Camden makes mention of the same find:[114] “At the foote of this mountaine (St. Michael’s Mount), within the memorie of our Fathers, whiles men were digging up of tin, they found Spear-heads, axes, and swordes of brasse wrapped in linnen, such as were sometimes found within the forrest of Hercinia in Germanie, and not long since in our Wales. For evident it is by the monuments of ancient Writers that the Greeks, the Cimbrians, and the Britans used brazen weapons, although the wounds given with brasse bee lesse hurtfull, as in which mettall there is a medicinable vertue to heale, according as Macrobius reporteth out of Aristotle. But happily that age was not so cunning in devising meanes to mischiefe and murthers as ours is.”
Hearne, the editor of Leland’s “Itinerary,” took a less philosophical view of these instruments. Writing to Thoresby[115] in 1709, he maintains that some old instruments of bronze found near Bramham Moor, Yorkshire, are not the heads of British spears; on the contrary, they are Roman, not axes used in their sacrifices, nor the heads of spears and javelins, but chisels which were used to cut and polish the stones in their tents. Such instruments were also used in making the Roman highways and in draining their fens.
Plot[116] also, at a somewhat earlier date, asserted a Roman origin for bronze celts, which he regarded as the heads of bolts, founding his opinion mainly on two, which are engraved in the Museum Moscardi. These, which are reproduced in the Archæologia, vol. v. Pl. VIII. 18 and 19, are of the palstave form, and were regarded by Moscardo[117] as the heads of great darts to be thrown from a catapult. A flat celt found in Staffordshire,[118] Plot takes to be the head of a Roman securis with which the Popæ slew their sacrifices.
Rowland,[119] in his “Mona Antiqua Restaurata,” 1723, suggested that looped palstaves fastened by a thong to a staff might be used as war flails.
The imaginative Dr. Stukeley, in the year 1724, communicated to the Society of Antiquaries a discourse on the use of celts, which is to be found in the Minute Book of the Society. An abstract of it is given by Mr. Lort[120] in his paper subsequently mentioned. Dr. Stukeley undertook to show that celts were British and appertaining to the Druids, who, when not using them to cut off the boughs of oak and mistletoe, put them in their pouches, or hung them to their girdles by the little ring or loop at the side. In a more sensible manner he divided them into two classes, the recipient and the received; that is to say, the socketed, in which the handle was received, and the flat and palstave forms, which entered into a notch in the handle.
Borlase,[121] notwithstanding that he was under the impression that a number of socketed celts found at Karnbrê in 1744 were accompanied by Roman coins, one of them at least as late as the time of Constantius I., did “not take them to be purely Roman, foreign, or of Italian invention and workmanship.”
He argues that the Romans of Italy would not have made such instruments of brass after Julius Cæsar’s time, when the superior hardness of iron was so well understood, and that metal was so easily to be procured. Farther, that no representations of such weapons occur on the Trajan or Antonine Columns, that few specimens exist in the cabinets of the curious in Italy, where they are regarded as Transalpine antiquities, and that none have been found among the ruins of Herculaneum;[122] nor are any published in the Museum Romanum or the Museum Kircherianum. He concludes that they were made and used in Britain, but that though they were originally of British invention and fabric, they were for the most part made when the Britons had improved their arts under their Roman masters, as most of them seem too correct and shapely for the Britons before the Julian conquest.
As to the uses of celts, Borlase cites the various opinions of the learned, and observes that if they had not been advanced by men of learning it would be scarce excusable to mention some of them, much less to refute them. They had been taken for heads of walking staffs, for chisels to cut stone withal (as such instruments must have been absolutely necessary in making the great Roman roads), as tools with which to engrave letters and inscriptions, as the sickles with which the Druids cut the sacred mistletoe, and as rests to support the lituus of the Roman augurs. After all, however, Borlase himself comes to the somewhat lame conclusion that they formed the head or arming of the spear, the javelin, or the arrow, and thinks that Mr. Rowland comes the nearest to the truth of any author he has read, when he says that they might be used with a string to draw them back, and something like a feather to guide them in flying towards the enemy, and calls them sling-hatchets. He concedes, however, that for such weighty heads there was no occasion for feathers, and as for slinging of hatchets against an enemy, he does not remember any instance, ancient or modern. Some of the celts, moreover, are too light to do any execution if thrown from the hand.
The Rev. Mr. Lort,[123] who communicated some observations on celts to the Society of Antiquaries in 1776, differed from Dr. Borlase, and regarded a large flat celt found in the Lower Furness as manifestly designed to be held in the hand only, and much better adapted to the chipping of stone than to any other use which has hitherto been found out for it. He will not, however, take upon himself to assert that some socketed celts, which he also describes, were designed for the same purpose. Appended to the paper by Mr. Lort are notices of several bronze celts, which at different times had been brought under the notice of the Society of Antiquaries. Some which had been exhibited in 1735 were regarded by Mr. Benjamin Cooke and Mr. Collinson as Gaulish weapons used by the Roman auxiliaries at the time of Claudius. Mr. Cooke, however, took them to be axes, and mounted one of them on a shaft, citing Homer as his authority for doing so, and speaking of the ἀξίνην ἔυχαλκον.