculative reconstruction, privileging verifiable developments and the careful arrangement of evidence. Readers can expect a measured, explanatory voice that balances narrative momentum with attention to institutional change. The mood is steady and analytical, designed to clarify rather than embellish, and to show how smaller decisions accumulate into major transformations. Hodgkin writes for the serious general reader as well as students of early medieval history, presenting a structured journey across centuries that keeps sight of the long arc culminating in 1066, without dwelling on minutiae beyond the needs of the argument.
Central themes include the making of political authority, the interplay of local custom and emerging law, and the shaping force of belief and ecclesiastical organization. The story attends to contact zones—places where newcomers and long-settled populations negotiated space, power, and identity—and to the ways geography framed opportunity and constraint. Continuity and rupture both matter: older practices persist even as new institutions arise. By emphasizing process, Hodgkin encourages readers to see England not as a static inheritance but as a historical construction, formed through accommodation and contest, memory and reform, and the practical demands of governance across diverse communities.
Hodgkin’s method is characteristic of early twentieth-century English historiography: an ordered synthesis that draws on primary testimony as mediated through rigorous scholarship of the day. He privileges what can be reasonably inferred from recorded evidence and established learning, foregrounding clarity over conjecture. At the same time, the book bears the imprint of its era, and some emphases reflect the intellectual horizons of its original audience. Readers encounter a conscientious effort to relate political narrative to social and religious structures, with careful transitions that show how institutions, leadership, and belief intersect to guide change over time.
For contemporary readers, this volume matters because it illuminates foundational questions that still resonate: how communities absorb newcomers, how authority is legitimated, how law and custom evolve, and how cultural exchange shapes identity. It offers a framework for understanding the roots of English institutions and the historical contingencies behind them. Engaging with Hodgkin also reveals how narratives of national formation were crafted in the early 1900s, enabling a critical dialogue between past scholarship and present perspectives. That dual value—source of knowledge and window into historiography—makes the book a meaningful starting point for further study and reflection.
Approached on its own terms, the book provides a clear itinerary from England’s earliest traces to the threshold of the Norman Conquest, emphasizing structure, causation, and the steady accumulation of change. Rather than seeking dramatic revelations, it aims to render complexity comprehensible, offering signposts that help readers connect periods, peoples, and institutions. The result is a coherent introduction to a long and intricate past, one that frames 1066 not as an isolated moment but as the culmination of centuries of development. Readers come away with a durable map of early English history and questions to pursue in more specialized works.
Synopsis
Thomas Hodgkin presents a continuous survey of England’s past from prehistory to the Norman Conquest, drawing on archaeological findings, classical writers, early chronicles, and legal texts. He frames the island’s geography and resources as conditions influencing contact, invasion, and settlement. The narrative proceeds in strict chronological order, interweaving political change with social, legal, and ecclesiastical development. Early uncertainties are acknowledged, but the emphasis remains on what can be reliably inferred from surviving evidence. The overall purpose is to trace how diverse peoples and institutions formed a coherent realm. The book concludes that 1066 marks a decisive transition grounded in long-evolving structures rather than an absolute break with the past.
The account begins with Britain before Rome, outlining the movement from stone to bronze and iron cultures and the emergence of Celtic-speaking communities. Hodgkin describes tribal groupings, religious practices associated with the druids, and patterns of warfare and alliance. Contacts with Gaul and the Mediterranean are noted through trade, particularly in metals and luxury goods. Julius Caesar’s expeditions introduce the island to Roman attention, while Belgic influences in the southeast foreshadow closer continental ties. Population distribution, hill forts, and early agriculture sketch the social landscape that Rome would encounter. The chapter closes with the idea of a culturally varied but interconnected Britain on the eve of imperial engagement.
Roman Britain is presented through the stages of conquest, administration, and integration. Claudius’s invasion establishes provincial rule; campaigns under governors like Agricola expand and consolidate control, though limits are set by geography and resistance. Hodgkin outlines the road network, urban centers such as Londinium and Verulamium, and villa economies that fostered trade and taxation. Rebellions, notably Boudica’s rising, test but do not overturn imperial authority. Military frontiers, including Hadrian’s Wall, define northern policy. The spread of Latin culture and the gradual presence of Christianity appear alongside enduring native traditions. By the fourth century, Britain is a structured province with developed towns, coinage, and civic institutions, yet exposed to external pressures.
The withdrawal of Roman power unfolds amid wider imperial crises. Raids from Picts, Scots, and Saxons increase as frontier defenses and garrisons strain. Hodgkin reviews the Saxon Shore forts, usurpations such as those of Carausius and Allectus, and the political turbulence culminating in the early fifth century. Appeals to Rome fail as the empire reorients its priorities. The rescript of Honorius symbolizes the end of direct protection, leaving Romano-British elites to organize local defense and governance. Economic contraction, shifting trade, and regional autonomy follow. The narrative emphasizes the transitional nature of this era, in which Roman administrative habits survive while new military arrangements and external settlements begin to reshape the island.
Germanic migration and settlement reshape political and cultural life. Hodgkin recounts the traditional narratives of Jutish, Saxon, and Anglian groups, placing Kent, Sussex, Wessex, East Anglia, Mercia, and Northumbria in their regional contexts. He distinguishes between legend and probable patterns of conquest and colonization, noting varied experiences of displacement and accommodation. Early kingship emerges within small polities that expand through warfare and alliance, producing the so-called Heptarchy. Legal codes, beginning with Aethelberht of Kent, offer evidence of social ranks, compensation tariffs, and the role of kin. Language and custom consolidate as the English kingdoms define territories and identities, setting the stage for later competition and consolidation.
Conversion to Christianity and the growth of learning mark a major turning point. Augustine’s mission from Rome in 597 leads to the baptism of Kentish rulers and renewed continental ties. From the northwest, Irish missions through Iona influence Northumbria, where kings like Edwin, Oswald, and Oswiu foster church foundations. Hodgkin outlines the Synod of Whitby, which aligns practice with Roman usage, aiding ecclesiastical unity. Monasteries at Lindisfarne, Wearmouth-Jarrow, and elsewhere become centers of scholarship, art, and book production, exemplified by Bede’s historical work. The church contributes to lawmaking, diplomacy, and education, integrating England into wider Christian networks and providing institutions that endure through later political upheavals.
