The old granite crosses always have short arms, and may belong to a primæval type that had nothing to do with crucifixion. According to Cæsar (_De bello Gallico_, vi. 18) the Druids said that Dis was the ancestral deity of all the Celtic race; and figures of this deity have come to light. As his attribute he holds up a big sledgehammer; and I suspect his hammer was the prototype of all these crosses--the ancient symbol was retained, but with an altered meaning. When these northern nations were converted, the new religion was grafted on the old; and the grafting was not always neatly done. The Anglo-Saxon kings all claimed descent from Woden, and he was once a god; but when they took up Christianity, they had to fit him in. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle (855) knows better than the Pentateuch what happened in Noah’s Ark. That speaks only of Shem and Ham and Japheth; but Noah’s wife had another baby while she was on board--“se wæs geboren in thære earche Noe”--and this was Woden’s ancestor. That seems incongruous enough, but it is nothing to the incongruity of an Anglo-Saxon coin with its inscription all in Arabic except two lines of Roman letters, “Offa the King,” which come in upside down between three lines of Arabic, “Mohammed the Prophet of God.” It is a gold coin, a mancus, of the same weight as an Arabic dinar; and it is dated in year 157 of the Hegira, or 773 A.D. It was found in Rome, and must be one of those gold mancuses that King Offa undertook to pay Pope Hadrian for Peter’s Pence. The southernmost part of Italy was known as Bruttium in Latin, but Brettia in Greek, and was said to take its name from Brettos (a son of Hercules) who came over with the first Greek colonists. And this, I suspect, is the only basis for the story that Britain took its name from an imaginary Brutus who brought a colony here. I suspect that Geoffrey of Monmouth got the Brettos story at second hand through Stephanos, who quotes it from Antiochos of Syracuse, say 423 B.C. And our Geoffrey either got it wrong, or altered it to suit his theme, and thus created Brute the Trojan. The story of Brute the Trojan is not wilder than the story of Æneas, and the motive is the same--to connect the Britons (like the Romans) with the Homeric heroes and thus with the Olympian gods. (Brute was a great-grandson of Æneas, so Venus was his great-great-grandmother.) I cannot see why the story makes the Trojans land at Totnes, fifteen miles from here, rather than in any other part of Britain. But at Totnes they show you the very stone on which Brute stepped ashore, just as they show you the stone at Brixham on which Dutch William stepped ashore, and the stone at Newton from which he was proclaimed as King.