Chapter IV: The Bronze Age and the Voyage of Pytheas (1)

[Sidenote: A Copper Age preceded the Bronze Age in certain countries, but has not been proved to have existed in Britain.]

Those who have learned to realize the extreme slowness with which material culture was evolved in its earlier stages would be disposed to doubt whether the first metallic implements were made of bronze, and to ask whether, at all events in some part of the world, the Neolithic must not have merged into a Copper Age. It is easy to imagine that the accidental melting of a piece of copper ore may have suggested the possibility of fashioning the metal into tools; and that inventive cutlers took impressions of stone axes in clay, and found that they could make from them copper axes which were not liable to break:[477] but one can hardly believe that simultaneously the discovery should have been made that the softness and bluntness of copper could be remedied by mixing with it a small proportion of tin. It is indeed not inconceivable that bronze was the first metal which was ever manufactured; for near the surface copper ores often contain tin oxide; and it has been proved that by smelting such ores bronze can be produced.[478] But of course only experiment could have shown that tools made of this metal were better than copper. The Egyptians were acquainted with the use of copper long before they began to manufacture bronze;[479] and in many parts of the British Isles as well as of the Continent copper implements have been discovered which belonged to prehistoric times.[480] But such discoveries do not necessarily prove the existence of a Copper Age: they may often be accounted for by the supposition that tin, which is far less widely distributed than copper, was temporarily wanting. In many cases implements of copper and of bronze have been met with in intimate association; and sometimes copper implements of advanced type with primitive bronze.[481] When, on the other hand, copper implements are repeatedly found in deposits which are known to be older than the oldest bronze in the districts in which they occur, the conclusion is irresistible that they were used there before bronze was manufactured.[482] There was certainly a Copper Age in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Cyprus; and probably also in Hungary, Northern Italy, Spain, and Ireland, with which, in ancient times, Spain was closely connected, and in which copper celts were unmistakably modelled upon those of stone: but for Britain the evidence is not sufficient.[483] We must assume then provisionally that in our island the metal which was first used for cutting-tools was bronze.

[Sidenote: Bronze implements used for many centuries in Europe before the Iron Age.]

Certain metallurgists, however, maintain that a Bronze Age, properly so called, may never have existed; and that iron may have been manufactured during and even before the period to which the bronze tools that are exhibited in museums belong. Iron was undoubtedly known to the Egyptians at a very remote date, perhaps as early as bronze.[484] Primitive methods of extracting iron from its ore, which are still practised in India and Africa, require far less skill than the manufacture of bronze: the metallurgists argue that since iron is rapidly oxidized by air and moisture, the iron tools which they assume to have been made in the so-called Bronze Age must have perished in the conditions to which most of the bronze tools that have been discovered were exposed; and they insist that iron tools have actually been found in association with objects of the early Bronze and even of the late Neolithic Age.[485]

The inconsistency of these arguments is self-evident; and if their authors had known the rudiments of archaeology, they would never have published them.[486] Hundreds of iron weapons have been recovered from the Thames: a competent archaeologist has affirmed that there was not one which could not with certainty be attributed to some period later than the Bronze Age; and since numerous articles of stone and bronze have been found in the same bed, he reasonably concludes that if iron implements had been used in the Bronze Age, some few at least must have come to light.[487] Nor is there any reason to suppose that if iron tools had been laid in graves of the Bronze Age, they would necessarily have perished beyond recognition; for in the famous Tyrolese cemetery of Hallstatt, and in many other deposits that, like it, belonged to the transitional period when bronze and iron were simultaneously used, the iron objects, oxidized though they are, retain their distinctive forms.[488] Yet in the numerous British barrows of the Bronze Age, and in the hoards of the same period that have been unearthed in England, Scotland, and Wales, not a trace of iron has ever been found.[489] Nothing then can be more certain than that in Britain, as in the rest of Europe, the Iron Age was preceded by a long period during which the only metals used were copper and bronze.[490]

[Sidenote: Where did the European bronze culture originate?]

Every antiquary knows that bronze did not reach this country until long after it was first used in Southern Europe, and that it was common in Egypt many centuries before; but in what part of the world it was first manufactured remains an unsettled question.[491] The oldest piece of bronze that has yet been dated was found at Mêdûm in Egypt, and is supposed to have been cast about three thousand seven hundred years before the birth of Christ. But the metal may have been worked even earlier in other lands; for a bronze statuette and a bronze vase, which were made twenty-five centuries before our era, have been obtained from Mesopotamia; and the craft must have passed through many stages before such objects could have been produced. Yet it would be rash to infer that either the Babylonians or the Egyptians invented bronze; for neither in Egypt nor in Babylonia is there any tin. Some archaeologist who shall explore the virgin fields of the Far East may one day be able to prove that bronze was worked by the Chinese, in whose country both copper and tin abound, earlier than by any other people; but even so it will still remain doubtful whether the art was not independently discovered elsewhere. There is no evidence that the bronze culture of Mexico and Peru did not originate in America;[492] and although it was once believed that all the tribes of Europe ultimately derived their knowledge of the metal from Asia,[493] there are many who now maintain that it is impossible to detect in European deposits of the Bronze Age the slightest trace of Oriental origin.[494]

[Sidenote: Origin and affinities of the bronze culture of Britain.]

