showed itself with extraordinary rapidity. One may compare the
revolution effected by bronze in the early world, indeed, with the
revolution effected by railways in our own time; only the neolithic
world had been so very simple a one that the change was perhaps even
more marvellous in its suddenness and its comprehensiveness. Metal
itself implied metal-working; and metal-working brought about, not only
the arts of smelting and casting, but also endless incidental arts of
design and decoration. The bronze hatchets, for example, to take our
typical implement, begin by being mere copies of the stone originals;
but, as time goes on, they acquire rapidly innumerable improvements.
First, metal is economized in the upper part which fits into the
handle, while the lower or cutting edge is widened out sideways, so as
to form an elegant and gracefully curved outline for the whole
implement. Next come the flanged axes, with projecting ledges on either
side; and then the palstaves with loops and ribs, each marking some new
improvement in the character of the weapon, which the inventor would no
doubt have patented but for the unfortunate fact that patents were as
yet wholly unknown to Bronze Age humanity. Later still come the
socketed hatchets of many patterns, with endless ingenious little
devices for securing some small advantage to the special manufacturer.
I can fancy the Bronze Age smith showing them off with pride to his
interested customers: 'These are our own patterns--the newest thing out
in bronze axes; observe the advantage you gain from the ribs and
pellets, and the peculiar character which the octagonal socket gives to
the hafting!' Indeed, in this single department of bronze celts alone,
Mr. Evans in his great monumental work figures over a hundred and
eighty distinct specimens (out of thousands known), each one presenting
some well-marked advance in type upon its predecessor. There is almost
a Yankee ingenuity of design in many of the dodges thus registered for
our inspection.
Many of the celts, I may add, are most beautifully decorated with
geometrical patterns, some of which belong to a very high order of
ornamental art. This is still more the case with the daggers, swords,
and defensive armour, often intended for the use of great chieftains,
and executed with an amount of taste and feeling long since dead among
the degenerate workmen of our iron age.
But the indirect effects of the introduction of metal working were far
more interesting and important in their way than the direct effects.
With bronze began the great age of agriculture, of commerce, and of
navigation.
Of agriculture first, because the bronze hatchet enabled men to make
such openings in the forest as neolithic man had never ever dreamed of.
For the first time in the history of our race, whole tracts of country
at once began to be cleared and cultivated. Stone Age tillage was the
tillage of tiny plots in the forest's depths; Bronze Age tillage was
the tillage of fields and wide open spaces in the champaign country.
The Stone Age knew no specials implements of agriculture as such; its
tomahawk was indiscriminately applied to all purposes alike of war or
gardening. You scalped your enemy with it, or you cut up your dinner,
or you dug your field, or you planted your seed-corn, according as
taste or circumstances directed. But while the Bronze Age men had axes
to hew down the wood, they had also sickles and reaping-hooks to cut
their crops, and a sort of hoe or scraper to till the soil with.
Specialisation reached a very high pitch. All the remains of the Bronze
Age show us an agricultural people by no means idyllic in their habits
to be sure, and not all disposed to join the Peace Preservation
Society, but cultivating large stretches of wheat or barley, grinding
their meal in regular mills, and possessed of implements of
considerable diversity, some of which I shall proceed to notice later.
The evidences of commerce and of navigation are equally obvious. Bronze
itself consists of tin and copper: and there are only two parts of the
world from which tin in any large quantities can be procured--namely,
Cornwall and the Malay Archipelago. The very existence of bronze,
therefore, necessarily implies the existence of a sea-going trade in
tin, for which some corresponding benefits must of course have been
offered by the early purchaser. As a matter of fact, we know with some
probability that it was Cornish tin which first tempted the Phoenicians
out of the inland sea, past the Pillars of Hercules, to brave the
terrors of the open Atlantic. Long before the days of such advanced
navigation, however, the Cornish tin was transported by land across the
whole breadth of Southern Britain and shipped for the Continent from
the Isle of Thanet. A very old trackway runs along the crest of the
Downs from the West Country to Kent, known now as the Pilgrim's Way,
because it was followed in far later times by mediæval wayfarers from
Somerset and Dorset to the shrine of St. Thomas à Becket at Canterbury.
