is not improbable that the festival held there every first of August in honour of the deified Augustus simply superseded, in name mostly, an older feast held on that day in honour of Lug.[1]
What took place in the south of Gaul may have come to pass also in Britain: the echoes of a feast or fair on the first of August have not yet died out of Wales, where one still speaks of Gwyl Awst, which would now mean only the August festival, though, according to the analogy of other names,[2] it should be rendered the Feast of Augustus. Gwyl Awst is now a day for fairs in certain parts of North Wales, and it is remembered in central and southern Cardiganshire as one on which the shepherds used, till comparatively lately, to have a sort of picnic on the hills. One farmer's wife would lend a big kettle, and others would contribute the materials held requisite for making in it a plentiful supply of good soup or broth, while, according to another account, everybody present had to put his share of fuel on the fire with his own hands. But in Brecknockshire the first of August seems to have given way, some time before Catholicism had lost its sway in Wales, to the first holiday or feast in August,
- ↑ M. d'Arbois de Jubainville, in an article in La nouvelle Revue historique de Droit français et étranger (see his offprint entitled Études sur le Droit celtique (Paris, 1881), p. 92), was the first to notice this interesting coincidence; and he suggests that the ludi miscelli and the tournaments of eloquence, which Caligula ordered to take place there in his presence (Suetonius' Caligula, 20: see also his Claudius, 2; Strabo, iv. 3, 2 [p. 261]), formed simply the Gallo-Roman continuation of a Celtic custom which had its beginning previous to the advent of the Roman.
- ↑ Such as Gwyl Fair, Gwyl Iwan, Gwyl Fihangel, the feasts respectively of SS. Mary, John, and Michael the Angel.
