Ancient Britain and the Invasions of Julius Caesar
T. Rice (Thomas Rice) Holmes
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Ancient Britain
And
The Invasions Of Julius Caesar
By T. Rice Holmes
Hon. Litt.D. (Dublin)
Author Of ‘A History Of The Indian Mutiny’ ‘Caesar’S Conquest Of Gaul,’ Etc.
‘There seems no human thought so primitive as to have lost its bearing on our own thought, nor so ancient as to have broken its connection with our own life’.--E. B. TYLOR.
Oxford At The Clarendon Press 1907
Henry Frowde, M.A.
Publisher To The University Of Oxford London, Edinburgh New York And Toronto
Preface
This book is in one sense a companion of my _Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul_; and much that was written in the preface of that volume is equally applicable here. The last three chapters of Part I, and the later articles in Part II, are intended to do for Britain what I formerly tried to do for Gaul; but whereas the main object was then to illustrate the conquest, and the opening chapter was merely introductory, my aim in these pages has been to tell the story of man’s life in our island from the earliest times in detail. What has been called ‘prehistory’ cannot be written without knowledge of archaeology; but from the historical standpoint archaeological details must be handled, not for their own sake, but only in so far as they illustrate the development of culture. The two books are constructed on the same principle: in this, as in the other, the second part is devoted to questions which could not properly be discussed in narrative or quasi-narrative chapters, though I am encouraged by the judgement of expert critics, British, American, and Continental, of _Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul_, to hope that general readers who are interested in these matters may not find the articles which deal with them tedious. Those on Stonehenge, Ictis, and the ethnology of Britain, although they controvert certain opinions which are commonly accepted, will, I hope, tend to place facts in their true light. Two articles deal with well-worn themes,--the identity of the Portus Itius, and the place of Caesar’s landing in Britain. These problems have been pronounced by eminent scholars, including Mommsen, to be insoluble; nevertheless, I venture to affirm that in both cases the inquiry has now been worked out to demonstration. Critics who may be disposed to regard this claim as arrogant or frivolous will, I trust, read the articles through before passing judgement upon them. The questions would have been settled long ago if any competent writer had bestowed upon them as much care as has been expended in investigating Hannibal’s passage over the Alps.
Books and articles on various branches of the study of ancient Britain are practically innumerable; no other book, intended to treat it comprehensively from the beginning to the Roman invasion of A.D. 43, has, so far as I know, yet appeared.
I wish to express my gratitude to all who have in any way helped me. I am indebted to Sir John Evans for figures 1-6, 8-11, 14, 15, and 18-29, as well as for an opinion, most kindly given, in regard to certain coins which are not mentioned in his _Coins of the Ancient Britons_; to the Director of the British Museum for figures 30, 36-9, 41, 43, and 44; to the Society of Antiquaries for figures 7, 13, 16, 31, 35, and 40; to the Delegates of the Oxford University Press for figures 12 and 32-4; to Dr. Joseph Anderson for figure 17; and to Canon Greenwell for a proof of a valuable and interesting article--‘Early Iron Age Burials in Yorkshire’--which, I believe, is to appear in _Archaeologia_. Captain Tizard, R.N., F.R.S., kindly answered various questions which I asked him about tidal currents. Mr. E. J. Webb, Sir George Darwin, Professor Postgate, Professor Haverfield, Mr. Clement Reid, F.R.S., Mr. George Barrow, F.G.S., Captain J. Iron, Commander Richmond, R.N., and Commander Boxer, R.N., gave me information, which, in every instance, will be found, acknowledged either in footnotes of Part I, or in Part II, on various points of detail.
It is vain to plead that work would have been better if circumstances had been more favourable. But if any indulgence may be accorded to an author who, except on holidays, can only find leisure for writing or research after he has fulfilled the duties of an exacting profession, and who, in order to gain time, has worked steadily throughout his vacations for nearly thirty years, I am entitled to it.
11 DOURO PLACE, KENSINGTON, W. _October 19, 1907_.
Contents
PAGE PREFACE iii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS xv
Part I
Chapter I
Introduction 1
Chapter II
The Palaeolithic Age
Reasons for devoting a chapter to the Palaeolithic Age 13
Tertiary Man 13
The Ice Age 14
Continental Britain 19
The relation of palaeolithic man to the Ice Age 22
‘Eolithic’ man? 25
The environment of palaeolithic man in Britain 30
Whence did he come? 30
Chronological puzzles 31
Palaeolithic skeletons 33
Palaeolithic artists 35
Range of the palaeolithic hunters in Britain 35
Where their tools have been found 36
Inhabited caves 37
Cave implements and river-drift implements 38
Divers forms of tools 41
Palaeolithic workshops 42
Handles 44
Uses of tools 45
Culture of the palaeolithic inhabitants of Britain 45
Religion 49
Totemism 51
Was the domestication of animals a result of totemism? 55
Magic 57
Was there a ‘hiatus’ between the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic Age? 59
Chapter III
The Neolithic Age
The early neolithic immigrants 62
The origins of British civilization were neolithic 63
Geography of neolithic Britain 64
Who were the later neolithic invaders? 64
Evidence from dolmens 65
Relics of the neolithic population: their settlements 67
Flint mines and implement factories 69
Difficulty of determining age of stone implements 71
Indefiniteness of the prehistoric ‘Ages’ 72
Stone implements 73
The two main divisions of flint implements 73
How flint implements were made 73
Celts 75
Their uses 77
Chisels and gouges 77
Axes, axe-hammers, anvils, and mullers 78
Implements made of flakes 79
Javelin-heads and arrow-heads 80
Bone implements 82
Pygmy flints 82
Specialization of industries 83
A lost art 83
Dwellings 84
Food and cookery 88
Agriculture 89
Treatment of women 91
Duration of life 91
Clothing and ornaments 91
Trepanning 92
The _couvade_ 94
Hill-forts 95
Primitive writing 99
Sepulture: barrows and cairns 100
Inhumation and incineration 110
Human sacrifice 112
Traces (?) of cannibalism 113
Interment of animals 114
Religion 115
An alien invasion: period of transition 119
Chapter IV
The Bronze Age And The Voyage Of Pytheas
A Copper Age preceded the Bronze Age in certain countries, but has not been proved to have existed in Britain 121
Bronze implements used for many centuries in Europe before the Iron Age 123
Where did the European bronze culture originate? 124
Origin and affinities of the bronze culture of Britain 126
Period of its commencement 126
Physical characters of the late neolithic and early bronze-using invaders of Britain 127
Their social organization 128
Character and results of the invasions: the invaders poor in bronze weapons 129
Evidence of finds as to the settlements of the invaders 129
Stone implements used long after the introduction of bronze 132
Hill-forts 132
Primitive metallurgy 139
Bronze implements:--celts 139
Sickles 144
The Arreton Down hoard 145
Halberds 145
Shields, swords, spears 145
Moulds 148
Decoration of weapons 149
Hoards 149
Pasturage 150
Agriculture 151
Signs of amelioration in the conditions of life 152
Dwellings 153
Lake-dwellings 153
Hut-circles 154
Inhabited camps 156
The Heathery Burn Cave 157
Dress 160
Pins and buttons 161
Weapons mounted with gold or amber 162
Ornaments 163
Distribution of wealth: sources of gold, ivory, and amber 167
Why was Wiltshire exceptionally rich in ornaments? 169
British trade and the spiral 170
Comparative backwardness of culture in Britain 171
The information obtainable from graves 172
Round barrows, cairns, and sepulchral circles 173
Chronology of the barrows 181
Cremation and inhumation 184
Sepulchral pottery 191
The ‘drums’ of Folkton Wold and their significance 199
Sepulchral evidence as to religion 200
Engraved stones 205
Sun-worship 207
Stone circles and other megalithic monuments 207
Stonehenge 213
The voyage of Pytheas 217
Ictis 221
‘Ultima Thule’ 224
Pytheas and the ethnology of Britain 227
The passing of the Bronze Age 230
Chapter V
The Early Iron Age
Iron probably introduced into Britain by Gallic invaders 231
The Belgae preceded by other Brythons, who began to arrive about 400 B.C. 232
Ethnology of the invaders 234
The order in which the various tribes arrived unknown 235
‘Late Celtic’ art 236
Coral and enamel 237
Swords and scabbards 238
Mirrors 239
Brooches and pins 240
Ornaments 241
Woodwork 241
Pottery 242
The noblest creation of Late Celtic art 244
Imported objects of art 246
British ships and coracles 247
Trackways 247
Coinage 248
Iron currency bars 250
Mining 251
Agriculture 252
Dwellings of the rich 254
Towns 254
Hill-forts 255
Some permanently inhabited 257
Hunsbury 259
Inhabited caves; pit-dwellings; ‘Picts’ houses’; beehive houses; and brochs 260
The Glastonbury marsh-village 263
Dress 264
Reading and writing 265
Inequalities in culture 266
Intertribal war and political development 268
Instances of female sovereignty: the condition of women 269
Political and social conditions of Britain and Gaul compared 270
Religion 271
Sepulchral usages 286
The Druids 289
Ties between Britons and Gauls 299
How the Britons were affected by Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul 300
Chapter VI
Caesar’S First Invasion Of Britain
Caesar obliged to secure his rear before invading Britain 301
He contemplated invasion as early as 56 B.C. 301
Campaign against the Veneti necessary in order to secure command of the Channel 303
Campaign against the Morini 305
Its failure leaves Caesar’s base not quite secure 305
Caesar determines to sail from the Portus Itius (Boulogne) 306
He attempts to obtain information about Britain from Gallic traders 307
Gaius Volusenus sent to reconnoitre the opposite coast 308
Envoys from British tribes sent to Caesar to promise submission 308
He commissions Commius to return with them and gain over tribes 309
Volusenus’s voyage of reconnaissance 309
Kentishmen prepare for resistance 312
Certain clans of the Morini spontaneously promise to submit 312
Caesar’s expeditionary force 313
Sabinus and Cotta sent to punish the recalcitrant Morini and the Menapii 314
Caesar’s voyage 314
His cavalry transports fail to put to sea in time 314
He anchors off the Dover cliffs 315
Late in the afternoon he sails on to Walmer--Deal 316
The landing vigorously resisted 316
Caesar’s victory indecisive owing to want of cavalry 317
The Romans encamp 317
British chiefs sue for peace 318
The cavalry transports dispersed by a gale 318
Caesar’s fleet partially wrecked 319
The British chiefs prepare to renew hostilities 320
Caesar labours to retrieve the disaster 320
The 7th legion surprised and attacked while cutting corn 321
Military operations suspended owing to bad weather 322
The Britons, attempting to rush Caesar’s camp, are defeated with heavy loss 323
Caesar compelled by the approach of the equinox to return to Gaul 323
Causes of his partial failure 323
Two transports fail to make the Portus Itius: the troops whom they carried attacked by the Morini 324
Punishment of the Morini and Menapii 324
Thanksgiving service at Rome for Caesar’s success 325
Chapter VII
Caesar’S Second Invasion Of Britain
Caesar builds a fleet for a second expedition 326
Mandubracius flees from Britain and takes refuge with Caesar 327
Caesar winters in Cisalpine Gaul and Illyricum 327
His correspondence with Cicero 327
Cicero’s hopes and fears about the second British expedition 329
Caesar returns to Gaul 329
He is obliged to march to the country of the Treveri 330
Returning to the Portus Itius, he finds fleet and army assembled 331
He resolves to take Gallic chiefs of doubtful fidelity as hostages to Britain 331
Dumnorix resolves not to go 332
The fleet weatherbound 332
