A CONCISE HISTORY OF ENGLAND. CHAPTER I. THE ANCIENT BRITONS. We know very little of the History of England before the Christian era. The polished inhabitants of Greece and Rome heard but faint rumours of its existence. It was described to them as a fearful and gloomy land, bordering on an unknown ocean without a shore, ever shrouded in fogs and storms, covered with dark forests, and inhabited by strange beings hardly human in form. To them it was the Ultima Thule, the last known land. Before Cæsar's visit the Romans heard vague accounts concerning it from the merchants who traded in Gaul, and brought to Marseilles the tin and copper yielded by its mines. It seems, too, that at a very remote period the Phoenicians from Tyre and Sidon, and their colonists from Carthage, had sailed beyond the straits of Gibraltar, and touched at the Scilly Isles on the coast of Cornwall; and it is probable that they first wrought the copper and tin mines found there. About the year 55 B.C. Julius Cæsar was led by the course of his conquests to the north-west of France B (then called Gaul), and it is from his writings that we obtain the earliest authentic account of our country and its people. The whole island was called by the Gauls Britannia, and its people Britons. The meaning of this name is not known, though a great many fanciful legends sprang up afterwards to account for it. The people, as we know from their language and monuments, and from their descendants who remain to this day in Wales and Brittany, belonged to that great Cymric or Celtic race, which was in early times so widely spread over the north-west of Europe. Branches of the same family occupied France and Spain. They were celebrated in ancient history as the conquerors of Rome about 390 B.C. Fifty years before Cæsar's invasion they had been defeated after a terrible battle by Marius, near Marseilles. Two hundred years before Christ, they had penetrated to Asia Minor, and settled in the province called after them Galatia. Such was the race to which the Britons belonged. Natural objects, such as rivers, hills, valleys, and forests, retain longer than others their early names. These names in England are mostly of Celtic origin. Everything of greatest antiquity that survives amongst us is Celtic, and we cannot with certainty trace the remains of any earlier people. These first inhabitants of England, then, as represented to us by Cæsar, were, if compared with their successors of the present day, a savage and uncultivated people; and could we behold them, we should view them with as much astonishment as we do a tribe of wild North-American Indians, or the natives of Australia and New Zealand. They were few in number, as are all nations who subsist mainly by the produce of the chase and do not cultivate the soil; and it is very probable that the inhabitants of England at Cæsar's invasion did not much exceed half a million. The thick forests which then covered the island, its impassable marshes and morasses, were filled with animals, whose flesh supplied the hardy hunters with food, and their skins with raiment; the wolf, the wild bull, and the bear lurked in the dense thickets and caves. The clothing of the Britons was scanty, and consisted principally of cloaks made from the skins of animals. In time of war they seem to have been almost naked, and to have stained their skins of a dark blue or green by means of a plant called woad. Their weapons were clubs, spears, bows and arrows, which they wielded with great dexterity. They were also famed for their war-chariots, which were armed with sharp scythe-like blades; and when driven with impetuosity against the enemy's line made great havoc. These chariots were used by the principal warriors, who were trained to dismount and fight on foot, and remount with the utmost rapidity. The houses of the Britons were of the rudest construction. Most of them were huts of wood, wattled with clay and roofed with straw or the boughs of trees. Those of their chiefs and kings were very little superior. They displayed considerable skill in the construction of defences, which were chiefly erected on the summits of lofty hills, and were circular in shape, built of loose stones, and encircled by deep ditches and palisades. The remains of one |