Archaic England Part 34

The sovereign On, the ancient Courser "of the blushing purple and the potent number," was mighty _Hu_, whose name New, or _Ancient Yew_, is, I think, perpetuated at Newbury--where _Hew_son is still a family name--at Newington Padox (said to be for _paddocks_) in Warsickshire, at Newington near Wye, in Kent, and possibly at other _New_markets or tons, which are intimately a.s.sociated with horse-racing. With the river Noe in Derbyshire may be connoted Noe, the British form of Noah: The Newburns in Scotland and Northumberland can hardly have been so named because they were novel or new rivers, and in view of the fact that British mythology combined Noah's ark (Welsh _arch_) with a mare, it may be questioned whether the place-name Newark (originally Newarcha), really meant as at present supposed _New Work_.[494] It may be that the Trojan horse story was purely mythological, and had originally relation to the supposition that mankind all emerged from the body of the Solar Horse.

The Kensington Hippodrome was eventually closed down on account of the noise and disorders which arose there, and one may safely a.s.sume there was always a certain amount of _rude_ness and _rowd_iness among the _rout_ at all hippodromes. Had Herr Cissa, the imaginary Saxon to whom the authorities so generously ascribe Cissbury Ring, Chichester, and many other places, been present on some prehistoric Whit Monday, doubtless like any other personage of importance he would have arrived at Kensington seated in a _reidi_--the equivalent of the British _rhod_.

And if further, in accordance with Teutonic wont, Cissa had sneered at the s.h.a.ggy little _keffils_[495] of the British, certainly some keen Icenian[496] would have pointed out that not only was the _keffil_ or _cafall_ a horse of very distinguished antiquity, but that the word _cafall_ reminded him agreeably of the Gaulish _cheval_ and the Iberian _cabal_, both very chivalrous or cavalryous old words suggestive of _valiant_, _valid_, and strong Che or Jou.

Hereupon some young c.o.c.kney would inevitably have uttered the current British byword--

For acuteness and valour the Greeks For excessive pride the Romans _For dulness the creeping Saxons_.[497]

Unless human nature is very changeable Herr Cissa would then have delivered himself somewhat as follows: "It is really coming to this, that we Germans, the people to whose exquisite Kultur the nations of Europe and of America, too, owe the fact that they no longer consist of hordes of ape-like savages roaming their primordial forests, are about to allow ourselves to be dictated to."[498]

Irritated by the allusion to ape-like savages one may surmise that a jockey of Chichestra inquired whether Herr Cissa claimed the river Cuckmere and also Cuckoo- or _Houn_dean-Bottom, the field in which Lewes racecourse stands? He might also have insinuated that the White Horse cut in the downs below _Hinover_[499] in the Cuckmere valley was there long before the inhabitants of _Hanover_ adopted it as a totem, and that the Juxons were just as much ent.i.tled to the sign of the Horse as the Saxons of Saxony, or Sachsen. To this Herr Cissa would have replied that the White Horse at Uffington was a "deplorable abortion," and that its barbaric design was "a slander on the Saxon standard". Hereupon a yokel from Cuckhamsley Hill, near Zizeter, sometimes known as Cirencester, probably inquired with a chuckle whether Herr Cissa claimed every Jugestree, Tree of Justice, Esus Tree, a.s.size or a.s.sembly Tree in the British Islands? He pertinently added that in Cirencester, or Churncester, they were in the habit of celebrating at Harvest Home the festival of the Kernababy, or Maiden, which he always understood represented the Corn baby, elsewhere known as the Ivy Girl, or "Sweet Sis". This youth had a notion that Sweet Sis, or the Lady of the Corn[500] was somehow connected with his native Cirencester, or Zizeter, and he produced a token or coin upon which the well coiffured head of a _chic_ little maiden or fairy queen was portrayed.[501]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 264.--British. From Evans.]

An Icenian charioteer, who explained that his people alternatively termed themselves the _Jugan_tes,[502] also produced a medal which he said had been awarded him at Caistor, pointing out that the spike of Corn was the sign of the Kernababy, that the legend under the hackney read CAC, and that he rather thought the white horse of the Cuckmere valley and also the one by Cuckhamsley were representations of the same c.o.c.k Horse.[503] He added that he had driven straight from Goggeshall in his gig--a kind of _coach_ similar to that in which the living image of his All Highest used of old time to be ceremoniously paraded.

