Archaic England Part 9

[108] Herodotus, 11, 52.

[109] Johnston, J. B., _Place-names of England and Wales_, p. 413.

[110] Burrows, R. M., _The Discoveries in Crete_, p. 11.

[111] _Hastings_ (Ward Lock & Co.), p. 63.

[112] xxvii. 12.

[113] _Sepulchres of Ancient Etruria_, p. 9.

[114] From _mercari_, to trade (Skeat).

[115] _Jonnock_ is probably cognate with _yankee_, which was in old times used in the New England States as an adjective meaning "excellent," "first-cla.s.s". Thus, a "yankee" horse would be a first-cla.s.s horse, just as we talk of English beef and other things English, meaning that they are the best. Another explanation of _yankee_ is that when the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock, near Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, in 1620, they were met on the sh.o.r.e by native Indians who called them "Yangees"--meaning "white man"--and the term was finally completed into "Yankees".

[116] Taylor, Rev. R., _Diegesis_, p. 158.

[117] The remarkable serpentine, sh.e.l.l-mosaiked shrine, known as Margate Grotto, is discussed in chap. xiii.

[118] i., 367.

[119] _Odyssey_, Book IV.

[120] _Cf._ Smith, G., _Religion of Ancient Britain_, p. 65.

[121] _Myths of Crete and Prehistoric Europe_, p. 239.

[122] Rydberg, V., _Teutonic Mythology_, pp. 22-36.

[123] _Odyssey_, Book I.

[124] _Ibid._, Book III.

[125] _The Myth of Br. Islands_, p. 324.

[126] The current idea that London was _Llyn din_, the _Lake town_, has been knocked on the head since it has been "proved that the lake which was described so picturesquely by J. R. Green did not exist". _Cf._ Rice Holmes, _Ancient Britain_, p. 704.

[127] Lon_dres_, the Gaulish form of London, implies that the radical was _Lon_--and perhaps further, that London was a _holy enclosure dun or derry_ where _luna_, the moon, was worshipped. There is a persistent tradition that St. Paul's, standing on the summit of Ludgate Hill or dun, occupies the site of a more ancient shrine dedicated to Diana, _i.e._, Luna.

[128] This name will subsequently be traced to Cres, the son of Jupiter, to whom the Cretans a.s.signed their origin.

[129] Wright, T., _Essays on Archaeological Subjects_, vol. i., p.

273.

[130] Wright, T., _Essays on Archaeological Subjects_, vol. i., p.

283.

[131] In Albany the memory of "the gudeman" lingered until late, and according to Scott: "In many parishes of Scotland there was suffered to exist a certain portion of land, called _the gudeman's croft_, which was never ploughed or cultivated, but suffered to remain waste, like the _Temenos_ of a pagan temple. Though it was not expressly avowed, no one doubted that 'the goodman's croft' was set apart for some evil being; in fact, that it was the portion of the arch-fiend himself, whom our ancestors distinguished by a name which, while it was generally understood, could not, it was supposed, be offensive to the stern inhabitant of the regions of despair.

This was so general a custom that the Church published an ordinance against it as an impious and blasphemous usage.

"This singular custom sunk before the efforts of the clergy in the seventeenth century; but there must still be many alive who, in childhood, have been taught to look with wonder on knolls and patches of ground left uncultivated, because, whenever a ploughshare entered the soil, the elementary spirits were supposed to testify their displeasure by storm and thunder," _Demonology and Witchcraft._

[132] These Sources of Life or vessels of Almighty Power were described as Crown, Wisdom, Prudence, Magnificence, Severity, Beauty, Victory, Glory, Foundation, Empire. _Cf._ King, C.

W., _The Gnostics and their Remains_, p. 34.

[133] Johnston, Rev. J. B., _Place-names of England and Wales_.

[134] "The origin of the name is quite unknown to history....

Possibly because so many dogs were drowned in the Thames here."--Johnston, Rev. J. B., _Place-names of England_, p.

321.

[135] Walsh, R., _An Essay on Ancient Coins, Medals, and Gems_, p.

58.

[136] Rhys, Sir J., _Celtic Heathendom_, pp. 14-16.

[137] British children still cross their forefingers as a sign of _treus_, _pax_, or _fainits_.

[138] _Britannia Antiquissima_, p. 4.

[139] _Cf._ Thomas, J. J., _Britannia Antiquissima_, pp. 84, 85.

