Ancient Britain and the Invasions of Julius Caesar

by T. Rice Holmes

Now I would ask geologists whether it is not dangerous to strive after chronological precision in geological inquiries by reasoning which assumes that nature worked during a long period of remote time at a uniform rate of speed. The calculations by which Sir Archibald Geikie laboured years ago to estimate the time which the Thames occupied in excavating its valley,[2370] the calculations which geologists have made as to the time required for the deposition of the layers of stalagmite in caves,[2371] have been proved to be futile. This much at all events is certain: if Mr. Reid’s calculation is accurate, it stultifies the testimony of the ancient authors to whom he appeals.

For I would ask Mr. Reid how he proposes to reconcile his own statement, ‘that the ancient writers can be literally depended on,’ with the assumption, which he admits that he is compelled to make in order to show ‘the perfect consistency of the accounts’, that ‘Mictis and Ictis were the same island as Vectis’. Is he not aware that in Pliny’s Natural History[2372] [M]ictis and Vectis are distinguished? If he had studied Müllenhoff’s great work, he would not have attempted to reconcile Pliny’s account of the six days’ voyage to [M]ictis with Diodorus’s account, which ‘mentions only the causeway to Ictis’, by assuming that the writer whom Diodorus followed lived two centuries later than Timaeus. For Diodorus’s account was not, as Mr. Reid fancies, based upon Posidonius; he also, like Pliny, derived his information immediately from Timaeus, ultimately from Pytheas. Not less hopeless is Mr. Reid’s attempt to explain Pliny’s account of the voyage to [M]ictis. How could the Isle of Wight be described as ‘distant inwards from Britain six days’ voyage’? Because, says Mr. Reid, ‘the Isle of Wight and more easterly parts of the south of England were politically part of Gaul perhaps even at that early date [300 B.C.]; the tin-producing “Britain” was apparently outside the dominion of the Belgae, and must have been Devon and Cornwall.’ This argument rests upon a doubtful ‘perhaps’, an obscure ‘apparently’, a desperate ‘must have been’, and the baseless assumption that the Belgae had established dominion in Britain in the time of Pytheas: it leaves the word ‘inwards’ unexplained; and it is pulverized by the mere fact that in the very chapter from which Mr. Reid is quoting and everywhere else Pliny uses the word Britain not in the sense of ‘Devon and Cornwall’, but simply in the sense of Britain. To any man who is not obliged to distort the plain meaning of words it is clear that, from Pliny’s point of view, Ictis was six days’ sail from Britain, and that by ‘inwards’ he meant, speaking from the standpoint of an Italian, ‘northward.’ Thus London might be intelligibly described as fifty-two miles ‘inwards’ from Brighton; but to say that Brighton is a day’s sail ‘inwards’ from Portsmouth would be gibberish. As Müllenhoff has pointed out, Pliny confounded the distance of Ictis from Britain with that of Thule.[2373]

Enough of Mr. Reid’s attempt to reconcile the irreconcilable. Like Professor Ridgeway, he does not explain why men of business preferred to pay the cost of the long voyage from the Isle of Wight to the mouth of the Loire, when they need only have paid for the shorter voyage from Cornwall, or why they chose to saddle themselves with the cost of the overland transport from Cornwall to Hampshire. Nor does he explain why this imaginary and expensive overland transport was substituted for the imaginary coasting voyage. Nor again does he explain how wagons, loaded with tin (for Diodorus does not speak of pack-horses except in connexion with the journey across Gaul), were able to travel two hundred miles along unmetalled trackways. The rate at which they crawled, the numerous breaks down, the curses of the drivers, and the wear and tear of the cattle I leave to Mr. Reid’s imagination. The eminent archaeologist, Mr. C. H. Read, who accepts Mr. Reid’s conclusions, assures us that a voyage from St. Michael’s Mount to the mouth of the Loire is not to be thought of, for it would have involved a ‘long and dangerous sea passage’.[2374] Is he serious? This long sea passage was far shorter than the passage from the Isle of Wight: why it was more dangerous than a passage which involved navigation in the neighbourhood of the Channel Islands as well as of Ushant no seaman will be able to understand. The passage which seems so terrible to Mr. Read was made by Pytheas.[2375] The passage from Italy to Sardinia was longer: several times longer was the passage from Britain to Iceland, which was made long before the invention of the compass;[2376] as long or longer the passage from Scandinavia to Britain, which was made, according to Mr. Read himself,[2377] in the Bronze Age. That the Veneti should have been quite willing to sail from the Isle of Wight to the Loire, but so afraid of sailing in their stout ships from Cornwall that they deliberately added more than a hundred miles to the length of their voyage, is a mystery which Mr. Read must be left to explain.