But whatever may have been the case in Southern lands, there is no doubt that the knowledge of bronze came to this country from abroad. The old theory that it was a result of Phoenician commerce with Britain has long been abandoned;[495] and British bronze implements are so different from those of Norway and Sweden, Denmark, and Hungary that it cannot have been derived from any of those countries.[496] German influence was felt at a comparatively late period;[497] but from first to last the British bronze culture was closely connected with that of Gaul, and through Gaul with that of Italy.[498]

[Sidenote: Period of its commencement.]

The period when bronze first appeared in Britain can only be approximately fixed. It is certain that in the south-eastern districts iron tools began to be used not later than the fourth century before the Christian era.[499] The final period of the British Bronze Age is marked by the discovery of bronze-founders’ hoards, all of which contain tools or fragments of tools which are known as socketed celts, or other socketed instruments which were contemporary with them. These hoards are so numerous and so widely diffused, and the objects of which they are composed are so varied in form, that the time during which they were deposited cannot, in the opinion of experts, have been less than four or five hundred years. But before the first socketed celt was cast the bronze culture passed through earlier stages, during which the flat celts that resembled those of stone were being used, and then gradually giving way to improved forms, which in their turn were succeeded by later developments. The veteran archaeologist who has handled and examined almost every specimen of these numerous varieties has arrived at the conclusion that the British Bronze Age must have begun at the latest between 1400 and 1200 B.C.;[500] and while no one would now contend for a later date, there are some who maintain that bronze was first used in Britain twenty centuries before the Christian era.[501]

[Sidenote: Physical characters of the late neolithic and early bronze-using invaders of Britain.]

After the Bronze Age set in, as before the close of the preceding period, bands of invaders, wholly different in physical type from the neolithic aborigines, landed successively through long ages upon our eastern and southern shores. They came from the Netherlands, from Denmark and its islands, perhaps also from Scandinavia and from Gaul. They must not, however, be identified either with the invaders who introduced the Celtic language into Gaul or with any Celtic-speaking people. There is no evidence, and it is in the last degree improbable, that any Celtic tribe had appeared in Gaul at the time when the alien immigrants began to settle in Britain, or that Celtic had then taken shape as a branch of the Indo-European language. Those immigrants have often been described as a tall, stalwart, round-headed race; but the evidence of sepulchral remains shows that they sprang from various stocks. Those of the type which is commonly regarded as specially characteristic of the Bronze Age were taller and much more powerfully built than the aborigines: their skulls were comparatively short and round; they had massive jaws, strongly marked features, enormously prominent brow ridges and retreating foreheads; and their countenances must have been stern, forbidding, and sometimes almost brutal. Similar skulls, which have much in common with the primitive Neanderthal type,[502] have been exhumed from neolithic tombs in Denmark and the Danish island of Falster. But the skeletons which have been found in some of the oldest Scottish cists belonged to men whose average height, although they were sturdy and thickset, was barely five feet three inches, and whose skulls, shorter and rounder than the others, as well as their milder features, proved that they were an offshoot of the so-called Alpine race of Central Europe, of which there were numerous representatives in Gaul. Again there were tall men with skulls of an intermediate type; while others, who combined harsh features and projecting brows with narrow heads, and whose stature was often great, would seem to have been the offspring of intermarriage between the older and the newer inhabitants. Not a single skeleton of the characteristic British round-barrow type is known to have been discovered on French soil: the round-headed inhabitants of Gaul were as conspicuously short as those of Britain were generally tall; nor, excluding the Britons of the Alpine stock, was there any physical resemblance between the two peoples. The British invaders of the Alpine stock, judging from the pottery which was found with their skeletons, came for the most part, as we shall afterwards see, not from Gaul but from the valley of the Rhine. Moreover, the round-headed people of Gaul settled there first early in the Neolithic Age, before a Celtic word was spoken; and although their descendants formed the substratum of the Gallic population who, in Caesar’s time, called themselves Celts, that name was introduced by conquerors of a wholly different stock. Probably a Celtic invasion of Britain took place before the British Iron Age began: but the remains of such invaders are not recognizable in any British graves.[503]

[Sidenote: Their social organization.]

Each of the invading clans was doubtless ruled by a chief; for many of the burial mounds which they erected were intended for the great alone, and could only have been constructed by the organized labour of many hands.[504] They must have respected family ties; for women and even babies were interred with scrupulous care; and more than one barrow was reared for the reception of a single child.[505] Yet infants have so often been found buried along with women that one can only conclude that infanticide was as prevalent in ancient as in modern Britain.[506] Only the children were slain because their mothers could no longer nurse them, not because they desired to rid themselves of trouble.

[Sidenote: Character and results of the invasions: the invaders poor in bronze weapons.]

In Wiltshire and other parts of Southern Britain the old population would seem to have been largely dispossessed or subdued; but the skeletons found in the barrows of Derbyshire and Staffordshire, of Yorkshire and the other northern counties, indicate that there the immigrants mingled more or less peacefully with the people whom they came among.[507] Fighting no doubt took place everywhere; but the notion that bronze weapons gave the first invaders victory is disproved by the fact that in the earlier part of the era bronze was both costly and rare.[508] If chieftains had bronze, their clansmen were still armed with old-fashioned weapons; and until the new age was far advanced, the neolithic tribes, in so far as they were conquered, must have yielded to superior numbers, superior skill, or superior strength. Probably in certain districts they were never conquered, and never permitted the intruders to dwell among them. Among a vast number of stone implements that have been found lying on the moors west of Rochdale and Ashton-under-Lyne bronze was searched for in vain;[509] and one may provisionally infer that these hillmen were protected by the strength of their territory.

