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Regarding the stories told of many of these stones, generally attributing to them impossible movements, curative qualities or magical properties, their significance is not always clearly determinable; but when we know that much of this lore is very like that attaching to the “holy wells” and “wishing wells,” which were scenes of pagan rites long after the introduction of Christianity, and to some of which even now miraculous powers are accredited, can it be doubted that much of this lore has persisted in folk memory from pagan times, and probably, in some degree, from the Later Stone Age? The evidence of anthropology, in the opinion of modern students, proves that among the population of England to-day Celtic and, indeed, Neolithic types abound “even in the Anglo-Danish counties of Lincoln, Norfolk and Suffolk. … The old teaching about the extermination of one race by another, whether of Neolithic people by Goidels, of Goidels by Brythons, or of all these by Romans, Saxons, Danes or Normans, is not now set forth by many writers of repute. … Dr. Beddoe has calculated that over the greater part of England the Celtic strain amounts to one half.”* Writing of the Old English village, Professor F. York says “It is probable that the thegen and geneat and village tradesmen, save, perhaps, the smith, were mostly of English blood, with such mixture as marriage or concubinage with the British women caused; the other classes, over most of the island, were probably of Celtic or pre-Celtic blood.”† Mr. R. G. Collingwood, F.S.A., who touches on the subject in his recently issued manual on Roman Britain, also agrees that “there is much evidence of a mixed population in the Anglo-Saxon period, a population containing a British strain strong enongh to influence the character of the whole.” Again, the French ethnologist, Dr. Colignon, remarks that “When a race is well seated in a region, fixed to the soil by agriculture, acclimatised {27} by natural selection and sufficiently dense, it opposes—for the most precise observations confirm it—an enormous resistance to new comers whoever they may be.” The conclusions arrived at by the writers just quoted are supported by Professor Eilert Ekwall, who, in contributing the “Celtic Element” chapter to the recently issued Introduction to the Survey of English Place-Names, remarks that “The view often held that the British population was exterminated or swept away seems to have lost ground of late years. The numerous British place-names in England tell strongly against it.”
*Folk Memory, pp. 56, 91, 92.
†Social England, 1898, I, pp. 124–5.
The attitude taken up by the Romans towards the British during the former’s occupation of the country, must not be ignored in any attempt to explain how it came about that strange rites, associated with Neolithic and Celtic religious ceremonies, survived to become recorded in recent times as examples of common folk belief and custom. Themselves familiar with a polytheistic religion—and, as Mr. John Ward remarks “polytheism has unlimited elasticity,”—the Romans came to identify various gods of Britain with some of their own, and, in consequence, we find among the altars of that period which have been brought to light, several inscribed to deities bearing Celtic or other names often equated with those of the Græco-Roman pantheon. It is not always possible to distinguish old British deities from those whose worship was imported into this country by a Roman soldiery consisting of representatives of various continental races included within the Roman Empire; but enough is known to assure us that little or no obstacle was placed by the Romans in the way of the worshippers of native gods. Even local religious cults among the Britons appear to have had their temples here in Roman times, and to have become Romanized. Some of these native divinities such as Nudd or Lludd, to whom there was an important shrine at Lydney, on the banks of the Severn, are conspicuous figures in early Celtic mythology; but altars have been found in Britain to several other gods and goddesses who appear to have had no known worshippers outside of the British Isles. As Mr. Ward writes: “We know too little of the religions of pre-Roman Britain to estimate how many of the latter (deities) were {28} indigenous, and how far imported by the military”;* but it is obvious that little or nothing occurred during the Roman occupation to disturb the continuity of those primitive religious rites, of which there are emasculated survivals down to our own day.
*The Roman Era in Britain, p. 13.
All these important conclusions may be legitimately quoted in support of the contention that from the Later Stone Age—of which Norfolk and Suffolk have produced more abundant relics than any other part of England—until quite recent times there has never been any serious obstacle to the survival of superstitions which prehistoric practices gave rise to in connection with standing stones and other megalithic monuments.
