WE have now traced in outline the history of Celtic peoples and Celtic lands from the Wurmian glaciation to the Roman conquest of Britain, and have cited as evidence the conclusions drawn from linguistic science and an extensive array of data of an anthropological and archÆological character. Though most of the main conclusions arrived at have been suggested before, many of them to be subsequently discarded as lacking sufficient evidence, the main story of the Wiros and their wanderings, as I have outlined it above, seems to be compatible with all the positive information we possess, though it is in conflict, as I am well aware, with many theories that have been built upon them.

My views will not, I feel sure, meet with ready acquiescence from some Celtic scholars, especially from those who follow Zimmer and Kuno Meyer. This school has for thirty years been engaged in proving that there is no philological evidence for the existence of Goidelic speech in England or Wales, except such as was introduced from Ireland in the third or fourth century, A.D. I do not wish to dispute the philological evidence, nor do I feel competent to do so. I am ready to admit, at any rate for the sake of argument, that no such philological evidence exists. But England has been overrun by Kimri, Romans and Saxons, since the Gaels are believed to have come, and the absence of such evidence is not surprising.

I would, however, point out that the absence of philological evidence of their presence is not conclusive evidence of their absence. If my equation of the bronze swords and the finger-tip pottery with Q speaking people is correct, and the evidence from Italy and the Seine valley seems incontrovertible, the Gaels not only came to England, but settled there in considerable numbers, and even inhabited the southern slopes of the Glamorgan hills. No absence of Goidelic elements in British place-names is proof against such positive evidence. A few of the Gaels may have reached Ireland from the mouth of the Loire, in fact it seems probable that some such movement took place, though positive archÆological evidence from the French side is for the present lacking.

Lastly there is an idea prevalent in some quarters that at one time there was in Europe a great Celtic empire. Some writers speak of this as though it had been a Gaelic empire. I have been unable as yet to trace this superstition to its source. I suspect that the chapters on Brennius in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Britons[512] are the real foundation for this strange belief, though naturally no-one to-day would base a serious hypothesis upon so shifty a foundation. M. d’Arbois de Jubainville[513] seems to rely mainly on a passage from Livy[514], in which the writer states that Bellovesus and Sigovesus, nephews of Ambigatus, king of the Bituriges, were sent simultaneously on two expeditions. Livy says nothing of an empire, and the movements which he dates at 600 B.C. seem to have occurred 300 years later. DÉchelette[515] had dealt with this absurd notion according to its deserts.

The empire of Ambigatus, if such a thing existed, must have been a Kimric not a Gaelic power. But empires, if we are to understand the word in the sense in which it is ordinarily used, need settled conditions, such as did not prevail in north or north-west Europe until the arrival in the latter region of the pax Romana. It is conceivably possible that among the Kimri the tribal chiefs paid some form of loose allegiance to a super-chief, just as the Dorians, and to some extent the Hellenic world, recognised, very occasionally the hegemony of Sparta; but the evidence which we possess from classical sources does not even imply the existence of any such over-lordship among the Celts. In any case such vague hegemony could only have existed among the Kimric tribes, who for a thousand years harried the people of Celtic lands and the Celtic cradle, Gaelic lords or non-Wiro subjects alike. Before their arrival the Gaelic chiefs ruled only in the mountain zone, and the establishment of an empire in a mountainous country, draining into four rivers and four seas, would have been more impossible than in the open steppe.