The Ethnology of the British Islands Part 1

The Ethnology of the British Islands.

by Robert Gordon Latham.

CHAPTER I.

PRELIMINARY REMARKS.--PRESENT POPULATIONS OF THE BRITISH ISLES.--ROMANS, ETC.--PRE-HISTORIC PERIOD.--THE IRISH ELK.--HOW FAR CONTEMPORANEOUS WITH MAN.--STONE PERIOD.--MODES OF SEPULTURE.--THE PHYSICAL CONDITION OF THE SOIL--ITS FAUNA.--SKULLS OF THE STONE PERIOD.--THE BRONZE PERIOD.--GOLD ORNAMENTS.--ALLOYS AND CASTINGS.--HOW FAR NATIVE OR FOREIGN.--EFFECT OF THE INTRODUCTION OF METALS.--DWELLINGS.

The ethnologist, who pa.s.ses from the history of the varieties of the human species of the world at large, to the details of some special family, tribe, or nation, is in the position of the naturalist who rises from such a work as the _Systema Naturae_, or the _Regne Animal_, to concentrate his attention on some special section or subsection of the sciences of Zoology and Botany. If having done this he should betake himself to some ponderous folio, bulkier than the one which he read last, but devoted to a subject so specific and limited as to have scarcely found a place in the general history of organized beings, the comparison is all the closer. The subject, in its main characteristics, is the same in both cases; but the difference of the details is considerable. A topographical map on the scale of a chart of the world, a manipulation for the microscope as compared with the preparation of a wax model, are but types and ill.u.s.trations of the contrast. A small field requires working after a fashion impossible for a wide farm; often with different implements, and often with different objects. A dissertation upon the Negroes of Africa, and a dissertation upon the Britons of the Welsh Princ.i.p.ality, though both ethnological, have but few questions in common, at least in the present state of our knowledge; and out of a hundred pages devoted to each, scarcely ten would embody the same sort of facts. With the Negro, we should search amongst old travellers and modern missionaries for such exact statements as we might be fortunate enough to find respecting his geographical position, the texture of his hair, the shade of his skin, the peculiarities of his creed, the structure of his language; and well satisfied should we be if anything at once new and true fell in our way. But in the case of the Briton all this is already known to the inquirer, and can be conveyed in a few sentences to the reader. What then remains? A fresh series of researches, which our very superiority of knowledge has developed; inquiries which, with an imperfectly known population, would be impossible. Who speculates to any extent upon such questions as the degrees of intermixture between the Moors and the true Negroes of Nubia?

Who grapples with such a problem as the date of the occupation of New Guinea? Such and such-like points are avoided; simply because the _data_ for working them are wanting. Yet with an area like the British Isles, they are both possible and pertinent. More than this. In such countries there must either be no ethnology at all, or it must be of the minute kind, since the primary and fundamental questions, which const.i.tute nine-tenths of our inquiries elsewhere, are already answered.

Minute ethnology must be more or less speculative--the less the better.

It must be so, however, to some extent, because it attempts new problems. Critical too it must be--the more the better. It often works with unfamiliar instruments, whose manipulation must be explained, and whose power tested. Again, although the field in which it works be wide, the tract in which it moves may be beaten. An outlying question may have been treated by many investigators, and the results may be extremely different. In British ethnology, the history of opinions only, if given with the due amount of criticism, would fill more than one volume larger than the present.

The above has been written to shew that any work upon such a subject as the present must partake, to a great degree, of the nature of a disquisition: perhaps indeed, the term _controversy_ would not be too strong. The undeniable and recognized results of previous investigators are truisms. That the Britons and Gaels are Kelts, and that the English are Germans is known wherever Welsh dissent, Irish poverty, or English misgovernment are the subjects of notice. What such Kelticism or Germanism may have to do with these same characteristics is neither so well ascertained, nor yet so easy to discover. On the contrary, there is much upon these points which may be well _un_-learnt. Kelts, perchance, may not be so very Keltic, or Germans so very German as is believed; for it may be that a very slight preponderance of the Keltic elements over the German, or of the German over the Keltic may have determined the use of the terms. Such a point as this is surely worth raising; yet it cannot be answered off-hand. At present, however, it is mentioned as a sample of minute ethnology, and as a warning of the disquisitional character which the forthcoming pages, in strict pursuance to the nature of the subject, must be expected to exhibit.