Herr Cissa hereupon maintained that it was impossible for anyone to drive straight anywhere in a gig, for it was an accepted axiom of the science of language that the word gig, "probably of imitative origin,"

meant "to take a wrong direction, to rove at random".[504] At this juncture a venerable _columba_ from St. Columbs, Nottinghill, intervened and produced an authentic Life of the Great St. Columba, wherein is recorded an incident concerning the holy man's journey in a gig without its linch pins. "On that day," he quoted, "there was a great strain on it over long stretches of road," nevertheless "the car in which he was comfortably seated moved forward without mishap on a straight course."[505]

[Ill.u.s.tration: FIG. 265.--Sculptured Stone, Meigle, Perthshire. From _The Life of St. Columba_ (Huyshe, W.).]

In view of this feat, and of an ill.u.s.tration of the type of vehicle in which the journey was supposedly accomplished, it was generally accepted that Herr Cissa's definition of _gig_ was fantastic, whereupon the Saxon, protesting, "You do not care one iota for our gigantic works of Kultur and Science, for our social organisation, for our Genius!"

a.s.serted the dignity of his _gig_ definition by whipping up his horses, taking a wrong direction, and roving at random from the enclosure.

FOOTNOTES:

[400] With Ecne may be connoted _ech_, the Irish for _horse_.

[401] _Irish Myth. Cycle_, p. 82.

[402] _Germania_, x.

[403] "The senses of the horse are acute though many animals excel it in this respect, but its faculties of observation and memory are both very highly developed. A place once visited or a road once traversed seems never to be forgotten, and many are the cases in which men have owed life and safety to these faculties in their beasts of burden. Even when untrained it is very intelligent: horses left out in winter will sc.r.a.pe away the snow to get at the vegetation beneath it, which cattle are never observed to do."--Chambers's _Encyclopaedia_, v., 792.

[404] Bayley, H., _The Lost Language of Symbolism_, vol. ii. _Cf._ chapter, "The White Horse".

[405] _Nauticaa Mediterranea_, Rome, 1601.

[406] Brock, M., _The Cross: Heathen and Christian_, p. 64.

[407] "The oak, tallest and fairest of the wood, was the symbol of Jupiter. The manner in which the princ.i.p.al tree in the grove was consecrated and ordained to be the symbol of Jupiter was as follows: The Druids, with the general consent of the whole order, and all the neighbourhood pitched upon the most beautiful tree, cut off all its side branches and then joined two of them to the highest part of the trunk, so that they extended themselves on either side like the arms of a man, making in the whole the shape of a cross. Above the insertions of these branches and below, they inscribed in the bark of the tree the word Thau, by which they meant G.o.d. On the right arm was inscribed Hesus, on the left Belenus, and on the middle of the trunk Tharamus."--Quoted by Borlase in _Cornwall_ from "the learned Schedius".

[408] _Ancient British Coins_, p. 49.

[409] _The Coin Collector_, p. 159.

[410] _Numismatic Manual_, p. 225.

[411] Jewitt, L., _English Coins and Tokens_, p. 4.

[412] Head, Barclay, V., _A Guide to the Coins of the Ancients_, p.

1 (B. M.).

[413] Akerman, J. Y., _Numismatic Manual_, p. 228.

[414] Akerman, J. Y., _Numismatic Manual_, p. 10.

[415] The earliest "Lady" of Byzantium was the fabulous daughter of Io, _Cf._ Schliemann, _Mykene_.

[416] Macdonald, G., _The Evolution of Coinage_, p. 5.

[417] Macdonald, G., _The Evolution of Coinage_, p. 9.

[418] According to Skeat _jingle_, "a frequentative verb from the base _jink_," is allied to _c.h.i.n.k_, and _c.h.i.n.k_ is "an imitative word".

[419] Munro, Dr. Robt., _Prehistoric Britain_, p. 45. The italics are mine.

[420] Johnson, W., _Folk Memory_, p. 321.

[421] _Bella Gallico_, Bk. IV.

[422] _Crete, the Forerunner of Greece_, p. 72.

[423] _Iliad_, XX., 570-80.

[424] "It's you English who don't know your own language, otherwise you would realise that most of what you call 'Yankeeisms' are merely good old English which you have thrown away."--J.

Russell Lowell.

[425] As ill.u.s.trated _ante_, p. 381.

[426] _Ill.u.s.trated London News_, 10th August, 1918.

[427] _Cf._ _Troy_, p. 353; _Ilios_, 619.

[428] Il., lix.

[429] Hawes, C. H. and H. B., _Crete the Forerunner of Greece_, p.

44.

[430] _aeneid_, Book II., 111.

[431] _Ibid._, 20.

[432] Johnson, W., _Byways_, 419.

[433] _Sepulchres of Ancient Etruria_, p. 10.

[434] Johnston, Rev. W. B., _Place-names of England and Wales_, p.