Wales

From the low chain of sand dunes which fringes the north-eastern coast of France can be discerned, on a day of ordinary brightness, the great cliffs of Kent. Frequently they are overhung by the dark and damp canopy which has given to our island the evil reputation of being the home of eternal mist and night. But occasionally the sun strikes them, and they appear brilliantly white and alluring. To the French shore have come, in the course of centuries, wave after wave of wandering peoples; men impelled by every sort of motive, fear of stronger foes, love of plunder, and eagerness for adventure. They have come; they have seen the beckoning white cliffs so enticing in their mystery, and have crossed over and essayed to make them their {8} own. Thither only the other day came the ruthless German, bent upon striking at the tiny heart of so vast an Empire. Thither a hundred years before came Napoleon, reluctant that any part of Europe should challenge his overlordship. Thither eight centuries earlier had come the polished and adventurous Norman, eager to win broad acres and martial renown beyond the sea. Still earlier had come the Danes, plunderers rather than settlers, but men who nevertheless left an abiding mark upon the heterogeneous population of the island. The Danes had but followed in the wake of the German tribes who had come over, conquered, and bestowed a new name upon the larger and more fertile part of Britain. It is with the arrival of these last-named people that the history of England begins; but the history of Wales must be traced to a far earlier origin. Indeed, we can trace the descent of the people who now inhabit the hills and valleys of the westernmost parts of Britain to those dim prehistoric times about which only geology, ethnology, philology, and archæology can enlighten us. And at an even earlier date than that this country was inhabited by man: but the ice of the north descended upon the {9} land, and all the higher forms of life became extinct. Between the men of the pre-glacial and the men of the post-glacial age in Britain no link has as yet been discovered.

The Britain revealed to our eyes when science first raises the curtain is not the Britain which we to-day know. The mountains were higher, and the chalk hills had not assumed their present smooth and rounded shape. It was not then an island, but part of a mighty continent, parts of which are now submerged beneath the waters of the North Sea, the English Channel, and the Atlantic. In all probability a great river flowed through what are now the Straits of Dover. The climate, however, apparently, did not differ to any marked degree from that which now prevails. Over this continent roamed many animals, some of which are entirely extinct, and others which have long since fled either to the colder north or to the warmer south. They included the mammoth, the cave lion, the bear, the rhinoceros, the hyena, the hippopotamus, the bison, the reindeer, the elk, and the wild horse. The men who lived with, and hunted, these beasts were very low in the scale of civilization. Indeed the only evidence of the possession by them of any {10} culture at all is a number of sketches or paintings of animals upon the walls of caves and on domestic utensils. The art displayed in these figures is extremely rudimentary, and between them and the pictures seen at a modern exhibition the gulf is a wide one; but the primitive artist undoubtedly possessed one sovereign merit--he left the beholder in no doubt as to the meaning of the picture! To these earliest inhabitants of Britain the name Men of the Old Stone Age has been given. Their sense of the artistic must have been far more highly developed than their sense of the comfortable. Their dwellings were caves, and those without any sort of furniture. Of manufactures they knew nothing: they neither wove cloth nor moulded clay. Their clothing must have consisted of the skins of the animals which they killed; and as the evidence seems to indicate that they were not cannibals, the same animals must have provided them with food. Since they knew nothing about the use of metals, all their hunting and all their fighting must have been carried on with weapons of stone; and indeed a plentiful stock of their arrow heads and axes has survived. To this period it is quite impossible to assign even an approximate {11} date: it may have been as late as ten thousand years ago, but it may just as easily have been a hundred thousand.

When the snow and the ice had departed and left a country which men could once again inhabit, the outward aspect of Britain had greatly altered. It was now an island, differing only in minor details from the Britain which we now know. With the restoration of a milder climate man returned. But the great beasts did not come back; and henceforth we hear only of the dog, the horse, the ox, the sheep, the pig, the goat, and the wolf. The age which then opened is known as the Neolithic, or New Stone Age. The use of metals had not yet been discovered, and all weapons and tools were still made of stone; but there was a marked improvement in their manufacture. The type of civilization was evidently higher. Hunting and fishing, together with incessant fighting, were still the chief occupations of man; but to these pursuits had now been added the tending of flocks and herds. The art of weaving, too, had been discovered, and skins had made way for brightly-coloured cloth garments. Pots, jugs, and dishes of every variety were baked, many of them accurate and graceful in their outline. {12} Finally, the people of the New Stone Age had learned to be agriculturists; and that led them to abandon nomadic habits for fixed settlements where, in time, villages came to be built. Many of these earliest villages were built in lakes, and traces of them have been discovered in Wales in Llangorse Lake and in Llyn Llydaw. Who these people were is a question which cannot be answered with even the slightest degree of certitude. Indeed the whole problem of race in those early times is so obscure as to make a study of it almost altogether barren and unprofitable. One thing only is certain, and that is that throughout the New Stone Age the people who dwelt in Britain were not Celts. As not a word of their language has survived, it is difficult to determine whether they were members of the great family called Aryans, to which the whole present population of Europe, with the exception of Finns, Turks, and Hungarians, belongs. Of these people it is probable that three successive waves arrived. In many things they differed, but were alike in being all extremely dark. Their descendants constitute the most pronounced element in the population of modern Wales.

