400 THE HORSES OF PREHISTORIC [CH. 



the horse found in the barrow whose measurements are iden- 

 tical with those of the Helveto-Gallic horses probably either 

 sprung from imported ancestors or had been itself imported. 



Nor is there any difficulty in proving that constant trade with 

 France and the Peninsula was carried on in the days when the 

 Cuchulainn Saga was composed. It is absolutely certain that 

 already in the early centuries of the Christian era there existed 

 a very considerable trade between Ireland and the Continent. 

 According to the Confession of St Patrick, the apostle of Ireland 

 sailed from that island to France in a ship whose cargo com- 

 prised those famous Celtic dogs^ which in the time of Augustus 

 (29 B.C. — 14 A.D.) also formed part of the exports of Britain' to 

 the Continent, where they were highly valued both for war (cf. 

 p. 419) and the chase, more especially as the Greeks and other 

 Mediterranean peoples possessed few dogs that could run down 

 a hare until they came to know the Celtic vertragus in the 

 third century B.c.^ Indeed Arrian — in what appears to be the 

 oldest reference to the sport of coursing — calls special attention 

 to the fact that some of the Celts who did not live by the chase, 

 but hunted for sport, did not use nets (as did the Greeks), but 

 gave the hare fair play. If dogs were exported from Ireland, 

 there is no reason why the Irish should not have imported horses 

 from France and Spain, for the Irish legends also point to early 

 intercourse between the latter country and Ireland. Thus in 

 The Wooing of Emer — the same poem which contains the de- 

 scription of Cuchulainn's steeds — we read how Emer's father, 

 Forgall the Wily, " went to Emain Macha (the modern Navan 

 Rath) in the garb of a foreigner, as it were an embassy from 

 the king of the Gauls, that had come to confer with Conchobar 

 with an offering to him of golden treasures, and the wine of 

 Gaul, and all sorts of good things besides." This passage occurs 

 in the older redaction of the poem, which is assigned to the 

 eighth century by Prof. Kuno Meyer. From this it is perfectly 

 clear that when the poem was composed there was constant 

 intercourse between Ireland and Gaul. Elsewhere in the sagas 

 we hear of Irishmen going to the coast of Spain and Portugal. 



1 Tripartite Life of St Patrick, ed. Whitley Stokes, pt. ii. pp. 362-3. 

 - Strabo, 166. ^ Arrian, Cynegeticus, 3. 



