18. The Celtic Fringe - Page 2

dozen
ages by each fresh invader. Before the dawn of history, Heaven knows
what shadowy Belgæ and Iceni enslaved it. But historical time will serve
our purpose. The Roman enslaved it, but left Caledonia and Hibernia
free, the Cambrian, the Silurian, the Cornishman half-subjugated. The
Saxon and Anglian enslaved the east, but scarcely crossed over the
watershed of the western ocean. The Dane, in turn, enslaved the Saxon in
East Anglia and Yorkshire. The Norman ground all down to a common
servitude between the upper and nether millstones of the feudal
system--the king and the nobleman. At the end of it all, Teutonic
England was reduced to a patient condition of contented serfdom: it had
accommodated itself to its environment: no wish was left in it for the
assertion of its freedom. To this day, the south-east, save where
leavened and permeated by Celtic influences, hugs its chains and loves
them. It produces the strange portent of the Conservative working-man,
who yearns to be led by Lord Randolph Churchill.

With the North and the West, things go wholly otherwise. Even Cornwall,
the earliest Celtic kingdom to be absorbed, was rather absorbed than
conquered. I won't go into the history of the West Welsh of Somerset,
Devon, and Cornwall at full length, because it would take ten pages to
explain it; and I know that readers are too profoundly interested in the
Shocking Murder in the Borough Road to devote half-an-hour to the origin
and evolution of their own community. It must suffice to say that the
Devonian and Cornubian Welsh coalesced with the West Saxon for
resistance to their common enemy the Dane, and that the West Saxon
kingdom was made supreme in Britain by the founder of the English
monarchy--one Dunstan, a monk from the West Welsh Abbey of Glastonbury.
Wales proper, overrun piecemeal by Norman filibusterers, was roughly
annexed by the Plantagenet kings; but it was only pacified under the
Welsh Tudors, and was never at any time thoroughly feudalised.
Glendower's rebellion, Richmond's rebellion, the Wesleyan revolt, the
Rebecca riots, the tithe war, are all continuous parts of the ceaseless
reaction of gallant little Wales against Teutonic aggression. "An alien
Church" still disturbs the Principality. The Lake District and
Ayrshire--Celtic Cumbria and Strathclyde--only accepted by degrees the
supremacy of the Kings of England and Scotland. The brother of a Scotch
King was Prince of Cumbria, as the elder son of an English King was
Prince of Wales. Indeed, David of Cumbria, who became David I. of
Scotland, was the real consolidator of the Scotch kingdom. Cumbria was
no more conquered by the Saxon Lothians than Scotland was conquered by
the accession of James I. or by the Act of Union. That