The extent, then, to which the two stocks that occupy the British Isles are pure or mixed; the characteristics of each stock in its purest form; and the effects of intermixture where it has taken place, are some of our problems; and if they could each and all be satisfactorily answered, we should have a Natural History of our Civilization. But the answers are not satisfactory; at any rate they are not conclusive. Nevertheless, a partial solution can be obtained; a partial solution which is certainly worth some efforts on the part of both the reader and the writer. Other questions, too, curious rather than of practical value, const.i.tute the department of minute ethnology; especially when the area under notice is an island. The _date_ of its occupancy, although impossible as an absolute epoch, can still be brought within certain limits. Whether, however, such limits would not be too wide for any one but a geologist, is another question.

Now, if I have succeeded in shewing that criticism and disquisition must necessarily form a large part of such an ethnology as the one before us, I have given a reason for what may, perhaps, seem an apparent irregularity in the arrangement of the different parts of the subject.

With the civil historian, the earliest events come first; for, in following causes to their consequences, he begins with the oldest. The ethnologist, on the other hand, whenever--as is rarely the case--he can lay before the reader the whole process and all the steps of his investigations, reverses this method, and begins with the times in which he lives; so that by a long series of inferences from effect to cause, he concludes--so to say--at the beginning; inasmuch as it is his special business to argue backwards or upwards. Yet the facts of the present volume will follow neither of these arrangements exactly; though, of course, the order of them will be, in the main, chronological. They will be taken, in many cases, as they are wanted for the purposes of the argument; so that if a fact of the tenth century be necessary for the full understanding of one of the fifth, it will be taken out of its due order. Occasional transpositions of this kind are to be found in all works wherein the investigation of doubtful points preponderates over the ill.u.s.tration of admitted facts, or in all works where discussion outweighs exposition.

The period when the British Isles were occupied by Kelts only (or, at least, supposed to have been so) will form the subject of the earlier chapters. The facts will, of course, be given as I have been able to find them; but it may be not unnecessary to state beforehand the nature of the princ.i.p.al questions upon which they will bear.

The date of the first occupancy of the British Isles by man is one of them. It can (as already stated) only be brought within certain wide--very wide--limits; and that hypothetically, or subject to the accuracy of several preliminary facts.

The division of mankind to which the earliest occupants belonged is the next; and it is closely connected with the first. If the Kelts were the earliest occupants of Britain, we can tell within a few thousand years when they arrived. But what if there were an occupation of Britain anterior to theirs?

The civilization of the earliest occupants is a question inextricably interwoven with the other two; since the rate at which it advanced--if it advanced at all--must depend upon the duration of the occupancy, and the extent to which it was the occupancy of one, or more than one, section of mankind. But foreign intercourse may have accelerated this rate, or a foreign civilization may have altogether replaced that of the _indigenae_. The evidence of this is a fourth question.

So interwoven with each other are all these questions, that, although the facts of the first three chapters will be arranged with the special view to their elucidation, no statement of the results will be given until the invasion of the Anglo-Saxons, or the introduction of the great Germanic elements of the British nation, leads us from the field of early Keltic to that of early Teutonic research; and that will not be until the details of the Britons as opposed to the Gaels, of the Gaels as opposed to the Britons, and of the Picts (as far as they can be made out) have been disposed of.

One of the populations of the British Isles, at the present moment, speaks a language belonging to the Keltic, the other one belonging to the Teutonic cla.s.s of tongues. However, it is by no means certain that the blood, pedigree, race, descent, or extraction coincides with the form of speech: indeed it is certain that it does so but partially.

Though few individuals of Teutonic extraction speak any of the Keltic dialects as their mother-tongue, the converse is exceedingly common; and numerous Kelts know no other language but the English. Speech, then, is only _prima facie_ evidence of descent; nevertheless, it is the most convenient criterion we have.

The Keltic cla.s.s falls into divisions and subdivisions. The oldest and purest portion of the Gaelic Kelts is to be found in Ireland, especially on the western coast. Situated as Connaught is on the Atlantic, it lies beyond the influx of any new blood, except from the east and north; yet from the east and north the introduction of fresh populations has been but slight. Here, then, we find the Irish Gael in his most typical form.

