Ancient Man in Britain

by Donald A. Mackenzie

MEGALITHS

Upper: Kit's Coty House, Kent. Lower: Trethevy Stone, Cornwall.

When the Easterners were expelled from Spain by a people from Central Europe who used weapons of bronze, some of them appear to have found refuge in Gaul. Siret is of opinion that others withdrew from Brittany, where subsidences were taking place along the coast, leaving their megalithic monuments below high-water mark, and even under several feet of water as at Morbraz. He thinks that the settlements of Easterners in Brittany were invaded at one and the same time by the enemy and the ocean. Other refugees from the colonies may have settled in Etruria, and founded the Etruscan civilization. Etruscan menhirs resemble those of the south of France, while the Etruscan crozier or wand, used in the art of augury, resembles the croziers of the megaliths, &c., of France, Spain, and Portugal. There are references in Scottish Gaelic stories to "magic wands" possessed by "wise women", and by the mothers of Cyclopean one-eyed giants. Ammianus Marcellinus, quoting Timagenes,[73] attributes to the Druids the statement that part of the inhabitants of Gaul were indigenous, but that some had come from the farthest shores and districts across the Rhine, "having been expelled from their own lands by frequent wars and the encroachments of the ocean".

The bronze-using peoples who established overland trade routes in Europe, displacing in some localities the colonies of Easterners and isolating others, must have instructed the natives of Western Europe how to mine and use metals. Bronze appears to have been introduced into Britain by traders. That the ancient Britons did not begin quite spontaneously to work copper and tin and manufacture bronze is quite evident, because the earliest specimens of British bronze which have been found are made of ninety per cent of copper and ten per cent of tin as on the Continent. "Now, since a knowledge of the compound", wrote Dr. Robert Munro, "implies a previous acquaintance with its component elements, it follows that progress in metallurgy had already reached the stage of knowing the best combination of these metals for the manufacture of cutting tools before bronze was practically known in Britain."[74]

The furnaces used were not invented in Britain. Professor Gowland has shown that in Europe and Asia the system of working mines and melting metals was identical in ancient times. Summarizing Professor Gowland's articles in Archæologia and the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, Mr. W. J. Perry writes in this connection:[75] "The furnaces employed were similar; the crucibles were of the same material, and generally of the same form; the process of smelting, first on the surface and then in the crucibles was found everywhere, even persisting down to present times in the absence of any fresh cultural influence. The study of the technique of mining and smelting has served to consolidate the floating mass of facts which we have accumulated, and to add support for the contention that one cultural influence is responsible for the earliest mining and smelting and washing of metals and the getting of precious stones and metals. The cause of the distribution of the megalithic culture was the search for certain forms of material wealth."

That certain of the megalithic monuments were intimately connected with the people who attached a religious value to metals is brought out very forcibly in the references to pagan customs and beliefs in early Christian Gaelic literature. There are statements in the Lives of St. Patrick regarding a pagan god called "Cenn Cruach" and "Crom Cruach" whose stone statue was "adorned with gold and silver, and surrounded by twelve other statues with bronze ornaments". The "statue" is called "the king idol of Erin", and it is stated that "the twelve idols were made of stone, but he ('Crom Cruach') was of gold". To this god of a stone circle were offered up "the firstlings of every issue and the chief scions of every clan". Another idol was called Crom Dubh ("Black Crom"), and his name "is still connected", O'Curry has written, "with the first Sunday of August in Munster and Connaught". An Ulster idol was called Crom Chonnaill, which was either a living animal or a tree, or was "believed to have been such", O'Curry says. De Jubainville translates Cenn Cruach as "Bloody Head" and Crom Cruach as "Bloody Curb" or "Bloody Crescent". O'Curry, on the other hand, translates Crom Cruach as "Bloody Maggot" and Crom Dubh as "Black Maggot". In Gaelic legends "maggots" or "worms" are referred to as forms of supernatural beings. The maggot which appeared on the flesh of a slain animal was apparently regarded as a new form assumed by the indestructible soul, just as in the Egyptian story of Bata the germ of life passes from his bull form in a drop of blood from which two trees spring up, and then in a chip from one of the trees from which the man is restored in his original form.[76] A similar belief, which is widespread, is that bees have their origin as maggots placed in trees. One form of the story was taken over by the early Christians, which tells that Jesus was travelling with Peter and Paul and asked hospitality from an old woman. The woman refused it and struck Paul on the head. When the wound putrified maggots were produced. Jesus took the maggots from the wound and placed them in the hollow of a tree. When next they passed that way, "Jesus directed Paul to look in the tree hollow where, to his surprise, he found bees and honey sprung from his own head".[77] The custom of placing crape on hives and "telling the bees" when a death takes place, which still survives in the south of England and in the north of Scotland, appears to be connected with the ancient belief that the maggot, bee, and tree were connected with the sacred animal and the sacred stone in which was the spirit of a deity. Sacred trees and sacred stones were intimately connected. Tacitus tells us that the Romans invaded Mona (Anglesea), they destroyed the sacred groves in which the Druids and black-robed priestesses covered the altars with the blood of captives.[78] There are a number of dolmens on this island and traces of ancient mine-workings, indicating that it had been occupied by the early seafarers who colonized Britain and Ireland and worked metals. A connection between the tree cult of the Druids and the cult of the builders of megaliths is thus suggested by Tacitus, as well as by the Irish evidence regarding the Ulster idol Crom Chonnaill, referred to above (see also [Chapter XII]).

Who were the people that followed the earliest Easterners and visited our shores to search like them for metals and erect megalithic monuments? It is impossible to answer that question with certainty. There were after the introduction of bronze working, as has been indicated, intrusions of aliens. These included the introducers of the short-barrow method of burial and the later introducers of burial by cremation. It does not follow that all intrusions were those of conquerors. Traders and artisans may have come with their families in large numbers and mingled with the earlier peoples. Some intruders appear to have come by overland routes from southern and central France and from Central Europe and the Danube valley, while others came across the sea from Spain. That a regular over-seas trade-route was in existence is indicated by the references made by classical writers to the Cassiterides (Tin Islands). Strabo tells that the natives "bartered tin and hides with merchants for pottery, salt, and articles of bronze". The Phœnicians, as has been noted, "monopolized the trade from Gades (Cadiz) with the islanders and kept the route a close secret". It was probably along this sea-route that Egyptian blue beads reached Britain. Professor Sayce has identified a number of these in Devizes Museum, and writes:

"They are met with plentifully in the Early Bronze Age tumuli of Wiltshire in association with amber beads and barrel-shaped beads of jet or lignite. Three of them come from Stonehenge itself. Similar beads of ivory have been found in a Bronze Age cist near Warminster: if the material is really ivory it must have been derived from the East. The cylindrical faience beads, it may be added, have been discovered in Dorsetshire as well as in Wiltshire."

Professor Sayce emphasizes that these blue beads "belong to one particular period in Egyptian history, the latter part of the Eighteenth Dynasty and the earlier part of the Nineteenth Dynasty.... The period to which they belong may be dated 1450-1250 b.c., and as we must allow some time for their passage across the trade routes to Wiltshire an approximate date for their presence in the British barrows will be 1300 b.c."