The Project Gutenberg eBook, Early Britain--Roman Britain, by Edward Conybeare

A MAP OF BRITAIN to illustrate THE ROMAN OCCUPATION.
London: Published by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge.

EARLY BRITAIN.

ERRATA.

PREFACE

In the present work my object has been to give a readable sketch of the historical growth and decay of Roman influence in Britain, illustrated by the archaeology of the period, rather than a mainly archaeological treatise with a bare outline of the history. The chief authorities of which I have made use are thus those original classical sources for the early history of our island, so carefully and ably collected in the 'Monumenta Historica Britannica';^[1] which, along with Huebner's 'Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum[2],' must always be the foundation of every work on Roman Britain. Amongst the many other authorities consulted I must acknowledge my special debt to Mr. Elton's 'Origins of English History'; and yet more to Mr. Haverfield's invaluable publications in the 'Antiquary' and elsewhere, without which to keep abreast of the incessant development of my subject by the antiquarian spade-work now going on all over the land would be an almost hopeless task.

EDWARD CONYBEARE.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Amongst the historians the most important are—Caesar, who tells his own tale; Tacitus, to whom we owe our main knowledge of the Conquest, with the later stages of which he was contemporary; Dion Cassius, who wrote his history in the next century, the 2nd A.D.;^[3] the various Imperial biographers of the 3rd century; the Imperial panegyrists of the 4th, along with Ammianus Marcellinus, who towards the close of that century connects and supplements their stories; Claudian, the poet-historian of the 5th century, whose verses throw a lurid gleam on his own disastrous age, when Roman authority in Britain was at its last gasp; and finally the British writers, Nennius and Gildas, whose "monotonous plaint" shows that authority dead and gone, with the first stirring of our new national life already quickening amid the decay.

Of geographical and general information we gain most from Strabo, in the Augustan age, who tells what earlier and greater geographers than himself had already discovered about our island; Pliny the Elder, who, in the next century, found the ethnology and botany of Britain so valuable for his 'Natural History'; Ptolemy, a generation later yet, who includes an elaborate survey of our island in his stupendous Atlas (as it would now be called) of the world;^[4] and the unknown compilers of the 'Itinerary,' the 'Notitia,' and the 'Ravenna Geography.' To these must be added the epigrammatist Martial, who lived at the time of the Conquest, and whose references to British matters throw a precious light on the social connection between Britain and Rome which aids us to trace something of the earliest dawn of Christianity in our land.^[5]

ANCIENT AUTHORITIES REFERRED TO IN THIS WORK

LATER AUTHORITIES

PRE-ROMAN BRITAIN

§  A.—Palaeolithic Age—Extinct fauna—River-bed men—Flint implements—Burnt stones—Worked bones—Glacial climate

§  B.—Neolithic Age—"Ugrians"—Polished flints—Jadite—Gold ornaments—Cromlechs
—Forts—Bronze Age—Copper and tin—Stonehenge

§  C.—Aryan immigrants—Gael and Briton—Earliest classical nomenclature—British Isles
—Albion—Ierne—Cassiterides—Phoenician tin trade viâ Cadiz

§  D.—Discoveries of Pytheas—Greek tin trade viâ Marseilles—Trade routes—Ingots—Coracles
—Earliest British coins—Lead-mining

§  E.—Pytheas trustworthy—His notes on Britain—Agricultural tribes—Barns—Manures—Dene
Holes—Mead—Beer—Parched corn—Pottery—Mill-stones—Villages—Cattle—Pastoral
tribes—Savage tribes—Cannibalism—Polyandry—Beasts of chase—Forest trees—British
clothing and arms—Sussex iron

§  F.—Celtic types—"Roy" and "Dhu"—Gael—Silurians—Loegrians—Basque peoples—Shifting
of clans—Constitutional disturbances—Monarchy—Oligarchy—Demagogues—First inscribed coins

§  G.—Clans at Julian invasion—Permanent natural boundaries—Population Celtic settlements
—"Duns"—Maiden Castle

§  H.—Religious state of Britain—Illustrated by Hindooism—Totemists—Polytheists—Druids
—Bards—Seers—Druidic Deities—Mistletoe—Sacred herbs—"Ovum Anguinum"—Suppression
of Druidism—Druidism and Christianity

THE JULIAN INVASION

B.C. 55, 54