[Sidenote: Evidence of finds as to the settlements of the invaders.]

Bronze implements or other relics of the Bronze Age have been found in almost every county of England, Wales, and Scotland, and in some of the adjoining islands;[510] but their distribution appears to imply that, as might have been inferred from the geographical features, some districts were far more densely populated than others. The lands which the new comers selected were mainly those which were already occupied by the neolithic inhabitants. The relics are most abundant in those which are now most sparsely peopled, but which were then sought after because, even when the soil was poor, it was dry, well-watered, and comparatively open. The moors of Derbyshire, Yorkshire and other Northumbrian counties, Devonshire and Cornwall; the bracing uplands of East Anglia; the downs of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Berkshire, Hampshire, Dorsetshire, and Wiltshire; and the wolds of Lincolnshire,--these were the tracts which the immigrants occupied in the greatest numbers. The Midlands, on the other hand, would seem to have attracted comparatively few: Durham, for some unexplained reason, was generally avoided;[511] while the northern and north-western tracts of Scotland were almost entirely neglected.[512] The Yorkshire Wolds afford an interesting example of the motives which determined the choice of abode. Their scanty vegetation could not have tempted a people who depended for their subsistence mainly upon their flocks and herds; yet the numerous barrows with which they are studded and the flint implements which have been picked up in thousands from their surface prove that they were as thickly peopled as any other part of Britain. The reason was that they were unencumbered by the forests which could only have been cleared by arduous labour; their climate was healthy; and, above all, they were so completely isolated by the wooded valley of the Derwent, the swamps of Holderness, the broad estuary of the Humber, and the morasses which then covered the plain of York, that their occupants were secure from all attack.[513]

In certain parts of England the routes by which invaders advanced may be traced by the sites at which bronze implements have been found. In Worcestershire, for example, these spots have been mapped along the line of the Avon from Warwickshire to the Severn, and again in the valley of the latter river, where it was apparently crossed by ancient trackways. The implements in these two counties belong to comparatively late periods.[514]

The settlements must often have been desperately resisted, more and more as time passed and unoccupied lands became rare. But it would be a mistake to assume that the struggle was always between aboriginal communities and round-headed invaders. There must have been much intermingling between the old population and the new: gradually the use of bronze weapons must have spread to neolithic clans or to those who could obtain them by barter or theft; and by the time when the Bronze Age was far advanced tribes of mingled stock must often have presented a united front to enemies from over sea. Even when the invaders had slowly made their way from the Channel to the far north, and from the German Ocean to the Irish Sea, hunger or the lust of booty would often lead to intertribal raids. Gradually weapons were improved; and we shall presently endeavour to trace their evolution. Even to the very end of the period, however, not only the rank and file but the wealthiest chief, who had a complete set of bronze implements and weapons, and who could afford to decorate the handle of his blade with ivory, amber, or gold, to wear gold buttons on his clothing, sometimes even to adorn his charger with a gold peytrel, shot arrows tipped with flint. Flint arrow-heads, leaf-shaped and barbed, have been found by thousands in deposits of the Bronze Age, but in this island never one of bronze. Even when daggers had given place to swords and bronze spears were common, battle-axes were made not of bronze but of stone.[515]

[Sidenote: Stone implements used long after the introduction of bronze.]

Stone implements indeed, such as were in use in the Neolithic Age, have been found so often in the graves of chieftains associated with those of bronze that we may be sure that, at least in the earlier part of the Bronze Age, even the wealthier classes could not afford to discard the older material; while among the needy population of the Yorkshire Wolds many barrows contained no implements except those of flint or bone.[516] Bronze saws have very rarely been found in this country, although they were common enough in Southern Europe;[517] and since all our bronze gouges are comparatively late,[518] it may be inferred that during the earlier Bronze Age these tools were everywhere still made of flint. In the west of Scotland, at all events, metal tools were apparently unknown until long after the first round-headed people landed, and probably until long after bronze had begun to be used in Southern Britain.[519] We may indeed be sure that the Stone Age continued for centuries later in remote parts of the country; and perhaps in certain islands bronze may have remained unknown.

[Sidenote: Hill-forts.]

When a clan had succeeded in establishing itself, it had to provide for its protection against cattle-lifters and slave-hunters; and gradually and by immense labour great strongholds were constructed on suitable sites. Comparatively rare in the south-east, they are conspicuous on nearly all the hilly districts of England, Wales, and Scotland;[520] but it is in the western and south-western counties that they most abound. Devonshire and the adjacent parts of Somersetshire contain not less than eighty; and almost every spur on Salisbury Plain is fortified.[521] The multiplicity of these camps bears witness not only to density of population and constant warfare, but also to the utter disunion which existed at the time when they were constructed. Supposing that the majority of the forts in Dorsetshire, for instance, were built in the Late Celtic Period, we should have to conclude that the Durotriges, who then inhabited that district, were merely a loose aggregate of scores of clans, ever ready to prey upon one another; for if the forts had been destined only to repel the attacks of some other tribe, they would hardly have been so numerous and so widely scattered. It is true that the Gallic Morini in Caesar’s time had not become welded into one state, and that the Kentish clans were under four petty kings; but in the period when the older earthworks were thrown up it would seem that far less progress had been made towards union. But even supposing that most of the prehistoric forts were later than the Bronze Age, their purpose accorded with the methods of primitive warfare. A chain of modern fortresses impedes an invader because, while they remain uncaptured, he cannot pass between them without exposing his line of communication. But in ancient times, when one tribe attacked another, it had no communications to guard: the invaders carried their food with them, and when it was spent trusted for support to the enemy’s country.[522] If a tribe had desired merely to protect its frontier, it would not have erected hill-forts but a continuous entrenchment.