Power shifts among the kingdoms lead to periods of regional supremacy. Mercia, under rulers such as Penda and Offa, dominates central England, with Offa’s Dyke marking the Welsh frontier and a broad coinage reform indicating economic strength. Subsequently, Wessex rises under Egbert. Meanwhile, Scandinavian activity transforms the political landscape. Initial raids intensify into major incursions, culminating in the Great Army’s campaigns and the establishment of the Danelaw. Hodgkin highlights Alfred the Great’s defense, administrative reorganization, fortified burhs, and naval measures, as well as his lawmaking and encouragement of learning. The settlement with Guthrum and a revived royal authority establish frameworks for reconquest and integration of Danish-settled regions.
The tenth century brings consolidation into a single kingdom. Edward the Elder and Aethelflaed of Mercia reconquer territories and fortify strategic sites. Under Athelstan, royal authority extends over all English peoples, with external victories, including Brunanburh, underscoring unity. Later reigns, notably Edgar’s, emphasize orderly governance and monastic reform associated with Dunstan, Oswald, and Aethelwold. Hodgkin describes institutions such as the witan, shire and hundred courts, law codes, standardized coinage, and royal itinerancy. Danish settlers are increasingly integrated through law and service. The result is a strengthened monarchy capable of coordinating defense, administering justice, and supporting a church that reinforces moral and political cohesion.
Renewed Scandinavian pressure tests this structure. Under Aethelred, tribute payments and shifting strategies fail to secure lasting peace. Sweyn Forkbeard and then Cnut achieve dominance, with Cnut’s reign characterized by a balanced administration, respect for law and church, and management of great earldoms. Succession disputes follow his death, leading to Edward the Confessor’s restoration. Norman connections deepen alongside the rise of the Godwin family and a powerful earldom system. In 1066, competing claims produce invasions from Norway and Normandy. Hodgkin closes with Stamford Bridge and Hastings, presenting the Norman Conquest as inaugurating a new political order built upon, rather than erasing, the institutional legacy of earlier centuries.
Historical Context
Thomas Hodgkin’s narrative is set across the island of Britain, chiefly in the regions that became England, from prehistory through 1066. The chronological setting spans Roman Britannia (first to early fifth century), the Anglo-Saxon polities known as the Heptarchy, the Christianization of the English, the Viking age, and the political unification culminating in the Norman Conquest. Its places range from Londinium, York, and Canterbury to frontier lines such as Hadrian’s Wall and Offa’s Dyke, and maritime gateways on the North Sea. Hodgkin, writing in late Victorian and Edwardian England, triangulates classical authors, Bede, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, and emerging archaeology, situating early English state-building within wider European and North Sea networks.
Roman Britannia forms the first great frame. Julius Caesar’s expeditions (55–54 BCE) precede the Claudian invasion of 43 CE that established a provincial administration with coloniae at Camulodunum (Colchester) and later Londinium. The revolt of Boudica in 60/61 devastated Camulodunum, Londinium, and Verulamium before being suppressed. Frontier policy produced Hadrian’s Wall (c. 122–128) and, briefly, the Antonine Wall. Urbanization, roads, villas, and early Christian communities emerged, but imperial withdrawals after 410 left civic structures exposed. Hodgkin reads Tacitus and epigraphic evidence to argue that the collapse of Roman authority created the conditions for Germanic military settlers, a rupture the book treats as decisive for later English institutions.
The Anglo-Saxon settlement (c. 450–600) reshaped power. Tradition names Hengest and Horsa in Kent; archaeological horizons, such as fifth- and sixth-century cemeteries and elite finds like the Sutton Hoo ship burial (c. 625, East Anglia), mark new identities. By the seventh century a mosaic of kingdoms—Kent, Sussex, Essex, East Anglia, Wessex, Mercia, and Northumbria—competed. Law codes of Aethelberht (c. 602) and Ine of Wessex (r. 688–726) codified wergild and kin-responsibility. Offa of Mercia (r. 757–796) asserted supremacy, minted broad pennies, and raised Offa’s Dyke along the Welsh frontier. Hodgkin uses Bede and charters to trace how assemblies (moots), shire organization, and royal law grew from Germanic customs.
Christianization supplied literacy and administrative cohesion. Augustine of Canterbury arrived in 597 under papal commission, converting Aethelberht of Kent and founding the archbishopric. Irish-Northumbrian missions—Aidan from Iona to Lindisfarne (635)—advanced evangelization; the Synod of Whitby (664) aligned Northumbria with Roman computus and discipline. Theodore of Tarsus (archbishop, 668–690) organized dioceses; Benedict Biscop introduced monastic learning and libraries. The tenth-century Benedictine Reform under Dunstan, Oswald, and Aethelwold regularized monastic life and expanded scriptoria. Hodgkin leverages Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica (731), saints’ lives, and monastic rules to show how ecclesiastical networks underwrote kingship, lawmaking, and cultural synthesis across the former Heptarchy.
The Viking Age and the emergence of a unified English kingdom form the book’s central drama. Raids began with Lindisfarne in 793 and intensified into large-scale campaigning by the Great Heathen Army (865), associated with leaders such as Ivar and Halfdan. Northumbria fell (York seized, 866), East Anglia’s King Edmund was killed (869), and Mercia was partitioned. Alfred of Wessex (r. 871–899) survived crises—defeat and refuge at Athelney—then won at Edington (878) against Guthrum, leading to the Treaty of Wedmore and the delineation of the Danelaw. Alfred’s reforms combined defense and governance: the burh network fortified towns linked by a burghal hidage system; a reorganized fyrd and early naval initiatives countered seaborne threats; a legal preface and compilation asserted royal justice; a learning program sponsored translations (including Gregory’s Pastoral Care) to restore clerical competence. His successors extended reconquest: Edward the Elder (r. 899–924) and his sister, Aethelflaed Lady of the Mercians (d. 918), captured strategic boroughs like Derby and Leicester. Under Athelstan (r. 924–939), English rule reached Northumbria (927), coinage was standardized, and the Witan’s activity is attested in frequent charters. The victory at Brunanburh (937), against a coalition of Olaf Guthfrithson of Dublin, Constantine II of Alba, and others, affirmed a single English kingship. Hodgkin interweaves the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, law codes, and numismatic evidence to depict a polity forged by war but stabilized by institutions—defense in depth, royal itineration, and the articulation of shire and hundred courts—whose lineaments frame the pre-Conquest state.