CHAPTER IV

ALBION

"The Anglo-Saxons, down to a late period, retained the heathenish Yule, as all Teutonic Christians did the sanct.i.ty of Easter-tide; and from these two, the Yule-boar and Yule-bread, the Easter pancake, Easter sword, Easter fire, and Easter dance could not be separated. As faithfully were perpetuated the name and, in many cases, the observances of midsummer. New Christian feasts, especially of saints, seem purposely as well as accidentally to have been made to fall on heathen holidays. Churches often rose precisely where a heathen G.o.d or his sacred tree had been pulled down; and the people trod their old paths to the accustomed site: sometimes the very walls of the heathen temple became those of the church; and cases occur in which idol-images still found a place in a wall of the porch, or were set up outside the door, as at Bamberg Cathedral where lie Sclavic-heathen figures of animals inscribed with runes."--GRIMM.

Our Chronicles state that when Brute and his companions reached these sh.o.r.es, "at that time the name of the island was Albion". According to tradition Alba, Albion, or Alban, whence the place-name Albion, was a fairy giant, but this, in the eyes of current scholarship, is a fallacy, and _alba_ is merely an adjective meaning _white_, whence wherever met with it is so translated. But because there happens to be a relatively small tract of white cliffs in the neighbourhood of Dover, it is a barren stretch of imagination to suppose that all Britain thence derived its prehistoric t.i.tle, and in any case the question--why did _alba_ mean white?--would remain unanswered. The Highlanders of Scotland still speak of their country as Albany or Alban; the national cry of Scotland was evidently at one time "Albani," and even as late as 1138, "the army of the Scots with one voice vociferated their native distinction, and the shout of Albani! Albani! ascended even to the heavens".[140]

Not only by the Romans but likewise by the Greeks, Britain was known as Albion, and one may therefore conjecture that the white-cliff theory is an unsound fancy.

Strabo alludes to a certain district generally supposed to be Land's End, under the name "Kalbion,"[141] a word manifestly having some radical relation to "Albion". By an application of the comparative method to place-names and proper-names, I arrived several years ago at the seemingly only logical conclusion that in many directions _ak_ and its variants meant _great_ or _mighty_. On every hand there is presumptive evidence of this fact, and I have since found that Bryant and also Faber, working by wholly independent methods, reached a very similar conclusion. My _modus operandi_, with many of its results, having been already published,[142] it is unnecessary here to restate them, and I shall confine myself to new and corroborative evidence.

In addition to _great_ or _mighty_ it is clear that the radical in question meant _high_. The German trisagion of _hoch! hoch! hoch!_ is still equivalent to the English _high! high! high!_ the Swedish for _high_ is _hog_, the Dutch is _oog_, and in Welsh or British _high_ is _uch_. It is presumably a trace of the gutteral _ch_ that remains in our modern spelling of _high_ with a _gh_ now mute, but the primordial Welsh _uch_ has also become the English _ok_, as in Devonshire where _Ok_ment Hill is said to be the Anglicised form of _uch mynydd_, the Welsh or British for _high_ hill. I shall, thus, in this volume treat the syllable _'k_ or _'g_ as carrying the predominant and apparently more British meaning of _high_. That the sounds 'g and 'k were invariably commutable may be inferred from innumerable place-names such as _Og_bourne St. Andrew, alternatively printed _Oke_bourne, and that the same mutability applies to words in general might be instanced from any random page of Dr. Murray's _New English Dictionary_. We may thus a.s.sume that "Kalbion," meant Great Albion or High Albion, and it remains to a.n.a.lyse Alba or Albion.

B and P being interchangeable, the _ba_ of _Alba_ is the same word as _pa_, which, according to Max Muller, meant primarily _feeder_; _papa_ is in Turkish _baba_, and in Mexico also _ba_ meant the same as our infantile _pa_, _i.e._, feeder or father. In _paab_, the British for _pope_, one _p_ has become _b_ the other has remained constant.

The inevitable interchange of _p_ and _b_ is conspicuously evident in the place-name--Battersea, alternatively known as Patrickseye, and on that little _ea_, _eye_, or _eyot_ in the Thames at one time, probably, cl.u.s.tered the padres or paters who ministered to the church of St.

Peter--the architypal Pater--whose shrine is now Westminster Abbey.

It is a custom of children to express their superlatives by duplications, such as _pretty pretty_, and in the childhood[143] of the world this habit was seemingly universal. Thus _pa_, the Aryan root meaning primarily _feeder_, has been duplicated into _papa_, which is the same word as _pope_, defined as indicating the father of a church.

In A.D. 600 the British Hierarchy protested against the claims of the "paab" of Rome to be considered "the Father of Fathers,"[144] and there is little doubt that Pope is literally _pa-pa_ or _Father Father_. In Stow's time there existed in London a so-called "Papey"--"a proper house," wherein sometime was kept a fraternity of St. Charity and St.