The fate of Dumnorix 333
Caesar sets sail, leaving Labienus in charge of Gaul 333
The fleet drifts north-eastward out of its course 334
The landing-place, between Sandown Castle and Sandwich, reached by rowing 335
Leaving the fleet at anchor in charge of a brigade, Caesar marches against the Britons 335
forces the passage of the Stour near Canterbury 337
and storms a fort to which they had retreated 337
Next morning he sends three columns in pursuit 337
but is forced to recall them by news that many of his ships had been wrecked 338
He beaches the ships, constructs a naval camp, and repairs damage 338
Results of the disaster 338
Caesar again marches towards Canterbury. Cassivellaunus elected commander-in-chief of the Britons 339
The Romans harassed by British charioteers 340
Trebonius routs the Britons 341
The British infantry disperse 341
War-chariots _versus_ Roman troops 341
Caesar marches for the country of Cassivellaunus 343
whose chariots harass his cavalry 344
Caesar crosses the Thames 345
Cassivellaunus orders the kings of Kent to attack the naval camp 346
Caesar enters the country of the Trinovantes, who furnish hostages and grain 346
Five of the confederate tribes submit 346
Attack on the naval camp repulsed 347
Caesar’s hurried journey to the coast and its significance 348
Cassivellaunus sues for peace 349
Caesar and his army return to Gaul 350
Caesar’s description of Britain 351
Review of Caesar’s invasions of Britain 352
Chapter VIII
The Results Of Caesar’S Invasions Of Britain
The importance of Caesar’s British expeditions underestimated by his contemporaries and by historians 355
Development of British commerce 357
The British inscribed coinage and its historical value 358
The dynasties of Cassivellaunus and Commius 361
Tasciovanus 361
Epaticcus and Cunobeline 361
Cunobeline’s coins prove growth of Roman influence in Britain 362
His conquests 362
Flight of Dubnovellaunus and Tincommius (?), the son of Commius, to Rome 363
The later adventures of Commius 364
His conquests in Britain 365
Tincommius, Verica, and Eppillus 365
Augustus contemplates an invasion of Britain 367
Why he abandoned his intention 367
Continued growth of Roman influence in Britain 368
Cessation of British coinage in certain districts which had belonged to the sons of Commius 368
Relations of Cunobeline with Rome 369
His exiled son, Adminius, takes refuge with Caligula 369
Death of Cunobeline 370
Unpopularity of his dynasty intensified on the accession of his sons, Caratacus and Togodumnus 370
Invasion of Britain by Aulus Plautius 371
Review of British history from 54 B.C. to A.D. 43 371
The Roman conquest and its results 372
Permanence in English history of prehistoric and Celtic elements 372
Part II
The Ethnology Of Ancient Britain.--
I. Introduction 375
II. The methods of anthropology 376
III. Eolithic man (?) 379
IV. Palaeolithic man 380
V. The Pygmies (?) 390
VI. Neolithic man 393
VII. The ‘Pictish Question’ 409
VIII. The Round-heads 424
IX. The Celts 444
X. Conclusion 455
The Names πρετανικαι νησοι, _Britanni_, And _Britannia_ 459
The Birthday Of Religion 461
Dumbuck, Langbank, Dunbuie 463
Inhumation And Cremation 465
Sepulchral Pottery 467
Stonehenge 468
The Cassiterides, Ictis, And The British Trade In Tin.--
I. The Cassiterides 483
II. Ictis and the British trade in tin 499
Dene-Holes 515
The Coast Between Calais And The Somme In The Time Of Caesar 517
The Configuration Of The Coast Of Kent In The Time Of Caesar 518
I. Between Ramsgate and Sandown Castle 519
II. Between Sandown Castle and Walmer Castle 521
III. The Goodwin Sands 525
IV. The South Foreland and the Dover Cliffs 528
V. Dover Harbour 530
VI. Between Dover and Sandgate 531
VII. Romney Marsh 532
Portus Itius.--
I. Review of the controversy 552
II. The data furnished by Caesar, Strabo, and Ptolemy 554
III. Caesar sailed from the Portus Itius on both his expeditions 556
IV. The value of Caesar’s estimate of the distance between the Portus Itius and Britain 557
V. The estuary of the Somme 558
VI. Ambleteuse 563
VII. Calais 565
VIII. Wissant 565
IX. Boulogne 585
The Place Of Caesar’S Landing In Britain.--
I. Introduction 595
II. The data furnished by Caesar and other ancient writers 596
III. The day on which Caesar landed in 55 B.C. 600
IV. Did Caesar land at the same place in both his expeditions? 603
V. The various theories about Caesar’s place of landing 604
VI. The question of the tides 605
VII. The theory that Caesar landed at Pevensey 611
VIII. The theory that Caesar landed at Lympne or Hythe 622
IX. The theory that Caesar landed at Hurst 638
X. The theory that Caesar landed between Hurst and Kennardington 639
XI. The theory that Caesar landed opposite Walmer and Deal 644
XII. The theory that Caesar landed at Richborough or Sandwich 662
The Credibility Of Caesar’S Narrative Of His Invasions Of Britain 666
The Disembarkation Of The Romans In 55 B.C. 673
The Site Of Caesar’S Camp In 55, And Of His Naval Camp In 54 B.C. 673
The War-Chariots Of The Britons 674
THE OPERATIONS OF THE BRITONS DURING THE LAST FEW DAYS OF CAESAR’S FIRST EXPEDITION 677
WHERE DID CAESAR ENCOUNTER THE BRITONS ON THE MORNING AFTER HIS SECOND LANDING IN BRITAIN? 678
CAESAR’S EARLIER OPERATIONS IN 54 B.C. (_B. G._, v. 9-11) 685
Caesar’S Second Combat With The Britons In 54 B.C. 688
The Combat Between Trebonius And The Britons 692
Where DID Caesar Cross The Thames? 692
Caesar’S Passage Of The Thames 698
The Site Of Cassivellaunus’S Stronghold 699
DID _Londinium_ Exist In Caesar’S Time? 703
The Julian Calendar And The Chronology Of Caesar’S Invasions Of Britain 706
Topographical Notes 735
Addenda 739
Index 743
List Of Illustrations
Figure Page
1 Harpoon-head (Kent’s Cavern) 43
2 Flint flake (Reculver) 43
3 ‘Tongue-shaped’ implement (Biddenham, Bedfordshire) 43
4 Oval implement (Dartford Heath) 43
5 Rough-hewn celt (Mildenhall, Suffolk) 75
6 Polished celt (Coton, Cambridgeshire) 75
7 Hafted celt (Solway Moss) 76
8 Chisel (Burwell, Cambridgeshire) 77
9 Double-edged axe-head (Hunmanby, Yorkshire) 78
10 Flint knife (Saffron Walden) 79
11 Curved blade (Fimber, Yorkshire) 80
12 Leaf-shaped arrow-head (Yorkshire Wolds) 81
13 Lozenge-shaped arrow-head (Yorkshire Wolds) 81
14 Triangular arrow-head (Amotherby, Yorkshire) 81
15 Barbed arrow-head (Rudstone) 81
16 Ground-plan of chambered barrow (Uley) 104
17 Horned cairn of Get 106
18 Flat bronze celt (East Riding of Yorkshire) 142
19 Flanged bronze celt (Norfolk) 142
20 Flanged bronze celt with stop-ridge (Northumberland) 142
21 Winged bronze celt (Dorchester, Oxfordshire) 143
22 Looped palstave (Brassington, Derbyshire) 143
23 Socketed celt (Kingston, Surrey) 143
24 Arreton Down blade 145
25 Bronze shield (Yetholm, Roxburghshire) 146
26 Leaf-shaped bronze sword (Battersea) 147
27 Bronze spear-head (Thames) 148
28 Jet button (Rudstone) 161
29 Bronze torque (Wedmore, Somersetshire) 164
30 Gold lunette (Llanllyfni, Carnarvonshire) 164
31 Amber necklace (Lake, Wiltshire) 166
32 Drinking-cup 192
33 Food-vessel 193
34 Cinerary urn (Goodmanham, Yorkshire Wolds) 193
35 Incense-cup (Bulford, Wiltshire) 194
36 Chalk ‘drum’ (Folkton Wold) 200
37 Bronze mirror (Trelan Bahow, Cornwall) 239
38 Brooch (Water Eaton, Oxfordshire) 240
39 Wooden bowl (Glastonbury) 242
40 Late Celtic urn (Shoebury, Essex), 243
41 Patterns on Late Celtic pottery (Glastonbury), 243
42 Late Celtic shield (Battersea) 245
43 Bronze open-work ring (Stanwick, N.R. Yorkshire) 265
44 Circle of interments (Aylesford) 287
Maps
South-Eastern Britain 305 East Kent 313 Romney Marsh and Hythe harbour (illustrating theories of their topography in 55-4 B.C.) 531
[The maps of South-Eastern Britain and East Kent, like all maps of Ancient Britain, are inevitably inexact; but the errors are unimportant. The Dover cliffs, for instance, have lost by erosion, but one cannot say how much (see pages 528-30); nor is it possible to indicate the exact nature of the slight change which the coast has undergone between Sandown Castle and Walmer Castle (pages 521-5). Again, I have not attempted to delineate the coast west of Pevensey or west or north of Reculver precisely as it was in 55 B.C., because, even if such an attempt had been successful, nothing would have been gained for the purpose of this book. As far as possible, however, the maps represent the conclusions reached in the article on the configuration of the coast of Kent in the time of Caesar. The outline of Richborough harbour and of the estuary between Thanet and the mainland is intended to show approximately the high-water mark of spring tides. At low tide the channel was very narrow (page 519).]
Ancient Britain
And
The Invasions Of Julius Caesar
Chapter I
Introduction
When Caesar was about to sail on his first expedition to Britain, he summoned the Gallic traders whose vessels used to ply between Gaul and the Kentish coast, and tried to elicit from them information; but, to quote his own words, ‘he could not find out either the extent of the island, or what tribes dwelt therein, or their size, or their method of fighting, or their manners and customs, or what harbours were capable of accommodating a large flotilla.’ Even after he had seen the country and its inhabitants with his observant eyes he was not much better informed: all that he could learn about the aborigines he summed up in a single sentence; and later writers, Greek, Italian, and mediaeval--Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Augustus Caesar, Pomponius Mela, Tacitus, Suetonius, Dion Cassius, Herodian, and the rest--added very little to the knowledge which he had gathered. Yet the materials which are now available for a description of prehistoric and pre-Roman Britain, however limited their range, are so abundant that the difficulty is to use them with discrimination and to fashion the essential into a work of art. How have these materials been obtained? When the general reader takes up a history, he accepts the narrative in a spirit more or less sceptical. He knows that it has been composed, either directly or at second hand, from written, perhaps also from oral testimony; and he rarely troubles himself to inquire what the evidence is, or with what diligence and acuteness it has been sifted. But when he is invited to read an account of the evolution of culture among people who recorded nothing and of whom nothing was recorded, it is natural that he should insist upon peering into the writer’s workshop that he may judge for himself what the materials are worth.
During many centuries, while the materials were most abundant, they remained unused. Many of them were rifled by treasure-seekers, carted away by builders, or destroyed by the plough. Even when the Renaissance turned men’s minds to the study of the past, they had no thought of any sources of information except the written documents which they were only beginning to learn how to use. The Italian scholar, Raymond de Marliano, the Dutch geographer, Abraham Ortels, made futile guesses about topographical questions suggested by Caesar’s _Commentaries_, but never dreamed that there was anything to be learned of a people who had lived in Britain when the South Foreland and Cape Grisnez were still undivided. Camden travelled over the length and breadth of England, amassing stores of information, much of which he did not know how to interpret, and built up geographical theories upon place-names, which, in default of linguistic science, were of necessity worthless. Even the great French scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries--Chifflet, Du Fresne, Scaliger, Sanson, and d’Anville--although their geographical essays are still worth reading, failed to determine the port from which Caesar had sailed to Britain. Stukeley, who was one of the first to excavate barrows and describe their contents and who made valuable observations of some of our megalithic monuments, encumbered his folios with fanciful speculations which only served to entertain his contemporaries and to mislead posterity.[1] But these men had no access to the sources which are now open to many who are intellectually their inferiors; and, notwithstanding the smallness of their achievement, they did their work as pioneers.