Amongst those which were occupied in the Bronze Age or before may be mentioned Badbury Rings in Dorsetshire;[523] the stone fort on Whit-Tor in Dartmoor[524] and another in the Rhonddha valley in Glamorganshire;[525] Small Down camp near Evercreech in Somersetshire;[526] the fort of Carn Brea in Cornwall;[527] the series of entrenchments which mark the spurs of the hills that command the valley of the Esk from Guisborough to Whitby;[528] those which line the western border of Worcestershire;[529] Oldbury, some three miles east of Sevenoaks;[530] Hollingbury on the Sussex Downs;[531] Lutcombe Castle on the Berkshire Downs, overlooking the Vale of White Horse;[532] and the greatest of all--the Maiden Castle, whose stupendous ramparts are the pride of Dorchester.[533] But it is probable that the greater number may ultimately be referred to the Age of Bronze.[534]

The form, construction, and materials of British forts are naturally diverse. In Cornwall, Devonshire, Wales, and other places they were of course built largely or wholly of stone, the masonry being always uncemented: elsewhere they were true earthworks. Leaving out of sight the question of their date, they may be grouped in three classes.[535] The first comprises those that were erected on promontories or other heights which on one or more sides were fortified by precipice, river, or sea. Such was the fort of Carl’s Wark in Derbyshire, which, on three sides, rises almost sheer above the swamps of Hathersage Moor. On the west, where the ground slopes towards the plain, a huge earthen rampart, faced with dry masonry, afforded secure protection; and the slopes below the eastern and southern sides are strewn with great stones which must have fallen from the walls above.[536] The ‘cliff-castles’ on the coasts of Kirkcudbright and of Wales and on the headlands between the Land’s End and Cape Cornwall belong to the same group.[537] In the second class the entrenchments, traced upon commanding sites, which, however, were nowhere so steep as to dispense with artificial aid, followed the tactical line of defence which the nature of the hill indicated. Most of the heights on which they stand are covered with soil so thin that they never could have been thickly wooded, and if trees had encumbered their sides they would have been cut down; for the object of the engineers was to leave no ‘dead ground’ on which an assailant could conceal himself. If he felt strong enough to lead his clansmen to the assault, he knew that they could not avoid being exposed from the moment when they penetrated within the range of a bow or a sling. General Pitt-Rivers, who did so much to illuminate the study of prehistoric fortifications, was never weary of calling attention to the skill with which they had been designed. Once only, when he was exploring the camp at Seaford, he thought that he could detect evidence of neglect. As he stood upon the rampart he noticed that an advancing force would be able to conceal itself for a while. Presently, however, it flashed across his mind that time had done its work upon rampart and ditch; and soon excavation proved that the latter had lost by silting seven feet of its original depth. The general saw with delight that the designer had been as vigilant as any of his contemporaries. The rampart in ancient times must have been at least five feet higher; and then the garrison who manned it would have been able instantly to detect the first enemy who ventured within range. ‘How carefully,’ he wrote, ‘the defenders economized their interior space, drawing their rampart just far enough down the hill to obtain a command of view, but not one yard further.’[538]

In certain cases, however, the hill was so extensive that if the tactical line of defence had been slavishly followed, the defenders would have been too few. Then the chief engineer modified the accepted principle. Selecting a spot at which he might safely abandon the natural line, he made his sappers build a cross rampart at right angles to it straight across the hill-top until it joined the works on the further side. An example of this device may be seen in the camp of Puttenham in Surrey.[539]

Among the more famous strongholds of the second class are Cissbury on the South Downs, which, as we have seen, was almost certainly erected in the Neolithic Age,[540] Badbury Rings, and the Maiden Castle. This noble fortress must surely have deserved its modern name. No British force could ever have taken it: no other country can show its match. Three lines of ramparts defend the northern and four the southern side: gaining the summit of the road from Weymouth, you see them outlined against the sky; and as you mount the hill-side, they rise, one behind another, like veritable cliffs. Worn by the rains of five-and-twenty centuries or more, they still stand sixty feet[541] above their fosses; and their entrances, on the east and the west, are guarded by overlapping works so intricate that if a column had succeeded in forcing its way across the abatis, it would have found itself helplessly winding in and out as through a labyrinth, pounded on either flank and enfiladed by stones and arrows discharged at point-blank range.

The strongholds of the third class were erected on lower hills or on high ground little elevated above the surrounding country, and therefore depended less for their protection upon natural features.[542] Those that have been explored belong to the Late Celtic Period.[543] It may be doubted, however, whether such forts were generally later than those whose sites were more commanding; for the inhabitants of every district could only choose the best positions which they could find.[544] Cherbury camp indeed, about four miles south-east of Fyfield in Berkshire, was built on a lowland plain.

