We have seen that round barrows were already being erected before the

Bronze Age began, and that they were used not only by the round-headed

invaders but also by the older population.[702] After the close of the

Neolithic Age no more long barrows were constructed,[703] although

some of those which existed were still used even under the Roman

occupation;[704] nor were the dead buried, except perhaps in certain

Cornish cairns,[705] in chambers which were intended to be opened from

time to time. Thenceforward the graves were cists, commonly made of

four stones set on edge, which were closed by a fifth once for all

after the corpse or burnt bones had been laid within them;[706] or,

where no stones could be obtained, holes scooped in the chalk,[707]

and sometimes even hollowed trunks of trees or real coffins.[708]

Occasionally, however, the body, burnt or unburnt, was laid upon

the ground without anything to protect it from the superincumbent

mass.[709] When a tumulus was erected, whether it was an earthen barrow

or a cairn, its form was usually round and occasionally oval. The

change involved degeneration.[710] Galleries were no longer required.

The chambered cairns of the north gave way to structureless heaps of

stone: the chambered long barrows of England with their portals,

entrance-passages, and graceful exterior curves were succeeded by mere

mounds.[711]

What would first impress an ordinary wayfarer is the vast number of

the round barrows compared with the rarity of those of the older form.

The mounds clustered in the immediate neighbourhood of Stonehenge many

times outnumber all the long barrows in Britain. Three hundred still

exist in an area of twelve square miles; and from one spot hard by the

great stones Stukeley counted a hundred and twenty-eight.[712] Again,

while the long barrows almost always stand on conspicuous hills, round

barrows are sometimes placed on low ground.[713] In certain maritime

districts, for instance Cornwall and Brittany, it has been noticed that

the monuments of the dead are most thickly strewn in the extreme west,

as if the builders had desired that the spirits of those who had gone

before them might look upon the setting sun.[714]

The material, it need hardly be said, varied according to the resources

of the district. In Scotland, Wales, and Cornwall cairns are almost

universal, some being of gigantic size. In 1876 a cairn in Fifeshire

was opened; and after more than a thousand cartloads of stones had

been removed, a solitary cist appeared, containing one interment.[715]

Sometimes, however, mounds of various kinds coexist in the same region:

thus in Devonshire we find round barrows, cairns, and small central

cairns covered by round barrows.[716] In other counties again barrows

made of earth, of chalk, and of earth and chalk mixed may be seen

close together.[717] Curiously enough many barrows on the Yorkshire

Wolds were constructed of clay which had been fetched from distant

places.[718]

Round barrows range in diameter from twenty to one hundred and fifty

feet; and while some are even now twenty-four feet high, others barely

rise above the level of the surrounding ground.[719] Those of the

oldest form, which, however, continued to be erected contemporaneously

with others of later types, have some resemblance to a shallow

inverted bowl. More than three-fourths of the Wiltshire barrows belong

to this variety, which is also prevalent in Yorkshire and almost

invariable in Derbyshire, Dorsetshire, Somersetshire and the Orkney

Islands.[720] These mounds are occasionally surrounded by shallow

ditches, in which cases they represent a transition to the form which

is called bell-shaped.[721] Barrows of the latter kind, which stand on

a flat area surrounded by a ditch, but not by a bank, and are larger,

steeper, and more conical than those of the primitive form, are far

more numerous in Wiltshire, and especially round Stonehenge, than

elsewhere; although a few exist in other parts of Southern England,

and some of the so-called bowl barrows in the East Riding can hardly

be distinguished from them.[722] Latest of all were the disk-shaped

barrows,--small mounds standing alone, in pairs, or in groups of

three, within a circle defined by a ditch, which is fenced on its

outer side by a bank. Occasionally the enclosure contains no mound at

all, but only a grave dug out of the chalk; on the other hand, in one

instance the whole area within the ditch is covered by a low mound.

Disk barrows are commonest near Stonehenge, and outside Wiltshire they

are hardly to be found except in the adjoining corner of Dorsetshire,

on the Cotswold Hills, in Sussex, and, though rarely, in Derbyshire.

As they contained ornaments more frequently than the other kinds, it

has been supposed that they were specially devoted to the interment of

women;[723] but we may accept the explanation that, like the barrows,

the ornaments for the most part were comparatively late.

The significance of the ditches and banks has puzzled many antiquaries.

There are barrows close to one another, some of which are surrounded by

ditches, while others have none; while in districts in which stone is

abundant there are barrows enclosed by or enclosing small circles of

stones, and others which have neither one nor the other.[724] Perhaps

the barrows enclosed by circles are comparatively late, and the stones

may sometimes have been intended, wholly or in part, to give form

and symmetry to the mound; for in Derbyshire, where the barrows of

the Bronze Age are really cairns, a structural improvement was made

by building up the whole mound of concentric rings of stones.[725]

Again in Wiltshire ditches and banks are invariably complete;[726]

whereas on the Yorkshire Wolds banks and ditches or circles of stones

are generally incomplete; and this characteristic, which belonged, as

we have seen, to certain long barrows,[727] is repeated not only in

megalithic circles in the British Isles and in India, but also in rings

which are carved on rocks and on the covering stones of cists.[728] It

has been suggested that the banks and stone circles were intended to

bar the exit of the dreaded spirits of the dead;[729] but if this was

the purpose of the builders, why did they leave the barrier imperfect?

It is possible that their motive was not superstitious but utilitarian:

the break may simply have been a causeway intended to give access to

the barrow.[730]

Round barrows and cairns, like long barrows, are commonly supposed to

have been erected only as memorials of chiefs, their relatives, and

perhaps their honoured retainers;[731] for, it is said, no humble

family would have had the needful command of labour: but considering

that in Wiltshire, where there are more long barrows than in all the

rest of Britain, round barrows are thirty-four times as numerous,[732]

it is difficult to accept this opinion. Many of the round barrows are

small; and it is surely probable that the poorer clansmen sometimes

voluntarily gave their services to provide respected members of their

own class with a distinctive monument. Barrows and cairns, however,

are not the only sepulchres in which interments of the Bronze Age have

been discovered. A cave at Gop, near Rhyl, which had been used as a

dwelling, contained a sepulchral vault;[733] and Rains Cave in the

same county was used alternately as a dwelling and a cemetery.[734]

Many graves also exist over which no mound was erected.[735] Thus

on Handley Down in Dorsetshire no less than fifty-two interments of

cremated bones were found in holes dug out of the chalk on the western

side of a barrow. They were evidently later than the funeral in the

barrow itself, and were doubtless the remains of the descendants or

connexions of the chief who had been buried there.[736] In Scotland

numerous cemeteries, most of which were on knolls or sandhills, were

unmarked by any external sign;[737] and at Elton, near Beverley, in

the East Riding, more than seventy bodies were interred without a

barrow.[738] It has been supposed that such graves belonged to the

poor and lowly; and doubtless where they occur in large numbers and

are almost or entirely devoid of accompanying relics the assumption is

justified.[739] In certain cases also, where one or two large barrows

are associated with groups of tiny mounds, the latter were devoted to

the humbler members of the tribe. Two of the Scottish cemeteries,

however, contained gold armlets, others beautifully ornamented bronze

blades;[740] and three of the only four graves in which Pitt-Rivers

found the sepulchral vessels which are known as drinking-cups lacked

any memorial.[741] These may have been the graves of men of rank;

and so may the simple stone cists, in which relics have been found

that would seem to have belonged to persons of some wealth;[742] for

while every cist that has been observed in Devonshire either is or was

once covered by a mound,[743] there are many in Northumberland, as in

Scotland, which were left without any monument.[744]

Perhaps the most curious of all the burial grounds of the Bronze Age

is one which has been lately explored at Bleasdale in Lancashire, and

which may be compared with the wooden chamber in the neolithic Wor

Barrow on Cranborne Chase.[745] Here, on a moorland knoll surrounded by

an amphitheatre of hills, is a circle made not of stones but of wooden

logs closely planted in a trench, and containing a smaller circle,

which consists of a bank with a ditch on its inner side. Within this

ditch is a low mound, concealing another circle of logs, in the centre

of which were found two sepulchral urns. The ditch is floored with

poles, which may perhaps have been trodden by worshippers who walked

in ceremonial procession around the grave; for the bottom of a ditch

surrounding a barrow near Blandford, which was opened towards the end

of the last century, was worn into a smooth track by human feet.[746]

Hardly less remarkable is a circle near Port Erin in the Isle of Man,

formed of eighteen cists, in six separate sets, each composed of three

arranged in the shape of the letter T, two being placed end to end

along the circumference, while the third extended outwards at right

angles.[747]

In Britain, as in other countries, cenotaphs were erected in honour of

the dead whose remains could not be found. Barrows have been opened

within which, after the most careful scrutiny, not the faintest

indication could be detected of any burial, although in one there was

an empty urn and in another a small stone pavement, enclosed by a

miniature stone circle and resting upon burnt earth, which suggested

that an ideal cremation had been performed.[748] It seems possible that

Silbury Hill was a monument of this sort. This stupendous earthwork,

which commands the Bath road, six miles west of Marlborough, is one

hundred and thirty-five feet high and covers about five acres. The

cost of its erection at the present day would be not less than twenty

thousand pounds.[749] In 1777 a shaft was sunk from the top to the

bottom; and in 1849 a tunnel was driven from the side to the centre.

