In speaking of the relations, real or fairly imaginable, between Soissons or Senlis and the English in the parts of the island which lie opposite to that part of Gaul, I asked you to note that this was Belgic Gaul. We have seen that for some time before Julius Caesar’s invasion a change had been going on in the population of those parts of Britain to which I now refer. The Belgae had been crossing the narrow sea and settling here, presumably driving away the inhabitants whom they found. They so specially occupied the parts where now Hampshire is, that the capital city, Went, was named from them by the Latins Venta Belgarum, Belgian Venta; to return in later times to its old name of Caer Went, this is, Went Castle, Winchester. Indeed, the Belgae are credited with the occupation of territory up to the borders of Devon. The British tribe of the Atrebates, again, were the same people as the Gauls in the district of Arras; and they occupied a large tract of country stretching away from the immediate west of London. Caesar remarks on this fact that the immigrant Gauls retained the names of their continental districts and cities. The Parisii on the east coast, north of the Humber, afford another illustration.
Now when Jerome, about the year 367, was at Trèves, the capital of Gaul, situate in Belgic Gaul, he learned the native tongue of the Belgic Gauls; and when later in his life he travelled through Galatia, in Asia Minor, he found the people there speaking practically the same language as the Gauls about Trèves. Thus we are entitled to claim the Galatians as of kin to the Belgic division of the Gauls, and therefore as the same people with those who from before Caesar’s time flowed steadily over from Belgic Gaul to Britain. That the Galatians were Gauls is of course a well-known fact in history; the point I wish to note is that they were Belgic Gauls. We may therefore see in St. Paul’s epistle to the Galatian churches a description of the national character of the Britons of these parts of the island. Fickleness, superstition, and quarrelsomeness, are the characteristics on which he remarks. The very first words of the Epistle, after the preface, strike a clear and forcible note:—“I marvel that ye are so quickly moved to abandon the gospel of him that called you, for another gospel.” Again, “O foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you!” “Ye were in bondage to them which are by nature no gods;... how turn ye back again to the weak and beggarly rudiments, whereunto ye desire to be in bondage over again!” “If ye bite and devour one another.” Without at all saying that these national characteristics are traceable in any parts of our islands now, it is evident that they are in close accord with what we hear of the early inhabitants. As also is another remark made in early times, “the Gauls begin their fights with more than the strength of men, they finish them with less than the strength of women.”
The line taken by a recent writer, Professor W. M. Ramsay, in his most interesting and able book, “The Church in the Roman Empire,” traverses this argument about the Galatian Epistle. In opposition to the great divine who for eight years spoke from this pulpit, and made this Epistle a special study for a great part of his life, Professor Ramsay maintains, by arguments drawn from geographical and epigraphical facts not known thirty years ago, when Dr. Lightfoot first wrote, that the Epistle was addressed to the people in the southern part of the Roman province called Galatia, who were not Galatians at all; and was not addressed to those in the northern part, who were Galatians proper, and occupied the whole of the country named from them Galatia. But I use the illustration, notwithstanding this. The controversy is not quite ended yet; and I do not feel sure that the difficulties of the Epistle itself, from Professor Ramsay’s point of view, are very much less considerable than those which Dr. Lightfoot’s view undoubtedly has to face. In any case the Galatians proper were of close kin with the more civilised of our British predecessors—ancestors we may perhaps say—and this at least gives us a personal interest in what at first sight would seem to be a very far-off controversy.
The tradition which used to find most favour was that Joseph of Arimathea came over with twelve companions, and received from a British king in the south-west a portion of land for each of his companions, and founded the ecclesiastical establishment of Glastonbury. There is certainly some very ancient history connected with the “twelve hides” of Glastonbury. Go as far back as we will in the records, we never come to the beginning of the “xii. hidæ.” The Domesday Survey tells us, eight hundred years ago, that the twelve hides “never have been taxed.” Clearly they take us back to some very early donation; and I see no reason—beyond the obvious difficulty of its geographical remoteness—against the tradition that here was the earliest Christian establishment in Britain. At the Council of Basle, in 1431, when the Western Church was holding councils with a view to reforming from within the enormous abuses of the Roman Court, a prelude to the “Reformation” into which we were driven a hundred years later, the precedence of churches was determined by the date of their foundation. The English Church claimed and received precedence as founded in Apostolic times by Joseph of Arimathea. Those were not very critical days, so far as historical evidence was concerned, and I should not have mentioned this legend, or should only have mentioned it and passed on, but for a recent illustration of a part of the story. The more we look into early local legends, the more disinclined we become to say that there is nothing substantial in them. The story has from early times gone, that the first British Christians erected at Glastonbury a church made of twigs, of wattle-work. This wattle church survived the violent changes which swept over the face of the land. Indeed, it is said, and with so much of probability that Mr. Freeman was willing to accept it as a fact, that Glastonbury was the one place outside the fastnesses to which the British Christians fled, where Christian worship was not interrupted when the English came. This wattle church survived till after the Norman invasion, when it was burned by accident[17]. Wattle-work is a very perishable material; and of all things of the kind the least likely would seem to be, that we, in this nineteenth century, should, in confirmation of the story, discover at Glastonbury an almost endless amount of British wattle-work. Yet that is exactly what has happened. In the low ground, now occupying the place of the impenetrable marshes which gave the name of the Isle of Avalon to the higher ground, the eye of a local antiquary had long marked a mass of dome-shaped hillocks, some of them of very considerable diameter, and about seventy in number, clustered together in what is now a large field, a mile and a quarter from Glastonbury. The year before last he began to dig. Peat had formed itself in the long course of time, and its preservative qualities had kept safe for our eyes that which it enclosed and covered. The hillocks proved to be the remains of British houses burned with fire. They were set on ground made solid in the midst of waters, with causeways for approach from the land. The faces of the solid ground and the sides of the causeways are revetted with wattle-work. There is wattle-work all over, strong and very well made. It clearly was the main stand-by of the Britons, whose fortress this was, and their skill in making it and applying it was great. The wattle when first uncovered is as good to all appearance as the day it was made. The huts are oval and circular, and some are of large dimensions. The largest of all are not yet opened, but already a hut covering about 450 square feet has been found. All have a circular area of white stones in the middle, carried from far, for a hearth, &c., and all have been destroyed by fire. But though the fire has destroyed the huts completely, it has preserved for us the account of the material of which they were made, as clearly as if it were inscribed on the brick cylinders of an Assyrian king. It has baked the clay with which the huts were covered, and the baked clay shews the impress of wattle-work. The houses of the Britons at Glastonbury were, as a matter of fact, as long tradition tells us their church was, made of wattles[18].
