Page:Dictionary of Greek and Roman Geography Volume I Part 1.djvu/455

 f^ ^f 3XV/.;; f^r^"' ^^c/C hnU'*^S:;fi ^>rI^o i/o^^lotJ/. *-ii«'*''1>^t* K^^7i//i. jBRITANNICAE INSULAE. BRITANNICAE INSULAE, 437 Jrtaik one, — " Britannos — vicit, aUo muro oespiddo — ducto." {Anton. PiuSf b.') Coercion and consolidation are still the rnle; the notices for the reigns of Commodns and Pertinaz, thongh hrief and unimportani, being found in so good an historian as Dion. Dion, too, is the chief authority for the reign of Severus. He would have been suifi- cient single-handed; but he is supported by both coins and inscriptions. At the same time, he never " "^ " erection of any wall to Severus. On s ot one as alrcaHv existing. Spartianus is the auth^y for the usual doctrine. {Sever. 18.) XZi^ctr .'S-t-U /, y ili. I O. When Caiedonia — As opposed to Britain in general — comes under notice, a further reference to the text of Dion respecting the actions of Severus will be made. A. D. 211, on the fourth of February, Severus dies at York. British history, never eminently clear, DOW becomes obscurer still. An occasional notice is all that occurs until the reign of Diocletian. Thia b^ns A. D. 284. The usurpers Camusius uid AUectos now appear in the field. So do nations hitherto unnoticed — the Franks and the Saxons. Whatever may be the value of the testimony of Gildas, Beda, and the other accredited sources of Anglo-Saxon history, in respect to the fact of Hengist and Horsa having at a certain time, and in s certain place, invaded Britain; the evidence that they wex8 the ^rst German* who did so is utterly insufficient. The Panegyric ctf Eumenius — and we must remember that, however worthless the panegyrists may be as authors, they have the merit of being contemporary to the events they describe — contains the following remarkable passage : — Gods, unconquered Caesar, has the extermi- nation of all the enemies, whom you have attacked, and of the Franks more eepeciaUy^ been decreed, that even those of your soldiers, who, having missed their way on a foggy sea, reached the town of London, destroyed promiscuously and throughout the city the whole remains of that mercenary mul- titude of barbarians, that, after escaping the battle, sacking the town, and, attempting flight, was still left — a deed, whereby your provincials were not only saved, but delighted by the sight of the slaughter." (Eumen. Panegyr. Constant. Caes.) The Franks and Picts are first mentioned in Bri- tain in the reign of Diocletian : the Attacotts and Scots under that of Julian (a. d. 360). The authorities now improve — being, chiefly, Ammianus Marcellinus and Claudian. It will, nevertheless, be soon seen that the ethnology of Britain is as obscure as its archaeolc^. The abandonment of the isle by the Romans, and its reduction by the Saxons, are the chief events of the 5th and 6th centuries, all ob- scure. It is even more diflkult to say how the Germanic populations displaced the Roman, than how the Roman displaced the Keltic. And this introduces a new question, a question already suggested, but postponed, viz. : the value of the writers of the beginning of the Byzantine and the end of the proper Roman period. It is evident that no author much earlier than the times of Ho- norins and Arcadius can tell us much about the de- cline and fall of the Roman supremacy in the west. It is evident, too, that the literature passes from Paganism to Christianity. Procopius is the most important of the Pagans. The little ho tells us of j).ia^. be remembered, that his blunders and confusion are in respect to Brittia, This, as aforesaid, he sepa- rates from Britamiia. Those who confound Uie two are ourselves — the modem writers. To Jomandes we refer in vain for anything of value; although from the extent to which he was the historian of certain nations of Germanic extrac- tion, and from the degree to which Britain was in his time Germanised, we expect more than we find. Hence from the time of Ammianus to the time of Gildas — the earliest British and Christian writer of our island — from about a.d. 380 to a.d. 550 — we have no author more respectable than Orosius. He alone, or nearly so, was known to the native his- torians, and what he tells us is httle beyond the names of certain usurpers. When Britain is next known to the investigator, it has ceased to be Roman. It is German, or Saxon, instead. Such is the sketch of the history of Roman Britain, considered more especialJjMn respect to the authorities on which it rests. /The value of the only author who still de- mands notice, Richard of Cirenc^ter, is measured j in the article MoiUNiTl ? S«^ n^'^V^'TLiJT^^'*'^ POPULATION. It is well known that the bulk of the South Britons of Caesar's time belonged to the same stock as the Gauls, and that the Gauls were Kelts. But whether the North Britons wera in the same cate- gory; whether the Britons of Caesar were descended from the first occupants of the islands ; and, lastly, whether the population was wholly homogeneous, are all points upon which opinions vary. A refer- ence to the article Beloae shows that, for that population, a Germanic affinity has been claimed; though, apparently, on insufficient grounds. The population of North Britain may have been, such as it is now, Gaelic. Occupants, too, earlier than even the earliest Kelts of any kind, have been assigned to the island by competent archaeologists. Nothing less than an elaborate monogra]^ specially devoted to the criticism of these complicated points, would suffice for the exhibition of the arguments on both sides. The present notice can contain only the result of the writer's investigations. Without either denying or affirming the existence of early Iberian, German, or Scandinavian settle- ments in particular localities, he believes them to have been exceedingly exceptional ; so that, to all intents and purposes, the population with which the Phoenicians traded and the Romans fought were Kelts of the British branch, t. e. Kelts whose lan- guage was either the mother -tongue of the present Welsli, or a form of speech closely allied to it. The ancestors of this population he believes to have been the earliest occupants of South Britain at least Were they so of North Britain ? There are points both of internal and external evidence in this question. In the way of intenial evidence it is cer- tain, that even in tlioee parts of Scotland where the language is most eminently Gaelic, and, as such, more especially connected with the speech of Ireland, the oldest geograpiiical terms are British rather than Erse. Thus, the word for mountain is fren, and never sliabh, as in Ireland. Again, the words aber and inver, in such words as ^6er-nethy and Invert nethy, have long been recognised as ^e Shibboletlis (so to say) of the British and Gaelic populations. They mean the same thing — a month of a river. BrUain is oorrect, though unimportant; for it must | sometimes the junction of twa Now whilst aber ff3 t.
 * By so thorough a consent of the Immortal