Stonehenge by Rosemary Hill

Stonehenge by Rosemary Hill

Author:Rosemary Hill
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Publisher: Profile Books Ltd
Published: 2010-07-05T16:00:00+00:00


22. The First Preaching of Christianity in Britain, by J. R. Herbert, 1842, from an engraving of 1847 by Charles George Lewis. The converted Druid is seen removing his pagan crown of oak leaves prior to baptism. By the mid nineteenth century the connection between the Druids and Stonehenge was taken for granted by everyone from Darwin to Dickens.

Summing up the state of affairs in 1876, the antiquary William Long – himself a supporter of the theory that Stonehenge was built by the Belgae, the inhabitants of northern Gaul – could only lament the ‘dissipation of Archaeological power and … profitless “beating of the air”’ which was still going on in ‘the endeavour to maintain positions which the writer humbly believes to be utterly untenable’. The main position he was anxious to undermine was that of the pro-Druid school. Sir Henry James was not their only supporter and although many antiquaries had given them up – even Algernon Herbert, whatever his peculiarities, was too well versed in the classical sources to countenance them – among the general public they flourished. Every child knew that they had built Stonehenge, especially those who read Dickens’s Child’s History of England. Published in Household Words from 1851 to 1853, it unfolds a blood-curdling vision of prehistoric times that harps alarmingly on the ‘strange and terrible religion called the Religion of the Druids’, which involved horrible torture, human sacrifice and ‘some kind of veneration for the Oak, and for the mistletoe’. ‘These Druids built great Temples and altars, open to the sky, fragments of some of which are yet remaining,’ Dickens explained. ‘Stonehenge, on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire, is the most extraordinary of these.’ Bellini’s opera Norma, which had its first performance in English at Drury Lane in 1837, casts its heroine as ‘a high-priestess of the Temple of Esus’, which is still usually presented as a version of Stonehenge and the Cuming Museum in south London is certainly not the only one to house a nineteenth-century collection that includes ‘Druid’ pottery beads. Even Darwin referred to Stonehenge in The Formation of Vegetable Mould as the ‘Druidical stones’, a phrase which must have disappointed some of his archaeological admirers, but in truth it had become generic.

Meanwhile the real Druids, or at least those who classed themselves as Druids in the nineteenth century, were flourishing, if not harmonious. The Druid Magazine for the year 5836 – or 1832 as it was reckoned by non-Druids – gave encouraging accounts of ‘respectable parties enrolling themselves under the banner of Druidism’ and of the Loyal Trafalgar Lodge at Monmouth processing to church through the town ‘headed by their band’. There was a dinner afterwards. Early nineteenth-century Druid activity was still largely modelled on Freemasonry and there was an emphasis on dining, proposing toasts and awarding medals to one another. The magazine ran an article on Stonehenge which took a predictable view of its origins and followed John Wood’s suggestions about its function in the ‘Druidical system of education’. Between the lines, however, conflict was discernible.



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