any authentic records, we find a people circulating coined money at the same time that their implements of industry or of warfare were composed of stone, bone, and perhaps of bronze. We are not certain, however, when Cæsar spoke of the coinage amongst the Britons, and used the term “ære importato,” whether he alluded to the money itself or to the material of which it was composed as being “imported.” We are informed by the same authority that the Britons used both brass and iron counters (taleæ) of a certain weight as money. It is probable that no part of the British coinage—money stamped or impressed with figures or designs—except these “counters,” was older than the times of the Romans, although a Celto-Gallo money might have circulated amongst them previously. Under the Romans the inscriptions on the British money were in Roman characters, and the designs, being representations of horses, figures, and human heads, exhibit some mechanical skill.
Other examples there are of their money, stamped with designs most rude and confused, as if unskilful hands had attempted imitations from a higher class of types or models.
Undoubtedly bronze if not iron implements have been found in this country deposited contemporaneously with those of bone and flint. The usages of almost every nation prove there ever existed different styles of arms for the various classes of the community. In war the leaders and aristocracy would be supplied with the best weapons of offence and defence which the skill of the age could produce; but their humble followers and the great mass of the other combatants would be armed only with scythes, spears, bows and arrows, and pointed stakes hardened in the fire. So amongst the Celtic tribes, the chief would possess his weapons of bronze or of iron, and his serf or slave be armed only with his stone axe, spear, flint flake, or humble sling. The various tribes who encountered Cæsar, and who on more than one occasion repulsed his legions, can hardly be identified with a people using weapons of the simplest materials and most primitive construction. The weapons of a people capable of offering a successful resistance to the legions of the Roman Empire would imply the use, or partial use, of weapons of a superior manufacture to those discovered in the ancient barrows, and induce us to consider that the construction of these graves and their artificial contents were the results of the labours of an older race of men than the so-called Celto-Britons.
The authenticity of the golden sickles with which the Druids are said to have culled the sacred mistletoe may admit of controversy, yet we must not forget that the Britons were possessed of torques and armillæ of gold, this metal being found at one period in considerable quantities in this country and in Ireland, the extensive tracts of bog and morass in the latter island materially assisting in the preservation of such relics.
Some of the English tumuli exhibit traces of two and even of more interments—a later population having adopted and used the sepulchres of their predecessors.
We have reason to believe that even amongst the Britons double interments took place. Mr. Bateman describes a barrow which he inspected wherein the upper deposit contained two skeletons, an urn, a piece of iron, a horse-bit, and a flint arrow-head; and below this, in a stone cist of another deposit, was an iron knife or dagger with a case of the same material. Amongst instruments of flint at Cardow-lowe, a bronze dagger and an iron knife were found. Indeed, bronze daggers without handles, bearing marks of rivets by which they had probably been attached to wooden hafts, were frequently exhumed in Wiltshire by Sir R. C. Hoare. Some of these instruments were ornamented with lines, angles, and zigzag patterns. Similar relics have been found also in Dorsetshire, Derbyshire, and in Scotland.
Bronze spear-heads have also been deposited with the remains of the population of the so-called age of stone, and gold bucklers have been discovered exhibiting considerable probability that they were worn by the same people. A remarkable story is told relating to one of these ancient interments, which exhibits in a striking view the force of imagination. A woman residing at Mold in Flintshire declared that as she was one night passing an ancient barrow in that neighbourhood, which had the reputation of being haunted, and which was denominated by the peasantry “the hill of the fairies,” she beheld over the spot in question “a figure clothed in a coat of gold which shone like the sun.” This mound, which was composed apparently of pebbles, was shortly afterwards levelled for agricultural uses. In it was a burial-place containing a skeleton, upon which was a breastplate of thin gold ornamented with a peculiar pattern. In another part of the barrow was an urn and some bone ashes. This occurrence took place as lately as October, 1833. The golden corslet is now in the British Museum. In this national repository, in the “Gold Room,” may be seen many costly articles of workmanship in gold, some of which belong to our own country and to the people and periods to which these remarks refer.
Figure 4 b is an example of a gold armlet dug up with another of the same description in the neighbourhood of Canterbury about two years since, the relics probably of a British grave, no other articles being found—or, at all events, preserved—by the railway labourer who lit upon the discovery. The one engraved weighed 2 oz. 2 dwts.; it exhibits considerable skill in the manufacture.
Figure 2 b represents a solid torc, being an incomplete ring and of lesser antiquity than the specimen No. 1 b. The latter example, also of gold, is in the British Museum. It terminates in two bulbs slightly concave, the sides being decorated with an engrailing.
The ancient Irish kings and chieftains were famed—at least, in song,—for their torcs, gorgets, and collars of gold. Nor is there any reason to discredit the fact. The public museums and private collections in Ireland exhibit many specimens of these ancient ornaments. Some of them, preserved in the Museum at Dublin, are of large size and of elaborate workmanship.
In a tumulus in the county of Clare gold ornaments were found, in the year 1855, of the value of 3000l. The spoils, probably, of some battle-
