Rejoicing with their foals three thousand mares,
may be connoted his reference to “Hyde’s fertile vale,”[506] and there is little doubt that spring-abounding Idas and Hyde Parks were once as plentiful as Prestons, Silverdales, and Kingstons.
The name Ida is translated by the dictionaries as meaning perfect happiness, and Ada as rich gift: we have already seen that the ideal pair of Ireland were Great King Conn and Good Queen Eda, and that it was during the reign of these royal twain that Ibernia, “flowed with the pure lacteal produce of the dairy”.[507]
Hyde Park, now containing Rotten Row at Kensington, occupies the site of what figured in Domesday Book as the Manor of Hyde: the immediately adjacent Audley Streets render it possible that the locality was once known as Aud lea, or meadow, whence subsequent inhabitants derived their surname. Hyde Park is partly in Paddington, a name which the authorities decode into “town of the children of Paeda”. This Paeda is supposed to have been a King of Mercia, but he would hardly have been so prolific as to have peopled a town, and, considered in conjunction with the neighbouring Praed or pere Aed street, it is more likely that Paeda was Father Eda, the consort of Maida or Mother Eda, after whom the adjacent Maida Vale and Maida Hill seemingly took their title. By passing up Maida Vale one may traverse St. John’s Wood, Brondesbury or Brimsbury, Kensal Green, Cuneburn, and eventually attain the commanding heights of Caen, or Ken wood, from whence may be surveyed not only “Hyde’s fertile vale,” situated on “spring-abounding Ida’s lowest spurs,” but a comprehensive sweep of greater London.
According to Tacitus “some say that the Jews were fugitives from the island of Crete,”[508] and he continues: “There is a famous mountain in Crete called Ida; the neighbouring tribe, the Idaei, came to be called Judaei by a barbarous lengthening of the national name”. Modern editors of Tacitus regard this statement as no doubt the invention of some Greek etymologer, but with reference to the Idaei they speak of this old Cretan race as “being regarded as a kind of mysterious half-supernatural beings to whom mankind were indebted for the discovery of iron and the art of working it”.[509]
There is evidence of a similar idealism having once existed among the Britons and the Jews in the second Epistle of Monk Gildas to the following effect: “The Britons, contrary to all the world and hostile to Roman customs, not only in the mass but also in the tonsure, are with the Jews slaves to the shadows of things to come rather than to the truth”.[510] By “truth” Gildas here of course means his own particular “doxy,” and the salient point of his testimony is the assertion that practically alone in the world the British and the Jews were dreamy, immaterial, superstitious idealists. That the Idaeians of Crete, Candia, or Idaea were singularly pure or candid may be judged from the testimony of Sir Arthur Evans: “Religion entered at every turn, and it was, perhaps, owing to the religious control of art that among all the Minoan representations—now to be numbered by thousands—no single example of indecency has come to light”.[511] Referring to British candour, Procopius affirms: “So highly rated is chastity among these barbarians that if even the bare mention of marriage occurs without its completion the maiden seems to lose her fair fame”.[512]
This alleged purity of the British Maid is substantiated by the words prude and proud, both of which like pretty, purity, and pride, are radically pure Ide. Skeat defines prude as a woman of affected modesty, and adds “see prowess”; but prudery has little connection with prowess, and is it really necessary to assume that primitive prudery was “affected”? The Jewish Jah is translated by scholars as “pure Being”; the passionate adoration of purity is expressed in the prehistoric hymn quoted ante [page 183], Hu the Mighty was pre-eminently pure, and it is thus likely that the ancient Pere, Jupiter, or Aubrey meant originally the Pure.
We have seen that Jupiter, the divine Power, was conceived indifferently as either a man or an immortal maid: a maid is a virgin, and the words maid or mayde, like Maida, is radically “Mother Ida”. According to Skeat maid is related to Anglo-Saxon magu, a son or kinsman; and one may thus perhaps account for brother, bruder, or frater, as meaning originally the produce or progeny of the same pere—but not necessarily the same pair.
To St. Bride may be assigned not only the terms bride and bridegroom, or brideman; but likewise breed and brood. Skeat connects the latter with the German bruhen to scald, but a good mother does not scald her brood, and as St. Bride was known anciently as “The Presiding Care”; even although bairn is the same word as burn, we may assume that St. Bride did not burn her brat.
There is a Bridewell and a church of St. Bride in London, but to the modern Londoner this “greatest woman of the Celtic Church” is practically unknown. In Hibernia and the Hebrides, however, St. Bride yet lives, and in the words of a modern writer is “more real than the great names of history. They, pale shadows moving in an unreal world, have gone, but she abides. With each revolving year she flits across the Machar, and her tiny flowers burn golden among the short, green, turfy grass at her coming. Her herald, the Gillebrighde, the servant of Bride, calls its own name and hers among the shores, a message that the sea, the treasury of Mary, will soon yield its abundance to the fisher, haven-bound by the cold and stormy waters of winter. He sees St. Bride, the Foster Mother, but his keen vision penetrates a vista far beyond the ages when Imperial Rome held sway and, in that immemorial past, beholds her still. In the uncharted regions of the Celtic imagination, she abides unchanging, her eyes starlit, her raiment woven of fire and dew; her aureole the rainbow. To him she is older than the world of men, yet eternally young. She is beauty and purity and love, and time for her has no meaning. She is a ministering spirit, a flame of fire. It is she who touches with her finger the brow of the poet and breathes into his heart the inspiration of his song. She is born with the dawn, and passes into new loveliness when the sun sets in the wave. The night winds sing her lullaby, and little children hear the music of her voice and look into her answering eyes. Who and what, then, is St. Bride? She is Bridget of Kildare, but she is more. She is the daughter of Dagda, the goddess of the Brigantes; but she is more. She is the maid of Bethlehem, the tender Foster Mother; but she is more even than that. She is of the race of the immortals. She is the spirit and the genius of the Celtic people.”[513]