Late tenth- and early eleventh-century turbulence tested that polity. Edgar the Peaceable (r. 959–975) presided over naval musters and uniform coinage. Under Aethelred II, styled Unready (978–1016), renewed Scandinavian pressure led to Danegeld payments: 10,000 pounds after Maldon (991), 16,000 (994), 24,000 (1002), 36,000 (1007), and 48,000 (1012). The St. Brice’s Day killings (1002) inflamed hostilities. Sweyn Forkbeard briefly took the throne (1013), followed by Cnut (r. 1016–1035), who ruled a North Sea empire with earls such as Godwin in Wessex. Laws of Cnut and continuity in coinage signaled administrative sophistication. Hodgkin relates these cycles to structural weaknesses—factional earldoms and fiscal strain—while noting durable legal and ecclesiastical frameworks.
Events of 1064–1066 close the arc. Harold Godwinson’s journey to Normandy (1064) and alleged oath to support William’s claim shadowed succession politics. Rebellion in Northumbria (1065) expelled Tostig, widening rifts. On Edward the Confessor’s death (5 January 1066), the Witan acclaimed Harold II; in September, Harald Hardrada and Tostig defeated an English force at Fulford (20 September), but Harold won decisively at Stamford Bridge (25 September). William of Normandy landed at Pevensey (28 September); at Hastings (14 October) Norman combined arms broke the shield wall and Harold was slain. London submitted, and William was crowned on Christmas Day 1066. Hodgkin balances English annals and Norman sources to probe legitimacy, tactics, and constitutional consequence.
Hodgkin’s treatment functions as a social and political critique by illuminating how violence, enslavement, and elite factionalism constrained justice and common welfare. He foregrounds unequal wergilds, the dependence of ceorls and slaves on lordship, and the costs of Danegeld as evidence of structural inequity. His emphasis on the Witan, shire and hundred moots, and the codification of law implicitly endorses participatory and rule-bound governance over autocratic or predatory power. By juxtaposing missionary reform with raiding economies, he critiques leadership that privileges conquest over learning and administration. The narrative casts 1066 not only as dynastic rupture but as a warning about the fragility of institutions when private interest eclipses communal obligation.
The history of England, from the earliest times to the Norman Conquest
ERRATA.
Page 332, line 12, for “Guthred” read “Guthfred”.
Page 333, line 3, for “North Wales” read “part of South Wales”.
CHAPTER I.THE PREHISTORIC FOREWORLD.
The history of England if we wish to take it in its narrowest sense begins with the migrations of the Angles, Jutes and Saxons in the fifth century after Christ. Yet, remembering that we have dwelling close beside us and mingling their blood with ours a gallant little people who own no descent from the Anglo-Saxon invaders, and remembering also how magical was the effect on all the barbarian races, of contact with the all-transmuting civilisation of Rome, we cannot surely leave altogether untold the story of those five centuries during which our country was known to the rest of Europe not as Anglia but as Britannia. Can we absolutely stop even there? It is true that the conscious history of Britain, the history that was written by chroniclers and enshrined in libraries, begins, as do the histories of all the nations of Western Europe, with the day when they came first in contact with the Genius of Rome. But is it possible to avoid trying to peer a little further into the infinite, dim and misty ages that lie beyond that great historic landmark? This is what our teachers of natural science have endeavoured to do on our behalf, labouring with the spade of the excavator and the collected specimens of the comparative anatomist to read a few of those faded pages of the history of Britain which had already been long illegible when Julius Cæsar landed on our shores.
And first we listen to the voice of Geology. After toiling through the all-but eternities of the Primary and Secondary systems of rock-formation, she seems to heave a sigh of relief as she enters the vestibule of the Tertiary system. New heavens and a new earth, an earth not utterly unlike that upon which we now dwell, seem to lie before her, and she names the four vast halls through which she leads her disciples “the Dawn of the New,” “the Less New,” “the More New,” and “the Most New” (Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene and Pleistocene). In the last of these halls, which is represented by a mere line on the geological ground plan, yet which may easily have had a duration of 200,000 years, we at last find our fellow-countryman, the first human inhabitant, as far as we know, of the British Isles. In certain well-known caves on the south coast of Devonshire (Kent’s Cavern and Brixham) there were found some sixty years ago flint implements undoubtedly fashioned by human hands, along with the remains of hyenas and other animals long since extinct in the British Islands, and these were lying under a stalagmite floor which must have taken at least 12,000 years, and may well have taken 100,000 years, for its formation. It was thus conclusively proved that Palæolithic man[1] whose handiwork has been found in many other European countries, especially in the wonderfully interesting caves of Aquitaine, lived also, how many millenniums ago none can say, in the limestone caves of Britain. Besides these dwellers in caves and probably of an even earlier period than they, were the other Palæolithic men who have left abundant traces of their presence in the spear-heads, flints, scrapers and other large stone implements which are often found in the gravel deposits of ancient rivers.
The Old Stone-workers, as this earliest known race of men is called to distinguish them from Neolithic men, their immeasurably remote descendants or representatives, knew, of course, nothing of the use of metals, and generally fashioned their flint implements or their bone needles in a somewhat rough and unworkmanlike manner. They knew nothing of the art of the weaver, and can therefore have had no other clothing than the skins of beasts. Neither did they ever manufacture anything in the nature of pottery; so that shells and the skulls of animals must have been their only drinking cups. But the relics of their primeval feasts show that they were in all probability not cannibals, and the very few Palæolithic skulls which have been preserved show a type decidedly nobler than some of the backward races of the present day. Curiously enough the men who had made so little advance in the homely industries of life had nevertheless a distinct feeling for graphic art. “By far the most noteworthy objects” in the Palæolithic caves “are the fragments of bone, horn, ivory and stone, which exhibit outlined and even shaded sketches of various animals. These engravings have been made with a sharp-pointed implement, and are often wonderfully characteristic representations of the creatures they portray. The figures are sometimes single; in other cases they are drawn in groups. We find representations of a fish, a seal, an ox, an ibex, the red-deer, the great Irish elk or deer, the bison, the horse, the cave-bear, the rein-deer and the mammoth or woolly elephant.”1
Whatever may have been the precise relation of the Pleistocene period to the Great Ice Age—a point as to which there is some difference of opinion—it is admitted that at some time or other after that when the hyena howled in the Brixham Cave, and when Palæolithic man left there his rudely worked flint implements, the conditions of life in Northern Europe changed. The Arctic zone invaded the larger part of the Temperate zone, and a great cap of ice covered not only the Scandinavian countries and the greater part of Russia but Ireland, Scotland and England, at least as far south as the valley of the Thames. Now were our chalk hills rounded into smoothness, now were many of our river beds hollowed out, and untidy heaps of “terminal moraine” deposited where the glaciers debouched into the valleys. This dismal change, destructive of all the higher organic life and continuing possibly over a period of thousands of years, makes, in our island at any rate, an impassable barrier between two races of mankind. When the great ice deluge subsided, when the winter-tyrant returned to his true Arctic home, when the oak and the pine began again to appear upon the hills, and flowers like our own bloomed in the valleys, then the Neolithic man, the “New Stone-worker,” came upon the scene and scattered abundant evidences of his presence over the land. From that period—date we cannot call it, for we have no evidence which would justify us in making the roughest approximation to a date—man has been continuously a dweller in this island, Neolithic man at length yielding ground to the immigrant Celt, the Celt to the Saxon, the Saxon to the Dane and the Norman.
