The Ancient Bronze Implements, Weapons, and Ornaments, of Great Britain and Ireland.

by John Evans

Having now passed in review the various forms of instruments, arms, and ornaments belonging to the Bronze Period of Great Britain, it will be well to attempt some chronological arrangement of the different types, and to examine the means at our command for fixing the approximate date and duration of the Period as well as the sources from which the knowledge of bronze in this country was derived.

The sequence and extent of variation in the types of an instrument or weapon destined to serve some given purpose are of course important factors in any theoretical calculation of the length of time such an instrument was in use. For if the type has remained one and the same during the whole period of the use of the instrument, it affords no evidence as to the length of its duration; whereas, if it has varied, and the sequence of its variations can be traced, their nature and extent may afford some means of judging of the length of time probably necessary for the development of the succession of forms. Or where an instrument has been so well adapted for its particular ends that no material modification in its form was likely to take place in it, so long as its use was limited to its original purpose, yet the springing from it of what may be termed collateral types of instruments specialized for other though analogous purposes may also be indicative of the original form having remained in use during a lengthened period of time.

The extremely numerous variations which may be observed in socketed celts afford conclusive evidence of that instrument having been employed in this country during a long series of years; and the collateral varieties, such as socketed chisels and gouges, as well as the more distantly related socketed hammers, give corroborative testimony to the same effect.

Improvements in the method of working metals will often react on the forms of tools and weapons, but here again the chronological element exists, as old processes and old forms are slow to die, especially among a people of no very high material civilisation. The discovery, for instance, of the art of producing hollow sockets in bronze castings by the use of cores of loam or clay, though it materially modified the form of many instruments, did not cause the entire extinction of the older forms without sockets, the use of which in some cases went on side by side with that of the instruments of more novel invention; and this fact tends to prove that bronze must have long been in use for tools with tangs instead of sockets, before the process of coring was known. Indeed, as I have elsewhere[1749] pointed out, the Bronze Period of Britain is susceptible of division into an earlier and later stage, the former mainly characterized by instruments which were let into their hafts or handles, and the latter by those which received their handles in sockets. As will subsequently be seen, it may be divided even into three more or less distinct stages.

A division into two stages has been suggested for the Scandinavian Bronze Age. M. Gabriel de Mortillet has in like manner divided the Bronze Period of France and Switzerland into an earlier and later stage—the one distinguished by flanged celts, which came into use at the close of the Stone Period (his Epoque robenhausienne), and the other by palstaves and socketed celts, which he regards as belonging to the close of the Bronze Period. To these two stages he has applied the terms morgien and larnaudien, derived from the Lake-dwelling of Morges, in the Lake of Geneva, and from the large founder’s hoard discovered at Larnaud (Jura). Curiously enough he regards the flat celts as being even more recent in date than the socketed, forgetful that the form with flanges at the sides can hardly by any possibility have been an original type, as such flanges must either have been produced by hammering the sides of flat celts, or must have been cast in a mould consisting of two halves, which certainly cannot have been so early a form of mould as a simple recess in stone, sand, or clay, adapted for casting a nearly flat plate of metal like a wedge-shaped celt.

Such flat celts, as has already been mentioned, have been found with interments in barrows associated with what were apparently lance-heads of flint, and maces and battle-axes of stone; and their nearest allies, those with but slight flanges—the result of hammering the sides—have also been found under similar circumstances.

The knife-daggers, as described in Chapter X., and the awls or prickers, are the only other bronze instruments which in this country can challenge a similar antiquity; and none of these, as a rule, are found in those deposits of bronze objects to which the name of “hoards” has been given.

As M. Gabriel de Mortillet and others have pointed out, these hoards are of more than one character. In certain cases they seem to have been the treasured property of some individual who would appear to have buried his valued tools or weapons during troublous times, and never to have been able to disinter them. In other cases the hoards were probably the property of a trader, as they consist of objects ready for use and in considerable numbers; and in others, again, they appear to have been the stock-in-trade of some bronze-founder of ancient times, as they comprise worn out and broken tools and weapons, lumps of rough metal, and even the moulds in which the accumulation of bronze was destined to be recast.

Mr. Worsaae has suggested that some of these hoards may be of a votive character and have been deposited in the ground as precious offerings to the gods. I am not, however, aware of any of our British hoards being of such a character that they can safely be regarded as votive.