McFarlane’s Lives and Exploits of Banditti and Robbers (London, 1837) is a useful introduction to the subject. The author saw a part of what he wrote about, and gives many references, particularly for Italy. A good bibliography of Spanish brigandage will be found in the Reseña Historica de la Guardia Civil of Eugenio de la Iglesia (Madrid, 1898). For actual pictures of the life, nothing is better than the English Travellers and Italian Brigands of W. J. C. Moens (London, 1866), and The Brigands of the Morea, by S. Soteropoulos, translated by the Rev. J. O. Bagdon (London, 1868).
(D. H.)
BRIGANDINE, a French word meaning the armour for the brigandi or brigantes, light-armed foot soldiers; part of the armour of a foot soldier in the middle ages, consisting of a padded tunic of canvas, leather, &c., and lined with closely sewn scales or rings of iron.
BRIGANTES (Celtic for “mountaineers” or “free, privileged”), a people of northern Britain, who inhabited the country from the mouth of the Abus (Humber) on the east and the Belisama (Mersey; according to others, Ribble) on the west as far northwards as the Wall of Antoninus. Their territory thus included most of Yorkshire, the whole of Lancashire, Durham, Westmorland, Cumberland and part of Northumberland. Their chief town was Eburacum (or Eboracum; York). They first came into contact with the Romans during the reign of Claudius, when they were defeated by Publius Ostorius Scapula. Under Vespasian they submitted to Petillius Cerealis, but were not finally subdued till the time of Antoninus Pius (Tac. Agricola, 17; Pausan. viii. 43. 4). The name of their eponymous goddess Brigantia is found on inscriptions (Corp. Inscr. Lat. vii. 200, 875, 1062; F. Haverfield in Archaeological Journal, xlix., 1892), and also that of a god Bergans = Brigans (Ephemeris Epigraphica, vii. No. 920). A branch of the Brigantes also settled in the south-east corner of Ireland, near the river Birgus (Barrow).
See A. Holder, Altceltischer Sprachschatz, i. (1896), for ancient authorities; J. Rhys, Celtic Britain (3rd ed., 1904); Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyclopädie, iii. pt. i. (1897).
BRIGG (properly Glanford Briggs or Glamford Bridge), a market town in the North Lindsey or Brigg parliamentary division of Lincolnshire, England, situated on the river Ancholme, which affords water communication with the Humber. Pop. of urban district (1901) 3137. It is 23 m. by road north of Lincoln, and is served by the Grimsby line of the Great Central railway. Trade is principally agricultural. In 1885 a remarkable boat, assigned to early British workmanship, was unearthed near the river; it is hollowed out of the trunk of an oak, and measures 48 ft. 6 in. by about 5 ft. Other prehistoric relics have also been discovered.
BRIGGS, CHARLES AUGUSTUS (1841–), American Hebrew scholar and theologian, was born in New York City on the 15th of January 1841. He was educated at the university of Virginia (1857–1860), graduated at the Union Theological Seminary in 1863, and studied further at the university of Berlin. He was pastor of the Presbyterian church of Roselle, New Jersey, 1869–1874, and professor of Hebrew and cognate languages in Union Theological Seminary 1874–1891, and of Biblical theology there from 1891 to 1904, when he became professor of theological encyclopaedia and symbolics. From 1880 to 1890 he was an editor of the Presbyterian Review. In 1892 he was tried for heresy by the presbytery of New York and acquitted. The charges were based upon his inaugural address of the preceding year. In brief they were as follows: that he had taught that reason and the Church are each a “fountain of divine authority which apart from Holy Scripture may and does savingly enlighten men”; that “errors may have existed in the original text of the Holy Scripture”; that “many of the Old Testament predictions have been reversed by history” and that “the great body of Messianic prediction has not and cannot be fulfilled”; that “Moses is not the author of the Pentateuch,” and that “Isaiah is not the author of half of the book which bears his name”; that “the processes of redemption extend to the world to come”—he had considered it a fault of Protestant theology that it limits redemption to this world—and that “sanctification is not complete at death.” The general assembly, to which the case was appealed, suspended Dr Briggs in 1893, being influenced, it would seem, in part, by the manner and tone of his expressions—by what his own colleagues in the Union Theological Seminary called the “dogmatic and irritating” nature of his inaugural address. He was ordained a priest of the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1899. His scholarship procured for him the honorary degree of D.D. from Edinburgh (1884) and from Glasgow (1901), and that of Litt.D. from Oxford (1901). With S. R. Driver and Francis Brown he prepared a revised Hebrew and English Lexicon (1891–1905), and with Driver edited the “International Commentary Series.” His publications include Biblical Study: Its Principles, Methods and History (1883); Hebrew Poems of the Creation (1884); American Presbyterianism: Its Origin and Early History (1885); Messianic Prophecy (1886); Whither? A Theological Question for the Times (1889); The Authority of the Holy Scripture (1891); The Bible, the Church and the Reason (1892); The Higher Criticism of the Hexateuch (1893); The Messiah of the Gospels (1804), The Messiah of the Apostles (1894); New Light on the Life of Jesus (1904); The Ethical Teaching of Jesus (1904); A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Psalms (2 vols., 1906–1907), in which he was assisted by his daughter; and The Virgin Birth of Our Lord (1909).
