Page 333, line 3, for “North Wales” read “part of South Wales”.
CHAPTER I.
THE PREHISTORIC FOREWORLD.
The history of England if we wish to take it in its narrowest sense begins with the migrations of the Angles, Jutes and Saxons in the fifth century after Christ. Yet, remembering that we have dwelling close beside us and mingling their blood with ours a gallant little people who own no descent from the Anglo-Saxon invaders, and remembering also how magical was the effect on all the barbarian races, of contact with the all-transmuting civilisation of Rome, we cannot surely leave altogether untold the story of those five centuries during which our country was known to the rest of Europe not as Anglia but as Britannia. Can we absolutely stop even there? It is true that the conscious history of Britain, the history that was written by chroniclers and enshrined in libraries, begins, as do the histories of all the nations of Western Europe, with the day when they came first in contact with the Genius of Rome. But is it possible to avoid trying to peer a little further into the infinite, dim and misty ages that lie beyond that great historic landmark? This is what our teachers of natural science have endeavoured to do on our behalf, labouring with the spade of the excavator and the collected specimens of the comparative anatomist to read a few of those faded pages of the history of Britain which had already been long illegible when Julius Cæsar landed on our shores.
And first we listen to the voice of Geology. After toiling through the all-but eternities of the Primary and Secondary systems of rock-formation, she seems to heave a sigh of relief as she enters the vestibule of the Tertiary system. New heavens and a new earth, an earth not utterly unlike that upon which we now dwell, seem to lie before her, and she names the four vast halls through which she leads her disciples “the Dawn of the New,” “the Less New,” “the More New,” and “the Most New” (Eocene, Miocene, Pliocene and Pleistocene). In the last of these halls, which is represented by a mere line on the geological ground plan, yet which may easily have had a duration of 200,000 years, we at last find our fellow-countryman, the first human inhabitant, as far as we know, of the British Isles. In certain well-known caves on the south coast of Devonshire (Kent’s Cavern and Brixham) there were found some sixty years ago flint implements undoubtedly fashioned by human hands, along with the remains of hyenas and other animals long since extinct in the British Islands, and these were lying under a stalagmite floor which must have taken at least 12,000 years, and may well have taken 100,000 years, for its formation. It was thus conclusively proved that Palæolithic man whose handiwork has been found in many other European countries, especially in the wonderfully interesting caves of Aquitaine, lived also, how many millenniums ago none can say, in the limestone caves of Britain. Besides these dwellers in caves and probably of an even earlier period than they, were the other Palæolithic men who have left abundant traces of their presence in the spear-heads, flints, scrapers and other large stone implements which are often found in the gravel deposits of ancient rivers.
The Old Stone-workers, as this earliest known race of men is called to distinguish them from Neolithic men, their immeasurably remote descendants or representatives, knew, of course, nothing of the use of metals, and generally fashioned their flint implements or their bone needles in a somewhat rough and unworkmanlike manner. They knew nothing of the art of the weaver, and can therefore have had no other clothing than the skins of beasts. Neither did they ever manufacture anything in the nature of pottery; so that shells and the skulls of animals must have been their only drinking cups. But the relics of their primeval feasts show that they were in all probability not cannibals, and the very few Palæolithic skulls which have been preserved show a type decidedly nobler than some of the backward races of the present day. Curiously enough the men who had made so little advance in the homely industries of life had nevertheless a distinct feeling for graphic art. “By far the most noteworthy objects” in the Palæolithic caves “are the fragments of bone, horn, ivory and stone, which exhibit outlined and even shaded sketches of various animals. These engravings have been made with a sharp-pointed implement, and are often wonderfully characteristic representations of the creatures they portray. The figures are sometimes single; in other cases they are drawn in groups. We find representations of a fish, a seal, an ox, an ibex, the red-deer, the great Irish elk or deer, the bison, the horse, the cave-bear, the rein-deer and the mammoth or woolly elephant.”[1]
Whatever may have been the precise relation of the Pleistocene period to the Great Ice Age—a point as to which there is some difference of opinion—it is admitted that at some time or other after that when the hyena howled in the Brixham Cave, and when Palæolithic man left there his rudely worked flint implements, the conditions of life in Northern Europe changed. The Arctic zone invaded the larger part of the Temperate zone, and a great cap of ice covered not only the Scandinavian countries and the greater part of Russia but Ireland, Scotland and England, at least as far south as the valley of the Thames. Now were our chalk hills rounded into smoothness, now were many of our river beds hollowed out, and untidy heaps of “terminal moraine” deposited where the glaciers debouched into the valleys. This dismal change, destructive of all the higher organic life and continuing possibly over a period of thousands of years, makes, in our island at any rate, an impassable barrier between two races of mankind. When the great ice deluge subsided, when the winter-tyrant returned to his true Arctic home, when the oak and the pine began again to appear upon the hills, and flowers like our own bloomed in the valleys, then the Neolithic man, the “New Stone-worker,” came upon the scene and scattered abundant evidences of his presence over the land. From that period—date we cannot call it, for we have no evidence which would justify us in making the roughest approximation to a date—man has been continuously a dweller in this island, Neolithic man at length yielding ground to the immigrant Celt, the Celt to the Saxon, the Saxon to the Dane and the Norman.
