Battle-fields.
The chief of the Scandinavian monuments, and the most interesting for our present object, comprise those groups of stones which mark battle-fields. Not only are their dates generally known with sufficient precision to throw considerable light on the question of the antiquity of such monuments in general, but they also illustrate, if they do not determine, the use of many of the groups of stones we meet with in other countries. Sjöborg devotes ten plates in his first volume to these battle-fields, illustrating twice that number of battles which occurred between the fifth and the twelfth centuries after Christ.
99. View of Battle-field at Kongsbacka. From Sjöborg.
The first of these, at Kongsbacka, near the coast in Halland, though of somewhat uncertain date, is worth quoting from its similarity to the alignments on Dartmoor, Ashdown, Karnac, and elsewhere, though, unfortunately, no plan or dimensions are given. On the hills beyond is a tumulus called the grave of Frode, and on the plain a conspicuous stone bears his name; but whether this was Frode V. (400) or some other Frode is not clear. Sjöborg assigns it to a date about 500, and there seems very little reason to doubt he is at least approximatively correct.[325]
The second battle-field illustrated is similar to the last, except in the form of the stones, which seem to belong to a different mineralogical formation.[326] They are plainly, however, seen to be arranged in circles and lines, and are even more like forms with which we are familiar elsewhere. It is said to represent a battle-field in which the Swedish king Adil fought the Danish Snio, and in which the latter with the chiefs Eskil and Alkil were slain. As all these names are familiarly known in the mediæval history of these countries there can be no great difficulty in ascribing this battle also to about the same age as that at Kongsbacka.
With the third we tread on surer ground. No event in the history of these lands is better known than the fight on the Braavalla Heath, in Östergothland, where the blind old king, Harald Hildetand, met his fate in the year 736, or 750 according to others. As the Saga tells us, Odin had, when the king was young, taught him a form of tactics which gave him a superiority in battle over all his enemies; but the god having withdrawn his favour from him, he fell before the prowess of his nephew, Sigurd Ring, to whom the god had communicated the secret of the battle array. It does not appear to admit of doubt that the circles shown in the cut in the opposite page were erected to commemorate this event, and that they contain the bodies of those who were slain in this action; and if this is so, it throws considerable light on the battle-fields of Moytura, illustrated woodcuts Nos. 54 to 61. The circles on Braavalla are generally from 20 to 40 feet in diameter, and consequently are, on the average, smaller than those at Moytura; they are also more numerous, unless we adopt Petrie's suggestion,[327] that there must originally have been at least two hundred in the Irish field; and if so, it is the smaller ones that would certainly be the first to be cleared away, so that the similarity may originally have been greater than it now is—so great, indeed, as to render it difficult to account for the fact that two battle-fields should have been marked out in a manner so similar when so long a time as seven centuries had elapsed between them. As it does not appear possible that the date of the Braavalla fight can be shifted to the extent of fifty years either way, are we deceiving ourselves about Moytura? Is it possible that it represents some later descent of Scandinavian Vikings on the west coast of Ireland, and that the cairn on Knocknarea—
"High and broad,
By the sailors over the waves
To be seen afar,
The beacon of the war renowned"[328]—
which they built up during ten days—is really the grave of some Northern hero who fell in some subsequent fight at Carrowmore? That all these are monuments of the same class, and belong, if not to the same people, at least to peoples in close contact with one another, and having similar faiths and feelings, does not appear to admit of doubt. When, however, we come to look more closely at them, there are peculiarities about them which may account for even so great a lapse of time. The Braavalla circles are smaller, and on the whole perhaps, we may assume, degenerate. There are square and triangular graves, and other forms, which, so far as we know, are comparatively modern inventions, and, altogether, there are changes which may account for that lapse of time; but that more than seven centuries elapsed between the two seems to be most improbable.
