After this hunting and gathering era, there was farming and domestication of animals such as horses, pigs, sheep, goats, chicken, and cattle. Of these, the pig was the most important meat supply, being killed and salted for winter use. Next in importance were the cattle. Sheep were kept primarily for their wool. Flocks and herds were taken to pastures. The male cattle, with wood yokes, pulled ploughs in the fields of barley and wheat. The female goat and cow provided milk, butter, and cheese. The chickens provided eggs. The hoe, spade, and grinding stone were used. Thread was spun with a hand-held spindle which one hand held while the other hand alternately formed the thread from a mass and then wound it around the spindle. A coarse cloth was woven and worn as a tunic which had been cut from the cloth. Kings wore tunics decorated with sheet gold. Decorated pottery was made from clay and used to hold liquids and for food preparation and consumption. During the period of "lent" [from the word "lencten", which means spring], it was forbidden to eat any meat or fish. This was the season in which many animals were born and grew to maturity. Wood carts with four wheels were used to transport produce and manure. Horses were used for transportation of people or goods. Wood dug-out boats and paddles were used to fish on rivers or on the seacoast.
Clans had settlements near rivers. Each settlement had a meadow, for the mowing of hay, and a simple mill, with round timber huts, covered with branches or thatch or turf supported by a ring of posts. Inside was a hearth with smoke going up through a hole in the roof, and a cauldron for cooking food. There was an upright loom in the darkness. The floor was swept clean. At the door were spears or bags of slingstones ready for immediate use. The King lived in the largest hut. Gullies outside carried off excess water. Each hut had a garden for fruit and vegetables. A goat or cow might be tied out of reach of the garden. There was a fence or hedge surrounding and protecting the garden area and dwelling. Buckets and cauldrons which had originated from the Mediterranean were used. Querns with the top circular stone turned by hand over the bottom stone were used for grinding grain. There were ovens to dry and roast grain. Grain was first eaten as a porridge or cereal. There were square wood granaries on stilts and wood racks on which to dry hay. Grain was stored in concealed pits in the earth which were lined with drystone or basket work or clay and made airtight by sealing with clay or dung. Old pits were converted into waste dumps, burials, or latrines. Outside the fence were an acre or two of fields of wheat and barley, and sometimes oats and rye. Wheat and rye were sown in the fall, and oats and barley in the spring. Sowing was by men or two oxen drawing a simple scratch plow. The crops were all harvested in the summer. In this two-field system, land was held by peasants in units designed to support a single extended family. These fields were usually enclosed with a hedge to keep animals from eating the crop and to define the territory of the settlement from that of its neighbors. Flax was grown and made into linen cloth. Beyond the fields were pastures for cattle and sheep grazing. There was often an area for beehives. This was subsistence level farming.
Pottery was given symmetry when formed with use of a wheel and heated in increasingly hot kilns. From kilns used for pottery, it was noticed that lumps of gold or copper ore within would melt and assume the shape of what they had been resting on. These were the first metals, and could be beaten into various shapes, such as ornaments. Then the liquid ore was poured into moulds carved out of stones to make axes and daggers, which were reheated and hammered to become strong. Copper-tipped drills, chisels, punches and awls were also made.
The bodies of deceased were buried far away from any village in wood coffins, except for kings, who were placed in large stone coffins after being wrapped in linen. Buried with them were a few personal items, such as copper daggers, flat copper axes, and awls [small pointed tool for piercing holes in leather, wood, or other soft materials.]. The deceased was buried in a coffin with a stone on top deep in the earth to keep the spirit of the dead from coming out to haunt the living.
It was learned that tin added to the copper made a stronger metal: bronze. Stone hammers, and bronze and iron tools, were used to make cooking pots, weapons, breast plates, and horse bits, which were formed from moulds and/or forged by bronze smiths and blacksmiths from iron extracted from iron ore heated in bowl-shaped hearths. Typically one man operated the bellows to keep the fire hot while another did the hammering. Bronze was made into sickles for harvesting, razors for shaving, tweezers, straight hair pins, safety pins for clothes, armlets, neck-rings, and mirrors. Weapons included bows and arrows, flint and copper daggers, bronze swords and spears, stone axes, and shields of wood with bronze mountings. The bows and arrows probably evolved from spear throwing rods. Kings in body armor fought with chariots drawn by two horses. The horse harnesses had bronze fittings. The chariots had wood wheels, later with iron rims. When bronze came into use, there was a demand for its constituent parts: copper and tin, which were traded by rafts on waterways and the sea. When iron came into use, there were wrought iron axes, saws, adzes [ax with curved blade used to dress wood], files, ploughshares, harrows [set of spikes to break clods of earth on plowed land and also to cover seed when sewn], scythes, billhooks [thick knife with hooked point used to prune shrubs], and spits for hearths. Lead was mined. There was some glassmaking of beads. Wrought iron bars were used as currency.
