THE ETHNOLOGY OF ANCIENT BRITAIN (continued 2)

Mr. Nicholson1866 says that ‘we have abundant materials for deciding whether Pictish was or was not (1) Aryan, (2) Keltic, (3) Goidelic, in (a) the place-names recorded by ancient geographers and one or two mediaeval documents, (b) the person-names given by one or two ancient historians and in mediaeval chronicles, (c) the inscriptions’. From these materials Mr. Nicholson undertakes to demonstrate that Pictish was Goidelic, and that ‘it stands to Highland Gaelic in exactly the same relation in which Anglo-Saxon stands to modern English’;1867 while Dr. Whitley Stokes1868 and Dr. Macbain1869 undertake with equal confidence to demonstrate that it was related to Brythonic. According to Bede,1870 the place which marked the western termination of the wall of Severus was called in Pictish Peanfahel. Pean is commonly identified with the Welsh word penn, ‘a head’; and accordingly it has been inferred that Pictish was ‘a Kymric or semi-Kymric dialect’.1871 Mr. Nicholson, on the other hand, claims to have shown that Pean is ‘a Goidelic borrowing from the Latin penna or pinna’. Professor Rhys1872 formerly clung to the view that Peanfahel was a Brythonic name, but was not in the least disconcerted thereby; for, he explained, ‘the Picts must have learnt it ... from the Verturian Brythons.’ On the question of etymology he has now become a convert to Mr. Nicholson’s view:1873 but on the question of ethnology he retains his own opinion; for, he explains, ‘The non-Celtic Picts, when we find them coming southwards, seem to have been fast adopting the idioms of their neighbours.’1874 Mr. Nicholson1875 analyses with laborious ingenuity a large number of names in Adamnan’s Life of Columba, of place-names in the Pictish Chronicle, of Pictish historical names, and of words which occur in the ‘Pictish inscriptions’, and insists that they are Goidelic: Dr. Whitley Stokes[1876] and Dr. Macbain[1877] produce words from the same sources, from Ptolemy’s Geography, and from Dion Cassius, and insist that they are Brythonic. Dr. Stokes’s authority is so great that his verdict is worth quoting:—‘The foregoing list of names and other words contains much that is still obscure; but on the whole it shows that Pictish, so far as regards its vocabulary, is an Indo-European and especially Celtic speech. Its phonetics, so far as we can ascertain them, resemble those of Welsh rather than of Irish.’1878

But the arguments for Brythonic, on the one hand, and for Goidelic, on the other, leave Professor Rhys unmoved. Prove as many Pictish words as you please to have been Goidelic, as many as you please to have been Brythonic: he will regard them with serene indifference.1879 For, he tells you,1880 ‘the Pictish language would seem to have been rapidly becoming overloaded with loan-words from Goidelic or Brythonic when we first hear anything about it. So, failing to recognize this borrowing of words by the Picts, some have been led to regard Pictish as a kind of Gaelic, and some as a dialect akin to Welsh. The point to have been decided, however, was not whether Gaelic or Welsh explains certain words said to have been in use among the Picts, but whether there does not remain a residue to which neither Gaelic nor Welsh, nor, indeed, any Aryan tongue whatever can supply any sort of key.’ The professor is still thinking of that outlandish inscription which, according to Mr. Nicholson, is Goidelic, and the professor’s reading of which, according to Dr. Macbain, is no language at all. But, admitting provisionally the existence of ‘a residue’ to which no Aryan language ‘can supply any sort of key’, we should, I must repeat, only have to conclude that in certain remote parts of the extensive territory occupied by the Picts a non-Aryan language survived into the Christian era, just as in a remote part of France a non-Aryan language survives at this day: we should not have to conclude that that language was spoken by the Picts in general. ‘La question,’ says M. d’Arbois de Jubainville, in a notice of Professor Rhys’s article on the Pictish inscriptions,1881 ‘la question est de savoir si cette population [the pre-Aryan population] est restée dominante. Les noms de peuples tels que Smertae ... des noms d’hommes tels que celui du Calédonien Argentocoxos ... me semblent décisifs.’ It is absolutely certain, and is insisted upon by Professor Rhys himself, that in Roman times many of the tribes which were included under the general designation of Picts bore Celtic names, and that many of the geographical names in the country which they inhabited were Celtic also. On the other hand, not a single Pictish name, tribal, or geographical, or personal, not a single Pictish word which has been preserved by Ptolemy or by our other authorities, has been proved to be non-Celtic; and if, as Professor Rhys maintains, Pictish was a non-Aryan language overlain by loan-words from the two Celtic dialects, it was so buried beneath them as to be no longer discernible. Argentocoxos,1882 as the professor says, was a Pict, and one of the many Picts whose names were Celtic: if the Picts had spoken a non-Celtic language, however much overloaded with Celtic loan-words, would not their own names have been non-Aryan? As their names were Celtic, it is reasonable to infer that their language was Celtic also. The professor, it is true, points out that ‘in Wales many a man has the English name John Jones, though he cannot speak English’.1883 Yes, but the Welsh are a conquered or, let us say, absorbed people, whereas the professor himself assures us1884 that before the time of Ptolemy ‘the Goidels and the Picto-Brythons [of the North] had come under the power of the more purely non-Celtic tribes beyond them’.1885 But this is of course a pure assertion. The professor fails to prove that any Celtic people in Britain came under the power of non-Celtic tribes. Many centuries before the time of Pytheas the neolithic population had for the most part been reduced to subjection; and, although remote clans may possibly have retained their individuality, in many parts of the island the descendants of the aborigines had become intermingled, first with the ‘Round Barrow’ invaders, the earlier of whom at all events, as I shall presently show,1886 were not Celts, and secondly with the Celts themselves. Professor Rhys1887 himself admits that the name of the Picts ‘was never, perhaps, distinctive of race, as Brythons and Goidels seem to have been sometimes included under it’; and, although he goes on to say that ‘the term probably applied most strictly at all times’ to ‘the non-Celtic natives’, it is not likely that the name of non-Celtic natives should have prevailed over that of the Celts.

For all these reasons it appears to me infinitely more probable that in Pictland as, according to Professor Rhys himself, in the rest of Britain,1888 the non-Aryan language should have been absorbed by Celtic than that Celtic should have been absorbed by the non-Aryan language.

There is probably this grain of truth in Professor Rhys’s theory, that the non-Celtic natives continued to exist in greater purity in the country which was occupied by a group of tribes who, during the latter part of the Roman occupation and afterwards, were called Picts, than in any other part of Britain. But I doubt whether this eminent scholar could have spent his time less profitably than in striving to demonstrate, first, that the language of the Picts was related to Basque, and, when he was forced to abandon this attempt, in clinging to the theory that it was a non-Aryan tongue.

VIII. THE ROUND-HEADS

There is, as we have already seen,1889 sufficient evidence that round-headed immigrants had begun to appear in Britain towards the end of the Neolithic Age; but the majority of the prehistoric skulls of this kind undoubtedly belong to the Age of Bronze. Men of the same type were living in England at the time of the Saxon invasion;[1890] and their descendants may be recognized here and there at the present day.1891 The prehistoric skeletons have been found not only in the round barrows of Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, Denbighshire, Man, and Orkney, and in secondary interments in long barrows, but also in Welsh caverns and graves and in the short cists of Scotland.1892 The range of this people in Britain was, however, it need hardly be said, far wider than that which the discovery of a few skeletons has indicated.

