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 Another Random Document on
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entrance. Even when there was no gallery, this symmetrical curve
was still adopted, and its termination marked by monumental
pillars.395 The Wor Barrow on Cranborne Chase, an oval mound of
such uncommon form that Pitt-Rivers, before he opened it, felt
doubtful whether it did not belong to the Bronze Age, appears to
have been a chambered sepulchre of an abnormal kind. When the
tumulus had been removed, a trench, enclosing an oblong space,
appeared in the chalk which had formed the old surface. Stake-holes
were detected in the trench; and the famous antiquary concluded
that the stakes had been simply ‘a wooden version of the long
chambers of stone’.396

Fig. 17.
Intimately related to certain chambered long barrows are the famous
horned cairns, which exist only in Caithness. Although their forms
also are various, the larger cairn of Yarhouse being extremely
elongated while that of Ormiegill might be almost exactly contained
within a perfect square, the ruling idea remained the same. The
exterior wall, which is always double, develops eastward and
westward into horn-shaped projections, which curve outwards. Thus
the four sides form four symmetrical concave curves; whereas in
English chambered barrows, like that of Uley and some of the
barrows at Upper Swell in Gloucestershire,397 the curvilinear
projections which correspond with the horns exist only at the
eastern end. An opening between the eastern horns in the Scottish
cairns gives access to the chamber, which is commonly divided into
three partitions by two pairs of stones, crossing the side walls and
leaving a passage between.398

Just as the long are earlier than the short horned cairns, so the
latter are earlier than the round chambered cairns of Scotland; for
no horned cairns were erected after the Scottish Bronze Age had
begun, whereas, although the round chambered cairns were
developed towards the close of the Neolithic Age, and although
metal has never been found in them,399 their external form was
reproduced in the Bronze Age, when chambers were no longer
built.400 The chambers of the round cairns also are divided into
sections; and one of them, near Loch Etive in Argyllshire, shows
traces of an encircling trench and rampart.401 In Southern Britain
the chronological sequence was probably the same: the round
chambered cairns seem to be later than the chambered long
barrows. The Park Cwm tumulus in the peninsula of Gower, which
has a central avenue and two pairs of opposite chambers opening
out of it,402 has been likened to the Uley barrow; but its form is
round. The chambered tumulus of Plas Newydd Park in Anglesey,
which is roughly oval,403 may possibly represent an earlier and
transitional form.404
Round chambered barrows exist in Derbyshire, the design of which
is purely local. Thus the Five-Wells barrow, near Taddington, has two
chambers, each of which was approached by a gallery entered
through a kind of port-hole on either side of the mound. The skulls
that have been found in these tombs are of the neolithic type: but a
barrow on Derwent Moor, which is commonly assigned to the same
period,405 contained an urn, ornamented with designs characteristic
of the Bronze Age, in which a piece of copper was found;406 and an
experienced antiquary has remarked that in cataloguing the remains
found in the Derbyshire barrows he ‘found it almost impossible to
separate the Neolithic from the Bronze Age interments’.407 In West
Cornwall also there are gigantic chambered cairns, round or oval, the
date of which is uncertain. No bronze has been found in them, but
abundance of pottery, and cists which are undoubtedly later than the
chambers. One, standing on the cliff which rises above Cape
Cornwall, contained a double-walled dome, and reminded its
explorer of the huge tope at Bhojpur.408

Chambered cairns of a peculiar kind remain in Argyllshire and the

islands of Islay and Arran, the like of which have been discovered
nowhere else except on the opposite coast of Ireland.409 Nearly all
the pottery that has been found in them closely resembles that of
the dolmens of North-Western France and the Pyrenees, while none
exactly like it has been exhumed in England; and, combining these
facts with the geographical position of the sepulchres themselves,
the antiquary who has explored them concludes that their builders
came late in the Neolithic Age from Brittany, and, sailing up St.
George’s Channel, settled on the opposite shores of Scotland and
Ireland.410 Physically, however, they belonged, as their skeletons
show, to the same stock as the great majority of the neolithic people
of Britain.411

