Ancient Britain and the Invasions of Julius Caesar

by T. Rice Holmes

The Druids.

It would be interesting to learn whether any Celtic prophet, like the great preachers of India and Palestine, taught that mercy is better than sacrifice. If we may trust Diogenes Laertius,[1228] the Druids bade their disciples not only to fear the gods, but to do no wrong and to quit themselves like men. At all events the study of Celtic religion is inseparable from that of Druidism.

Where did Druidism originate? Caesar, in a well-known passage, remarks that it was believed to have arisen in Britain and to have been imported thence into Gaul;[1229] and some scholars accept this tradition as literally true. The earliest extant mention of Druids[1230] was made about the commencement of the second century before Christ,—not long after the Belgic conquest of Britain began; and it has been supposed that the conquerors found Druidism flourishing there, and made it known in the land from which they had set out. But the Belgae were not the first Celtic conquerors of Britain; and it is reasonable to suppose that if Druidism was of British origin, it would have been imported into Gaul long before. The common view is that on both sides of the Channel it originated among the neolithic population; and Caesar’s words are sometimes explained in the sense that in his time it was more vigorous in Britain than in Gaul, and that Gallic Druids therefore travelled to Britain in order to be initiated into its mysteries. At all events it is not unreasonable to believe that the Celts learned it from some non-Aryan people; for there is nothing to show that the Gauls whom the Romans first encountered had ever heard of it. The Germans, with whom the Celts were long in contact in Central Europe and to whom they were ethnically akin, had no Druids;[1231] and although it may be true that the intense devotion to religious observances which Caesar remarked among the mixed population of Gaul[1232] did not exceed that of other barbarians,[1233] it appeared to him to contrast sharply with the temper of the peoples beyond the Rhine.[1234] This spirit led them to connect religion with every act of life: in the chase,[1235] in all the operations of war, after victory or defeat, before undertaking an expedition, in selecting the site of a town, the gods were regularly invoked:[1236] there was no distinction between the sacred and the profane; or rather, nothing was profane. The contrast which Caesar observed supports the theory of the non-Aryan origin of Druidism.

But was Druidism in Britain universal? The leading Celtic scholar of this country insists that there is no evidence that Druidism was ever the religion of any Brythonic people;[1237] and since he assigns almost the whole of Britain south of the firths of Forth and Clyde to the Brythons, he appears to restrict the area of Druidism to a narrow western fringe. This hardly accords with Caesar’s statement that Britain was the stronghold of Druidism. Moreover, when Caesar tells us that the Druids were the religious aristocracy of the Gauls, he plainly gives us to understand that Druidism was common to all the peoples who lived between the Seine and the Garonne; and it is certain that among many if not most of these peoples the Gallo-Brythonic element was predominant. Indeed, although it is commonly assumed that the Belgae had no Druids, there is absolutely no ground for the assumption. Caesar often used the word Galli in a wider sense, including the Belgae; and it is not improbable that when he was describing the manners and customs of the Gauls and Druidism, which was their most remarkable institution, he intended his description to apply to the Belgae as well.[1238] Moreover, the very writer who denies that the Brythons had Druids tells us that Druidism was the religion of the British aborigines and was borrowed from them by the British Goidels; and it is certain that both the aborigines and the Goidels (if they had already reached Britain) survived in considerable numbers in the territory which the Brythons conquered.[1239] It is clear therefore that Druidism persisted within the Brythonic area; and that the Brythons held aloof from it is a groundless guess.[1240]