But Mr. Charles Elton has shown conclusively that the Pilgrim's Way is
many centuries more ancient than the martyr of King Henry's epoch, and
that it was used in the Bronze Age for the transport of tin from the
mines in Cornwall to the port of Sandwich. To this day antique ingots
of the valuable metal are often dug up in hoards or finds along the
line of the ancient track. They were evidently buried there in fear and
trembling, long ages since, in what Indian _voyageurs_ still call a
_cache_, by caravans hurriedly surprised by the enemy; and owing to the
unfortunate accident of the possessors all getting killed off in the
ensuing fray, the ingots have been left undisturbed for centuries for
the benefit of antiquaries at the present time. 'It's an ill wind that
blows nobody good.' Probably the inhabitants of Herculaneum and Pompeii
had very little notion what valuable relics their bodies and houses
would prove in the end for curious posterity.
The converse evidence of a return trade in other goods is no less
striking. Not only are articles in amber found in Bronze Age tombs all
over Europe (though the gum itself belongs to the Baltic and the North
Sea alone), but also gold objects of southern workmanship occur in
British barrows; while sometimes even ivory from Africa is noticed in
the inlaid handles of some Welsh or Brigantian chieftain's sword. Glass
beads were likewise imported into Britain, as were also ornaments of
Egyptian porcelain. In fact, the Bronze Age clearly marks for us the
period when trade routes extended in every direction from the
Mediterranean, north and south, and when the world began to be
commercially solidified by a primitive theory of foreign exchange. It
is a little odd that the basis of all this traffic was tin, and that we
still use the name of that same metal as a brief equivalent for coin in
general: but persons of serious economical or philological intelligence
are particularly requested not to enter into grave correspondence with
the author of this paper on any possible levity which they may detect
lurking in this innocent remark.
Some small idea of the rapid advance in civilization which marked the
Bronze Age may perhaps be formed from a brief enumeration of the
principal classes of remains which have come down to us intact from
that first epoch of metal. Besides all the various celts, hatchets, and
adzes, whose name is legion, and whose patterns are manifold, many
other tools or implements occur abundantly in the barrows or _caches_.
Chisels, either plain, tanged, with lugs, or socketed; gouges, hammers,
anvils, and tongs; punches, awls, drills, and prickers; tweezers,
needles, fish-hooks, and weights; all these are found by dozens in
endless variety of design. Knives are common, and the vanity of Bronze
Age man made him even put up without a murmur with the pangs of shaving
with a bronze razor. Daggers and rapiers naturally abound, many of them
of rare and beautiful workmanship. Halberds turn up less frequently,
but swords are abundant, and are sometimes tastefully decorated with
gold or ivory. Even the scabbards sometimes survive, while the shields,
adorned with concentric rings or with knobs and bosses, would put to
shame the rank and file of cheap modern metal work. Nay, the very
trumpets which sounded the onset often lie buried by the warrior's
side, and the bells which adorned his horse's neck bring back to us
vividly the Homeric pictures of Bronze Age warfare.
The private life of Bronze Age man and his correlative wife is
illustrated for us by another great group of more strictly personal
relics. There are pins simple and pins of the infantile safety-pin
order: there are brooches which might be worn by modern ladies, and
ear-rings so huge that even modern ladies would in all probability
object to wearing them, unless, indeed, a princess or an actress made
them the fashion. The torques, or necklets, are among the best known
male decorations, and are still famous in Ireland, where Malachi
(whoever he may have been) wore the collar of gold which he tore from
the proud invader. Many of the bracelets are extremely beautiful; but,
strange to say, as if on purpose to spite the common prejudice about
the degeneracy of modern man, they are all so small in girth as to
betoken a race with arms and legs hardly any bigger than the Finns or
Laplanders. Of the clasps, buttons, and buckles I will say nothing
here. I have enumerated enough to suggest to even the most casual
observer the vastness of the revolution which the Bronze Age wrought in
the mode of life and the civilisation of ancient man.
Bronze found our early ancestor, in fact, a half-developed savage: it
left him a semi-civilized Homeric Greek. It came in upon a world of
skin-clad hunters and fishers: it went out upon a world of Phoenician
navigators, Egyptian architects, Achæan poets, and Roman soldiers. And
all this wide difference was wrought in a period of some eight or ten
centuries at the outside, almost entirely by the advent of the simple
bronze axe.
THE ISLE OF RUIM.
Perhaps you have never heard its name before; yet in the earlier ages
of this kingdom of Britain, Ruim Isle, rising dim through the mist of
prehistoric oceans, was once in its own way famous and important.
