190 AN ENGLISH SHIRE. 



weapons of stone. As soon as they had learnt the use of 

 bronze, certain great changes and improvements followed 

 naturally amongst others, an immense advance in the 

 art of boat-building. The Celts of the bronze age soon 

 constructed vessels which enabled them to cross the 

 narrow seas and invade Britain. Their superior weapons 

 gave them at once an enormous advantage over the 

 Euskarian natives, armed only with their polished flint 

 hatchets, and before long they overran the whole island, 

 save only the recesses of Wales and the north of Scotland. 

 From that moment, the bronze age of Britain set in 

 say some 1,000 or 1,500 years before the Christian era. 



The Celts, however, did not exterminate the whole 

 Euskarian people ; they were too few in number and too 

 far advanced in civilisation for such a course. They 

 knew it was better to make them slaves than to destroy 

 them ; for the Celts had just reached, but had not yet 

 got beyond, the slave-making stage of culture. To this 

 day, people of mixed Euskarian parentage, and marked 

 by the long skull, dark complexion, and black eyes of the 

 Euskarian type, form a large proportion of the English 

 peasantry ; and they are found even in Sussex, which 

 subsequently suffered more than most other parts of 

 Britain from the destructive deluge of Teutonic barbarism 

 in the fifth century. But though the Celts did not 

 exterminate the Euskarians, they completely Celticised 

 them, just as the Teuton is now Teutonising the old 

 population of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. In South 

 Wales and elsewhere, indeed, the aborigines retained 

 their own language and institutions, as Silures and so 

 forth ; but in the conquered districts of southern and 



