the
meaning of Kynetes. Secular historians, long before Jerome, have an
uncomfortable way of saying that the inhabitants of the interior of
Britain were cannibals, and their matrimonial arrangements resembled those
of herds of cattle. As we in London had relations with the centre of the
country, we may argue--and I think rightly--that by "the interior" the
historians did not mean what we call the Midlands, but meant the parts
furthest removed from the ports of access in the south-east, that is, the
far west and the far north.

Next, and again before the history of our islands begins, an immigration
of Celts[11] took place, a people belonging--unlike the earlier race of
whom I have spoken--to the same Indo-European family of nations to which
the Latins, and the Teutons, and the Greeks, and the speakers of Sanskrit,
belonged. Of their various cousin-nations, these Celts were nearest in
language to the Latins, we are told, and, after the Latins, to the
Teutons. They came to this island, it is understood, from the country
which we call France.

Thirdly, the Gauls, who on the continent had both that name and the name
of the older Celts[12], and must be regarded as the dominant sub-division
of their race, impelled in their turn by pressure from the south and east,
came over into these islands, and here were called Britons[13]. They
squeezed out the earlier occupants from most part of the larger island,
driving them north and west and south-west, as the Celtic inhabitants
long before had driven the earlier race. When the Romans came, fifty years
before Christ, these Britons occupied the land practically from the south
coast to the further side of the Firth of Forth. There had been for some
time before Caesar's arrival a steady inflow of Belgic Gauls, people from
the eastward parts of what we call France; and these people, the most
recent comers among the Britons, were found chiefly on the coasts, but in
parts had extended to considerable distances inland. The Celts, to
distinguish the preceding immigrants by that name, though in fact it does
not properly convey the distinction, occupied Devon and Cornwall, South
Wales, the north-west corner of North Wales, Cumberland, and the
south-west of what we now call Scotland, that is, Wigton, Kirkcudbright,
Dumfries, and part of Ayr. They occupied also a belt of Caledonia north of
Stirling. They occupied at least the eastern parts of Ireland. Anglesey
and Man were in their hands. The p