100. Part of the Battle-field of Braavalla Heath. From Sjöborg.
101. Harald Hildetand's Tomb at Lethra.[329]
To return, however, to King Hildetand. According to the saga, "After the battle the conqueror, Sigurd Ring, caused a search to be made for the body of his uncle. The body when found was washed and placed in the chariot in which Harald had fought, and transported into the interior of a tumulus which Sigurd had caused to be raised. Harald's horse was then killed and buried in the mound with the saddle of Ring, so that the king might at pleasure proceed to Walhalla either in his chariot or on horseback. Ring then gave a great funeral feast, and invited all the nobles and warriors present to throw into the mound great rings and noble armour, in honour of the king Harald. They then closed up the mound with care."[330] This mound still exists at Lethra's Harald, capital in Seeland. It was mentioned by Saxo Grammaticus in 1236,[331] and described and drawn by Olaus Wormius in 1643;[332] and no one ever doubted its identity, till recently the Museum authorities caused excavations to be made. Unfortunately some "wedges of flint" have been found in the earth which was extracted from the chamber, from which Worsaae and his brother antiquaries at once concluded that "it is beyond all doubt merely a common cromlech of the stone period"[333] —a conclusion that seems to me the reverse of logical. No one, I presume, doubts that King Hildetand was buried in a tumulus with rings and arms; and if this tumulus was regarded historically as his, for the last 600 years, and traditionally so from the time of his death, it is incumbent upon the antiquaries to show how worthless these traditions and histories are, and to point out where he really rests. To form an empirical system and to assert—which they cannot prove—that no flint implements were used after a certain prehistoric date, and that consequently all mounds in which flint implements are found are prehistoric, seems most unreasonable, to say the least of it. It would be surely far more philosophical to admit that flint may have been used down to any time till we can find some reason for fixing a date for its discontinuance. In this instance an "instantia crucis" would be to dig into some of the circles at Braavalla, and see if any flints are to be found there. No metal was found at Moytura, though metal was, if history is to be depended upon, then commonly used, and flint implements were probably not found because those who opened the tombs were not aware of its importance. Pending this test, the form of the grave may give us some indication of its age. It is an oblong barrow, with an external dolmen at one end, and with a row of ten stones on each side, the two end ones being taller than the rest. A similar mound, known as the Kennet long barrow, exists at Avebury,[334] so similar indeed that if this tomb at Lethra is historical so certainly is the English example. If, on the other hand, either can be proved to belong to the long forgotten past, the other must also he consigned to the same unsatisfactory limbo.
The barrow at West Kennet was carefully explored in 1859 by Dr. Thurnam, and the results of his investigation fully detailed in a paper in the 'Archæologia,' vol. xxxviii., from which the following particulars are abstracted, together with some others from a second paper, "On Long Barrows," by the same author, in vol. xlii. of the same publication.
Externally it is a mound measuring 336 feet in length by 75 feet at its broadest part. Originally it was surrounded by what is called a peristalith of tall stones, between which, it is said, a walling of smaller stones can still be detected. On its summit, as at Lethra, was an external dolmen over the principal chamber of the tomb. The chamber was nearly square in form, measuring 8 feet by 9, and approached by a passage measuring 15 feet by 3 feet 6 inches in width; and its arrangement is in fact the same as that of the Jersey tumulus ([woodcut No. 11]), and, as Sir John Lubbock remarks, "very closely resembles that of a tumulus" he had just been describing, of the Stone age, in the island of Möen, "and, in fact, the plan of passage graves generally."[335]
102. Long Barrow, Kennet, restored by Dr. Thurnam. 'Archæologia,' xlii.
When opened, six original interments were found in the chamber, under a stratum of black, sooty, greasy matter, 3 to 9 inches in thickness, and which, Dr. Thurnam remarks, "could never have been disturbed since the original formation of the deposit" (p. 413). Two of these had their skulls fractured during lifetime; the others were entire. To account for this, Dr. Thurnam takes considerable pains to prove that slaves were sometimes sacrificed at the funeral of their masters, but he fails to find any instance in which they were killed by breaking their heads; and if they were to serve their master in the next world, even a savage would be shrewd enough to know that cracking his skull was not the way to render him useful for service either in this world or the next. No such mode of sacrifice was ever adopted, so far as I know.[336] But supposing it was so, all the six burials in this tomb seem to have been nearly equal, and equally honourable, and why, therefore, all their skulls were not broken is not clear. If on the other hand we assume that it is the grave of six persons who were slain in battle, two by blows on the head, and four by wounds in the body, this surely would be a simpler way of accounting for the facts observed. Even, however, if we were to admit that these men with the broken heads were sacrificed, this would by no means prove the grave to be prehistoric. Quite the contrary, for we know from the indisputable authority of a decree of Charlemagne that human sacrifices were practised by the pagan Saxons as late, certainly, as 789,[337] and were sufficiently frequent to constitute one of the first crimes against which he fulminated his edicts. The fact is that neither historians nor antiquaries seem quite to realise the state of utter barbarism into which the greater part of Europe was plunged between the collapse of the Roman Empire and the revival of order under Charlemagne. Christianity no doubt had taken root in some favoured spots, and some bright lights shone out of the general darkness, but over the greater part of Europe pagan rites were still practised to such an extent as easily to account for any heathen practice or any ancient form of sepulture which may be found anywhere existing.