Scotland, like Ireland, is _Gaelic_ in respect to its Keltic population, but the stock is less pure. However slight may be the admixture of English blood in the Highlands and the Western Isles, the infusion of Scandinavian is very considerable. Caithness has numerous geographical terms whose meaning is to be found in the Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. _Sutherland_ shews its political relations by its name. It is the _Southern Land_; an impossible name if the county be considered English (for it lies in the very _north_ of the island), but a natural name if we refer it to Norway, of which Sutherland was, at one time, a southern dependency, or (if not a dependency), a robbing-ground.

Orkney and Shetland were once as thoroughly Norse as the Faroe Isles or Iceland.

The third variety of the present British population is in the Isle of Man, where a language sufficiently like the Gaelic of Ireland and Scotland to be placed in the same division, is still spoken. Yet the blood is mixed. The Nors.e.m.e.n preponderated in Man; and the const.i.tution of the island is in many parts Scandinavian, though the language be Keltic.

In Wales the language and population are still Keltic, though sufficiently different from the Scotch, Irish, and Manx, to be considered as a separate branch of that stock. It is conveniently called _British_, _Cambrian_, and _Cambro-Briton_. It is quite unintelligible to any Gael. Neither can any Gael, talking Gaelic, make himself understood by a Briton. On the other hand, however, a Scotch and an Irish Gael understand each other; whilst, with some effort, they understand a Manxman, and _vice versa_. So that the number of mutually unintelligible languages of the Keltic stock is two; in other words, the Keltic dialects of the British Isles are referable to two branches--the British for the Welsh, and the Gaelic for the Scotch, Irish, and Manx.

The other language of the British Isles is the English, one upon which it is unnecessary to enlarge; but which makes the third tongue in actual existence at the present moment, if we count the Irish, Scotch, and Manx as dialects of the same language, and the fifth if we separate them.

By raising the Lowland Scotch to the rank of a separate language, we may increase our varieties; but, as it is only a general view which we are taking at present, it is as well not to multiply distinctions. I believe that, notwithstanding some strong a.s.sertions to the contrary, there are no two dialects of the English tongue--whether spoken east or west--in North Britain or to the South of the Tweed--that are not mutually intelligible, when used as it is the usual practice to use them. That strange sentences may be made by picking out strange provincialisms, and stringing them together in a manner that never occurs in common parlance, is likely enough; but that any two men speaking English shall be in the same position to each other as an Englishman is to a Dutchman or Dane, so that one shall not know what the other says, is what I am wholly unprepared to believe, both from what I have observed in the practice of provincial speech, and what I have read in the way of provincial glossaries.

The populations, however, just enumerated, represent but a fraction of our ethnological varieties. They only give us those of the nineteenth century. Other sections have become extinct, or, if not, have lost their distinctive characteristics, which is much the same as dying out altogether. The ethnology of these populations is a matter of history.

Beginning with those that have most recently been a.s.similated to the great body of Englishmen, we have--

1. The Cornishmen of Cornwall.--They are Britons in blood, and until the seventeenth century, were Britons in language also. When the Cornish language ceased to be spoken it was still intelligible to a Welshman; yet in the reign of Henry II., although intelligible, it was still different. Giraldus Cambrensis especially states that the "Cornubians and Armoricans used a language almost identical; a language which the Welsh, from origin and intercourse, understood in _many_ things, and _almost_ in all."

2. The c.u.mbrians, of c.u.mberland, retained the British language till after the Conquest. This was, probably, spoken as far north as the Clyde. Earlier, however, than either of these were--

3. The Picts.--The c.u.mbrian and Cornish Britons were simply members of the same division with the Welshmen, Welshmen, so to say, when the Welsh area extended south of the Bristol Channel and north of the Mersey. The Picts were, probably, in a different category. They may indeed have been Gaels. They have formed a separate substantive division of Kelts. They may have been no Kelts at all, but Germans or Scandinavians.

