Ancient Britain and the Invasions of Julius Caesar. T. Rice Holmes
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Mr. Clement Reid, for instance, holds that in the Palaeolithic Age England never rose more than seventy feet above its present level,36 and that men first entered it across a narrow strait which was formed in the earlier period of glaciation.37 It is certain that the sea then washed the coast of Sussex and the western counties; for near Selsea there is a patch of boulder-clay—the only one south of the Thames—which must have been deposited by shore-ice, and there are rocks belonging to Bognor or the Isle of Wight, to the Channel Islands, and to Brittany, which were transported by icebergs and dropped when they melted under the summer sun.38 Again, before the first English boulder-clay was formed Arctic plants flourished near Cromer; and, says Mr. Reid,39 ‘as these occur just above the present sea-level, and lie evenly on the strata below without deeply channelling them, the height of the land at the commencement of the Glacial Epoch, in Norfolk at any rate, must have been almost the same as it is now’. The same observer assures us that in Southern Britain the first intense cold was succeeded, after an interval of which geology has nothing to tell, by an interglacial period in which the land sunk about one hundred and forty feet below its present level, so that shingle was deposited on what is now Portsdown Hill;40 and that it then gradually rose until, long before the second glaciation began, its level, marked by fresh-water and estuarine deposits, once more virtually coincided with the present line.41 But, he tells us, at some time after the disappearance of the ice which deposited the latest boulder-clay of Norfolk the land stood rather higher than now;42 and he holds that even in the early part of the Neolithic Age Britain must have been almost connected with the Continent, for many of the river valleys were excavated to depths of from sixty to seventy feet below the present level of the sea.43 The submerged forests of Devonshire, Cornwall, and the Bristol Channel, which contain traces of neolithic handiwork, flourished at a time when the land stood from fifty to seventy feet above its present elevation.44
But there are other facts which demonstrate that at some time after the first period of intense cold—perhaps in that interval of which geology has nothing to tell—the Continent must have included Britain. As we shall presently see, not only the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the glutton, and other Arctic animals, but also many species which prefer a temperate climate, and others which are now tropical, lived in this country side by side with palaeolithic man. Nearly all of them had been represented here before the earliest glaciers of Scotland were formed.45 But even on the southern side of the Thames the cold was so intense during the earlier part of the Ice Age that none of the tropical, none even of the temperate species could there have lived: since the land was barren, treeless, and frozen,46 even the mammoth, protected though it was by its woolly coat, could have found little food;47 and large herds of Arctic animals travelled as far southward as Italy and Spain.48 It is therefore evident that the beasts of tropical and of temperate climes whose remains have been found in the river-drift and in caves along with palaeolithic implements must have entered Britain after the coldest period had ceased.49 Moreover, vast quantities of bones of Pleistocene mammals, some of which, such as the reindeer, have never been found in Britain in preglacial deposits, have been dredged up out of the bed of the North Sea, principally from the Dogger Bank;50 and it is therefore clear that at some time after the climax of the Glacial Period that sea or a large part of it did not exist. It cannot indeed be proved that the men of the river-drift and the caves entered Britain as soon as the other animals;51 and possibly the Dover Strait may have existed as a narrow channel at the time of their arrival: but since the bones that were raised from the Dogger Bank appear to belong to the time when the Thames was laying down the gravels in which men’s tools have been found,52 it seems probable that the land bridge was standing in some part of the Palaeolithic Age.
The relation of palaeolithic man to the Ice Age.
