Early Britain-Roman Britain Part 1

Early Britain--Roman Britain.

by Edward Conybeare.

PREFACE

A little book on a great subject, especially when that book is one of a "series," is notoriously an object of literary distrust. For the limitations thus imposed upon the writer are such as few men can satisfactorily cope with, and he must needs ask the indulgence of his readers for his painfully-felt shortcomings in dealing with the ma.s.s of material which he has to manipulate. And more especially is this the case when the volume which immediately precedes his in the series is such a mine of erudition as the 'Celtic Britain' of Professor Rhys.

In the present work my object has been to give a readable sketch of the historical growth and decay of Roman influence in Britain, ill.u.s.trated by the archaeology of the period, rather than a mainly archaeological treatise with a bare outline of the history. The chief authorities of which I have made use are thus those original cla.s.sical sources for the early history of our island, so carefully and ably collected in the 'Monumenta Historica Britannica';[1] which, along with Huebner's 'Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum[2],' must always be the foundation of every work on Roman Britain. Amongst the many other authorities consulted I must acknowledge my special debt to Mr.

Elton's 'Origins of English History'; and yet more to Mr. Haverfield's invaluable publications in the 'Antiquary' and elsewhere, without which to keep abreast of the incessant development of my subject by the antiquarian spade-work now going on all over the land would be an almost hopeless task.

EDWARD CONYBEARE.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A complete Bibliography of Roman Britain would be wholly beyond the scope of the present work. Much of the most valuable material, indeed, has never been published in book form, and must be sought out in the articles of the 'Antiquary,' 'Hermes,' etc., and the reports of the many local Archaeological Societies. All that is here attempted is to indicate some of the more valuable of the many scores of sources to which my pages are indebted.

To begin with the ancient authorities. These range through upwards of a thousand years; from Herodotus in the 5th century before Christ, to Gildas in the 6th century after. From about 100 A.D. onwards we find that almost every known cla.s.sical authority makes more or less mention of Britain. A list of over a hundred such authors is given in the 'Monumenta Historica Britannica'; and upwards of fifty are quoted in this present work. Historians, poets, geographers, naturalists, statesmen, ecclesiastics, all give touches which help out our delineation of Roman Britain.

Amongst the historians the most important are--Caesar, who tells his own tale; Tacitus, to whom we owe our main knowledge of the Conquest, with the later stages of which he was contemporary; Dion Ca.s.sius, who wrote his history in the next century, the 2nd A.D.;[3] the various Imperial biographers of the 3rd century; the Imperial panegyrists of the 4th, along with Ammia.n.u.s Marcellinus, who towards the close of that century connects and supplements their stories; Claudian, the poet-historian of the 5th century, whose verses throw a lurid gleam on his own disastrous age, when Roman authority in Britain was at its last gasp; and finally the British writers, Nennius and Gildas, whose "monotonous plaint" shows that authority dead and gone, with the first stirring of our new national life already quickening amid the decay.

Of geographical and general information we gain most from Strabo, in the Augustan age, who tells what earlier and greater geographers than himself had already discovered about our island; Pliny the Elder, who, in the next century, found the ethnology and botany of Britain so valuable for his 'Natural History'; Ptolemy, a generation later yet, who includes an elaborate survey of our island in his stupendous Atlas (as it would now be called) of the world;[4] and the unknown compilers of the 'Itinerary,' the 'Not.i.tia,' and the 'Ravenna Geography.' To these must be added the epigrammatist Martial, who lived at the time of the Conquest, and whose references to British matters throw a precious light on the social connection between Britain and Rome which aids us to trace something of the earliest dawn of Christianity in our land.[5]

ROMAN BRITAIN

CHAPTER I

PRE-ROMAN BRITAIN

SECTION A.

Palaeolithic Age--Extinct fauna--River-bed men--Flint implements--Burnt stones--Worked bones--Glacial climate.

A. 1.--All history, as Professor Freeman so well points out, centres round the great name of Rome. For, of all the great divisions of the human race, it is the Aryan family which has come to the front.

a.s.similating, developing, and giving vastly wider scope to the highest forms of thought and religion originated by other families, notably the Semitic, the various Aryan nationalities form, and have formed for ages, the vanguard of civilization. These nationalities are now practically co-extensive with Christendom; and on them has been laid by Divine Providence "the white man's burden"--the task of raising the rest of mankind along with themselves to an ever higher level--social, material, intellectual, and spiritual.

A. 2.--Aryan history is thus, for all practical purposes, the history of mankind. And a mere glance at Aryan history shows how entirely its great central feature is the period during which all the leading forces of Aryanism were grouped and fused together under the world-wide Empire of Rome. In that Empire all the streams of our Ancient History find their end, and from that Empire all those of Modern History take their beginning. "All roads," says the proverb, "lead to Rome;" and this is emphatically true of the lines of historical research; for as we tread them we are conscious at every step of the _Romani Nominis umbra_, the all-pervading influence of "the mighty name of Rome."

