156 CRANIA BEITANNICA. [CHAP. VI.
i . ,
CHAPTER VI.
ETHNOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OE THE SUCCESSIVE POPULATIONS OE THE
BRITISH ISLANDS.
For, certes, these are people of the Island.
T E M P E S T , I I I . iii.
THE first reliable account we have of the inhabitants of Southern Britain is that afforded in the
Commentaries of Julivis Cajsar, who wrote from personal observation, after considerable intimacy
with the tribes of Gaul, and the knowledge he had acquired by iutercom-se with those who, for
pm'poses of trade or policy, had gained an acquaintance with the Britons. CfEsar's brief statement
has the merit of not contradicting what we learn from subsequent sources, is consistent with
itself, and is pretty free from surmise or hypothesis. He assures us that the people of the interior
of the island were traditionally reputed to know no derivation extraneous to their native
country (the thickly-dwelling autochthones of Ms contemporary Biodorus), and that those of
the maritime part, or southern coast, had passed across the Channel, being immigrants, who
mostly retained the names of the states whence they were derived*. If we must regard these
latter in the mass named Belgse—as immigrants, there is reason to view them as not literally of
the true Celtic stock. Julius tells us that Gaul (exclusive of the Pv^oman province bordering the
Mediterranean) was divided among three peoples, different in language, customs, and laws :—the
Aquitani in the south, whose tongue is considered to remain in the Basque, or Euscaldune ; the
Celtaj, called Gauls by the Pvomans, occupying the great central region up to the Seine and
Marne; and the Belgaj to the north of these rivers t- We thus perceive that the denomination
Celtica, applied by the ancient geographers to Gaul in its entirety, was merely an extension of
the name of the race which dwelt in the middle of that great country. The term Celta; has been
fm-ther applied to the aborigines of these Islands, for no better reason than that they adjoined
what was called Celtica, in this larger sense, and used a similar speech. That the Belgse who
crossed the Channel were allied to the Celtic people is inferred from the ancient names of mountains,
rivers, &c. of the southern parts of England having their origin and meaning in the Celtic
language t . and there being no mention of a difference of speech between them and the aborigines.
From " Celtica " proper, it has been considered by some that Ptolemy's Parisii, of the East
* M. Ame'clee Thierry attributes this movement in its greatest
force to about a century before our era. Hist, des Ganlois,
D' ed. 1858, i. 46. It is probable that it cannot have begun
much earlier than 200 years before Christ.
t The testimony of Tacitus, when comparing the Britons
with the Gauls, is " sermo baud multum diversns." (Vit.
Agric. xi.) The difference was one of dialect.
i We employ the term Celtic language, m agreement with
common usage, as the general designation of all the dialects
spoken by the ancient Celtae, or Gauls of central Gaul,
'the ancient Belgse, the Armoricans, the Britanni, and the
Hiberni, as well as of the modern representatives of these
tongues. The name Celtee was not apphed to the Irish before
the 1 7th century.
Edward Lhuvd and others have maintained that many of the
earliest names in South Britain are Gaelic and not Cymric. This
is at variance with the conclusions of the French antiquaries as
to the source of the BelgiE, a subject to be discussed hereafter,
is alike discordant with a Cimbric origin of the Britons, and is
said also to want philological foundation. Garnett's " Philological
Essays," 1859, p. 151. Robert Williams, "On the
Origin of the Welsh," Archseol. Cambrens. 18C0, p. 2.
CHAP. VL] ETHNOGRAPHICAL SICETCH OE SUCCESSIVE POPULATIONS. 157
Riding of Yorkshire, came, as weU as other smaU tribes. The foundation for such a view is the
similarity of names,-in this case, more correctly, a coincidence with that of the tribe dwellmg
on the banks of the Seine, which is still perpetuated in the designation of the capital of Trance.
Without objecting to tMs conclusion, we maybe permitted to express a doubt, whether too much
importance has not been accorded to these casual similitudes, in the anxiety to gam a guiding
ray of Ught through the darkness of antiquity, and to derive the people of these Islands from the
continent H the tribe of the Paxisii were an offshoot from the Parisii of Celtica, we have the
authority of Caesar for the conclusion that they, or, at least, most of them, spoke a different
dialect from the Belgse. j, j. i,
Julius speaks of the Belgie as the most warlike people of Gaul, which he accounts for by
their remote position-standing in the way both of southern refinement, and of the resort of
merchants with the means for rendering them effeminate. They exceUed their neighbours m
Roman virtues, probably not in civilization in the modern sense.
Of the immigrants who retained the names of the congeners they left behind them m the
Belgic section of Gaul, the Begni, who settled in the present Surrey and Sussex, are considered
to be identical with the Remi, whose capital city was the present Rheims. The Atrebates, who
fixed then- residence in Berkshire, bore the same name as the parent tribe in Belgium,—as did
also the Belgse proper, who found new homes in Hampshire, Wiltshire, and Somersetshire. Besides
these chief tribes, others of less importance have been traced, with more or less probability
to the British shores. We must make special aUusion to one mentioned by Pliny*, inferred
to have been situated to the south of Boulogne, and bearing the name of Britanni, who are
considered to have obtained a footing on the opposite coast of Cantiumt- In the supposed
continental region of this tribe, between the rivers Authie and Somme, there stiU exists^ a
" Bretagne," although now a poor hamlet. In this argument, founded on names, is it not quite
as likely that the Britanni of Pliny, on the northern coast of Gaul, were derived from the
Britannic Island ? We regard it as more likely that this was the case, and that the name commemorated
their origin and transmigration.
The earliest and probably native name of the Island itself is Albion i, which was applied to
it by the Greek as well as Latin writers from the period of Aristotle downwards, if he were
indeed the author of the treatise " De -Mundo." Aristotle, Strabo, Pomponius Mela, Ptolemy,
and others spoke of Albion and lerne, one or both; but they were also acquainted with the more
general title of the Bretannic Isles §. If, therefore, we admit that the Britanni wandered into
the Pas de Calais, and passed over the narrow Straits of Dover to form a settlement of the same
denomination in Cantium, thus imparting a name which was afterwards extended, not merely to
the Island, but to the whole group, or that a tribe of this name came hither from Armorica, we
are constrained to refer this emigration to a period long anterior to Julius Csesar, possibly 300
years. But, what is most diflcult, we must'also acknowledge that Cffisar, with aU his intercourse
and acquaintance with the Belgic tribes and with Cantium, nowhere alludes to any tribe
Gauls deduces the name Britannia directly from an immigrant
tribe derived from this latter country—Armorica. lb. i. 69,
152. Early Geogr. of West. Europe, by H. L. Long, 1859,
p. 41. This gentleman visited the district mdicated by Pliny
to the north of the Somme in 1854, and has given a map
* I-Iistoria Mundi, lib. iv. c. 17.
t Sharon Turner, Hist, of the A.-S. 5th ed. 1828, i. 48.
"An Essay on the Physiognomy, &c. of the present Inhabitants
of Britain," by the Eev. T. Price, 1829, p. 63. Am.
Thierry (i. 47), who thinks it probable that Pliny derived
his information from some ancient writer, but makes the
Britanni to have dwelt to the north of the Seine, before they
emigrated to Armorica or Sretagne. The historian of the
of it.
Beda, Hist. Eccles. I.
Vide mpra, p. 63.