Off the old and obliterated south-eastern promontory of our island,
where the land of Kent shelved almost imperceptibly into the Wantsum
Strait, Ruim Island--the Holm of the Headland--stood out with its white
wall of broken cliffs into the German Sea. The greater part of it
consisted of gorse-clad chalk down, the last subsiding spur of that
great upland range which, starting from the central boss of Salisbury
Plain, runs right across the face of Surrey and Kent, and, bifurcating
near Canterbury, falls sheer into the sea at the end of either fork by
Ramsgate or Dover. But in earlier days Ruim Isle was not joined as now
by flats and marshes to the adjacent mainland; the chalk dipped under
the open Wantsum Strait, much as the chalk of Hampshire dips to-day
under the Solent Sea, and reappeared again on the other side in the
Thanet Downs, as it reappears in the Isle of Wight at the ridge of St.
Boniface and the central hills about Newport and Carisbrooke. For now
the murder indeed is out, and you have discovered already that
Ruim--his dim, mysterious Ruim--is only just the commonplace,
vulgarized Isle of Thanet.
Still, it is not without cause that I have ventured to call it by that
strange and now almost forgotten old-world name. There is reason, we
know, in the roasting of eggs, and, if I have gone out of my way to
introduce the ancient isle to you by its title of Ruim, it is in order
that we might start clear of the odour of tea and shrimps, the
artificial niggers, and cheap excursionists, that the name of Thanet
brings up most prominently at the present day before the travelled mind
of the modern Londoner. I want to carry you back to a time when
Ramsgate was still but a green gap in the long line of chalk cliff, and
Margate but the chine of a little trickling streamlet that tumbled
seaward over the undesecrated sands; when a broad arm of the sea still
cut off Westgate from the Reculver cliffs, and when the tide swept
unopposed four times a day over the submerged sands of Minster Level.
You must think of Thanet as then greatly resembling Wight in
geographical features, and the Wantsum as the equivalent of the Solent
Sea.
In the very earliest period of our history, before ever the existing
names had been given at all to the towns or villages--nay, when the
towns and villages themselves were not--Ruim was already a noteworthy
island. For there is now very little doubt indeed that Thanet is the
Ictis or 'Channel Island' to which Cornish tin was conveyed across
Britain for shipment to the continent. The great harbour of Britain was
then the Wantsum Sea, known afterwards as the Rutupine Port, and later
still as Sandwich Haven. To that port came Gaulish and Phoenician
vessels, or possibly even at times some belated Phocæan galley from
Massilia. But the trade in tin was one of immense antiquity, long
antedating these almost modern commercial nations: for tin is a
necessary component of bronze, and the bronze age of Europe was
entirely dependent for its supply of that all-important metal upon the
Cornish mines. From a very early date, therefore, we may be sure that
ingots of tin were exported by this route to the continent, and then
transported overland by the Rhone valley to the shores of the
Mediterranean.
The tin road, to give it its more proper name, followed the crest of
the Hog's Back and the Guildford downs, crossing the various rivers at
spots whose very names still attest the ancient passages--the Wey at
Shalford, the Mole at Burford, the Medway at Aylesford, and the Wantsum
Strait at Wade, in which last I seem to hear the dim echo to this day
of the Roman Vada. Ruim itself, as less liable to attack than an inland
place, formed the depôt for the tin trade, and the ingots were no doubt
shipped near the site of Richborough. We may regard it, in fact, as a
sort of prehistoric Hong-Kong or Zanzibar, a trading island, where
merchants might traffic at ease with the shy and suspicious islanders.
Ruim at that time must have consisted almost entirely of open down,
sloping upward from the tidal Wantsum, and extending a little farther
out to sea than at the present moment. Pegwell Bay was then a wide
sea-mouth; Sandwich flats did not yet exist; and the Stour itself fell
into the Wantsum Strait at the place which still bears the historic
name of Stourmouth. Round the outer coast only a few houseless gaps
marked the spots where 'long lines of cliff, breaking, had left a
chasm'--the gaps that afterwards bore the familiar names of Ramsgate,
that is to say Ruim's Gate, or 'the Door of Thanet;' Margate, that is
to say, Mere Gate, the gap of the mere (Kentish for a brook),
Broadstairs, Kingsgate, Newgate, and Westgate. The present condition of
Dumpton Gap (minus the telegraph) will give some idea of what these
Gates looked like in their earliest days; only, instead of seeing the
cultivated down, we must imagine it wildly clad with primæval
undergrowth of yew and juniper, like the beautiful tangled district
near Guildford, still known as Fairyland. Thanet is now all
sea-front--it turns its face, freckled with summer resorts, towards the
open German Ocean. Ruim had then no sea-front at all, save the bare and
inaccessible white cliffs; it turned, such as it was, not toward the
sea, but toward the navigable Wantsum. Even until late in the middle
ages Minster was the most important place in the whole island; and
after it ranked Monkton, St. Nicholas, and Birchington--villages, all
of them, on the flat western slope. The growth in importance of the
seaward escarpment dates only from the days when Thanet became
practically a London suburb.