No trace of burial was found:[750] but even primary interments were

not always made at the centre of a barrow; and the labour of proving,

if it could be proved, that Silbury Hill was not erected over a grave

would be out of all proportion with the result. At all events its

purpose was connected with sepulchral usage. Recent excavations in the

meadow west and north of the hill are believed to have shown that it

was originally surrounded by a trench, which was filled with water;

and a local antiquary has suggested that the mound was an artificial

stronghold![751] But what clan would have undertaken this herculean

labour in a district where every hill was suitable for defence, and of

what use would the mound have been for such a purpose?

[Sidenote: Chronology of the barrows.]

The chronology of the barrows is somewhat perplexing. There is hardly a

single absolutely certain instance in which a socketed celt, a sword,

or a socketed spear-head has been found in a barrow, associated with

an interment;[752] and most antiquaries infer that the round barrows

generally belong to the earliest period of the Bronze Age.[753] It

would follow that during not less than four or five centuries the

practice of raising mounds over graves was discontinued, and one could

only wonder how it came to be revived at the beginning of the Iron

Age. It has indeed been argued that the absence of swords is no proof

that they were not used when barrows were being erected, but merely

shows that it was not customary to bury costly weapons which were not

habitually worn.[754] It seems difficult, however, to explain why a

distinction should have been drawn between swords and socketed celts,

on the one hand, and knives, daggers, and awls, which were often

buried, on the other.[755] Some may accept the suggestion that in the

later period of the Bronze Age, when cremation had presumably become

general, the practice of burying weapons or ornaments had ceased;[756]

but in the Early Iron Age it was not uncommon.[757] It would seem,

moreover, that in one or two instances socketed weapons were laid

with the dead;[758] and Dr. Arthur Evans, pointing out that an amber

necklace, found in one of the barrows near Stonehenge, is identical

in form and arrangement with the amber necklaces of Hallstatt, boldly

affirms that the disk-shaped barrows of Wiltshire belong to the end

of the Bronze Age.[759] Be this, however, as it may, it is morally

certain that some of the glass beads which abounded in the graves

of South Wiltshire were contemporary with socketed weapons; and a

competent antiquary, who has diligently examined their associations,

concludes that they belonged to the eighth and seventh centuries before

the Christian era.[760] Moreover, an earthenware vessel of the kind

which are called incense-cups, found in a barrow at Bulford, near

Amesbury, was ornamented with concentric circles;[761] and, as we have

seen,[762] this form of decoration, which is common on the covering

stones of cists in Scotland and in the north of England,[763] is also

characteristic of socketed celts and unknown on implements of earlier

date. The number of celts which have been found in barrows is so small

that it would be premature to lay stress upon the fact that only one

belonged to the socketed type;[764] and there may have been some

reason, of which we are ignorant, for the absence of spear-heads and

swords. In Gaul, at all events, relics belonging to every phase of the

bronze culture have been exhumed from burial mounds.[765]

[Sidenote: Cremation and inhumation.]

In the Bronze Age, as in the period of the long barrows, both cremation

and inhumation were practised in Britain. In Cleveland and on the coast

between Scarborough and Whitby cremation was almost invariable:[766]

in Northumberland nearly twice as common as inhumation.[767] In

Derbyshire,[768] on the other hand, inhumation interments are slightly

commoner than those by cremation; and on the Yorkshire Wolds more than

three times as numerous.[769] In Wiltshire and Dorsetshire inhumation

is as rare as cremation on the Wolds; and in Gloucestershire,

Devonshire, Cornwall, Merioneth, Carnarvon, and Denbigh cremation is

practically universal.[770] In Devonshire interments by inhumation have

been found, but never in barrows.[771] In Scotland the numbers are

about equal.[772]

Archaeologists generally hold that cremation was not practised in the

Bronze Age until a comparatively late date,--probably not before 1000

B.C.; and this view seems at first sight to be supported by the facts

that it was unknown in Scandinavia in the earlier period;[773] that

cinerary urns were not the earliest of the sepulchral vessels; and that

drinking-cups, which were in use before any of the others, although

they continued to be used after cinerary urns had been introduced,[774]

are generally found with unburnt skeletons, and have never been found

with the cremation interments in Cleveland.[775] On the other hand, in

Brittany in the centuries which immediately followed the introduction

of metallurgy cremation was almost invariable;[776] burnt bones, as

we shall presently see, were often buried without urns; and since

cremation was not uncommon in the Neolithic Age, the custom probably

persisted into the Bronze Age independently of its introduction by

immigrants who possessed weapons of bronze. Indeed, unless cremation

existed from the very beginning of the Round Barrow period, it seems

impossible to account for the fact that in the sepulchres of certain

districts not a single instance of inhumation has ever been observed.

Before the inhabitants of Bute emerged from their Stone Age they

practised both cremation and inhumation; and there is no evidence that

the latter was earlier than the former.[777] Not infrequently both

in Scotland and in many parts of England skeletons and burnt bones

reposed under the same cairn, in the same barrow, within the same stone

circle, even in the same cist; and in some cases they were buried at

the same time.[778] A cairn has been opened at Greenhill in Fifeshire,

in which four different modes of sepulture had been practised: cremated

remains had been laid in the earth, and beneath a stone slab; an

unburnt body had been buried in a cist, and another lowered into a

pit.[779] In some barrows one unburnt body has been found accompanied

by several deposits of burnt bones; and it has been inferred that, even

after cremation had become general, the bodies of chieftains were very

rarely burned, although those of their wives and retainers were.[780]

It is possible that this distinction may sometimes and in some places

have been maintained; but obviously it was very unusual. For otherwise

we should be compelled to suppose that in Cleveland and in those

western districts in which cremation was universal no chiefs were

buried in barrows at all, although it is universally admitted that it

was in their honour that barrows were erected. And if the presence of

an unburnt body surrounded by urns is a sign that wife and dependents

were sacrificed in honour of the dead chief, what conclusion is to be

based upon the association of nine skeletons with a single cremated

interment?[781] On the Yorkshire Wolds the question as to which

method should be adopted had nothing to do either with rank or sex or

age;[782] and one may reasonably suppose that it was often settled

simply by individual preference. Moreover, the expense of cremation was

far greater than that of inhumation;[783] and it is not improbable that

long after the former had become prevalent among the wealthy the poor

were generally obliged to content themselves with the latter.