But concerning Druidism as it existed in Britain we have no special information, except the passage in which Tacitus[1241] speaks of the cruel rites practised by the Druids of Anglesey. Caesar described Druidism once for all;[1242] and since he says that British Druidism was the model and the standard of the Gallic Druids, we can only infer that his description applied in many respects to Britain as well as to Gaul. There the Druids formed a corporation, admission to which was eagerly sought: they jealously guarded the secrecy of their lore; and full membership was only obtainable after a long novitiate. They were ruled by a pope, who held office for life; and sometimes the succession to this dignity was disputed by force of arms. They were exempt from taxation and from service in war. They had, as the priests of a rude society always have, a monopoly of learning. The ignorance and superstition of the populace, their own organization and submission to one head, gave them a tremendous power. The doctrine which they most strenuously inculcated (if Caesar was not misinformed) was the transmigration of souls. ‘This doctrine,’ he said, ‘they regard as the most potent incentive to valour, because it inspires a contempt for death.’[1243] They claimed the right of deciding questions of peace and war. Among the Aedui, if not among other peoples, at all events in certain circumstances, they exercised the right of appointing the chief magistrate.[1244] They laid hands on criminals and, in their default, even on the innocent, imprisoned them in monstrous idols of wickerwork, and burned them alive as an offering to the gods. They immolated captives in order to discover the divine will in the flow of their blood or their palpitating entrails;[1245] they lent their ministrations to men prostrated by sickness or going forth to battle, who trusted that heaven would spare their lives if human victims were offered in their stead; and one form of human sacrifice which they appear to have countenanced—the slaughter of a child at the foundation of a monument, a fortress, or a bridge—has left many traces in European folk-lore and been practised in Africa, Asia, and Polynesia in modern times.[1246] They practically monopolized both the civil and the criminal jurisdiction;[1247] and if this jurisdiction was irregular, if they had no legal power of enforcing their judgements, they were none the less obeyed. Primitive states did not originally take cognizance of offences committed against individuals, which were avenged by their kin; and when they began to intervene they did so at the request of the injured party or his surviving relatives. What was peculiar to the Celts was that this intervention was exercised by the priests;[1248] and doubtless the outlaws who, as Caesar says,[1249] abounded in Gaul were criminals whom they had banished. Every year they met to dispense civil justice in the great plain above which now soar the spires of Chartres cathedral.[1250] Those who disregarded their decrees were excommunicated; and excommunication meant exclusion from the civil community as well as from communion in religious rites.