Here, as also in France412 and Northern

Inhumation and Germany,413 funerals were performed both by
incineration. inhumation and incineration. In the barrows of
South-Western Britain, cremation, although not
unknown, was very rare;414 in Yorkshire415 and the chambered
cairns of Bute,416 almost universal. Judging from the analogy of
other countries and from the fact that inhumation persisted into the
Bronze Age, and then for a long period was generally superseded by
cremation,417 it seems probable that the latter was not introduced
until a comparatively late epoch.418 The two modes of burial were,
however, contemporaneous not only in different parts of the country
but in the same district and in the same grave. Burnt and unburnt
bones have been found lying together in such a manner as to prove
that they had been interred at the same time.419 Cremation was
generally performed in the chamber or on the floor of the barrow
where the body was deposited.420 When the corpse was buried
entire, it was usually laid upon the ground421 with the knees
doubled up towards the chin, or placed sitting in a similar posture by
the side of the tomb.422 This custom, which was almost universal in
prehistoric times, and is still practised by many savages, is best
explained by the assumption that it was thought seemly to bury the
dead in the position in which they had slept, and that, for the sake
of warmth, they had commonly lain down to rest in an attitude
which most of us have occasionally adopted for the same reason.423
In some barrows only single skeletons have been found; but
generally in unchambered barrows, where more than two persons
had been buried in one grave, the bones lay heaped together as
though the bodies had been unceremoniously flung down;424 while
in certain cases they were found disjointed in such wise that it was
evident that the dead had not been buried entire, or, as is often the
case in savage countries and even in Brittany and the Catholic
cantons of Switzerland, until long after the flesh had decayed.425
The Balearic islanders, in the time of Diodorus Siculus,426 used to
sever the bodies of their dead in pieces and inter them in urns; and
the same practice prevailed in Spain in the Age of Bronze.427 British
explorers, moreover, have often noticed, in opening barrows, that
skeletons were incomplete, many of the bones being absent.428
Since the piled skeletons belonged to old and young, male and
female, it can only be concluded that corpses were often stored, as
in a mortuary, until a sufficient number had accumulated, and then
buried all together.429 In a barrow situated at Upper Swell in
Gloucestershire, Rolleston found evidence which convinced him that
interments were sometimes made successively upon the same spot.
An undisturbed skeleton was here surrounded by a great quantity of
bones, the arrangement of which was such that he was forced to
conclude that they had been displaced in order to make room for
it.430 In chambered barrows successive interments were of course
regular, gallery and chamber being designed to admit them.

Thurnam was convinced that in the barrows which

Human sacrifice. he explored there were unmistakable evidences of
human sacrifice. In nearly all of them he found
fractured skulls, the broken edges of which were so sharp that he
inferred that the skull had been cleft in life by a club or a stone axe;
while in some cases one skull only was unmutilated. His conclusion
was that the few entire skulls were those of chiefs or their relatives,
while the others belonged to slaves or captives who had been
sacrificed. In one instance, in which only two interments were met
with, the broken skull was that of a woman, while the bones of the
other corpse, which belonged to a man, had been imperfectly
burned. Thurnam argued that the burnt bones belonged to a chief,
and that the woman was his wife.431 Rolleston, on the other hand,
could see no reason for believing that the broken skulls had been
cleft deliberately.432 He pointed out that the fragments were so
numerous that if the persons to whom they belonged had been
sacrificed, they must have been slaughtered by a succession of
wanton blows; that the fractures were utterly different from those of
skulls which are known to have been broken by deliberate blows,
and resemble those which have been caused by the shifting of soil
or the collapse of stones; and he argues that from what we know of
the sentiments of savage and barbarian peoples it is in the last
degree improbable that slaves or captives, if they had been
sacrificed, would have been allowed to repose side by side with their
lords. Nevertheless it is not safe to reject all the evidence which
Thurnam adduced. In a round barrow near Stonehenge Hoare found
a skull which appeared to have been cut in two as deftly as by a
surgical instrument;433 and one may believe that what was done in
the Bronze Age was not unknown in the Age of Stone. When we
remember that evidences of human sacrifice have been detected in
French neolithic tombs,434 and that the practice was universal in
ancient times,435 we shall be safe in assuming that neolithic Britain
was no exception to the rule that after a chieftain’s obsequies his
dependents were immolated in order that their souls might be set
free to minister to his.436