At this point Ethnology must intervene and take up the story of the ages which has thus far been told by her sister Geology. Of what race were the men who after the retreat of the great desolating glaciers came to inhabit this our island? We know that on the one hand they were in a decidedly more advanced state of civilisation than their Palæolithic predecessors. Instead of the rough unshapely pyramids of flint which the Old Stone men used for axes and chisels, Neolithic man went on shaping and polishing his implements till scarcely a fault could be found in the symmetry of their curves. He continued, of course, to hunt and fish as his predecessor had done, but he had also some knowledge of agriculture, he was a breeder of cattle and he knew how to weave cloth and to bake pottery. He no longer lived principally in caves, but sometimes in a fairly constructed house, often, for security, built on the edge of a lake. But, strange to say, with all these great advances towards civilisation, he does not seem to have felt any of that passion for picture-drawing which distinguished his predecessor “the artistic hunter of the Reindeer period”.[2] The physiological characteristics which differentiate Neolithic man from the Celt, his conqueror, will be more fully dwelt on when we come to the next act in the drama; but meanwhile it may be stated that the race was not a tall one. Professor Rolleston says: “I have never found the stature to exceed 5 feet 9 inches in any skeleton from a barrow which was undoubtedly of the ‘stone and bone’ [i.e., Neolithic] period”. There is some reason to think that they were dark complexioned with black and curly hair, but it must be admitted that the evidence for this statement is not very conclusive.
On the whole Ethnology decides that these earliest inhabitants of our island after the Great Ice Age were a non-Aryan race, strangers therefore to that great and widely scattered family to which, as far as language is concerned, all the great European peoples save the Turks, the Hungarians and the Finns, ultimately belong. Of course since no vestige of language survives to indicate their nationality, even this universally accepted classification, or rather refusal to classify, must be considered as purely conjectural. In the words of Professor Rolleston: “The race which used stone and bone implements, may, so far as the naturalist’s investigations lead him, have spoken either a Turanian or an Aryan tongue: what he sees in their skulls and their surroundings impresses him with the notion of an antiquity which may have given time enough and to spare for the more or less complete disappearance of more than one unwritten language”. The important fact to lay hold of is that the whole of the long period of Stone-workers in this country is pre-Celtic. Any name which we may for purposes of convenience give to these aborigines of Britain, whether the now nearly discarded word Turanians, to mark their exclusion from the Aryan family; or Iberians, to indicate a possible connexion with the mysterious Basques of the Pyrenees; or Silurians, in order to show a possible survival of their type in the countrymen of Caractacus; is only like an algebraical symbol, a label affixed to a locked box, denoting our ignorance of its contents.
Perhaps the most important fact known in connexion with the Neolithic inhabitants of Britain is that recent discoveries show that they were the builders of Stonehenge. That a race of men using no implements of iron should have succeeded in rearing those huge blocks into position on the plain of Wiltshire is a stupendous marvel, equalling in its way the erection of the pyramids of Ghizeh, the placing of the great stones in the temple at Baalbek, or the superposition of the 300-ton block of Istrian marble on the tomb of Theodoric, at Ravenna. This discovery seems to throw some doubt on the generally received notion that Stonehenge was connected with Druidical worship, since that was probably of Celtic origin. It is possible that Stonehenge may be the “magnificent circular temple to Apollo” which, according to Diodorus Siculus, existed in an island which may be identified with Britain.
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