Did the Druids owe their conception of immortality, as Diodorus Siculus[1251] and Timagenes[1252] imply, to the influence of Pythagoras? The testimony of these writers has been contemptuously rejected:[1253] but it seems not improbable that Druidism may have absorbed tenets of Pythagorean origin through the medium of the Greeks of Massilia;[1254] and this conjecture gains some support from numismatic evidence. A British uninscribed gold coin, found at Reculver, bears on its reverse side the figure, formed by five interlacing lines, which is known as the pentagram and was a well-known Pythagorean symbol.[1255] It would seem, however, that if metempsychosis was really a Druidical doctrine, it had no firm hold upon the Celts in general; and their sepulchral customs were not consistent with it. Their notion of a future life, like that of the Bronze Age, was a form of the ‘Continuance Theory’, which has had so many adherents both in primitive and modern tribes.[1256] They believed that there was an Elysium somewhere in the west, where they were to live again, feasting, carousing, and duelling, a life like that which they had lived before, but free from care.[1257] If the Druids, as Caesar said, taught that souls passed ‘from one person to another’, they meant perhaps that after death the soul entered a new body,—the ethereal counterpart of that which it had left behind. The immortality of the soul was an idea, more or less vague, common to many peoples: for the Celts the Druids made it an article of faith. Nor indeed are we precluded from supposing that some of them may have conceived or borrowed from a classic source the doctrine of future retribution. But what that theory was which, as Caesar says[1258], the Druids inculcated in regard to the origin of the universe and the nature and motion of the heavenly bodies, it is useless to inquire[1259]. We only know that, as they traced the descent of the Gauls back to Dis Pater, they regarded night as older than day, and reckoned time by nights; and that, in common with all the peoples of antiquity, they computed their years by the revolutions of the moon[1260]. The statements of Caesar and Pliny are supplemented by a calendar, engraved on bronze, which was discovered towards the end of the last century at Coligny in the department of the Ain[1261]. It has its lucky and unlucky days; certain days would be regarded as suitable for sacrifices as well as for other functions[1262]; and the regulation of these important matters would certainly have been retained by the Druids. It has been said, perhaps in reliance upon a mistranslation of the word dryas or druias, that Druidesses taught side by side with Druids[1263]: at all events Boadicea sought to divine the issue of her campaign by observing the movements of a hare, besought the gods to bless her enterprise, and after her success offered female captives to Andate, the goddess of victory;[1264] and her joint exercise of royal and priestly functions seems to give colour to the suggestion that in primitive times Celtic kings may also have been priests.[1265] Cicero[1266] indeed relates that the Galatian King, Deiotarus, was the most skilful augur of his country. But the facts of historical import which stand out as certain are these. Like the Brahmans, who, so long as their authority is acknowledged, recognize, but regulate, the Protean manifestations of Hindu religious fancy,[1267] the Druids kept control over the manifold forms of aboriginal and Celtic worship. Being a sacerdotal caste, not, like the priests of Rome, popularly elected, but self-constituted and self-contained, they were naturally opposed to all innovation. It has been said that ancient writers regarded as peculiar to the Druids beliefs and practices which were common to them and other priests of antiquity. Certainly human sacrifice was not peculiar to the Celts: the ceremony of cutting the mysterious mistletoe was German as well as Druidical;[1268] and as the Druid sacrificed white bulls before he ascended the sacred oak,[1269] so did the Latin priest in the grove which was the holy place of Jupiter.[1270] But while every ancient people had its priests, the Druids alone were a veritable clergy.[1271] Celtic religion, in so far as it had the same ancestry as that of Rome, would easily harmonize with it; but Druidism, with its more definite theology, might be expected to counteract this tendency, and would therefore be a danger to Roman dominion.[1272] And it was British Druidism that supported and renovated the Druidism of Gaul, and formed one of the bonds of union between the two Celtic lands.[1273]

Ties between Britons and Gauls.

For, if their material culture was somewhat less advanced, the Britons, at least those of the south-eastern districts, naturally remained connected by the closest ties with the Gauls, and particularly with the Belgae. The Britons of Kent were little less civilized than the Gauls;[1274] and Belgic kings, like William the Conqueror and his descendants, ruled on both sides of the Channel.[1275] Not many years before the period of the Gallic wars, Diviciacus, king of the Suessiones, who governed directly the country round Soissons, had established supremacy not only over a large part of the surrounding Belgic territory but also over Britain;[1276] and during a period which may have coincided with his reign gold coins of certain types were used indifferently in the Belgic districts of Britain and of Gaul, and were doubtless struck for rulers who had possessions in both.[1277] But the power of Diviciacus had ended with him;[1278] and when Caesar came to Gaul, the tribes of South-Eastern Britain were divided into antagonistic groups, headed respectively by the Catuvellauni and the Trinovantes. Cassivellaunus, the king of the Catuvellauni, was the ablest and most aggressive of the British princes of his time; but his opponents were supported, it would seem, by the influence of Commius, a chieftain of the Belgic Atrebates, whose territory comprised adjacent districts of the departments of Pas-de-Calais and Nord, and who were connected with the British tribe of the same name.

How the Britons were affected by Caesar’s campaigns in Gaul.

But, if anything could induce the Britons to forget their differences, it was the news which reached them of Caesar’s movements in Gaul. The events of the first year of his pro-consulship—the overthrow of the Helvetii, who had migrated into Gaul from Switzerland, and the defeat of the German invader, Ariovistus—might not affect their interests: but in the following year, when the Belgae banded together against the Roman conqueror, it was time for them to be on the alert. British adventurers crossed the Straits to assist their kinsmen; and when Caesar shattered the forces of the coalition, the leaders of at least one Belgic tribe fled over sea to escape his vengeance. Late in the autumn of that year or early in the following spring rumours reached the ports of the Channel that Caesar purposed to invade Britain.