A. 3.--And above all is this true of the history of Western Europe in general and of our own island in particular. For Britain, History (meaning thereby the more or less trustworthy record of political and social development) does not even begin till its destinies were drawn within the sphere of Roman influence. It is with Julius Caesar, that great writer (and yet greater maker) of History, that, for us, this record commences.

A. 4.--But before dealing with "Britain's tale" as connected with "Caesar's fate," it will be well to note briefly what earlier information ancient doc.u.ments and remains can afford us with regard to our island and its inhabitants. With the earliest dwellers upon its soil of whom traces remain we are, indeed, scarcely concerned. For in the far-off days of the "River-bed" men (five thousand or five hundred thousand years ago, according as we accept the physicist's or the geologist's estimate of the age of our planet) Britain was not yet an island. Neither the Channel nor the North Sea as yet cut it off from the Continent when those primaeval savages herded beside the banks of its streams, along with elephant and hippopotamus, bison and elk, bear and hyaena; amid whose remains we find their roughly-chipped flint axes and arrow-heads, the fire-marked stones which they used in boiling their water, and the sawn or broken bases of the antlers which for some unknown purpose[6] they were in the habit of cutting up--perhaps, like the Lapps of to-day, to anchor their sledges withal in the snow. For the great Glacial Epoch, which had covered half the Northern Hemisphere with its mighty ice-sheet, was still, in their day, lingering on, and their environment was probably that of Northern Siberia to-day. Some archaeologists, indeed, hold that they are to this day represented by the Esquimaux races; but this theory cannot be considered in any way proved.

A. 5.--Whether, indeed, they were "men" at all, in any real sense of the word, may well be questioned. For of the many attempts which philosophers in all ages have made to define the word "man," the only one which is truly defensible is that which differentiates him from other animals, not by his physical or intellectual, but by his spiritual superiority. Many other creatures are as well adapted in bodily conformation for their environment, and the lowest savages are intellectually at a far lower level of development than the highest insects; but none stand in the same relation to the Unseen. "Man," as has been well said, "is the one animal that can pray." And there is nothing amongst the remains of these "river-bed men" to show us that they either did pray, or could. Intelligence, such as is now found only in human beings, they undoubtedly had. But whether they had the capacity for Religion must be left an unsolved problem. In this connection, however, it may be noted that Tacitus, in describing the lowest savages of his Germania [c. 46], "with no horses, no homes, no weapons, skin-clad, nesting on the bare ground, men and women alike, barely kept alive by herbs and such flesh as their bone-tipped arrows can win them," makes it his climax that they are "beneath the need of prayer;"--adding that this spiritual condition is, "beyond all others, that least attainable by man."

SECTION B.

Neolithic Age--"Ugrians"--Polished flints--Jadite--Gold ornaments--Cromlechs--Forts--Bronze Age--Copper and tin--Stonehenge.

B. 1.--Whatever they were, they vanish from our ken utterly, these Palaeolithic savages, and are followed, after what lapse of time we know not, by the users of polished flint weapons, the tribes of the Neolithic period. And with them we find ourselves in touch with the existing development of our island. For an island it already was, and with substantially the same area and sh.o.r.es and physical features as we have them still. Our rivers ran in the same valleys, our hills rose with the same contour, in those far-off days as now. And while the place of flint in the armoury of Britain was taken first by bronze and then by iron, these changes were made by no sudden breaks, but so gradually that it is impossible to say when one period ended and the next began.

B.2.--It is almost certain, however, that the Neolithic men were not of Aryan blood. They are commonly spoken of by the name of _Ugrians_,[7] the "ogres"[8] of our folk-lore; which has also handed down, in the spiteful Brownie of the wood and the crafty Pixie of the cavern, dimly-remembered traditions of their physical and mental characteristics. Indeed it is not impossible that their blood may still be found in the remoter corners of our land, whither they were pushed back by the higher civilization of the Aryan invaders, before whom they disappeared by a process in which "miscegenation" may well have played no small part. But disappear they did, leaving behind them no more traces than their flint arrow-heads and axes (a few of these being of jadite, which must have come from China or thereabouts), together with their oblong sepulchral barrows, from some of which the earth has weathered away, so that the ma.s.sive stones imbedded in it as the last home of the deceased stand exposed as a "dolmen" or "cromlech." But an appreciable number of the earthworks which stud our hill-tops, and are popularly called "Roman" or "British" camps, really belong to this older race. Such are "Cony Castle" in Dorset, and the fortifications along the Axe in Devon.