At this point Ethnology must intervene and take up the story of the ages which has thus far been told by her sister Geology. Of what race were the men who after the retreat of the great desolating glaciers came to inhabit this our island? We know that on the one hand they were in a decidedly more advanced state of civilisation than their Palæolithic predecessors. Instead of the rough unshapely pyramids of flint which the Old Stone men used for axes and chisels, Neolithic man went on shaping and polishing his implements till scarcely a fault could be found in the symmetry of their curves. He continued, of course, to hunt and fish as his predecessor had done, but he had also some knowledge of agriculture, he was a breeder of cattle and he knew how to weave cloth and to bake pottery. He no longer lived principally in caves, but sometimes in a fairly constructed house, often, for security, built on the edge of a lake. But, strange to say, with all these great advances towards civilisation, he does not seem to have felt any of that passion for picture-drawing which distinguished his predecessor “the artistic hunter of the Reindeer period”.2 The physiological characteristics which differentiate Neolithic man from the Celt, his conqueror, will be more fully dwelt on when we come to the next act in the drama; but meanwhile it may be stated that the race was not a tall one. Professor Rolleston says: “I have never found the stature to exceed 5 feet 9 inches in any skeleton from a barrow which was undoubtedly of the ‘stone and bone’ [i.e., Neolithic] period”. There is some reason to think that they were dark complexioned with black and curly hair, but it must be admitted that the evidence for this statement is not very conclusive.
On the whole Ethnology decides that these earliest inhabitants of our island after the Great Ice Age were a non-Aryan race, strangers therefore to that great and widely scattered family to which, as far as language is concerned, all the great European peoples save the Turks, the Hungarians and the Finns, ultimately belong. Of course since no vestige of language survives to indicate their nationality, even this universally accepted classification, or rather refusal to classify, must be considered as purely conjectural. In the words of Professor Rolleston: “The race which used stone and bone implements, may, so far as the naturalist’s investigations lead him, have spoken either a Turanian or an Aryan tongue: what he sees in their skulls and their surroundings impresses him with the notion of an antiquity which may have given time enough and to spare for the more or less complete disappearance of more than one unwritten language”. The important fact to lay hold of is that the whole of the long period of Stone-workers in this country is pre-Celtic. Any name which we may for purposes of convenience give to these aborigines of Britain, whether the now nearly discarded word Turanians, to mark their exclusion from the Aryan family; or Iberians, to indicate a possible connexion with the mysterious Basques of the Pyrenees; or Silurians, in order to show a possible survival of their type in the countrymen of Caractacus; is only like an algebraical symbol, a label affixed to a locked box, denoting our ignorance of its contents.
Perhaps the most important fact known in connexion with the Neolithic inhabitants of Britain is that recent discoveries show that they were the builders of Stonehenge. That a race of men using no implements of iron should have succeeded in rearing those huge blocks into position on the plain of Wiltshire is a stupendous marvel, equalling in its way the erection of the pyramids of Ghizeh, the placing of the great stones in the temple at Baalbek, or the superposition of the 300-ton block of Istrian marble on the tomb of Theodoric, at Ravenna. This discovery seems to throw some doubt on the generally received notion that Stonehenge was connected with Druidical worship, since that was probably of Celtic origin. It is possible that Stonehenge may be the “magnificent circular temple to Apollo” which, according to Diodorus Siculus, existed in an island which may be identified with Britain.
To the age of stone succeeded the age of bronze, and to the age of bronze succeeded that of iron. Both in our island belong to the domination of the Celts, except in so far as the age of iron may be said to have lasted through Roman, Saxon and Norman domination down to our own day. It is admitted by all that the Celtic immigrants came in two successive waves, the distinction between which may be seen to this day, or if not always seen in physical type, at least always heard in the language of their descendants. The first wave, which is generally known as the Gaelic, eventually rolled to the Highlands and islands of Scotland and to the shores of Ireland, and is represented philologically by the kindred dialects of Gaelic and Erse. The second wave, popularly known as the Cymric, overspread the whole east and centre of Britain, the Gaels being probably forced to retire before their Cymric conquerors. To this race belong the Welsh and the Bretons of France; and Cumberland and Cornwall once spoke their language. Some of our most recent authorities on British ethnology, believing the term Cymri to be of late origin and the term Gaelic to have some misleading associations, prefer to speak of Goidels and Brythons (early national names) instead of Gaels and Cymri; but the distinction between the two races and the main lines of their geographical distribution are generally accepted, and are not affected by this question of nomenclature.
It is probable, then, that at some period whose date cannot yet be even approximately conjectured, and from some quarter which we may guess, but can only guess, to have been the north of Germany, a bronze-using race of warriors and hunters, ancestors of the modern Highlander and Irishman, crossed the sea and established themselves in the island of Britain, or, as it was, perhaps, then called, Albion. Later on, but how many centuries later none can say, another race, kindred but probably hostile, invaded our shores, drove the Gaels or Goidels before them, established themselves in the best parts of the southern portion of the island, and, being themselves called Brythons, gave to the whole land the name by which the Romans called it, Britannia. As we know that iron had been introduced into the country before the arrival of the Romans, we may conjecture that this second Celtic wave consisted of the wielders of weapons of iron, and that this was one cause of their victory over the Goidels. The Brythons, thus settled in the valley of the Thames and above the chalk cliffs of Sussex, were the enemies whom Cæsar encountered when he invaded Britain.