About the middle of the eighteenth century a spirit of antiquarian curiosity was aroused in England. The Society of Antiquaries, which had been founded in 1717, received in 1752 a charter from George the Second; and in 1770 appeared the first number of their principal organ, _Archaeologia_, which is still in course of publication. Many of the earlier papers were crude and superficial, showing keen interest in the things of the past, but naturally betraying ignorance of the methods by which alone the significance of antiquarian discoveries could be ascertained. Early in the nineteenth century, however, Sir Richard Colt Hoare and his friend, William Cunnington, began to excavate the barrows of Wiltshire; and with their labours the era of scientific investigation may be said to have begun. Hoare had in earlier life been an ardent fox-hunter; but, as he grew older, he found that barrow-digging was a pastime more exciting still. Craniology was at that time unborn; and Hoare omitted to measure the numerous skeletons which he discovered or to utilize them for the advancement of ethnology. Even the work that he professed to do was often marred by a lack of thoroughness which, although it was inevitable in a pioneer, irritated the critical spirit of later explorers.[2] But with all its limitations the _Ancient History of North and South Wiltshire_, the first volume of which appeared in 1812, was an important work. A few years earlier, John Frere had recorded in _Archaeologia_[3] the discoveries of stone implements which he had made at Hoxne in Suffolk. Such discoveries had of course in innumerable instances passed unrecorded. In the British Isles, as in many other lands, flint arrow-heads were regarded by the peasants who found them as fairy-darts; while stone axes, which in Scotland, Ireland, and Cornwall, are still deemed to possess medical virtues, were said to have fallen from the sky.[4] In the time of Charles the Second, however, Sir Robert Sibbald, greatly daring, affirmed that the fairy-darts had been made by man;[5] and nearly a century before the time of Frere an implement, which has since been assigned to the Palaeolithic Age, had been found near Gray’s Inn Lane, and had been vaguely described as ‘a British weapon’. But Frere saw that the tools which he had collected were not to be ascribed even to the ‘painted savages’ who had resisted the invasion of Caesar; and although even he did not suspect their immeasurable antiquity, he declared that they must have belonged to ‘a very remote period indeed’ and to ‘a people who had not the use of metals’. In 1824 Dr. Buckland, who had spent some years in exploring ossiferous caves, published an account of his work in _Reliquiae Diluvianae_, a book which, by attributing the phenomena that it recorded to an universal deluge, impelled geological research in a wrong direction, and delayed for many years the recognition of the truth that the earlier human occupants of the caves had been contemporary with the mammoth and other extinct animals. Soon afterwards MacEnery, whose example was followed by Godwin Austen, examined Kent’s Cavern near Torquay, a task which was systematically completed some five-and-twenty years ago by a committee of the British Association. It was not, however, before the middle of the nineteenth century that the knowledge of the Stone Ages began to be built up on a sound foundation. From 1841 to 1860 Boucher de Perthes was patiently exploring in the neighbourhood of Abbeville and Amiens the gravels which the river Somme had deposited in the Pleistocene Period, and collecting flints which were proved to have been shaped by the hands of man. Lyell, Prestwich, John Evans, Lubbock, and Flower visited the scene of his labours, and testified to the authenticity of his discoveries; and after long controversy the most reluctant were forced to admit that the human race had existed at a period infinitely more remote than had hitherto been imagined. Similar discoveries were soon made in England, in various European countries, in Africa, Asia, and America. In our islands, as well as on the Continent, as antiquarian zeal became more widely diffused, the need of organized effort was felt; and, side by side with the leading academies--the Society of Antiquaries, the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, the Royal Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, the Royal Irish Academy, the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, and the Cambrian Archaeological Association--local societies were gradually formed in every important provincial town. Accident from time to time revealed objects for which no search had been made. Ploughmen guiding their teams, navvies working upon roads or in railway-cuttings, miners and quarrymen, labourers draining land, sportsmen groping after game which they had shot, came upon antiquities of the nature of which they were ignorant. Evans, in the intervals of leisure which he could win from a busy life, indefatigably collected implements of stone, bone, and bronze, systematized the discoveries of a host of minor workers, and marshalled facts and deductions in volumes which have become classical; and, not content with this, he supplemented the labours of Akerman, Hawkins, Roach Smith, and others, and revealed to his countrymen the origin, the varieties, and the geographical distribution of the coins which their British ancestors had minted, and the historical value of which he was the first to emphasize. His son, who has lately become famous as the explorer of Crete, carried his researches further afield, but often found time to grapple with British problems; contributed to our knowledge of Stonehenge and other megalithic circles; and by his discoveries at Aylesford in Kent threw a beam of light upon the history of the Celtic Iron Age. Boyd Dawkins explored the caves of Somersetshire, Derbyshire, and Wales. Bateman, Thurnam, Davis, Warne, Greenwell, Mortimer, and Atkinson of Danby continued in a more scientific spirit the labours of Hoare,[6] and recorded the discoveries which they had made in numerous barrows. General Pitt-Rivers brought the experience of a soldier, the sagacity of a man of the world, and the genius which was his own to the investigation of archaeological and anthropological problems; demonstrated the value of thorough excavation[7] and of accurate pictorial illustration; impressed upon the rising school of students the need of precision in recording the circumstances of every find; and by expending a considerable fortune in adding to knowledge set an example of enlightened generosity. Sir Arthur Mitchell, in a series of lectures[8] which have been described as a masterpiece of sceptical irony, warned antiquaries, but in no didactic spirit, to think, and to think again, before they drew conclusions from the records which the spade had revealed. The Devonshire Association appointed committees to examine the antiquities of their richly dowered county, and printed a series of reports upon the megalithic monuments, the graves, and the ‘hut-circles’ of Dartmoor. John Abercromby traced from Great Britain to the original seat of manufacture the sites where the so-called drinking-cups, which accompanied so many British interments of the earlier round barrows, have been found; while Romilly Allen, following in the steps of Wollaston Franks, helped to elucidate the development of the art of the Bronze Age and the Late Celtic Period. Professor Gowland disclosed by excavation the origins of Stonehenge, and by his metallurgical knowledge enabled us to understand the methods of prehistoric miners. Charles Read made intelligible, even to casual visitors, the collection of antiquities in the British Museum which illustrates the culture of the Ages of Stone, Bronze, and Iron. Francis Haverfield, scholar, archaeologist, and practical excavator, while making himself the foremost authority on the history of Roman Britain, incidentally enlarged the records of pre-Roman times. Joseph Anderson carried on the work which Daniel Wilson had begun, and described the successive stages of culture through which the inhabitants of Scotland had passed from the earliest to the beginning of the historic period. Coles, Christison, and Bryce added significant details to the information which his lectures had given. But it would be tedious to prolong the list of workers. Everywhere the success with which the last resting-places of the dead had been made to tell their tale stimulated antiquaries to search for fresh relics that might help them to realize more fully how those dead had lived. Flint quarries and workshops, where primitive tools were fabricated, hut-circles, Scottish brochs, lake-dwellings, pits, and ‘earth-houses’ were explored; and, in response to the exhortations of Pitt-Rivers, camps and other earthworks were patiently excavated, although, for lack of funds, research of this kind has not progressed very far. The exploration of the far-famed marsh-village at Glastonbury is nearly complete; and the results which have been obtained, collated with those that were yielded by the examination of the camps of Cissbury, Lewes, Hod Hill, and Hunsbury, have done much to dispel the old fancy that the ancient Briton was a savage.
But perhaps no intelligent man ever progressed far in archaeological study without discovering for himself this caution:--though the relics of man’s handiwork, unlike his written history, cannot lie, their meaning may in divers ways be misinterpreted. They will not yield it up except to the trained and discerning eye.[9]
Meanwhile toilers in other fields were co-operating with the archaeologists. Physical anthropology began to make strides. Since Davis, Thurnam, and Rolleston described the skeletons which had reposed in the long barrows and the round barrows of Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Yorkshire, and Northumberland, since Huxley wrote his memoirs on the river-bed skulls of England and Ireland, greater accuracy of method has been evolved, and Beddoe, Turner, Garson, and Haddon have supplemented and corrected their predecessors’ work. Geologists endeavoured to determine the configuration of the land at the time when man first lived in Britain; and a definite result was attained when borings made in implement-bearing beds showed the relative chronology of the period during which palaeolithic hunters had inhabited the eastern counties. Burial customs revealed by the opening of barrows and cists, holes drilled in the stones of dolmens, strange devices sculptured on graves and on rocks, suggested problems as to the religious ideas of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, which the archaeologist, the ethnographer, and the folklorist attempted to solve. Philologists studied the Celtic languages, and succeeded in some measure in deducing from place-names and other relics of the ancient dialects information bearing upon the history of the invasions and the distribution of the two great branches of the Celtic stock.
A great advance was made when the Comparative Method was brought to bear upon the study of primitive culture. It was recognized that the antiquities of our own island could not be adequately comprehended without reference to those of other lands. For at every turn the inquirer found himself arrested by obstinate questionings. Whence had the immigrants of the Old and the New Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Early Iron Age set out? Whence was the knowledge of bronze derived? What was the starting-point of the culture of the Iron Age? What were the first beginnings of Late Celtic Art? How was one to account for the existence in remote countries of this or that British custom? The British archaeologist who would intelligently ponder these questions must take account of the work which has been done by Cartailhac, the brothers Siret, Bertrand, Edouard Piette, Salomon Reinach, Montelius, Sophus Müller, Arthur Evans, Ridgeway, Myres, and Flinders Petrie in elucidating the antiquities of France, Spain, Italy, Central Europe, Scandinavia, the Aegean Sea, North Africa, and Egypt; and the British ethnologist cannot afford to be ignorant of what Broca, Hamy, de Quatrefages, Salmon, Hervé, Manouvrier, Virchow, Ranke, and Sergi have done for the ethnology of Europe. Pitt-Rivers saw that ethnography, which informs us about the arts and crafts, the manners and customs of surviving savage tribes, can give archaeology indispensable aid;[10] and all who have compared the contents of the American Room and the Ethnographical Gallery in the British Museum with what they have seen in the Prehistoric Room will believe the Keeper when he assures them that ‘in all probability the resemblance between the perishable productions of the modern savage and those of prehistoric man, which are now lost, was as great as that which undoubtedly exists in the case of implements of stone and bone which have remained’:[11] but in endeavouring to apply their knowledge to the elucidation of the antiquities of a particular country they will not forget to be on their guard. Nor may we neglect the facts which folk-lore societies have in late years so diligently collected; but those who have learned from the great works of Tylor how much of primitive custom still lingers in the depths of modern civilization will become sceptical when they are invited by less sober reasoners to trace the origin of this or that surviving superstition to any one race or tribe or period of the remote past; and readers who have accepted with enthusiastic admiration the seductive theories of _The Golden Bough_ should weigh well the criticism which Sir Alfred Lyall, qualified by intimacy with primitive peoples as well as by a sceptical and cultivated intellect, has published of that brilliant and truly epoch-making book.
When we have finished our survey of prehistoric times we shall find that while we can still rely upon the aid of the archaeologist and the anthropologist, other materials have been accumulating which will enable us to read our classical texts with an insight that was impossible for the old-fashioned historian. The texts themselves have been purified and restored. Inscriptions have yielded new information on matters of history, ethnology, and religion; and the vast labour which has been expended by those who have striven to elucidate the most interesting of all subjects cannot wholly fail to help us when we inquire what the British Celts thought of man’s relation to the universe. As one scholar after another has noted the significance of dates recorded in Cicero’s correspondence, and compared them with the relevant passages in the _Commentaries_ and other ancient writings, chronological difficulties have gradually disappeared. Physical geography and geology, supported partly by written documents, partly by archaeological discoveries, have combined to reconstruct the map of the coast on which Caesar landed. Astronomers and hydrographers have perfected our knowledge of tidal streams, and thereby forged a key which, for those who possess the indispensable knowledge of seamanship and of ancient military history, can unlock the secrets of Caesar’s voyages. Military experts and soldiers who have served in the field are willing to help us to understand the story of his campaigns.
But after the student has digested all the information which he can extract from books and manuscripts, from museums, from travel and observation, perhaps from practical experience in digging, and, above all, from those who combine learning with knowledge of the world, of affairs, and of men, he will find that his materials are still, and on certain points must always remain inadequate. Some branches of research, indeed, are virtually complete. All, or nearly all, that sepulchres and skulls and coins can teach us of Ancient Britain and its inhabitants we know. Many more implements, weapons, ornaments, and urns will be accumulated; but it may be doubted whether they will add sensibly to that knowledge which is really worth having. But much still remains to be learned. The geological record is still incomplete; and one of our most accomplished field-geologists is hopefully looking forward to a time when it may be possible to determine the uttermost antiquity of man and to illuminate the dark era that intervened between the Pleistocene Period and the apparent commencement of the Neolithic Age.[12] His experience has enabled him to tell archaeologists that in order to solve chronological problems, they cannot afford to neglect even the shells which abound in many burial-mounds.[13] There is room also for many labourers in excavating stone circles, camps, and earthworks, and determining their age, in exploring habitations, wherever they can be found, and learning what they can teach about those who constructed them.[14] What has been already done in this department has produced the most fruitful results: the speculations of Dr. Guest, for instance, in regard to the so-called ‘Belgic ditches’, have been stultified by pick and shovel.[15] But such work, which in other civilized countries is an object of national concern, languishes here for want of funds. No British Government can expect support from the intelligence and the public spirit of its constituents in spending money upon archaeological research, or has the courage to give them a lead;[16] and where are the wealthy Englishmen who will follow the example of their American cousins in endowing such work?
Nevertheless, enough is already known to justify an attempt to create a synthetical work, the aim of which shall be to portray in each successive stage and to trace the evolution of the culture--nay, in some sort even to construct a history--of prehistoric Britain, and to rewrite the history of the period which is illustrated by contemporary records. Not only is the subject fascinating; it is an indispensable introduction to the history of England. I have tried to bear ever in mind the interdependence of all the sciences which can help to restore the past, and to remember the warning, ‘Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.’ It is easy to laugh at the guesses of Camden and the theories of Stukeley; but they were only framing the hypotheses which are as necessary for the progress of archaeology as of other sciences; and certain theories which in our own day have been acclaimed with enthusiasm, while serving their purpose like theirs, will, like theirs, be found open to criticism.
But we need not exercise ourselves overmuch in the region of theory. Though we must be content to remain ignorant of many things, the story of Ancient Britain, gaining as it progresses firmness of outline and fullness of detail, can be constructed upon a basis of fact.
Chapter II
The Palaeolithic Age
[Sidenote: Reasons for devoting a chapter to the Palaeolithic Age.]
A chapter devoted to Palaeolithic Man may perhaps appear irrelevant to a work the aim of which is to serve as an introduction to English history; for it has been questioned whether in this country he left any descendants, and therefore whether he exercised even the smallest influence upon the later immigrants. But in France, if not here, the Palaeolithic merged, perhaps by a long period of transition, into the Neolithic Age:[17] the neolithic inhabitants of Britain were of course descended from palaeolithic ancestors; and in every part of the world in which it existed the palaeolithic culture was apparently much the same. There are therefore other reasons besides that of sentiment for attempting in this book to describe the life of primitive men and the surroundings in which they lived: yet sentiment has its weight; for no one who is not heedless of the past would forget the efforts of those who, in hard struggle with nature and with fierce beasts, were the unconscious founders of European civilization. Without the faith of the Shinto ancestor-worshipper one may share his daily repeated pious gratitude,--‘Ye forefathers of the generations, and of our families, and of our kindred, unto you, the founders of our homes, we utter the gladness of our thanks.’[18]
[Sidenote: Tertiary man.]
The palaeolithic people had acquired a degree of skill in the manufacture of stone tools which is only attainable by the most practised modern imitators. But the progress which they made during the incalculably long period of their existence was so small that they must have needed ages to ascend to the level at which we are able to observe them. Therefore, although no skeletons, no implements have yet been found which can be referred, in the opinion of all experts, to the Tertiary Period, the most sceptical are willing to believe that man, even if he did not deserve the appellation of _Homo sapiens_, did then wander upon the face of the earth.[19] But how, when he had assumed the erect position and had begun to make intelligent use of the hands which gave him such an advantage in contending with other carnivorous animals more powerful than himself, he learned slowly and by repeated efforts to chip the flints that he picked up into serviceable shapes; how in the struggle for a livelihood the stronger or the more cunning prevailed; how with developing intelligence came keener susceptibility to pain as well as to pleasure; how men’s fancies were quickened by light and darkness, sun, moon, and stars, and their fears excited by storm and flood and fire; how they strove to communicate to each other their alarms, their desires, and their joys--these things may only be imagined; and the imagination of those who have read most wisely and have most observantly studied the ways of modern savages will lead them least astray.
[Sidenote: The Ice Age.]