Julius Caesar speaks more than once of the skill of the British in this respect. He tells us of the plaiting together of the branches of growing trees to form barriers in the woods, which his soldiers found unpleasantly effective. We read also of the wattle-work erections of various shapes in which human victims were enclosed to be burned. And, from a more peaceful side, we learn that the tables of ladies in Rome were not completely in the fashion if they had no examples of British baskets. “Basket,” as you know, is one of the best examples of the survival of a British word among us, a word used also by the Romans[19], their word bascauda and our “basket” representing the Welsh basgawd and basget.
There is abundance of evidence of the interest taken by the Romans in Britain and its people, and of the esteem in which Britons were held at Rome. Martial, who settled in Rome in the year a. d. 66, perhaps one year or two years before St. Paul’s death, speaks of a British lady in Rome, Claudia, the newly-married wife of Pudens. Of her he says[20], in terms as he believed of the highest personal praise—
Though Claudia from the sea-green Britons came,
She wears the aspect of a Roman dame.
And, again, he mentions, not without pride, that he was read in Britain: ‘Britain, too, is said to sing my verse.’ It is a little difficult to resist the tendency to see in this Pudens and Claudia the Pudens and Claudia of the last sentence before the final blessing in the last letter of St. Paul, where their names are linked together by that of Linus, the first Bishop of Rome. We are told, however, that the severe historian ought to resist this tendency of the natural man.
Again, Seneca, the brother of Gallio, whom we meet in the Acts, had a great deal of money invested in Britain. Juvenal brings a British king into his verse, and Richborough oysters. Josephus[21] tells us that Titus made use of the Britons, as a telling illustration in his final speech to the desperate Jews:—“Pray what greater obstacle is there than the wall of the Ocean, with which the Britons are encompassed? And yet they bow before the arms of the Romans.”
Those are probably sufficient indications of the kind of evidence we have. We know, too, that the Roman troops came and went; and we may be sure that they made Britain and the strange things they had seen here a frequent subject of conversation. We cannot doubt that St. Paul, in his enforced intercourse with the soldiery at Rome, learned all he could about the distant parts of the world, which only the Roman armies had visited. Nay, we in London may go further than that. Seeing that Nero recalled from Britain the victorious Suetonius in 61, and that St. Paul lived with Roman soldiers in all probability from 61 to 63, we may imagine that some soldier or other described to St. Paul that terrible day on which Suetonius made up his mind that he must leave London to its fate. You remember the account of Tacitus[22], so telling in its studied brevity. It is, I think, the first definite appearance of London on the stage of history. The occasion was the revolt of Boadicea, to retain the familiar incorrectness of the name. Colchester had fallen, all the Romans there being slaughtered. The ninth legion had been attacked and routed by the Britons, and all the infantry killed. Many a gallant fight no doubt in the thick woods, like that which Wilson and his comrades fought last month[23]. The governor of the province fled to Gaul. Verulam fell, with great slaughter. There was no taking captive, no selling into slavery. The Britons made sure work; they burned, they tortured, they crucified. One man of the Romans kept his head, or all would have been massacred. With a constancy which made men marvel, Suetonius marched through the midst of foes to the relief of London—London not then illustrious as a colony, but more famous than any other city in the land for the number of its merchants and the abundance of its merchandise. Should he make London his centre of defence? He looked at the small number of his soldiers: he thought of the destruction of the ninth legion. He determined to leave London to its fate. Tears and prayers could not move him. He gave the signal to march. Those of the citizens who accompanied him his soldiers protected. All who remained behind, unable or unwilling to leave their homes, all were overwhelmed in one great slaughter. The Romans calculated that at Colchester, Verulam, and London, from seventy to eighty thousand of Romans and their allies were slain by the enraged Britons[24]. We may imagine how St. Paul would listen to that tale of woe, then quite fresh, the most tragic event of the time; and how he would long for an opportunity of softening the disposition of the Britons by the gentle doctrines of Christ.