But Mr. Reid, in the conversation which passed between us, urged reasons in favour of his theory which are omitted in his paper and to which I shall endeavour to do justice. Archaeological evidence, he remarked, shows that the people of Cornwall were far more uncivilized than those of Hampshire: even supposing that St. Michael’s Mount was an island, it had no real harbour; and it would have been very dangerous for mariners to attempt to get there especially in a fog or a south-westerly gale. I reply that it would also have been dangerous in such weather to attempt to fetch the coast of the Isle of Wight, as the ship would have incurred the risk of running a-tilt against the limestone causeway; that in a fog the skipper would have anchored; and that, notwithstanding the lack of a proper harbour, the ship would have lain snugly in sheltered water under the lee of St. Michael’s Mount. The comparative barbarism of the people of Cornwall is irrelevant: as they wanted to sell their tin, there was no danger that they would molest their customers. Besides, Mr. Reid seems to forget that the people who produced the tin delivered it to the traders at Ictis. The traders transacted business directly with them; and, assuming that Ictis was the Isle of Wight, they were as barbarous when they had crossed the limestone causeway as they had been when they left the tin mines. Mr. Reid’s argument compels him once more to throw overboard the ancient authority, who, as he insists, ‘can be literally depended on’; for Diodorus distinctly states that the tin-mining inhabitants of Belerium were friendly to strangers, and from their intercourse with foreign merchants had become comparatively civilized.[2378] This passage proves that, according to Diodorus, Ictis was in the territory of Belerium, and by itself demolishes Mr. Reid’s theory. For how could the inhabitants have become civilized by their commercial dealings if the merchants never came near Belerium, and the only inhabitants who came in contact with them were wagoners or boatmen?

It is clear then that the case for the Isle of Wight rests upon the geological evidence, such as it is, that at the time when Ictis was a trading station, St. Michael’s Mount was ‘an isolated rock rising out of a swampy wood’. Common sense and the historical evidence are all on the other side. If St. Michael’s Mount had not been available, there would have been nothing to prevent the traders from shipping the tin at Falmouth or in Plymouth Sound; and acceptance of Mr. Reid’s theory involves, besides other insuperable difficulties, the assumption that the tin-merchants were ignorant of the first principles of business.

III. We now come to the question, When did the overland trade in tin between Corbilo and Massilia begin, and how long did it last? That it existed before the time of Pytheas—that is to say, at least as early as the fourth century before Christ—is certain;[2379] for, as we have seen, Pliny and Diodorus Siculus derived their information about Ictis ultimately from him.[2380] Müllenhoff,[2381] indeed, contends for a still earlier date. Only on this hypothesis, he argues, can we explain the remarkable fact that the great Celtic immigration at the beginning of the fourth century B.C. not only did no harm to Massilia but actually increased its prosperity, the profits of the trade being appreciated by the Celts themselves. Still, there is no evidence that it existed (except in the form of intertribal barter) before the foundation of Massilia, or even that it had begun long before Pytheas visited Britain.

