Whether the twisted pins from the Wiltshire barrows are of the nature of gimlets, as suggested by Dr. Thurnam, is a difficult question. I shall, however, prefer to treat of them as personal ornaments rather than as tools. It is possible that they may to some extent have combined the two functions. As to the instruments which I have been describing being piercing tools or awls, there seems to be little doubt; and Mr. Bateman can hardly have been far wrong in regarding them as intended to pierce skins or leather. Though not curved like the cobbler’s awl of the present day, they are probably early members of the same family. In Scandinavia these instruments are of frequent occurrence, sometimes being provided with ornamental handles also made of bronze.[688] They are in that part of Europe often found in company with tweezers and small knives of bronze, and all were probably used together in sewing, the hole being bored by the awl and the thread drawn through by the tweezers and, when necessary, cut with the knife. Possibly the use of bristles as substitutes for needles dates back to very early times.
In one instance at least tweezers have been found in Britain in company with objects apparently belonging to the Bronze Age, though no doubt to a very late part of it. Those represented in Fig. 229 were discovered near Llangwyllog,[689] Anglesea, together with a two-edged razor, a bracelet, buttons, rings, &c., which are now in the British Museum.
A more highly ornamented pair of tweezers, with a broad end, found with a bone comb, a quern, spindle-whorls, &c., in a Picts’ house near Kettleburn,[690] Caithness, belongs to a considerably later period.
| Fig. 229. Llangwyllog. | Fig. 230. Ireland. |
The needles of bronze found in the British Isles do not as a rule appear to belong to the Bronze Period, though some of those found on the Continent seem to date back to that age. Two are engraved by Wilde,[691] and there are altogether eighteen such articles in the Museum of the Royal Irish Academy. A broken specimen (1¼ inch) from the sand-hills near Glenluce,[692] Wigtonshire, has been figured.
Another useful article anciently formed of bronze—though perhaps not, strictly speaking, a tool—may as well be mentioned in this place; I mean the fish-hook, of which, however, I am able to cite but one example as having been found in the British Isles. This was found in Ireland, and is shown in Fig. 230,[693] kindly lent by the Royal Irish Academy.
Fish-hooks of bronze have been found in considerable abundance on the site of several of the Swiss Lake-dwellings; and it is not a little remarkable that in form many of them are almost identical with the steel fish-hooks of the present day. The barb, to prevent the fish from struggling off the hook, is in most instances present, and double hooks are occasionally found. The attachment to the line was, even in the single hooks, frequently made by a loop or eye, formed by flattening and turning back the upper part of the shank of the hook. Fish-hooks were found in the Fonderie de Larnaud (Jura),[694] and in the hoard of St. Pierre-en-Châtre (Oise).
Such are the principal forms of tools and instruments of bronze found in these islands. Some of them, such as the socketed gouges, hammers, and chisels, can only belong to the latter part of the Bronze Period, when the art of using cores in order to produce sockets or other hollow recesses in castings was well known. Others, like the simple awls so frequently found in company with instruments of flint in our barrows, appear to extend from the commencement of the Bronze Age to its close.
There still remains to be described a class of instruments in use by the husbandman, and not by the warrior; and as the present chapter has extended to such a length, it will be well to treat of these under a separate heading.