Inhumation was accompanied by many varieties of usage. Most of

the Wiltshire barrows contained only one interment, though in a

few--evidently family tombs--there were two or even more.[784] Those

of the Yorkshire Wolds, on the other hand, generally contained

several, two or three having sometimes been laid in one grave; and

where one only was found the barrow was of the conical kind which is

common in Wiltshire.[785] In the Scottish cists also, single burial

is the rule, though occasionally husband and wife were interred

together, and sometimes a father with his child.[786] The same

variety has been noticed in connexion with cremation: a group of

eight barrows in Lincolnshire contained one urn each, while inside a

barrow in Dorsetshire was found a cairn which covered nearly fifty

interments.[787] When a mound was erected, the primary interment was

generally made in the centre.[788] The body was almost always laid

in the crouched position. In Wiltshire this custom was absolutely,

and on the Yorkshire Wolds almost, universal: the same posture indeed

was commonly adopted there even when the body was cremated.[789] In

Dorsetshire, on the other hand, the extended position appears to have

been occasionally met with.[790] When secondary interments have been

found, they were generally on the surface of the barrow or just outside

it, and were covered with fresh material.[791] There is a barrow on

Lord’s Down in Dorsetshire, formed of alternate layers of mould and

chalk, which represent no less than five successive interments, each of

which was covered by a new tumulus.[792] Almost invariably on the Wolds

secondary interments were made on the southern or eastern side of the

mound, doubtless in order that the dead might face the sun; and this

fancy underlies the prejudice, which still exists, against burying on

the northern side of a churchyard.[793] Probably the same purpose is

discernible in the orientation of the skeletons. Generally in Wiltshire

they were laid with their heads towards the north so that they looked

southwards;[794] and although in Yorkshire and elsewhere the head has

been found directed to almost every point of the compass, yet, as a

general rule, it was so laid as to face the sun: thus when it pointed

westward or to the north or south of west, the body was commonly laid

upon its right side; when to the east or the adjacent points, upon the

left.[795]

It is probable that bodies were generally interred either in the

clothes which had been worn in life or in a winding-sheet; for at

Kelleythorpe in the East Riding a linen cloth was underlying a

skeleton: bones have been found in divers parts of Britain with

fragments of woollen or leathern fabrics clinging to them; and buttons

in their natural positions on the breast-bone.[796] In one instance

Hoare found a skeleton in a disk-barrow near Amesbury, lying on the

ground, without cist, grave, or coffin, beneath a heap of stones,

and quaintly suggested that the dead man had suffered the doom of

Achan.[797] Occasionally, however, corpses were not buried entire;

but, as in the Stone Age, the bones were disjointed and interred

separately.[798]

When the dead were cremated the customs which governed the disposal

of primary and secondary interments remained the same: indeed in the

Lord’s Down barrow the latter comprised both skeletons and burnt

bones. The mound was sometimes raised over the funeral pile; but more

commonly the ashes were brought to the place of interment.[799]

Although they were often enclosed in urns, this custom was by no means

universal. In the disk-shaped barrows of Wiltshire, in which cremation

was almost invariable, urns were very rare: the remains had generally

been wrapped in a skin or a linen cloth.[800] In Dorsetshire, on the

other hand, except in the north-eastern corner, the customs of which

closely resembled those of Wiltshire, urns were used three times out

of four;[801] while some barrows have been opened which contained

both urns enclosing burnt bones and burnt bones without any urn.[802]

Occasionally an urn has been found which, instead of containing the

bones, was surrounded by them.[803] Sometimes the urn was placed

upright; but much oftener, at least in Wiltshire, it was inverted;[804]

and occasionally one urn was inverted as a cover over another.[805] In

more than one instance a custom described by Homer had found its way

to Britain: the urn which contained the ashes of Patroclus was wrapped

in a cloth;[806] and in a barrow in Cambridgeshire, as well as in six

of those which Hoare opened, the same ritual was observed.[807] In

several Scottish graves tiny urns, containing the remains of infants,

were placed inside vessels of ordinary size;[808] and it is remarkable

that in a few instances empty cinerary urns have been found in

association with unburnt bodies.[809] Why urns were sometimes broken

into fragments before they were placed in the grave it would be vain to

guess.[810]

[Sidenote: Sepulchral pottery.]

The urns and drinking-cups which have been so often mentioned were not

the only kinds of sepulchral pottery. Besides them were bowls which

have been called food-vessels and incense-cups. The custom of placing

vessels in graves was not, however, universal: both in Wiltshire and in

Yorkshire the majority of interments were without them.[811] All four

kinds are worth studying, not only as illustrative of funeral customs,

but also because they throw light upon the origin of the round-headed

invaders and upon the intercourse which subsisted in the Bronze Age

between Britain and other lands.[812]

Like the domestic pottery of the same period and of the modern

inhabitants of the Hebrides, they were generally made by women: the

markings, produced by the impression of finger-tips and finger-nails,

with which they were often ornamented, were the work of small

hands.[813] The potter’s wheel, which, more than two thousand years

before the Christian era, was used in Hissarlik, the town on whose site

Troy was afterwards built, was as yet hardly known in Britain,[814] and

the British pottery of the Bronze Age was baked at open fires.[815]

[Illustration: FIG. 32. ½]

Although they all comprise numerous varieties, the four groups are so

distinct that an observant eye, after an hour spent in a well-stored

museum, or even after studying the illustrations alone, would be able,

in almost every instance, to assign this or that specimen to its proper

class. Drinking-cups are generally about seven or eight inches high,

and fall under three principal types. That which is apparently the

earliest and, in Southern Britain, by far the commonest, is globular

in its lower part, and rises from the waist into a high brim with

straight sides. In cups of the second class an oval body passes into

a brim which curves outward. The third kind, almost all the examples

of which belong to Northumberland and Scotland, and which, from its

accompaniments, would seem to have been the latest, is also somewhat

oval in the lower part, and has a very low and more or less straight

brim. A few high-brimmed cups have handles, and are not unlike modern

tankards. Drinking-cups in general are the handsomest and the most

skilfully baked of all the British sepulchral vessels; but in course

of time their forms gradually deteriorated, for each generation had

inferior models to copy.[816]

[Illustration: FIG. 33. ½]

Food-vessels, which range between three and eight inches in height,

are very diversified in form, and, unlike drinking-cups, vary greatly

in quality. They commonly resemble a large cup or bowl with a narrow

bottom, and sometimes they are slightly contracted towards the mouth.

Many of them have knobs round the neck, which are sometimes perforated,

so that they might have been suspended by a cord; and those which have

no perforations are doubtless mere survivals.[817]

[Illustration: FIG. 34. ½]

Cinerary urns, which were certainly introduced later than food-vessels

or drinking-cups, are as a rule much larger, although one or two have

been found which were as small as the smallest incense-cup. Many of

them are more than two feet high. The commonest form resembles a

double truncated cone with the base in the centre, the upper being much

the smaller of the two; but some urns are cylindrical, barrel-shaped,

or even like flower-pots; while a few, which are peculiar to central

Dorsetshire, are nearly globular, and, except for the scantiness of

their ornament, not unlike certain drinking-cups.[818]

[Illustration: FIG. 35. ½]

Incense-cups are the smallest, perhaps the latest of all sepulchral

vessels, and the most various in form. Some contract from the centre

towards the top and the bottom; others expand, others again contract

from the bottom to the top. A few resemble saucers in shape; and many

are perforated with oval, lozenge-shaped, or vertical holes, one

example having as many as twenty-seven.[819]

Drinking-cups have been found on the Continent not only in Germany,

Gelderland, and Denmark, from which countries, it should seem, they

were introduced into Britain, but also in Spain, Portugal, Brittany,

and the Channel Islands.[820] On the Continent they all belong to the

Neolithic Age; and this fact alone is sufficient to show that the

people who brought them into Britain had no bronze implements.[821]

Moreover, although they continued in use in this country during a

considerable part of the Bronze Age, they have rarely been found with

bronze.[822] Only two specimens have been obtained in Ireland,[823]

an additional indication of the erroneousness of the theory which

identifies the earliest round-headed invaders who introduced

drinking-cups into Britain with the Goidelic Celts. Like food-vessels,

drinking-cups were receptacles for solid food or perhaps some kind of

porridge; for remains which have been proved by analysis to be animal

or vegetable have been found in both.[824]

Food-vessels are unknown outside the British Isles, and are frequent

in Ireland,[825] while hardly a single specimen has been found in

any of the numerous barrows of Wiltshire or Dorsetshire.[826] Like

drinking-cups, they accompany skeletons far more frequently than burnt

bones;[827] and they were obviously invented after drinking-cups had

been some time in use, though, as it would seem, while incense-cups

were still unknown.[828]

Incense-cups, like food-vessels, are common in Ireland as well as in

Britain: a few have been found in the Channel Islands; but on the

Continent they do not exist. They, too, are rare in Dorsetshire and

the western counties,[829] although cremation was even more prevalent

there than in Wiltshire, where they are numerous, and although they

have hardly ever been found except with cremated remains.[830] It is

remarkable that they were often deposited inside the urn and among the

burnt bones.[831] The purpose for which they were designed has been a

subject of much controversy. It is difficult to believe that they were

really censers, for incense was probably not obtainable in Britain,

though amber, which has occasionally been used as incense, may possibly

have been burned in them. The numerous holes with which so many of them

are pierced, and which would have stimulated combustion, might suggest

that they were intended to carry the sacred fire from which the funeral

pile was to be lighted; but as many specimens contain no holes it is

impossible to acquiesce in this explanation.[832]

All these vessels were ornamented with the geometrical decoration

characteristic of the Bronze Age, which consists for the most part

of combinations of straight lines, arranged in almost infinite

variety--chevrons, zigzags, lozenges, and the herring-bone pattern--as

well as dots and what have been called oblong punch marks, and, in

a few cases, crosses, curves, and even circles. The patterns were

impressed upon the clay while it was still wet by a pointed implement

of bone or wood, by cords, and occasionally, as we have seen, by

finger-nails or finger-tips. Some of them may have been imitated from

basket-work or from the plaited straw or grass with which the fragile

vessels were protected; for Pitt-Rivers found on his estate a fragment

of fine basket-work over which clay had been plastered on both sides.