A word may be said as to the relation of these Aryan invaders to the presumably non-Aryan aborigines, the Neolithic men to whom allusion was previously made. It used to be supposed that these aborigines disappeared before the men of bronze and iron as completely as the aborigines of Tasmania have disappeared before the Anglo-Saxon immigrant. More careful investigation has led our recent ethnologists to deny this conclusion. In the first place, there are features in the rude polity of the historic Celts which suggest a doubt whether they really constituted the whole population of the country. Their chiefs are warlike leaders, their rank and file are themselves owners of slaves. Everything about them seems to show that they were, like the Spartans, a comparatively small ruling race surrounded by a subject population, which they perhaps needed to keep severely in check. Then the testimony of the tombs—and it is after all to the tombs that we must chiefly resort for information as to the fate of these buried peoples—decidedly confirms the theory of the survival of the aborigines and of their blending to a considerable extent with their Celtic conquerors. The stone-using people buried their dead in oblong mounds technically known as “long barrows” generally some one hundred to two hundred feet long by forty or fifty feet wide. The skulls found in these long barrows, lying side by side with implements of stone, are uniformly of the type known as Dolicho-cephalic, that is, the width from ear to ear is very considerably less than the length from the eyes to the back of the head. With the introduction of bronze we at once find a noticeable difference both in the shape of the tomb and the appearance of its occupant. The mound is now circular, generally from forty to sixty feet in diameter, the “round barrow” of the archæologist; and the skulls found in it are at first uniformly of the Brachy-cephalic type, square and strong, the width generally about four-fifths of the length. The important point to observe for our present purpose is that as we pass from the early Celtic to the late Celtic type of barrow—a transition of which we are assured by the gradual introduction of iron as well as by other signs known to archæologists—the character of the skulls undergoes a certain modification towards the Dolicho-cephalic type. The conclusion arrived at by the greatest investigator of British barrows, Dr. Greenwell, is that “ultimately the two races became so mixed up and connected as to form one people. If this was the case, by a natural process the more numerous race would in the end absorb the other, until at length, with some exceptions to be accounted for by well-known laws, the whole population would become one, not only in the accidents of civilisation and government, but practically in blood also.”
CHAPTER II.CÆSAR IN BRITAIN.
Down to the middle of the first century before Christ the British Isles were scarcely more known to the civilised nations of southern Europe than the North Pole is to the men of our own day. The trade which had probably long existed in the tin of Cornish mines had been purposely kept in mysterious darkness by the Phœnicians who profited thereby, so that Herodotus, the much inquiring, only mentions the Tin-islands (Cassiterides) to say that he knows naught concerning them. That trade had now probably become, save for the short passage of the channel, an overland one, and enriched the merchants of Marseilles. A citizen of that busy port, Pytheas by name, who seems to have been contemporary with Alexander the Great, professed to have travelled over the greater part of Britain, and afterwards to have sailed to a great distance along the northern coast of Germany. It was the fashion of later authors, such as Polybius and Strabo, to sneer at his alleged voyage of discovery and to doubt his veracity, but the tendency of modern inquiry is in some degree to restore the credit of this Marco Polo of pre-Christian times, to show that in some points he had a more correct knowledge of geography than his critics, and to deepen our regret that his work is known to us only in a few passages selected and perhaps distorted by his hostile reviewers. It must be admitted that if he reported that the circumference of Britain was 40,000 stadia (about 5,000 of our miles), and that he had traversed the whole of it on foot,3 his statement was not altogether consistent with fact.
Such, however, was all the information that the Greeks and Romans possessed concerning our island near the middle of the first century B.C., at the time when Cicero was thundering against Catiline, and Pompey was forcing his way into the temple at Jerusalem. Her time, however, for entrance on the great theatre of the world was near at hand, and it was for her a fortunate circumstance, and one not inconsistent with the part which she has played thereon in later ages, that the man who brought her on to the stage should have been himself the central figure in the world’s political history—Gaius Julius Cæsar[2].
Sprung from one of the oldest and proudest families of Rome, yet nephew by marriage of the peasant-soldier Marius, Cæsar, the high-born democrat, possessed in his own person that combination of qualities which has ever been found most dangerous to the rule of a narrow and selfish oligarchy. The outworn machine which men still called the Roman republic was obviously creaking towards an utter breakdown, and must soon, if the provinces were not to be bled to death by greedy senators, be replaced by the government of a single man, whether that man were called king, or general, or dictator. The only question was who that single man should be. Cæsar felt that he was the man of destiny, foreordained to stand on that awful eminence. He flung out of the Roman forum and senate-house, teeming as they were with squalid intrigues and echoing to the cries of ignoble factions, and at the age of forty set himself to a ten years’ apprenticeship to empire on the banks of the Loire and the Saône, amid the vast forests of Britain or of Gaul. The French historian, Michelet, has finely said: “I would that I could have seen that pale countenance, aged before its time by the revelries of Rome: that delicate and epileptic man, walking at the head of his legions under the rains of Gaul, swimming across our rivers or riding on horseback among the litters in which his secretaries were carried, and dictating five or six letters at once: agitating Rome from the furthest corners of Belgium: sweeping two millions of men from his path and in the space of ten years subduing Gaul, the Rhine and the northern ocean”.
At the end of the first three years of Cæsar’s proconsulship (58–56 B.C.) having apparently almost completed the conquest of Gaul, he stood a conqueror on the southern shore of the Straits of Dover, looked across at the white cliffs of Albion, and dreamed of bringing that mysterious island within the circle of Roman dominion. Pretexts for invasion were never lacking to an adventurous proconsul. There were close ties of affinity between many of the northern tribes of Gaul and their British neighbours. Some tribes even bore the same name. The Atrebates of Arras were reflected in the Atrebates of Berkshire; there were Belgæ in Somerset and Wiltshire as well as in Belgium; even men call Parisii were found, strangely enough, in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Then there was also the connexion, whatever may have been its value, between the religion of the continental and the insular Celts. Our information concerning the Druids[3] (chiefly derived from Cæsar himself) is somewhat vague and unsatisfactory, but there is no reason to doubt his statement that the Druidic “discipline” had originated in Britain and had been carried thence into Gaul, and thus any religious element that there may have been in the resistance of the Gallic tribes to Roman domination would look across the channel for sympathy and inspiration.
