Clerestory

“ For three hundred years never a day has passed without many persons being interred there; and the hideous clay, the yellow and many-coloured loam, that had once lived and breathed, and loved and spoken, has now risen several feet above the adjacent street, against the walls of the great old church in the centre, and has buried the basements of the quaint and dark monuments that surround it. ”

“ It has long appeared to me that a general résumé of the almost endless store of knowledge presented by the very varied relics of the grave-mounds of the three great divisions of our history—the Celtic, the Romano-British, and the Anglo-Saxon—kept distinct from the histories of those peoples, and from extraneous matters, and treating them more in a general than in an ethnological manner, could not fail to be a useful addition to our archæological literature, and would prove of great value and convenience to the general reader, as well as to the antiquary and the historian. ”

“ It mil at once be seen that the stone-period must be of extraordinary antiquity. If the Celts possessed settled abodes in the west of Europe, more than two thousand years ago, how much more ancient must be the population which preceded the arrival of the Celts. ”

“ ISText, the succession of ages to which different classes of remains belong is well marked; the drift implements belong to the palaeolithic or old stone age, when as yet the implements were extremely rude, and not ground or polished; above these in deposit, and therefore later in time, come the artistically shaped and polished celts of the neolithic or new stone age ; above these, again, relics of the bronze and early iron ages, with which historical antiquity in Europe begins. ”

“ Most of the relics were found resting on the clay so they must have remained there for a sufficient time to have allowed these thick deposits to have formed, and it is possible that they may be associated with some of the Neolithic people who took to this mode of living when the Celtic invaders with their bronze weapons were steadily driving them northwards or reducing them to a state of slavery. ”

“ The townspeople were well armed: they kept horses and chariots, wove their own cloth, sawed their own timber, made their own earthenware, and grew their own corn; and heaps of slag showed that they had smelted the ore, which lay thenceforward undisturbed for nineteen hundred years.1080 One of several skulls which were found just outside the town was perforated with three holes, which suggest that the British Celts, like the Gauls and their neolithic predecessors, made amulets out of the remains of their own dead.1081
Inhabited caves; pit-dwellings; ‘Picts’ houses’; beehive houses; and brochs. ”

“ A careful baking, either by artificial heat or in the burning rays of a tropic sun, rendered the clay tablets very enduring, so that many which have been dug from ancient ruins are now in a remarkable state of preservation, bearing letters and figures as clear as any of the inscriptions on marble, stone, or metal that have come to us from the splendid days of Greece or Rome. ”

“ But the rude stone moulds, the sand-cast celts and palstaves, and the relics of the primitive forges in which they were wrought, all point to aboriginal learners slowly acquiring the new art, while perhaps its originators were introducing those works of beautiful form and great finish and delicacy of workmanship, which the antiquary of the eighteenth century could ascribe to none but the Roman masters of the world. ”

“ In the chief countries of Celtic civilisation, Gaul, Cisalpine and Transalpine, Britain and Ireland, abundant materials have been found for elucidating the stages of culture through which man passed in prehistoric times. In Britain, for example, palæolithic man has left numerous specimens of his implements, but the forms even of these rude implements suggest that they, too, have been evolved from still more primitive types. ”

“ It was upon clay that they learnt to write; it was to slabs of terra-cotta that their kings confided the memory of their victories and acts of devotion, and the private population their engagements and the contracts into which they entered. For thousands of years tablets of clay thus received not only long texts, but those impressions from seals, each one of which represents a signature. While wet and soft, clay readily accepted any symbol that man chose to place upon it; once it was burnt, those symbols became practically indestructible. ”

“ Poor child! that flexible clay of which these old brothers molded their admirable symbols was not Persian, nor Memphian, nor Teutonic, nor local at all, but was common lime and silex and water, and sunlight, the heat of the blood, and the heaving of the lungs; it was that clay which thou heldest but now in thy foolish hands, and threwest away to go and seek in vain in sepulchers, mummy pits, and old bookshops of Asia Minor, Egypt, and England. It was the deep to-day which all men scorn; the rich poverty, which men hate; the populous, all-loving solitude, which men quit for the tattle of towns. ”

“ The country round about is volcanic, and the face of the landscape shows it plainly. Clermont-Ferrand, the capital, was a populous city in Roman times, and was the centre from which the spirit of the Church survived and went forth anew after five consecutive centuries of devastation and bloodshed of Vandals, Visigoths, Franks, Saracens, Carlovingians and Capetians. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As they stand, it becomes hard to conceive how otherwise, in equally intelligible language, a great historical event could have been commemorated in the everlasting record supplied by clay. They are records, and not mere ornaments. They mirror the first century of America’s life as a nation. ”

“ And within the cella, nearly concealed by the surrounding columns, were the statues of the gods, and the altars on which incense was offered, or sacrifices made. In every part, interior and exterior, do we see a matchless proportion and beauty, whether in the shaft, or the capital, or the frieze, or the pilaster, or the pediment, or the cornices, or even the mouldings—everywhere grace and harmony, which grow upon the mind the more they are contemplated. ”

“ The celt, the knife, the lance and arrow-heads, and other weapons and implements, can be traced in an uninterrupted progressive series from the oldest and rudest palæolithic specimens, up to the highly-finished ones of polished stone, and through these into the age of metals, and into historic times and the actual implements of existing savage races. It is impossible to doubt that one of the palæolithic celts from St. Acheul or St. Prest is as truly a work of the human hand, guided by human intelligence, as a modern axe ”

