Ancient Britain and the Invasions of Julius Caesar

by T. Rice Holmes

Relics of the neolithic population: their settlements.

Relics of the neolithic population have been found over the whole extent of Great Britain and in the adjacent islands, from Kent to Cornwall, from the Isle of Wight to Shetland, not only in barrows and cairns, but also in caves in which they lived and died, in the neighbourhood of the quarries from which they obtained flint for manufacturing their tools, in pit-dwellings, on the margins of lakes, in the beds of rivers, in ditches, in peat-mosses, in sandy wastes where the sand had been blown away from the soil which it had long concealed, in fens, on open downs, and in fields by the accidental impact of a plough. Their sepulchres, as we shall afterwards see,[235] remain in comparatively few regions; but on the more cultivated lands many have doubtless been destroyed. It is reasonable to suppose that the settlements were made successively throughout a long period; and that the earliest comers took possession of the choicest lands in the south. Those who came later would displace their predecessors if they had the power, and if the prize seemed worth a struggle: otherwise they would move on to the nearest vacant lands; and so in the course of ages, and after much bloodshed, the whole island came to be occupied. But each successive horde found large tracts of the country through which they plodded overgrown by forests or covered by morasses; and they must often have had to travel far before they could obtain a suitable abode. Except the gigantic Irish elk and the wild ox known as the aurochs, which survived into the Bronze Age, and which, later still, Caesar found roaming in the German forests,[236] the great beasts which had lived in Britain with palaeolithic man were no more; but brown bears and grizzly bears, beavers and wild cats, still survived; herons, swans, and cormorants flitted over the fens; red deer, wild boars, and even a few reindeer remained to supply the new comers with game; and in every forest wolves were lurking to prey upon their cattle.[237] If we were to mark upon a map all the places at which neolithic implements have been found, it would correspond more or less closely with one constructed a priori by a geographer, ignorant of the results of archaeological research, who appreciated the requirements of early settlers. He would expect to find that they had avoided as far as possible the toil of cutting down woods, and that they had selected dry uplands, where the subsoil was porous and their cattle could find pasture, and which overlooked river-valleys, where they themselves could get water and fuel, and on the slopes of which they could build sheltered dwellings. He would not therefore be surprised to learn that the traces of occupation are most numerous on the chalk downs, the Derbyshire moorlands, the Pennine Range and the Yorkshire Wolds, the Malvern Hills, and other high lands which fulfilled the necessary conditions.[238]

Without his tools the settler could not build his hut, cut his firewood, or kill and dress a calf or a kid from his herd. Let us therefore try to ascertain how he made them, and how far he had improved as a craftsman upon the rude methods of his palaeolithic predecessor.

Flint mines and implement factories.

Within the last half-century archaeologists have succeeded in revealing some of the factories in which the prehistoric cutlers wrought. The nature of their materials of course still depended upon the rocks which were to be found in the district where they lived. Those who could get no flint used quartzite, basalt, felstone, greenstone, porphyry, diorite, or whatever stone they could obtain.[239] But flint was still the staple material. The palaeolithic hunters were obliged, as we have seen, to use stray blocks: their successors had learned how to win the flint from the bed of chalk in which it lay. Among the chief centres of mining and manufacture were Brandon in Suffolk and Cissbury, which is on the South Downs, about three miles north of Worthing. Grime’s Graves, the mines which supplied the famous factory of Brandon, are situated in a fern-clad wood, and occupy more than twenty acres. The so-called graves are circular shafts, about twenty-five feet in diameter at the mouth, from thirty to fifty deep, and on an average twenty-five feet apart. Most of them were connected by galleries, which had been tunnelled in directions that followed the seams of the flint. The tools with which the excavations were made were stone ‘celts’, or hatchets, and picks made of the brow-tines of the antlers of reindeer. Unlike modern picks they were one-sided; and a specimen encrusted with chalk on which the owner’s finger-prints are still visible, is now lying in the Prehistoric Room of the British Museum. More than one of the lamps were found by the aid of which the workmen had groped their way through the galleries,—small cups hollowed out of chalk, which they had evidently filled with oil or fat and furnished with some kind of wick.[240] When the flint had been hewn out with the hatchets, which have left their marks upon the sides of the galleries, it was hauled up to the surface, perhaps in baskets made of wicker or hide, and carried to the workshops, where it was wrought into implements, which were afterwards bartered for such articles as the manufacturers required. Innumerable flakes and chips of waste flint were found, which testified to their activity. One of them at least was a sculptor as well. A fragment of a human limb, modelled out of chalk, was discovered by the antiquary who first explored the site; and he tells us that the anatomical features were ‘rendered with an accurate knowledge of the parts’.[241] But what most impressed him was to find in one of the galleries a set of tools lying upon a piece of unfinished work in the position in which they had been laid some four thousand years ago.[242] Walking through the wood to the open heath of Broomhill, he came to the pits that yield the material which the ‘knappers’ of Brandon still manufacture into gun-flints for African tribes. The industry has been carried on since neolithic times, and even then it was ancient; for Brandon was an abode of flint-workers in the Old Stone Age. Not only the pits but even the tools show little change: the picks which the modern workers use are made of iron, but here alone in Britain the old one-sided form is still retained. Only the skill of the workers has degenerated: the exquisite evenness of chipping which distinguished the neolithic arrow-heads is beyond the power of the most experienced knapper to reproduce.[243]

