CHAPTER IV ALBION "The Anglo-Saxons, down to a late period, retained the heathenish Yule, as all Teutonic Christians did the sanctity of Easter-tide; and from these two, the Yule-boar and Yule-bread, the Easter pancake, Easter sword, Easter fire, and Easter dance could not be separated. As faithfully were perpetuated the name and, in many cases, the observances of midsummer. New Christian feasts, especially of saints, seem purposely as well as accidentally to have been made to fall on heathen holidays. Churches often rose precisely where a heathen god or his sacred tree had been pulled down; and the people trod their old paths to the accustomed site: sometimes the very walls of the heathen temple became those of the church; and cases occur in which idol-images still found a place in a wall of the porch, or were set up outside the door, as at Bamberg Cathedral where lie Sclavic-heathen figures of animals inscribed with runes."--GRIMM. Our Chronicles state that when Brute and his companions reached these shores, "at that time the name of the island was Albion". According to tradition Alba, Albion, or Alban, whence the place-name Albion, was a fairy giant, but this, in the eyes of current scholarship, is a fallacy, and _alba_ is merely an adjective meaning _white_, whence wherever met with it is so translated. But because there happens to be a relatively small tract of white cliffs in the neighbourhood of Dover, it is a barren stretch of imagination to suppose that all Britain thence derived its prehistoric title, and in any case the question--why did _alba_ mean white?--would remain unanswered. The Highlanders of Scotland still speak of their country as Albany or Alban; the national cry of Scotland was evidently at one time "Albani," and even as late as 1138, "the army of the Scots with one voice vociferated their native distinction, and the shout of Albani! Albani! ascended even to the heavens".[140] Not only by the Romans but likewise by the Greeks, Britain was known as Albion, and one may therefore conjecture that the white-cliff theory is an unsound fancy. Strabo alludes to a certain district generally supposed to be Land's End, under the name "Kalbion,"[141] a word manifestly having some radical relation to "Albion". By an application of the comparative method to place-names and proper-names, I arrived several years ago at the seemingly only logical conclusion that in many directions _ak_ and its variants meant _great_ or _mighty_. On every hand there is presumptive evidence of this fact, and I have since found that Bryant and also Faber, working by wholly independent methods, reached a very similar conclusion. My _modus operandi_, with many of its results, having been already published,[142] it is unnecessary here to restate them, and I shall confine myself to new and corroborative evidence.