Fig. 452.—A Pagan Love-Feast. Now in the Lateran Museum. From Roller, Les Cata. de Rome, pl. LIV. The pagan character is assured by the winged Eros at the left.
The name Piccadilly is assumed to have arisen because certain buns called piccadillies were there sold: the greater likelihood is that the bun took its title from Piccadilly. This curious place-name, which commemorates the memory of a Piccadilly Hall, is found elsewhere, and is probably cognate with Pixey lea, Poukelay, and the legend Pixtil, etc. Opposite Down Street, Piccadilly, or Mayfair, there are still standing in the Green Park the evidences of what may once have been tumuli or duns, and the Buckden Hill by St. Agnes’ Well in Hyde Park may, as is supposed, have been a den for bucks, or, as is not more improbable, a dun sacred to Big Adon:[846] leading to Buck Hill and St. Agnes’ Well there is still a pathway marked on the Ordnance map Budge Walk, an implication seemingly that Bougie, or Bogie, was not unknown in the district. We have connoted Rotten Row of Hyde Park with Rotten Row Tower near Alnwick: this latter is situated on Aidon Moor. By Down Street, Mayfair, is Hay Hill, at the foot of which flowed the Eye Brook, and this beck no doubt meandered past the modern Brick Street, and through the Brookfield in the Green Park where the fifteen joyful heydays of the Mayfair were once celebrated: whether the Eye Brook wandered through Eaton Square—the site of St. Peter’s Church—I do not know, nor can I trace whether or not the “Eatons” hereabout are merely entitled from Eaton Hall in the Dukeries. Each Eaton or island ton, certainly every sacred island, seems to have been deemed a “central boss of Ocean: that retreat a goddess holds,”[847] and this central boss appears to have been conceived indifferently or comprehensively as either a Cone, a Pyramid, a Beehive, or a Teat. Wyclif, in his translation of the Bible, refers to Jerusalem as “the totehill Zyon,” and there is little doubt that all teathills were originally cities or sites of peace: according to Cyprien Roberts: “The first basilicas, placed generally upon eminences, were called Domus Columbæ, dwellings of the dove, that is, of the Holy Ghost. They caught the first rays of the dawn, and the last beams of the setting sun.”[848] Everywhere in Britain the fays were popularly “gentle people,” “good neighbours,” and “men of peace”: a Scotch name for Fairy dun or High Altar of the Lord of the Mound used to be—sioth-dhunan, from sioth “peace,” and dun “a mound”: this name was derived from the practice of the Druids “who were wont occasionally to retire to green eminences to administer justice, establish peace, and compose differences between contending parties. As that venerable order taught a saogle hal, or World-beyond-the-present, their followers, when they were no more, fondly imagined that seats where they exercised a virtue so beneficial to mankind were still inhabited by them in their disembodied state”.[849]
In Cornwall there is a famous well at Truce which is legendarily connected with Druidism:[850] Irish tradition speaks of a famous Druid named Trosdan; St. Columba is associated with a St. Trosdan;[851] at St. Vigeans in Scotland there is a stone bearing an inscription which the authorities transcribe “Drosten,”[852] probably all the dwellers on the Truce duns were entitled Trosdan,[853] and it is not unlikely that the romantic Sir Patrise of Westminster was originally Father Truce. It has already been noted that treus was Cornish for cross, that children cross their fingers as a sign of fainits or truce, and there is very little doubt that cruciform earthworks, such as Shanid, and cruciform duns such as Hallicondane in Thanet were truce duns. The Tuatha de Danaan, or Children of Donn, who are supposed to have been the introducers of Druidism into Ireland, were said to have transformed into fairies, and the duns or raths of the Danaan are still denominated “gentle places”.[854] That the ancient belief in the existence of “gentle people” is still vivid, is demonstrated beyond question by the author of The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries, who writes (1911): “The description of the Tuatha de Danaan in the ‘Dialogue of the Elders’ as ‘sprites or fairies with corporeal or material forms, but endued with immortality,’ would stand as an account of prevailing ideas as to the ‘good people‘ of to-day”.[855] The generous Donn, the King of Faery, is obviously Danu, or Anu, or Aine, the Irish goddess of prosperity and abundance, for we are told that well she used to cherish the circle of the gods.[856] At Knockainy, or the Hill of Ainy, Aine, whose name also occurs constantly on Gaulish inscriptions,[857] was until recent years worshipped by the peasants who rushed about carrying burning torches of hay: that Aine was Aincy, or dear little aine, is inferred by the alternative name of her dun Knockaincy: “Here,” says Mr. Westropp, “a cairn commemorates the cult of the goddess Aine, of the god-race of the Tuatha De Danaan. She was a water-spirit, and has been seen, half raised out of the water, combing her hair. She was a beautiful and gracious spirit, ‘the best-natured of women,’ and is crowned with meadow-sweet (spiræa), to which she gave its sweet smell. She is a powerful tutelary spirit, protector of the sick, and connected with the moon, her hill being sickle-shaped, and men, before performing the ceremonies, used to look for the moon—whether visible or not—lest they should be unable to return.”[858] By St. Anne’s in Dean Street, Soho, is Dansey Yard, where probably dancing took place, and dins of every sort arose.