To return, however, to our long barrow. Under a piece of Sarsen stone, but on the skull of one of the principal persons interred here (No. 4), were found two pieces of black pottery (fig. 8, page 415), which Dr. Thurnam admits may be of the Roman age. Other fragments of the same vessel were found in other parts of the tomb, and also fragments of pottery (figs. 14 to 17), not British, but to which he hesitates to assign an age. So far as I can judge, it seems just such pottery as the less experienced British potters would form, on Roman models, after the departure of that people. But this is immaterial; for beyond the chamber, and deeper consequently into the tumulus, were found fragments of undoubted Roman pottery. So far, therefore, everything favours the view that it was the sepulchre of persons slain in battle, after the departure of the Romans; for we can hardly believe that a battle would be fought, and such a tomb raised over the slain, during their occupation; and if so, as the pottery proves it could not be before, a choice of a date is fixed within very narrow limits. It may either have been in 450, immediately after the departure of the Romans, or in 520, the date of the battle of Badon Hill, which is the time at which, I believe, it was reared. So far as the general argument is concerned, it is of no consequence which date is chosen. Against this conclusion we have to place the following facts. First, no trace of iron or bronze, or of metal of any sort, was found in the tomb. Secondly, at least 300 flint fragments were found in it. Some of these were mere chippings, some cones, but many were fairly formed flint implements (figs. 10 to 13),[338] not belonging to the oldest type, but such as antiquaries are in the habit of ascribing to the pre-metal Stone age. In addition to these, the quantity of coarse native pottery was very remarkable. No whole vessels were found, but broken fragments that would form fifty vessels were heaped in a corner; and there were corresponding fragments in another corner. Dr. Thurnam tries to explain this by referring to the passage in the grave scene in 'Hamlet,' where our great dramatist speaks of "shards, flints, and pebbles," which should be thrown into the graves of suicides; the use of which, he adds, "in mediæval times may be a relic of paganism." It does not, however, seem to occur to him that, if such a custom was known in the sixteenth century, it would be likely to have been in full force in the sixth. It is strange enough that such a custom, even if only referred to suicides, should have survived a thousand years of such revolutions and changes of religion as England was subjected to in those days; but that it should be known to Christians, after 3000 or 4000 years' disuse, seems hardly possible.
No argument, it appears to me, can be drawn from the different kinds of pottery found in the tomb. If any one will take the trouble of digging up the kitchen midden of a villa built within the last ten years, in a previously uninhabited spot, he will probably find fragments of an exquisite porcelain vase which the housemaid broke in dusting the drawing-room chimney-piece. He will certainly find many fragments of the stoneware used in the dining-room, and with them, probably, some of the coarser ware used in the dairy, and mixed with these innumerable "shards" of the flower-pots used in the conservatory. According to the reasoning customary among antiquaries, this midden must have been accumulating during 2000 or 3000 years at least, because it would have taken all that time, or more, before the rude pottery of the flower-pots could have been developed into the exquisite porcelain of the drawing-room vase. The argument is, in fact, the same as that with respect to the flints. It may be taken for granted that men used implements of bone and stone before they were acquainted with the use of metal; but what is disputed is that they ceased to use them immediately after becoming familiar with either bronze or iron. So with earthenware: men no doubt used coarse, badly formed, and badly burnt pottery before they could manufacture better; but, even when they could do so, it is certain that they did not cease the employment of pottery of a very inferior class; and we have not done so to the present day. To take one instance among many. There are in the Museum of the Society of Antiquaries at Edinburgh a series of vessels, hand-made and badly burnt, and which might easily be mistaken—and often are—for those found in prehistoric tombs. Yet they were made and used in the Shetland Islands in the last and even in the present century.