Some of the Gallic forts which Caesar saw, and of our own, were in his time inhabited by large industrial communities; but although many of the British strongholds which belonged to the Bronze Age contain the foundations of huts and broken pottery,[545] it is doubtful whether they had more than a few occupants except in time of war.[546]

Every explorer who has tried to imagine the conditions of life in ancient British forts has noticed that many of them have no apparent source from which water can be obtained. It has indeed been suggested that where there was neither a spring nor running water within reach the garrison had recourse to dew-ponds, which are still used for watering cattle on the Hampshire downs.[547] But even these reservoirs were generally lacking. Pitt-Rivers, however, argued that in the chalk districts many sites which are now remote from water may have possessed springs. At the village of Woodcuts in Cranborne Chase, after cleaning out a Roman well, one hundred and eighty-eight feet deep, he found no water, but the iron-work of a bucket.[548] But even where there was no spring it is easy to understand how the garrison supplied themselves. None of these camps was ever subjected to a prolonged siege. No army can undertake such an operation unless it can ensure a continuous supply of food; and to do this requires forethought and organization of which barbarous clans are incapable. Again and again the Gauls with whom Caesar contended, whose civilization was far more advanced than that of the Britons of the Bronze Age, were obliged to abandon movements that might otherwise have succeeded, simply because their commissariat had been neglected.[549] When ancient Britons were obliged to take refuge in their stronghold, they knew that the danger would pass if they could hold out for a little while. Women and children who failed to reach the entrenchment in time were doubtless slain or enslaved. But otherwise the worst that was to be dreaded was the loss of crops or stock and the destruction of dwellings. We may suppose that while the cattle were being driven into the fort the women carried up in vessels of skin or earthenware as much water as would suffice for a few days. Such was the practice of the Maoris at a recent time.[550]

[Sidenote: Primitive metallurgy.]

In spite of war industrial arts were making progress, which was stimulated by war itself. Copper was abundant in Cornwall, Cardiganshire and Anglesey, and near Llandudno: tin was to be had near the surface in Cornwall,[551] and perhaps first attracted attention where it was associated with gold; native smiths began to copy the tools which were brought from abroad; and insular forms were gradually evolved. Among the immigrants there must have been some who were acquainted with metallurgy; and just as the modern coach-builder finds himself obliged to manufacture motor-cars, so, we may be sure, the more enterprising cutlers who had hitherto made stone implements gradually learned to produce tools of copper or bronze. The metals were of course not at first procured by mining. Copper would be obtained from boulders or from lumps of ore on hill-sides, and tin from the gravel beds of streams. The methods, which have been recorded by modern observers, of primitive communities are probably much the same as those of the Britons of the Bronze Age. The original furnaces differed hardly at all from the fires at which food was cooked. The fire was kindled within a fire-place of large stones, underneath which was a pit. The wind, rushing through the crevices of the stones, created a draught, which may have been forced by some rude bellows. After the embers and the slag had been raked away the molten metal in the pit was watched until it was on the point of becoming solid, when the copper cakes were snatched out and broken into the lumps of which specimens have been found in bronze-founders’ hoards. For the smelting of tin a method may have been adopted which was still practised in Germany in the Middle Ages. A trench was filled with brushwood, above which logs were piled; and as soon as the fuel was aglow the ore was pitched on to the fire until a sufficient amount had accumulated. Then the embers were raked away, and the molten tin ladled out.[552] It is worthy of remark that all the Scottish bronze implements which had been analysed up to the year 1880 contained lead;[553] and one may perhaps infer that the tin which was exported from Cornwall to Scotland was not pure.

[Sidenote: Bronze implements:--celts.]

Many bronze implements were reproductions, more or less modified, of neolithic models. Stone celts, knives, daggers, spear-heads, awls, chisels, gouges, sickles, and saws have their successors in bronze. Gradually, however, new forms were developed or invented. Bronze was of course at first reserved for weapons; and knives or knife-daggers probably preceded all others, because the metal was originally too scarce and expensive to be used for those which required a large expenditure of material.[554] Flat axes, resembling more or less closely the polished neolithic celts, were, however, manufactured early in the Bronze Age. After some time the sides of the narrow part of the celt, above the cutting edge, were hammered upwards,--probably in order to steady the blade against a lateral strain; and thus by insensible gradations the flat was transformed into the flanged celt; while a projection, commonly called a stop-ridge, was cast on the narrow part of the blade with the object of preventing it from being forced too far into its wooden haft. As the flanges became more marked, they were first confined to the upper part of the tool, and afterwards developed into wings which were hammered inwards so as to form a kind of rudimentary socket.[555] Celts of this form are called palstaves,--a word of Icelandic origin, which denotes a spade. In palstaves of another kind the part between the wings and above the stop-ridge was cast thinner than the rest, so that a groove appeared into which the haft could be securely fitted; and a loop was often added at one side to enable the attachment to be secured by bands of twine.[556] The final improvement was to cast the blade with a socket for the reception of the handle: but palstaves remained in use down to the very end of the Bronze Age;[557] while in some socketed celts the wings survive as mere ornaments upon the sides.[558] Like palstaves nearly all socketed celts are looped on one side, and a few on both.[559] Naturally the socket was not limited to celts, but applied also to knives,[560] chisels,[561] gouges,[562] and other tools. Socketed knives, however, are very rare in Scotland; and on the Continent, except in Northern France, they are almost unknown.[563] On the other hand the patterns of our socketed chisels and gouges appear to have been derived from some foreign source.[564]