Most prehistorians now agree that the period of what is known as the megalithic culture began, so far as Britain is concerned, towards the end of the Neolithic Age in our islands, and that the introduction of this particular culture was due to the arrival here of a race of people of African origin, which has left impressive relics of its presence in the shape of dolmens, menhir and other megalithic monuments in the continent from which it came and the countries into which it migrated. This African or Lybian race—the Mediterranean race of Professor Sergi, still represented by the Berbers in Northern Africa—is believed to have reached our islands by way of Spain. As instances of the cultural states and religious beliefs of the Lybians of North Africa and the Neolithic inhabitants of the British Isles, we may take the following customs prevalent in the former country in historical, and in Great Britain and Ireland in prehistoric times: (1) Human sacrifice by fire; (2) sacrifice of children to ensure fruitful seasons; (3) sacrifice of animals and eating of the victims; (4) killing of aged and infirm parents; (5) worship of standing stones; (6) dolmen-burial; (7) construction of stone circles and alignments; and (8) ritual dancing around standing stones.
Against subsequent Celtic invasions this Neolithic race seems to have maintained its hold so firmly in {29} some districts that even to-day it retains some measure of distinctiveness, while there is probably not a county in the United Kingdom, or in Ireland, where it is not still represented. In the case of this pre-Celtic race, as in that of the Celtic, the “extermination theory” no longer finds many supporters, and in view of the belief that it was able to impress certain features of its culture upon its dominating conquerors, as they in turn were able to impress many of theirs on later comers, the survival of beliefs and customs of Neolithic origin presents itself as a natural occurrence.
These beliefs and customs are relics of the religious ritual and usages of a race in some ways far more savage that we have reason to believe the Gaels or Brythons to have been when they appeared in Britain, and yet also, in some ways, more advanced than their conquerors: they were worshippers, as Mr. Gomme asserts, of “deities which there is little difficulty in recognizing as the counterparts of those religious goddesses of India, who are worshipped and venerated by non-Aryan votaries.” There is much evidence that their religious rites were those of an agricultural people, and, as the Celts were hunters and warriors rather than agriculturists, it is more than probable that they were the chief cultivators of the soil in Celtic and Roman times. Their rites of nature worship, often bloody and orgiastic, appear to have been very similar to those the Lybians are known to have practised on and around just such megaliths as are found in most parts of the British Isles. The statement of Pliny that the British women who took part in religious mysteries stained themselves in imitation of the dark races, is evidently a reference to the survival of such practices, or may even signify that the women in question actually belonged to the African race and had darker skins than their Celtic contemporaries in Britain. That some of our standing and holed stones were considered representative or symbolic of deities who demanded the sacrifice of youthful victims; that they were set up, like the “high places” of Baal, in order that their worshippers might “cause their sons and daughters to pass through the fire of Moloch”; and that the passing of children through holed stones is a ceremony having its origin in pagan sacrifices, seem natural conclusions to draw from the foregoing evidence.
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Although it may be distinctly antagonistic to the ideas commonly held regarding the stages of cultural development of the early inhabitants of the British Isles, there is much to be said in favour of the suggestion that the race of African origin which introduced the megalithic culture into these islands, possessed a higher culture than the earliest Celts who came after them, and that degeneration, rather than advancement, ensued upon contact with the Celts. To a large extent this would be a natural consequence of conquest by and living in subjection to a more powerful race of different ideals and warlike tendencies. The African race—to which, in view of their early migrations, the name of Mediterranean better applies—was that which gave us the wonderful Etruscan culture, the marvels of Cretan Knossos and many of those of early Egypt. “These are the folk who underlay classic civilization. The empires of Greece and Rome have disappeared, together with their culture, but have left this old population where they stood before.”* Upon their lore and fable is based much of Greek and Latin literature, and what we now know of them helps to explain the assertions of Herodotus and others regarding the African origin of Hercules, Neptune and other gods and goddesses. Into the British Isles they brought forms of nature-worship conducive to a mystical ecstasy, which often degenerated into orgiastic revelry—a lack of self-control approaching mania which has not been without manifestation among modern representatives of the race under circumstances creating extreme emotion. Even in our own day, it may be this African element among us which is occasionally responsible for startling revelations of primitive superstition and savagery. Yet while there are these survivals, and occasional outbreaks of an ancient and obscure malignity, this same element is probably accountable for much of the weird and beautiful of the old Celtic mythology. Probably, it would not be going too far to say that it was the intermingling and intermarriage of the southern race with the Celts which makes modem Celts in these islands what they are in temperament to-day, they {31} owing to the southerners just as much as the modem Norwegians owe to the mystic, poetic Finns.