The traditional name for the men of the {13} New Stone Age is the Iberians. Before the Celtic invasion a more or less homogeneous people inhabited the British Isles, France, Spain, and northern Italy. The use of the term "Mediterranean" as a substitute for Iberian has been suggested. To its use there is only one real objection, and that is that it is almost wholly devoid of meaning. Some recent writers, rejecting both these terms, have used the term "Hamitic," a family of languages closely allied to the Semitic. This novel theory has been based upon two grounds: (1) The Irish and Welsh languages, although drawing their vocabulary from Celtic or Aryan sources, have a syntax paralleled in Berber and Egyptian. No one who has seen them can fail to perceive the remarkable similarity between the physiognomy of the Berber peoples of northern Africa and the prevailing type of South Wales Welshman. (2) There is identity of culture and of religion not only between the Neolithic inhabitants of Britain and those of North Africa, but also between them and the people of Egypt and Babylon. A high stage of civilization was attained by these people. The building of Stonehenge would in itself be proof enough of their engineering skill. It is likely that there was {14} continuous contact between Britain in those days and the great cradles of civilization--the valleys of the Nile, the Tigris, and the Euphrates--and that traders brought to the distant isle not only foreign wares but new knowledge and up-to-date ideas.

When, or how, the Stone Age passed into the Age of Bronze we do not know. Bronze was used in Egypt at least as early as the fourth millennium B.C., and in all likelihood it was introduced into Britain in the ordinary course of trade. Whencesoever it came, there can be no doubt that it speedily wrought a complete revolution in men's way of living. In Britain bronze was not the only metal to be largely used. There were famous gold mines in Ireland, copper in Wales, and tin in Cornwall. The men of the New Stone Age had displayed none of their predecessors' love of drawing; but they immediately evinced a most remarkable aptitude for working in gold and bronze. Torques, rings, and bracelets of extreme beauty have been discovered belonging to this period. As the country was sparsely populated there was room enough for wave after wave of immigrants. The newcomers would not be regarded altogether as foreigners, for in race, language, and {15} civilization the inhabitants of both sides of the English Channel were identical. Thus the new mingled peaceably with the old without any of the fierce struggles which form so hideous an aspect of the later migrations.

But this period of calm was soon to be interrupted. A new people appeared on the scene, a branch of the great Celtic people to whom for purposes of identification and differentiation the name Goidels has been given. These people were more warlike than the older inhabitants of the island; nevertheless there was no settled policy of extermination or even of expropriation. But slow and silent pressure did its work. The Iberians were gradually pushed into the remoter corners of the west, and especially into the mountainous region which we now call Wales.

It is unnecessary perhaps to impress upon, the reader that there never was at any time anything resembling a Celtic Empire, or even a Celtic nation. It is only the name which we give to a branch of the Aryan or Indo-European family of races which migrated at a very early date from central Asia to the banks of the Rhine, the Main, and the Danube. They became known to the Greeks of classical times, who called them Hyperboreans. A {16} martial folk they were, delighting in combat, and always thirsting for fresh conquests, for glory, and for plunder. Their first struggle was with the Germanic tribes, whom they eventually subjugated. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, a writer of the first century B.C. refers to Germany as a Celtic territory. But after a time the Germans turned on their masters and expelled them from what had been their first European home, the region which lies between the Elbe and the Rhine.

It is but natural that wandering nations should in all ages have felt attracted by France. To those, particularly, who came from the arid and frozen steppes of Russia, or from the wind-swept Scandinavian lands, its sunny plains, its fine rivers, its fields so well adapted for the cultivation of grain, its gentle hills on whose slopes the vine flourishes so luxuriantly, must have seemed a veritable paradise. It is therefore not in the least surprising that, from the earliest dawn of history, race should have striven with race for the possession of so fair an inheritance. Among the first invaders within the period of recorded history were the Celts, who invaded France somewhere about the year 600 B.C. Their second invasion occurred some time after 300 B.C. This time {17} they swept over the whole country from the Channel to the Bay of Biscay, and from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean. The land was then called Gaul; and these were the people against whom the whole might of Rome was directed under the leadership of Julius Cæsar. Invaders and invaded were closely akin in blood. After a stubborn resistance the whole country was subjugated. Latin civilization was speedily assimilated, and Gaul became, after a time, more Roman almost than Rome itself. Even at this distant date, nowhere is it more easy to enter into the spirit of ancient Rome than within the gaunt and gigantic amphitheatre of Arles, by the exquisite Maison Carrée of Nimes, and beneath the stupendous aqueduct of Pont du Gard. But as the power of Rome declined new torrents of invaders swept into Gaul in successive waves, Burgundian giving place to Visigoth, and Visigoth to Frank.