The earliest British celts were copied not from stone models but from foreign ones of bronze;[565] and our winged celts and palstaves resemble certain French specimens so closely that they too were probably modelled in the first instance upon the latter.[566] The socket also was invented by some ingenious foreign cutler;[567] for palstaves with the wings bent over are rare in this country, whereas socketed celts with ornamental wings are common.[568] Socketed celts were apparently never widely diffused in Northern Britain; and of course even in the south they did not altogether displace palstaves.[569] Even after they began to be manufactured here the output was supplemented by importation from Gaul: a certain type, the blades of which, instead of expanding, are long and narrow, and the sockets almost square, occurs frequently in North-Western France and our southern counties, but very seldom in the north.[570]

Bronze celts in general, like those of stone, were doubtless used for various purposes--as hoes, hatchets, and possibly battle-axes--and some, which are very narrow or very small, as chisels.[571] Palstaves were sometimes used, as their name would suggest, in the construction of earthworks.[572]

[Sidenote: Sickles.]

Sickles probably originated in Southern Europe. The few early specimens that have been found here have their closest analogies in France and Denmark; but, for some unknown reason, socketed sickles are almost peculiar to the British Isles.[573]

[Sidenote: The Arreton Down hoard.]

A hoard was found early in the eighteenth century on Arreton Down, near Newport in the Isle of Wight, which helped to illustrate the evolution of bronze weapons. Daggers, which differed from knives principally in size, though they began to be manufactured later, were originally hafted with rivets; but afterwards they were cast with tangs or shanks, which were let into the handle, and fastened by a single rivet.[574] The Arreton Down hoard contained nine tanged blades, which closely resemble daggers but may have been spear-heads. Many similar blades have been found since, but hardly any outside the British Isles.[575]

[Sidenote: Halberds.]

From daggers were derived a class of weapons very rare in this country, called halberds, which in Scandinavia and Northern Germany have been found mounted as battle-axes. Heavier and broader than their prototypes, they were often made of nearly pure copper, which rendered them less brittle and more suitable for dealing heavy blows.[576]

[Sidenote: Shields, swords, spears.]

Swords, shields, and, with certain exceptions, spears and javelins were not manufactured until the latest period of the Bronze Age. Swords and spear-heads required great skill in casting: shields were so thin that they could not be cast at all, but were wrought by the hammer.[577] Even at the close of the Bronze Age they were probably unobtainable except by the rich, while the rank and file doubtless still made shift with bucklers of wicker-work, wood or leather. The shields of the Bronze Age were invariably circular. Nearly all were ornamented over their whole surface with concentric rings, of which one example has as many as thirty, separated by circles of small studs; and this ornamentation is peculiarly British. One curious shield, found in the Fen country, is adorned with serpentine lines, which may have been intended to represent snakes.[578]

British bronze swords, like those of the Continent, from which they were copied, are commonly of a type which is called leaf-shaped, the blade tapering gently inwards from the hilt, then gradually expanding until, at about one-third of the distance, measured from the point, it attains its greatest width. They, as well as certain rapier-shaped swords, were intended for stabbing, not striking. Their length was generally about two feet, but varied between sixteen and thirty inches. Their sheaths were as a rule made of wood or leather, which, however, were often tipped with bronze; and many of these tips or chapes have been found in the Thames and elsewhere without the scabbards, which had perished.[579]

The spears of the earlier Bronze Age were identical with neolithic flint weapons. Probably the earliest bronze spear-heads were some of the larger blades that have been found in Wiltshire barrows, which are commonly described as knives or daggers.[580] Others were derived from the tanged blades of the Arreton Down type, if, indeed, the latter were not themselves spear-heads. A curious and unique specimen, which was found in the Thames at Taplow, and is now in the British Museum, is ornamented with gold studs on the bottom of the blade, which are merely survivals of the rivets that attached to its haft the dagger from which it had been evolved.[581] Spear-heads of this kind, which are invariably provided either with a pair of holes in the blade or a pair of loops below it, intended to secure its attachment to the shaft,[582] are extremely rare on the Continent, and appear to have been invented in Ireland, whence they spread in the course of trade to Britain.[583] Another form of spear-head, which originated in the British Isles and has never been found elsewhere, was barbed, and seems to have been used for hunting rather than in war.[584] The commonest, however, is the continental leaf-shaped type, some specimens of which have analogies in Gaul and the Swiss lake-dwellings.[585] The smaller weapons of the spear-head class were doubtless javelins.[586]

[Sidenote: Moulds.]

Many of the moulds in which weapons and implements were cast have been preserved. Open moulds sufficed for flat axes; but the more difficult operations of casting palstaves and socketed celts required that the moulds should be made in halves. All the open ones that remain were of stone; many others, however, were doubtless formed of more perishable materials, such as clay or compact sand. Bronze moulds were also used; but the only specimens which have been found were for palstaves, socketed celts, and gouges. There is a bronze mould in the British Museum that was itself cast in a mould of clay, formed round a model palstave, and attached to it by string, which was of course reproduced in the metal. Leaden celts have once or twice been met with, which of course would have been useless as cutting tools; and it is probable that they were intended simply for making moulds of clay or sand. Bronze moulds were costly, and would soon wear out. It has been suggested therefore that, just as a printer uses in his press not his original wood-block but an electrotype copy, so the bronze-founder generally reserved his bronze moulds for making leaden models from which any number of clay moulds could be formed.[587] Sockets were produced by means of clay cores, which were inserted in the moulds. Socketed celts have so often been found in hoards with the cores remaining in them that we may reasonably conclude that they were bartered by the bronze-founders in this state, and that, as in the Neolithic Age, the purchasers finished them with their own hands.[588] The hammers and anvils which were used in the final stage of manufacture were commonly stone, though a few light bronze hammers have been unearthed; and the decoration was applied by means of punches.[589]

[Sidenote: Decoration of weapons.]