The Tertiary was merging into the Quaternary or Pleistocene Period when the climate which had before fostered the palms and crocodiles whose fossils have been discovered in the London Clay,[20] but had been gradually changing, became intensely cold. Snow fell thickly upon the mountains of Scandinavia; glaciers began to creep down the valleys; and gradually the ice accumulated until it overspread the whole of Northern Europe, filled the basins of the Baltic and the North Sea, hid mountains and uplands in Scotland, and choked the dales of Northern England, of the Midlands, and of Wales; while isolated glaciers were formed even so far southward as the valleys of the Beaujolais and the Lyonnais. The ice has left its record upon the Highland and Cumbrian mountains, whose rugged crags it moulded into flowing curves; upon rocks which were scratched by stones embedded in slowly moving glaciers; in the mud, stiff and tenacious, which they deposited as they grided over many kinds of rocks, and which, being interspersed with stones, large and small, is called boulder-clay; in rocks which they transported and dropped far from their native sites, and by which the directions that they followed can still be traced; in moraines which mark the limits of their descent and their recession; in lakes that were formed, after the ice had disappeared, in glens which moraines had dammed;[21] in the Arctic plants which survive on mountains, and in those whose fossil remains have been found in Norfolk near the level of the sea. In many places the boulder-clay lies in two or more layers, separated by stratified sands and gravels, from which it has been generally inferred that the Ice Age was interrupted by a period--here and there by short intervals--during which the climate was mild. Told briefly and in general terms, the tale which a learner might piece together from geological textbooks[22] is something like this. The cold was most intense during the earlier stage, when the lower boulder-clay was being deposited, and, little by little, Britain rose until it became one with the Continent, with Ireland, and with Scandinavia, and extended far westward into the Atlantic Ocean. Then, we are told, the ice-sheet that covered Scandinavia was six thousand feet thick; and though it became thinner as it advanced southward, it shrouded the hill-tops in Scotland, where boulders were lifted right over the water-parting, and dropped on the western side, and scored its marks upon rocks in the Lake District at heights of two thousand five hundred feet; while, spreading over Ireland, it went out to sea beyond Cork and Kerry, where the wall of ice broke off and floated away in bergs. Then the land slowly sank until in the interglacial period only the hills stood out above the sea, and Great Britain became an archipelago. Again the movement was upward, though often interrupted and perhaps not general in extent: the climate was again becoming severe; and, although the rigours of the first period were not repeated, local glaciers crept down the higher valleys north of the Midlands, while icebergs floated over the parts that remained submerged and over the North Sea. Now too, as in the earlier period, the cold was not everywhere continuous: there were oscillations during which the glaciers alternately advanced and retreated. As the Ice Age was beginning to near its end, the land continued to rise until the North Sea, the English Channel, and the Irish Sea once more disappeared. In the latest stage of all, when Arctic conditions were about to vanish even in our northern latitudes, there was a gradual subsidence: Scotland was lowered about one hundred feet beneath the present level of the sea, as the highest ‘raised beach’ along the shores of the great estuaries testifies; and the waters rushed in over the sinking valley of the Dover Strait.
Such was the orthodox faith: but the rising geologists have discarded some of its articles; and even among the faithful there are pious doubters. Many authorities deny that the sea-shells which are found on hills in North Wales, Cheshire, and elsewhere, prove that they were once submerged: those shells, they insist, were ploughed up by glaciers out of the sea-floor; and they require us to believe that they were carried up the sides of the hills to heights of thirteen hundred and fifty feet above the sea-level.[23] But although these shells are probably not in their original position, and the mere presence of marine organisms is no sufficient proof of former submergence, shells have been found near Inverness, five hundred feet above the sea, in the very place where they lived and died. Still, it does not follow that the submergence which they attest was interglacial.[24] Some inquirers believe that the glaciers advanced and retreated once and no more;[25] that there was only one slight elevation of the land and one slight subsidence: others that Britain was not only elevated twice, but also twice partially submerged; others that it was finally severed from the Continent in the earlier part of the Ice Age, when the drainage of Northern Europe, pouring into the North Sea and barred by the ice-sheet from escaping northwards, cut for itself a channel across the isthmus which now lies below the Dover Strait.[26] One expert still insists that when man first entered Britain the whole country stood at least six hundred feet above its present level:[27] another, in the same work, denies that its greatest elevation was more than seventy feet;[28] and their editor looks helplessly on. One writer suggests that there may never have been an Ice Age, in the strictest sense of the term, at all, but only local glaciers, such as now exist in Greenland.[29] Another has laboured to show that the accumulation of ice-sheets ‘merely marked one or more culminating epochs in a period when the climate was at least as commonly temperate as Arctic’.[30] Others even now maintain that not one only, but five interglacial periods interrupted the intense cold;[31] others again that there was no interglacial period at all, but only local ameliorations of climate.[32] Another fertile theme of controversy has been the origin of the boulder-clays. But the confession of a Fellow of the Royal Society, who, as a member of the Geological Survey, lived in Norfolk for eight years, studying its geology, suggests that, after all, a sense of humour may compensate for inability to fathom the mysteries of the Ice Age. ‘After spending about a year in Norfolk,’ he says, ‘I began to believe I knew all about the drifts, but during the following seven years of my sojourn in that county, as I moved from place to place, I somehow seemed to know less and less, and I cannot say what would have been the result, but fortunately the geological survey of the county came to an end.’[33] Fortunately, too, it is not essential to our study of palaeolithic man to decide in every case between the theories of rival geologists. All admit that in Britain the Thames was the extreme southern limit of glacial movement, although even in the southern fringe Arctic conditions prevailed; that glaciers covered a large part of the country north of the Thames, and on the higher regions coalesced into ice-sheets: the view that the lower boulder-clay was a _moraine profonde_ has at last been generally adopted;[34] while almost all agree that there was at least one interglacial period, and that there were climatic variations in certain tracts. Nevertheless one of the ablest and most experienced of our field geologists has recently given weighty reasons for his own conviction that even this solitary age of amelioration should not be regarded as an established fact.[35]
[Sidenote: Continental Britain.]
But, if we are to study the Palaeolithic Age intelligently, we must endeavour to test for ourselves the dogma that Britain was then continental. That dogma has recently been questioned by geologists who have minutely re-examined in the field the phenomena of the Glacial Epoch. Mr. Clement Reid, for instance, holds that in the Palaeolithic Age England never rose more than seventy feet above its present level,[36] and that men first entered it across a narrow strait which was formed in the earlier period of glaciation.[37] It is certain that the sea then washed the coast of Sussex and the western counties; for near Selsea there is a patch of boulder-clay--the only one south of the Thames--which must have been deposited by shore-ice, and there are rocks belonging to Bognor or the Isle of Wight, to the Channel Islands, and to Brittany, which were transported by icebergs and dropped when they melted under the summer sun.[38] Again, before the first English boulder-clay was formed Arctic plants flourished near Cromer; and, says Mr. Reid,[39] ‘as these occur just above the present sea-level, and lie evenly on the strata below without deeply channelling them, the height of the land at the commencement of the Glacial Epoch, in Norfolk at any rate, must have been almost the same as it is now’. The same observer assures us that in Southern Britain the first intense cold was succeeded, after an interval of which geology has nothing to tell, by an interglacial period in which the land sunk about one hundred and forty feet below its present level, so that shingle was deposited on what is now Portsdown Hill;[40] and that it then gradually rose until, long before the second glaciation began, its level, marked by fresh-water and estuarine deposits, once more virtually coincided with the present line.[41] But, he tells us, at some time after the disappearance of the ice which deposited the latest boulder-clay of Norfolk the land stood rather higher than now;[42] and he holds that even in the early part of the Neolithic Age Britain must have been almost connected with the Continent, for many of the river valleys were excavated to depths of from sixty to seventy feet below the present level of the sea.[43] The submerged forests of Devonshire, Cornwall, and the Bristol Channel, which contain traces of neolithic handiwork, flourished at a time when the land stood from fifty to seventy feet above its present elevation.[44]
But there are other facts which demonstrate that at some time after the first period of intense cold--perhaps in that interval of which geology has nothing to tell--the Continent must have included Britain. As we shall presently see, not only the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the glutton, and other Arctic animals, but also many species which prefer a temperate climate, and others which are now tropical, lived in this country side by side with palaeolithic man. Nearly all of them had been represented here before the earliest glaciers of Scotland were formed.[45] But even on the southern side of the Thames the cold was so intense during the earlier part of the Ice Age that none of the tropical, none even of the temperate species could there have lived: since the land was barren, treeless, and frozen,[46] even the mammoth, protected though it was by its woolly coat, could have found little food;[47] and large herds of Arctic animals travelled as far southward as Italy and Spain.[48] It is therefore evident that the beasts of tropical and of temperate climes whose remains have been found in the river-drift and in caves along with palaeolithic implements must have entered Britain after the coldest period had ceased.[49] Moreover, vast quantities of bones of Pleistocene mammals, some of which, such as the reindeer, have never been found in Britain in preglacial deposits, have been dredged up out of the bed of the North Sea, principally from the Dogger Bank;[50] and it is therefore clear that at some time after the climax of the Glacial Period that sea or a large part of it did not exist. It cannot indeed be proved that the men of the river-drift and the caves entered Britain as soon as the other animals;[51] and possibly the Dover Strait may have existed as a narrow channel at the time of their arrival: but since the bones that were raised from the Dogger Bank appear to belong to the time when the Thames was laying down the gravels in which men’s tools have been found,[52] it seems probable that the land bridge was standing in some part of the Palaeolithic Age.
[Sidenote: The relation of palaeolithic man to the Ice Age.]
It has been demonstrated that palaeolithic men were living in East Anglia after glaciers had finally disappeared from that part of the country. The valleys of the Ouse and its tributaries, in the gravels of which their implements are to be found, were worn down through boulder-clay.[53] Excavations at Hoxne in Suffolk have shown that the people who left their tools there lived at a time which was separated by two climatic waves, attested by the flora of two sets of strata, from the age in which the latest boulder-clay of that district had been deposited.[54] Moreover, in many cases in which evidence has been adduced to show that palaeolithic remains are of glacial or interglacial date, doubts have arisen either as to the artificial character of the flints or as to the age of the beds in which they were found.[55] When, for instance, a member of the Geological Survey announced that he had found palaeolithic implements at Brandon in Suffolk in three interglacial beds, separated by layers of boulder-clay,[56] Sir John Evans suggested that the clay was not in its original position, but had slipped down from a higher level.[57] Again, Dr. Henry Hicks and Sir Joseph Prestwich were convinced that the cave of Cae Gwyn in the Vale of Clwyd had been inhabited before the climax of the Ice Age.[58] Here a flint flake was taken out of earth separated by a superincumbent bed of clay from a layer of sand and gravel, above which again rested boulder-clay that, in Hicks’s judgement, showed no sign of having ever been disturbed, and which, in the opinion of Mr. Clement Reid,[59] must have been deposited before the last glaciation of the district. Even this evidence, however, is not unanimously accepted. Flints have also been found in the Cromer Forest Bed at East Runton, which was certainly preglacial; but Sir John Evans cannot see on them the faintest marks of human workmanship.[60]
Nevertheless, it is not improbable that when the hunters whose tools have been exhumed from the drift of South-Eastern Britain were living in a comparatively mild climate, Scotland, the Lake Country, and the highlands of Yorkshire and Wales may still have been partially buried beneath ice.[61] The high-level drift of the Thames valley, which has yielded so many implements, is believed by eminent geologists to have been laid down at a time when ice spread over Northern Britain;[62] and in support of this view it has been contended that in those regions no palaeolithic implements have been found.[63] The argument cannot be easily set aside; but it has been pointed out that in the northern districts, owing to the extreme scarcity of flint, stone tools could only have been made of harder rocks, on which it is not so easy to detect marks of human agency; that the alluvial deposits in those parts are not readily accessible to search; and that, if they are patiently explored, implements may yet be recovered from them.[64] Some years, however, have elapsed since this suggestion was made; and it has not yet been verified. Moreover, the absence from the country north of Yorkshire, save in a few preglacial deposits, of such bones as have been found with palaeolithic remains seems to indicate that the animals contemporary with palaeolithic man were unable to find food in Northern Britain owing to the continuance of an Arctic climate.[65] Man was undoubtedly living in Southern Britain in the cold period that succeeded the so-called interglacial period of Sussex and Hampshire; for the plateau gravels that cap the Bournemouth cliffs, in which his tools have been found, are older than the valley gravels of the Hampshire Avon and the Stour, which were formed towards the end of the Ice Age by torrents that streamed over frozen chalk downs impervious to water and swept away the fragments of their crumbling surface.[66] Furthermore, stone implements have been found at Caddington below, and near London embedded in, a stratum known as ‘contorted drift’, which is believed to have been formed in a period of great cold;[67] and it is merely a question of words whether this period is to be included in the last phase of the Ice Age.[68]
[Sidenote: ‘Eolithic’ man?]