The round-headed invaders are commonly described as physically finer men than the neolithic population whom in most parts of Britain they subdued;1893 but the truth is that, both in respect of stature and of cranial form, they belonged to two utterly different groups, though, as might be expected, some exhibit characteristics of both.1894 The average height of 17 brachycephalic men whose skeletons had been found in round barrows before 1865 would have been, according to Dr. Beddoe’s estimate, 5 feet 9 inches, or almost 1 metre 753; while the average height of 27 men of various cephalic indices, including the 17 just mentioned, whose skeletons (described in Crania Britannica) have been found in round barrows, would, according to the same authority, have reached 5 feet 9⅖ inches,1895 or approximately 1 metre 763. Measurements of skeletons which have been discovered since the publication of Crania Britannica have yielded results virtually the same.[1896] On the other hand two groups of skeletons have recently been described which belonged to a much shorter race. Four, taken from round barrows in Glamorganshire, showed, according to Dr. Beddoe’s method, an average height of about 5 feet 5¾ inches;1897 while 7 male skeletons, found in short cists in and near Aberdeenshire, ranged, according to Mr. Alexander Low, between 5 feet and 5 feet 7 inches, the average being only 5 feet 3 inches.1898 The skulls of these skeletons will be presently described.

The cephalic indices of 103 male skulls, found before the year 1894 in round barrows or in other interments of the Bronze Age,[1899] ranged from 70 to 88, 55 of them exceeding 80; while those of 19 skeletons from round barrows in which no bronze was found ranged from 68 to 88, six of them exceeding 80.1900 In both series a large proportion of the skulls whose indices fell short of 80 belonged, wholly or in part, to the Long Barrow race. Other skulls, however, which have since been described and of the characteristics of which Dr. Beddoe, the compiler of this list, may have been ignorant, yielded indices higher still.1901

But it is not enough to describe the invaders of the Bronze Age as brachycephalic: they shared that characteristic with peoples who were otherwise markedly different from them. Let us first consider those which belong to the so-called characteristic type, which, until a recent date, received more than its share of attention,—that which is seen only in the taller skeletons. Their foreheads, says Rolleston, were ‘sometimes ... especially in cases where the whole skull and skeleton are marked by great strength and even ruggedness, markedly sloping’.1902 Their supraciliary ridges were often extraordinarily prominent. ‘The eyebrows,’ says the same authority, ‘must have given a beetling and probably even formidable appearance to the upper part of the face, whilst the boldly outstanding and heavy cheek bones must have produced an impression of raw and rough strength.... Overhung at its root, the nose must have projected boldly forward.’[1903] These men were, in some instances, extremely prognathous:1904 their teeth were often extraordinarily large;[1905] and, to quote Thurnam, ‘the prominence of the large incisor and canine teeth is so great as to give an almost bestial expression to the skull.’[1906] The reader who scans the illustrations in Crania Britannica and in Canon Greenwell’s British Barrows will, however, see that the brachycephalic skulls even of the taller skeletons are not all of the same type. Moreover, some few of the Round Barrow skulls combine the contour of the characteristic brachycephalic skull of the British Bronze Age with dolichocephaly;1907 and this is one of the facts which tend to prove that in certain parts of England the brachycephalic invaders intermarried with the people whom they found in possession. In the East Riding of Yorkshire, indeed, it would seem that the old race and the new were as completely intermingled as the modern population. Dr. William Wright tells us that in a collection of 80 skulls, taken from round barrows and preserved in the Mortimer Museum at Driffield, ‘almost all the varieties of cranial shape met with in Europe are represented.’ Their cephalic indices ranged from 69 to 92; and, says Dr. Wright, ‘it is doubtful if it is possible to find a materially more mixed series of skulls in a community of to-day.’1908 Dr. Wright, however, does not believe that the skulls of apparently hybrid form prove intermarriage between the invaders and the old neolithic population, or that the former were purely brachycephalic. ‘To grant this,’ he argues, ‘one must believe that a pure round-headed race could have made its tardy progress across Europe unmixed,—an assumption which to my mind is incredible.’1909 Has the doctor forgotten that ten male skulls, found in short cists in and near Aberdeenshire and evidently assignable to the end of the Neolithic or the beginning of the Bronze Age,1910 were all brachycephalic, and that nine of them belonged to the same pure type.1911 Has he forgotten that the round barrow skulls of Wiltshire were mainly brachycephalic? Has he ever walked over the mountains of Auvergne? Very likely the round-headed race which he has in mind did not make its way across Europe unmixed; but the mixture did not greatly diminish the roundness. Very likely when it reached Britain it included a few long-heads; but the contrast between the uniformity in Wiltshire and the diversity in East Yorkshire suffices to disprove the doctor’s theory.

Some of Dr. Wright’s brachycephalic specimens belonged to a type which is quite different from the ‘characteristic’ Round Barrow type, and is also common to almost all the short Welsh and Scottish skeletons mentioned above.1912 These skulls are generally broader than those of the other kind. The ten found in Aberdeenshire and its neighbourhood ranged between 80.8 and 92.3, their average index being 85.39;1913 while those of Glamorganshire ranged between 81.7 and 86, and yielded an average of 84.2.1914 Not one of these skulls is prognathous:1915 all are high as well as round and broad: the supraciliary ridges are only slightly developed: the cheek bones are not prominent: the face is both broad and short; and the lower jaw is small.1916

Who were the brachycephalic people of the round barrows and the short cists, and whence did they come? Those who have attempted to solve these problems have generally had in mind only the tall round-heads, whether their skulls belonged to the characteristic type or showed signs of crossing with the other. Wherever the short people came from, their ethnical affinities are certain: they belonged to the so-called Alpine type of Central Europe, of which the French Grenelle race were a branch. Let us for the present confine our attention to the others. To the questions which I have asked at least six different answers have been given:—that they were Goidelic Celts; that they were Belgae; that they were Finns; that they came from Denmark or the Scandinavian peninsula; that their original home was Dalmatia; and, lastly, that they may be traced back to the valley of the Rhine.1917 But the view which has been repeated by almost every recent writer is that they were Goidels.1918

1-2. The Goidelic theory and the Belgic (which I ought perhaps to apologize for noticing) may be considered together; for if any argument tells in favour of the latter, it tells as much or more in favour of the former.

Thurnam, who does not trouble himself about the distinction between Goidelic and Brythonic Celts, points out that ‘extremely brachycephalic skulls have been exhumed from many of the French chambered tumuli’;1919 that seven skulls with cephalic indices of 80 and upwards from a dolmen near Senlis, which is in the territory that was occupied by the Belgae, ‘have much resemblance to those from the round barrows’;1920 and that three skulls with indices of 80, 80, and 85 respectively from a sepulchral grotto in the Belgic department of the Oise are ‘very similar in general character to the short skulls from the round barrows’.1921 He argues that of the cranial types represented by the peoples of the long barrows and the round barrows respectively ‘one at least must be Celtic’:1922 he points out that in the cremation interments which have been discovered in round barrows ‘the appearances are consistent with what we are told of the funerals of the Gauls ... by Caesar and Pomponius Mela’;1923 and his general conclusion is that the Round Barrow people were ‘an offshoot through the Belgic Gauls from the great brachycephalic stock of Central and North-Eastern Europe’.1924 Finally, Professor Rhys maintained in 18901925 (it would be rash to assume that his opinion is unchanged) that the Round Barrow race belonged to the Brythonic group, who, he asserted, being comparatively broad-headed, were less pure than the Goidels.

According to Professor Boyd Dawkins, the Round Barrow race must have been Goidels, and not Wends, Finns, or Slaves, because the latter would not have subsequently retreated eastward ‘against the current of the Celtic, Belgian, and German invasions’;1926 while the late Canon Isaac Taylor1927 affirmed that the skulls of the well-known ‘Sion type’, which by some anthropologists are believed to have belonged to the Celtic Helvetii, resembled those of the round barrows.

