01. Ancient Gaul

CHAPTER I. Ancient Gaul

The country which we now call France was not always called so, nor were the people who live in it always called the French.

When it is first mentioned, which is in old Latin books written more than 1800 years ago, it is called Gallia, or Gaul, and the people are spoken of as Gauls.

Gaul was in some respects the same as France is now, and in some respects very different. It was the same, or nearly the same, in its mountains, rivers, and some of the chief towns; it was different in its roads, fields, villages, and more than all, in the people who lived in it. When I say that all the towns were the same, I do not mean that they look the same now as they did then, but that the Gauls had towns in many of the places where the French now have them, and that they have lasted with almost the same names ever since.

If you look at the map of Europe you will see that France is a country about three times as big as England; it has the sea on two sides of it, the north and the west; on the south are first a range of mountains called the Pyrenees, separating it from Spain, and farther along another sea called the Mediterranean; on the east some more mountains called the Alps, and countries of Germany, and Belgium. Some way to the east of the eastern boundary you will see a river called the Rhine flowing from the south to the north, and ending in the German Ocean. Many of the rulers of France have wished and done their best to conquer the countries between France and the Rhine, but in this they have never succeeded.

There are in France four great rivers, and many smaller ones; they now flow through great cities and well-cultivated fields, often bearing steamboats and baiges, and supplying water to hundreds of villages, mills, and factories. In the time of the old Gauls they flowed through immense forests, which covered a great part of the country, and through swamps where no one lived but elks, beavers, and great wild bulls, larger and fiercer than any that are now to be seen. The Gauls themselves were wild and fierce; they knew very little, except about hunting and taking care of the flocks; they had no clothes, but painted their bodies, and pricked patterns on their skins, which is called tattooing, and which they thought a great ornament. Sometimes hatchets and knives of stone which belonged to the old Gauls are found buried in the ground in France, or arrows pointed with sharp stones, or spears to hunt the boar, or long narrow shields, which they used in war, or some of their small boats made of willow and covered with the skin of some beast, usually of an ox, like the coracles of the old Britons, of which you have read. Gaul was in those days a colder country than France now is; the winds were more violent, and the rivers were often covered with ice.

By degrees the Gauls began to find out that their country was fertile; that is, that whatever seed they sowed in the ground would grow up quickly and bear good fruit, and some of them began to make it their business to sow seed, and cut down the grain when it grew up, and to work in the fields as our farmers do, so that the people might have something else to eat besides the animals that the hunters brought home. The Gauls invented ploughs and sieves, and other useful instruments. As time went on, they found that besides being fertile, their country was rich in metals; they dug mines and found copper, iron, lead, and even silver and gold. Ships came to Gaul from other countries, and brought useful and beautiful objects of all kinds, which they gave to the Gnuls in return for some of the metal out of the mines. The Gauls grew rich, and spent their riches in making themselves more comfortable in many ways. Their food at this time was chiefly pork and ham, and they kept great flocks of pigs in their forests and meadows; they drank a sort of beer made of barley. In some parts of Gaul they had begun to grow the vine, which we find now all over the south of France, and from which the French get grapes to make their wine.

The Gauls began to wear clothes and ornaments; rings and bracelets of gold or other metal, and they built themselves houses of earth and wood, covered with straw or thatch. They made walls round their villages of beams of wood and blocks of stone, to protect them from their enemies, for they were still very much in the habit of going to war with one another, and they had other enemies besides, as we shall see.

The Gauls, like the old Britons, were heathens, and believed in many gods, who lived, as they thought, in the earth, the forests, the rocks, and the rivers. Their priests were called Druids, and were old and wise men, who had studied often for twenty years before they were considered wise enough to become "Men of the Oak," which was the name of the chief Druids;

The Druids taught the young men, and gave them lessons in all kinds of natural history ; and they held a great meeting every year, at which they settled any question or dispute that might be brought for them to decide, and sometimes they made laws for the country. But their chief business was to worship their gods, and teach the people how to worship them. Once every year the Druids went out to look for mistletoe, which they believed to be a sacred plant, and they thought it specially valuable when it grew upon the oak, which they considered the finest of trees. When the mistletoe was found upon an oak, the people came from all parts of the country and stood round the tree, while a Druid, dressed in white, climbed up with a golden sickle, and cut off the mistletoe, which the other Druids caught in a white cloth, and carried away as a precious treasure. They thought that gathering this mistletoe was pleasing to their gods, for the Gauls did not know of the one God in whom we believe, and who cares only that people should do right, and not that they should gather plants, however precious and rare, in His honour. But the Druids did worse than this, for they thought it was pleasing to their gods to kill men — usually prisoners taken in battle — at their altars. They also believed that by killing one man they might persuade the gods to spare the life of another who might be ill or in danger. There were female Druids, called ruidesses, who usually lived by the sea-shore in some wild, lonely place, and were often to be seen by night waving torches and singing wild songs in the darkness. The people supposed them to have the power of raising or quieting the winds and waves by their song.