With the Roman invasion Ruim saw a new epoch begin. A great
organization took hold of Britain. Roads were made and colonies
established. Verulam and Camulodun gave place in part as centres of
life and trade to York and London. Even in the native days, I believe,
the Thames must always have been a great commercial focus, and the Pool
by Tower Hill must always have been what Bede called it many centuries
later, 'a mart of many nations.' But under the Romans London grew into
a considerable city; and as the regular sea highway to the Thames lay
through the Wantsum, in the rear of Thanet, that strip of estuary
became of immense importance. In those days of coasting navigation,
indeed, the habit was to avoid headlands, and take advantage everywhere
of shallow short cuts. Ships from the continent, therefore, avoided the
North Foreland by running through the Wantsum at the back of Thanet; as
they avoided Shellness and Warden Point by running through the Swale,
at the back of Sheppey.
To protect this main navigable channel, accordingly, the Romans built
the two great guardian fortresses of the coast, Rutupiæ, or
Richborough, at the southern entrance, and Regulbium, or Reculver, at
the northern exit. Under the walls of these powerful strongholds, whose
grim ruins still frown upon the dry channel at their feet, ships were
safe from piracy, while Ruim itself sheltered them from the heavy sea
that now beats with north-east winds upon the Foreland beyond. In fact,
the Wantsum was an early Spithead: it stood to Rutupiæ as the Solent
stands to Portsmouth and Southampton. But Thanet Isle hardly shared at
all in this increased civilisation; on the contrary, Rutupiæ (the
precursor of Sandwich Haven) seems to have diverted all its early
commerce. For Rutupiæ became clearly the naval capital of our island,
the seat of that _vir spectabilis_, the Count of Saxon Shore, and the
rendezvous of the fleets of those British 'usurpers' Maximus and
Carausius. It was also the Dover of its own day, the favourite landing
place for continental travellers; while its famous oysters, the true
natives, now driven by the silting up of their ancient beds to
Whitstable, were as much in repute with Roman epicures as their
descendants are to-day with the young Luculluses of the Gaiety and the
Criterion.
I have ventured by this time to speak of Ruim as Thanet; and indeed
that was already one of the names by which the island was known to its
own inhabitants. The ordinary history books, to be sure, will tell you
in their glib way that Thanet is 'Saxon' for Ruim; but, when they say
so, believe not the fond thing, vainly imagined. The name is every day
as old as the Roman occupation. Solinus, writing in the third century,
calls it Thanaton, and in the torn British fragment of the Peutinger
Tables--that curious old map of the later empire--it is marked as
Tenet. Indeed, it is a matter of demonstration that every spot which
had a known name in Roman Britain retained that name after the English
conquest. Kent itself is a case in point, and every one of its towns
bears out the law, from Dover and Lymne to Reculver and Richborough,
which last is spelt 'Ratesburg' by Leland, Henry the Eighth's
commissioner.
In some ways, however, Thanet, under the Romans, must have shared in
the general advance of the country. Solinus says it was 'glad with
corn-fields'--_felix frumentariis campis_--but this could only have
been on the tertiary slope facing Kent, as agriculture had not yet
attempted to scale the flanks of the chalk downs. As lying so near
Rutupiæ, too, villas must certainly have occupied the soil in places,
as we know they did in the Isle of Wight; while the immense number of
Roman coins picked up in the island appears to betoken a somewhat dense
provincial population.
The advent of the English brings Thanet itself, as distinct from its
ancient port, the Wantsum, into the full glare of legendary history.