Now the view that the tall brachycephalic people of the round barrows were the Belgae is so utterly absurd that it is difficult to conceive how writers who posed as authorities on ethnology could ever have entertained it.1928 If some benighted classical scholar had ascribed the Copernican system to Ptolemy, one may imagine how he would have been derided by scientists; yet such a blunder would not have been different in degree from that which Thurnam committed and Huxley approved. For the Belgic invasion began, at the earliest, in the third, and, as Professor Rhys himself maintains,1929 in the second century before the Christian era; and the first invaders of the Round Barrow race landed in Britain, at the latest, about 1400 B.C.,1930 and probably several centuries earlier. The argument which Thurnam bases upon the alleged similarity between Round Barrow skulls and some which have been exhumed from French dolmens has no weight. To begin with, the theory that any Celtic-speaking people invaded Gaul in the Neolithic Age is contrary to historical and archaeological evidence;1931 and, assuming that they did, the resemblance between the skulls to which Thurnam refers and most of those of the tall Round Barrow skeletons is purely superficial. Any one may convince himself of this who will take the trouble to compare the illustrations of Round Barrow skulls in Crania Britannica with those in Crania Ethnica; and Thurnam himself in more than one passage1932 admits, indeed emphasizes, the distinction. Even Broca1933 denied that there was any physical affinity between the tall brachycephali of the round barrows and the [so-called] ‘real Celts of Gaul’; and, as we shall see presently, by the latter he simply meant the brachycephalic people, descended from neolithic ancestors, that formed the substratum of the population whom Caesar called Celtae. Similarly Dr. Beddoe truly says that the [characteristic] Round Barrow skulls resemble those of Borreby in the Danish island of Falster, rather than those of Broca’s Celtae.1934 It is true indeed, as we have seen, that some of the Round Barrow skulls resemble some of the neolithic French skulls; but, speaking generally, the former are far more rugged and in every way more strongly marked than the latter.1935

More striking, however, than the contrast between the skulls of the characteristic Round Barrow skeletons and those of the French brachycephalic neolithic race is the discrepancy in stature. The average height of the former was, as we have seen, on the lowest computation, 5 feet 8⅖ inches; that of the latter was very little over 5 feet.1936 Moreover, while the brachycephalic Finns and Danes and the few modern brachycephalic inhabitants of England are generally tall or moderately tall and fair, those of France and Central Europe are generally not only short but dark.1937

The argument that since the Long Barrow skulls were pre-Aryan, those of the round barrows must have been Celtic, begs the question. As we shall see presently, there are other skulls in museums, which belong to neither type, and which undoubtedly are Celtic. What reason is there to deny that the earlier brachycephalic invaders who were buried in round barrows may, as Mr. C. H. Read1938 reasonably suggests, have been pre-Aryan? The British Celts of the later Bronze Age were doubtless cremated; and therefore their skulls are not forthcoming. And if the resemblance between the cremation interments of the round barrows and those described by Caesar proved that the former were all Celtic, it would also prove that they were Greek!1939

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, 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. The argument that the Round Barrow skulls resemble those of the Sion type is disposed of by merely comparing the measurements and the illustrations of the two series. The Sion type, as Rolleston1940 says, ‘corresponds to many of our long-barrow skulls,’ and is not brachycephalic but dolichocephalic or mesaticephalic:1941 there is no proof that it was that of the Helvetii;1942 and, as I have pointed out elsewhere,1943 there is strong reason to believe that the Helvetii did not appear in Switzerland before the Iron Age.

So much for the arguments which have been adduced in favour of the popular theory. There are facts which absolutely disprove it. First, there is no evidence that the brachycephalic people who built round barrows ever reached Ireland, at least in appreciable numbers; for not a single skull of the characteristic Round Barrow type has ever been found there, and only four brachycephalic skulls which can be referred to prehistoric times.1944 Yet it is needless to say that since a time long anterior to the Roman invasion of Britain Ireland has been one of the principal abodes of the Goidelic stock. Secondly, it is, as we have seen, in the highest degree probable, if not certain, that the Round Barrow race first invaded Britain in the Neolithic Age. Let us, however, for the sake of argument, accept Professor Boyd Dawkins’s assumption that their advent synchronized with the beginning of the British Bronze Age. Now, according to Professor Montelius, the Bronze Age in this country began about 2000 B.C.; according to Sir John Evans,1945 six centuries later. It is impossible to fix with certainty the date of the earliest Celtic invasion of Britain; but such historical evidence as we possess points to the conclusion that it was not earlier than the seventh century before the Christian era.1946 M. Salomon Reinach has argued that a Celtic-speaking people appeared in North-Western Gaul in the ninth century,—the earliest date which has ever been proposed by any scholar; but his view is based on the mere conjecture that κασσίτερος,, the Greek word for tin, which occurs in Homer, is of Celtic derivation.1947 M. d’Arbois de Jubainville, indeed, who adopts this conjecture,1948 supposes that the Celts actually landed in Britain as early as the ninth century before Christ; but even if we accept his chronology, we are confronted with the fact that the very earliest date that has been assigned on historical or linguistic grounds for the first Celtic invasion1949 is four or five centuries later than the latest, ten or eleven centuries later than the earliest date which has been assigned by archaeologists for the commencement of the Bronze Age in Britain. Yet anthropologists and antiquaries will go on repeating the dogma that the builders of the round barrows, who, at the latest, began to arrive in Britain at the commencement of the Bronze Age, were Goidelic Celts. The moral is that anthropologists and antiquaries would not be worse equipped if they enlarged the sphere of their studies.

Again, the view that a Celtic-speaking people invaded Britain at the close of the Neolithic or the beginning of the Bronze Age implies that Celtic and Latin, the nearest of kin in the Aryan family of languages, had become differentiated long before the Neolithic Age came to its end. Would any philologist who knew the rudiments of archaeology sanction a theory so preposterous?1950

The foregoing arguments apply equally to the short men whose remains have been found in the greatest purity in North-Eastern Scotland. The race to which they belonged began to arrive in Gaul very early in the Neolithic Age:1951 they themselves landed in Britain before its close. Whoever they may have been, they were neither Goidels nor Belgae nor Brythons of any tribe.

Finally, although I am aware that I am about to tread upon thorny ground, I affirm that there is not the slightest reason to doubt that the Celtic invaders of Britain, in so far as they were descended from the Celtic-speaking people who conquered Gaul, were not a brachycephalic but a dolichocephalic or mesaticephalic people. I have already argued in favour of this thesis in a dissertation on ‘the Ethnology of Gaul’,1952 and I will now adduce fresh evidence in its favour. But first let me make my meaning perfectly clear. I do not mean that the Celtic invaders of Britain were all of the same type. On the contrary, I assume that the dominant race had intermixed and intermarried, before they embarked from the Continent, with descendants of the neolithic stocks. I do not mean that even the invaders who introduced the Celtic language into Gaul, even those who beat the Romans on the Allia, were homogeneous. Dr. Beddoe, as I have remarked elsewhere,1953 warns us not to believe that there was ever a period when, for example, all the Caledonians were red-haired. I only mean that among the Celtic-speaking conquerors of Britain dolichocephaly, as well as tallness and fairness, was a prevailing characteristic.

Thurnam1954 asserted that ‘we may ask in vain for a series of ancient dolichocephalic skulls which, on satisfactory archaeological grounds, can be assigned to the immediately pre-Roman, and therefore to the Celtic period, either in England or in France’. Let us consider England first. Now it happens that the skulls of the ‘Late Celtic’ period, or Early Iron Age, which have been found in this country are almost all either dolichocephalic or mesaticephalic.1955 Canon Greenwell,1956 it is true, explains this fact by the assumption that ‘the intruding round-headed people ... were gradually absorbed by the earlier and more numerous [Long Barrow] race’. ‘In this way,’ he says, ‘it appears to me that we may account for the skull type of the Early Iron Age without the necessity of requiring any immigration into Britain or its conquest after the time of the presumed occupation by the bronze-using round-headed people,’ &c. But that necessity is imperative. Had Canon Greenwell momentarily forgotten his Caesar? The immigration of the Belgae took place, at the earliest, in the third century B.C., many centuries after the ‘occupation by the bronze-using round-headed people’. It is true that some of the British skulls which belong to the Late Celtic period are of the same type as those of the Long Barrow race:1957 but this only proves that the Long Barrow race survived; and others are of a type which, as Rolleston says, is ‘entirely wanting ... in the series from the long barrows’.1958 Unfortunately, however, the Late Celtic skulls which have been found in Britain are comparatively few;1959 and hardly any of them can be assigned with certainty to the Brythonic invaders.