But populations neither Keltic nor Teutonic have, at different times, settled in England; populations which (like several branches of the Keltic stock) have either lost their distinctive characteristics, or become mixed in blood, but which (unlike such Kelts) were not indigenous to any of the islands. Like the Germans or Teutons, on the other hand, they were foreigners; but, unlike the Germans or Teutons, they have not preserved their separate substantive character. Still, some of their blood runs in both English and Keltic veins; some of their language has mixed itself with both tongues; and some of their customs have either corrupted or improved our national character. Thus--

1. The battle of Hastings filled England with Normans, French in language, French and Scandinavian in blood, but (eventually) English in the majority of their matrimonial alliances. And before the Normans came--

2. The Danes--and before the Danes--

3. The Romans.--Such is the general view of the chief populations, past and present, of England; of which, however, the Keltic and the Angle are the chief.

The English-and-Scotch, the Normans, the Danes, and the Romans have all been introduced upon the island within the Historical period--some earlier than others, but all within the last 2,000 years, so that we have a fair amount of information as to their history; not so much, perhaps, as is generally believed, but still a fair amount. We know within a few degrees of lat.i.tude and longitude where they came from; and we know their ethnological relations to the occupants of the parts around them.

With the Kelts this is not the case. Of Gael or Manxman, Briton or Pict, we know next to nothing during their early history. We can guess where they came from, and we can infer their ethnological relations; but history, in the strict sense of the term, we have none; for the Keltic period differs from that of all the others in being pre-historic. This is but another way of saying that the Keltic populations, and those only, are the aborigines of the island; or, if not aboriginal, the earliest known. Yet it is possible that these same Keltic populations, whose numerous tribes and clans and nations covered both the British and the Hibernian Isles for generations and generations before the discovery of the art of writing, or the existence of a historical record, may be as well understood as their invaders; since ethnology infers where history is silent, and history, even when speaking, may be indistinct.

At any rate, the previous notice of the ethnology of the British Isles during the Historical period, prepares us with a little light for the dark walk in the field of its earliest antiquity.

Nothing, as has just been stated, in the earliest historical records of Britain, throws any light upon the original occupation of the British Islands by man; indeed, nothing tells us that Britain, when so occupied, was an island at all. The Straits of Dover may have existed when the first human being set foot upon what is now the soil of Kent, or an isthmus may have existed instead. Whether then it was by land, or whether it was by water, that the population of Europe propagated itself into England, is far beyond the evidence of any historical memorial--far beyond the evidence of tradition. Nothing at present indicates the nature of the primary migration of our earliest ancestors. Neither does any historical record tell us what manner of men first established themselves along the valleys of the Thames and Trent, or cleared the forests along their watersheds. They may have been as much ruder than the rudest of the tribes seen by Paulinus and Agricola, as those tribes were ruder than ourselves. They may, on the other hand, have enjoyed a higher civilization, a civilization which Caesar saw in its later stages only; one which Gallic wars, and other evil influences, may have impaired.

For the consideration of such questions as these it matters but little whether we begin with the information which the ambition of Caesar gave the Romans the opportunity of acquiring, or such accounts of the Phnician traders as found their way into the writings of the Greeks; Polybius (for instance), Aristotle, or Herodotus. A few centuries, more or less, are of trifling importance. The social condition in both cases is the same. There was tin in Cornwall, and iron swords in Kent; in other words, there was the civilization of men who knew the use of metals, both on the side of the soldiers who followed Ca.s.sibelaunus to fight against Caesar, and amongst the miners and traders of the Land's-end. In both cases, too, there was foreign intercourse; with Gaul, where there was a tincture of Roman, and with Spain, where there was a tincture of Phnician, civilization. This is not the infancy of our species, nor yet that of any of its divisions. For this we must go backwards, and farther back still, from the domain of testimony to that of inference, admitting a pre-historic period, with its own proper and peculiar methods of investigation--methods that the ethnologist shares with the geologist and naturalist, rather than with the civil historian.

In respect to their results, they may be barren or they may be fertile; but, whether barren or whether fertile, the practice and application of them is a healthy intellectual exercise.

It must not be thought that the use of metals, and the contact with the Continent, which have just been noticed, invalidate the statement as to the insufficiency of our earliest historical notices. It must not be thought that they tell us more than they really do. It is only at the first view that the knowledge of certain metallurgic processes, and the trade and power that such knowledge developes, are presumptions in favour of a certain degree of antiquity in the occupancy of our island on the parts of its islanders; and it is only by forgetting the _insular_ character of Great Britain that we can allow ourselves to suppose that, though our early arts tell us nothing about our first introduction, they at any rate prove that it was _no recent event_.

