Ancient Britain and the Invasions of Julius Caesar

by T. Rice Holmes

The couvade.

Folk-lore societies have collected countless instances of beliefs or customs preserved by the lower classes of modern nations, many of which are certainly of very remote origin, although it is generally impossible to say where they originated, or whether they belonged to this or that people of antiquity. But there is evidence that one custom which appears utterly meaningless to those who have not inquired its original meaning, which is retained by peoples who have long forgotten what that meaning was, but which with others is still or was in comparatively recent times not merely a survival but a reality, existed among our neolithic ancestors. Every one has heard of the couvade, or hatching, which ordains that when a child is born the father should take to his bed, and there remain for days or weeks after the mother has resumed her ordinary mode of life. We learn from Greek writers that it prevailed among the ancient Corsicans,[350] the Tibareni of Pontus in Asia Minor,[351] and the Iberians of Northern Spain;[352] and with various modifications it exists or has existed among the Basques and the Caribs of the West Indies, in South America, California, Greenland, West Africa, Southern India, the Indian archipelago, and Eastern Asia. It originated in a belief that the real parent was the father, and that between him and his child there was a physical union so intimate that unless he rested and were nursed and abstained from ordinary food, his child would suffer. But this belief was not primitive. Matriarchy, it would seem, was the root of family life: descent was reckoned through the mother, for the father was often unknown. It has been conjectured that when paternal relationship began to be acknowledged, fathers felt the need of insisting upon their rights, and that accordingly a parody of lying-in gradually became a custom.[353] An Irish legend shows that the couvade survived in Ulster into the Christian era;[354] and a few years ago a similar custom was observed in a remote district of Yorkshire.[355] Although the peoples who have retained the couvade in modern times, like those among whom its existence was noted by ancient writers, are, with hardly an exception, neither of Aryan nor of Semitic origin, it is perhaps conceivable that it may have been brought into the British Isles in post-neolithic times by invaders who had accepted it from races whom they had subdued; but it is far more probable that it was a widespread custom of the Neolithic Age belonging to tribes of the Mediterranean race, to which the neolithic Britons, as well as the Iberians and Corsicans, belonged.[356]

Hill-forts.

Although the neolithic tribes of Britain had common customs and superstitions,[357] and were, for the most part, sprung from one stock, they were not of course a nation. Arriving in successive hordes, and settling wherever they could find room, they were separated by mountain, stream, forest, and morass, as well as by the lack of horses, vehicles, and roads. But as their numbers multiplied and it became more and more difficult to find sufficient food, the struggle for life must have led to intertribal war, and men’s minds must have been exercised to improve their weapons and to fortify their settlements and cattle-pounds not only against the wolves, which they had ever with them, but also against depredation. Every one who knows the South Downs and the hilly districts of the midlands, the west, and the north, has noticed the camps and earthworks which crown almost every height; but, as we have already seen, there are only a few of these entrenchments of which the period of construction is known, although we have abundant evidence that many have been occupied by successive races or in successive stages of culture. Almost all of them have been superficially explored, and implements of neolithic form have been found in many; but the reader knows that such implements were used in the Bronze Age and in the Iron Age even in those parts of the country where bronze and iron were common. If stone tools were found in the original body of a rampart or beneath the silt in a trench, without any objects of metal or any such tools or pottery as were characteristic of the Bronze Age or of later times, it might fairly be presumed that the people who built the camp were in their neolithic stage.[358] Except the camps that are known to be Roman, and others which have been proved by excavation to be Norman, most of those that have been thoroughly explored were evidently constructed after the art of metal-working had become known; and this is also true of those that have been scientifically examined in France.[359] There are, however, not a few British strongholds for which neolithic age has been claimed, though perhaps in some instances on insufficient grounds. Thus it has been asserted that Whit Tor camp on Dartmoor has yielded ample evidence of neolithic origin;[360] but all the excavations of hut-circles, kistvaens, and barrows that have been made on Dartmoor tend to show that it was not occupied before the Bronze Age.[361] A few of the pits which abound in the hill-fort of Eggardun in Dorsetshire have been explored; and it is said that one of them contained ‘typical neolithic pottery’.[362] But, in the absence of an exact description of the vessels, such an argument is unsatisfactory, although it might have some weight if they resembled the coarse unornamented bowls which were found in the long barrow of North Bavant in Wiltshire[363] or the neolithic bowls of the Scottish chambered cairns.[364] Still there are entrenchments, such as Chanctonbury Rings,[365] on the downs some six miles north of Worthing, Beltout,[366] within which stands the Beachy Head lighthouse, the Maiden Bower camp near Dunstable,[367] and some on the Surrey Hills,[368] in and around which flint implements have been found in such profusion that they may be provisionally referred to the Neolithic Age.[369] Even Cissbury camp, which contained numerous relics of the Early Iron Age, may have been constructed in the age of stone: a single cutting, only eleven yards long, revealed numerous worked flints lying, without pottery or metal, on the chalk bottom; and Pitt-Rivers suggested that the entrenchment might have been made for the protection of the mines.[370] It is true that no bronze implement was found, from which it might be argued that the camp was not constructed before the Iron Age: but, for aught that we can tell, bronze may still be lying beneath the soil; for the cost of excavating the whole camp, without which it is impossible to prove the negative, would be enormous. Certain small entrenchments in Franche-Comté were unquestionably constructed in neolithic times;[371] and it may be safely said that in an age when life and property were so insecure every isolated settlement must have been in some way fortified. Many of the entrenchments on the South Downs are, however, so slight that they could only have protected flocks and herds against wolves; and this may also have been the purpose of the thickset hedge, undoubtedly of prehistoric origin, that marks the line along which the downs were bounded by the Wealden Forest.[372]

Primitive writing.