As a general rule drinking-cups and food-vessels are far more profusely

ornamented than the other kinds, both being in many cases covered with

decoration.[833] Except perhaps in the case of drinking-cups, it is

doubtful whether any useful conclusion can be drawn from the patterns;

for, although the oblong punch marks are apparently peculiar to the

British Isles,[834] chevrons of divers kinds have been found in nearly

every country of Europe, as well as Africa, Madagascar, Siberia,

Ceylon, the Philippine Islands, and North Australia.[835] Indeed one

form of chevron ornament--the so-called diaper pattern--appears not

only on French neolithic pottery and on urns from a chambered cairn in

Orkney, but also on a palaeolithic implement from Brassempouy;[836] and

the rude hand-made bowls out of which the modern Hebrideans eat their

porridge are still ornamented, as they were three thousand years ago,

with straight lines made with a pointed stick or with impressions of a

thumb-nail.[837] On the other hand, as chevron patterns characterized

the Bronze Age throughout Europe, although they occurred both earlier

and later, further research may ultimately show that they had a common

origin.[838] The supposition that concentric circles--a form of

ornament which, as we have seen, is also characteristic of the shields

of the Bronze Age--were generally symbolical of sun-worship,[839] is

hardly likely to be proved. Probably in some cases they had this or

some other religious meaning: but in others they may have been purely

decorative; and they are to be seen on the _churingas_ or sacred stones

of the Aruntas of Central Australia,[840] who, it need hardly be said,

do not worship the sun. More interesting are the few vessels which

bear incised designs inlaid with white earth, and resemble, though

in a ruder style, pottery from the lake-dwellings of Switzerland and

Austria and from Hissarlik.[841] It is conceivable that this kind of

decoration may have arisen independently in the different lands in

which it has been observed: but the most sceptical would hardly deny

the evidence of indirect connexion with the Aegean which has been

furnished by the famous chalk [Sidenote: The ‘drums’ of Folkton Wold

and their significance.] ‘drums’ of Folkton Wold. Associated with the

body of a child in a trench which partially surrounded the barrow were

three solid drum-shaped cylinders of chalk, decorated not only with

familiar geometrical designs, but also with concentric circles, which

in one case seemed to be degenerate spirals, figures called ‘double

horse-shoes’, which occur at New Grange and at Gavr’ Inis in Brittany,

and quaint representations of the eyes and eyebrows of the human face,

closely resembling the so-called owl-heads which Schliemann found on

vases at Hissarlik. Similar faces are sculptured on standing stones

and the walls of sepulchral grottoes in the departments of the Marne,

the Gard, and the Tarn, and incised on Spanish pottery of the early

Bronze Age; and probably it was by way of Spain that this Mediterranean

influence found its way to a remote Yorkshire moor.[842]

[Illustration: FIG. 36. ⅔]

[Sidenote: Sepulchral evidence as to religion.]

We have already examined the evidence which the articles deposited

in graves afford as to the wealth and social condition of the people

who were buried there. They also suggest problems connected with

their religious faith. The custom of depositing implements, weapons,

or ornaments with the dead was the exception rather than the rule.

Less than one-fourth of the interments in the Yorkshire Wolds were

associated with any article whatever; and even in South Wiltshire

barely two-thirds. In Derbyshire and Scotland relics were comparatively

frequent, but by no means universal; in Cornwall almost entirely

absent.[843] When we find that daggers were often placed in the hands

of corpses[844] and that nearly all the flint tools on the Wolds were

brand-new,[845] we may be disposed to reject the theory that the motive

of those who deposited them was simple affection or superstitious

dread of using what had belonged to the living; but when, on the other

hand, we remember that so many of the dead were left destitute, we ask

ourselves whether the articles that were placed in graves were really

intended to be used in a future state.[846] But it is a mistake to

expect either uniformity of custom or rigid consistency. Different

tribes and different individuals may well have had different beliefs;

and it is not likely that belief was always translated into action.

Articles that belonged to the living have sometimes been buried

from mere motives of affection or from a wish to get rid of that

which was associated with the idea of death; sometimes from a vague

desire to please or to avoid the displeasure of the dead.[847] Often,

however, as we learn not only from historians, such as Caesar[848]

and Tacitus,[849] but also from the evidence that has been collected

respecting the customs of savage tribes, objects have been deposited

with the dead in the full expectation that their souls would be

of use to the souls of their owners in another life;[850] and when

not inanimate objects only but wives, slaves, and animals have been

sacrificed, it may be safely assumed that this was the motive. Nor is

the belief absolutely extinct even in civilized lands. Less than half

a century ago the widow of an Ulster farmer killed his horse, and,

in reply to a remonstrance, asked, ‘Would you have my man go about

on foot in the next world?’[851] All these motives may have worked

in the Bronze Age. We have seen that offerings of food were placed

in food-vessels and drinking-cups; and they may sometimes have been

laid beside the dead even when no vessels contained them. The bones of

domestic animals, deer, and wild boars which have been found in scores

of barrows, and most of which had been pounded for the extraction of

the marrow, were doubtless in many cases the remains of the food upon

which the survivors had feasted, but perhaps also of food offered

to the dead.[852] It is possible too that the burnt bones which are

sometimes mixed with cremated human bones may be the remains of animals

sacrificed at the funeral, and may represent the custom, described by

Homer[853] and Caesar,[854] of slaying animals of which the dead had

been fond and burning them on the funeral pile;[855] and when we are

told that the skulls of oxen were carefully interred in several barrows

and that a horse was buried near the summit of a barrow in Wiltshire

above a cremated interment,[856] we are tempted to accept a similar

explanation. We can understand why implements and weapons were often

placed inside urns along with the burnt bones;[857] but it would be

vain to ask why a cow’s tooth was frequently placed in juxtaposition

with a corpse;[858] and who would venture to account for the presence

of the burnt bones of a fox inside an urn in a barrow on Ridgeway Hill

in Dorsetshire, of the skeleton of a mole and the bones of mice in

an urn in Glamorganshire, or of the skeleton of a hog in a cist in a

Staffordshire barrow?[859] We can only suppose that these mysterious

deposits had some religious meaning.

But whether animals were sacrificed or not, there can hardly be a

doubt of the prevalence of human sacrifice. It has been pointed out

that several bodies were frequently interred in one barrow at the same

time; that in some cases a man and a woman were laid in one grave or

in adjoining graves of the same date; and that in a barrow overlooking

the valley of the Derwent a woman was buried with a man whose head

her hands clasped, while his legs were above hers and his right hand

upon her hip; and of these facts one finds it difficult to suggest any

explanation save that of sacrifice or of suicide.[860] The innumerable

potsherds which lay scattered in many barrows when they were first

opened, and the minute flint chips with which cinerary urns were

sometimes crammed[861] remind one of the words in _Hamlet_:--

For charitable prayers

Shards, flints, and pebbles should be thrown on her,

though we should be mistaken if we supposed that in the Bronze Age such

offerings were made in the spirit which animated the ‘churlish priest’

who grudged decent burial to Ophelia.[862]

A distinguished archaeologist has argued that not only in Greece and

the Eastern Mediterranean but also in Gaul and Britain inhumation and

cremation were associated with different conceptions of a future life;

the ghost of the body which was interred being regarded as tenanting

the grave, whereas, when cremation was practised, the soul was supposed

to take flight to Hades or to some far land, though it could not enter

the confines until the body which it had quitted was duly burned.[863]

But whatever the Mycenaeans and the Greeks may have believed, there

is no reason to suppose that in the West cremation was attended with

any such doctrinal change. We have seen that both in the Neolithic Age

and after, cremation and inhumation were practised contemporaneously

and sometimes even in the same grave;[864] and recent excavations have

shown that in the caves of Mentone, even in the Old Stone Age, the two

modes of sepulture were in use.[865] If the Celts of the Early Iron

Age believed that ‘on the burning of the body the soul departed to a

distant region’, there is no proof that their belief was different

when they laid the body in the grave; and who will maintain that the

religious ideas of the Gauls were revolutionized when in the second

century before Christ cremation once more became the rule, or that

among the Britons of Caesar’s time cremation and inhumation, which had

each their votaries, were the outward signs of religious beliefs that

were utterly unlike?[866]

[Sidenote: Engraved stones.]

