of horses employed by the nations of 

 their time. 



THE GREAT HORSE IN THE URST CENTURY. 



Our next piece of evidence comes, not 

 from the writer but from the artist, if he 

 may be called so ; not from without the 

 shores o\ Britain but from within. For 

 some historical purposes coins serve a pur- 

 pose as valuable as pictures, and the present 

 is a case in point. The coins of which 

 illustrations are here u'iven are amono- the 

 very earliest known to have been struck 

 in this island. They date from the age 

 of Cunobelin (the First century), and are 

 therefore the production of a period when 

 neither Art nor Agriculture had place in 

 the country ; they are relics of a time when 

 the conditions of life required only the 

 herdsman and the soldier. With these facts 

 in mind we may examine these coins and 

 see what we can gather from them. The 

 fact that the device on each is a horse 

 suggests at once that this animal played a 

 most important part in the social economy 

 of the people who struck the coins. They 

 were among those found on the borders 

 of Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, 