“ Such are some of the relics of antiquity which the soil of our native land retains, as a memorial of the primitive people who first trod upon it. Concerning their lives and records history is silent, until the Conqueror tells us something of our Celtic forefathers. From the scanty remains of prehistoric races, their weapons and tools, we can gather something of the earliest inhabitants of our island, and try to realise their habits and mode of life. ”

“ The study of its details and of the evolution of its various types belongs to archaeology; but a general knowledge of its main features is essential to the understanding of British history.
Late Celtic works of art are in general as easily recognized as those of the Bronze Age, although only an expert could assign a given specimen to its proper period; but they are far more difficult to describe. While the chevron is the characteristic feature of the older culture, that of the younger is the curve. ”

“ Given a sufficient number of examples of each class, the experienced eye would at once discriminate between the modern European Fin, Germanic Teuton, and British Celt. The conclusion appears therefore inevitable, that if we find in the ancient tumuli like variations in physical form, systematically reducible to two or more classes, we are justified in assuming the existence of diverse primitive races, and of seeking in the accompanying relics for indications of their peculiar arts and customs, as well as of their relative positions as contemporary or successive occupants of the country. ”

“ The Celtic genius, under the influence of Christianity, and as representing the art of the early Christian Western civilization—exemplified in the remarkable designs in the Book of Kells—was, on the other hand, strictly ornamental in its manifestations, suggesting in its richness, and in the intricacy and ingenuity of its involved patterns, as well as the geometric forms of many of its units, a relation to certain characteristics of Eastern as well as primitive Greek art. ”

“ The dead clay knows nothing of our feelings, and whether it is borne to the grave in pompous procession and laid to rest in a great abbey amid the mourning of a nation or tossed as dust to the wind, is a matter of utter indifference. ”

“ The archæological evidence of burial customs among the Celts also bears witness to this belief. Over the whole Celtic area a rich profusion of grave-goods has been found, consisting of weapons, armour, chariots, utensils, ornaments, and coins.1163 Some of the interments undoubtedly point to sacrifice of wife, children, or slaves at the grave. Male and female skeletons are often in close proximity, in one case the arm of the male encircling the neck of the female. ”

“ Here also we made some acquaintances, who almost contrived to cheat me into happiness. The delight of Clerval was proportionably greater than mine; his mind expanded in the company of men of talent, and he found in his own nature greater capacities and resources than he could have imagined himself to have possessed while he associated with his inferiors. “I could pass my life here,” said he to me; “and among these mountains I should scarcely regret Switzerland and the Rhine.” ”

“ The palæolithic, neolithic and metal ages are taken up in their natural order. The famous relic sites, notably those of England, France and America, the kitchen-middens, lake-dwellings, crannoges, dolmens, menhirs, cromlechs, traces of peoples long since disappeared in name even if still represented by their descendants, are noticed in considerable detail and with many illustrations. ”

“ In the Late Celtic Period, and indeed long after its close, caves were still inhabited, as throughout the prehistoric ages, in some cases by outlaws, who made a precarious livelihood by robbing wealthy travellers.1082 Pit-dwellings in small groups, which apparently differed little from those of the Neolithic Age, have been found stored with Late Celtic relics;1083 and doubtless it was from habitations of this class that the thatched huts of mud and wattle-work which Strabo1084 describes, and the remains of which have been already noticed, were evolved. ”

“ It may perhaps be thought by some that sufficient space has already been devoted to this infantile period of the race, yet childish as such decorations seem, they are found among the valued relics of men whose giant monuments have outlived many massive structures destined by later ages to perpetuate the memory of historic deeds, or consecrated to the services of the all-powerful Church of medieval Christendom. ”

“ Relics of a prehistoric race have been found in great abundance, ranging from the stone age to that of bronze and metals. These people buried their dead not only in stone graves or cells, but also in great jars of burnt clay, accompanied by pieces of pottery and other articles of use and value. ”

“ Everything betokens the close of the long Pagan era which we have followed down from that remote dawn of archæological annals in which we catch the first dim traces of the aboriginal Briton mingled among alluvial relics of strange animal life, to the commencement of authentic written history and inscriptions, preparatory to a new period of which our own century forms a part. ”

“ Though more crests are blazoned nowadays than there are minutes in which the heralds may count them, yet old families still live, with roots deep down in rural England's soil, and nourish in quiet legends which, when they come to notice, are the fairest flowers in the garden of English folk-lore. ”

“ The great difficulty in studying the religion and mythology of the ancient Celts, is to bridge over the gulf of ages dividing the literature of the Celtic nations of the present day from the narrative of the writers of antiquity and the testimony of the stones. ”

“ EARLY TRADE WITH CELTIC LANDS UNTIL the close of the stone age the movements of people had been by means of gradual drifting. During the palæolithic age, when the population supported itself by hunting, the people wandered over considerable areas in search of game, and the inhabitants of different regions frequently met and mingled with one another. ”

“ The old gentleman's enthusiasm, for antiquities was often played on by these young friends, but more effectually by his eldest son, John Clerk (Lord Eldin) , who, having a great genius for art, used to amuse himself with manufacturing mutilated heads, which, after being buried for a convenient time in the (p. 133) ground, were accidentally discovered in some fortunate hour, and received by the laird with great honor as valuable accessions to his museum. ”