According to tradition, it was at Ebb's Fleet, a little side creek near
Minster, that Hengest and Horsa first disembarked in Britain. As a
matter of fact, there is reason to suppose that at a very early time an
English colony did really settle down in peace in Thanet. On Osengal
Hill, not far from Ebb's Fleet, the cemetery of these earliest English
pioneers in England was laid bare by the building of the South Eastern
Railway. The graves are dug very shallow in the chalk, seldom as deep
as four feet; and in them lie the remains of the old heathen pirates,
buried with their arms and personal ornaments, their amber beads and
strings of glass, and the coins that were to pay their way in the other
world. But, what is oddest of all, a few of the graves in this earliest
English cemetery are Roman in character, and in them the interment is
made in the Roman fashion. The inference is almost irresistible that
the first settlement of Thanet by the English was a purely friendly
one, and that Roman and Jute lived on side by side as neighbours and
allies on the Kentish island.
I don't doubt, myself, that the whole settlement of Kent was equally
friendly, and that the population of the county contains throughout an
almost balanced mixture of Celtic and Teutonic elements.
However, the century and a half that succeeded the English colonization
of south-eastern Britain were, no doubt, a time of great retrogression
towards barbarism, as everywhere else in Romanised Europe. The villas
that must have covered the gentle slopes towards the Wantsum fell into
decay; the fortresses were destroyed; the roads ran wild; and the sea
and river began slowly to slit up the central part of the great
navigable backwater. A hundred and fifty years after Hengest and Horsa,
if those excellent gentlemen ever really existed, another famous
landing took place in Thanet. Augustine and his companions disembarked
at Ebb's Fleet, and held close by (on the hill behind Prospect House)
their first interview with Æthelberht. But though this epoch-making
event happened to occur in Thanet, it has no special connection with
the history of the island, any further than as a component of England
generally. And indeed, even through the garbled version of Bede, it is
plain enough to see that British Christendom was not yet wholly wiped
out in eastern Britain. The conversion of Kent was essentially a
conversion of the king and nobles to the Roman communion; it brought
back once more the part of Britain most in connection with the
continent into the broad fold of continental Christendom. It is quite
clear, in fact, that Rutupiæ and Durovernum, Richborough and
Canterbury, had never ceased to hold close intercourse with the
opposite shore, whose cliffs still shine so distinctly from the hills
about Ramsgate. For Æthelberht himself was married to a Christian
Frankish princess of the house of the Merwings; and coins of the
Frankish kings and of the Byzantine emperors have been found on the
surface or in contemporary Jutish graves in Kent.
It is interesting to observe, too, that of the monks whom Gregory chose
to accompany Augustine on his easy mission, one was Lawrence, who
succeeded his leader as second Archbishop of Canterbury, and another
was Peter, the first Abbot of St. Augustine's monastery. Out of
compliment to these pioneer missionaries, or to their Roman house of
St. Andrew's, almost every old church in that part of Kent is dedicated
accordingly, either to St. Augustine, St. Lawrence, St. Peter, St.
Gregory, St. Andrew, or St. Martin (patron of Bertha's first church at
Canterbury). Thus, as we shall see hereafter, St. Lawrence was the
mother church of Ramsgate, and St. Peter's of Broadstairs, while the
entire lathe bears the name of St. Augustine.
In Thanet, too, the first evidence of the new order of things was the
foundation in the island of that great civilizing agency of mediæval
England, a monastery. The site chosen for its home was still, however,
characteristic of the old point of view of Thanet. It was the place
that yet bears the name of Minster, situated on a little creek of the
Wantsum sea, where some slight remains of an ancient pier may even now
be traced among the silt of the marshes. The island still looked
towards the narrow seas and the port of Rutupiæ, not, as now, towards
the tall cliffs and the German Ocean. Ecgberht, fourth Christian king
of Kent, by the advice of Theodore, the monk of Tarsus who became
Archbishop of Canterbury, made over to the lady whose name is
conveniently Latinised as Dompneva, first abbess, some forty-eight
plough-lands in the Isle of Thanet. This cultivated district, bounded
by the ancient earthwork known (from the name of the second abbess) as
St. Mildred's Lynch, lay almost entirely within the westward-sloping
and mainly tertiary lands; the higher chalk country was as yet
apparently considered unfit for tillage. The existing remains of
Minster Abbey are, of course, of comparatively late Plantagenet date;
but as parts of a great grange, whose still larger granary was burnt
down only in the last century, they serve well to show the importance
of the monastic system as a civilizing agency in the country districts
of England.