The truth of the matter seems to be that, as in the case of a find of coins, it is the date of the last piece that fixes the time of the deposit. There may be coins in it a hundred or a thousand years older, but this hoard cannot have been buried before the last piece which it contains was coined. So it is with this barrow. The presence of Roman or post-Roman pottery in an avowedly undisturbed sepulchre fixes, beyond doubt, the age before which the skeletons could not have been deposited where they were found by Dr. Thurnam. The presence of flints and coarse pottery only shows, but it does so most convincingly, how utterly groundless the data are on which antiquaries have hitherto fixed the age of these monuments. It proves certainly that flints and shards were deposited in tombs in Roman or post-Roman times; and if there is no mistake in Dr. Thurnam's data, this one excavation is, by itself, sufficient to prove that the Danish theory of the three ages is little better than the "baseless fabric" of—if not "a vision"—at least of an illusion, which, unless Dr. Thurnam's facts can be explained away, has no solid foundation to rest upon.
If any systematic excavations had been undertaken in the Scandinavian long barrows, it would not, perhaps, be necessary to adduce English examples to illustrate their age or peculiarities. Several are adduced by Sjöborg, but none are reported as opened. This one, for instance, is externally like the long barrow at West Kennet, and, if Sjöborg's information is to be depended upon, is one of several which mark the spot where Frode V. (460-494) landed in Sweden, where a battle was fought, and those who fell in it were buried in these mounds, or where the Bauta stones mark their graves. If this is so, the form of the long barrow with its peristalith was certainly not unknown in the fifth century; and there is no improbability of its being employed in England also in that age. In settling these questions, however, the Scandinavians have an immense advantage over us. All their mounds have names and dates; they may be true or they may be false, but they give a starting-point and an interest to the enquiry which are wanting in this country, but which, it is hoped, will one day enable the Northmen to reconstruct their monumental history on a satisfactory basis.
103. Long Barrow at Wiskehärad, in Halland. From a drawing by Sjöborg.
In most cases antiquaries in this country have been content to appeal to the convenient fiction of secondary interments to account for the perplexing contradictions in which their system everywhere involves them. In the instance of the Kennet long barrow there is no excuse for such a suggestion. All the interments were of one age, and that undoubtedly the age of the chamber in which they were found, and the pottery and flints could not have been there before nor introduced afterwards. Indeed, I do not know a single instance of an undoubtedly secondary interment, unless it is in the age of Canon Greenwell's really prehistoric tumuli. When he publishes his researches, we shall be in a condition to ascertain how far they bear on the theory.[339] In the chambered tumuli secondary interments seem never to occur; and nothing is more unlikely than that they should. As Dr. Thurnam himself states: "In three instances at least Mr. Cunnington and Sir R. C. Hoare found in long barrows skeletons which, from their extended position and the character of the iron weapons accompanying them, were evidently Anglo-Saxon."[340] A simple-minded man would consequently fancy that they were Anglo-Saxon graves, for what can be more improbable than that the proud conquering Saxons would be content to bury their dead in the graves of the hated and despised Celts whom they were busy in exterminating.[341]
If the above reasoning is satisfactory and sufficient to prove that the long barrow at West Kennet is of post-Roman times, it applies also to Rodmarton, Uley, Stoney Littleton, and all the Gloucestershire long barrows which, for reasons above given (ante, [page 164]), we ventured to assign to a post-Roman period; and à fortiori it carries with it King Hildetand's tomb at Lethra. It is true we have not the same direct means of judging of its date as we have of our own monuments. The Danes treat with such supreme contempt any monument that does not at once fall in with their system, that they will not even condescend to explore it. So soon as Worsaae found some "flint wedges" in the tomb, he at once decreed that it was prehistoric, and that it was no use searching farther; and we are consequently left to this fact and its external similarities for our identification. Here, again, is a difficulty. The two drawings above given (woodcuts [Nos. 101] and [102]) may show them too much alike or exaggerate differences. The one is an old drawing from nature, the other a modern restoration; still the essential facts are undoubted. Both are chambered long barrows, ornamented by rows of tall stones, either partially or wholly surrounding their base, and both have external dolmens on their summit, and both contain flint implements. If this is so, the difficulty is rather to account for so little change having taken place in 230 years than to feel any surprise at their not being identical. The point upon which we wish to insist here is that they are both post-Roman, and may consequently belong to any age between Arthur and Charlemagne.
