T. Rice Holmes

“ There, within the brief span of historical time, wind, tide, and river, and finally the labour of man, have wrought changes as remarkable as those that in other regions required the lapse of ages which the imagination fails to conceive. The antiquary who walks from Westenhanger Station to the brow of Lympne Hill, and looks out over the vast field of shingle that extends seaward, and, on his left, towards Hythe, and then over the broad level of the marsh that stretches away on his right between the Wealden upland and Dymchurch Wall, will easily picture to himself the scene that once was there. ”

“ But when the Roman had gone, when the Saxon, the Dane, and the Norman had come, the descendants of neolithic aboriginals, of bronze-using immigrants, and of Celts still lived on; and their composite influence has ever since been helping to form the British character and to determine the course of British history. The roads on which we travel, the flocks and herds that feed us, the corn that grows in our fields, the implements which we use,—all our industrial arts are inseparably connected with theirs. ”

“ It is necessary also to study the ancient geography of the coast of Kent; to be acquainted with the tidal phenomena of the English Channel; to have at least an elementary knowledge of seamanship; to know Caesar’s writings intimately, and not merely read the Fourth and Fifth Books for the occasion; and, above all, to gain that understanding of the principles of ancient warfare which can only be acquired by one who has studied the history of modern campaigns, and has learned, by experience or from intercourse with practical men, how things actually happen. No genius is needed ”

“ 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. ”

“ And for the purpose of prosecuting that most difficult of all inquiries, the ethnical problem, the part played by race in the developement of peoples and the effects of race blendings, it must be remembered that the Celtic world commands one of the chief portals of ingress into that mysterious prae-Aryan foreworld, from which it may well be that we modern Europeans have inherited far more than we dream.’ But when we have entered the ‘prae-Aryan foreworld’, how shall we map out its various provinces, and what clue shall we have gained to the solution of ‘the ethnical problem’? ”

“ The worship of animals, to those who have not felt the fascination of anthropology, appears merely unintelligible and absurd. Animals were worshipped because they were formidable or wonderful; because men fancied that they were incarnations of deity; because they might be tenanted by the souls of heroic forefathers;1199 and animal-worship, or a relic of animal-worship, which may perhaps, in some cases, have been a survival of totemism, has left vestiges in Celtic art. ”

“ The 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. ”

“ Just as the neolithic cutlers of Britain were inferior to those of Denmark, so there is nothing in our museums which can vie with the astonishing splendour of the decorated palstaves and shields, the trumpets and vessels of the Scandinavian region. ”

“ And when we are told that some quaint superstition which the folklorist discovers in Devonshire or the Highlands is non-Aryan, and must therefore be traceable to the people who were here before the first Celtic invader arrived, we may ask how it is possible to disprove that it had been inherited by the Celt from remote ancestors or had been borrowed by him from non-Aryan tribes while he was still a wanderer. We must be content, if we can but catch something of the spirit of neolithic religion, to remain in blank ignorance of its details. ”

“ Men who are familiar with war and who have a sufficient knowledge of the conditions of navigation in the Straits of Dover know that there was only one port on the north-eastern coast of Gaul which would have answered all Caesar’s requirements, and that Caesar would not have made a foolish choice. Accordingly the greatest of modern soldiers affirmed without hesitation that the greatest soldier of Rome had sailed to Britain from Boulogne. ”

“ That the first Celtic-speaking invaders landed in Britain before the end of the Bronze Age I do not deny; and if they came from that part of Gaul which was inhabited by the Celtae, I have no doubt that many of them were brachycephalic. But it is nevertheless certain that among these invaders the dominant element, who were Celtic in blood as well as in speech, and whose physical type was that described by the ancient writers, were not brachycephalic but mesaticephalic or dolichocephalic. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In answer to Professor Boyd Dawkins it may be said that if the tall Round Barrow race were not Finns or Slaves, it does not follow that they were Goidels. And supposing that they were Finns or Slaves, why should it be necessary to assume that they ‘subsequently retreated eastward against the current of the Celtic, Belgian, 432 and German invasions’? Or that they retreated eastward at all? The ‘Iberian’ immigrants certainly did not retreat ‘against the current’ of the Round Barrow invaders: they retreated, if at all, to the remoter parts of Britain. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There must have been much intermingling between the old population and the new: gradually the use of bronze weapons must have spread to neolithic clans or to those who could obtain them by barter or theft; and by the time when the Bronze Age was far advanced tribes of mingled stock must often have presented a united front to enemies from over sea. Even when the invaders had slowly made their way from the Channel to the far north, and from the German Ocean to the Irish Sea, hunger or the lust of booty would often lead to intertribal raids. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Human sacrifice.
Thurnam was convinced that in the barrows which he explored there were unmistakable evidences of human sacrifice. In nearly all of them he found fractured skulls, the broken edges of which were so sharp that he inferred that the skull had been cleft in life by a club or a stone axe; while in some cases one skull only was unmutilated. His conclusion was that the few entire skulls were those of chiefs or their relatives, while the others belonged to slaves or captives who had been sacrificed. ”

“ It is almost an article of faith that the earlier Celtic invaders were Goidels, or tribes who had not changed qu into p; but there are some who maintain that neither in the time of Pytheas nor even in that of Caesar were there any Goidels in Britain; and that those who were settled in Wales in the third century of our era were all of Irish origin. No direct evidence indeed can be adduced for the common view; but it is hard to conceive that the earliest Celtic immigrants, unless they set out from Spain or from North-Western Gaul, should have passed by Britain in order to settle in Ireland. ”

“ Who will attempt to differentiate the respective shares of the pre-Aryan Long Barrow race, of the few representatives of the pre-Aryan Grenelle race who settled in this land, of the tall harsh-featured Round Barrow people, of the Goidels, and finally of the Brythons in building up the character which was to be further modified by the Roman, the Saxon, the Dane, the Norman, the Fleming, and aliens of every nationality, who each and all contributed something to a result which, influenced by the Continent, by the Far West, and now by the Far East, is still in process of evolution? ”

“ 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, 49 or famished wolf has slain his wife or child. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The ethnology of ancient Britain has been studied from many points of view. Writers of a past generation relied simply upon the notices which are to be found in the works of Caesar, Strabo, Tacitus, and other ancient writers. In the last century the science, if it may now be so called, of physical anthropology came into being. The barrows in which our prehistoric ancestors had buried their dead were opened; and the skeletons which had been left in them by earlier explorers were systematically measured. ”

“ It is true that the Gallic Morini in Caesar’s time had not become welded into one state, and that the Kentish clans were under four petty kings; but in the period when the older earthworks were thrown up it would seem that far less progress had been made towards union. But even supposing that most of the prehistoric forts were later than the Bronze Age, their purpose accorded with the methods of primitive warfare. A chain of modern fortresses impedes an invader because, while they remain uncaptured, he cannot pass between them without exposing his line of communication. ”

“ The skeletons of the Early Iron Age that have been exhumed in Britain are mainly those of small or middle-sized men, who to an untrained eye seem hardly distinguishable from the neolithic race, but whose skulls, although they too are long and narrow, generally differ from theirs in the sight of an expert. Even the skeletons that have been found interred with war-chariots are unlike those of the cemeteries of North-Eastern Gaul. ”