It has been demonstrated that palaeolithic men were living in East Anglia after glaciers had finally disappeared from that part of the country. The valleys of the Ouse and its tributaries, in the gravels of which their implements are to be found, were worn down through boulder-clay.53 Excavations at Hoxne in Suffolk have shown that the people who left their tools there lived at a time which was separated by two climatic waves, attested by the flora of two sets of strata, from the age in which the latest boulder-clay of that district had been deposited.54 Moreover, in many cases in which evidence has been adduced to show that palaeolithic remains are of glacial or interglacial date, doubts have arisen either as to the artificial character of the flints or as to the age of the beds in which they were found.55 When, for instance, a member of the Geological Survey announced that he had found palaeolithic implements at Brandon in Suffolk in three interglacial beds, separated by layers of boulder-clay,56 Sir John Evans suggested that the clay was not in its original position, but had slipped down from a higher level.57 Again, Dr. Henry Hicks and Sir Joseph Prestwich were convinced that the cave of Cae Gwyn in the Vale of Clwyd had been inhabited before the climax of the Ice Age.58 Here a flint flake was taken out of earth separated by a superincumbent bed of clay from a layer of sand and gravel, above which again rested boulder-clay that, in Hicks’s judgement, showed no sign of having ever been disturbed, and which, in the opinion of Mr. Clement Reid,59 must have been deposited before the last glaciation of the district. Even this evidence, however, is not unanimously accepted. Flints have also been found in the Cromer Forest Bed at East Runton, which was certainly preglacial; but Sir John Evans cannot see on them the faintest marks of human workmanship.60
Nevertheless, it is not improbable that when the hunters whose tools have been exhumed from the drift of South-Eastern Britain were living in a comparatively mild climate, Scotland, the Lake Country, and the highlands of Yorkshire and Wales may still have been partially buried beneath ice.61 The high-level drift of the Thames valley, which has yielded so many implements, is believed by eminent geologists to have been laid down at a time when ice spread over Northern Britain;62 and in support of this view it has been contended that in those regions no palaeolithic implements have been found.63 The argument cannot be easily set aside; but it has been pointed out that in the northern districts, owing to the extreme scarcity of flint, stone tools could only have been made of harder rocks, on which it is not so easy to detect marks of human agency; that the alluvial deposits in those parts are not readily accessible to search; and that, if they are patiently explored, implements may yet be recovered from them.64 Some years, however, have elapsed since this suggestion was made; and it has not yet been verified. Moreover, the absence from the country north of Yorkshire, save in a few preglacial deposits, of such bones as have been found with palaeolithic remains seems to indicate that the animals contemporary with palaeolithic man were unable to find food in Northern Britain owing to the continuance of an Arctic climate.65 Man was undoubtedly living in Southern Britain in the cold period that succeeded the so-called interglacial period of Sussex and Hampshire; for the plateau gravels that cap the Bournemouth cliffs, in which his tools have been found, are older than the valley gravels of the Hampshire Avon and the Stour, which were formed towards the end of the Ice Age by torrents that streamed over frozen chalk downs impervious to water and swept away the fragments of their crumbling surface.66 Furthermore, stone implements have been found at Caddington below, and near London embedded in, a stratum known as ‘contorted drift’, which is believed to have been formed in a period of great cold;67 and it is merely a question of words whether this period is to be included in the last phase of the Ice Age.68
‘Eolithic’ man?
But there is one district from which evidence has been obtained that has convinced many who sought conviction, that there were men in Britain before the first British palaeolithic tool was made. In the village of Ightham, near Sevenoaks, lives a tradesman, named Benjamin Harrison, whose discoveries have caused much searching of heart, if they have not revolutionized our knowledge of the life of early man. In 1885 he began to search for old stone implements on the chalk plateau between the valleys of the Medway and the Darent. There, embedded in patches of gravel that must have been drifted on to the plateau from hills higher still, which had been already worn down by denudation even when palaeolithic hunters were roaming among herds of mammoths in the valley of the Thames, he found flints of divers shapes which seemed to him to bear sure traces of man’s handiwork, and which have been termed ‘eoliths’, or stone implements of a dawning age. Nearly all of them, indeed, were so rude that the chipping on their edges has been ascribed by sceptics to the action of nature. But if even a small fraction of them could be proved to be authentic, the contention of their finder would be established. They recur, again and again, in certain