There was already a certain amount of commercial intercourse between Britain and Gaul, and Cæsar endeavoured to ascertain by questioning the merchants engaged in that trade what was the size of the island, what were its best harbours, and what the customs and warlike usages of the natives. On none of these points, however, could he obtain satisfactory information. The proconsul therefore sent a lieutenant named Volusenus with a swift ship to reconnoitre the nearer coast, but he returned in five days without having ventured to land. Meanwhile, as the object of the general’s prolonged stay in the territory of the Morini became more and more evident, messengers from certain of the British tribes began to cross the channel, charged—so Cæsar says—with a commission to promise “obedience to the rule of the Roman people,” and to give hostages as a pledge of their fidelity. The arrival of the ambassadors and their attempt to turn the proconsul from his purpose by fair speech and unmeaning promises we may well believe. How much the Regni and the Cantii knew about the rule of the Roman people, and what intention they had of loyally submitting to it, may be left uncertain. Cæsar, however, availed himself of the opportunity to send over with these returning envoys a certain Celtic chieftain named Commius, whom he had himself made king of the continental Atrebates, and on whose fidelity he thought that he could rely, to exhort the native tribes peacefully to accept the dominion of the Roman people, as the representative of whom Cæsar himself would shortly make his appearance among them. This mission of Commius proved quite fruitless. As soon as he landed—so he said—the Britons arrested him and loaded him with chains, and it was only after the defeat which will shortly be described that they sent him back to Cæsar. As we find Commius only four years later taking a leading part in the insurrection of the tribes in the north of Gaul, and professing an especial hostility to all who bore the name of Roman, we may, perhaps, doubt whether, even at this time, his pleas for subjection were as earnest, or the chains imposed upon him by the Britons as heavy, as Cæsar’s narrative would seem to imply.
Cæsar had determined to make his exploratory voyage with two legions, the Seventh and the Tenth. He perhaps hoped that actual war would not be necessary to bring about the formal submission of the tribes on the coast, and he therefore did not take with him more than the 8,000 to 10,000 men, which were probably the actual muster of two legions, and a body of cavalry whose precise number is not stated. As fighting, however, might, after all, prove to be necessary, he took care that one of the legions which accompanied him should be the famous Tenth on whose courage and devotion he often relied, not in vain. To transport the legions he had collected about eighty cargo ships (naves onerariæ), many of which had been employed the year before in his naval campaign off the coast of Brittany. He had also a certain number of galleys (naves longæ) capable of being rowed much faster than the heavy transport ships could sail. On these latter his staff of officers, quæstors, legates and prefects were embarked, and no doubt the proconsul himself was their companion.
The fleet set sail about midnight on August 26, B.C. 55, or on some day very near to that date. The port of embarkation was probably near to Cape Gris Nez and at the narrowest part of the channel, but almost every sentence of the following narrative has been the subject of an animated topographical discussion, and Cæsar himself mentions no names of places that can be certainly identified.4 Whatever may have been the harbour from which the legions embarked it was not the same which had been appointed as a rendezvous for the cavalry. These latter were to be borne upon a little fleet of eighteen transports which were detained by a contrary wind at a port eight miles farther up the channel. As we shall see, their ill fortune in the matter of weather continued throughout the expedition, and their consequent inability to co-operate with the legions may have been the chief cause of the expedition’s failure.
As for the main body of the fleet, it must have made an extremely slow voyage, for it was not till the fourth hour of the day (about 8.30 A.M.) that the foremost ships caught sight of the shores of Britain. The landing was evidently not to be unopposed: on all the hills armed bodies of the enemy were drawn up. The word used by Cæsar signifies properly “hills,” but as he goes on to say that “the sea was commanded by such steep mountains that a weapon could easily be hurled from the higher ground to the shore,” we are probably right in understanding these “hills” to be the well-known chalk cliffs of Kent. Seeing therefore no suitable place for landing, Cæsar signalled for his fleet to gather round him, and lay quietly at anchor for five hours. Summoning his staff he imparted to them such information concerning the nature of the country as he had been able to gather from Volusenus, and explained that in maritime warfare such as that in which they were now engaged, liable to be affected by rapid changes of the weather and the sea, it was pre-eminently necessary that they should give prompt obedience to his orders. At about 3 P.M., apparently, the fleet weighed anchor, and, wind and tide having become favourable, moved forward about seven miles and there halted opposite a level and open shore which seemed well adapted for landing.
The barbarians, however, who were of course watching Cæsar’s movements, sent forward their chariots and their cavalry, and following themselves with rapid movements were on the spot to oppose the Romans’ disembarkation. It seemed for some time as if their opposition would be effectual. The ships drawing many feet of water could not approach near to the land, and the soldiers, with their hands encumbered by the pilum or the sword and their bodies weighted with the heavy armour of the Roman legionary, found it no easy matter to jump from the ships, to stagger through the slippery ooze, to defend themselves against the attacks of the nimble and lightly armed barbarians. Seeing this, Cæsar ordered up the galleys, which were rowed rapidly backwards and forwards between the transports and the shore, and from the decks of which slings, bows and balistae freely employed worked havoc among the barbarians, already disposed to terror by the unwonted sight of the triremes. But as the soldiers still hesitated, chiefly on account of the depth of the water into which it was necessary to plunge, the standard-bearer of the Tenth legion, after a short prayer to the gods for good luck to his legion, leapt into the sea, shouting with a loud voice: “Jump! comrades! unless you would see your eagle fall into the enemy’s hands. I at any rate will do my duty to the Republic and our general.” His example was contagious. All the soldiers leapt from the ships and were soon engaged in a hand-to-hand struggle with the Britons, each man rallying to the standard that was nearest to him as it was hopeless in such a mêlée to form regular rank by legions and cohorts. The barbarians, charging with their horses into deep water, were sometimes able to surround smaller parties of the invaders or to harass them from a distance with their darts. Hereupon, Cæsar filled the boats of the long ships and some of the lighter skiffs with soldiers, who rowing rapidly backwards and forwards carried help where it was most needed.