We may perhaps hope to find other clues to the religious ideas of the

Bronze Age in megalithic monuments and in the engraved stones which

have been already mentioned.[867] There are certain designs upon the

latter of which the meaning is evident. The figure of an axe graven

on a cist at Kilmartin in Argyllshire has many analogues on dolmens

in the Morbihan and on the walls of artificial sepulchral grottoes

in the department of the Marne; and, as the axe in the Mycenaean Age

was a symbol of Zeus, we may suppose that such engravings represented

a widespread cult of one of the most fruitful of human inventions,

which originated in neolithic times, and survived in the manufacture

of miniature celts to serve as pendants and, still later, in the use

of stone celts as amulets.[868] The most common devices, however,

are small circular depressions, called cup-markings, and concentric

circles; while occasionally groups of concentric circles are united by

grooves. Cup and ring markings are found on the stones of cists, on

standing stones, on boulders, and on rocks in most parts of Scotland,

in Carnarvonshire and Merionethshire, in Northumberland, Cumberland,

Westmorland, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Man, Derbyshire, Staffordshire,

Dorsetshire, and Cornwall, and likewise in Ireland, France, Germany,

Switzerland, Portugal, Scandinavia, Asia, Africa, and America.[869]

Natural cup-markings have been noticed on the covering-stones of

certain dolmens;[870] and it may be that such stones were deemed lucky

and that, when they could not be obtained, they were imitated; but of

those which are artificial the significance remains unknown.[871] The

rings may perhaps in some instances be symbolical of sun-worship, for

on the cairn of Lough Crew in Ireland and in Scandinavia a few have

rays;[872] and since we find them on the covering-stones of cists,

while in Australia similar designs, drawn on rocks, are magical or

sacred,[873] it would seem probable that they had some religious

meaning.[874] Sun-worship undoubtedly prevailed in certain parts

of the British Isles. A few years ago there was found in Zeeland a

gold-plated bronze disk, engraved with concentric circles and mounted

on a miniature car with the model of a horse attached, which was

recognized by all archaeologists as a votive object, connected with the

worship of the sun. Similar disks, two of which are ornamented with

a cruciform pattern--a well-known solar symbol--have been exhumed in

Ireland, and a fragment of one in a barrow near Bath.[875] Besides the

spirals which have been already mentioned, the most remarkable of all

the rock-carvings is a swastika on a rock near Ilkley, identical with

one which has been discovered in Sweden, not far north of Gothenburg:

the oldest known examples of this mystical figure come from the second

city that was built upon the site of Troy.[876]

[Sidenote: Stone circles and other megalithic monuments.]

We have seen that many barrows and cairns were immediately surrounded

by, or enclosed, rings of standing stones which were part of the

sepulchral structure. It is now time to consider the larger stone

circles and other megalithic monuments which have occasioned

voluminous controversies. They were not invented in the Bronze Age;

for, as we have seen,[877] some of the long barrows were surrounded

by peristaliths: the famous circle of Callernish in the island of

Lewis contains a chambered cairn, from which it is structurally

distinct;[878] and some of our circles which are apparently

non-sepulchral may have been set up in transitional times. But the

development of the circle, which can be traced most clearly in

Scotland, was gradual. In the chambered cairns and chambered long

barrows the peristalith as a rule was merely an adjunct: in many

unchambered cairns and round barrows the stone setting is still a

subordinate part of the whole; but, gradually separating itself, it

became the leading feature of the monument, while the central cairn or

barrow frequently disappeared, and was replaced by a simple cist.[879]

By similar stages the encircling trenches and banks in Wiltshire and

Oxfordshire became distinct from the small disk barrows which they

contained.[880]

Stone circles are to be seen in the northern counties of England, in

Derbyshire and Staffordshire, Shropshire and Cheshire, Oxfordshire,

Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, Devonshire, Somersetshire,

and Cornwall; and also in Glamorganshire, Orkney, the islands of Arran

and Lewis, Argyllshire, Perthshire, Inverness-shire, Banffshire,

Aberdeenshire, and Kincardineshire.[881] Menhirs, or isolated standing

stones, and stone rows are found in this island only on Dartmoor, in

Cornwall, Northumberland, Scotland, and Wales.[882]

In form as well as in size British stone circles present numerous

varieties.[883] It would, however, be useless, at all events until

circles of every kind had been excavated, to attempt to account for

their distinctive features; and it is significant that, although

various districts have types of their own, there are examples of divers

kinds in close proximity.[884] Many were simple rings. Some consisted

of concentric rings; and here and there small circles, each of which

was outside the others, were enclosed within a greater. Sometimes the

stones were set up in close proximity; sometimes in open order.[885]

Among circles of the latter kind Stonehenge, Avebury, and Callernish

were approached by stone avenues,[886] the existence of which has been

tentatively explained by the supposition that originally the spaces

between the stones of the circle were filled by walls intended to keep

out beasts.[887] A few circles are surrounded by ditches, which were

spanned by causeways; others by both ditches and banks; and it is

noteworthy that at Avebury the ditch lies within the bank, while at

Stonehenge in the same county it surrounds it.[888] In many circles of

Banffshire, Kincardineshire, and Aberdeenshire, there is a recumbent

stone, placed intentionally in that position,--a feature which appears

to be elsewhere unknown:[889] a few in Aberdeenshire have a solitary

pillar in the centre;[890] while Stonehenge, the Rollright Stones in

the Cotswold Hills, and some Scottish circles are distinguished by a

similar stone which stands outside.[891]

The imaginative Stukeley, whose teaching is still echoed in many

handbooks, regarded stone circles as Druidical temples; and although

nearly every modern antiquary feels bound to ridicule this theory, none

can prove that it does not contain a kernel of truth. Druids presided

at all religious ceremonies;[892] and it would be rash to deny that

in stone circles religion had any part. The foremost archaeologist of

France has virtually sanctioned the discredited theory;[893] and if

there is any truth in the view, which still has respectable advocates,

that some circles were solar temples, Druids may well have directed the

worshippers. It has been contended that many circles were orientated

to the place of the midsummer sunrise, and that the presence of the

solitary outlying stones would be inexplicable unless they were set

up as pointers. These monoliths, however, are very rare: some are in

positions which cannot be reconciled with any theory of sun-worship;

and when they are absent and there is no avenue, it is clearly

impossible to prove that the circle was orientated at all.[894] It

is true that the existence of an interment within a circle no more

proves that it was not a temple than the graves in Poets’ Corner prove

that Westminster Abbey is not a church: but the most enthusiastic

advocates are forced to admit that many circles show no trace of

orientation, and the evidence upon which they rely is sometimes of

the flimsiest kind.[895] The one statement which can be positively

made about the object of stone circles is that very many of them were

erected in honour of the dead. Many enclose cairns or barrows: many

others contained human remains, almost always cremated, in cists.[896]

Stone circles are associated with sepulchres not only in Britain but

in Scandinavia, Northern Germany, France, Spain, Italy, North Africa,

Syria, and India, indeed in every country in which they exist.[897]

It is true that in many English circles evidence of such association

is lacking;[898] but we may doubt whether in any case its absence

has been absolutely proved; and if the excavations had been directed

by an antiquary as wealthy and as diligent as Pitt-Rivers, it might

have been forthcoming.[899] But supposing that there are circles in

which no burial ever took place, it does not follow that they were

unconnected with sepulchral usage: like the empty barrows which, as we

have seen, are cenotaphs, they may have been erected in honour of brave

men who had fallen in battle or of some chief whose body could not be

recovered. Nor are circles the only megalithic monuments the object

of which was sepulchral. The menhirs of France are often grouped with

dolmens and burial mounds;[900] and there is not a single stone row or

avenue on Dartmoor which is not associated with cairns, barrows, or

cists.[901] One, which is more than two miles long--longer than any

in Brittany--links a circle to a cairn, and was perhaps designed to

perpetuate the memory of two ancestors who had done great deeds.[902]

Perhaps among the many superstitions about these monuments which have

survived into modern times there are some that recall the purpose for

which they were designed. When Camden wrote, the Rollright Stones were

still regarded as petrified men; and it has been suggested that the

belief pointed to a time when popular imagination ‘transferred to the

stone that marked the resting-place of the departed something of his

very material being’.[903]

[Sidenote: Stonehenge.]

