NORTH SIDE, CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL
That may be the first original sneer at the British climate, the sneer which now takes the form that whenever the sun appears in England it is photographed, lest the inhabitants of the island should forget what it is like. (There is an Australian "drought" story of the same order of humorous exaggeration, that in a certain district the rain from heaven had been withheld so long, and grass had so long disappeared, that when at last relief came and the grass grew the sheep would not eat it, as they did not recognise what it was!) But perhaps Hecatæus was serious. It is not at all unlikely that the gossip Hecatæus had of the Isle of the Hyperboreans came from Phœnician sources, and referred to that south-westerly extremity of Cornwall which gets the full benefit of the warm Gulf Stream, and has in consequence an astonishingly mild climate for its latitude, a climate quite capable of producing sometimes two crops a year.
As for sun worship, there are many indications of the practice of its rites in prehistoric Britain. The "Round Towers" which are sprinkled over Ireland can best be explained by a theory of sun worship. Stonehenge, in the south of England, which dates back to about 1500 years b.c., was probably a temple of sun worship. There are the ruins of a temple, possibly of the sun, at Avebury (Wilts.) of even older date.
It would be impossible to attempt even to hint at all the evidence in the matter. But what may be accepted quite safely as a fact is, that in prehistoric times the Briton was no laggard in the path of civilisation: that indeed he was among the early pilgrims on that path. Even as far north as the Yorkshire Wolds—it is clear from recent excavations—there was a thick local population of men in the Neolithic Age. The burial mounds of these Neolithic tribes have lately been excavated, and have given much valuable evidence as to the history of Man. The "Ipswich Man," too—the indubitable remains of a man who walked upright and who had skull accommodation for a human brain, discovered in strata of a most remote age of the earth—proves that in the little corner of the world which was to have such a wonderful history in the far future, there were early indications of promise.
It is worth while to clear our British ancestors of the reproach of being woad-painted savages at a time of the world's history when every European, almost, had learned at least the use of skins. For those Britons were responsible for that "Celtic fringe" which to-day shows so largely in our poetry and our politics, and in other walks of life. The ancient Briton enters into the making of modern England through the strong traces of his ancestry left in Cornwall, Devon, the Marches of Wales, and elsewhere.
But respectably clothed, arm-bearing, house-building personage as he was, the ancient Briton would never have made a very great mark in the world if he had been left to himself. He would never have overflowed to send out tidal waves of conquest like the Norsemen or the Goths. Possibly even in those early days he had his Celtic qualities of poetry and imagination and argumentativeness, and spent much of his energy in dreaming things instead of doing things. It was when the Romans came that England began to shape towards a big place in the world.
The Romans do not seem to have had a very bloody campaign in subduing that part of Britain which is now England. The people were rather softer than the Gauls of the mainland. Their country was penetrated by several rivers such as the Thames, which gave easy highways to the Roman galleys. The gentle contours of the country made easy the building of the Roman roads, which were the chief agents of Roman civilisation. But the Roman dominion in the British Islands stopped with England. Scotland, Wales, Ireland remained unsubdued. That fact was to have an important bearing on the future of England. Step by step, Fate was working for the making of the people who were to cover the whole earth with their dominions.
We have seen that in the beginning Britain was a part of Gaul, a temperate and fertile peninsula which by right of latitude should have had the temperature of Labrador, but which, because of the Gulf Stream, enjoyed a climate singularly mild and promotive of fertility. When the separation from the mainland came because of the cutting of the English Channel, the Gallic tribes left in Britain began to acquire, as the fruits of their soft environment and their insular position, an exclusive patriotism and a comparative immunity from invasion. These made the Briton at once very proud of his country and not very fitted to defend its shores.
With the Roman invasion the future English race won a benefit from both those causes. The comparative ease of the conquest by the Roman Power freed the ensuing settlement by the conquerors from a good deal of the bitterness which would have followed a desperate resistance. The Romans were generous winners and good colonists. Once their power was established firmly, they treated a subject race with kindly consideration. Soon, too, the local pride of the Britons affected their victors. The Roman garrison came to take an interest in their new home, an interest which was aided by the singular beauty and fertility of the country. It was not long before Carausius, a Roman general in Britain, had set himself up as independent of Italy, and with the aid of sea-power he maintained his position for some years. The Romans and the Britons, too, freely intermarried, and at the time when the failing power of the Empire compelled the withdrawal of the Roman garrison, the south of Britain was as much Romanised as, say, northern Africa or Spain. All the appurtenances of Roman civilisation had been brought to Britain. It was no mere barbarous province. It had its great watering-places such as Bath, and its fine cities and its vineyards, though the British climate nowadays is accused of not being able to grow grapes. British oysters, too, were famous among the gluttons of Rome, and one Roman emperor is said to have raised a British oyster to the rank of consul as a mark of his appreciation. (This jest of the table, if all stories can be credited, has since been repeated in England, and is responsible for the "Sir Loin" of beef and also the "Baron" of beef.)