But Thurnam also believed that the long barrows

Traces (?) of contained evidences of cannibalism.437 The
cannibalism. numerous passages in which ancient writers
accused the inhabitants of the British Isles of
devouring their own kind refer mainly to the Irish:438 but they were
speaking of their contemporaries; and when some of the Yorkshire
barrows were opened it was evident that the flesh had been
removed from the bodies before they were interred.439 But even if
cannibalism was practised in our Neolithic Age, the motive was not
hunger. The numerous bones of oxen, swine, red deer, goats, and
horses440 which are found in the barrows, mingled with fragments of
pottery, prove that a funeral was an occasion for a feast, and may
show that, as in later times, offerings were made to the ghosts of
the dead.441 If human flesh was eaten, it was doubtless in the hope
that moral qualities which had distinguished the dead might be
absorbed by the living.442

Perhaps the most curious feature in neolithic

Interment of interments is that animals were sometimes buried
animals. entire.443 It is not indeed surprising that at Eyford
in Gloucestershire there was buried with a woman
a dog which may have been her companion;444 but in a long barrow
near Stonehenge was found the skeleton of a goose which had
evidently not been eaten.445 Was it a sign that neolithic people had
the same religious prejudice against eating geese which Caesar
noted,446 or had this goose been sacrificed?447
 We can hardly err in regarding the sepulchral
Religion. monuments on which such stupendous labour was
expended as witnesses of a belief which may be
called religious, and perhaps as a further illustration of the
apophthegm, ‘The first begetter of gods on earth was fear’.448 For if
the spirits of ancestors are believed by savage tribes to be on the
whole well disposed towards those whom they leave behind, yet
when their bodies do not receive due burial their wrath is terrible.449
The most eminent of modern French archaeologists maintains that
the dolmens, chambered tombs, and standing stones of France were
erected under the influence of Druids;450 and in this country also the
belief has long been growing that Druidism was of non-Celtic and
neolithic origin: but since our knowledge of it is confined to the
period when it was a Celtic institution, we must defer our
consideration of it.451 But, apart from the graves themselves, there
is hardly any certain evidence in our neolithic interments of religious
belief. While in France, Scandinavia, Northern Germany, and other
lands, the tombs of this period were stored with implements,
ornaments, and weapons, the spirits of which were doubtless
consecrated to the service of the dead,452 such relics are so rare in
Britain453 that unless the barrows were despoiled in bygone days by
heedless explorers, we can only suppose that it was not generally
thought necessary to provide those who had passed away with the
means of continuing their life in another world; and it may be that
the few arrow-heads, flakes, and other objects which have been
found in graves were rather intended as marks of reverence or
affection than for use.454 On the other hand, some of the
implements found in neolithic barrows are said to have been
intentionally broken;455 and this is often done by savages in the
belief that the souls of the implements456 may thus be set free to be
of use to the spirits of the dead.457 The holes that are to be seen in
the stones of dolmens in many lands are here so rare458 that we
may hardly regard them as evidence of a belief that spirits must be
allowed an exit from their graves; although such a belief has been
common to many peoples, and may even linger on among ourselves,
as in France and Germany, in the superstition which often impels
survivors to open door or window when life is ebbing away459. It
must be confessed that we know little more of neolithic than of
palaeolithic religion. Fetichism, which is ubiquitous—the belief that
spirits inhabit or operate through stocks and stones and what not;
the belief by which the Dorsetshire peasant who treasures his holed
pebble for luck is still animated—may be assumed to have belonged
to both.460 The worship of saints may be a survival of the worship of
ancestors.461 The traces of the adoration of wells and lakes and
rivers which may still be observed in the remoter parts of Great
Britain and Ireland, where peasants offer pence to the spirit of the
spring, and children were lately bidden to beware of the river-sprite
who was waiting to drown them, are undoubtedly linked to a
prehistoric faith;462 and so is that superstition which prevails in New
Zealand, in the Malay Archipelago, and on the banks of the Ganges,
and which among the islanders of St. Kilda and the Shetlanders of
Scott’s day impelled men to refuse aid to a drowning comrade
because they feared to balk the marine demon of his prey.463 Nor
need we doubt that, like other savages, our neolithic forefathers saw
sun, moon, and stars as living beings, or that, like the Australian
aboriginals and the nameless tribes who passed on to the Greeks the
myths which were by them invested with poetic form, they invented
stories to account for the wonders which they saw in the starry
heavens.464 Neither need we hesitate to believe that, as each clan
had its chief, so the clansmen saw, above elves and kelpies, gnomes
and goblins, rock-spirits and tree-spirits, the mightier deities of
Heaven and Earth, Sun and Moon, Fire, Water, and Thunder.465 We
may believe, if we please, that they prayed, as savages, nay
Christians, often pray, not that they might become better, but that
they might be better off.466 We may suppose too that magic, which
is even now used in remote villages as an engine of extortion,467
was still a power by which men strove to ensure supplies of food or
to make rain fall in time of drought, perhaps also a weapon by which
the man of intellect made himself obeyed. But when we consider the
infinite variety of forms which superstition assumes, we see that it
would be vain to contend that any one belief now held by this or
that savage tribe was identically part of the faith that was professed
in Britain in the Neolithic Age. Even the fancy that an ethereal soul
survived bodily death may not have been universal; and as the
Tonga islanders and the Virginians are said to have believed that
only the souls of chiefs would live again,468 so it is conceivable that
the slaves by whose sweat were built the barrows in which their
lords were to be interred were regarded as doomed to annihilation.
And when we are told that some quaint superstition which the
folklorist discovers in Devonshire or the Highlands is non-Aryan, and
must therefore be traceable to the people who were here before the
first Celtic invader arrived, we may ask how it is possible to disprove
that it had been inherited by the Celt from remote ancestors or had
been borrowed by him from non-Aryan tribes while he was still a
wanderer. We must be content, if we can but catch something of the
spirit of neolithic religion, to remain in blank ignorance of its details.
We must keep in mind that in unnumbered centuries it cannot have
remained the same, and that in diverse regions its manifestations
must have been various. We must not ask for more than the
assurance that to the herdsmen who pastured their cattle on our
downs all Nature was animated; that in their eyes ‘as the human
body was held to live and act by virtue of its own inhabiting spirit-
soul, so the operations of the world seemed to be carried on by the
influence of other spirits’;469 and that, like all savage and half-
savage peoples, they were enslaved by custom, fettered by taboos,
and compelled, when they were driven by necessity to violate them,
to expiate their offence by complex rites.470 It may, however, be
presumed that the religion of neolithic man progressed when he
ceased to be a wanderer, and especially when he began to till the
soil. Supernatural beings were not of necessity gods to be
worshipped; but when the god of a community became the lord of
its land, he was its protector, nay, its father, who, in return for due
reverence and sacrifice, would do his utmost to guard it against
human enemies and hostile deities.471