"Time," we may fairly say, "must be allowed for such habits as are implied by the use of metals to have developed themselves, and, consequently, generations, centuries, and possibly even millenniums must have elapsed between the landing of the first vessel of the first Britons, and the beginning of the trade with the Ka.s.siterides." As a general rule, such reasoning is valid; yet the earliest known phenomena of British civilization are compatible with a comparatively modern introduction of its population. For Great Britain may have been peopled like Iceland or Madeira, _i.e._, not a generation or two after the peopling of the nearest parts of the opposite Continent, but many ages later; in which case both the population and its civilization may be but things of yesterday. In the twelfth century, Iceland had an alphabet and the art of writing. Had these grown up within the island itself, the inference would be that its population was of great antiquity; since time must be allowed for their evolution--even as time must be allowed for the growth of acorns on an oak. But the art may be newer than the population, or the population and the art may be alike recent. Hence, as the civilization of the earliest Britons may be newer than the stock to which it belonged, the testimony of ancient writers to its existence is anything but conclusive against the late origin of the stock itself. It is best to admit an absolutely pre-historic period, and that without reservation; and as a corollary, to allow that it may have differed in kind as well as degree from the historic.

There is another fact that should be noticed. The languages of Great Britain are reducible to two divisions, both of which agree in many essential points with certain languages or dialects of Continental Europe. The British was closely, the Gaelic more distantly, allied to the ancient tongue of the Gauls. From this affinity we get an argument _against_ any extreme antiquity of the Britons of the British Isles. The date of their separation from the tribes of the Continent was not so remote as to obliterate and annihilate all traces of the original mother-tongue. It was not long enough for the usual processes by which languages are changed, to eject from even the Irish Gaelic (the most unlike of the two) every word and inflection which the progenitors of the present Irish brought from Gaul, and to replace them by others. So that, at the first view, we have a limit in this direction; yet unless we have settled certain preliminaries, the limit is unreal. All that it gives us is the comparatively recent introduction of the _Keltic_ stock.

Varieties of the human species, _other than Keltic_, may have existed at an indefinitely early period, and subsequently have been superseded by the Kelts. Philology, then, tells us little more than history; and it may not be superfluous to add, that the occupancy of Great Britain by a stock of the kind in question, earlier than the Keltic, and different from it, is no imaginary case of the author's, but a doctrine which has taken the definite form of a recognized hypothesis, and characterizes one of the best ethnological schools of the Continent--the Scandinavian.

For the ambitious attempt at a reconstruction of the earliest state of the human kind in Britain, we may prepare ourselves by a double series of processes. Having taken society as it exists at the present moment, we eject those elements of civilization which have brought it to its present condition, beginning with the latest first. We then take up a smaller question, and consider what arts and what forms of knowledge--what conditions of society--existing amongst the earlier populations have been lost or superseded with ourselves. The result is an approximation to the state of things in the infancy of our species.

We subtract (for instance) from the sum of our present means and appliances such elements as the knowledge of the power of steam, the art of printing, and gunpowder; all which we can do under the full light of history. Stripped of these, society takes a ruder shape. But it is still not rude enough to be primitive. There are parts of the earth's surface, at the present moment, where the metals are unknown. There was, probably, a time when they were known nowhere. Hence, the influences of such a knowledge as this must be subtracted. And then come weaving and pottery, the ruder forms of domestic architecture, and boat-building, lime-burning, dyeing, tanning, and the fermentation of liquors. When and where were such arts as these wanting to communities? No man can answer this; yet our methods of investigation require that the question should be raised.

Other questions, too, which cannot be answered must be suggested, since they serve to exhibit the trains of reasoning that depend upon them. Was Britain (a question already indicated) cut off from Gaul by the Straits of Dover when it was first peopled? If it were, the civilization required for the building of a boat must have been one of the attributes of the first aborigines; so that, whatever else in the way of civilization may have been evolved on British ground, the art of hollowing a tree, and launching it on the waves was foreign.