BRIGGS, HENRY (1556–1630), English mathematician, was born at Warley Wood, near Halifax, in Yorkshire. He graduated at St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1581, and obtained a fellowship in 1588. In 1592 he was made reader of the physical lecture founded by Dr Thomas Linacre, and in 1596 first professor of geometry in Gresham House (afterwards College), London. In his lectures at Gresham House he proposed the alteration of the scale of logarithms from the hyperbolic form which John Napier had given them, to that in which unity is assumed as the logarithm of the ratio of ten to one; and soon afterwards he wrote to the inventor on the subject. In 1616 he paid a visit to Napier at Edinburgh in order to discuss the suggested change; and next year he repeated his visit for a similar purpose. During these conferences the alteration proposed by Briggs was agreed upon; and on his return from his second visit to Edinburgh in 1617 he accordingly published the first chiliad of his logarithms. (See Napier, John.) In 1619 he was appointed Savilian professor of geometry at Oxford, and resigned his professorship of Gresham College on the 25th of July 1620. Soon after his settlement at Oxford he was incorporated master of arts. In 1622 he published a small tract on the North-West Passage to the South Seas, through the Continent of Virginia and Hudson’s Bay; and in 1624 his Arithmetica Logarithmica, in folio, a work containing the logarithms of thirty thousand natural numbers to fourteen places of figures besides the index. He also completed a table of logarithmic sines and tangents for the hundredth part of every degree to fourteen places of figures besides the index, with a table of natural sines to fifteen places, and the tangents and secants for the same to ten places; all of which were printed at Gouda in 1631 and published in 1633 under the title of Trigonometria Britannica (see Table, Mathematical). Briggs died on the 26th of January 1630, and was buried in Merton College chapel, Oxford. Dr Smith, in his Lives of the Gresham Professors, characterizes him as a man of great probity, a contemner of riches, and contented with his own station, preferring a studious retirement to all the splendid circumstances of life.
His works are: A Table to find the Height of the Pole, the Magnetical Declination being given (London, 1602, 4to); “Tables for the Improvement of Navigation,” printed in the second edition of Edward Wright’s treatise entitled Certain Errors in Navigation detected and corrected (London, 1610, 4to); A Description of an Instrumental Table to find the part proportional, devised by Mr Edward Wright (London, 1616 and 1618, 12mo); Logarithmorum Chilias prima (London, 1617, 8vo); Lucubrationes et Annotationes in opera posthuma J. Neperi (Edinburgh, 1619, 4to); Euclidis Elementorum VI. libri priores (London, 1620. folio); A Treatise on the North-West Passage to the South Sea (London, 1622, 4to), reprinted in Purchas’s Pilgrims, vol. iii. p. 852; Arithmetica Logarithmica (London, 1624, folio); Trigonometria Britannica (Goudae, 1663, folio); two Letters to Archbishop Usher; Mathematica ab Antiquis minus cognita. Some other works, as his Commentaries on the Geometry of Peter Ramus, and Remarks on the Treatise of Longomontanus respecting the Quadrature of the Circle, have not been published.
