Note 2079 — THE ETHNOLOGY OF ANCIENT BRITAIN (continued 2)

Keltic Researches, pp. 25, 149. On page 26 (n. 1) Mr. Nicholson makes the curious suggestion that ‘the Britons, strictly speaking, were the Kymric branch who painted themselves, as distinguished from the Goidelic who tattooed’. Is he prepared to argue that the Belgae, who, on his theory, were Goidels, and with whom (p. 110) he apparently identifies ‘the original Brittones or Brittani’, were not included among ‘the Britons, strictly speaking’? Will he maintain, in the face of Caesar, from whom we learn that the Britons all ‘painted themselves (Omnes vero se Britanni vitro inficiunt)’, that ‘the great majority’ (p. 110) of the inhabitants of Britain did not paint? And, since Caesar undoubtedly included among the painted Britons the maritime tribes of the south-east, and also included them among the Belgae, does he not see the inconsistency into which he has fallen?

Bratuspantium, the name of a Belgic town mentioned by Caesar (B. G., ii, 13, § 2), would to most minds prove that the Belgae spoke a Gallo-Brythonic dialect, not only by the p which it contains, but also by the nt, a non-Goidelic combination. Mr. Nicholson, however (Keltic Researches, p. 16, with which cf. A. Holder, Alt-celtischer Sprachschatz, i, 515), of course explains the p as Indo-European.