*Bradley Malta and the Mediterranean Race, p. 85.
One might easily imagine that this southern race, after venturing into these colder and probably almost uninhabited lands,* became the victims of a kind of permanent nostalgia, which later manifested itself as an established disposition towards dreamy despondency and fatalistic acceptance of the depressing conditions of serfdom, attended by an abject belief in the necessity for propitiating at all costs unfriendly supernatural powers. For in the remoter districts, where the old Neolithic element is most easily identifiable, this still seems to be the prevailing disposition among the agricultural and seafaring folk, and, although it is often supposed to be accounted for by the Celtic temperament, it is not characteristic of the exuberant, versatile and combative Celt.
*It is now believed that some of the earlier Palaeolithic people were still inhabiting parts of the coast of Britain when the Neolithic immigrants arrived.
The late J. Romilly Allen, F.S.A., some time ago drew attention† to evidence from Ireland which might be interpreted as showing that the Celts of the Bronze Age were largely indebted to the Neolithic aborigines for their artistic development, and that the absorption of the aborigines by the conquering Gaels had had a stimulative effect on decorative art. In Co. Meath, he pointed out, the best specimens of Bronze Age ornament sculptured on stone occur on megalithic monuments of the type admitted to belong to the Neolithic period, so that in Ireland the erection of dolmens, chambered cairns and other similar structures must have continued during the Bronze Age, or the characteristic patterns of the latter age must have been derived from a Neolithic source.
†Celtic Art in Pagan and Christian Times, p. 43
A recent summary of modern conclusions regarding this wonderful race, which gave to many parts of Europe such a remarkable and distinctive culture, is that “It held our islands till the coming of the Celts, who fought with the aborigines, dispossessed them of the more fertile parts, subjugated them, even amalgamated with them, but certainly never extirpated them. In the time of the Romans they were practically independent in South Wales. In Ireland they were long unconquered and are found as allies rather than {32} serfs of the Gaels, ruling their own provinces, and preserving their own customs and religions. Nor, in spite of all the successive invasions of Great Britain and Ireland, are they yet extinct, or so merged as to have lost their type, which is still the predominant one in many parts of the west, both of Britain and Ireland, and is believed by some ethnologists to be generally upon the increase all over England.”* If this be the case, it is in agreement with the result of anthropometric investigation in Crete, where the alien elements which settled in the island after the end of the Minoan Ages seem to have bred out to a large extent, and the long-headed Mediterranean type has re-established itself even where the broad-heads became numerically preponderant.
*Squire, Celtic Myth and Legend, pp. 20–21
Probably there is no part of Great Britain and Ireland where a study of local folklore would not lead to like conclusions to those arrived at in the foregoing pages. The late Canon J. C. Atkinson, who for more than forty years was indefatigable in acquainting himself with the ancient lore, custom and belief of the moor folk of the Yorkshire parish in which he dwelt and ministered, writes that “the more one really enters into the story of the folklore still surviving in these dales of ours … the more one finds to suggest how hard has been the struggle between the old paganism and the new Christianity. Survivals of this form or that of the old nature-worship … meet one at every turn.” And elsewhere, after commenting on the comparative ease with which the heathenish practices of the Saxons and Danes were suppressed in Northern England, he adds “But the far older nature-worship, the rude fetichism which dated back to ages long before history, had tougher and deeper roots. The new religion could turn the nature-deities of this primeval superstition into devils, its spells into magic, its spae-wives into witches, but it could never banish them from the imagination of men; it had in the end even to capitulate to the nature-worship, to adopt its stones and its wells, to turn its spells into exorcisms and benedictions, its charms into prayers.”†
†Forty Years in a Moorland Parish, pp. 131, 236.