Now it is safe to say that the writers who are most willing to a.s.sign a high antiquity to the first occupation of the British Isles by Man, have never carried their epoch so high as the time when Britain and Gaul were joined by an isthmus. On the contrary, they all argue as if the islands were as insular as they are at present, and attribute to the first settlers the construction and management of some frail craft--rude, of course, but still a seaworthy piece of mechanism--after the fashion of the boats of Gaul or Germany; and this is the reasonable view of the subject.

In Mr. Daniel Wilson's "Pre-historic Annals of Scotland," we have the best _data_ for the next portion of the question, viz., the extent to which geological changes have occurred since the first occupancy of our islands. In the valley of the Forth,[1] alterations in the relations of the land and sea to the amount of twenty-five feet have occurred since the art of making deers' horns into harpoons was known in Scotland. Such at least is the inference from the discovery, in the Ca.r.s.e lands about Blair Drummond Moss, of the skeleton of a whale, with a harpoon beside it, twenty-five feet above the present tides of the Forth. As much as can be told by any single fact is told by this; its valuation being wholly in the hands of the geologists.

Then, the bone of an Irish elk, according to one view (but _not_ according to another), gives us a second fact. A rib, with an oval opening, where oval openings should not be, and with an irregular effusion of callus around it, is found under eleven feet of peat. Dr.

Hart attributes this to a sharp-pointed instrument, wielded by a human hand, which without penetrating deep enough to cause death, effected a breach on the continuity of the bone, and caused inflammation to be set up. But Professor Owen thinks that a weapon of the kind in question, if left in, to be worked out by the _vix medicatrix_ of Nature, would be fatal, and consequently he prefers the notion of the wound having been inflicted by a weapon which was quickly withdrawn, _e.g._, the horn of some combative rival of its own kind, rather than the human. Now if it be a difficult matter to say what will, and what will not kill a man in the year '52, much more so is it to speak chirurgically about Irish elks of the Pleiocene period. Hence the evidence of man having been cotemporary with the Megaceros Hibernicus is unsatisfactory.

That a certain amount, then, of change of level between the land and sea, in a certain part of Scotland, has taken place since Scotchmen first hunted whales is the chief fact, relative to the date of our introduction, that we get from geology. From archaeology we learn something more. Those sepulchral monuments which have the clearest and most satisfactory signs of antiquity, contain numerous implements of stone and bone, _but none of metal_. When metal is found, the concomitant characters of the tomb in which it occurs, indicate a later period. If so, it is a fair inference for the ethnological archaeologist to conclude, that although the earliest colonists reached Britain late enough to avail themselves of boats, their migration was earlier than the diffusion of the arts of metallurgy. And this has induced the best investigators to designate the earliest stage in British ethnology by the name of the STONE PERIOD, a technical and convenient term.

It is the general opinion, that during this period the practice of inhumation, or simple burial, was commoner than that of cremation or burning, though each method was adopted. Over the remains disposed of by the former process, were erected mounds of earth (_tumuli_ or _barrows_), heaps of stone (_cairns_), or cromlechs. There are strong suspicions that the practice of _Sutti_ was recognized. Around a skeleton, more or less entire, are often found, at regular distances, the ashes of bodies that were burnt; just as if the chief was interred in the flesh, but his subordinates given over to the flames. The posture is, frequently, one which, on the other side of the Atlantic, has called forth numerous remarks. Throughout America, it was observed by Dr.

Morton, that one of the most usual forms of burial was to place the corpse in a half upright position, or a sitting att.i.tude, with the knees and hams bent, and the arms folded on the legs. Now this is a common posture in Britain--a clear proof of the extent to which similar practices are independent of imitation. If any ornaments be found with the corpse, they are chiefly of cannel coal. The implements are all of stone, or bone--the celt, the arrow, the spear-head, the adze, and the mallet.

What was the physical aspect of the country at this time? The present, _minus_ the clearings--wood and fen, fen and wood, in interminable succession; woods of oak in the clay soils; of beech on the chalk; of birch, pine, and fir in the northern parts of the island. The boats were essentially _monoxyla_, _i.e._, single trees hollowed out, sometimes by stone adzes, oftener by fire. The chief dresses were the skins of beasts.