The flint works at Cissbury have a general resemblance to those of Grime’s Graves; but the pits were sunk on a different principle.[244] They are contained in an entrenchment which did not exist at the time when the earliest were made, but was almost certainly constructed in the Neolithic Age.[245] The extreme rudeness of the tools which were found in them has led to the belief that they are older than Grime’s Graves;[246] but, on the other hand, stone implements of the rudest kind were manufactured for special purposes long after the Stone Age had passed away.[247] Moreover, many of the ruder Cissbury tools appear to be unfinished; and it may have been intended that they should be perfected by the people with whom they were exchanged. Many of the smaller pits contained not only stone implements but also fragments of pottery and remains of horses, goats, deer, and horned cattle; and from this Pitt-Rivers, who first explored them, concluded that they had been used as dwellings after they had ceased to serve their purpose as quarries, or had been inhabited by the workers who obtained their flint from the larger pits. On this site also deer-horn picks were found; and Pitt-Rivers, wishing to test their value, provided a set of similar tools, with which he and one of the labourers whom he employed dug a pit three feet square and three feet deep in an hour and a half.[248]

Difficulty of determining age of stone implements.

With the better material which was thus obtained the neolithic craftsmen fashioned implements of which some can hardly be distinguished, even by experts, from those of the older period, though the greater number are recognizable even by a tiro. It must, however, be remembered that in many cases one cannot tell whether a find of stone implements belongs to the Neolithic or to the Bronze Age; and some are probably later still. Indeed it would be impossible to point to any kind of stone implements which ceased to be manufactured in Britain when bronze was introduced.[249] Indefiniteness of the prehistoric ‘Ages’. One of the first cautions which the student of archaeology gives himself is that the epochs into which it has been found convenient to divide the Prehistoric Period were not definitely separated. It has been well said that they shade into one another like the colours in the solar spectrum.[250] The age in which we are now living affords an illustration. In one sense what might be called the Mechanical Age began when the first motor-car appeared on a London street; but we are still living in an era of transition, which will not end until, if ever, horses shall have ceased to be used for traction. Similarly stone tools continued to be used throughout the Bronze Age and the Late Celtic Period; and in certain remoter parts of the British Isles they are being used to-day.[251] When they are found associated with primary interments in long barrows or chambered cairns, or when they are met with in large numbers in other deposits which there is no reason to assign to a later period, they may as a rule be safely referred to the Neolithic Age; but, as we shall presently see,[252] there are certain implements of stone which were undoubtedly used in the Bronze Age, and of which it cannot be said with certainty that in this country they were used before. Some interments, however, which are ascribed to the Age of Bronze may have belonged to the older race, who still remained in their neolithic age although they were glad to use any bronze tools upon which they could lay their hands. Similarly the grave of an Australian savage who was buried some sixty years ago was found to contain, besides a piece of flint, a clay pipe, an iron spoon, and the handle of a pocket-knife.[253]

Stone implements.

The several kinds of tools that first began to be used in the Neolithic Age present numerous varieties of form which, in this book, it would be irrelevant to describe. To deal with them is the province of archaeology; and the reader who wishes to make himself acquainted with them can do so, after he has mastered the literature of the subject, by visiting the collections in our museums and by himself becoming a collector. Here we desire only to learn so much as may help us to understand how neolithic man lived, and from what origins the culture which succeeded his was evolved.