But there is one district from which evidence has been obtained that has convinced many who sought conviction, that there were men in Britain before the first British palaeolithic tool was made. In the village of Ightham, near Sevenoaks, lives a tradesman, named Benjamin Harrison, whose discoveries have caused much searching of heart, if they have not revolutionized our knowledge of the life of early man. In 1885 he began to search for old stone implements on the chalk plateau between the valleys of the Medway and the Darent. There, embedded in patches of gravel that must have been drifted on to the plateau from hills higher still, which had been already worn down by denudation even when palaeolithic hunters were roaming among herds of mammoths in the valley of the Thames, he found flints of divers shapes which seemed to him to bear sure traces of man’s handiwork, and which have been termed ‘eoliths’, or stone implements of a dawning age. Nearly all of them, indeed, were so rude that the chipping on their edges has been ascribed by sceptics to the action of nature. But if even a small fraction of them could be proved to be authentic, the contention of their finder would be established. They recur, again and again, in certain well-defined and peculiar shapes; the chips have in many cases been removed not from the exposed parts but from concave sides which, he would have us believe, natural agents could hardly have affected;[69] if Sir John Evans and other experts are unable to accept them as artificial, Canon Greenwell,[70] Pitt-Rivers,[71] and Prestwich[72] were convinced that they had been wrought by man; even the labourers who picked them out of the gravel hardly ever failed to distinguish them from the surrounding flints;[73] and, if we may believe the champions of their authenticity, those who assert that they were shaped by nature have failed to produce stones of similar forms from the valley-drift.[74] Now when the hunters of the Thames valley were making their tools, Britain had the same main features of hill and dale that it has to-day; but when the gravels were being drifted on to the Kentish plateau, Thames and Medway were yet unborn; and, filling the great valley that now lies between the North Downs and the Lower Greensand hills, some five miles further south, the plateau rose southward to Central Wealden uplands two thousand feet or more above the sea. With no special knowledge of geology the antiquary who spends a holiday in walking from Sevenoaks or Wrotham on to the plateau may satisfy himself that this is true. Mingled with the eoliths in the patches of drift are fragments of chert that must have been washed down from the Lower Greensand at a time when it rose high above the plateau’s level; for south of the eolithic area, inclining upward below the chalk and below the Upper Greensand, the outcrop of the Lower Greensand shows itself still. The plateau drift lies upon rock of preglacial age;[75] and although there is no evidence that it is itself older than the Pleistocene period, some geologists hold that it was deposited soon after, perhaps before, British glaciers began to form.[76]
But assuming that the eoliths are artificial, does it follow that they are older than the oldest palaeoliths, or that they were wrought by a race different from the men of the valleys? Mr. Clement Reid has pointed out that the gravel at Alderbury, some three miles below Salisbury, in which multitudes of eoliths have been found, is on exactly the same level as that of a gravel three miles lower down the valley, where Prestwich picked up a palaeolithic implement which had fallen from a yet higher elevation.[77] If the position of this implement was an index of its age, eoliths were being used in Wiltshire after palaeoliths had begun to be manufactured.[78] On the other hand, it is asserted that eoliths have lately been found in Tertiary deposits on the high plateau above the Avon;[79] and one geologist, who rejects all eoliths, would argue that Benjamin Harrison’s labours have not been vain. Many palaeolithic implements have been found on the Kentish plateau, but never embedded in association with eoliths: most of them are unworn, and look as if they had remained on the very spot where they were lost; and it is easy to see that they are far less ancient than the eoliths. But certain implements have also been found there which, although they were not lying in the gravels, appeared to bear marks of having been derived from them and washed down in the same drift that contains the eoliths. Like the latter they were stained deep brown, covered with glacial scratches, and coated with the white deposit of silica.[80] If this argument had been generally accepted, one might conclude that the greater antiquity of British man does not depend for its proof upon the authenticity of the eoliths. What all admit is that in France flints of eolithic form have been found even in Tertiary beds.[81]
But while the extreme antiquity of many eoliths is certain, the question of their authenticity has recently been debated with renewed and redoubled vigour. About two years ago an eminent French palaeontologist, Monsieur Marcellin Boule, announced that in the process of manufacturing cement at Mantes many flints had been converted into eolithic forms;[82] and it has been contended that the conditions which were actually observed in the factory were analogous to those of the torrential streams by which flints may have been dashed hither and thither as they were swept on to the Kentish plateau in primaeval times.[83] An ardent advocate of the authenticity of eoliths insisted that some of the Kentish types would be looked for in vain among the machine-made specimens from Mantes;[84] but a sceptic affirmed that he had himself found an eolith, manifestly untouched by man, with its notch accurately fitting against another stone, the two having been ground together by a natural process which he described as the slipping, sliding, and foundering of the insoluble surface material from higher to lower levels.[85] Although it was objected that certain rectangular eoliths with blunt edges could not have been produced except by art,[86] it is permissible to doubt whether the human origin of eoliths will ever be established beyond dispute; and he who reflects that they have been met with not only in Tertiary beds but in those immeasurably later deposits which were contemporary with or but little older than palaeolithic man[87] will leave them for the present without regret to the consideration of enthusiasts.
[Sidenote: The environment of palaeolithic man in Britain.]
Let us then try to conceive of the environment of those palaeolithic hunters of whose culture we have clearer indications in a late phase of the Ice Age, when the glaciers of Southern Britain had passed away. Then the configuration of the country was very different from that which we behold. The chalk ranges of Kent and of Picardy were unbroken. The Thames, fed sometimes by torrential rains, flowing rapidly and fitfully in the broad shallow valley which it was excavating, was depositing gravels on the slopes that bordered it, a hundred feet above the level of its existing waters,[88] and wandering far eastward across a plain from whose now sunken surface bones of mammoth and reindeer, of hyena and bear have been dredged, to swell that greater Rhine which found no outlet till it reached a far northern sea. Mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and giant elks with antlers ten feet across, roamed in the forests; hippopotamuses swam in the streams;[89] brown bears and grizzly bears and lions and hyenas made their dens in caves, and dragged into their dark and sinuous recesses the prey which they had torn down in the open.
[Sidenote: Whence did he come?]
The earlier palaeolithic immigrants, impelled perhaps by scarcity of game, had crossed the valley of the Dover Strait doubtless from the nearer parts of France or Belgium; but the original home of the race is unknown, for palaeolithic tools have been found not only in this island and almost every European country except Scandinavia, but also in North Africa, in the valley of the Nile,[90] in Palestine and Asia Minor, the Euphrates Valley, Somaliland, India, and North America: as a high authority has remarked, they are ‘so identical in form and character with British specimens that they might have been manufactured by the same hands’;[91] and the same may be said of those which were wrought by the Tasmanians, who, fifty years ago, had not yet been exterminated by the pioneers of Christian civilization.[92]
[Sidenote: Chronological puzzles.]
Many attempts have been made to calculate the number of millenniums that have elapsed since our Palaeolithic Age began and since it came to its end. Croll, the author of the astronomical theory of the Ice Age, finally concluded that that epoch ceased about eighty thousand years ago;[93] and Sir Archibald Geikie laboured in his youth to estimate the time which the rivers would have taken to excavate their valleys from the days when they were depositing the high-level gravels to the era when they reached their present depth.[94] But any one who uses his powers of reflection will see how many elements of uncertainty must stultify such a method as this;[95] and, since the cause of the Ice Age remains unknown, the calculations of Croll were futile.[96] Indeed, if it were possible to prove that eighty thousand years have passed since the beginning or since the end of the Palaeolithic Age, not much would be gained; for whose mind can conceive what such a period means? The wiser archaeologists have given up the quest of chronological precision; and they know that the imagination may be stimulated by more legitimate means. Go to Caversham and stand upon the gravels washed down by the Thames in his lusty youth:[97] one hundred and twenty feet below he is flowing now; think of the ages that passed while his waters were hollowing out that valley, which was as it is still before the Palaeolithic Age had passed away. Walk along the cliff near Bournemouth, and look out over the Solent Sea. That cliff was once a river bank; and even the cautious geologist who has described how Hampshire was wrought into its present form is willing to believe that man had then appeared in our land. Where you see salt water he would have seen dry land, bounded far away by a range of hills which linked the downs of the Isle of Wight to those that rise behind Weymouth Bay, and of which the Needles remain as lonely relics: he would have seen the Solent flow, a mighty river, enriched by the tribute of the Stour, the Avon, the Itchen, and the Test.[98] Ascend the hill on which stands Dover Castle, and gaze upon Cape Grisnez. Let the waters beneath you disappear: across the chalk that once spanned the Channel like a bridge men walked from the white cliff that marks the horizon to where you stand. No arithmetical chronology can spur the imagination to flights like these.[99]
[Sidenote: Palaeolithic skeletons.]
The dwellers on the plateau, if they did exist in preglacial times, have left us no memorial save their tools: but can we picture to ourselves the lineaments of the palaeolithic hunters who came after them? Human bones, including two perfect skulls, closely associated with the bones of hyenas, have been recovered from a cave near Plymouth. The average height of the people to whom they belonged was little more than five feet: the skulls have hardly been described with sufficient accuracy to enable us to compare them with others of the same period; but, in regard to breadth and to the degree of projection of the lower jaw, they were not very different from the majority of modern British skulls.[100] Two other human skulls have been found in England for which palaeolithic age has been claimed--one near Swanscombe in Kent, the other near Bury St. Edmunds; but the former may not be as old as the bed from which it was unearthed; and the other was so broken that its contour could hardly be restored.[101] But almost all the older palaeolithic skulls that have been found in Western Europe belong to the same type, which is generally called after the famous specimen that was exhumed nearly half a century ago in the Neander valley in Rhenish Prussia, and of which the most characteristic examples were derived from a cavern at Spy in the province of Namur. The Swanscombe skull has somewhat similar characters; and it has been supposed that the earlier palaeolithic inhabitants of Britain belonged to the Neanderthal race. Unfortunately, however, the dates of the Neanderthal and Spy specimens cannot be fixed. The latter may belong to the comparatively advanced period in which the best palaeolithic stone implements of France were manufactured: the former was not seen in place by a competent observer, and its age is quite uncertain.[102] If the very few skeletons that we possess are typical, these men were short, big-boned, and powerfully built. Their heads were long and narrow, their foreheads amazingly low and retreating, and their jaws heavy and projecting. But their most striking features were enormously massive and outstanding brow ridges. Although the Neanderthal skull was described by Huxley as the most ape-like of all human skulls, and although for some time after its discovery it was the subject of animated discussion, it and its congeners were thenceforward regarded by all anatomists until the beginning of the present century as human in the strictest sense of the word. Within the last few years, however, a German anthropologist has endeavoured to prove that it and the two skulls of Spy may only be called human in a limited sense: he refuses to class them under the head of _Homo sapiens_, and refers them to an older species, which he calls _Homo primigenius_. This view, however, has not made influential converts: the Neanderthal skull was capacious enough to lodge a brain as large as that of many a living savage; and trained observers have pointed out that skulls of like contour have belonged in modern times to men of considerable mental power.[103] A considerable number of skeletons have lately been discovered in Moravia, which, although like the Neanderthal race they had long skulls and prominent brows, belonged to a higher type, and, as the length of their thigh-bones showed, were of great stature;[104] while the caves of Baoussé-Roussé, near Mentone, were the resting-place of very ancient men, in whose skeletons anatomists have detected certain negroid characteristics, although their skulls must have contained a large volume of brain.[105]
But the Palaeolithic Age was of such vast duration that before its close Britain may well have been invaded by new races. In the latest period there were living in the Riviera a people whose physical features connect them with the earliest French neolithic race; and in South-Western France skulls of like type have been found at Laugerie-Basse and Chancelade in the valley of the Lozère.[106] The relics of these men which have been discovered in the caves in which they dwelled show that some of them were worthy to be called forerunners of Pheidias and Praxiteles. With their tools of flint or chert they carved ivory dagger-handles, or, as we are now assured, objects of uncertain use,[107] adorning them with figures of the heads of reindeer, and scratched on horns or tusks drawings of mammoths, deer, horses, and hunters spearing salmon, of which the finer examples are recognized by modern artists as true works of art.[108] A single specimen, found in the Robin Hood Cave in Creswell Crags, is all that we can show:[109] but implements with which it was associated present points of likeness to those of the French caves which justify the assumption that the primitive artists of France sent emigrants to our land.
[Sidenote: Range of the palaeolithic hunters in Britain.]
The palaeolithic nomads, whether of the earlier or the later race, pushed their way as far north as Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, and Denbighshire, perhaps even into the East Riding of Yorkshire; and as far west as Glamorganshire, Caermarthenshire and Devonshire:[110] but almost all the remains of their handiwork have been found in the south-eastern district of England,--in Kent, especially the neighbourhood of Reculver, Sussex, Hampshire, Essex, Middlesex, and Surrey, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk.
[Sidenote: Where their tools have been found.]
The places in which these relics lay buried may be grouped in four classes,--the plateau gravels, already described; gravels which were apparently deposited not by rivers but by heavy rains which, falling upon frozen chalk downs, destroyed the shattered surface and swept it away in floods;[111] the river-drift, and caves; and, unlike the belongings of the neolithic herdsmen, those of the older inhabitants are not to be found, except in special cases, on or near the surface of the earth. The amateur who has acquired the rudiments of geology and has learned to discern stone implements among the fragments of rock which surround them, knows that in the gravels and sands which rivers deposited at various elevations when they were flowing now here now there in higher and wider channels he may hope to find specimens to add to his collection. Common sense too teaches him that in the same valley the higher terraces were formed before the lower, and that the tools which they contain, however closely they may resemble those which are embedded below, are nevertheless, as a rule, far older.[112] If he asks himself how they found their way into these gravel beds, reflection will soon suggest the answer. It would seem that although the palaeolithic hunters dwelled sometimes near lakes or ponds, they usually settled on the banks of streams. Fishing, hunting, wading through fords, warned by swiftly rising floods to quit their habitations, they lost or abandoned the weapons which now serve our purpose instead of theirs. But in some cases beds which contained palaeolithic remains are so situated that a tiro would never suppose that they had been deposited by running water at all. Few even of professed geologists would have thought of searching on the hill-tops at Caddington, near Dunstable; yet old stone implements have been found there in profusion. When the men who made them were alive the hills were valleys, and the valleys which now lie below the hills did not exist. Nor would it have occurred to any but a geologist that the tools which were espied lying at the foot of the cliffs between Reculver and Herne Bay had fallen from the gravels which line their summit.[113]
[Sidenote: Inhabited caves.]
