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NOTES.
421
in insula," according to their own tradition; the natural offspring of the land. These, from his picture of them, were complete wild men of the woods, driven far into the interior hy the Belgic invaders. As might well be expected, such savages had no coinage at all ; of the precious metals they knew nothing ; their poor representatives of value were carried about them in the shape of personal ornaments. Cœsar's actual words upon this point are (as the acute Pinkerton has well seen) those to be found in the editio princeps of his Commentaries (Roma, 1469), a passage later so pre­posterously disfigured by the emendations of over-learned editors, in order to adapt it to their own preconceived ideas. It stands thus :—" Utuntur tamen a;re ut nummo aureo, aut annulis ferreis ad certum pondus exami-natis pro nummo." Now had these native Britons, like the Gauls, pos­sessed a regular coinage, Cœsar would not certainly have thought such an ordinary usage a thing worthy to be enumerated amongst the peculiarities of this newly-discovered race, especially as the rest of his list consists of manners and customs the most diverse from those of the rest of the world. It is therefore evident that he was struck with this their strange substi­tute for a circulating medium, and deemed it especially worthy of mention.
The estimation of the constituents of this currency coincide with the re­lative value of the two metals amongst the aborigines—the copper taking the place of gold, the iron of silver ; for Cassar has just before stated that all the copper they used was imported, \vhereas iron they had, though only in small quantities, upon the sea-coast (doubtless alluding to the old Sussex mines). Metal in thick wire, bent up into rings of a certain weight, was perhaps the very earliest form of currency in the world. The ancient Egyptians knew no other, and to this day it is universal (for copper and gold) with the tribes on the Guinea coast. Such a form is recommended by its portability on the fingers, or of several linked together into a chain, besides the convenient shape of the piece of metal for conversion into other uses.
The above view is corroborated by the fact that no British coins exist that can be attributed to the natives beyond the limits of Belgic influence. None are ever discovered in the region occupied by the Silures, that power­ful tribe which maintained its independence the latest of all, nor in the country of the Ordovices, though actually abounding in gold ; nor any­where to the north of the Solway, though so long the seat of an inde­pendent British kingdom.
A few years after Caesar's landing, Cunobeline, a king of the Iceni, the Belg;e of the east coast, having acquired some little tincture of Roman education, gave up the old Greco-barbarian type of the coinage, and endea­voured to imitate that of his patron Augustus, both in design and in make, just as his countrymen upon the Continent were, a little earlier, rudely copying the consular denarii. It may be supposed that the chiefs of the other maritime tribes followed his example, and issued the numerous cari­catures of the Roman mintage found in other parts of England, pieces in base silver and copper, struck in the Roman style, flat, not like the Greek, dished upon one side. That such a coinage was actually carried on here, until the real subjugation of the island in Nero's reign, is established by a
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