Professor Ridgeway insists that it is ‘obvious that when the Belgic tribes ... made permanent settlements on the south-east coast of Britain, the course of trade would pass regularly from Kent into Northern France, and that the old route by Armorica, Corbilo, and the Loire would fall into disuse’.[2382] If anything is ‘obvious’, it is that the course of trade would continue to follow the most convenient route, and that merchants would not saddle themselves with the expense of conveying tin, destined for Mediterranean markets, all the way from Cornwall to Kent. Besides, how was it to be conveyed thither? Certainly not by land; for Professor Ridgeway tells us himself that the barrier interposed by the great forest of Anderida would have rendered this impossible.[2383] Certainly not by sea; for, unless the merchants had taken leave of their senses, why should they have paid for the voyage from Cornwall to Kent, then for the voyage from Kent to Boulogne, and then for the long overland journey to Marseilles, when, by taking the route which led from St. Michael’s Mount to the mouth of the Loire, both the voyage and the land journey would have been considerably shortened? If Caesar does not expressly mention Corbilo, neither does he expressly mention any other commercial port; and he does imply that the Veneti had the lion’s share of the carrying trade with Britain.[2384] Possibly Corbilo had lost its importance by the time of Caesar; but the estuary of the Loire still formed one of the two most important harbours in the west of Gaul, and Strabo mentions it as one of the four principal Gallic ports from which ships bound for Britain set sail.[2385] The argument based upon the fact that the overland journey lasted thirty days implies that the merchants would have deliberately preferred a longer to a shorter route; and as the distance from the mouth of the Loire to Massilia was about four hundred and eighty miles in a straight line, it does not seem incredible that the journey should have lasted thirty days. But what puzzles me most in Professor Ridgeway’s argument is that, while it is partly based upon the testimony of Diodorus, it sets that testimony at defiance. The professor holds that the authority whom Diodorus followed was Posidonius. If so, Posidonius stated that in his time British tin was shipped for the Continent at Ictis. Now Professor Ridgeway identifies Ictis with the Isle of Wight. I have shown that Ictis was St. Michael’s Mount. But, according to Professor Ridgeway, British tin was shipped, in the time of Posidonius, neither at the Isle of Wight, nor at St. Michael’s Mount, but in Kent.[2386] The train of thought which led to this conclusion is one which my poor brain is powerless to follow.[2387]

Professor Haverfield[2388] affirms that the Roman annexation of Gallia Narbonensis ‘secured that trade route by which Diodorus Siculus tells us that British tin reached the Mediterranean, that is the route from Narbo by the “pass of Carcassonne” and Toulouse to Bordeaux’; but I cannot find any evidence that this was the route to which Diodorus referred.

Professor Rhys[2389] has constructed a theory about the course of the tin trade during the maritime supremacy of the Veneti which is even more remarkable than that of Professor Ridgeway. He tells us that ‘at one time they probably landed British tin at the mouth of [the Loire] ... and they fetched some of it at any rate from the south-east of Britain’. In other words, the tin was conveyed at heavy cost by the Britons three hundred miles from Cornwall to the south-east of Britain, in order that the Veneti might add at least two hundred miles to the voyage which they would have undertaken if they had fetched it direct from Cornwall; and this was done although, as Professor Rhys himself assures us, there was ‘communication between the Dumnonii [of Cornwall] and the nearest part of Gaul during the Venetic period’. The professor adds that ‘whatever direct trade in tin there may have been between the tin districts of Britain and the Loire, it must have been utterly unknown to Caesar’. I reply that if, as Professor Rhys holds, there was trade in tin by way of South-Eastern Britain between the tin districts of Britain and the Loire, this trade also must, on Professor Rhys’s theory, have been unknown to Caesar, for he mentions neither the one nor the other; but that the voyage which Crassus made to the tin-producing districts of Cornwall, and about which Caesar is equally silent, shows that Caesar was not ignorant, but merely reticent.

But Professor Ridgeway would assign a different reason for Caesar’s silence. Remarking that ‘when Strabo, writing as a contemporary, is describing the exports from Britain, he omits the mention of tin, whilst from the extract from Posidonius, quoted alike by him and Diodorus, it is plain that when the Stoic explorer visited North-Western Europe, the British tin trade was still of importance’, the professor suggests that in the time of Caesar Britain ceased to export tin.[2390] But did not Strabo write long after Caesar died? Professor Haverfield, on the other hand, has given reasons for the view that ‘the early Cornish tin trade, which Posidonius and Caesar knew, died out about the beginning of our era’; and he suggests that it may have done so because the Romans had just discovered ‘the real site of the Cassiterides in N. W. Spain’.[2391] ‘Very little,’ he remarks, ‘has been found west of Exeter which can be connected with the first two centuries of the Roman Empire.... Plainly the Romans of the conquest period did not care to advance beyond Exeter.... Yet if the tin trade had then been flourishing they would hardly have stopped. We must put the halt at Exeter beside the silence of the writers after Caesar, and suppose that for some reason the tin trade had ceased in Cornwall. Perhaps as iron took the place of bronze in many lands tin was no longer in such demand; perhaps the Spanish ore was cheaper than the Cornish; perhaps the accessible Cornish tin streams seemed exhausted. Whatever the reason, the Cornish tin trade vanished before A.D. 50. It reappears two centuries later.’[2392]