Kent’s Cavern and the Brixham Cave, near Torquay, the Wookey Hole ‘Hyena Den’, near Wells, the Long Hole Cave in Glamorganshire, and the caves of Creswell Crags, on the north-eastern border of Derbyshire, are perhaps the most famous of their class. Heaps of bones have been found in all of them, which proved that the men who, from time to time, inhabited them were contemporary, like those whose tools are recovered from the river-drift, with animals of which some, like the mammoth, the straight-tusked elephant, and the ‘sabre-toothed’ tiger, have disappeared from the face of the earth, and many have long been extinct in Britain. Generally in the lower strata the stone tools are exactly like those found in the river-drift; while in the higher they are as a rule more elaborately finished, and are associated with needles, harpoons, and other implements of bone. The same sequence is discernible in the palaeolithic caves of France and Belgium.[114]
[Sidenote: Cave implements and river-drift implements.]
Let us compare in some museum the sets of tools and weapons which have been taken from caves with those of the river-drift. Are the latter older than the former, and is it possible to establish in either or in both a chronological succession of types? Taken by itself, the form of palaeolithic implements, at least in this country, is not generally a criterion of their age; but neither the forms of those that have come from the caves nor the bones which accompanied them forbid us to believe that the oldest are at least as old as any that belonged to the drift. Generally speaking, the fauna of the caves and of the river gravels are identical.[115] It is therefore certain that, although in general aspect a collection of implements derived from the former source is unlike one from the latter because the two were deposited in different circumstances, some of the deposits in the drift and in the caves were contemporaneous.[116] Since a few implements of river-drift form have been found in caves along with those of higher types, it seems reasonable to conclude that the same men possessed both; and if those which are characteristic of the caves are almost entirely absent from the drift, is not the explanation partly that they were more perishable, partly that many of them would not have been used in the field? In other words, there is no reason to believe that the later occupants of the caves were men of different race or of different habits from the contemporary hunters whose lost tools have been given up by the drift.[117] Long ago Monsieur de Mortillet framed a chronological classification of French and Belgian palaeolithic implements according to their types, which, though of late years it has been modified, has been provisionally accepted; but in this country it has been found impossible to follow his example: the same types exist here, but the relative antiquity of the specimens can seldom be determined; for implements of the oldest French types have been found in deposits which belong to the close of our Palaeolithic Age.[118] Even when implements from the high-level terraces are compared with those of the lower, no marked distinction is observed. In certain cases of course a local classification has been established. Thus the stone implements in the upper strata of two of the caves of Creswell Crags belonged to the advanced type which is called after the settlement of Solutré in the department of Saône-et-Loire;[119] and the implements of North-East London which, from their position at the bottom of the excavations as well as their colour, were evidently the oldest, were also inferior in workmanship to newer specimens found above them some twelve feet beneath the surface, and far inferior to the newest of the same district, which were recovered from an old land-surface, two or three feet below the existing ground, generally called the ‘Palaeolithic Floor.’[120] Again, in the brick-fields of Caddington excavation revealed an ancient land-surface on which a palaeolithic colony had made their tools. At a later time a new surface about two feet higher was formed by brick-earth, which must have been swept down by heavy rains from the hills above; and on this more implements appeared. Above it again is a bed of contorted drift, containing implements whose deep ochreous colour would seem to show that of the three series they are the oldest: evidently they were washed down from the hill-tops on which perhaps lived the earliest inhabitants of the district, and which, as they were gradually worn away, formed a deposit in what were then valleys, but are now in their turn hills. The lowest implements, which were of course older than those next above them, belong to the type called after the cave of Le Moustier in the valley of the Vezère, which is itself later than the type associated with the high-level gravels of the Somme.[121] It has been suggested that when the evidence of plants or of strata is wanting, the relative age of palaeolithic implements may be provisionally estimated by the animal remains with which they are found. The straight-tusked elephant, the ‘big-nosed’ rhinoceros, and the hippopotamus were characteristic, we are told, of the earliest palaeolithic times;[122] the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the cave-bear, and the hyena of a later period; and the reindeer was specially abundant towards the close of the age. But it is now generally recognized that if this orderly succession of fauna existed in Aquitaine, it cannot be distinguished either in our island or in Northern Gaul. When we find Arctic and tropical animals commingled, when we see that the bones of big-nosed rhinoceros and woolly rhinoceros, of straight-tusked elephant and hyena and reindeer have been dug out of the same beds,[123] we may conclude that it is hardly worth while to gauge the antiquity of the works of palaeolithic craftsmen by such tests as these.
On a general review it should seem that the French chronological classifications of palaeolithic implements, even applied to England, contain a measure of truth. The implements which are commonly found in the river-drift and other deposits in the open field undoubtedly began to be manufactured before those which are characteristic of the caves; and those of Mousterian type were first made, both in England and in France, long before the development of the elegant Solutrean forms and the period in which flourished the artists of South-Western France.[124] But both in France and in England Mousterian implements were still used during the later period;[125] and even drift implements of the oldest kind continued to be used by palaeolithic hunters of the latest generation.[126]
[Sidenote: Divers forms of tools.]
In order to apprehend the culture of the palaeolithic races, it is necessary to be conversant with the forms of their tools. The great majority were made of flint; but in places where flint was scarce or difficult to obtain other stones, for example, chert, quartzite pebbles, sandstones, and felstone, were used. The principal forms were flint flakes, which were probably intended to serve as knives, sometimes even as saws (for a few of them are serrated),[127] and, in certain instances, as scrapers for dressing hides; implements or weapons, pear-shaped or tongue-shaped in outline, more or less acutely pointed, and more or less truncated at the butt, some of which look like spear-heads, though they may have been grasped in the hand; and oval, almond-shaped, and occasionally heart-shaped or triangular implements, which have a cutting edge all round. Each of these forms of course comprises many varieties, not only in contour but also in the mode of chipping; and a few tools of abnormal shapes have also been found, as well as natural blocks of flint, called ‘hammer-stones’, which were used in the process of manufacture, and most of which were slightly trimmed in order to make them more serviceable. Near Ipswich a lady has recently discovered a tiny implement which, it has been fondly suggested, some hunter may have wrought as a toy for his child.[128] Among the bone implements were harpoons, barbed sometimes on one, sometimes on both sides, which have been found in Kent’s Cavern and other caves, and which closely resemble those that are used by the Eskimos of our own day; and needles drilled by bone awls, with eyes so small that the threads of reindeer sinew which they received could hardly have exceeded a thirtieth of an inch in diameter. Moreover, it is more than probable that clubs, wooden tools, and utensils and vessels of skin were also used, which, from their perishable nature, have long since disappeared.[129]
[Sidenote: Palaeolithic workshops.]
The explorations of antiquaries have revealed more than one of the open-air workshops in which the primitive tool-makers plied their trade. Near Crayford, on a sandy beach beneath an old chalk cliff that overhung the Thames when on its southern side its bed was nearly two miles wider, excavation discovered the surface, strewn with flint flakes, in actual contact with mammoths’ bones, on which the workers had lived and toiled until a great flood drove them away, leaving the sediment which for countless ages concealed their remains. The inferior quality of the flint showed that they had not known how to win it by mining from the rock, but had been obliged to content themselves with such stray blocks as they could find. The enthusiast who discovered the site was actually able to fit many of the flakes together, and to reconstruct the original blocks from which they had been struck off.[130] At Caddington, where hammer-stones and punches, great blocks of flint which had been used as anvils, and innumerable flakes and cores bore their silent testimony, Mr. Worthington Smith inferred from the confusion in which finished and unfinished tools were left that the settlers, terrified perhaps by some violent storm, had suddenly quitted their abode. He found an implement which had been ruined by an ill-directed blow of the hammer, and one which had been re-flaked and re-pointed by a later worker; and his practised eye detected that the craftsmen had flaked their tools differently from those of Crayford.[131] Speaking generally, however, the methods of working were the same as those which are still followed by the ‘knappers’ of Brandon in Suffolk, who manufacture gun-flints for African savages. The flakes which were to be used as knives or scrapers were detached from the blocks by a stone hammer; and the larger implements were trimmed into the various shapes which have been described, by blows along their edges, which chipped off small splinters. The effect of the hammer was to produce on the flake, just below the point where the blow was delivered, a protuberance, which is called the ‘bulb of percussion’, and which of course left a corresponding cavity on the block from which the flake was detached. This bulb is the mark by which a manufactured flint may be recognized; but on tools whose artificial origin is manifest even to an untrained eye it has often been obliterated by the process of chipping.[132]
[Illustration: FIG. 1.]
[Illustration: FIG. 2. ½]
[Illustration: FIG. 3. ½]
[Illustration: FIG. 4. ½]
[Sidenote: Handles.]
Inquisitive antiquaries have raised the question whether any palaeolithic implements were furnished with handles. The Tasmanians simply grasped their tools in their hands;[133] and there is little evidence that the Britons mounted theirs:[134] but the triangular sharply-pointed flints which have been already described might sometimes have been used as arrow-points or javelin-heads.[135] Some were doubtless missiles and nothing more.
[Sidenote: Uses of tools.]
But, as experts who have passed their leisure in recovering, comparing, and classifying these things confess, it is impossible to define the various purposes to which this or that stone tool was applied. ‘Who,’ says Lord Avebury,[136] ‘could describe the exact use of a knife?’ We only know that with his rude implements the palaeolithic hunter did all the work that his hand found to do,--felled trees, chopped wood to feed his fire, dug up esculent roots, scooped out canoes, killed and cut up the animals on which he subsisted, skinned them and dressed their hides to clothe himself withal, encountered his enemies in battle, and defended himself in conflict with the beasts against which his keen sight and hearing, his intellect, and these weapons, which it enabled [Sidenote: Culture of the palaeolithic inhabitants of Britain.] him to fashion, were his sole protection.[137] Yet as we look at the tools in a museum, nearly the same at the end as the beginning of our immeasurably long Palaeolithic Age, we marvel even more at the mental stagnation of the primeval savage than at the skill which he had laboriously attained; and we wonder how it was that men who had learned to chip their blocks of flint so accurately remained content, generation after generation, with the art which they had acquired, and never thought of grinding the cutting edge against another stone and thus producing a better and sharper weapon. ‘We see in our own times,’ wrote Sir Charles Lyell,[138] ‘that the rate of progress in the arts and sciences proceeds in a geometrical ratio as knowledge increases; and so, when we carry back our retrospect into the past, we must be prepared to find the signs of retardation augmenting in a like geometrical ratio.’ It would seem that in the Palaeolithic Age men had no pottery and grew no corn: they certainly had no cattle; and, though they lived by hunting, they had no dogs.[139] Perhaps they sometimes dug pits to trap their game; for one of the engravings from La Madelaine may have been intended to depict a beast impaled upon a wooden stake.[140] Their numbers must have been very small; for people who live by the chase alone require for their sustenance forests of vast extent.[141] Some, as we have seen, lived in caves; others, as we may infer from the remains that have been picked up beneath the cliffs of Oldbury,[142] by Sevenoaks, under projecting ledges of rock; generally perhaps, and especially in districts in which no caves were available, the dwellings were huts or shelters made of trees and boughs. Some of the bones that were found in Kent’s Cavern, some even of the gravels that have yielded eoliths,[143] show traces of fire, which was probably produced by the friction of sticks or by striking flint against iron pyrites;[144] and one is tempted to infer that the hunters or their women learned to make their food more palatable by cooking. The numberless fractured bones which were strewed in the caves had evidently been pounded for the sake of the marrow, which in every age was a dainty dish for prehistoric folk; and in the closing period, when harpoons had been invented, men were able to vary their diet of meat and herbs and wild fruit with divers kinds of fish. By that time too they had acquired the art of sewing, and doubtless they made themselves coats of skins, perhaps even, like the cave-dwellers of the Pyrenees, long gauntlets of fur;[145] while fossils that have been found with natural holes artificially enlarged may justify the assumption that, like the cave-dwellers of France, they adorned themselves with necklaces.[146] The figure of a horse engraved on a bone that was disinterred from one of the Creswell caves suggests, as we have seen, that in this country, as in France, there were men who were not destitute of the artistic faculty: but this solitary specimen can hardly compare with the best of the drawings that delighted the explorers of the contemporary French caves. It is difficult for any one who looks at these life-like sketches to believe that those who made them were not inspired by love of art; but the ingenuity of a modern archaeologist, who observes that the Australian aborigines scratch on rocks the likenesses of animals as charms to promote their fecundity, has suggested that they were merely talismans intended to supply the hunter with abundant game. As he insists[147] that the animals which the artists represented were all edible, one may fairly ask whether they were accustomed to feed upon the glutton,[148] the serpent, and the wolf;[149] whether they counted each other as legitimate prey; what could have been the utilitarian motive for depicting an otter chasing a fish;[150] and what was the object of engraving the strange quasi-human creature which the antiquary who discovered it in the cavern of Mas d’Azil described as an ‘anthropomorphic ape, nearer akin to man than the anthropoids that we know’.[151] Nevertheless it is not improbable that religion, which has stimulated savage as well as mediaeval and modern art, may have been one of the motives of the cave-dwellers; and perhaps the artist was sometimes a magician, though it would be idle to speculate on the purpose of his spells.[152]
Disciplined imagination, working upon a basis of ascertained fact, may help one to picture the lives of those primitive inhabitants of our island. We can see them returning at evening to the fires which their women had kindled, and which served at once to warm them, to cook their food, to keep off beasts of prey, and to scare away the malignant spirits of whom, if they were like other savages, they were yet more in dread. We may see a vast herd of reindeer crossing the ford at Windsor, and wolves watching for their chance to spring upon stragglers. We may hear the trumpeting of the elephant, the roar of the lion, the bellowing of the wild bull, the howl of the hyena, the snort of the hippopotamus, as it splashed or swam in the waters of the Thames or the Ouse. We may imagine the hunter striving by sign, or gesture, or rudimentary language, to express his delight when he has succeeded in the chase, his despair when ill success leaves him and his to pine with hunger, his terror when the eclipsed moon turning to red, when flood, or lightning, or pestilence warns him that the spirits of nature are wroth, his grief when bear, or bison, or famished wolf has slain his wife or child. How he disposed of his dead he has left no sign: but in the caves near Mentone, which were inhabited in successive periods of the Palaeolithic Age, there were evidences that the corpses had been decently interred;[153] and the skeletons found in Moravia[154] had been carefully protected by a rampart of stones.[155]
[Sidenote: Religion.]