But of all the megalithic circles of our island one only is familiar,

even by name, to us all. Stonehenge is the most famous and in its

artlessness the most artistic of all rude stone monuments. Even those

who have never visited it are acquainted with its form; and the

imagination of Turner has caught the spirit of the scene. The grandeur

of Stonehenge does not depend upon size: in its best days it bore much

the same relation to Avebury as the Sainte Chapelle to the cathedral of

Notre Dame; but, weather-worn and mutilated, with many of its stones

fallen and others gone, it impresses all who are sensitive to nobility

of design as the creation of a master mind. When the work was finished,

if indeed it was not left incomplete, the outer circle probably formed

a continuous architrave, all the stones supporting imposts, whose

ends were wrought into bosses that rested in hollows prepared for

their reception. Within was an incomplete circle of smaller stones,

which in their turn surrounded five great trilithons, disposed in the

form of a horse-shoe, of which two only remain. They have analogues

in Tripoli and in Syria; but in this island they are unique.[904] On

their inner side was a similar group of lesser stones; and within this

choir lies a vast block, which is known as the Altar Stone.[905] From

the north-eastern point of the trench that surrounds the rampart an

avenue, flanked on either side by a bank and a shallow ditch, may still

be traced for some four hundred yards; and on it stands the huge pillar

called the Friar’s Heel.

A portion of the area of Stonehenge has recently been excavated;

and more than a hundred of the rude tools have been recovered with

which the stones were dressed. It was proved that the great sandstone

boulders, commonly called sarsens, had been roughly trimmed where

they were found on Salisbury Plain; for the fragments that were found

by the excavators were very few.[906] After they had been carried to

the place where they now stand[907] they were dressed with a skill

which shows how far superior the masons were to those who had set up

the rough blocks of Avebury. Each pillar was gradually uplifted by

levers until it could slide down the sloping rim of the pit which the

workers with their deer-horn picks had excavated, and of which the

other three walls were vertical: then it was hoisted by ropes till it

stood upright, and finally secured by a packing of smaller stones which

supported it below. It is thus that megaliths are commonly erected in

Japan to this day.[908] How the huge imposts were elevated is somewhat

doubtful. The Khasis shove theirs up an earthen bank.[909] In Japan

the stone is raised at one end by wooden levers, logs being inserted

beneath it: the other end is raised by the same means; and thus by

slow degrees the proper level is attained, when the stone is forced

on to its supports.[910] Once it was thought that the ‘blue-stones’

of which the inner circle is composed had been fetched from Cornwall

or Dartmoor,[911] or oversea from Ireland; but the geologist who was

consulted after the excavation inferred from the vast number of angular

chips which were discovered within the small area of operations that

the stones had been not only dressed but also chipped into shape by

the site of Stonehenge; and one can hardly believe that if it had been

necessary to carry them from afar, the builders would not have reduced

their weight by rough-hewing them where they were found.[912]

Stonehenge has a literature of its own which comprises nearly a

thousand works. It has been assigned to the Neolithic Age, to the

Bronze Age, to the era of Roman dominion, and to a time when the Saxons

had been long settled in Wessex. Many years ago Pitt-Rivers pointed

out the only way in which these controversies could be closed; but

unfortunately the recent excavation was confined to a small area. It

only proved that the use of copper was not unknown in Wiltshire when

the stones were set up; for on one of the sarsens, seven feet below

the surface, was found a stain produced by contact either with copper

or bronze. Deer-horn picks were commonly used in the Bronze Age,

and bronze tools are useless for working stone; therefore the stone

implements which the excavations brought to light leave the question

of date unsettled. The absence of bronze implements is of course

no proof that the monument belonged to the Stone Age; not a single

article of bronze was found in twenty-four barrows of Rushmore in South

Wiltshire, every one of which was erected when bronze was common.[913]

Moreover, with hardly an exception, every primary interment that has

been found within a megalithic circle in Britain was made in the Age

of Bronze.[914] All antiquaries agree that of all the British circles

Stonehenge was the most elaborate; and the natural conclusion is that

it was one of the latest of them all. Two barrows are encroached upon

and partially surrounded by the rampart, which must therefore be of

later date; and chippings of both sarsens and blue-stones were found by

Hoare in one of the surrounding barrows along with a bronze dagger and

a bronze pin. On the other hand this discovery proves that Stonehenge

existed before the period of the barrows, not one of which is later

than the Bronze Age, came to an end.

Nevertheless a distinguished astronomer, who has been a President of

the British Association, recently assigned a date to Stonehenge with

which these facts are irreconcilable; and although his theory was

demolished by a brother astronomer, he has not hesitated to republish

it. Stonehenge, he insists, was originally built a thousand years

before the trilithons were added; and the trilithons represent a

reconstruction and a re-dedication, which took place about sixteen

hundred and eighty years before the birth of Christ. His chronological

argument rests upon the assumption that Stonehenge was a temple,

consecrated, at its hypothetical second dedication, to the cult of

the solstitial sun. Remarking that the avenue extends in the general

direction of the sunrise at the summer solstice, he attempted to

determine its azimuth. Unhappily the bearing was not everywhere the

same. He took the mean, and found that it nearly coincided with a

line drawn from the principal bench mark of the Ordnance Survey on

Sidbury Hill, the site of an ancient fort, to the centre of Stonehenge.

Although there was no evidence that the erection of Stonehenge had

the remotest connexion with Sidbury Hill, although the hill itself is

not visible from Stonehenge, he found it convenient to discard his

own calculation of the azimuth of the avenue and to adopt instead the

bearing of the bench mark. Then, making the further assumption that

the sun-worshippers adopted as the moment of sunrise the time when the

upper tip of the sun first appeared above Sidbury Hill--a phenomenon

which is very rare--he ascertained from the rate of change in the

obliquity of the ecliptic that it would have been there visible about

sixteen hundred and eighty years before the Christian era; or perhaps

two centuries earlier or later. Nor did his assumptions end here.

Although the Alexandrian astronomer who constructed the Julian calendar

miscalculated the date of the summer solstice, he assumed that sixteen

centuries earlier the barbarous inhabitants of a northern island

could tell it exactly; and he assumed that, in order to observe the

sunrise, they stood at the exact point within the circle at which it

was convenient to him to place them.[915]

But such laborious puerilities will not trouble the unlearned wayfarer

who feels the enchantment of the past. For him it is enough that

Stonehenge was the work of men who felt the majesty of death, and

for whom no toil was too great that could do honour to the dead.

Chronology has little interest for him: whether Stonehenge was built

to hallow the vast necropolis in which it stands, or the dead were

brought from afar to lie beneath its shadow, he knows that the three

hundred barrows and the great monument are indissolubly connected. The

moment when he descried the grey weather-beaten stones on the lonely

Wiltshire upland will not fade from his mind. Above the south horizon

appeared the slender spire of Salisbury; and the work of the Middle

Age and of the Age of Bronze awakened emotions of the same kind: for

both were erected in obedience to the thought that man cannot live

by bread alone. It may be that those who set up the circle thought

differently from the believers who thronged it in later times: the cult

of ancestors, the worship of the sun, the adoration of the Celtic deity

who was the counterpart of Zeus may have called successive generations

of pilgrims to the holy place. Passing beneath the trilithons and among

the prostrate stones, one thinks of all that has been done and suffered

since mason and digger worked side by side to execute the nameless

architect’s design. Time-honoured even when the Roman first landed on

our shore, Stonehenge was standing in all its glory when the Greek

explorer came who first made known our island to the civilized world.

[Sidenote: The voyage of Pytheas.]

