Page:Bury J B The Cambridge Medieval History Vol 2 1913.djvu/507

Rh blessings of civilisation were derived, and whose inhabitants could enter into various relations, friendly and hostile, with those of this world. There are traces, too, of the conception of local other-worlds, to be found underneath lakes and parts of the sea, while, both in Irish and Welsh legend, there are vestiges of a belief in the blissful conditions of life on certain fabulous islands. In Welsh legend, too, it would appear that the wild country of Northern Britain was regarded as a haunted region. In some Welsh medieval poems there are echoes of a belief that the souls of the departed made their home in the Caledonian forest.

With regard to the priests of Britain and Ireland, we have little direct knowledge, but, though the Irish drui may conceivably be a borrowed word from the Gallo-Latin druida, it is most probable that it is a native word, and, in any case, the part played by the druids in Irish society as magicians and seers in the legends of Ireland would be their natural part in pre-Christian times. In Welsh society, too, the continuance into fairly recent times of the practice of having recourse to wizards in certain emergencies, points to the antiquity in Welsh life of the institution of the sorcerer. The best description that can be given of Britain and Ireland in the days of their heathendom, is that of countries whose inhabitants could have been seldom free by night or by day from a sense of being haunted, but whose gloom was relieved by visions of happy other-lands, into which the privileged might some day enter. Doubtless, in close conjunction with Keltic heathendom, there was at one time much oral mythology, the fragments of which can now only with difficulty be disentangled from the mass of Keltic medieval and modern folk-lore.

There is one problem upon which no light appears to be available, namely the religious organisation through which was maintained the worship of the major Keltic deities, whose names are found in the British Isles as well as on the Continent, and the distinction, if any, that was made between their worship and that of the minor local deities. All that we know is, from the survival of some of their names, that the tradition of their worship was not entirely lost. At Bath there are remains of a temple dedicated to Sulis, who was identified with Minerva. At Caerwent and Lydney there are also remains of temples, the latter dedicated to a Keltic god, Nodens or Nodons. Near Carrawburgh there was a temple belonging to the British water-goddess Coventina, and at Benwell in a small temple there were found two altars, one to Anociticus and the other to Antenociticus. For an account of these temples the reader is referred to Ward's Romano-British Buildings and Earthworks (London, Methuen & Co., 1911).