All these may fairly be considered Keltic; though the evidence for none of them is conclusive. The names that are supplied by inscriptions—names which, like the previous ones, I take from Zeuss without having examined the details—exhibit a remarkable preponderance of the termination -enn-, or neh-. Thus we have Nehal-ennia, Ruma-nehæ, Vacalli-nehæ, Maviat-inehæ, Gesat-enæ, Etrai-enæ, Aserici-nehæ, and Leher-ennius. I can throw no light on the termination. Two other names ending in -ast, Arbog-ast and Morit-ast, seem Slavonic; and, as such, are probably referable to some garrison.
Dusius has a better claim than any word hitherto mentioned, since it exists in the present word deuce.
It is little, then, that the minute ethnologist can add to the current description of the ancient Druidism, for by that name it is convenient to express the Paganism of Britain, in which Gaul, to a certain degree, shared. The Druid as the priest, and the Bard as the poet—such are the native names in the Gallic religion and literature. That certain deities were analogous to the Roman Mercury, Apollo, Mars, Jupiter and Minerva, is expressly stated, but what names each bore, and how close the parallel ran is unknown. “Deum maxime Mercurium colunt: hujus sunt plurima simulacra, hunc omnium inventorem artium ferunt, hunc viarum atque itinerum ducem, hunc ad quæstus pecuniæ mercaturasque habere vim maximam arbitrantur. Post hunc, Apollinem et Martem et Jovem et Minervam. De his eandem fere quam reliquæ gentes, habent opinionem: Apollinem morbos depellere; Minervam operum atque artificiorum initia transdere; Jovem imperium cœlestium tenere; Martem bella regere.”
Their social constitution was a system of chiefs, retainers, and slaves; nevertheless, the full development of such a form of government is not easily to be reconciled with the existence of towns or cities, and such centres of regular industry as we know the ancient Gauls to have possessed. Whatever it may have been in the Belgic area, there are good reasons for believing it to have been considerably modified in the southern and central parts of Gaul.
The Gauls knew the use of the Greek alphabet, they cultivated land, they built towns. It is impossible, in the face of this, to allow them a capacity for civilization less than that of the Iberians, or even than the Italians themselves, so far as these last were not improved by Greek and Etruscan influences.
That, contrasted with the Germans, they displayed a great mobility of temper, is likely enough. To the literature and political power of Rome, after the reduction of Gaul to a province, they contributed largely—less, perhaps, than the Spaniards who gave to their conquerors Seneca and Lucan as writers, and Trajan and Adrian as rulers, but still largely: for Cornelius Gallus, in the palmy days of Roman literature, and Ausonius in its decline, as well as others, had Gallic blood in their veins.
Their aptitude for war can scarcely be measured by the early Gallic aggressions on the Republic. He is a bold man who would say that the Teutones and Cimbri were Keltic at all, whilst, in respect to the Galli of Brennus, the Insubrians, the Cenomani, and other Gauls of the second Punic war, they were Cisalpine rather than Gallic Kelts. Still, they were Kelts—though Kelts beyond the pale of the Keltic fatherland. The same applies to the Boii.
I must now change the subject to remark that those differences of blood and pedigree, corresponding with (but, by no means, necessarily, creating) a difference of habits and civilization which the previous investigations have afforded, are only good up to the thirteenth century; so that it must not be supposed that those peculiarities (whatever they were), which the Ligurian and Iberian bases, the earlier admixture of Romans, the subsequent influence of the Goths, and the final introduction of Arab and Spanish elements evolved, exist at the present moment. If it were so, the difference between the northern and southern French would be greater than it really is. I do not say whether this is little or much. I only say that, had the original influences and intermixture taken their course, the present French of Languedoc and Provence would show certain characteristics which they have now lost, or, if they retain them, exhibit in a slighter degree. But in the thirteenth century, the north of France was turned against the south. There are good writers who put so high a value on the admixture of Arab and Hispano-Arabic influences as to have persuaded themselves that Provence and part of Gascony were on the high road to Mahometanism when the Albigensian crusade arrested their career. One would willingly believe that there was some reason for one of the most horrible campaigns of history, which might, as far as a murderous fanaticism can be put under the shadow of an excuse, palliate its atrocities. The physical historian, however, looks only to its more material effects; and these were to replace a vast proportion of the French of the southern by the French of the northern type and lineage; for this is the effect of wars of extermination, or (hoping that such have never existed in the full extent of the dire import of the word) of those conquests that either lust or fanaticism teaches to simulate them. I shall quote Sir James Stephen to show that the Albigensian Crusade was of the kind in question. He has given, with painful eloquence, the sickening details of the wars under Simon de Montfort:—
“The church of the Albigenses had been drowned in blood. Those supposed heretics had been swept away from the soil of France. The rest of the Languedocian people had been over-whelmed with calamity, slaughter, and devastation. The estimates transmitted to us of the numbers of the invaders and of the slain, are such as almost surpass belief. We can neither verify nor correct them; but we certainly know, that, during a long succession of years, Languedoc had been invaded by armies more numerous than had ever before been brought together in European warfare since the fall of the Roman empire. We know that these hosts were composed of men inflamed by bigotry, and unrestrained by discipline,—that they had neither military pay nor magazines,—that they provided for all their wants by the sword, living at the expense of the country, and seizing at their pleasure both the harvests of the peasants and the merchandise of the citizens. More than three-fourths of the landed proprietors had been despoiled of their fiefs and castles. In hundreds of villages, every inhabitant had been massacred. There was scarcely a family of which some member had not fallen beneath the sword of De Montfort’s soldiers, or been outraged by their brutality. Since the sack of Rome by the Vandals, the European world had never mourned over a national disaster so wide in its extent, or so fearful in its character.”[7]
From the beginning of the thirteenth century to the present time everything has had a tendency to amalgamate the component ethnological elements of France—to make it a country of one nation, rather than the area of many varieties. Its civil history, however, is the source for our knowledge of all this.