The Sabines, who had overrun much of the Latin territory, even as far as the hill overlooking the Palatine, seem to have adopted the Latin language, while retaining a few features of their original Umbrian dialect. Soon afterwards some Kimri from Felsina seem to have made themselves war lords over Etruria, and to have for a time extended the Etruscan empire from the Alps to Pompeii, but being a small military aristocracy in a land with an ancient and advanced culture, they failed to impose their Wiro language upon the inhabitants.
But the larger group of Kimri had settled by the upper waters of the Danube and had adopted with modifications the Celtic speech. About 900 B.C. disagreements arose between them and the Q speaking Gaelic lords of the villages in the mountain zone, and no time was lost in attacking these communities in Switzerland and Savoy, in burning the pile-dwellings and expelling the inhabitants.
We must now take up again the tale of the bronze-using Q-speaking Celts, the story of fresh Gaelic movements, but this time a story of flight rather than of invasion. This was not a question only of Gaelic lords, for the Alpine peasants, who doubtless spoke a Celtic dialect and called themselves Celts, were also involved in this ruin. They fled by divers routes to the north and the west. By the swords of Type G we can trace their wanderings over Gaul, down the Rhone, the Loire and the Seine. Others seem to have fled northwards to Schleswig, Jutland, Sweden and even Finland, to escape their pursuers, while a large party landed in England, mainly between the Thames and the Wash, and found refuge with their relations who had settled on the open downs some centuries before.
The former arrivals had been Nordic lords, with perhaps a few half-breed retainers; the refugees were largely Alpine peasants, unaccustomed to pastoral pursuits on the high downs, and more anxious for water-meadows and arable patches by the margins of lakes and rivers. Settlements were made by the banks of the Thames between London and Richmond, and doubtless higher up the river. Lowlands were cleared in Wessex in the Vale of Pewsey, such as the village at All Cannings, and other settlements were made by lakes and marshes in South Wales.
In most parts of Gaul the Kimri followed the refugees, and drove them from the valleys of the Rhone and the Loire into the hills. In the Seine valley, however, the Sequani were left undisturbed and gave their name to the river. Though no positive evidence has appeared, so far as I know, there is reason for believing that many of these Gaelic wanderers found refuge in south Brittany and La Vendée, and persisted in their lake-dwelling culture. No pile-dwellings have been found in these parts, so far as I am aware, yet I suspect their existence; but perhaps the numerous islets in the Bay of Morbihan were a sufficiently safe refuge for these poor folk.
The Kimric invasion of Gaul reached at first neither to the extreme west nor to the north, for its main advance was down the Rhone valley to the Midi. But there is evidence that small bands moved towards the north-east, down the valleys of the Meuse and Moselle, and we can pick up their traces again in Belgium.[504] So far direct archæological evidence still further north fails us, at least in Hallstatt times, though perhaps the Kimri did not cross the mouth of the Rhine until they had adopted La Tène culture; but if, as I have suggested, we are to consider the name Cimbri as a variant of Kimri, they must have reached the peninsula of Jutland, to which they gave the name of the Cimbric Chersonese. That they came within sight of the Baltic sea is clear, for an old name for that sea, Morimarusam,[505] is Celtic. If, however, Rhys is correct in considering the word Goidelic,[506] it must have been given to the sea by the Gaelic refugees. In Jutland the Kimri came into contact with the Teutones, descendants of the Wiros who had carried northwards the Type B swords. Whether they fought them at first is uncertain, but by the second century they had made an unholy alliance with them to ravage the lands to the south, and they would again have carried fire and sword throughout Europe had not their operations been cut short in 102 B.C. at Aquæ Sextiæ by the Roman army under Marius.
It was apparently in the fourth century, or a few years earlier, that certain tribes of these Kimri, whether a southern branch of the Cimbri or tribes living to the south-west of the chersonese in Frisia, Holland or Belgium, is uncertain, began to move southwards and westwards. These were the Galati, Galli and Belgæ. They began in various waves to disturb southern Europe, and to harry the settled communities as far as Asia Minor, where they survived for several centuries as Galatians.
It is not necessary for our purpose to trace in detail these movements, except in so far as they affect our problem. In the second century, or thereabouts, the Veneti, one of these tribes, who had taken to the sea, sailed down the channel and settled at Vannes, at the head of the Morbihan bay.