For dulness the creeping Saxons.[497]
Unless human nature is very changeable Herr Cissa would then have delivered himself somewhat as follows: “It is really coming to this, that we Germans, the people to whose exquisite Kultur the nations of Europe and of America, too, owe the fact that they no longer consist of hordes of ape-like savages roaming their primordial forests, are about to allow ourselves to be dictated to.”[498]
Irritated by the allusion to ape-like savages one may surmise that a jockey of Chichestra inquired whether Herr Cissa claimed the river Cuckmere and also Cuckoo- or Houndean-Bottom, the field in which Lewes racecourse stands? He might also have insinuated that the White Horse cut in the downs below Hinover[499] in the Cuckmere valley was there long before the inhabitants of Hanover adopted it as a totem, and that the Juxons were just as much entitled to the sign of the Horse as the Saxons of Saxony, or Sachsen. To this Herr Cissa would have replied that the White Horse at Uffington was a “deplorable abortion,” and that its barbaric design was “a slander on the Saxon standard”. Hereupon a yokel from Cuckhamsley Hill, near Zizeter, sometimes known as Cirencester, probably inquired with a chuckle whether Herr Cissa claimed every Jugestree, Tree of Justice, Esus Tree, Assize or Assembly Tree in the British Islands? He pertinently added that in Cirencester, or Churncester, they were in the habit of celebrating at Harvest Home the festival of the Kernababy, or Maiden, which he always understood represented the Corn baby, elsewhere known as the Ivy Girl, or “Sweet Sis”. This youth had a notion that Sweet Sis, or the Lady of the Corn[500] was somehow connected with his native Cirencester, or Zizeter, and he produced a token or coin upon which the well coiffured head of a chic little maiden or fairy queen was portrayed.[501]
Fig. 264.—British. From Evans.
An Icenian charioteer, who explained that his people alternatively termed themselves the Jugantes,[502] also produced a medal which he said had been awarded him at Caistor, pointing out that the spike of Corn was the sign of the Kernababy, that the legend under the hackney read Cac, and that he rather thought the white horse of the Cuckmere valley and also the one by Cuckhamsley were representations of the same Cock Horse.[503] He added that he had driven straight from Goggeshall in his gig—a kind of coach similar to that in which the living image of his All Highest used of old time to be ceremoniously paraded.
Herr Cissa hereupon maintained that it was impossible for anyone to drive straight anywhere in a gig, for it was an accepted axiom of the science of language that the word gig, “probably of imitative origin,” meant “to take a wrong direction, to rove at random”.[504] At this juncture a venerable columba from St. Columbs, Nottinghill, intervened and produced an authentic Life of the Great St. Columba, wherein is recorded an incident concerning the holy man’s journey in a gig without its linch pins. “On that day,” he quoted, “there was a great strain on it over long stretches of road,” nevertheless “the car in which he was comfortably seated moved forward without mishap on a straight course.”[505]
Fig. 265.—Sculptured Stone, Meigle, Perthshire. From The Life of St. Columba (Huyshe, W.).
In view of this feat, and of an illustration of the type of vehicle in which the journey was supposedly accomplished, it was generally accepted that Herr Cissa’s definition of gig was fantastic, whereupon the Saxon, protesting, “You do not care one iota for our gigantic works of Kultur and Science, for our social organisation, for our Genius!” asserted the dignity of his gig definition by whipping up his horses, taking a wrong direction, and roving at random from the enclosure.