Had the primitive people of Britain any religion, or any ideas that contained the germs of religious belief? It is not enough to point to modern savages like the Tasmanians, whose material culture was lower than that of the palaeolithic Britons, but who certainly believed in a spiritual world.[156] The cave-dwellers of Mentone were interred with their implements and ornaments, perhaps intended for use in a future state;[157] but such evidence is not forthcoming here. The painted pebbles, however, and the ‘bull-roarers’ which were treasured in the caves of South-Western France may well have had analogues among the inhabitants of this island[158] who were in the same stage of culture; and doubtless, like the similar objects which are shown by the natives of Central Australia, they were connected, more or less closely, with religious ideas.[159] No savage tribe, indeed, has yet been observed of whom it can be proved that they were without religion; for some travellers who have affirmed the contrary have been unable to comprehend ideas which differed wholly from their own; some have recorded facts which gave the lie to their own denial; some have confessed that after long intercourse they had discovered the existence of beliefs which they had never suspected; and all who have been qualified by tact and sympathy to deal with savages have recognized how hard it is to induce them to disclose their inmost thoughts.[160] But much depends upon the sense in which the word Religion is to be understood. The great anthropologist whose writings have given the most powerful impetus to the study of primitive culture has taken as his ‘minimum definition of religion’ the belief in spiritual beings;[161] and although it might be rash to affirm that materialism is inconsistent with religion, and no sympathetic reader would deny that the Latin poet who denounced ‘foul religion’ with such fierce earnestness had a religion of his own, Professor Tylor’s words may serve as our guide.[162] It is true that the conception of a spiritual being formed by a primitive mind has hardly anything in common with that approved by a theologian or a philosopher: for the savage, as for Tertullian and Origen, spirits are not immaterial; they are exceedingly subtle, but still corporeal. Nor, indeed, are they necessarily immortal. Savage religion is utterly different from that which has been the guide of life to men who, though they had put away all hope of everlasting life, retained their sense of the nobility of human nature,--‘to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world’; utterly different from that which inspires the idealist to whom theology is a vain thing and the supernatural unreal, but who clings to his belief that man’s punishment or reward hereafter is simply to be what he has become, that his destiny is to grow in grace, lapsing perhaps, but again aspiring, until his spirit becomes one with the indwelling spirit of God. Yet, although the orthodox may refuse the name of religion to an animism begotten of fear and unconnected with ethics, though idealists may scoff at the conception of spiritual beings which invests them with bodily form and ponderable and mortal albeit ethereal substance, that animism was the seed out of which their own faith--its framework but not its nobler part--was evolved.
He whose mind is informed by the teaching of ethnography may conceive, if he has a sympathetic imagination, the mental state that gave birth to primitive religion; but if his reading has not been wasted, he will understand how vain would be the attempt to ascribe to this or that prehistoric people any known savage creed. For, alike in origin and in essence, the forms of modern animism are manifold. To the palaeolithic Briton fire, leaping roaring and devouring, devastating flood, rushing wind, lightning flash, disease, death itself,--all may have been animated by spirit, or have been themselves spiritual beings. Elves, goblins, phantoms may have been created by his brain, and have seemed to flit before him when prolonged fasting had stimulated the creative power of his fancy. The conceptions that were ultimately to become the greater gods of polytheism may have arisen in his mind as in the minds of other savage men. At least we may believe that, unless he differed greatly from the modern savages whose handiwork resembles his, he began to people the universe with spiritual beings when he became conscious of his own soul; that the phantasms which he saw in dreams were for him real and alive; that every spirit in which he believed originated in the curiosity that led him to seek the cause of every natural phenomenon; that, although social friction had compelled him to recognize a moral code, his religion and his morality were not one but two, not mutually supporting but distinct; and, finally, that no thought of future retribution or reward troubled or comforted his heart.
[Sidenote: Totemism.]
Intimately connected with primitive religion is totemism, that strange institution which has been observed in various stages of survival among the North American Indians, the forest tribes of South America, the aboriginals of Western and Central Australia, the Malays, the hill-tribes of Central India, certain Mongoloid tribes of Central Asia, in Bechuanaland, and in the Bantu district of South Africa;[163] which in every case began before those whom it affected had come to domesticate animals, to till the earth, or to fashion pottery;[164] and which tends to decay when hunting gives place to pasturage.[165] One cannot but inquire whether an institution so widespread existed among the prehistoric inhabitants of Britain; and, although no distinct case of totemism has been found or recorded in Europe,[166] the inquiry is not perhaps so hopeless as it may at first sight appear.
The leading principles of totemism have been so often defined that they are doubtless familiar to many readers. Evidently it originated at a time when men were not possessed by the fancy that they were a distinct branch of creation, but felt their kinship with other animals, which they had hardly begun to regard as inferior.[167] The members of the clans which form a totemic tribe trace their descent generally from some animal, sometimes even from a plant or an object which we should call inanimate, and bear its name. But how did the conception of relationship between a clan and an animal or vegetable species arise? It has been suggested that metempsychosis may supply the explanation. Some great man perhaps gave out that after his death no hare was to be eaten by his clan because a hare would be possessed by his soul. Thus not only his own children and grandchildren but also hares would be his descendants; and he would be the founder of a totem-family, which might develop into a totem-clan.[168] On the other hand, it has been argued that when totemism began descent was necessarily reckoned in the female line, and that it is therefore useless to search for its origin in anything--for example, ‘a paternal soul tenanting an animal’--which was deemed to be inherited from a male ancestor.[169]
Until a recent date it was an article of faith among anthropologists that, except in special circumstances, the life of a totem-animal was, in the eyes of the clan which belonged to it, sacred, and that marriage between the members of any one clan was absolutely tabooed. If a clansman of a Crocodile clan desired a wife, he must seek her from a Wolf clan or from some other. But within the last few years totemism has been carefully and minutely observed among the Arunta tribe of Central Australia; and the records of these observations mark a new era in anthropology. With the Aruntas totemism does not forbid the slaughter of the totem-animal and does not prescribe exogamy: it is based upon the belief that they are descended from ‘quasi-human animal or vegetable ancestors, whose souls are still reborn in human form in successive generations’.[170] It has, however, been maintained that in the organization of this tribe there are still discernible traces of totemism of the primitive type, involving both exogamy and respect for the life of the totem-animal;[171] and also that their totemism is so decadent that nothing can be learned from it as to totemic origins.[172]
Totemism is indeed a subject of extraordinary difficulty: its literature is enormous and rapidly growing; and it is out of the question in this book to do more than point out its problems, and put the reader in the way of pursuing the study for himself. The problem of its origin can never be solved with certainty; for the institution cannot now be observed in its primitive state; and any attempt to trace it backward must start from conjecture as to the original social condition of man.[173] Perhaps the most plausible and ingenious theory rests upon the assumption, for which considerable evidence has been adduced, that groups of men originally designated one another by animal and plant names, and that these names were accepted even when they were bestowed in derision. Such a group, finding itself called, let us say, by the name of the pig, and not knowing how it had come by the name, would naturally believe that there was an intimate connexion between itself and the porcine species.[174] The taboos which forbade the slaughter of the totem-animal and marriage between a man and a maiden of the same kin would, it is argued, follow when once the universal belief, that ‘the blood is the life’ and therefore sacred, was evolved.[175]
There are superstitions and names which suggest that totemism may once have existed in Britain; but even if their evidence is accepted, it is of course impossible to point out the source from which they were ultimately derived. They may have belonged to our early Neolithic Age, or they may have been introduced later, when totemism had died out, by invaders who had received them from inferior tribes with whom they came in contact. We are assured that Cornish fishermen believe that drowning men sometimes assume the form of animals;[176] that in the village of Burchurch in Shropshire it is deemed unlucky to kill a bat;[177] that at Great Crosby in Lancashire the goose is held sacred;[178] and that certain Scottish clans derived their names from animals.[179] The familiar passage in which Caesar observes that the Britons counted it impious to taste the flesh of hares, fowls, and geese[180] has also been interpreted as a survival of totemism.[181] But this is a mere guess. The greatest of anthropologists has warned us not to assume that every sacred animal is a totem:[182] the association with a clan of a species of animals is only one form of animal-worship. It is, however, quite possible that if these animals had once been totems, they were revered by clans with whom the ancestors of the British Celts had mixed before they emigrated from Gaul; for broken bones of the hare, which were found in one of the caves of Perthi-Chwareu in Denbighshire, show that at all events in that part of neolithic Britain the animal was eaten.[183]
[Sidenote: Was the domestication of animals a result of totemism?]
Some anthropologists have argued that the domestication of animals and even agriculture resulted from totemism.[184] Thus Monsieur Reinach insists that the domestication of the boar is an irrefragable proof of its former sanctity; for, he argues, if men had always thought themselves entitled to kill and eat boars, boars would never have multiplied under human protection, and become the ancestors of domestic swine. Domestication, he considers, implies a long truce between men and animals, something analogous to the Golden Age, celebrated by poets of antiquity, in which men were vegetarians. One may be pardoned for maintaining a sceptical attitude towards a theory which is obviously incapable of proof, which to men who live remote from libraries but in the midst of animals presents insuperable difficulties, and which, moreover, seems to imply that prehistoric tribes were excessively stupid. If it were true, one would expect to find that oxen, sheep, and pigs had been reared in the Palaeolithic Age, and that modern totem groups had domesticated or were now domesticating totem animals. But the only animal which the cave-dwellers of South-Western France apparently domesticated was the horse, which was doubtless lassoed and fastened not because it was sacred but for food;[185] and the Aruntas have no domestic animals. A hungry Australian would have no scruple in killing and eating an animal, not belonging to his own totem-species, which by his wife would be deemed sacred: the Bantus have sheep and oxen, but neither the ox nor the sheep is among their totems. What motive could savages have had for keeping totem-animals in captivity in large numbers unless they had desired to eat their flesh or to drink their milk, and why should they have toiled to provide food for them in winter? Why should the domestication of any species be impossible unless the lives of the animals were spared for a long term of years; and why, if every bull and ram were suffered to gratify its sexual instincts unchecked, and cows and ewes were unmilked and unused, should they become tame.[186] It is surely not incredible that primitive hunters, not belonging to Bull or Boar clans, who saw that wild oxen and wild boars were good for food, should have conceived the idea of ensuring a more constant supply by trapping young animals, taming them, and breeding from them. Totemism may conceivably have had some influence upon the domestication of animals; but it seems probable that there was room for common sense.[187] And the mere fact that a piece of sculpture representing an ear of barley was found in a cave at Lourdes hardly seems sufficient to justify the conclusion that barley was an object of worship in the Palaeolithic Age, and that its subsequent cultivation was due to totemism.[188] What we may safely conclude is that exogamy, with which totemism is commonly associated, although they may have been originally distinct, was one of the chief factors in consolidating groups and allying them together.[189]
[Sidenote: Magic.]
The subject of totemism naturally leads on to that of magic; for in Australia totemic groups have developed into co-operative magic-working societies; and there is no rashness in assuming that magic flourished everywhere before the end of the Palaeolithic Age. We are often told that magic was based upon a confused association of ideas; that it was the embryo of science;[190] and that priest and magician have ever been foes. There is much truth in this: but magic is not to be so easily explained; and most of us are still far from sympathetically understanding the mental state in which it originated. To say that one kind of magic is an outgrowth of the law of similarity, the magician fancying, for example, that by making drawings of animals he can cause their species to multiply; that the other depends upon the law of contact, when, for instance, it is supposed that whatever is done to a weapon will correspondingly affect the person whom it wounded,[191]--to say this is not to fathom the magician’s mind. Magic, notwithstanding the hostility with which priests have regarded magicians, cannot be separated from religion by a line of demarcation; nor indeed is it always possible to differentiate magicians from priests.[192] It has been well said that magic, as observed among primitive tribes, is ‘part and parcel of the “god-stuff” out of which religion fashions itself’.[193] Australian magicians believe that their powers are conferred upon them by supernatural beings;[194] and the magicians of many tribes call upon spirits to aid them in working their spells.[195] One of the most important functions of the magician is to ensure an adequate fall of rain; but in New Guinea this duty belongs to the priest of the god by whose favour the rain is believed to fall.[196] Vast learning has been expended to prove that monarchy originated in magic;[197] but we only know that magicians have sometimes succeeded in making themselves kings;[198] and doubtless in certain cases magic may have helped to sow the seed out of which gradations of rank were evolved.[199] But this would be but one more illustration of the accepted truth that family, tribe, priesthood, monarchy--all our institutions--are rooted in savagery.[200]
[Sidenote: Was there a ‘hiatus’ between the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic Age?]