Hillforts now had wooden palisades on top of their banks to protect the enclosed farmsteads and villages from stock wandering off or being taken by rustlers, and from attacks by wild animals or other people. Later a rampart was added from which sentries could patrol. These were supported by timber and/or stone structures. Timbers were probably transported by carts or dragged by oxen. At the entrances were several openings only one of which really allowed entry. The others went between banks into dead ends and served as traps in which to kill the enemy from above. Gates were of wood, some hung from hinges on posts which could be locked. Later guard chambers were added, some with space for hearths and beds. Sometimes further concentric circles of banks and ditches, and perhaps a second rampart, were added around these forts. They could reach to 14 acres. The ramparts are sufficiently widely spaced to make sling-shotting out from them highly effective, but to minimize the dangers from sling-shotting from without. The additional banks and ditches could be used to create cattle corridors or to protect against spear-thrown firebrands. However, few forts had springs of water within them, indicating that attacks on them were probably expected to be short. Attacks usually began with warriors bristling with weapons and blowing war trumpets shouting insults to the foe, while their kings dashed about in chariots. Sometimes champions from each side fought in single combat. They took the heads of those they killed to hang from their belts or place on wood spikes at the gates. Prisoners, including women and children, might become slaves. Kings sometimes lived in separate palisades where they kept their horses and chariots.
Circles of big stones like Stonehenge were rebuilt so that the sun's position with respect to the stones would indicate the day of longest sunlight and the day of shortest sunlight. Between these days there was an optimum time to harvest the crops before fall, when plants dried up and leaves fell from the trees. The winter solstice, when the days began to get longer was cause for celebration. In the next season, there was an optimum time to plant seeds so they could spring up from the ground as new growth. So farming gave rise to the concept of a year. Certain changes of the year were celebrated, such as Easter, named for the Goddess of the Dawn, which occurred in the east (after lent); May Day celebrating the revival of life; Lammas around July, when the wheat crop was ready for harvesting; and on October 31 the Celtic eve of Samhain, when the spirits of the dead came back to visit homes and demand food or else cast an evil spell on the refusing homes; and at which masked and costumed inhabitants representing the souls of the dead paraded to the outskirts of the settlements to lead the ghosts away from their homes; and at which animals and humans, who might be deemed to be possessed by spirits, were sacrificed or killed perhaps as examples, in huge bonfires [bonefires] as those assembled looked out for spirits and evil beings.
There was an agricultural revolution from the two-field to the three-field system, in which there were three large fields for the heavy and fertile land. Each field was divided into long and narrow strips. Each strip represented a day's work with the plough. One field had wheat, or perhaps rye, another had barley, oats, beans, or peas, and the third was fallow. These were rotated yearly. There was a newly invented plough that was heavy and made of wood and later had an attached iron blade. The plough had a mould-board which caught the soil stirred by the plough blade and threw it into a ridge alongside the furrow dug by the plough blade. This plough was too heavy for two oxen and was pulled by a team of about eight to ten oxen. Each ox was owned by a different man as was the plough, because no one peasant could afford the complete set. Each freeman was allotted certain strips in each field to bear crops. His strips were far from each other, which insured some very fertile and some only fair soil, and some land near his village dwelling and some far away. These strips he cultivated, sowed with seed, and harvested for himself and his family. After the harvest, they reverted to common ownership for grazing by pigs, sheep, and geese. As soon as haymaking was over, the meadows became common grazing land for horses, cows, and oxen. Not just any inhabitant, but usually only those who owned a piece of land in the parish were entitled to graze their animals on the common land, and each owner had this right of pasture for a definite number of animals. The faster horse replaced the ox as the primary work animal. Other farm implements were: coulters, which gave free passage to the plough by cutting weeds and turf, picks, spades and shovels, reaping hooks and scythes, and sledge hammers and anvils. Strips of land for agriculture were added from waste land as the community grew. Waste lands were moors bristling with brushwood, or gorse, heather and wanton weeds, reed-coated marshes, quaking peat-bogs, or woods grown haphazard on sand or rock. With iron axes, forests could be cleared to provide more arable land.
Some villages had a smith, a wheelwright, and a cooper. There were villages which had one or two market days in each week. Cattle, sheep, pigs, poultry, calves, and hare were sold there. London was a town on the Thames River under the protection of the Celtic river god Lud: Lud's town. It's huts were probably built over the water, as was Celtic custom. It was a port for foreign trade. Near the town was Ludhill. Each Celtic tribe in England made its own coinage. Silver and bronze were first used, and then gold. The metal was put into a round form and then placed between two engraved dies, which were hit.
Flint workers mined with deer antler picks and ox shoulder blade shovels for flint to grind into axes, spearheads, and arrowheads. Mine shafts were up to thirty feet deep and necessitated the use of chalk lamps fueled by animal fat with wicks of moss. The flint was hauled up in baskets.