The patterns with which weapons were decorated are worth noticing even by those to whom archaeology for its own sake makes no appeal. Daggers and flat or slightly flanged celts were incised with rectilinear figures and chevrons only:[590] winged celts, palstaves, socketed celts, and spear-heads have similar designs in a few instances,[591] but for the most part they are ornamented with concentric circles. The significance of these facts will become apparent when we come to deal with certain chronological questions relating to the Bronze Age.[592]

[Sidenote: Hoards.]

What we know of the metal-work of this period has been learned mainly from buried hoards which were never recovered by their owners, and of which more than a hundred have been unearthed in Great Britain from Cornwall to Sutherland.[593] These hoards were of three kinds.[594] Some, consisting entirely of newly-made articles, belong to traders. Others, which comprise damaged or broken goods, and include moulds and often cakes of copper, represent the stock-in-trade of bronze-founders, who tramped over the country-side, and were ready to cast implements or ornaments of the latest fashion and to melt and recast old ones for anybody who could give them what they wanted in exchange. The tools in these collections were for the most part broken intentionally to make them more portable and ready for the crucible.[595] Other hoards again, which frequently comprise ornaments, alone or associated with implements, were the property of persons who were not in the trade. Hoards were of course buried when robbers were about or when some marauding clan appeared. By far the greater number belong to the latest period of the Bronze Age,[596] which shows that in earlier times the craft had not been specialized, or that people who could afford to buy bronze implements were so few that no travelling dealer could make a fair profit. Those who then possessed bronze tools must have made them for themselves unless there happened to be a skilled craftsman near who could earn a living by working for his neighbours.

The great improvement of tools and weapons would lead us to look for traces of corresponding progress in every department of material culture.

[Sidenote: Pasturage.]

Pasturage of course continued to be the mainstay of the mass of the population; and although there were probably few households which did not subsist partly upon the chase, the remains of funeral feasts in barrows and the refuse heaps of dwellings show that game was eaten much less than the flesh of domestic animals. It has been said that sheep were not introduced into Britain before the Roman conquest; but excavation has proved that they were bred by the bronze-using inhabitants of Dorsetshire.[597] Besides the small cattle that were common in the Neolithic Age large oxen were reared, at all events on Cranborne Chase and the Yorkshire Wolds; and, as in the Neolithic Age and doubtless for the same reason, animals were commonly slaughtered before they had reached maturity.[598] Although bronze fish-hooks, almost identical in form with our own hooks of steel, abounded in the Swiss lake-dwellings, and were present in more than one of the hoards that have been unearthed in France, only a single specimen has yet come to light in the British Isles: but it need not be inferred that the Britons had no taste for fish; for they probably caught trout and salmon with nets or spears.[599]

The growth of population was indeed making it difficult for men to provide for their families; and they were constrained to toil harder in order to avoid starvation. Under [Sidenote: Agriculture.] this pressure agriculture began to flourish; and wheat was grown at least as far north as Yorkshire.[600] Armed with bronze axes, the husbandmen were better able to clear forests and to bring new land under cultivation; and at harvest time, when they reaped their reward, then, we may be sure, the clansmen gathered, and sacrificed to their god, and held high festival.[601] Their labours are attested not only by numerous stone mullers and by the sickles that have been already mentioned, one of which was found even in Aberdeenshire, but also, as we have already seen, by the teeth of the skeletons in the barrows.[602] Oxen were probably used in ploughing.[603] Horses, which were very small, were domesticated, and in certain parts of the country eaten,[604] but they were not common; and, although the rock-carvings of Scandinavia and the bridle-bits and wooden wheels that have been found on the sites of Swiss lake-dwellings show that in the Bronze Age men had learned to ride and drive,[605] similar evidence is wanting in Britain. Looped bronze plates, however, have been found in a hoard at Abergele, which are supposed to have been a jingling ornament, attached to harness; and some small bells, found at Dowris in Ireland, resemble those which occasionally form a part of modern horse-trappings.[606] Oxen indeed, if not horses, must have been required for hauling timber even in neolithic times when clearings had to be made; and the wagons which conveyed tin to the coast when Pytheas visited Cornwall[607] had probably been in use long before his time.

[Sidenote: Signs of amelioration in the conditions of life.]

Certain facts seem to indicate that the conditions of life in the Bronze Age were becoming more favourable to longevity, and in particular that women were better off than before. Famines indeed must still have occurred; for of course there were bad harvests from time to time, and cattle then, as now, were liable to disease, and doubtless often perished in hard winters. But the disparity in stature between men and women was far less than it had been in the Neolithic Age;[608] and Thurnam estimated the average age of the people of the round barrows whose skeletons he had examined at fifty-five, eight years more than that of the aboriginals.[609] It has been affirmed that even the primitive Aryans often put old people to death;[610] but skeletons have been exhumed in Britain which showed signs of extreme age.[611]

[Sidenote: Dwellings.]