In France, on the other hand, the skulls of the corresponding period are very numerous; but few of them have been measured. Those few, however, confirm my argument. They belonged with very few exceptions to tall mesaticephalic or dolichocephalic men; and two of them may be seen in Salles IX and X of the Musée de St. Germain, near Paris, the former having been buried with his war-chariot, iron helmet, and long iron sword. The mean index of twenty-seven adult male skulls of this type, found in tumuli of the Early Iron Age in the department of the Marne, was 78.49; but Broca, who has described them, maintains that the index of skulls of the purest ‘Kymric’ (or, to use the term which is now in vogue, ‘Galatic’) type would be considerably lower; for, he argues, as the Gauls of the Marne lived very near the frontier of the Celtae, they must have intermarried with the brachycephalic people who formed the great majority of that group of tribes.1960

Again, in a recent article on tumuli of the Early Iron Age in the department of the Côte-d’Or, Dr. Hamy points to the noteworthy fact that two brachycephalic skulls, belonging to descendants of an earlier race, were found ‘among the dolichocephali who predominated in that population’;1961 and in a paper which he has just published on the earliest Gallic invaders of the Iron Age he shows that the cephalic indices of the available skulls from the Châtillonnais and the arrondissement of Beaune range between 73.1 and 76.59, while the average stature was 1 metre 75.7, or just over 5 feet 9⅛ inches.1962

The prevalent view in this country is, I am aware, that the Celts were a brachycephalic people; but it is begotten of sheer confusion of thought. Professor Ripley1963 remarks that ‘there is practically to-day a complete unanimity of opinion among physical anthropologists, that the term Celt, if used at all, belongs to the brachycephalic darkish population of the Alpine highlands’; and he adds that the only dissentient is M. G. de Lapouge.1964 But Dr. Beddoe,1965 whom he counts among the professors of the orthodox faith, has emphatically recorded his opinion that, at the time of the Roman conquest, the Celtic-speaking people of Southern Britain ‘partook more of the tall blond stock of Northern Europe than of the thick-set, broad-headed dark stock which Broca has called Celtic’; and the ‘unanimity’ (which is far from being ‘complete’) upon which Professor Ripley pins his faith is due partly to misunderstanding or misinterpretation of Broca’s famous essay, Qu’est-ce que les Celtes, partly to the desire of establishing a uniform connotation, and partly to the fact that some physical anthropologists have neglected to supplement their scientific researches by the study of classical texts. Broca found the term ‘Celt’ used in a multiplicity of senses, and he attempted to put an end to confusion by attaching to it one limited, conventional, and, as we shall see, misleading signification. When, in the essay to which I have just referred, he endeavoured to prove that the Celts were a dark brachycephalic people, he expressly limited the term ‘Celts’ to the population of that part of Gaul which, according to Caesar,1966 was inhabited by ‘a people who call themselves Celts and whom we [the Romans] call Gauls’. ‘There is no proof,’ he insists, ‘that the existence in the British Isles of a people bearing the name of Celts has ever been authoritatively affirmed’:1967 according to him, the invaders of Britain who spoke the so-called Celtic languages were the Belgae,1968 for he knew nothing about Goidels or pre-Belgic Brythons; and, although he allowed himself to be persuaded that the tall Round Barrow race spoke Celtic, he denied ‘that there is any other affinity except that of language between the brachycephali of the round barrows and the real Celts of Gaul’.1969 When he insisted that ‘the Celts’ were a dark brachycephalic people, he did not mean that darkness and brachycephaly were characteristic of the conquerors who introduced the Celtic language into Gaul: he meant that they were characteristic of the great mass of the mixed population whom Caesar called Celtae,1970 who were in the main descended from neolithic invaders, and whose uppermost stratum, so to speak, consisted of invaders whom Broca, speaking as a physical anthropologist rather than a philologist, called ‘Kimris’.1971 That the name Celtae did not belong to the people of Gaul until it was introduced by these Celtic-speaking ‘Kimris’ is evident from the fact that it belongs to the Celtic tongue:1972 in other words, the Celts, anthropologically speaking, were originally identical with the invaders who introduced the Celtic language first into Germany and then into Gaul.1973 These invaders were tall and mesaticephalic or dolichocephalic; and the Celtic-speaking conquerors of Britain belonged to the same stock.

‘The radical errors in Broca’s definition of the “Celts of history” [so I wrote some years ago1974] are these:—first, he calmly assumes that no classical writer’s testimony, except Caesar’s, is of any value; and secondly, he fails to see that Caesar, by saying that the people who called themselves “Celts” were called by the Romans “Gauls”, makes it as clear as noon-day that for him and for his countrymen, as for Polybius and Pausanias, the words “Celt” and “Gaul” were synonymous. Broca admits that the older population of Gallia Celtica was conquered by men of the same race as the Gauls or Celts who captured Rome. Therefore it is absolutely certain that the Celtae of Transalpine Gaul were called after their conquerors. The truth is that Broca, while he aimed at putting an end to confusion, only made confusion worse confounded. Moreover, throughout his discussion, he simply ignores the Helvetii, who, according to Caesar, were included among the Celtae.’

Since the foregoing paragraph was written, I have lighted upon a passage1975 in which Broca himself justifies my argument and uses the word ‘Celt’ in the sense which I attach to it. The Celtae of Gaul, he remarks, ‘were already mixed before the arrival of the Kimris [or Gallo-Brythonic invaders], since the name [Celtae] under which they appeared for the first time in history had been imposed upon them by the conquering race of the Celts properly so called, which, like the Kimris and the Germans, came from the east, and, like them, was dolichocephalic.’1976

Professor Ripley appeals to the German ethnologist, Johannes Ranke,1977 whose arguments, he insists, are ‘decisive’. But any one who will take the trouble to read the chapter which Ranke devotes to the Celts will see that his argument does not support Professor Ripley’s contention. Virchow, he reminds us, has pointed out that wherever the Celts are known to have penetrated dark peoples are now to be found. But, as he fully admits, Virchow himself said, ‘I am not on that account inclined to assume that the original Celts were ... dark,’ and reminded his readers that the ancient writers described the Celts as fair. Ranke points out, further, that wherever the Celts originally dwelled in Central Europe we now find the people not only dark but also brachycephalic; but at the same time he warns us to bear in mind that in certain Celtic districts of Britain dolichocephaly is unmistakable, and that there is evidence that on the Continent the Celtic invaders found a dark brachycephalic people in possession. In other words, Ranke does not commit himself to any theory as to the physical characters of the Celts properly so called,—the invaders who introduced the Celtic dialects into Germany, Gaul, Britain, and other countries which they subdued. The reader will also bear in mind that the writers who identify the tall brachycephalic Round Barrow race with the Goidelic Celts unanimously maintain that they were fair.

That the Celtic-speaking invaders of Gaul and Britain were commonly dolichocephalic or mesaticephalic is not only attested by the skulls of warriors of the Iron Age, but is either attested or at least not disproved by the results of modern observations of existing Celtic-speaking peoples1978 and of the country which was formerly inhabited by the Gallic Belgae.1979 When Sergi1980 tells us that the Gauls who captured Rome were ‘composed of brunet Celts and blond Teutons’, he makes an assertion which, as it is absolutely unsupported by any evidence, calls for no refutation; and it would be useless to ask him who were the ‘blond Teutons’ who were the ancestors of the red-haired Gauls of the Perthshire Highlands.1981 As Dr. Beddoe1982 puts it, the Gauls of Scotland are probably descended from ‘Iberians’ crossed with ‘a long-faced, harsh-featured, red-haired race, who contributed the language and much of the character’.1983

3. The late Mr. Charles Elton,1984 referring to Professor A. H. Sayce’s Science of Language,1985 affirmed that ‘a Finnish idiom has been traced in several of the British languages’, and inferred that the tall builders of the round barrows were Finns. The idiom in question may, for aught that I know, have been traced by some philologist who had determined to find it, but not by Professor Sayce nor by any one to whom Professor Sayce refers. Mr. Elton’s argument is as obsolete as that which Professor Rhys founded upon his imaginary tracing of Basque in the language of the Picts.

