It is very difficult, at this distance of time, and with so little information, to discern clearly what sort of civil government prevailed among the ancient Britons.  In all very uncultivated countries, as society is not close nor intricate, nor property very valuable, liberty subsists with few restraints.  The natural equality of mankind appears and is asserted, and therefore there are but obscure lines of any form of government.  In every society of this sort the natural connections are the same as in others, though the political ties are weak.  Among such barbarians, therefore, though there is little authority in the magistrate, there is often great power lodged, or rather left, in the father:  for, as among the Gauls, so among the Britons, he had the power of life and death in his own family, over his children and his servants.

But among freemen and heads of families, causes of all sorts seem to have been decided by the Druids:  they summoned and dissolved all the public assemblies; they alone had the power of capital punishments, and indeed seem to have had the sole execution and interpretation of whatever laws subsisted among this people.  In this respect the Celtic nations did not greatly differ from others, except that we view them in an earlier stage of society.  Justice was in all countries originally administered by the priesthood:  nor, indeed, could laws in their first feeble state have either authority or sanction, so as to compel men to relinquish their natural independence, had they not appeared to come down to them enforced by beings of more than human power.  The first openings of civility have been everywhere made by religion.  Amongst the Romans, the custody and interpretation of the laws continued solely in the college of the pontiffs for above a century.[7]

The time in which the Druid priesthood was instituted is unknown.  It probably rose, like other institutions of that kind, from low and obscure beginnings, and acquired from time, and the labors of able men, a form by which it extended itself so far, and attained at length so mighty an influence over the minds of a fierce and otherwise ungovernable people.  Of the place where it arose there is somewhat less doubt:  Caesar mentions it as the common opinion that this institution began in Britain, that there it always remained in the highest perfection, and that from thence it diffused itself into Gaul.  I own I find it not easy to assign any tolerable cause why an order of so much authority and a discipline so exact should have passed from the more barbarous people to the more civilized, from the younger to the older, from the colony to the mother country:  but it is not wonderful that the early extinction of this order, and that general contempt in which the Romans held all the barbarous nations, should have left these matters obscure and full of difficulty.