It was probably at this stage of the encounter that an incident took place which is recorded not by Cæsar himself but by Valerius Maximus, an anecdote-collector of a later date. He tells us that a legionary named Scæva with four comrades rowed to a rock surrounded by the sea and from thence dealt destruction with their arrows among the Britons. Before long the ebbing tide made their rock accessible from the shore and the other soldiers thought it was time to row back to their ship. Scæva, refusing to accompany them, was soon surrounded by the barbarians, with whom he fought single-handed. Many he killed, but he himself suffered fearfully. His thigh was pierced by an arrow, his face smashed by a stone, his shield broken. At last he threw himself into the sea and swam to his vessel. Cæsar and the officers began to applaud him for his bravery, but he flung himself at the proconsul’s feet and with tears implored forgiveness for the military crime of the loss of his shield.
When the great body of the soldiers had at last struggled to the shore and could fight on firm land, Roman discipline soon prevailed over barbarian ardour. The Britons took to flight, but the absence of cavalry, bitterly regretted by Cæsar, checked pursuit. Next day there came ambassadors from the dispirited Britons praying for pardon, bringing the liberated Commius and promising to obey all Cæsar’s orders. After a grave rebuke for having violated the laws of nations by imprisoning his messengers, the proconsul granted his forgiveness and ordered the natives to hand over hostages for their good faith. A few were given, the rest who were to be sent by the more distant tribes were promised but never came. The reason of this failure of the negotiations (if they had ever had a chance of success) was the catastrophe which befel the lingering squadron with its freight of cavalry. On the fourth day after Cæsar’s landing, the eighteen ships with the horsemen on board drew nigh to Britain. Already they were descried by their comrades on shore when so violent a storm arose that they were hopelessly beaten off their course. Some were driven straight back to the harbour which they had quitted, others with imminent danger of shipwreck drifted down channel and at last, waterlogged and nearly helpless, regained some port in Gaul.
On the night which followed this disastrous day, a night of full moon, the unusually high tide, a marvel and a mystery to these children of the Mediterranean, surrounded the Roman ships which had been drawn up, as they hoped, high and dry on the beach. Cables were broken, anchors lost, some of the ships probably dashed against one another; it seemed as though Cæsar would be stranded without ships and without supplies on the inhospitable shore of Britain. He at once sent out some of his soldiers to collect supplies from the Kentish harvest fields, and set others to repair those ships, whose repair was yet possible, at the expense of their hopelessly ruined companions. He admits an entire loss of twelve, but leaves us to infer that the remainder were patched into some sort of seaworthiness. By this time undoubtedly the one thought of both general and army was how to get safe back to Gaul; and naturally the one thought of the Britons, who knew all that had occurred, was how to prevent that return. The promised hostages of course never appeared; and a troop of barbarians ambushed in a neighbouring forest watched for a favourable opportunity of attacking the Romans. That opportunity came one day when the soldiers of the Seventh legion were out foraging in the harvest fields. The sentinels in the Roman camp descried a cloud of dust rising in the direction whither their comrades had gone, and brought word to the general, who at once suspected that the precarious peace was broken and that mischief was abroad. Sallying forth with four cohorts he found that it was even so. The barbarians had emerged from their ambush, had fallen upon the unsuspecting legionaries, quietly engaged in reaping the British harvest, had slain a few of them and were harassing the rest with “alarums and excursions” by their cavalry and their charioteers.
At this point Cæsar interrupts his narrative to describe the British custom of using chariots in war, a custom which was evidently strange and disconcerting to the Roman soldiery. “This,” he says, “is their manner of fighting. First they drive their horses about in all directions, hurling darts, and by the very terror of their horses and clashing of their wheels often throw the ranks [of their enemies] into confusion. Then when they have insinuated themselves between the squadrons of the [hostile] cavalry they leap from their chariots and fight on foot. The charioteers meanwhile gradually draw out of the fray and so place the cars that if their friends should be overborne by the multitude of the enemy they may easily take refuge with them. In this way they combine the rapid movements of cavalry with the steadiness of infantry, and have acquired such a degree of dexterity by daily practice that they can hold up their galloping horses in the steepest descents, check and turn them in a moment, run along the pole or sit on the yoke, and then as quickly as possible fly back into the car.” It will be observed that Cæsar says nothing about the famous scythe-armed chariots of the Britons which, as has been often suggested, would surely on a battlefield be as dangerous to friends as to foes.
Cæsar’s arrival rescued his troops from their perilous position, and he was able to lead them back in safety to the camp. Many stormy days followed, during which warlike operations were necessarily suspended on both sides, but the barbarians employed the interval in beating up recruits from all quarters, attracted by the hope of plunder and of making an end at one blow of the army of invasion, whose scanty numbers moved them to contempt. When fighting was resumed the legions easily repelled the British attack, and some horsemen who had been brought by Commius, though only thirty in number, enabled Cæsar to pursue the flying foe for some distance, to kill many of them and to lay waste a wide extent of country with fire and sword. The usual group of penitent ambassadors appeared the same day in Cæsar’s camp; the usual excuses were offered; were accepted as a matter of necessity; and twice the number of hostages was ordered to be surrendered. It did not greatly matter how many were demanded, for Cæsar had no intention of awaiting their delivery. Soon after midnight the Roman fleet set sail, and the whole army returned eventually safe to Gaul, though two of the ships bearing 300 men drifted down the coast of Picardy, and the soldiers, attacked by no fewer than 6,000 of the Morini, had much ado to defend themselves till the general sent a force of cavalry to their succour.
On the arrival of Cæsar’s despatches in Rome the senate ordered a solemn supplicatio[5] or thanksgiving to the gods, which was to last for twenty days. The British expedition had been a daring and a showy exploit, but no one knew better than Cæsar himself that it had been an entire failure, and that nothing had really been done towards bringing a single British tribe under “the rule of the Roman people”. If this island was to be conquered, it was plain that a much larger force than two legions would be needed for the work. This Cæsar recognised, and accordingly he determined to make another attempt next year (B.C. 54) with five legions (perhaps about 21,000 men) and 2,000 cavalry. The previous campaign had evidently convinced the general of the importance of mounted men for this kind of warfare. He was also determined to have a longer interval before the autumnal equinox for the conduct of his campaign than he had allowed himself in the previous year, and accordingly somewhere about July 23 he set sail from the Portus Itius. He would, in fact, have started at least three weeks earlier, but the wind had been blowing persistently from a point a long way to the north of west. As soon as it shifted to the south-west, the fleet (which with all its companions consisted of 800 ships) started at sunset. In the night, however, the wind fell and the tide (which probably neither Cæsar nor any of his officers understood) carried the ships far out of their course. When the sun arose they saw that Britain was far behind them, on their left hand. Dropping their sails, they took to the oars, and Cæsar has words of well-deserved praise for his sturdy soldiers, who rowed so well that they made the heavy transport ships keep up with the lighter galleys which, as before, accompanied them. By a little after noon they reached the coast of Britain, apparently at their old landing-place. Their disembarkation was not now opposed; the Britons having, as it seems, lost heart when they saw so vast a flotilla approaching their shores.