It was about the time when the conquests of Alexander the Great were

revealing the far east to the eager curiosity of the Greeks that

Pytheas set forth from Massilia on the peaceful voyage which was to

bring Northern Europe within their ken. Such knowledge of Gaul and

Britain as had already reached the Mediterranean was of the vaguest

kind.[916] It has indeed been argued that the Greek word for tin,

_cassiteros_, which occurs in Homer, was of Celtic origin, and was

learned by the Greeks from traders who as early as the ninth century

before the Christian era procured tin from Cornwall.[917] If this

conjecture were accepted, it would suggest that the existence of an

island somewhere in the far northern ocean was at that time known to

a few dwellers in the south. It has also been supposed that the lines

in the _Odyssey_ which describe the country of the Laestrygones,

where the summer nights were short, were founded upon stories told by

sailors who had seen the British Isles;[918] but the passage seems

more applicable to Scandinavia, which, owing to the amber trade, was

from an early period of the Bronze Age connected with South-Eastern

Europe. The knowledge that tin was to be got from Cornwall must,

however, have reached the Mediterranean at a remote epoch through

the ties that connected Britain with Gaul. Himilco, the Carthaginian

admiral who, more than a century before the birth of Pytheas, sailed

into the English Channel, perhaps undertook his voyage for the purpose

of opening up trade with Cornwall at a time when the tin mines of

Galicia were nearly exhausted; but it is unlikely that his report, upon

which the poem of Festus Avienus was ultimately based, was originally

known except to his own government.[919] In the time of Pytheas,

however, there was a regular overland trade in tin between Cornwall and

Massilia, and doubtless also a seaborne trade between Cornwall and the

Carthaginian port of Cadiz.[920]

Pytheas was a great man. As an explorer he was the forerunner of

Columbus; and it is not easy for us, who live in an age when hardly

any part of the earth’s surface, except the polar regions, remains

untrodden, to conceive the animation with which his narrative was

discussed by his Greek contemporaries and by the geographers of a

later time.[921] His scientific eminence is attested by the use which

was made of his writings by Eratosthenes, the Alexandrian geographer

and poet, and by Hipparchus, the greatest astronomer of the ancient

world.[922] With a gnomon which he erected in his native town he

obtained an estimate of its latitude which erred by no more than a few

seconds;[923] the observations which he made in the Atlantic enabled

him to announce that the height of the tides had a definite relation to

the moon’s age;[924] he determined with some approach to accuracy the

configuration both of Gaul and Britain;[925] and at four stations in

or near our island he took observations of the altitude of the sun at

noon, from which Hipparchus calculated their respective latitudes.[926]

Unfortunately the work ‘On the Ocean’, which he based on the diary of

his voyage,[927] has perished. All that we know of it is contained in

a few fragments, quoted with more or less accuracy by the astronomer

Geminus, who was contemporary with Caesar, by Strabo, Diodorus Siculus,

Pliny, and other writers.[928] Strabo, influenced by the unimaginative

mind of Polybius, was bitterly hostile;[929] and his treatise on

geography taught many generations of readers to regard Pytheas as a

romancer.

It has been supposed that the Government of Massilia, jealous of the

commercial predominance of the Carthaginians, and hoping to wrest from

them a share of the trade in tin, employed Pytheas as their agent.

But the Massiliots already received a constant supply of tin directly

from the British mines; and it is hardly credible that they could have

expected to profit by importing it oversea round Spain instead of

overland.[930] Nor indeed could they have expected the Carthaginians,

who were all-powerful at sea, to allow their vessels to penetrate

into waters which they jealously policed. Polybius, who was affluent,

sneeringly remarked that a private individual, in poor circumstances,

could not have travelled such distances as Pytheas claimed to have

done.[931] It is no longer necessary to prove that Pytheas’s travels

were real; but, supposing that he could not afford to pay his own

expenses, we can only conclude that the Massilian Government, or

perhaps a syndicate of merchants, were sufficiently public-spirited to

spend money on scientific aims. For although it would seem probable

from his having extended his voyage to the amber districts that his

object was partly commercial, the fact that he sailed far away from

the trade routes, and spent a large part of his time in collecting

ethnographical information and making astronomical and geographical

observations shows that his own purpose was the advancement of

science. It is unnecessary to refute the quaint suggestion that

poverty compelled him to work his passage on board a Carthaginian

merchantman:[932] Carthaginian ship-owners would hardly have permitted

a captain to circumnavigate Britain in order to gratify the whim of

an alien scientist in the forecastle. If anything that relates to the

voyage of Pytheas is certain, it is that he was free to direct the

movements of the vessel as he pleased.[933]

The outward voyage, even before he first saw the British coast, was

full of interest. After passing Cape Finisterre, he steered eastward

along the northern coast of Spain, and found that, owing to the set of

the current and the prevailing westerly winds, the rate of sailing was

much more rapid than along the southern side of the Peninsula.[934] He

touched at Corbilo, a port on the estuary of the Loire, where British

tin was unshipped; noted the great bend which the Breton coast makes

towards the north-west; and found in the peninsula the same tribe

of Osismii whom Caesar encountered nearly three centuries later in

his campaign against the Veneti. Having visited Uxisama, the modern

Ushant, he struck thence along the course followed by the Phoenicians,

and in twenty-four hours crossed the western arm of the Channel and

landed near Belerium, the Land’s End.[935] He conversed freely with

the inhabitants, doubtless through the medium of an interpreter, and

found them friendly and comparatively civilized. They told him that the

tin was cast into ingots, shaped like ankle-bones, two of which would

form a suitable load for a pack-horse, and conveyed to an island off

the Cornish coast, called Ictis, which was accessible at low tide to

their wagons. There [Sidenote: Ictis.] it was shipped and carried to

Corbilo; and thence it was transported on horseback to the mouth of

the Rhone. The whereabouts of Ictis has long been a subject of dispute.

It has been identified with St. Michael’s Mount, with the Isle of

Wight, and even with the Isle of Thanet. This guess has, however, been

discarded,[936] and no longer needs refutation. It has recently been

shown that a natural causeway, formed by a limestone reef, connected in

prehistoric times the coast off Lymington with Yarmouth. But this does

not prove that Ictis was the Isle of Wight; nor does the fact, on which

much stress has been laid, that coins of a certain type are common

to Brittany, the Channel Islands, and the south-western districts of

Britain. Doubtless much traffic passed by way of the Channel Islands,

but not necessarily that which Pytheas described; and the Dumnonii, who

produced the tin, never struck coins at all.[937] We are told that in

those days St. Michael’s Mount was an isolated rock begirt by a swampy

wood; and that the voyage from Cornwall to the mouth of the Loire would

have been too long and dangerous for ancient seamen to attempt. The

former argument, in so far as it leans upon tradition, was demolished

forty years ago; the legend that St. Michael’s Mount was ‘The Hoar

Rock in the Wood’ was based upon a mediaeval story which confounded

St. Michael’s Mount with Mont St. Michel. It is true that the eminent

geologist who has proved the former existence of a causeway between the

Isle of Wight and the mainland has attempted to reinforce tradition by

science; but his calculations, which assume that alluvium was dispersed

by marine action at a constant rate, seem hardly less liable to error

than the discredited estimates of the antiquity of man which were

based upon assumptions regarding the rate of deposition of stalagmite

in caves.[938] Nor would any one who knows that long before the time

of Pytheas men were not afraid to sail from Norway to Ireland, that

the distance between Rome and Sardinia is greater than the greatest

breadth of the English Channel, and that before the invention of the

compass Irish monks made the voyage to Iceland, believe that the

Phoenicians or the Veneti in their stout ships were too timid to cross

from Cornwall to the Loire. It is not credible that shrewd merchants

would have submitted to pay the heavy additional price which would have

been exacted if the tin had been conveyed two hundred miles by land

before it was shipped, and then to saddle themselves with the cost of

conveying it by sea from the Isle of Wight to the Loire,--a voyage much

longer and not less dangerous than the direct route from Cornwall.

St. Michael’s Mount is the one island off the south coast of Britain

between the Land’s End and the Isle of Wight which corresponds with

Diodorus’s description; it is opposite the only part of the Cornish

coast where wagons could have descended to the shore; and Pengelly,

Lyell, and Ussher testify that its main features have persisted

unchanged for more than two thousand years.[939]

As far as the Land’s End the route of Pytheas is evident: thenceforward

all becomes obscure. We know that he circumnavigated Britain; for he

mentioned the South Foreland and alluded to the northern extremity

of Scotland, and he attempted to estimate the circumference of the

island.[940] We know that he explored the amber coast, and some

conjecture that he sailed to ‘far-off Thule’; but it is safe to

prophesy that on the details of his itinerary agreement will never

be reached. He accurately indicated the position of Ireland, which

Eratosthenes, guided by his observations, placed west of Britain, but

which, Strabo notwithstanding insisted, was the most northerly of all

inhabited lands.[941] It would seem that he landed more than once;

for he had much to tell of the manners and customs of the Britons. He

was especially struck by the gloominess of the climate; the corn,

he remarked, was not threshed on open threshing-floors on account of

the heavy rains and the lack of sunshine, but the ears were cut off,

carried into barns, and there ground; and he learned that the grain

was not merely used for food, but also for brewing a kind of beer.