4. Much may be said for the theory of the late Professor Rolleston, that the tall people of the round barrows came from Denmark or some of the adjoining islands, if it be duly modified. On the coast near Flamborough Head are remains of earthworks, which, as has been demonstrated by General Pitt-Rivers, who excavated them, were erected by invaders fighting their way inland; and, as he remarks, ‘it is unlikely that any but Northmen should have landed in this spot.’1986 Thurnam himself admits that there is ‘a great resemblance’ between the characteristic Round Barrow skulls and those from ‘the Giants’ Chamber at Borreby [in the island of Falster], and from other Scandinavian megalithic tombs’;1987 and his testimony is confirmed by Rolleston1988 and Dr. Beddoe.1989

Dr. A. H. Keane1990 argues, in opposition to Rolleston’s view, that if any of the Round Barrow invaders had come from Scandinavia, ‘they must have spoken some Low German dialect, of which there are no clear traces in the tribal and place-names of the Bronze Age.’ The answer is, first, that, as Mr. C. H. Read1991 suggests, they may have spoken not a Low German but a pre-Aryan dialect; and, secondly, that we know absolutely nothing about either the tribal or the place-names of Britain in the Bronze Age. Assuming that Low German tribal or place-names existed in Britain before the Celtic invasion, they would for the most part have been superseded by Celtic names, just as the Celtic invaders of Gaul generally substituted their own tribal and place-names for those of their predecessors, and just as in certain parts of Scotland Celtic names of rivers gave place to Norse names.1992

5. Messrs. J. Gray and J. F. Tocher infer from their observations of the physical characteristics of the population of West Aberdeenshire that ‘a tall, broad-headed, dark-haired, light-eyed people’, whom they regard as ‘the descendants of the men of the Bronze Age’, formerly inhabited Aberdeenshire, but were driven inland by later blond immigrants, who were shorter and had narrower heads, and whom they identify with North Germans.1993 The resemblance of the tall dark people to modern Dalmatians1994 is, they say, ‘significant when taken in conjunction with the fact that bronze first came into the British Isles from South-East Europe.’

‘The fact!’ But is it the fact? Archaeology has certainly shown that Britain, in the Bronze Age, was commercially connected with Northern France, which, as Mr. C. H. Read1995 says, was ‘supplied to a certain extent from Italy’. But no archaeologist supposes that bronze was carried all the way from Italy, still less from Dalmatia, into Britain or even into Northern France by Italians or Dalmatians. It came through the methods of primitive commerce. Moreover, as we have already seen,1996 ‘the men of the Bronze Age,’ by whom Messrs. Gray and Tocher mean the tall brachycephalic people of the round barrows, were still in their Stone Age when they began to invade Britain. A direct immigration from the coasts of the Adriatic into West Aberdeenshire or even Southern Britain is inconceivable; and if it had taken place gradually across the Continent, we should find that the immigrants had left traces of their presence on the way, which is not the case. Notwithstanding the thoroughness with which Messrs. Gray and Tocher conducted their investigation, I fear that it throws no new light upon the ethnology of Ancient Britain. After the successive invasions and immigrations, the internal migrations, and the intermarriages of 3,000 years, it is utterly impossible to establish by dint of even the most elaborate census of a living population the fact that the people of the Bronze Age even in West Aberdeenshire were ‘tall, broad-headed, dark-haired, and light-eyed’; and if they were, why only in West Aberdeenshire?

6. The Honourable John Abercromby maintains that the brachycephalic invaders, or some of them, came at the beginning of the Bronze Age or in the period of transition between the Neolithic Age and the Bronze Age from the neighbourhood of the middle Rhine or from some intermediate district between it and Britain.1997 Remarking1998 that ‘the recorded finds of the last hundred years are sufficient to establish the fact that the beaker [or drinking-cup] is the oldest form of fictilia in the Bronze Age of this country’, he argues that the immigrants who introduced the oldest drinking-cups of the kind which Thurnam designated as ‘type β’ must have belonged to a tribe who at one time lived in the valley of the Rhine, because between British and Rhenish specimens of this type ‘there is a substantial agreement’ both in form and ornament, which ‘seems too great to be the result of pure accident’; and he points out1999 that ‘the type exists not only in the central Rhine, but also near its mouth’, though the intermediate stages cannot be traced. The Rhenish cups belong to the Neolithic Age; and it seems impossible to prove that the earliest British examples were not made before any objects of bronze were manufactured in or introduced into Britain:2000 but Mr. Abercromby has certainly established a very strong probability in favour of the locality to which he refers their origin.2001

The great mistake that has been made in discussing the question is the not uncommon assumption that the brachycephalic immigrants who buried their dead in round barrows arrived in Britain at one time and came from one place. Some of them certainly appeared before the end of the Neolithic Age: others may have introduced bronze implements or ornaments; others doubtless came, in successive hordes, during the course of the Bronze Age. Some of those who belonged to the Grenelle race, who certainly came from Eastern Europe and possibly from Asia,2002 and whose centre of dispersion was the Alpine region,2003 may have started from Gaul;2004 others could have traced their origin to some Rhenish tribe; and I am inclined to believe that those who belonged to the characteristic rugged Round Barrow type crossed over, for the most part, from Denmark or the outlying islands. 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. And if I am asked where the Celtic skulls of the later British Bronze Age are to be found, I answer, Nowhere: they were reduced to ashes by cremation.2005

It is interesting to find that, according to Huxley, of the skeletons that were found in the famous Heathery Burn Cave, near Durham, which was inhabited in the closing period of the Bronze Age, not one belonged to either of the brachycephalic types, but all to ‘the same race of rather small and lightly-made men with prominent superciliary ridges and projecting nasal bones’2006 which is represented by the river-bed skulls of England and Ireland.2007

IX. THE CELTS

1. Little can be added to what has been said in the previous section about the physical characteristics of the Celtic invaders of Britain. Some Celtic scholars, as we shall presently see,2008 deny that any Goidels reached this country before the Roman conquest; but, assuming that some did so, there is no reason to suppose that they differed much physically from the Brythons. If Strabo2009 was right in saying that the Britons generally were less fair-haired than the Gauls, the inference would seem to be that the Celtic invaders of Britain had intermarried more freely than those of Gaul with the descendants of the aborigines; nor would this inference be weakened by the fact that, according to the same authority,2010 they were conspicuously taller than their Gallic kinsmen.2011 I believe, however, that Strabo’s statements were based upon nothing more than his own observation of the few Britons whom he says that he himself saw in Rome, supplemented perhaps by hearsay evidence derived from Roman soldiers or traders who were not trained observers; and that his testimony is worth neither more nor less than that of Lucan, who speaks of ‘the fair-haired Britons’.2012 Dr. Beddoe2013 has concluded, from his observation of the modern inhabitants of ‘those parts of Scotland and the north of England where Kymric blood may well be supposed to remain in large proportion,’ that the Belgae who invaded Britain as well as those of Gaul were on the whole somewhat dark: but his arguments, which I have examined fully elsewhere,2014 do not prove that the dominant Celts among the Belgae were dark, but simply that, before they invaded Britain, they had become largely intermixed with an older dark population, and that, since they reached this country, they and their descendants have intermarried with people darker than themselves.2015

