HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION

TO

FIRST PERIOD.

Ancient Population of Britain-Roman Britain--Cassi belaunus-Caractacus— Boadicea-Vortigern-Britain abandoned by the Romans-Anglo-Saxons-Hengist and Horsa-Ella-Cerdic-Natanleod-Arthur-Cymric-The Heptarchy -Saxon Bretwaldas-Offa-Cenulph-Egbert-Bernulph-Ethelwulf - Ethel

bald-Ethelbert-Ethelred.

ALL the traces of the past which we can still read in the present, as well as all traditional and recorded history, point to a spot situated somewhere in Central Asia as the cradle of our species, the fountainhead from which all the nations of the earth have descended. At what time the great primitive wave of population, generally designated the Gaelic, first set in upon the western regions of the world, we have no means of conjecturing even with an approach to certainty. There are reasons, however, for concluding that it had overflowed a great part of the continent of Europe, as well as the half-separated peninsulas of Greece and Italy-in both of which it had by that time been partially displaced by a succeeding wave-fully a thousand years before the Christian era. It is the opinion of some of those who have most elaborately examined this question,—of M. Gosselin, for instance, the learned French geographer, and of our own acute and ingenious Whitaker, the historian of Manchester,—that it could not have been long after this date before the first emigrants began to pass over from Gaul to Britain. There can be no doubt, at all events, that it was from Gaul that Britain actually derived its first inhabitants. The position of the two countries, the testimony of ancient authorities,-the resemblance of manners and customs,--the identity of religious doctrines and practices,-and, above all, the clear and strong testimony of language, all prove the one people to have sprung from the other. The original name of our island is that by which it still continues to be designated in the language of our Scottish Gael, the unmixed descendants of its primitive inhabitants. They call it Albinn, as we find Aristotle, the most ancient of the classic authors by whom it is mentioned, calling it Albion. Inn is the Gaelic term for a large island; all, though not now used by the Scottish Gael, is sufficiently ascer

tained to have anciently signified white. It is preserved both in the Latin albus, and in the geographical terms Alps and Apennines, (that is, Alp-pennin, or white mountain,) these ridges being so called from the perpetual snow seen on their summits. Albinn, therefore, means the white island, and the name was probably given to Great Britain from the chalk cliffs which it presented to the view of the people on the opposite coast. As for the word Britain, numerous interpretations have been given of it; but perhaps the most probable is that advanced by Mr Whitaker, in his history of Manchester, and afterwards more fully developed in his "Genuine Origin of the Britons asserted," in answer to Mr Macpherson. It appears pretty clearly that Britin, the barbaric term from which the Greeks and Romans formed their smoother Britannia, was really the name not of the island but of its inhabitants The termination in, in fact, which has so much perplexed Camden and other able antiquaries, is nothing more than the sign of the plural, according to the usual mode of declension in the Gaelic tongue. And Brit, Mr Whitaker maintains, signifies merely the divided or separated. It is in fact the same word with brik or brechan, a garment distinguished by divided or variegated colours, and still the common appellation of the Highland plaid. The Britin, therefore, were the separated people-or the emigrants, as we should say-those who had removed from the rest of their countrymen in Gaul, and settled in Albinn.

The whole of the southern coast of England, from Kent to the Land's End, appears to have been peopled in this way before either the more northern or the midland districts of the island had been penetrated. As the descendants of the original settlers, however, increased in number, and new bands of emigrants successively arrived from the mother-country, the back woods were gradually cleared, till, at last, the whole island had become inhabited. There is abundant evidence that this result had taken place long before the commencement of the Christian era. During this interval, also, a great part of Ireland had been taken possession of, and peopled, no doubt, from the neighbouring coasts of the west of England.

It seems to have been to one of the bands of foreign invaders, who thus overran Ireland, that the epithet Scots was first applied. The word-of which, however, different interpretations have been givenis most probably the same with the modern Gaelic term scuit or scaoit, signifying a wandering horde,—the origin, also, in all likelihood, of the name Scythians, so famous in all the records of these remote ages. From Ireland a branch of the Scots, several ages afterwards, passed over into Scotland, and eventually gave their name to the country. Scotland, however, had long before this been peopled both along its coasts, and in part, at least, of the interior, by the gradual movement northwards of the tide of population from South Britain. The general name given to the inhabitants of the northern part of the island before, and for some centuries after the era of Christianity, was not Scots, but Caledonians, that is, Caoilldaoin, men of the woods. They are spoken of by the Roman writers as divided into the Deucaledones and the Vecturiones. The former of these designations is the Gaelic Duchaoilldaoin, literally the true or real inhabitants of the woods; and it was applied to the mountaineers in the north-western part of the country, or what we now call the Highlands, as distinguished from the inhabi