B. 3.--During the neolithic stage of their development the Ugrians were acquainted with but one metal, gold, and some of their stone weapons and implements are thus ornamented. For gold, being at once the most beautiful, the most incorruptible, the most easily recognizable, and the most easily worked of metals, is everywhere found as used by man long before any other. But before the Ugrian races vanish they had learnt to use bronze, which shows them to have discovered the properties not only of gold, but of both tin and copper. All three metals were doubtless obtained from the streams of the West. They had also become proficients, as their sepulchral urns show, in the manufacture of pottery. They could weave, moreover, both linen and woollen being known, and had pa.s.sed far beyond the mere savage.

B. 4.--The race, indeed, which could erect Avebury and Stonehenge, as we may safely say was done by this people,[9] must have possessed engineering skill of a very high order, and no little accuracy of astronomical observation. For the mighty "Sa.r.s.en" stones have all been brought from a distance,[10] and the whole vast circles are built on a definite astronomical plan; while so careful is the orientation that, at the summer solstice, the disc of the rising sun, as seen from the "altar" of Stonehenge, appears to be poised exactly on the summit of one of the chief megaliths (now known as "The Friar's Heel"). From this it would seem that the builders were Sun-wors.h.i.+ppers; and amongst the earliest reports of Britain current in the Greek world we find the fame of the "great round temple" dedicated to Apollo. But no Latin author mentions it; so that it is doubtful whether it was ever used by the Aryan, or at least by the Brythonic, immigrants. These brought their own wors.h.i.+p and their own civilization with them, and all that was highest in Ugrian civilization and wors.h.i.+p faded before them, such Ugrians as remained having degenerated to a far lower level when first we meet with them in history.

SECTION C.

Aryan immigrants--Gael and Briton--Earliest cla.s.sical nomenclature--British Isles--Albion--Ierne--Ca.s.siterides--Phoenician tin trade _via_ Cadiz.

C. 1.--How or when the first swarms of the Aryan migration reached Britain is quite unknown.[11] But they undoubtedly belonged to the Celtic branch of that family, and to the Gaelic (Gadhelic or Goidelic) section of the branch, which still holds the Highlands of Scotland and forms the bulk of the population of Ireland. By the 4th century B.C. this section was already beginning to be pressed northwards and westwards by the kindred Britons (or Brythons) who followed on their heels; for Aristotle (or a disciple of his) knows our islands as "the Britannic[12] Isles." That the Britons were in his day but new comers may be argued from the fact that he speaks of Great Britain by the name of _Albion_, a Gaelic designation subsequently driven northwards along with those who used it. In its later form _Albyn_ it long remained as loosely equivalent to North Britain, and as _Albany_ it still survives in a like connection. Ireland Aristotle calls _Ierne_, the later Ivernia or Hibernia; a word also found in the Argonautic poems ascribed to the mythical Orpheus, and composed probably by Onomacritus about 350 B.C., wherein the Argo is warned against approaching "the Iernian islands, the home of dark and noisome mischief." This is the pa.s.sage familiar to the readers of Kingsley's 'Heroes.'[13]

C. 2.--Aristotle's work does no more than mention our islands, as being, like Ceylon, not pelagic, but oceanic. To early cla.s.sical antiquity, it must be remembered, the Ocean was no mere sea, but a vast and mysterious river encircling the whole land surface of the earth. Its mighty waves, its tides, its furious currents, all made it an object of superst.i.tious horror. To embark upon it was the height of presumption; and even so late as the time of Claudius we shall find the Roman soldiers feeling that to do so, even for the pa.s.sage of the Channel, was "to leave the habitable world."

C. 3.--But while the ancients dreaded the Ocean, they knew also that its islands alone were the source of one of the most precious and rarest of their metals. Before iron came into general use (and the difficulty of smelting it has everywhere made it the last metal to do so), tin had a value all its own. It was the only known substance capable of making, along with copper, an alloy hard enough for cutting purposes--the "bronze" which has given its name to one entire Age of human development. It was thus all but a necessary of life, and was eagerly sought for as amongst the choicest objects of traffic.

C. 4.--The Phoenicians, the merchant princes of the dawn of history, succeeded, with true mercantile instinct, in securing a monopoly of this trade, by being the first to make their way to the only spots in the world where tin is found native, the Malay region in the East, Northern Spain and Cornwall in the West. That tin was known amongst the Greeks by its Sanscrit name _Kastira_[14] ([Greek: ka.s.siteros]) shows that the Eastern source was the earliest to be tapped. But the Western was that whence the supply flowed throughout the whole of the cla.s.sical ages; and, as the stream-tin of the Asturian mountains seems to have been early exhausted, the name _Ca.s.siterides_, the Tin Lands, came to signify exclusively the western peninsula of Britain.

