Free The White Goddess by Robert Graves

style found in the Paris area, with inhumation but with little funeral furniture except the leafshaped arrow-head, the manufacture of which goes back to the Old Stone Age; the leaves copied are apparently the crack-willow, or purple osier, and the elder. Sometimes a leaf-shaped ‘port-hole’ is knocked out between two contiguous slabs of the burial chamber, the leaf copied being apparently the elder.

2000–1500 BC
    Invasion by a bronze-weaponed, broad-headed, beaker-making, avenue-building people from Spain by way of Southern France and the Rhine. Further immigration of long-heads from the Baltic, and from South-Eastern Europe by way of the Rhine. Cremation and the less ostentatious though better furnished round barrows were introduced. The leaf-shaped arrow-heads persisted, as they did in burials in France until early Imperial times; but the characteristic type was barbed and tanged in the shape of a fir-tree.

1500–600 BC
    Uninterrupted development of Bronze Age culture. Cross-channel traffic without large-scale invasion, though settlements of iron-weaponed visitors dating from about 800 BC are found in the South. Invasion of North Britain by the Picts. Small segmented blue faience beads manufactured in Egypt between 1380 and 1350 BC were imported into Wiltshire in large quantities. The language spoken in Britain except by the Picts and Old Stone Age Aboriginals is thought to have been ‘proto-Celtic’.

600 BC
    Invasion by a Goidelic people, identified by their ‘frill-comb-smear’ pottery, who migrated from the Baltic coast of Germany, entered the Rhineland where they adopted the ‘Hallstadt’ Iron Age culture, then invaded Britain; but were forced to remain in the South-Eastern counties.

400 BC
    First Belgic invasion of Britain – ‘La Tène’ Iron Age culture; and of Ireland between 350 and 300 BC . These people were a mixture of Teutons and Brythons (‘P-Celts’) and overran the greater part of the country: they were the ancient British whom the Romans knew. The Druidic culture of Gaul was ‘La Tène’.

50 BC –45 AD
    Second Belgic invasion. The principal tribesmen were the Atrebates who came from Artois, their settlements being identified by their bead-rimmed bowls. They had their capital at Calleva Atrebatum (Silchester) in North Hampshire, and their area of conquest extended from Western Surrey to the Vale of Trowbridge in Wiltshire, including Salisbury Plain.
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    If the story of Câd Goddeu concerns the capture of the national necropolis on Salisbury Plain from its former holders, this is most likely to have happened during either the first or the second Belgic invasion. Neither the coming of the round-barrow men, nor the Goidelic seizure of South-Eastern Britain, nor the Claudian conquest, which was the last before the coming of the Saxons, corresponds with the story. But according to Geoffrey of Monmouth’s mediaeval History of the Britons two brothers named Belinus and Brennius fought for the mastery of Britain in the fourth century BC ; Brennius was beaten and forced north of the Humber. Brennius and Belinus are generally acknowledged to be the gods Bran and Beli; and Beli in the Welsh Triads is described as the father of Arianrhod (‘Silver Wheel’), the sister of Gwydion and Amathaon. Amathaon evidently entered the Battle of the Trees as champion of his father Beli, the Supreme God of Light.
    So the Câd Goddeu can perhaps be explained as the expulsion of a long-established Bronze Age priesthood from the national necropolis by an alliance of agricultural tribesmen, long settled in Britain and worshippers of the Danaan god Bel, Beli, Belus or Belinus, with an invading Brythonic tribe. The Amathaonians communicated to their Brythonic allies – Professor Sir John Rhys takes Gwydion for a mixed Teuton-Celt deity and equates him with Woden – a religious secret which enabled Amathaon to usurp the place of Bran, the God of Resurrection, a sort of Aesculapius, and Gwydion to usurp that