CHAPTER III.
ORIGIN OF THE BRITONS.—KELTS OF GAUL.—THE BELGÆ.—WHETHER KELTIC OR GERMAN.—EVIDENCE OF CÆSAR.—ATTREBATES, BELGÆ, REMI, DUROTRIGES AND MORINI, CHAUCI AND MENAPII.
Of the two branches of the Keltic stock the British will be considered first, and that in respect to its origin.
It is rare that the population of an island is without clear, definite, and not very distant affinities with that of the nearest part of the nearest continent. The Cingalese of Ceylon can be traced to India; the Sumatrans to the Malayan Peninsula; the Kurile Islanders to the Peninsula of Sagalín; the Guanches of Teneriffe to the coast of Barbary. The nearest approach to isolation is in the island of Madagascar, where the affinities are with Sumatra, the Moluccas and the Malay stock rather than with the opposite parts of Africa, the coasts of Mozambique and Zanguibar. But Madagascar has long been the great ethnological mystery. Iceland, too, was peopled from Scandinavia and not from Greenland.
It is in Gaul, then, that we must look for the mother-country of Kelts; at least in the first[59] instance, for Gaul is the nearest point—the white cliffs of Folkstone being within sight of the opposite shore. Yet (as an example of the extent to which one ethnological question depends upon another) the Gallic origin of the earliest Britons has been objected to. For a Keltic population, indeed, it has been admitted to be the natural area; but we have seen that a population other and earlier than the Keltic has been inferred from the shape of the skulls, and other phenomena of the Stone period. Now for such a population as this, Jutland or Sleswick has been considered the more likely locality, since the skulls in question have been compared to those of the Laplanders and Finns; and, if this be true, the further north we carry the home of the British aborigines, the less we find it necessary to bring the Finn or Lap families southward. This reasoning is valid if the original fact of any pre-Keltic population be true. Those, however, who doubt the premises, have no need to refine upon the current notion of Gaul being the original home of the Britons. Gaul, then, is the ground from which we take our view of the great Keltic division of the human species in its integrity; for, hitherto, we have seen but the western offsets of it.
That the country between the Seine and Garonne, corresponding with the provinces of[60] Normandy, Brittany, Maine, Anjou, Poitiers, the Isle of France, and the Orleannois, was Keltic, has never been doubted. The evidence of Cæsar is express; and there is neither objection nor cavil to set against it. There it is, where, at the present moment, the Keltic Breton of Brittany continues to be the language of the common people.
The central and south-eastern parts of France—the Nivernois, Burgundy, the Bourbonnois, the Lionnois, Auvergne, Dauphiny, Languedoc, Savoy, and Provence—were chiefly Keltic. Perhaps they were wholly so; but as the Ligurians of Italy, and Iberians of Spain are expressly stated to have met on the lower Rhone, it is best to qualify this assertion. At the same time, good reasons can be given for considering that the Ligurians were but little different from the other Gauls.
South of the Garonne the ancient population was Iberic.
Switzerland, or the ancient Helvetia, was Keltic, and beyond Switzerland, along the banks of the Danube, and in the fertile plains of Northern Italy, intrusive and conquering Kelts were extended as far east as Styria, and as far south as Etruria; but these were offsets from the main body of the stock, whose true area was Gaul and the British isles.[61]