The peoples of Europe

by H. J. Fleure

The hardening of bronze was one of the most important facts affecting man's advance in the Bronze Age, and we have abundant indications (see papers in archaeological and anthropological journals by H. J. E. Peake) of man's ability to attack the forest seriously ere bronze gave place to iron. The attack on the forest was undoubtedly redoubled when man acquired iron weapons, and so the Early Iron Age witnessed extensive settlement in forest clearings in Europe north of the Alps, and with that went increase of corn-growing. South of the Alps the warming of the climate after the Ice Age had helped to reduce the forest, especially in view of the large stretches of limestone and the sharp slopes which have always hindered regrowth of forest once destroyed.

The Mediterranean region, by reason of the long summer drought, has become with the establishment of its present climate less fit for pasturing of animals and more suited to the goat than to cattle or sheep. As a result of this the destructive goat has reduced the forests and hindered their regrowth. The difficulty of stock-raising encouraged efforts towards cultivation, which is certainly very old in the Mediterranean region, and has passed through several phases that need elucidation. It seems probable that barley cultivation was established very early, and bee and fruit culture were gradually gathered around it, the olive proving invaluable as a substitute for animal fat. But ere the olive could be grown in quantity there had to be a good deal of organization, for it does not begin to bear till it is almost eight years old, and is in full bearing when it is nearing its thirtieth year. To wait for the olive, therefore, meant possession of some reserves and assurance of food supplies, such as imported grain, ere much land could be turned into olive groves. War and unsettlement worked against olive culture, for the risks of destruction of an olive grove were then serious, and the consequences disastrous.

If, however, olive culture was, on the one hand, the result of a measure of peace and prosperity, it was also in most cases the presage of further growth of prosperity; the harvest was reasonably assured and immensely valuable, especially as it could be transported far and wide by sea. The relation of olive culture to the classical period in Greece is well known. We seem to have grounds for associating city growth in the Mediterranean with trade and the spread of large-scale olive culture as well as with the question of defence.

Both north and south of the Alps the dependence of man on cereals after he gave up his milk and flesh diet seems to have made him desire salt, and the Early Iron Age settlements of Gaul are closely related to sources of salt, while the Mediterranean coast-lands had ample opportunities of salt getting. The pig had been domesticated by this time, and the salting of bacon and fish gave a reserve for the winter, but it has been claimed that salt was also in request for forms of porridge, &c. In thinking of the early settlements we should remember that north of the Alps there was perpetual danger lurking in the dark forest, while in the south there were the rough goatherds of the mountains.

In the last millennium before Christ the worsening of the Scandinavian climate drove peoples southwards towards Gaul, and thus led to a growth of hill-fortress towns, of which the supreme examples were Alesia, Gergovia, and Bibracte, and from Gaul the building of these fortress towns spread, with sea commerce, up the west coast of Britain, where Tre'r Ceiri on Yr Eifl in Carnarvonshire furnishes us with one of the best examples of this type of settlement of the Iron Age or Romano-British times.

For the purposes of this sketch it is not necessary to go into great detail about the Roman efforts, but we should note that within the bounds of their Empire they spread wheat cultivation, road communications, and their legal system, and that along with this seems to have gone a cheapening of iron. All these changes helped to knit the people to the soil, to make neighbourhood take the place of kinship as a basis of association, to root a language in the people's hearts. It is the men who 'lacte et carne vivunt', as Caesar puts it, who organize on a kinship basis, move from place to place, and lack the written records which do so much for language fixation.

We thus see in Gaul villages of various types in regions of differing history and opportunity, but pre-Roman fortress towns and Roman cities between them networking the country and related to roads built or adapted by the conquering engineers, and we note the implanting of linguistic features that not all the shocks of later disruptions have contrived to uproot. In Britain again are villages of varying types, pre-Roman or Romano-British fortress towns, chiefly on the west coast headlands, Roman cities for the most part speedily ruined, and Roman roads. The difference in the vitality of the cities is to be correlated with the difference as to language; the Roman elements in our language are for the most part the result of reintroduction later on. The Roman element in Welsh is usually allowed to be important.

If the spread of the rural Franks and of the Anglo-Saxons into the erstwhile Roman domains led to the submergence of the old cities and to much village foundation, there is at any rate a growing opinion that it did not destroy all continuity in either Gaul or Britain, that a good deal in our rural life goes back, as above hinted, to the late Bronze Age. The system of the manor under which the villagers give service to a military protector is too easily mixed up with the village system in discussions. The manor, with complex origins, is characteristic of post-Roman days of movement and strife. The civilizing element promoting agriculture and the law is furnished by the Church, which, with the centuries, spread its work over the Rhine, beyond the bounds of the Empire, right away to the limits of Europe-of-the-Sea, that is of the lands near Baltic or Mediterranean, or west of a north-south line near the east ends of those seas.

With the settling down which heralded the Middle Ages after the Dark Centuries of movement and war, we thus find the following broad facts. In the Mediterranean, where fruit culture and the city-state and trade were already old, that type of life reasserted itself even though the division of life on the north and the south sides (characteristic long before in Phoenician times) of the sea made grave difficulties.

In Spain the conflict between Islam and Christians inhibited the development of both and delayed everything. In both cases the military organization was unhealthily important, and the Muslim of the south kept much of their old social scheme based on the tribe, whereas they should have been adapting themselves to the rich land of Andalusia which they held. The result of the inhibitions made the Muslim far more of a misfit in the Andalusian garden than were the Christians on the heights of northern Spain, where seasonal movement of flocks and herds (transhumance) is still very important. The Muslim of the south thus gradually declined both in value and in influence, and though in earlier times they had been far more cultured than their Christian foemen, they had dropped far behind in organization before their subjugation in the fifteenth century. One should nevertheless bear in mind possible valuable survivals from the Muslim in matters of detail or of individual work. In Gaul cultivation had spread and had improved under monastic leadership; markets were growing under protection of the cathedrals, and were becoming the town centres that have persisted as the highly characteristic market towns of the Paris basin. After years of rivalry with Frankish dialects the old Roman heritage of language triumphed with some compromises, and became the langue d'oïl, the speech of the Paris basin and upper Burgundy, and the progenitor of standard modern French. In Britain the rural element seems to have predominated until Gaulish influences again became strong in the eleventh century.