And perhaps, since primitive worship concerned the community

rather than the individual,472 common superstitions and participation
in sacrificial feasts were already beginning to do their work of
creating the sense of kindred between divers groups, out of which,
ages later and after successive new invasions, war and policy were
to develop a state.473

We have gathered some scraps of information from the tools and

weapons and pottery, the dwellings and mines, the graves and the
skeletons of neolithic man. Can these dry bones live? Only for him
who has imagination, which, as the historian whose own was
supported by a vast armoury of solid knowledge declared with
splendid paradox, ‘is the mother of all history as of all poetry.’474 It is
not when we are reading the memoirs in which discoveries are
recorded, not when we are wandering through the galleries of a
museum, that those happy moments come in which we discern the
faint outlines of the prehistoric world, but rather when we are
roaming over sand or moor or upland, looking for the tools that
those old workers wrought, in the midst of the monuments which
their hands upreared. Not the outward life alone comes back to us—
the miner with lamp and pick creeping down the shaft; the cutler
toiling amid a waste of flints; herdsmen following cattle on the
downs; girls milking at sundown; lithe swarthy hunters returning
from the chase; fowlers in their canoes gliding over the meres; serfs
hauling blocks up the hillside to build the chambers in yonder
barrow; the funeral feast; the weird sepulchral rites; the bloody
strife for the means of subsistence between clan and clan:—we think
also of the meditations of the architects who created those
monuments in memory of the dead and of the adventurous lives of
those who were thus honoured; of their survivors’ desperate denial
of death’s finality; of the immeasurably slow, age-long movement of
expanding civilization; of the influence of superstition, paralysing,
yet ever tending to consolidate society; of the enthusiast whose
thoughts soared above the common level; of the toil that spent itself
in millenniums past, but is still yielding fruit; of unrecorded deeds of
heroism and of shame; of man’s ambition and of woman’s love.

