ANCIENT BRITAIN AND THE INVASIONS OF JULIUS CAESAR.* THE readers
of Dr. Holmes's former book on the conquest of Gaul anticipated that ancient Britain would come next. It is part of the same " sphere of influence," and Dr. Holmes is impelled across the Channel by the same irresistible necessity which called Julius Caesar. French archaeologists have before this made both fields of study their own. But our native students need not shrink from comparison with foreign, and in Dr. Holmes we have an admirable exponent of the views of an extraordinarily wide circle of writers, as well as a commentator and observer of original powers.
This is a history of our island which begins at the beginning. Monastic chroniclers used to begin at the Creation. Later English writers began with Julius Caesar. Freeman and Green protested against this, and started with the English invasions. The extreme doctrine, that nothing mattered before Hengist, was salutary at the time to clear away misconceptions about Roman or British political influence. But since most ordinary readers have been persuaded that the main stem of our polity is not British nor Roman, it is well to go back to the earliest recoverable traces of man in Britain. What went before must have influenced what came afterwards. In what manner, how much or how little, may be disputed; but if the earlier story is neglected entirely, the question of how much or bow little can never be correctly determined. The story of Britain is one of successive invasions from the South-East. Palaeolithic man, Neolithic Long Heads, Round Heads, Bronze Users, Celts, Belgae, Romans, English, Ecclesiastical Rome, Normans, all came that way. Who can tell what traces of the original furrows may not underlie the latest .wheel-marks? When Palaeolithic man came into Britain this was no island. Man came across dryshod, as the animals had come before him. The Palaeolithic people—on the existence of Eolithic man Dr. Holmes suspends his opinion—do not seem to have spread in any numbers beyond the South-East. Lincolnshire, Derby- shire, perhaps the East Riding, Denbighshire, Glamorganshire, Carmarthenshire, and Devonshire have yielded traces of them ; but the great majority of the implements found have been in an area bounded by a line from Hampshire through Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Northamptonshire, to the Wash. Here the remains of the Thames Valley, and of Kent and Sussex, outnumber the remains elsewhere. In other words, man, existing at an antiquity which is really immeasurable, succeeded in occupying what the Romans first conquered, what the early English conquests first covered, what William the Conqueror was master of after his first campaign. But
* Ancient Britain and the Invasions of Julius Caesar. By T. Rice Holmes, • A Book of Caricatures. By Max Beerbohm. London : Methuen and Co. Hon. Litt.D. (Dublin). With Illustrations and Maps. Oxford : at the the hunters who lived a precarious life among tigers, hyaenas, and mammoths were checked by no human resistance from going further. They were, to judge from their implements and their few skulls, an offshoot of the almost universally spread race which, with all its savage squalor, was still homo sapiens, masters of fire and of tools, and therefore potentially masters of creation. Yet again a characteristic of later history appears,—the outlying group was inferior to the Continental. The artistic development of Palaeolithic man, testified to by the French specimens of carving, has yielded so far only one example of its existence here.
The men who polished and ground stone, besides chipping it, must surely have sprung somewhere from the stone-chippers. Whether they did so here is another matter. Sir John Evans believes in a break of human existence in Britain between Palaeolithic and Neolithic man. The reason for this, if it is the case, is beyond us. Dr. Holmes, wisely we think, suspends his judgment on the fact. But when the Neolithic men were here Britain was something like what it is now. It was an island. Their land surface was not extremely different from ours. The Surrey Wey, for instance, was at the bottom of its valley near Farnham, not at the top of the hills where the Palaeolithic implements lie in the old river drift, deposited scores of thousands of years before Christ. Neolithic man is a familiar person to us compared with his predecessors. His various tools adapted to various purposes of a quasi-civilisation, his sepulchres, his bones, his pottery, his huts, his entrenchments speaking of some tribal organisa- tion, are common enough all over Great Britain. The remains exist very generally on the dry uplands, the Downs of the South, the Pennine Range, the Malvern Hills. Above the tangled forests and the marshes of the lowlands he found room for life on a dry soil, for pasturage of flocks and herds, for cultivation'; for be did cultivate in his later period, though not so extensively as bronze-using man did. But caution is necessary in drawing conclusions from negative evidence. His remains are, perhaps, not to be found now on some lower sites, because those sites have been inhabited and cultivated for some three thousand years since his time. The civilisation of Neolithic man is excellently described by Dr. Holmes, as it existed here, for again in the outlying island the arts of textile fabrics, pottery, and ornaments lagged behind Continental performance. In even the Stone Age we had an insular history not quite like that of the Continent. Man is