Troy Queen or the Eternal Queen, or dur queen, the hard Queen, at times a little dragon, oftener a dear Queen, i.e., Britomart, the Sweet Maiden, or Eda, the passionately beloved, the Adorée. "Bride, the gentle" is an epithet traditionally applied to St. Bride, St. Brigit, or St. Brig; in Welsh, brig and brigant mean tip top or summit, and these terms may be connoted with the Irish brig meaning pre-eminent power, influence, authority, and high esteem. At Chester, or Deva, there has been found an inscription to the "Nymph-Goddess Brig," and at Berrens in Scotland has been found an altar to the Goddess of Brigantia, which exhibits a winged deity holding a spear in one hand, and a globe in the other. In the British Museum is a coin lettered CYNETHRYTH REGINA: this lady, who is described as the widow of Offa, is portrayed "in long curls, behind head long cross": assuredly there were numerous Queen Cynethryths, but the original Cynethryth was equally probably Queen Truth, and in view of the fact that the motto of Bardic Druidism was "the Truth against the world," we may perhaps assume that the Druid was a follower of Truth or Troth. In the opinion of the learned Borlase the sculpture illustrated on page 485 represents the six progressive orders of Druidism contemplating Truth, the younger men on the right viewing the Maiden draped in the garb of convention, the older ones on the left beholding her nude in her symbolic aspect as the feeder of two serpents: it is not improbable that Quendred, the miraculous light-bearing Mother of St. Dunstan, was a variant of the name Cynethryth, at times Queen Dread, at times Queen Truth. The frequent discovery of coins-Roman and otherwise -within cromlechs such as Kit's Coty and other sacred 1 sites appears to me to prove nothing in respect of age, but rather a survival of the ancient superstition that the fairies possessed from time immemorial certain fields which could not be taken away or appropriated without gratifying the pixy proprietors by a piece of money: the land-grabber is no novelty, nor seemingly is conscience money. That important battles occurred at such sites as Moytura and Braavalla is no argument that those fantastic Troy Towns or Drewsteigntons were, as Fergusson laboriously maintained, monuments to commemorate slaughter. According to Homer Before the city stands a lofty mound, In the mid plain, by open space enclos'd; Nothing is more certain than that with the exception of a negligible number of conscientious objectors, a chivalrous people would defend its Eyedun to the death, and that the last array against invaders would almost invariably occur in or around the local Sanctuarie or Perry dun. It is a wholly unheard of thing for the British to think or speak of Britain as "the Fatherland": the Cretans, according to Plutarch, spoke of Crete as their Motherland, and not as the Fatherland: "At first," says Mackenzie, "the Cretan Earth Mother was the culture deity who instructed mankind. . . in Crete she was well developed before the earliest island settlers began to carve her images on gems and seals or depict them in frescoes. She symbolised the island and its social life and organisation." 3 Hazlitt, W. Carew, Faiths and Folklore, i., 222. 2 Iliad, ii., 940. The italics are CHAPTER XIV. DOWN UNDER. "It is our duty to begin research even if we have to penetrate many a labyrinth leading to nowhere and to lament the loss of many a plausible system. A false theory negatived is a positive result."-THOS. J. WESTROPP. IN the year 1585 a curious occurrence happened at the small hamlet of Mottingham in Kent: betimes in the morning of 4th August the ground began to sink, so much so that three great elm trees in a certain field were swallowed up into a pit of about 80 yards in circumference and by ten o'clock no part of them could be seen. This cavity then filled with water of such depth that a sounding line of 50 fathoms could hardly find or feel any bottom: still more alarming grew the situation when in an adjacent field another piece of ground sunk in like manner near the highway and "so nigh a dwelling house that the inhabitants were greatly terrified therewith ".1 To account for a subsidence much deeper than an elm tree one must postulate a correspondingly lofty soutterrain : the precise spot at Mottingham where these subsidences are recorded was known as Fairy Hill, and I have little doubt that like many other Dunhills this particular Fairy Hill was honeycombed or hollowed. Almost every Mottingham or Maiden's Home consisted not only of the 1 Walford, E., Greater London, ii., 95. 2 2 Mottingham, anciently Modingham, is supposed to be from Saxon modig, proud or lofty, and ham, a dwelling. Johnstone derives it as, "Enclosure characteristic surface features noted in the preceding chapter, but in addition the thoroughly ideal Maiden's Home went down deep into the earth: in Ireland the children of Don were popularly reputed to dwell in palaces underground; similarly in Crete the Great Mother-the Earth Mother associated with circles and caves, the goddess of birth and death, of fertility and fate, the ancestress of all mankind-was assumed to gather the ghosts of her progeny to her abode in the Underworld.1 Caves and caverns play a prime and elementary part in the mythologies of the world: their rôle is literally vital, for it was believed that the Life of the World, in the form of the Young Sun, was born yearly anew on 25th December, always in a cave: thus caves were invariably sacred to the Dawn or God of Light, and only secondarily to the engulfing powers of Darkness; from the simple cell, kille, or little church gradually evolved the labyrinthine catacomb and the stupendous rock-temple. The County of Kent is curiously rich in caves which range in importance from the mysterious single Dene Hole to the amazing honeycomb of caverns which underlie Chislehurst and Blackheath: a network of caves exists beneath Trinity Church, Margate; moreover, in Margate is a serpentine grotto decorated with a wonderful mosaic of shell-work which, so far as I am able to ascertain, is unique and unparalleled. The grotto at Margate is situated in the Dene or Valley underneath an eminence now termed Dane Hill: one of the best known of the Cornish so-called of Moding," or "of the Sons of Mod or Mot". We may assume these people were followers of the Maid, and that Mottingham was equivalent to Maiden's Home. 1 Mackenzie, D. A., Myths of Crete, p. xlvi. |