Herodotus, in the 5th century B.C., knew this name, but, as he frankly confesses, nothing but the name.[15] For the whereabouts of this El Dorado, and the way to it, was a trade secret most carefully kept by the Phoenician merchants of Cadiz, who alone held the clue. So jealous were they of it that long afterwards, when the alternative route through Gaul had already drawn away much of its profitableness, we read of a Phoenician captain purposely wrecking his s.h.i.+p lest a Roman vessel in sight should follow to the port, and being indemnified by the state for his loss.

SECTION D.

Discoveries of Pytheas--Greek tin trade _via_ Ma.r.s.eilles--Trade routes--Ingots--Coracles--Earliest British coins--Lead-mining.

D. 1.--But contemporary with Aristotle lived the great geographer Pytheas; whose works, unfortunately, we know only by the fragmentary references to them in later, and frequently hostile, authors, such as Strabo, who dwell largely on his mistakes, and charge him with misrepresentation. In fact, however, he seems to have been both an accurate and truthful observer, and a discoverer of the very first order. Starting from his native city Ma.s.silia (Ma.r.s.eilles), he pa.s.sed through the Straits of Gibraltar and traced the coast-line of Europe to Denmark (visiting Britain on his way), and perhaps even on into the Baltic.[16] The sh.o.r.e of Norway (which he called, as the natives still call it, Norge) he followed till within the Arctic Circle, as his mention of the midnight sun shows, and then struck across to Scotland; returning, apparently by the Irish Sea, to Bordeaux and so home overland. This truly wonderful voyage he made at the public charge, with a view to opening new trade routes, and it seems to have thoroughly answered its purpose. Henceforward the Phoenician monopoly was broken, and a constant stream of traffic in the precious tin pa.s.sed between Britain and Ma.r.s.eilles.[17]

D. 2.--The route was kept as secret as possible; Polybius tells us that the Ma.s.siliots, when interrogated by one of the Scipios, professed entire ignorance of Britain; but Pytheas (as quoted by his contemporary Timaeus, as well as by later writers) states that the metal was brought by coasters to a tidal island, _Ictis_, whence it was s.h.i.+pped for Gaul. This island was six days' sail from the tin diggings, and can scarcely be any but Thanet. St. Michael's Mount, now the only tidal island on the south coast, was anciently part of the mainland; a fact testified to by the forest remains still seen around it. Nor could it be six days' sail from the tin mines. The Isle of Wight, again, to which the name Ictis or Vectis would seem to point, can never have been tidal at this date. But Thanet undoubtedly was so in mediaeval times, and may well have been so for ages, while its nearness to the Continent would recommend it to the Gallic merchants.

Indeed Pytheas himself probably selected it on this account for his new emporium.

D. 3.--In his day, as we have seen, the tin reached this destination by sea; but in the time of the later traveller Posidonius[18] it came in wagons, probably by that track along the North Downs now known as the "Pilgrims' Way." The chalk furnished a dry and open road, much easier than the swamps and forests of the lower ground. Further west the route seems to have been _via_ Launceston, Exeter, Honiton, Ilchester, Salisbury, Winchester, and Alton; an ancient track often traceable, and to be seen almost in its original condition near "Alfred's Tower," in Somerset, where it is known as "The Hardway."

And this long land transit argues a considerable degree of political solidarity throughout the south of the island. The tale of Posidonius is confirmed by Caesar's statement that tin reached Kent "from the interior," _i.e._ by land. It was obtained at first from the streams of Dartmoor and Cornwall, where abundant traces of ancient was.h.i.+ngs are visible, and afterwards by mining, as now. And when smelted it was made up into those peculiar ingots which still meet the eye in Cornwall, and whose shape seems never to have varied from the earliest times. Posidonius, who visited Cornwall, compares them to knuckle-bones[19] [Greek: astrhagaloi]

D. 4.--The vessels which thus coasted from the Land's End to the South Foreland are described as on the pattern of coracles, a very light frame-work covered with hides. It seems almost incredible that sea-going craft could have been thus constructed; yet not only is there overwhelming testimony to the fact throughout the whole history of Roman Britain, but such boats are still in use on the wild rollers which beat upon the west coast of Ireland, and are found able to live in seas which would be fatal to anything more rigidly built. For the surf boats in use at Madras a similar principle is adopted, not a nail entering into their construction. They can thus face breakers which would crush an ordinary boat to pieces. This method of s.h.i.+p-building was common all along the northern coast of Europe for ages.[20] Nor were these coracles only used for coasting. As time went on, the Britons boldly struck straight across from Cornwall to the Continent, and both the Seine and the Loire became inlets for tin into Gaul, thus lessening the long land journey--not less than thirty days--which was required, as Polybius tells us, to convey it from the Straits of Dover to the Rhone. (This journey, it may be noted, was made not in wagons, as through Britain, but on pack-horses.)

D. 5.--Thus it reached Ma.r.s.eilles; and that the trade was founded by the Ma.s.siliot Pytheas is borne testimony to by the early British coins, which are all modelled on the cla.s.sical currency of his age.