2. Professor Rhys has more than once changed his opinion about the Celtic invaders of Britain since he began to handle the subject. In the second edition of his Lectures on Welsh Philology2016 he argued that they were not ‘two distinct nationalities, speaking two distinct languages’; in other words, he maintained that the Goidelic and Brythonic dialects had been evolved within the British Isles after the Celts had entered them. In the preface to Celtic Britain, however, which was written in January, 1884, he recanted; and his old view is now obsolete. For many years past he has maintained that the earliest invaders were Goidels, or, as he now prefers to call them, Celticans;2017 and that the later comers were Brythons. But whereas until a recent date he held that the only Brythonic invasion was that of the Belgae, and that Pytheas, who visited Britain towards the end of the fourth century B.C., ‘is not likely to have found any Brythons here,’2018 he now holds, or at all events held a few weeks before the time when I am writing, that the first Brythonic invaders ‘appear to have settled here before the middle of the fourth century B. C., for Pytheas ... gives indirect evidence to their presence’.2019 To this view I hope he will firmly adhere. There is, indeed, no direct evidence that any Brythonic immigrants landed in Britain before the Belgae. But indirect evidence there is; and that of two kinds. The first has been already noticed in the section on the Picts. There are good grounds for believing that the authority whom Diodorus Siculus followed in his notices of Britain was Pytheas.2020 Diodorus speaks of the British Isles as Πρετ(τ)ανικαὶ νῆσοι;2021 and the P in Πρετ(τ)ανικαί (if that reading is certain), shows that Pytheas learned the word from lips which spoke a Brythonic, or Gaulish dialect. M. d’Arbois de Jubainville asserts that his informants were Gauls:2022 but that is simply his opinion; it is open to any one to argue that Pytheas probably learned the name of the Britons as well as the facts which he reported about them and their country in Britain, and not in Gaul. Be this, however, as it may, it is, as we shall presently see, certain that during the earlier period of the Roman occupation, the greater part of England and a considerable part of Scotland were inhabited by Brythons; and, as we shall also see, it is extremely improbable that they were all of Belgic origin. The question of the chronological order of the various Celtic invasions is, according to Professor Rhys,2023 answered by the present geographical distribution of the Celtic-speaking peoples of the British Isles: ‘it may be regarded,’ he says, ‘as fairly certain that those who are found driven furthest to the west were the earliest comers.’ The argument might be sound enough (though the word ‘driven’ begs the question) if we were considering the British Isles as a whole, and not merely Britain;2024 and even those who maintain that there were no people of Goidelic descent in Britain in the time of Caesar could hardly answer Professor Rhys unless they assumed that the Goidelic invaders of Ireland came from Spain, or that they dared not risk a contest with the Southern Britons; for otherwise it is hard to believe that they would not have directed their immigration towards Britain, the nearer country.

Professor Rhys, in his Celtic Britain,2025 endeavours to trace the distribution of the Brythonic and Goidelic peoples, as he believes it to have existed at the time of the coming of the Romans; and in so doing he uses materials on which he founds another argument to show that there were Goidels in Britain at that time. These materials are Goidelic inscriptions which have been found in North Wales, in Cornwall, and in Devonshire:2026 but not one of them belongs to an earlier date than the fifth century of our era. With the exception of the districts in which they occur, of the greater part of Somersetshire and Dorsetshire, of South Wales and the adjoining parts of England which lie between the Severn and the Teme, and of Cumberland, part of Westmorland, the Isle of Man, Dumfries, Kirkcudbright, Wigtown, Ayrshire, Renfrew, and part of Lanarkshire, the professor regards the whole of Britain south of the Firths of Clyde and Forth as Brythonic; and he prints a list of proper names, most of which are certainly Brythonic, in support of this conclusion.2027 The northern part of the island he divides, for reasons which have been already examined, between Goidels and aboriginal tribes, whom he identifies with the Picts properly so called.2028 It will, however, of course be understood that when he speaks of Goidelic and Brythonic tribes, he means tribes who spoke the Goidelic and Brythonic dialects. The former he regards as mingled largely with the aborigines, and the latter with both Goidels and aborigines. But it is difficult to understand how he has been able to maintain that the Dumnonii of Cornwall and Devonshire were Goidels in the face of the fact that most of the British emigrants who invaded Brittany came from the Cornish peninsula,2029 bringing the name Dumnonii with them, and that he himself formerly insisted that the Dumnonii who inhabited what is now Renfrew and Ayrshire were Brythons.2030 I say ‘formerly’, because this is one of the many opinions which the professor has felt obliged to discard: ‘the southern portion’ of the Scottish Dumnonii have just been transformed by a stroke of the pen into ‘Goidels who adopted Brythonic speech’.2031 However, as M. d’Arbois de Jubainville says, referring to the inscriptions upon which Professor Rhys relies, ‘To conclude from the fact that five Goidels were buried, during the period which elapsed from about 400 to about 700 A.D., in the territory of the Dumnonii, that the entire population of that territory was Goidelic seems extremely rash;’2032 and, he asks,2033 ‘if they were Goidels, how came it that they brought a Brythonic dialect into Brittany?’ Further, he asks why Professor Rhys maintains that the Novantae of Galloway were Goidels when he admits that the Trinovantes of Essex were Brythons;2034 and the only answer which the professor vouchsafes to this question is that the name Novantae was ‘given them probably by Brythons’.2035 What are the grounds of his opinion, he does not say. I may add that while he explains2036 that ‘the consonantal combination of cs or x’ is Gaulish, that is to say, Gallo-Brythonic, he says2037 that it is ‘remarkable’ that ‘most of the early names with x belong to districts which have before been pointed out as non-Brythonic’. When we look for these districts, we find2038 that they were those of the Taexali, the Vacomagi, the Scottish Dumnonii, the Selgovae, and Cumberland. When we ask on what grounds the inhabitants of these districts had been ‘pointed out as non-Brythonic’, we find2039 that the Taexali and the Vacomagi were Pictish, that is to say ‘no doubt’ aboriginal; that the Dumnonii, according to the professor himself,2040 were ‘undoubtedly Brythons’, and remained so until, discovering perhaps that he had inadvertently given his case away, he changed them by his enchanter’s wand into ‘Goidels who adopted Brythonic speech’;2041 and that the Selgovae are asserted to have been, like the Novantae, ‘in a great measure ... most likely a remnant of the aboriginial inhabitants.’2042 Why? Because they were afterwards included under the name Atecotti, which ‘appears to have meant old or ancient’, and was ‘possibly given to them by the Brythons’.2043 Doubtless they were ‘in a great measure’ aboriginal, as were doubtless all the British tribes; but seeing that Uxellon, the name of a town in their country, is Gaulish, the natural conclusion is that their Celtic masters were not Goidels but Brythons.

3. Professor Kuno Meyer holds that ‘no Gael ever set his foot on British soil save on a vessel that had put out from Ireland’;2044 and his words are echoed by Dr. Macbain.2045 Professor Meyer points out that ‘we have the concurrent testimony of Irish and Welsh tradition that from the second century of our era till the sixth a series of partial conquests of Britain took place’.2046 Dr. Beddoe2047 has indeed argued that it is extremely improbable that ‘the Romans would have allowed the Irish Gael to acquire by violence possession of a large portion of one of their provinces’; and Professor Meyer, who admits the difficulty, says that he will not attempt to explain it away. He might have noted that the author of the panegyric which was addressed A.D. 296 to Constantius Chlorus2048 expressly affirms that such invasions did take place. Professor Meyer also points out that the Gaelic inscriptions which have been found in Southern Britain belong almost exclusively to South Wales, the quarter to which the invasions may be assumed to have been directed, very few having come to light in North Wales, Devonshire, and Cornwall.2049 On the other hand, it will be admitted that the record of these invasions is no proof that Goidels had not settled in Britain in pre-Roman times.

4. M. d’Arbois de Jubainville holds, as we have already seen,2050 that Goidels, or rather a people who spoke ‘the Celtic dialect from which Goidelic was evolved’,2051 were masters of the British Isles in the time of Pytheas, and that between his time and that of Caesar Britain was conquered by the Cymric Brittones. So far he is substantially in agreement with the view which, until a recent date, commended itself to Professor Rhys,2052 who, as the reader knows, now believes that there were two successive Brythonic invasions.2053 The more important differences between the two scholars lie partly in their views, which have been already examined, of the Pictish question; partly in the fact that M. d’Arbois is unable to accept the evidence which satisfies Professor Rhys that in Caesar’s time and later Goidelic tribes still remained in Western and Northern Britain. He holds that many of them had been driven by the Belgae into Ireland, and that in Britain they only survived as a vanquished people who had been forced to adopt the language of their Gaulish conquerors.2054 I am inclined to believe, from the analogy of Gaul,2055 that in Caesar’s time Goidelic was still spoken in remoter parts of the island.