One might be inclined to suppose that this amelioration was partly due to improved housing; but such evidence as exists tends to show that the habitations of the Bronze Age, although, owing to improved tools, they may have been better built, were designed on much the same lines as those of the preceding epoch. Pit-dwellings, like those which have been already described,[612] were still constructed in districts where stone was not obtainable. Very few, as we have seen, can be even approximately dated; but some which have been excavated at Hitcham in Buckinghamshire and in the fort of Eggardun on the Dorsetshire downs contained pottery which made it safe to assign them to the Bronze Age.[613] It may be that some of the Scottish subterranean dwellings which are known as weems belong to the same period, for a bronze sword was found in one at Monzie in Perthshire;[614] and perhaps a few of the so-called Picts’ houses and of the beehive huts in Cornwall and North Britain, which will be described hereafter, were built before iron was there used.

[Sidenote: Lake-dwellings.]

It is, as we have seen,[615] very doubtful whether any of the lake-dwellings of Britain were older than the Bronze Age; and it cannot be positively affirmed that any were as old. One at Barton Mere in Suffolk, if it really was a lake-dwelling,[616] probably belonged to that time, although the only implement found in it was a spear-head;[617] but the evidence for the date assigned to the well-known settlement at Holderness is considerably stronger. It has been argued that since both stone and bronze implements were found there, the site must have been occupied before the Iron Age, because, although in a time of transition the old material may persist by the side of the new, implements of two earlier periods would hardly survive into a third.[618]

[Sidenote: Hut-circles.]

There is, however, one class of dwellings numerous examples of which have been proved to have existed in the Bronze Age, if not before. The best-known groups of hut-circles are those of Anglesey, Dartmoor, Cornwall, and Northumberland. Sportsmen who have shot snipe in Anglesey must have noticed low mounds dotting the rough wastes which are common in the island. Buried beneath these hillocks lie the foundations of huts which were built in prehistoric times. Most of them are clustered in tiny hamlets of five or six; but at Ty Mawr on the southern slopes of the Holyhead Mountain, sheltered from the cold winds by a precipitous cliff and fortified against attack from below, was a considerable village, comprising more than fifty huts. On a clear day the villagers could discern the Wicklow Mountains; and the triple head of Snowdon, haunted, as they surely believed, by some divinity, closed their southward view. The lower walls of the huts, which alone remain, are about three feet thick, and enclose spaces of from fifteen to twenty feet in diameter, partitioned in one instance by upright stones. The entrance, defined by two pillars, invariably faces the south-west. Stones, blackened by fire and doubtless used for cooking, were found within, and also mullers for grinding corn, and the broken shells of the limpets and periwinkles on which the occupants partly lived. Some of the huts, however, appear to have been simply workshops. They were littered with broken quartz from a neighbouring copper lode: the fire-places, of which each contained two, one having a chimney in the thickness of the wall, were strewn with slag; and mortars and mullers abounded, which had been used not for grinding corn but for breaking stone.[619] Possibly the huts may have been roofed with converging stones, laid one above another in the beehive fashion; but some in Northumberland and Devonshire contain central cavities, like those of neolithic pit-dwellings, in which poles for supporting a roof of boughs thatched with turf were apparently fixed.[620] Hut-circles everywhere present the same general features; but of course there are numerous varieties of size and construction. Nearly all the huts were round; but a few in East Cornwall are oval;[621] and while most of the hamlets were enclosed by walls, some apparently did not need protection,[622] or were situated near a fort in which the villagers could take refuge. Grimspound on Dartmoor, the typical example of a fortified village, was apparently the stronghold of the people whose huts were scattered on the slopes hard by; and the dwellings which it enclosed may have been occupied in time of peace only by caretakers.[623] Some hamlets were encircled by non-defensive walls, which appear to be the remains of cattle-pens; while in others each pen was connected with its own hut, the walls forming a complex whole.[624] Many huts contain cooking-holes, lined with stones, in some of which traces of charcoal are found:[625] others had cooking-stones but no holes:[626] occasionally the kitchen was in the open air outside the dwelling;[627] and in a circle on Whit-Tor, where no provision for cooking was discernible, there seemed to be evidence that the hut had been simply the workshop of a flint implement maker.[628] Many of the dwellings on Dartmoor apparently consisted of only one room; while others, like the single specimen on Ty Mawr, contained partitions.[629] Some huts were paved, while others had no visible means of excluding damp.[630] The large size of many of the Dartmoor circles has led antiquaries to believe that they could not have carried roofs sufficiently strong to withstand the snows and storms of winter, and were only occupied in the summer by herdsmen;[631] but in most parts of England huts must have been inhabited throughout the winter, whose roofs were constructed of nothing more substantial than woodwork overlaid with sods or bracken. It is remarkable that not a single bronze implement, weapon, or ornament has ever been found in a hut-circle on Dartmoor, although sufficient pottery of the Bronze Age type remained to attest their age.[632] Probably, like the people who dwelt on the Yorkshire Wolds, the inhabitants were poor and backward; for the extreme scarcity of spindle-whorls and the abundance of the flint scrapers used for leather-dressing that lay scattered in their abodes seem to show that they were commonly clad in skins.[633]

[Sidenote: Inhabited camps.]