CAESAR'S INVASION 69 



for Caesar's contemplated invasion than they sent 

 forward cavalry and charioteers, which formed 

 their chief arm in warfare." 



The people of North Britain, however, still paid 

 but little attention to the advice of the more in- 

 telligent among their chiefs that cavalry ought 

 to be adopted and chariots entirely discarded, 

 the principle of ultra-conservatism which remains 

 one of the most marked characteristics of the 

 British nation at the present day being apparently 

 in force even in Caesar's time. 



By this period the Gauls, as Caesar soon 

 found out, had become a nation composed almost 

 wholly of knights. Yet whether the aboriginal 

 horse of the first yeomanry of Kent that met 

 Caesar upon his landing belonged to the breed 

 believed to have been imported by the Celts or 

 Germans, or whether they were descendants of 

 the horses known to have been largely bred 

 when Hannibal's warlike expeditions into Spain, 

 Gaul and Italy were over, is not known. 



Of interest it is to be told that the men 

 who invaded this country under the banner of 

 the White Horse greatly valued the particular 

 breed of horses they found here, and that in 

 consequence their descendants in later centuries 

 cut upon the chalk cliffs of the Berkshire downs 

 near Ilsley and Wantage the rough figures of 

 horses that remain there to this day. 



We have it on the authority of several of the 