Notwithstanding his larger armament, Cæsar’s second invasion was in many respects a mere replica of the first, and it is hardly worth while to describe it in equal detail. There was again a violent tempest which swept the fleet from its anchorage, destroyed forty of the ships, and obliged Cæsar to waste ten precious days in repairing the remainder. Toilsome as the task must be, he judged it advisable to draw all his ships up on land and surround them with a wall of circumvallation. When we remember that this was the precaution adopted by the Greeks who warred in Troy, we see how little essential change had been wrought in naval warfare in the course of 1,000 years. Meanwhile the Britons had assembled in large numbers in order to oppose the progress of the invaders, and had entrusted the national defence to a chief named Cassivellaunus who ruled over some of the tribes north of the Thames. Hitherto he had made himself apparently more feared than loved by his dealings with neighbouring tribes: the Trinobantes, especially, who dwelt in the district now known as Essex, had seen their king murdered and their king’s son made a fugitive by his orders; but now in the supreme hour of danger the hard, unscrupulous soldier was by general consent chosen as a kind of dictator.
After some preliminary skirmishes in which the heavily armed Roman legionaries suffered severely from the dashing onslaught and rapid retreat of the British chariots and cavalry, Cæsar determined to cross the Thames and beard the lion Cassivellaunus in his den. He was stationed on the north bank of the river which was fordable, but defended by sharp stakes placed in the bed of the stream. It is not quite clear from Cæsar’s account how this obstacle of the stakes was dealt with by his soldiers. Possibly they may have been partly removed by the cavalry whom he says that he sent first into the water. They were followed by the legionaries, who went, he says, so swiftly and with such a dash, though only their heads were out of water, that the enemy, unable to stand before the combined rush of horsemen and foot soldiers, left their stations on the bank and scattered in flight.
As was so often the case with these Celtic tribes, domestic discord in some degree lightened the labours of the invader. We have seen that Cassivellaunus had obtained by violence the sovereignty of the Trinobantes of Essex. Mandubracius, the son of the dead king, had fled to Gaul and cast himself on the protection of Cæsar, in whose train he returned to Britain. There was still probably a party in favour of the dethroned family, and it was not a mere formality when Cæsar ordered the tribe to accept Mandubracius for their chief, to supply his troops with corn, and to deliver forty hostages into his hands. Five other tribes whose unimportant names are given by Cæsar came in and made their submission; and from them the general learned that not far distant was the town (oppidum[4]) of Cassivellaunus, filled with a multitude of men and cattle, and defended by forests and marshes. “Now the Britons,” says Cæsar, perhaps with a sneer, “call any place a town” (oppidum) “when they have chosen a position entangled with forests and strengthened it with rampart and ditch, so that they may gather into it for shelter from hostile incursion.” Thither then marched Cæsar with his legions. He found a place splendidly strong by nature and art, but he determined to attack it from two sides at once. After a brief defence, the natives collapsed before the headlong rush of the Romans, and streamed out of the camp on the opposite side. Many were slain, many taken prisoners, and a great number of cattle fell into the hands of the Romans.
In order probably to divert the forces of his enemy from his own oppidum, the generalissimo Cassivellaunus had sent orders to the four kings of Kent to collect their forces and make a sudden attack on the naval camp of the Romans. The attack was repulsed by a vigorous sortie: many of the Britons were slain and one of their noblest leaders taken prisoner. Hereupon Cassivellaunus, recognising that the fortune of war was turning against him and that his own confederates were falling away, sent messengers to offer his submission and obtain peace through the mediation of his friend, perhaps his fellow-tribesman, Commius. Cæsar, who had his own reasons for desiring a speedy return to Gaul and who doubtless considered that enough had been done for his glory, accepted the proffered submission. He “ordered hostages to be delivered, and fixed the amount of tribute which was to be yearly paid by Britannia to the Roman people. He forbade Cassivellaunus to do any injury to Mandubracius or the Trinobantes,” and with these high-sounding phrases he departed. As he carried back many captives and not a few of his ships had perished in the storm, he had to make two crossings with his fleet, but both were accomplished without disaster. Of Cassivellaunus himself no further information is vouchsafed us, nor do we know what was the fate of the abandoned allies of Rome.
The great general in this instance “had come and had seen” but had not “conquered”. Most valuable, however, to us is the information which he has given us concerning our sequestered island, though in some cases it is evidently inaccurate. We need not linger over Cæsar’s geographical statements, though it is curious to see how certain errors of earlier geographers still lingered on even into the Augustan age of Roman literature. Thus he thinks that, of the three sides of Britain’s triangle one looks towards Gaul and the east, another towards Spain and the west, while the third, which has no land opposite it, faces north. Besides Ireland, which is half the size of Britain, there are other islands, apparently on the west, concerning which certain writers have said that they have continual night during thirty days of winter. As to this Cæsar was not able to obtain any definite information, but his own clepsydræ (water clocks) showed him that the nights in July were shorter in Britain than on the continent.
“Of all the natives far the most civilised are those who inhabit the district of Kent, which is all situated on the coast: nor do these differ greatly in their manners from the inhabitants of Gaul. Those who live farther inland sow no corn, but live on milk and flesh, and are clothed in skins. All the Britons however dye themselves with woad, which gives them a blue colour and makes them look more terrible in battle. They wear long hair and shave every part of the body except the head and the upper lip. Ten or a dozen men have their wives in common, especially brothers with brothers, fathers with their sons, the woman’s offspring being reckoned to him who first cohabited with her.” This ghastly statement is probably a mere traveller’s tale, utterly untrue of the Celts of Britain or of any other Aryan tribe. It has been thought that it may possibly have been derived from an institution something like the Sclavonic mir
