Page 42 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

had no place. Nor was there any tie of kinship between these

British farmers and those of Denmark. The farmers below the
Downs claimed kinship rather with the peoples across the Chan­
nel to the south. From there, the folk tales of their people would

relate, their forefathers had come about a thousand years ago.
Over in the more thickly wooded Ardennes lived people with the
same hilltop corrals, the same way of life, even an understand­

able language. In fact a tenuous relationship, a feeling of being
of one blood, extended throughout the backwoodsmen of the
whole of western Europe, to where the forests of France lapped

the bastions of the Alps or petered out on the sun-baked hills
facing the Mediterranean.

No one at this time could have explained that feeling of re­
lationship, nor extracted from the legends and fairy tales into
which it was woven the original folk tradition that over two thou­

sand years ago the forebears of all the farmers of Europe west of
the Rhine had crossed to a virgin continent from North Africa;

whereas Europe east of the Rhine had been settled by colonists
from Asia Minor who had occupied the Danube valley and from
there spread out over the European plain. All that now survived

was the feeling that the Western peoples belonged together and
that the Danubians east of the Rhine were somehow different.

Still farther south and west, in the southernmost parts of
Spain, the inhabitants of the hilltop towns would have protested
with vigor at the appellation of “backwoodsmen.” Though their

sierras are sparsely pine-clad, they do not, like the barbarians of
the rest of Europe, burn off their forests to clear new land for

planting, nor move their villages from place to place every few
years. Their stone-built towns are permanent, fortified with wall
and ditch, and they cover several acres of ground. They are

proud of being an ancient people, these dark slender Spaniards
whose flocks of sheep roam the close-cropped hillsides, and

whereas the British cattlemen look no farther for their origins
than across the Channel, the Spanish shepherds have never lost
the tradition that their forefathers came across the straits from

Africa.