The close of the British Palaeolithic Age is veiled in obscurity. ‘Mesolithic’ implements, whose form might show that they belonged to a period of transition between Palaeolithic and the Neolithic Age, have been diligently sought for; and some of the seekers insist that they have found them:[201] but the claim has not won general acceptance; and even if it could be established, a doubt would remain whether the makers of those implements belonged to the palaeolithic race of Britain or to a race which had come from abroad after our Palaeolithic Age had passed away. In the words of a high authority[202] ‘there appears, in this country at all events, to be a complete gap between the River-drift and Surface Stone Periods, so far as any intermediate forms of implements are concerned; and here at least the race of men who fabricated the oldest of the palaeolithic implements may have, and in all probability had, disappeared at an epoch remote from that when the country was again occupied by those who not only chipped but polished their tools.’ It has been urged by those who would extend this characteristically guarded conclusion that out of forty-eight mammalian species which were living in Britain in the older, only thirty-one survived into the later period; that Britain was united with the Continent in the former, and was an island in the latter; and that in caves which were inhabited in both periods the strata that contained palaeolithic remains were separated by a layer of stalagmite, the formation of which would have required many centuries, from the upper neolithic stratum. But all these arguments do not prove that there was a breach of continuity between the two ages. If seventeen mammalian species perished, thirty-one did survive. If Britain was continental in the Palaeolithic Age and insular in the Neolithic, the contrast does not exclude the possibility that man survived with his fellow animals from the former into the latter: at the time when the Hoxne implements were lost the land stood only a few feet above its present level,[203] and a strait must have separated Britain from Gaul; nor, on the other hand, is it absolutely certain that the earliest neolithic immigrants did not cross the Channel valley on foot. And if the stalagmite which lay between palaeolithic and neolithic implements proved that in certain caves the stage of culture represented by the lower strata was separated by a vast gulf of time from that represented by the higher, it still remains possible that some descendants of the primitive hunters may have survived to meet the neolithic invaders. Whoever maintains that there was a ‘hiatus’ between the two stone ages in Britain must frame some theory to account for the disappearance of the palaeolithic race. Either they must have been utterly destroyed by some cataclysm which could hardly have been less fatal to the thirty-one mammalian species that survived; or they must have been struck down by a pestilence, such as has never been recorded, that spared none; or they must have died out, although there was no civilized race to expedite their fate; or they must one and all have emigrated for some reason which cannot be explained. It is true that in the valley of the Lea near London and at Caddington the old land-surface on which they lived is covered by ‘contorted drift’, above which no undisturbed palaeolithic relics have been found; and it has been supposed that the cold to which the formation of this deposit was due forced the inhabitants to migrate southward. But this evidence has not been taken seriously; and it has also been suggested that the emigration, if it took place, was caused by an outbreak of disease, which, if it was real, may have been merely local. Again, it has been asserted by the most persistent advocate of discontinuity that the ‘cave men’ fled in terror before neolithic persecutors;[204] that their line of retreat is indicated by implements in the caves of Germany and in refuse heaps of Siberia; and that the extinction of certain mammals and the flight of others was due to the change of climate which resulted from the new-born insularity of Britain.[205] But if the cave-men were driven away by neolithic invaders, what becomes of the alleged hiatus? why should implements in Germany and Siberia be connected with British fugitives? and if mammals abandoned Britain because it had become an island, how did they get away? Somewhere or other the newer was evolved from the older culture: the palaeolithic skeletons which have been found in the caves near Mentone are not distinguishable from those of the same Ligurian coast which were interred in the Neolithic Age;[206] and evidence from stratified deposits in the valley of the Seine, lying one above another in unbroken succession, as well as the remarkable discoveries at Mas d’Azil and in the Riviera, have convinced the anthropologists of France that in their country a hiatus did not exist.[207] Therefore those of us who cling to the belief that the neolithic immigrants who first ventured to launch their frail canoes on the narrow Channel and ran them aground on the Kentish coast may have found the new-born island inhabited by men of an older race have some reason to show for our pious faith.[208]
Chapter III
The Neolithic Age
[Sidenote: The early neolithic immigrants.]
No one can say how long after the close of the Ice Age the first neolithic immigrants appeared;[209] nor can it even be positively affirmed that in Northern Britain the last glacier had then melted away. If they sailed across the Dover Strait, it was, as we have seen, extremely narrow; and we can hardly be sure that it existed at all.[210] Neolithic hunters, who may not have belonged to the earliest horde, roamed in forests which now lie buried beneath the Bristol Channel and the waves that break upon the Land’s End;[211] and from the depths at which their remains have been dug up it may be reasonably inferred that Southern Britain then extended at least as far as the line which is marked upon our maps and charts by the ten-fathom contour. But while in England the land stood above the modern level, in Scotland it lay below; for along the margin of the fifty-foot raised beach there are heaps of refuse left by men who lived at a time when the estuary of the Forth ran up to Falkirk, and the lands which form the Carse of Stirling were submerged:[212] dug-out canoes have been found embedded in the basin of the Clyde more than twenty feet above the present high-water mark;[213] and in a cave which was discovered by quarrymen in a cliff facing the bay of Oban, a hundred yards from the existing beach, dwelled hunters and fishermen, whose mode of life is attested by their deer-horn harpoons, the remains of the oxen and deer on which they partly subsisted, and the bone pins with which they fastened their clothing.[214] The character of the relics has led experts to the conclusion that the people to whom they belonged were among the earliest of the neolithic inhabitants of Western Europe; indeed it may be that they were descendants of a British or a Pyrenaean palaeolithic stock. The harpoons are of the same type as those which in the caves of South-Western France are assigned to the close of the Palaeolithic Age and to a time of transition between it and the following epoch, and which in recognized neolithic deposits have never been found either in Britain or in Gaul; and the general aspect of the Scottish and the Gaulish remains is virtually the same.[215] There are, moreover, other indications that the British Neolithic Age began long before the period to which the great majority of the antiquities that lie in our museums belong. A few years ago there were brought to light traces of a settlement which some primitive clan had formed on the bank of a stream that flows through Blashenwell Farm, hard by Corfe Castle. These settlers had lived in great part upon limpets, which they must have eaten raw, since the broken shells showed no trace of fire: they did not till the soil; they had no domestic animals and no pottery; and their tools were of the rudest kind.[216] Moreover, besides the implements that lay beneath the submerged forests, there have been found in the bed of the Trent, and in the Ham Marshes, thirty feet below the surface, skulls which are so far different from those that have been recovered from barrows and cairns as to suggest that the oldest neolithic invaders may have belonged to another stock.[217]
[Sidenote: The origins of British civilization were neolithic.]
But whoever they may have been, whatever the date of their arrival, it was an era since which the history of this country has been continuous. Their descendants are with us still: they or later comers brought with them the seeds of cereals and plants which are cultivated still, and animals the descendants of which still stock our farms; they practised handicrafts and arts from which the industries of modern Britain have been in part evolved.[218]
[Sidenote: Geography of neolithic Britain.]
The subsidence which is proved by the submerged forests was going on throughout the Neolithic Age, and only ceased about three thousand years ago. While the forests were insensibly sinking, the valleys that stretched behind them were flooded by the advancing sea, which penetrated through the chalk downs into the Weald in long fiords, and doubtless often carried the canoes of the later invaders.[219] But we cannot fix even approximately the period at which these people began to arrive.[220] All that can be said is that it was many centuries before the Bronze Age, which probably began in this country about eighteen hundred years before the Christian era.[221]
[Sidenote: Who were the later neolithic invaders?]
These hordes doubtless set out from various parts of northern Gaul; but to determine their origin is perhaps impossible.[222] The skeletons that have been exhumed from the neolithic tombs of England, Scotland, and Ireland, except some which were interred in the very latest period, when invaders of a widely different race were beginning to arrive, belong, for the most part, to the same general type. All, or almost all, had long narrow skulls: their faces were commonly oval, their features regular, and their noses aquiline: most of them were of middle height, and their limbs, as a rule, were rather delicate than robust. Men with the same physical characters lived contemporaneously in Gaul and the Spanish peninsula, and are still numerous in the basin of the Mediterranean; and the race to which they belonged is often called the Iberian, though there is no reason to believe that its British representatives belonged to the Iberian rather than to some other branch of the Mediterranean stock.[223] But it is remarkable that while early in the Neolithic Age Gaul and Spain, as well as Central Europe, were overrun by invaders of a totally different kind, who were extremely short and sturdy and had broad round heads, there is no evidence that men of this race reached Britain until the very end of the period, and then only in comparatively small numbers.[224] One would be inclined to infer that tribes of the Mediterranean stock began to migrate into Britain before many of the round-headed race had settled in Gaul. Vain attempts [Sidenote: Evidence from dolmens.] have been made to trace the migration to its original starting-point by the distribution of the dolmens, or rude stone sepulchres,[225] which are found in many European countries. A dolmen, in the strict sense of the word, is composed of large stones set on end, which wholly or partially enclose a space, and are covered by other stones or by a single stone, which rests upon their upper ends. Most of the chambers in our chambered barrows virtually answer to this definition; and if the enclosing mounds were removed, would appear as dolmens.[226] Some few, however, as well as chambers which have been explored in Brittany, were roofed over, like the so-called beehive huts, by layers of stones, which, as they rose, gradually approached each other, the highest supporting a flat slab whose weight kept them in place, while the pressure of the superincumbent cairn or barrow gave solidity to the whole.[227] But although the dolmens which are generally so called may be older than the chambered barrows,[228] they also were almost always covered or at least fenced by earthen mounds or cairns, which, in many cases, were still visible little more than a century ago.[229] There is no reason to suppose that in this country or in Ireland they were built by tribes of a different stock: it is impossible to draw a sharp distinction between the two classes of graves;[230] and for our present purpose they may safely be grouped together. They abound in Syria and Northern Africa, along the western side of the Spanish peninsula, over nearly the whole area of France, in Northern Germany, Wales[231] and the west of England, Ireland, South-Western and Northern Scotland, Denmark, and Scandinavia. Some archaeologists conclude that a dolmen-building race gradually moved westward from Syria, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, and thence passed through Spain and Gaul into Britain; while others insist that the place of their departure was Scandinavia. But it is not improbable that dolmens, which exist also in India, Japan, and many other countries, and which might have been built all over the world if stones had been everywhere available for their construction, were not originally designed by any one people, and that the resemblances which have been pointed out between those of widely separated regions were simply due to the similarity with which different tribes acted in similar circumstances. The neolithic skulls and the neolithic sepulchral pottery of Scandinavia are unlike those of Britain; while, on the other hand, the British dolmens belong to an earlier stage of culture than those of Africa. Everything points to the conclusion that the earliest dolmen-builders of Britain retreated from Gaul before the sturdy round-headed invaders;[232] and it is useless to inquire whether the Mediterranean stock, to which the British, like the earlier French dolmen-builders, belonged, originated in Europe, in Asia, or in Africa. We only know that the oldest traces of the race were discovered in the Riviera.[233] Some philologists, however, affirm that the modern Celtic dialects are distinguished by peculiarities of syntax which show that they were influenced by contact with an older language akin to the Hamitic dialects of Africa.[234]
[Sidenote: Relics of the neolithic population: their settlements.]
Relics of the neolithic population have been found over the whole extent of Great Britain and in the adjacent islands, from Kent to Cornwall, from the Isle of Wight to Shetland, not only in barrows and cairns, but also in caves in which they lived and died, in the neighbourhood of the quarries from which they obtained flint for manufacturing their tools, in pit-dwellings, on the margins of lakes, in the beds of rivers, in ditches, in peat-mosses, in sandy wastes where the sand had been blown away from the soil which it had long concealed, in fens, on open downs, and in fields by the accidental impact of a plough. Their sepulchres, as we shall afterwards see,[235] remain in comparatively few regions; but on the more cultivated lands many have doubtless been destroyed. It is reasonable to suppose that the settlements were made successively throughout a long period; and that the earliest comers took possession of the choicest lands in the south. Those who came later would displace their predecessors if they had the power, and if the prize seemed worth a struggle: otherwise they would move on to the nearest vacant lands; and so in the course of ages, and after much bloodshed, the whole island came to be occupied. But each successive horde found large tracts of the country through which they plodded overgrown by forests or covered by morasses; and they must often have had to travel far before they could obtain a suitable abode. Except the gigantic Irish elk and the wild ox known as the aurochs, which survived into the Bronze Age, and which, later still, Caesar found roaming in the German forests,[236] the great beasts which had lived in Britain with palaeolithic man were no more; but brown bears and grizzly bears, beavers and wild cats, still survived; herons, swans, and cormorants flitted over the fens; red deer, wild boars, and even a few reindeer remained to supply the new comers with game; and in every forest wolves were lurking to prey upon their cattle.[237] If we were to mark upon a map all the places at which neolithic implements have been found, it would correspond more or less closely with one constructed _a priori_ by a geographer, ignorant of the results of archaeological research, who appreciated the requirements of early settlers. He would expect to find that they had avoided as far as possible the toil of cutting down woods, and that they had selected dry uplands, where the subsoil was porous and their cattle could find pasture, and which overlooked river-valleys, where they themselves could get water and fuel, and on the slopes of which they could build sheltered dwellings. He would not therefore be surprised to learn that the traces of occupation are most numerous on the chalk downs, the Derbyshire moorlands, the Pennine Range and the Yorkshire Wolds, the Malvern Hills, and other high lands which fulfilled the necessary conditions.[238]
Without his tools the settler could not build his hut, cut his firewood, or kill and dress a calf or a kid from his herd. Let us therefore try to ascertain how he made them, and how far he had improved as a craftsman upon the rude methods of his palaeolithic predecessor.
[Sidenote: Flint mines and implement factories.]
Within the last half-century archaeologists have succeeded in revealing some of the factories in which the prehistoric cutlers wrought. The nature of their materials of course still depended upon the rocks which were to be found in the district where they lived. Those who could get no flint used quartzite, basalt, felstone, greenstone, porphyry, diorite, or whatever stone they could obtain.[239] But flint was still the staple material. The palaeolithic hunters were obliged, as we have seen, to use stray blocks: their successors had learned how to win the flint from the bed of chalk in which it lay. Among the chief centres of mining and manufacture were Brandon in Suffolk an
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