In the far northern districts he observed that domestic animals were

few, that the fruits of more favoured lands were not to be seen,

and that the only cereal was oats.[942] According to Pliny,[943] he

stated that the tide rose in one place to the prodigious height of

eighty cubits, or about one hundred and twenty feet. It has been

supposed that this passage refers to the race of the current through

the Pentland Firth;[944] but more probably Pytheas had seen the tidal

wave in the Bristol Channel, which actually rises sixty feet;[945] and

it must remain doubtful whether he exaggerated its volume or Pliny

misrepresented his meaning.

[Sidenote: ‘Ultima Thule.’]

The voyage which Pytheas made to the amber coast has no place in the

history of Britain; but we cannot but be interested in his account of

Thule, which he called the most northerly of the British Isles.[946] It

is doubtful, however, whether he even saw it.[947] He says that it was

six days’ sail from Britain;[948] but this statement may have been made

upon the authority of natives[949] who had conversed with Scandinavian

mariners on their way to or from Ireland. His description of the

manners and customs of the northern peoples, of their agriculture,

their domestic animals, and their food is reproduced by Strabo in a

paragraph so vague that one cannot be sure whether it was intended to

refer only to Britain, or to Thule as well.[950] Strabo, if he had

any clear notion on the subject, must have applied it to Britain, for

Thule was in his eyes a mythical land;[951] but if Pytheas was thinking

of Thule, his account may have been based upon hearsay. He described

it as situated on or near the Arctic Circle,[952] and since he called

it an island, his description, if he sailed thither himself, can only

refer to Iceland: but Iceland, when the Northmen took possession of

it, was found uninhabited except by a few monks;[953] and it may be

that he simply drew his own conclusions from the reports of Britons

who told him that in Thule there was one night every year on which

the sun never set.[954] Again, when he said that Thule was near the

frozen ocean,[955] he may only have reported what he had heard; though

it is unlikely that the natives of North Britain would have made a

statement so misleading about any of the Shetlands, which were within

a few hours’ sail of their own land. But perhaps we may find a clue

in a well-known passage in Geminus’s _Elements of Astronomy_.[956]

‘The natives,’ said Pytheas, according to this extract, ‘pointed out

to us the sleeping-place of the sun; for in these parts the nights

were very short, in some only two, in others three hours long, so that

the sun re-appeared soon after it had set.’ Even in the Shetlands

the duration of the shortest night is about five hours; but Cosmas

Indicopleustes,[957] a traveller and geographer of the sixth century,

affirms that the natives explained ‘the sleeping-place of the sun’ as

the place where for twenty-four hours there was unbroken darkness.

We may well conceive how Pytheas stood talking to Shetlanders or to

people who lived near Cape Wrath, while they pointed in the direction

of Norway, in the remoter parts of which, as they had learned from

Norwegian sailors, was to be seen the midnight sun, and at midwinter

there was for twenty-four hours continuous night. But Pytheas would not

have told this tale if he had himself watched the sun above the horizon

throughout the midsummer night; nor would he have placed Thule on the

Arctic Circle if he had not believed that such a spectacle was there

to be seen. For the Romans of the Empire Thule, as the northernmost

of the British Isles, was Mainland, which Agricola visited.[958] But

on the whole it seems most probable that Pytheas described it from

hearsay;[959] that he was misled into believing it to be in the British

archipelago; and that the Thule to which his informants pointed was the

Scandinavian peninsula.[960]

[Sidenote: Pytheas and the ethnology of Britain.]

But, apart from the deeds of Pytheas himself, perhaps the most

interesting information which we owe to the fragmentary record of his

voyage relates to the ethnology of Britain. He learned that it was

called the Pretanic Island. Before his time the Gauls for the most part

had come to change the original sound _qu_ into _p_; whereas certain

tribes of Western Gaul[961] as well as all those Celtic-speaking

inhabitants of the British Isles from whose dialect Gaelic, Irish,

and Manx have been evolved retained it, though the latter afterwards

modified it into _c_. On the other hand, wherever the Indo-European

tongue from which Celtic was an offshoot had the sound of _p_, most

of the Celtic-speaking tribes both of Britain and Gaul had let it

disappear. The word _Pretanic_ therefore implied the existence of an

earlier word _Qrtanic_; and supposing that Pytheas, as some believe,

heard _Pretanic_ only in Gaul, it might be argued that _Qrtanic_ was

still the British pronunciation. If so, none of the tribes who had

changed _qu_ into _p_, from whose dialect Welsh, Cornish, and Breton

descended, and who are commonly called Brythons, had yet invaded

Britain. But if, as seems much more probable, Pytheas derived his

information from Britons, the Brythons were already predominant at

all events in those parts of Britain in which he conversed with them.

Indeed, as we shall afterwards see,[962] it is morally certain that

Brythonic tribes had been settled here at least half a century before

he came.

The subject of the ethnology of the Celtic-speaking tribes of Britain

is extremely difficult; and on nearly every important point Celtic

philologists differ widely among themselves. It is almost an article

of faith that the earlier Celtic invaders were Goidels, or tribes who

had not changed _qu_ into _p_; but there are some who maintain that

neither in the time of Pytheas nor even in that of Caesar were there

any Goidels in Britain; and that those who were settled in Wales in the

third century of our era were all of Irish origin. No direct evidence

indeed can be adduced for the common view; but it is hard to conceive

that the earliest Celtic immigrants, unless they set out from Spain

or from North-Western Gaul, should have passed by Britain in order to

settle in Ireland. Even those who admit the priority of the Goidels in

Britain are not of one mind. While the foremost Celtic scholar of this

country maintains that when Celts first reached Britain the distinction

between the Goidelic and Brythonic dialects already existed, the

foremost Celtic scholar of France insists that at that time the Celtic

language was everywhere the same: according to him none of the Celts

had then changed _qu_ into _p_: that change was made later by Celtic

conquerors of Gaul, some of whose descendants afterwards colonized

Britain; and the people with whom Pytheas conversed were not, strictly

speaking, Goidels, but simply Celts who spoke a language from which the

Goidelic dialects--Gaelic, Manx, and Irish--were subsequently evolved.

On its chronological no less than on its ethnological side the Celtic

question is involved in obscurity. History, archaeology, and physical

anthropology can give the philologists little aid. The slender

historical evidence does not warrant us in assigning the earliest

Celtic invasion of Britain to a period more than six or seven centuries

before the Christian era. Philologists who, a few years ago, acquiesced

in this date, now put it back three centuries or more without troubling

themselves to give a reason. The Hallstatt period of culture, which,

in its earlier stage, coincided on the Continent with the transition

from the use of bronze to that of iron, is believed to have lasted

in Gaul from about 800 to about 400 B.C. As it is all but entirely

unrepresented in this country by iron weapons, one might perhaps argue

that Celts invaded Britain before iron implements of Hallstatt type

began to be common in Gaul; but this date gives us no help, for it

certainly was not earlier than the sixth century before Christ.[963]

Assuming that Goidelic and Brythonic were distinct dialects before the

Celts invaded Britain, there is no evidence that the Goidelic invaders

(if they existed) were physically different from their Brythonic

kinsmen; and if they were, the fact would throw no light upon the

Goidelic invasion. For, as we have seen, even if the period of the

round barrows lasted to the end of the Bronze Age, cremation, which

destroys evidence of physical type, was then in vogue. Therefore we

must rest satisfied with the probability that at some time after the

earlier period of the British Bronze Age tribes began to invade Britain

who spoke a language from which the Gaelic that we know was descended;

and with the certainty that when Pytheas landed on our shore he found

Brythons already in possession.[964]

[Sidenote: The passing of the Bronze Age.]

The coming of Pytheas marks the beginning of a new era. Bronze and even

stone implements were still used in the north and probably even in the

greater part of Southern Britain.[965] But the Bronze Age, properly so

called, had passed away: the Early Iron Age had begun.