The original sanctuary at Westminster was evidently associated with a dunhill which seems to have long persisted for Loftie, in his History of Westminster, observes: “The hillock on which we stand is called Thorn Ey”.[859] Tothill Street, Westminster, marks the site of what was probably the teat hill of Sir Patrise: the tothills being centres of neighbourly intercourse a good deal of tittle-tattle doubtless occurred there, and from the toothills watchmen touted, the word tout[860] really meaning peer about or look out: “How beautiful on the Mounds are the feet of Him that bringeth tidings—that publisheth Peace”.[861] It has been supposed that certain of the Psalms of David were addressed not to the Jewish Jehovah, but to the Phœnician Adon or Adonis, and it is not an unreasonable assumption that these hymns of immemorial antiquity were first sung in some simple Eyedun similar to the wattled pyreum at Kildare, or that at Avalon or Bride Eye.
The oldest sanctuary in Palestine is a stone circle on the so-called Mount of God, and in Britain there is hardly a commanding eminence which is not crowned with a Carn or the evidences of a circle. The Cities of Refuge and the Horns of the Altar, so constantly mentioned in the Old Testament, may be connoted with the fact that in an island fort at Lough Gur, Limerick, were discovered “two ponderous horns of bronze,” which are now in the British Museum: it will be remembered that at Lough Gur is the finest example of Irish stone circles. But stone circles are probably much more modern than the reputed founding of St. Bride’s first monastery at Kildare. We are told that Bride the Gentle, the Mary of the Gael, who occasionally hanged her cloak upon a lingering sunbeam, had a great love of flowers, and that once upon a time when wending her way through a field of clover[862] she exclaimed, “Were this lovely plain my own how gladly would I offer it to the Lord of Heaven and Earth”. She then begged some sticks from a passing carter, staked and wattled them into a circle, and behold the Monastery was accomplished. The character of this simple edifice reminds one of “that structure neat,” to which Homer thus alludes:—
Unaided by Laertes or the Queen,
With tangled thorns he fenced it safe around,
And with contiguous stakes riv’n from the trunks
Of solid oak black-grain’d hemm’d it without.[863]
The circle of Mayborough originally contained two cairns which are suggestive of Andromache’s “turf-built cenotaph with altars twain”: the great bicycle within a monocycle at Avebury is trenched around, and the summit of the circumference is still growing thickly with “tangled thorns”. On the Wrekin there is a St. Hawthorn’s Well; of “Saint” Hawthorn nothing seems to be known, and I strongly suspect that he was originally a sacred thorn or monument bush. The first haies or hedges were probably the hawthorn or haw hedges around the sacred Eyes, and the original ha-has or sunk ditches were presumably the water trenches which surrounded the same jealously-guarded Eyes: and as ha-ha is also defined as “an old woman of surprising ugliness, a caution,” it may be suggested that the caretakers or beldames[864] of the awful Eyes were, like some of the vergers and charwomen of the present day, not usually comely.