5. Mr. Nicholson has recently attempted to prove that all his predecessors are entirely mistaken even on the few points on which they are agreed. According to him, the earliest Celtic invaders of the British Isles were Brythons, whom, however, he prefers to call Kymri; after them came a horde of Goidels; in the third century before Christ the Picts, who were also Goidels, invaded Scotland; and finally came the Belgae, who were Goidels too! The result was that ‘apparently the great majority of the tribes inhabiting Roman Britain were Goidels’,2056 although ‘of the later Kymric recovery and victory in Wales and some other parts there is no manner of doubt’.2057 It will, at all events, be admitted that a victory, however late, gained by a small minority, was no mean achievement.

How does Mr. Nicholson set about proving this revolutionary theory? He tells us that ‘on the map of Roman Britain’ he can only see one ‘certainly Kymric geographical name’2058—Pennocrucium (now Penkridge) in Staffordshire. The long lists of Cymric names which have been drawn up by Professor Rhys, Dr. Whitley Stokes, M. d’Arbois de Jubainville, and Dr. Macbain do not move him at all. When he is confronted with geographical, tribal, or personal names belonging to Pictland—names such as Argentocoxos, Epidii, Gartnait, the Ochil Hills, and the prefixes aber and pet—he either ignores them or, as his opponents would say, explains them away.2059 Professor Rhys’s list2060 is disposed of with the same breezy self-confidence. Corstopiton, Epeiacon, (Mons) Graupius, Leucopibia, Maponi, Parisi, Petuaria, Prasutagos, Rutupiae, Toliapis,—these names are either left out of account or explained as Goidelic by the simple method of affirming or ‘suspecting’ that the p in each case is ‘Indo-European’.2061 The reader will form his own opinion if he can; only he will bear in mind that the weight of authority is all on one side. When doctors disagree, the patient must decide for himself which is the quack.

So much for the assertion that the Goidels, who, according to Professor Kuno Meyer and Dr. Macbain, were non-existent in Britain at the time when the Roman conquest began, formed then ‘the great majority’ of the population. What is the evidence for the theory that they came later than the Brythons?

There is no doubt that the Celts who first entered Gaul were Goidels2062 (assuming that Goidelic was then a distinct dialect2063), and that the latest Celtic invaders of Gaul as of Britain were Belgae.2064 If the Belgae had been Goidels, we should then have to admit that Gaul was invaded first by Goidels, then by ‘Cymri’, and finally by Goidels again. Is this likely? And is it not likely that if Goidels were the first Celts who invaded Gaul, they were also the first who invaded Britain?

Mr. Nicholson offers the following arguments in favour of his theory. Remarking that the Menapii were a Belgic tribe, he says2065 that ‘the Isle of Man(n) [which Caesar calls Mona] is called Monapia by Pliny (iv, 103)’; and that the Gaelic dialect which is spoken in the island is evidence that its inhabitants in Pliny’s time were Goidels.

Now I ask, first, is it certain that Pliny’s Monapia, rather than Caesar’s Mona, was the name by which the Isle of Man was known to its own inhabitants? Is it not probable that the name Monapia, which is, at all events presumably, Brythonic, came to Pliny from a Brythonic source?2066 Secondly, assuming that the names Monapia and Menapii are etymologically connected, does it necessarily follow that Monapia was a name peculiar to the Belgae, seeing that the tribal name Ceutrones occurs not only in Belgic Gaul but in the Alps?2067 Thirdly, is Mr. Nicholson prepared to prove that the Isle of Man was not colonized by Goidels after it had received the name Monapia from Brythons? Lastly, since Mr. Nicholson himself affirms2068 that although the name Aremorici is ‘certainly Kymric’, it nevertheless ‘is no proof that the Aremoricans were Kymric’, why does he insist that the fact, if it is a fact, that Monapia was Goidelic proves that the Belgae were Goidels?

Again, he says that the Parisi, who lived near the mouth of the Humber, were Belgae,2069 and he believes that ‘their name preserves Indo-European p’.2070 But Caesar did not include the Gallic Parisii among the Belgae, and did include them among the Celtae.2071 Mr. Nicholson’s belief, that the p in their name is Indo-European, is not shared by any other Celtic scholar.

Thirdly, he argues that the Atrebates, who were certainly Belgae, were Goidels; for, he says,2072 ‘With one exception, no ogam-inscription has ever been found in these isles outside territory which is known to have been once in Goidelic occupation. The single exception is that of the stone found at Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester).’ But, according to Mr. Nicholson himself, ‘the great majority’ of the British tribes were Goidelic: yet in only a small minority of their territories are ogam inscriptions forthcoming; and that minority, with the possible exception of the Atrebates, is in the west of England. What then is proved by the solitary inscription at Silchester? The individual who erected it was doubtless a Goidel:2073 but if it is to be regarded as a proof that the Atrebates were Goidels, then the existence of synagogues in Great Britain proves the truth of that widespread delusion which Professor Tylor2074 has described as ‘abject nonsense’,—the ‘Anglo-Israel theory’.2075

Fourthly, Mr. Nicholson remarks2076 that between the Parisi and the Iceni, the name of whose king, Prasutagus,2077 he regards ‘as containing Ind.-Eur. p’, while all other Celtic scholars regard it as Brythonic, dwelled the Coritani.2078 ‘From their position on the coast,’ he says, ‘they should belong to the same Picto-Belgic family, and I submit that their name is simply Qṛtanoi, Cruitni.’ In other words, Mr. Nicholson submits that a single tribe, which he assumes to have been Belgic, called itself by the same name which, on his own showing,2079 had been given to the entire population of Great Britain2080 long before the Belgae set foot in the land!

6. I have set down the gist of the linguistic evidence which has been offered in support of the various theories about the Goidels and the Brythons in order that the reader may be able to form an independent judgement about its value. It goes without saying that on any particular question of Celtic etymology no opinion except that of a competent Celtic scholar is worth listening to: on most of the questions that concern us competent Celtic scholars differ widely among themselves: Professor Rhys differs from himself; and Mr. Nicholson, whose competence I neither affirm nor deny, differs from everybody. Even the lay reader who has studied the writings of Dr. Windisch, of Professor Rhys, of Dr. Whitley Stokes, of Dr. Macbain, of Mr. Nicholson, and of M. d’Arbois de Jubainville, and who has made much use of Alfred Holder’s Alt-celtischer Sprachschatz cannot but see how few of the etymologies that relate to ethnology are to be accepted as certain. It would of course be absurd to sneer at the services which philology has rendered to ethnology and history; nevertheless the fact remains that on almost all the fundamental questions of Celtic ethnology the philologists agree to differ. And, at the risk of appearing flippant, I cannot help saying that when I read some of Mr. Nicholson’s pages, when I see how M. Salomon Reinach demonstrates, with the approval of M. d’Arbois de Jubainville and of Professor Rhys, who for once find themselves in agreement, that κασσίτερος, the Greek word for tin, must be of Celtic derivation because the root cassi- is found in numerous Celtic names,2081 I ask myself whether some future philologist will not adduce the similarity between Tamesis and Tamesi, the name of a Mexican river, as a proof that the Celts once colonized Central America; whether he will not compare the name of Admiral Togo with that of the British prince, Togo-dumnos, and prove that ‘the Japanese Nelson’ was of Celtic extraction.2082

7. Caesar, in a familiar passage, states that ‘the maritime districts [of Britain are inhabited] by people who crossed over from Belgium to plunder and attack [the aborigines], almost all of them being called after the tribes from whom the invaders were an offshoot’.2083 It is, however, impossible to define the limits of the region which, in Caesar’s time and during the period that elapsed between the date of his departure and that of the Claudian conquest, was occupied by the Belgae. The only tribal names that indicate their presence are those of the Catuvellauni,2084 who, about the commencement of the Christian era, occupied a territory of uncertain area round Verulamium, or St. Albans, which included Hertfordshire, Middlesex, and probably parts of Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Northamptonshire; the Atrebates, who possessed parts of Hampshire and Berkshire; and the Belgae, whose chief towns, according to Ptolemy,2085 were Aquae Calidae, or Bath, and Venta, or Winchester.2086 Caesar’s words would certainly lead us to believe that the Cantii, the Trinovantes, and the Regni were also Belgic peoples, although their names do not occur in the list of the Belgic tribes of Gaul.2087 Professor Rhys indeed affirmed in the second edition of Celtic Britain2088 that ‘there is no evidence that the Cantii ... should be considered Belgic’; and this statement is repeated in the edition which has recently been published: one feels therefore that the evolution of the professor’s views is quite normal when one reads in an intermediate volume, published two years ago,2089 that the earliest Belgic invaders of Britain were probably the Brittani,2090 and that the Brittani were probably the Cantii.

