Page:The Celtic Review volume 3.djvu/271

256 galleys’ at the best, probably varied by small skin canoes for their ordinary people, five hundred years after Cæsar had encountered the fleet of the Bretons and the Britons, and had acknowledged the marked superiority of their ships over those of the Romans.

Perhaps too much space has been given here to the maritime side of Celtic civilization. But, after all, the evidence thus derived is quite sufficient to show that the Romans were fighting a people who had attained a culture which, in some respects, was higher than their own. Men whose idea of a battleship was a high-hulked oaken sailing-vessel, having its beams riveted together with iron pins, and who knew how to forge chain cables for their anchors, such men must have lived a civilized life ashore as well as afloat. And this we know was the case.

‘The British Gauls appear to have been excellent farmers, skilled as well in the production of cereals as in stock-raising and the management of the dairy,’ observes Mr. Elton; and he further points to the fact that, as early as the fourth century B.C., the traveller Pytheas describes the ‘great barns’ in which they thrashed their corn. Farmers who build ‘great barns’ take care that they have good houses for themselves; and all this implies a civilized people. From authentic sources we gain a fair idea of their personal appearance. They were a comely race, tall of stature, fair-skinned, and light-haired. Men and women wore tartan plaids, tunics, and trews; the women having their hair ‘tied in an elegant knot upon the neck,’ and the men covering their heads with ‘a soft hat of a modern pattern’ (to quote Mr. Elton’s words once more). Particulars such as these reveal to us the fact that the ruling race in the south of Great Britain in Cæsar’s day were civilized people, and that the race or races whom Leech and A’Beckett had in view were of another order altogether.