Although the historian who endeavours to press archaeology into his service is struck by the general similarity in material culture between the peoples of different lands, and is sometimes inclined, overlooking the differences in detail, to think that in describing one he would be describing all, he presently remembers that if historical records were to be destroyed, much the same state of things would confront the archaeologist of the remote future; and in his own researches he meets with differences which lead him to believe that in every land the first beginnings of a national culture and of a national character were already being evolved. In this country or in that significant relics are discovered of which in others there is not a trace. One of the more sensational discoveries of recent years may set us wondering whether in prehistoric Britain vestiges of primitive writing will ever come to light. Many people have heard vaguely of the painted pebbles and the frescoes of Mas d’Azil and the other caverns in the Western Pyrenees which the veteran archaeologist, Edouard Piette, has for many years diligently searched. On one of the objects found in the cavern of Lorthet—a spirited engraving on reindeer-horn representing reindeer and salmon—are to be seen two small lozenges, each enclosing a central line: ‘justly proud of his work,’ says Monsieur Piette, ‘the artist has appended his signature.’[373] Be this as it may, other explorers have exhumed from the Placard cave at Rochebertier and the caves of La Madelaine and Mas d’Azil antlers incised with signs which exactly resemble various Greek and Phoenician letters, and may be compared with signs that have been found in an island of the Pacific. These signs are not letters but symbols: they are not combined in such a way as to form words or inscriptions.[374] But, says Monsieur Piette, being symbols, they do constitute a kind of primitive writing.[375] True writing is, however, evident on a potsherd taken from a neolithic settlement at Los Murciélagos in Portugal.[376] If this fragment could itself be proved to be of neolithic age, it would follow that in that remote time the art of writing was already known to at least one branch of the Mediterranean stock. But not a trace of writing, not even one of the alphabetiform symbols which were so widespread in the Pyrenees even in the late Palaeolithic Age, has yet been found in any prehistoric deposit in this island.

Sepulture: barrows and cairns.

So far we have been trying to piece together an account of the life of neolithic man. But it is of the last scene of all that the vestiges which he has left behind are most unmistakable. His sepulchres have been thoroughly and scientifically explored. Moreover, it is from them that much of the knowledge which we possess of his daily life has been gleaned. They afford evidence about his political and social organization, his religion, and his customs; and when we have examined them we shall be able to form a more vivid idea of the way in which he lived.

We have seen that the dead were sometimes buried in caves wherein they or their forefathers had dwelled;[377] and the humbler folk who had not the means of erecting sepulchral monuments must have dug graves of which no apparent trace remains; but the funerals that have told their own tale were those of chieftains, their families, and perhaps their favourite slaves, who were buried beneath mounds which, in divers forms, are found all over the world.[378] Savage communities indeed are commonly ruled by councils of elders; but in the period when the neolithic barrows were being erected the Britons had certainly passed beyond this stage. The means by which the revolution was effected were probably various. If the most adroit magician in a community of which every member practised magic may sometimes by force of character have made himself a chief,[379] it is certain that when property accumulated and group began to prey upon group, the instinct of self-preservation must have led men to submit to the rule of him who was marked out as the fittest to command in war.[380] Those who love to look for the places in this land that are hallowed by their associations with an older world may have seen the long barrows which are conspicuous on the hills that command Salisbury Plain and on other western heights, the chambered cairns of Scotland, and the dolmens of Cornwall and Wales. These sepulchres are far rarer than those of the Bronze Age, not more than sixty having been counted in Wiltshire, where they are most numerous, while the round barrows of the same county number nearly two thousand;[381] and the area of their distribution is far less extensive. In Gloucestershire, Somersetshire, and Dorsetshire they are not uncommon; a few are to be seen in the East Riding of Yorkshire; and Kent, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Durham, Cumberland, and Westmorland have each one.[382] Chambered cairns which are related to chambered long barrows are found near St. Asaph and in Caithness;[383] and other chambered cairns and chambered round barrows, which belong to the latest period of the Stone Age or to a time of transition, exist in Orkney, Inverness-shire, Argyllshire and some of the adjoining islands, the Holm of Papa Westray, Derbyshire, Wales, Cornwall and the Scilly Isles, and the islands of the Channel.[384]

The materials of which these monuments are composed vary of course according to the nature of the country in which they were erected. Stone was used where it was abundant, and earth or rubble where stone was not to be obtained. The significance of the barrows lies not in their substance but in their form; but it is probable that the absence of chambered barrows in South Wiltshire and Dorsetshire, where unchambered ones are common, is due simply to lack of the necessary stones.[385] The eminent Swedish archaeologist, Nilsson, argued that the ‘passage-graves’, or chambered barrows, of Scandinavia were designed on the model of subterranean dwellings; but the little evidence that remains tends to show that no such analogy existed here; and the Eskimos and Lapps, whose dwellings Nilsson had in view, bury their dead in tombs of a different kind.[386] Antiquaries who have had experience in opening chambered and unchambered barrows consider that the two classes were erected in the same period;[387] and the nature of the interments, as we shall presently see, justifies this conclusion.