The remaining battle-fields of which representations are given in Sjöborg are scarcely so interesting as that at Braavalla, which with the tomb of the king slain there are landmarks in our enquiry. If those circles on Braavalla Heath do mark the battle-field, and that tomb at Lethra is the one in which the blind old king was laid—neither of which facts I see any reason for doubting—all difficulties based on the assumed improbability of the monuments being so modern as I am inclined to make them are removed, and each case must stand or fall according to the evidence that can be adduced for or against its age. To return, however, to the battle-fields given by Sjöborg. Figures 43 and 44 represent two groups of circles and Bauta stones near Hwitaby, in Malmö. These are said to mark two battle-fields, in which Ragnar Lothbrok gained victories over his rebellious subjects in Scania: Sjöborg says in 750 and 762, as he adopts a chronology fifty years earlier than Suhm. But be this as it may, there does not seem any reason for doubting but that these stones do mark fields where battles were fought in the eighth century, and that Ragnar Lothbrok took part in them. These groups are much less extensive than those at Braavalla, but are so similar that they cannot be distant from them in age.
At Stiklastad, in Norway, in the province of Drontheim, a battle was fought, in 1030, between Knut the Great and Olof the Holy; and close to this is a group of forty-four circles of stones, which Sjöborg seems, but somewhat doubtfully, to connect with this battle. But about the next one (fig. 49) there seems no doubt. The Danish prince Magnus Henricksson killed Erik the Holy, and was slain by Carl Sverkersson, in the year 1161, at Uppland, in Denmark; and the place is marked by twenty stone circles and ovals, most of them enclosing mounds and two square enclosures, 30 to 40 feet in diameter. They are not, consequently, in themselves very important, but are interesting, if the adscription is correct, as showing how this heathenish custom lasted even after Christianity must have been fairly established in the country. Another group (fig. 51) is said to mark the spot where, in 1150, a Swedish heroine, Blenda, overcame the Danish king Swen Grate, and the spot is marked by circles and Bauta stones; one, in front of a tumulus, bears a Runic inscription, though it merely says that Dedrik and Tunne raised the stone to Rumar the Good.
Only one other group need be mentioned here. On a spot of land, in the island of Freyrsö, off the entrance of the Drontheim Fiord, in the year 958, Hakon, the son of Harald Harfagar, overthrew his nephews, the sons of Erik Blodoxe, in three battles. The first and second of these, as shown in the plan ([woodcut No. 104]), are marked by cairns and mounds; and the third by eight large barrows, three of which are of that shape known in Scandinavia as ship barrows, and measure from 100 to 140 feet in length. There are also three tumuli at 4 in the woodcut, in one of which one of Erik Blodoxe's sons is said to be buried. It is not clear whether the five large mounds that stud the plain do not cover the remains of those also who fell in this fight. It does not appear that any excavations have been made in them. The interest of this battle-field to us is not so much because it shows the persistence of this plan of marking battle-fields at so late a date—later ones have just been quoted—but because all the actors in the scene are familiar to us from the part they took in the transactions in the Orkneys in the tenth century. If they, in their own country, adhered to these old-world practices, we should not be astonished at their having erected circles or buried in mounds in their new possessions. It is true that none of these Scandinavian circles can compare in extent with the Standing Stones of Stennis or the Ring of Brogar, but this would not be the first time that such a thing has happened. The Greeks erected larger and, in proportion to the population, more numerous Doric temples in Sicily than they possessed in their own country; and the Northmen may have done the same thing in Orcadia, where they possessed a conquered, probably an enslaved, race to execute these works.
104. Battle-field at Freyrsö. From Sjöborg, vol. i. pl. 16.