always in some ways the same, but always in others different in different places and times. But, as Dr. Holmes points out, the differences of time shade off into each other. The Neolithic, the Bronze, the early Iron Ages over- lapped in point of time. They do so still. The same savage tribe possesses Liege guns, bone-tipped arrows, stone axes, and a few trade knives of steel. The Bronze Age especially, as an age of commerce—for not even copper, much less tin, is universally abundant—must have coexisted with the ages before and after. The first round-headed invaders of the earlier Neolithic Long Heads were also stone-users. Bronze- users were invaders, at least very probably. But the invaded would acquire bronze too. Till they did, we think that the invaders would get the better of them, in spite of Dr. Holmes's doubt whether bronze was used at first by more than a few chiefs. Probably it was not common; but .did not the Achilles or Hector of the brazen spear scatter the common herd ? There are inevitably other small points in which a reader• may disagree with Dr. Holmes. Need the burial of many children along with women mean infanticide ? Among savages when a mother is dying her child dies naturally. Notices of monuments cannot be expected to be exhaustive. Carnarvonsbire is omitted from the counties which possess circles of standing stones and but circles. The Maenau Hirion behind Pen- maenmawr are a standing circle, and Conway Mountain has huts. But the whole treatment of the mysterious stone circles seems excellent here. The passage on Stonehenge is worthy of its subject. Indeed, from the Neolithic to the early Iron Age Dr. Holmes seems at his best, if a critic who cannot pretend to such an exhaustive amount of reading may be allowed to say so. But one characteristic of all this part of the book is the complete exposition of many views, and an often suspended judgment upoii points which must remain Partly matters of opinion. There is a distinct change in the manner of the book when it comes to the period of documentary evidence. The volume
is nearly equally divided into two parts,—one descriptive history, the other treatises upon what are often strongly con- troverted questions, such as the ethnology of the Picts, the British tin trade, the Cassiterides, Ictis, and the localities of Caesar's invasions. The evidence upon these matters rests upon brief written notices of very various values, and scarcely any conclusion upon them can be reached which does not involve some difficulty. Mommsen said they were insoluble. But Dr. Holmes again and again uses such words as "Since I have proved," " It has now been demonstrated," or finally, " That some will for a time dispute these conclusions is likely enough; but not those whose judgments count. For them the problem is solved." Mommsen and Ally and Long are dead, and past conversion; Professor Ridgeway is alive happily, and so are some other people whose judgments may or may not count, but whose judgments will be suspended. We must indicate one or two weak points in the premisses of such very confi- dent conclusions. The texts nowhere state, what Dr. Holmes assumes, that tin was shipped from Ictis to Corbilo, on the Loire. Professor Ridgeway's argument, founded on the practice of the Greek language, is decisive that Ti Ince, means the port or bay under the Itian headland. Dr. Holmes says that it means Boulogne; but Boulogne is called Gesoriacum, not Portus Itius, and no historian, geographer, nor even a poet, says that Caesar sailed from Gesoriacum. The supposi- tion may solve difficulties, but it is not in the evidence.
Sir George Airy's conclusion about the tides is scarcely to be dismissed as Dr. Holmes dismisses it. By doing violence to Caesar's plain language he makes him come to Britain on possibly August 25th, probably the 26th. Caesar seems to say that he landed on the 27th, for his second squadron sailed on the fourth day after be landed, and he saw them on the 30th. He could not see them start from Gaul, and he would not know whether they had started before or after midnight of the 29th-30th. The plain sense is that he is referring to the 30th. But if Caesar's landing is brought forward by one or two days, and if an unusual state of the tidal currents prevailed, then the tidal stream would have been only twenty-five minutes too late to take Caesar to Deal. But winds might have accelerated the turn of the stream. So they might, and they might have delayed it. At any rate, there was no strong wind, or he could not have landed at all. Is it possible to found so absolute a conclusion as the one quoted. above on more unsatisfactory premisses ? The Astronomer-Royal knew the conditions and concluded differently. Every theory has its difficulties ; but surely the attitude of writers who admit that they have not settled the question, but that their views seem to them to involve less difficulty than others, is a safer position ?
But it is pleasant to dismiss a remarkable book with commendation. The last chapter of description, on the re- sults of Caesar's invasion, the subsequent political conditions in Southern Britain, and the penetration of the country by Roman influence preparatory to a somewhat easy conquest of the South-East under Claudius, is most interesting. The use of numismatic evidence illustrates the way in which history stands indebted to kindred branches of knowledge. All archaeology, indeed, is history written in metal, earth, and stone.
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