head, whence it may be assumed the bull was anciently as nowadays associated with John Bull. At British festivals our predecessors used to antic in the guise of a bull, and the bull-headed actor was entitled "The Broad". The bull was intimately connected with Crete; Britomart was the Lady of All Creatures, and seemingly the brutes in general were named either after her or Brut. The British word for bull was tarw, the Spanish is toro; in Etruria we find the City of Turin or Torino using as its cognisance a rampant bull; and I have little doubt that the fabulous Minotaur was a physical brute actually maintained in the terrible recesses of some yet-to-be-discovered labyrinth. The subterranean mausoleums of the Sacred Bulls of Egypt are among the greatest of the great monuments of that country; the bull-fights of Spain were almost without doubt the direct descendants of sacred festivals, wherein the slaying of the Mithraic Bull was dramatically presented, but in Crete itself the bull-fights seem to have been amicable gymnastic games wherein the most marvellous feats of agility were displayed. Illustrations of these graceful and intrepid performances are still extant on Cretan frieze and vase, the colours being as fresh to-day as when laid on 3000 years ago. In Britain the national sport seems to have been bullbaiting, and the dogs associated with that pastime presumably were bull-dogs. Doggedness is one of the ingrained qualities of our race; of recent years the bull-dog has been promoted into symbolic evidence of our tenacity and doggedness. Our mariners are sea-dogs, and the modern bards vouch us to be in general boys of the bull-dog breed. The mascot bull-dogs in the shops at this moment serve the same end as the mascot emblems and mysterious hieroglyphics of the ancients, and the Egyptian who carried a scarabæus or an Eye of Horus, acted without doubt from the same simple, homely impulse as drives the modern Englishman to hang up the picture of a repulsive animal subscribed, "What we have we'll hold ". The prehistoric dog or jackal symbolised not tenacity or courage, but the maker of tracks, for the well-authenticated reason that dogs were considered the best guides to practicable courses in the wilderness. Bull-headed men and dogheaded men are represented constantly in Cretan Art, and these in all likelihood symbolised the primeval bull-dogs who trekked into so many of the wild and trackless places of the world. The Welsh have a saying, "Tra Mor, Tra Brython," which means, as long as there is sea so long will there be Britons". Centuries ago, Diodorus of Sicily mentioned the Kelts as "having an immemorial taste for foreign expeditions and adventurous wars, and he goes on to describe them as 'irritable, prompt to fight, in other respects simple and guileless,' thus, according with Strabo, who sums up the Celtic temperament as being simple and spontaneous, willingly taking in hand the cause of the oppressed ".1 Diodorus also mentions the Kelts as clothed sometimes "in tissues of variegated colours," which calls to mind the tartans of the Alban McAlpines, Ians, Jocks, Sanders, Hendries, and others of that ilk. The dictionaries define the name Andrew as meaning a man, whence androgynous and anthropology; in Cornish antrou meant lord or master, and these early McAndrews were doubtless masterly, tyrannical, dour, derring-doers, inconceivably daring in der-doing. To try means make 1 1 Cf. Thomas, J. J., Britannia Antiquissima, pp. 84, 85. an effort, and we speak proverbially of "working like a Trojan". The corollary is that tired feeling which must have sorely tried the tyros or young recruits. After daring and trying and tiring, these dour men eventually turned adre, which is Cornish for homeward. Whether their hearts were turned Troy-ward in the Ægean or to some small unsung British tre or Troynovant, who can tell? "I am now in Jerusalem where Christ was born," wrote a modern argonaut to his mother, but, he added, "I wish I were in Wigan where I was born." CHAPTER IV ALBION "The Anglo-Saxons, down to a late period, retained the heathenish Yule, as all Teutonic Christians did the sanctity of Easter-tide; and from these two, the Yule-boar and Yule-bread, the Easter pancake, Easter sword, Easter fire, and Easter dance could not be separated. As faithfully were perpetuated the name and, in many cases, the observances of midsummer. New Christian feasts, especially of saints, seem purposely as well as accidentally to have been made to fall on heathen holidays. Churches often rose precisely where a heathen god or his sacred tree had been pulled down; and the people trod their old paths to the accustomed site: sometimes the very walls of the heathen temple became those of the church; and cases occur in which idol-images still found a place in a wall of the porch, or were set up outside the door, as at Bamberg Cathedral where lie Sclavicheathen figures of animals inscribed with runes."-GRIMM. OUR Chronicles state that when Brute and his companions reached these shores, "at that time the name of the island was Albion". According to tradition Alba, Albion, or Alban, whence the place-name Albion, was a fairy giant, but this, in the eyes of current scholarship, is a fallacy, and alba is merely an adjective meaning white, whence wherever met with it is so translated. But because there happens to be a relatively small tract of white cliffs in the neighbourhood of Dover, it is a barren stretch of imagination to suppose that all Britain thence derived its prehistoric title, and in any case the question-why did alba mean white?—would remain unanswered. The Highlanders of Scotland still speak of their country as Albany or Alban; the national cry of Scotland was evidently at one time 66 66 Albani," and even as late as 1138, 'the army of the Scots with one voice vociferated their native distinction, and the shout of Albani! Albani! ascended even to the heavens "1 Not only by the Romans but likewise by the Greeks, Britain was known as Albion, and one may therefore conjecture that the white-cliff theory is an unsound fancy. Strabo alludes to a certain district generally supposed to be Land's End, under the name "Kalbion," a word manifestly having some radical relation to "Albion". By an application of the comparative method to place-names and proper-names, I arrived several years ago at the seemingly only logical conclusion that in many directions ak and its variants meant great or mighty. On every hand there is presumptive evidence of this fact, and I have since found that Bryant and also Faber, working by wholly independent methods, reached a very similar conclusion. My modus operandi, with many of its results, having been already published, it is unnecessary here to restate them, and I shall confine myself to new and corroborative evid ence. 3 In addition to great or mighty it is clear that the radical in question meant high. The German trisagion of hoch! hoch! hoch! is still equivalent to the English high! high! high! the Swedish for high is hog, the Dutch is oog, and in Welsh or British high is uch. It is presumably a trace of the gutteral ch that remains in our modern spelling of high with a gh now mute, but the primordial Welsh uch 1 Toland, History of the Druids, p. 428. 2 Cf. Poste, B., Britannic Researches, p. 110. |