HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

BOOK I.

THE CELTIC OCCUPATION.

FROM DATE UNKNOWN TO A.D. 43.

§ 1. The Celtic race. Ancient Britons.-§ 2. Geography of the country. Language of the people. The early Gaels.-§ 3. Pursuits of the inhabitants. Their traffic and intercourse with foreigners.-§ 4. The Roman invasion. Resistance offered by the Britons.-§ 5. The island comparatively unknown.-§ 6. First dawnings of civilization and art. 7. The Druids, or priests. Religious assemblies of the people. Nature of the religion, and its ceremonies. Sacrifice of human victims. Form of the temples. Altars, cromlechs, and barrows. The Druids opposed to the growth of towns and the progress of agriculture. § 8. Roman invasion by Claudius, and final occupation of the island.

§ 1. In walking through our own neighbourhoods we very often see the remains of a castle crowning a hill, or the marks of a ditch now nearly filled up to the level of the field; a crumbling old wall salutes us at the side of the river, and on the top of the down a mound of peculiar shape rises up in its solitude of furze and heather. Generally we pass them by without any particular observation; the castle is an old ruin, the ditch an indentation in the soil, the crumbling old wall is a fence between two fields, and the mound upon the down is a sugar-loaf sort of heap, composed of earth and pebbles. Is that all? have we no curiosity to find out who placed them there? what sort of people lived in the castle? what was the

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use of the gaping ditch? who occupied the building at the winding of the stream? and what sort of thing is the heap on the top of the down? There are few parishes in England which have not specimens of one or other of those memorials of a vanished age. There is not a single village within a circuit of ten miles, which has not some tangible and uninistakeable proof of what are called the successive occupations of the country. The Celt, the Roman, the Saxon, the Norman, and finally, the whole of these combined, have left indelible evidence that they were working, thinking, loving, and hating personages, just like ourselves. Those marks of their residence here carry us back an almost indefinite time in the history of mankind. When the Grecians were overthrowing the Persian monarchy, more than two thousand years ago, funeral processions were going on up the sides of our hills, and great chieftains were buried with stone axes by their sides, and all the pomp and circumstance of glorious war. But long before that, while Moses, perhaps, was leading the children of Israel to the promised land, it is supposed that a race and people, now utterly undistinguishable, held possession of this island. A wretched race and miserable island; for the arts were so unknown that they left no more mark of their presence than a herd of wild cattle would have done, and all that remains to give a colour to the supposition of so very early an occupancy, is the name, here and there, of some river or hill, which is not British, nor Roman, nor Saxon, and is therefore considered to have formed part of a language totally different from them all. Hills and rivers, though not the works of men's hands, are as good guides to a knowledge of our predecessors as the walls and ditches we have named. It is the use man makes of those two great natural features of a country which enables us to judge of his manners and position. If we find the elevation cleared of wood, and the river kept within its banks, we may conclude that agriculture and pasturage have begun. These two imply a knowledge of the

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FIRST OCCUPANTS.

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rights of property, for no one would begin to improve and cultivate what did not belong to him, and a knowledge of the rights of property implies all the rest-security of life, and the supremacy of law.

§ 2. It will be seen from this that it is necessary to bear in mind the geography of a country in order to understand its people. Fancy pictures have been drawn of the antehistoric appearance of what is now the best cultivated and most beautiful land in Europe; but there is no use in appealing to the fancy. We have only to turn to the books of travel of every day, and we see ourselves reflected in the savages, who excite alternately the fear and the pity of their visitors. In the same way as "'tis always morning somewhere in the world," there is always existent on some part or other of the earth's surface a population representing the degrees of civilization through which we have passed. The inhabitants of Terra del Fuego, on the shores of the Straits of Magellan, may enable us to see our predecessors as they probably would have been found in the period of the original settlement. "Their very attitudes were abject," says a recent traveller, "and the expression of their countenances distrustful, surprised, and startled. The language of these people, according to our notions, scarcely deserves to be called articulate. Captain Cook has compared it to a man clearing his throat, but certainly no European ever cleared his throat with so many hoarse, guttural, and clicking sounds." The early Gaels who succeeded those shadowy populations were, perhaps, in the state of advancement attained by the Caffres and Hottentots of the Cape at the present time. For a parallel to the Saxon principalities, with uneasy submission to a central power, we must look to some of the half-formed territories and states belonging to the American Union; and an exact reproduction of the Normanfeudal period is shown to us in the military and territorial

organization of Oude, with turbulent nobles and a debased and dependent peasantry. Whatever point, therefore, we reach in these sketches of our own land and people, we may rest assured that there is some living exemplification of it at this very day; that we who, with other nations, lead the van in the march of improvement, are only at the head of an unnumbered array of all climes and kindreds who follow closely in our steps; and that the ground we now occupy with a feeling of gratification at the progress we have made, will hereafter be occupied by the rearmost rank of our still advancing army, till knowledge, arts, and religion, the nurse and conservator of them all, shall be as universally diffused as the sunlight or the air.

§3. The soft breezes of the Atlantic encouraged the vegetation of the early woods till the whole land was shadowed over with a covering of trees. Sole obstacle to the universal spread of foliage were the immense tracts of lakes and marshy land formed by the overflow of the untended rivers. North and south, and east and west, were equally given up to the rude energies of teeming soil and moderate temperature; and for ages of uncounted length the sun rose and the moon shone down in beauty on a land where no human sound was heard, and where only the waving of the forest replied to the roaring of the river and the stormy waves on the sea-shore. Some day when the waves were calm, a fleet of boats must have sailed or paddled into a sheltered haven, and the Gaels leapt forth upon the soil. Chased by some domestic commotion from the opposite coast, where their countrymen had for some time been established, the new settlers must have brought with them their wives and children, the leaders of their tribe, and the arms which were necessary to defend them from attack. They must also have brought over cattle, and the precious metals, and some knowledge of agriculture and of the mechanical arts from their ancient seats; for we find, when their authentic history begins in the pages of Julius

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JULIUS CAESAR.

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Cæsar, that they had among them warlike, enterprising, commercial and political populations, with scythed chariots of great ingenuity and power; with an established religion and a patriotic love of their native country, which could only spring from an appreciation of the blessings they enjoyed. Intercourse was kept up with the tribes they had left behind by a constant commerce and the community of their faith; for the products of England were sent over in strong, though small-sized vessels, to all the Atlantic and Channel coasts of Gaul, and Gaul in return sent its youth to study science and religion under the Druids or priesthood of the favoured isle.

How long this state of affairs had lasted, or how long it might have continued, no man can venture to guess; but an incident occurred in the year 56 before Christ, which lifted the partition veil between this island and the civilized portions of the world, and changed the fortunes of warrior and Druid, of Roman and of Briton, for all future time. This was a quarrel between Julius Cæsar, the greatest of Roman generals, and a small tribe occupying the land near the present Morbihan in France. The Veneti, though situated in the northern part of the Bay of Biscay, on the stormiest part of the Atlantic, sent for their friends and customers, the Gaels of Britain, to come to their aid; and though the channel was broad, and the great promontory where Brest now is had to be passed, the barks of the gallant islanders risked all the dangers of the voyage, and sailed into the Bay of Vannes filled with armed men. Our first interference with continental politics had not a very favourable termination. Cæsar learned with surprise and anger who his new opponents were; made many inquiries about their island, and determined to go over and take signal vengeance on the innocent inhabitants of Kent for the insult offered to the majesty of Rome by the inhabitants most probably of Hampshire or Dorset.