Before the Neolithic Age came to its end invaders began to appear
who had not yet learned the art of metal-working, but who belonged
 to a race of which the people in possession knew
An alien nothing.475 Sepulchral customs began to change.
invasion: period Long barrows were erected still, but, as in France,
of transition.
Holland, and other lands,476 mounds of circular
form were rising, and at last supplanted them. It was a time of
transition; and although in the far west and the far north the Stone
Age lingered on, another was approaching, which had long since
dawned in more favoured lands,—the Age of Bronze.
 CHAPTER IV

THE BRONZE AGE AND THE VOYAGE OF

PYTHEAS
Those who have learned to realize the extreme
A Copper Age slowness with which material culture was evolved
preceded the in its earlier stages would be disposed to doubt
Bronze Age in
whether the first metallic implements were made
certain
countries, but of bronze, and to ask whether, at all events in
has not been some part of the world, the Neolithic must not
proved to have have merged into a Copper Age. It is easy to
existed in imagine that the accidental melting of a piece of
Britain.
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.

Certain metallurgists, however, maintain that a

Bronze Bronze Age, properly so called, may never have
implements existed; and that iron may have been
used for many
manufactured during and even before the period
centuries in
Europe before to which the bronze tools that are exhibited in
the Iron Age. 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

Every antiquary knows that bronze did not reach

Where did the this country until long after it was first used in
European Southern Europe, and that it was common in Egypt
bronze culture
many centuries before; but in what part of the
originate?
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

But whatever may have been the case in Southern

Origin and lands, there is no doubt that the knowledge of
affinities of the bronze came to this country from abroad. The old
bronze culture
theory that it was a result of Phoenician commerce
of Britain.
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

The period when bronze first appeared in Britain

Period of its can only be approximately fixed. It is certain that
commencement. 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

After the Bronze Age set in, as before the close of

Physical the preceding period, bands of invaders, wholly
characters of different in physical type from the neolithic
the late neolithic
aborigines, landed successively through long ages
and early
bronze-using upon our eastern and southern shores. They came
invaders of from the Netherlands, from Denmark and its
Britain. 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

Each of the invading clans was doubtless ruled by

Their social a chief; for many of the burial mounds which they
organization. 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.

In Wiltshire and other parts of Southern Britain the

Character and old population would seem to have been largely
results of the dispossessed or subdued; but the skeletons found
invasions: the
in the barrows of Derbyshire and Staffordshire, of
invaders poor in
bronze Yorkshire and the other northern counties, indicate
weapons. 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.

Bronze implements or other relics of the Bronze

Evidence of Age have been found in almost every county of
finds as to the England, Wales, and Scotland, and in some of the
settlements of
adjoining islands;510 but their distribution appears
the invaders.
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

Stone implements indeed, such as were in use in

Stone the Neolithic Age, have been found so often in the
implements graves of chieftains associated with those of
used long after
bronze that we may be sure that, at least in the
the introduction
of bronze. 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.

When a clan had succeeded in establishing itself, it

Hill-forts. 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 Dartmoor524 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 feet541 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

In spite of war industrial arts were making

Primitive progress, which was stimulated by war itself.
metallurgy. 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.

Many bronze implements were reproductions,

Bronze more or less modified, of neolithic models. Stone
Implements:— celts, knives, daggers, spear-heads, awls, chisels,
celts.
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
 Fig. 19. ½

Fig. 18. ½

Fig. 20. ½
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