8. Finally, Dr. Macalister regards certain skeletons which have been found in the War Ditches of Cambridgeshire below layers that contained traces of late Roman occupation as Anglian2091; and it may be that they testify to a pre-Roman immigration from Northern Germany.

X. CONCLUSION

For the sake of clearness I shall summarize the results which this inquiry has attained. No human remains, except those of Bury St. Edmunds and Cattedown, which can be certainly attributed to the Quaternary Period have been found in Britain; but it is probable that the earlier inhabitants belonged in part to the Neanderthal stock, and that towards the close of the Palaeolithic Age they were joined by immigrants akin to the Chancelade people of the Lozère valley. There is no conclusive evidence that the earliest neolithic invaders found this island inhabited; but it has not been demonstrated that even here there was a ‘hiatus’ between the Old and the New Stone Age. The source of the first neolithic influx was probably in France, in the southern parts of which at all events the latest palaeolithic and the earliest neolithic inhabitants were akin. The neolithic invaders who built the long barrows of Southern Britain and the chambered cairns of Scotland, and many of whom built round barrows also, were a branch of the ‘Mediterranean’ race, and likewise came from France, perhaps in some cases originally from the Spanish peninsula; but if they are to be called ‘Iberian’ the term must be regarded as conventional. There is no evidence that they were related more nearly to the Basques than to some other branch of the Mediterranean stock.2092 They certainly spoke a non-Aryan language; and so probably did the earlier brachycephalic invaders, of whom the first comers landed in Britain before the end of the Neolithic Age. These invaders—the principal builders of the round barrows and the short cists—continued to arrive in successive hordes during the earlier part of the Bronze Age, some probably from Gaul, some from the Low Countries and the valley of the Rhine, and others, who settled in Yorkshire and Northumberland and perhaps in Derbyshire, from Denmark or Danish islands and possibly also from the Scandinavian peninsula. The brachycephalic Round Barrow skulls fall under two different types. Some resemble those of the French Grenelle race—in other words, the so-called Alpine race of Central Europe—and, like them, belonged to individuals of low stature; although the general superiority of the Bronze Age Britons in this respect is so great as to preclude the supposition that men of the pure Grenelle type invaded Britain in considerable numbers: others illustrate the rugged and, in some cases, almost brutal type which Thurnam and Rolleston have so forcibly described; and some of those of Yorkshire, especially Rudstone, and Northumberland exhibit these characteristics in such a degree that they may almost be grouped apart. The majority would seem to show that people of the two types intermarried, as they certainly did with the dolichocephalic neolithic population. The first Celtic invaders were Goidels, who certainly reached Ireland in the Bronze Age, and who may be supposed to have settled in Britain also before the time of Pytheas. The first Brythonic immigrants probably inaugurated the Iron Age in this country, and began to arrive a short time before the visit of Pytheas. They were succeeded by the Belgae, who, like them, came in successive hordes, the first probably in the third century before Christ. The Belgae and the other Brythons spread over the greater part of Southern Britain and many parts of Scotland. Both they and the Goidels were doubtless mixed with people of the ‘Iberian’ and Grenelle races with whom they had intermarried before they left the Continent; but the purer representatives of the two Celtic stocks—the descendants of the invaders who had introduced the Celtic languages into Gaul and of their continental kinsmen—belonged to a type different from both of the Round Barrow types, being not only tall and generally fair but dolichocephalic or mesaticephalic. A people characterized by dolichocephaly and low stature, who apparently were not descended from the Long Barrow race, but whose affinities are doubtful, were settled in the Early Iron Age in East Yorkshire, and, it would seem, nowhere else in Britain. The Picts of Romano-British history were a medley of tribes, among whom Celts were, as everywhere, predominant, but who probably included a greater proportion of the descendants of the neolithic and other pre-Aryan peoples than any other British group. It is possible that in the remoter parts of Pictland a non-Aryan dialect was still spoken when the Romans invaded Britain; but the pre-Aryan Picts as a whole had been Celticized, and the Celtic language had prevailed, although it had been largely modified by the speech with which it had come in contact. Everywhere in Britain the pre-Roman stocks have, in greater or less proportions, survived.2093 Few Englishmen, Welshmen, or Scotsmen, if their pedigrees could be traced back far enough, would not be found to count among their ancestors men of the type who were buried in long barrows, sturdy warriors of the Bronze Age, and Celts who fought against Caesar or were subdued by Agricola.

The study of ethnology is as fascinating to its votaries, partly by reason of its very difficulty, as the attempt to determine the distances of the less remote stars must have been to Bessel, Henderson, and Struve; but I can sympathize with those to whom, in both cases, the quest of knowledge for its own sake appears equally unprofitable. They may well ask the ethnologist why he does not proceed to deduce from what he knows conclusions that would interest all students of history and of human nature. ‘There are few fields,’ says Professor Bury,2094 ‘where more work is to be done or where labourers are more needed than the Celtic civilisations of Western Europe. In tracing from its origins the course of western history in the Middle Ages, we are pulled up on the threshold by the uncertainties and obscurities which brood over the Celtic world. 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’? That is as complex as the problem, which theoretically may not be insoluble, of forecasting remote meteorological as accurately as astronomical phenomena; and its solution is more hopeless still. We want to know what contributions the various British races which we have identified made to the formation of the British character, which is so obviously different from that of any other nation, and which is, so to speak, the generalized manifestation of the characters of the English, Scottish, and Welsh peoples, and, descending the scale, of the characters of the inhabitants of every district, and finally of every man.2095 Again, we want to trace the manifold sources from which the ‘Celtic’ character, with the idiosyncrasies of which we are all more or less familiar, is derived. But the Celtic character is not everywhere the same. Study it in Wales, in Man, in the Scottish Highlands, in Ireland, in Cornwall, in France, and you will find that while it is Celtic everywhere, everywhere it is different;2096 that everywhere it has become what it is because it is compounded, in different degrees, not only of Celtic, not only of pre-Celtic and pre-Aryan, but also of post-Celtic elements. And all these elements have been modified and moulded by different geographical and climatic influences and by adventitious circumstances too numerous to be particularized and too elusive to be estimated.2097 Those who know Ireland well have observed that the character of Anglo-Irishmen, whose blood is neither more nor less Celtic than that of many Englishmen, has acquired a quasi-Irish tinge, which is discernible in their children even when they have been born and bred in England; and this sets us thinking, though we think in vain. We all know the passage in which Mommsen compares the Gauls to the modern Irish: the ethnologist knows enough to see that it is as misleading as it is brilliant; but he knows too little to attempt to rewrite it. Anthropologically speaking, the Gauls (I use the word in its most comprehensive sense) were very different from the modern and indeed from the ancient Irish; and if Mommsen’s analogy were more than superficial, we should be forced to conclude that the character of the Gauls, as it is revealed in ancient writings, was that of the dominant Celts, perhaps mostly Gallo-Brythonic, alone; and that the character of the Irish is simply that of Celts, mostly Goidelic, who were once but have long ceased to be dominant. 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?