NATIVES AND IMMIGRANTS
( 5000 BC. to 55 Bc. )
One
day towards the middle of the seventeenth century John Aubrey, a young law
student at the Middle Temple, set out to explore the countryside around his father’s
estate in Wiltshire. Near the village of Avebury he came upon an extraordinary
circle of huge stones which seemed to him to comprise an ancient monument ‘as
much surpassing Stonehenge as a cathedral doth a parish church’. Remarkable as
the monument was and long as it had stood there, however, Aubrey’s was the
first detailed account of it. Even so, it aroused little interest. Seventy
years later, in his Tour through the whole Jsland of Great Britain of
1724-6, Daniel Defoe did not consider Avebury worthy of remark; and, later on
in the eighteenth century, when a local farmer decided to clear the ground for
ploughing, several of the larger stones were pushed over into a pit filled with
burning straw and smashed into fragments with sledge hammers. Stonehenge was
treated less cavalierly; but it was not until recent times that any serious
attempt was made to uncover the secrets of its history. Instead, tales were
told of esoteric ceremonies, of priestly incantations, of human sacrifices upon
the so-called Slaughter Stone.
Since
Aubrey’s day, while scholars have stripped some of the more fanciful myths from
these ancient stones, thereasons why they were so arranged remain a mystery,
though the alignment of the Central Stone at Stonehenge with the Heel Stone —
over which the sun rises on midsummer mornings — suggests a sanctuary
connected with a sun cult. At least the monuments can now be dated with some
accuracy. The Avebury stones were erected between 2000 BC and 1600 BC; the
‘Stonehenge monoliths in at least five stages covering a span of nine centuries
from about 2200 to 1300 BC. But of the people who placed them here, little more
is known than of their purposes in doing so.
In
the distant past, before the first monoliths were dragged across the open chalk
down of Stonehenge from the mountains of Wales, that is to say seven thousand
years ago, at the beginning of what was to become known as the Neolithic age,
these and other areas of what is now England were occupied by roving bands of
hunters who lived on the wild animals they could trap and kill, the fish they
could catch in the rivers, or the wild plants they could pick. They grew no
crops and had no livestock. Then, about six thousand years ago, these Stone
Age hunters were joined by other peoples, immigrants from the Continent, small
men and women, rarely more than 5 ft 6ins in height, who crossed the sea
in little skin boats, dug-out canoes and wicker-woven coracles, bringing with
them a different way of life. They made clearings in the forests for their
animals, grew crops, fashioned themselves axes and other tools from flint,
baked pottery, and established meeting places and tribal centres such as that
at Windmill Hill near Avebury whose summit was crowned by three concentric
lines of earthworks. Followed by other immigrants, they developed the custom of
burying their dead in stone tombs like that at West Kennett in Wiltshire whose
finds are in the museum at Devizes.
Among the new immigrants were the
Beaker Folk who took their name
from their distinctive bell-shaped drinking vessels with which they were buried
in crouching positions in individual graves. These people, originally perhaps
from Glastonbury which stood on an island surrounded by swamps — Celtic
tribesmen raided nearby settlements and carried off prisoners as slaves.
But the Celts were not essentially a bellicose
people; even their chieftains seemed to have preferred hunting to war, while
lesser men and women devoted their energies to husbandry. They were practised
farmers, dividing the land into square fields separated by banks and working
the earth with small ploughs drawn by oxen. They grew oats and rye, wheat and
barley. Corn was ground in handmills for bread; and the alcoholic drink known
as mead was made from water and fermented honey. They lived in round huts of
wood and clay-covered wattle with thatched roofs. Both men and women wore
brightly coloured clothes, red being a favourite colour, the material being
dyed with a substance extracted from cockles. They had shoes and sandals of
leather; and those who could afford them wore finely crafted ornaments and
jewellery, brooches, bracelets, necklaces and rings, some of them made by
their own people, others imported — together with glassware and wine — from foreign
lands to which hides and slaves, cattle, dogs and minerals, tin from the mines
of Cornwall, iron from Sussex, as well as gold and silver, were sent in return.
Among
the most industrious and virile of the Celtic tribes were the
Belgae who had begun to immigrate
to Britain from the valley of the Maine towards the beginning of the first
century BC. They settled at first in the south-east, where they soon became the
dominant people in the ‘area; and, as their coinage testifies, they established
centres at Colchester, St Albans and Silchester. One of the most powerful of
their chieftains was Cassivellaunus, uncle to Cunobelinus, Shakespeare’s
Cymbeline, who ruled over a large area north of the Thames in what is now
Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire and Berkshire.
Kings
like Cassivellaunus were far from being the barbarians of Roman propaganda.
They were skilled administrators, patrons of artists whose beautiful
curvilinear,abstract art decorated not only war shields and the hilts of swords
but the backs of bronze looking-glasses and the lids of jewellery boxes.
Certainly, when they made their appearance on the field of battle, they
presented an awesome sight in their chariots surrounded by warriors wearing no
armour, their hair long, their naked bodies dyed with woad. Yet for most of the
time their people seem to have lived at peace with one another, marrying not
only within their own tribes but with descendants of men and women who had come
to Britain long before them. They learned about gods and the transmigration of
souls from the wise men, astrologers and soothsayers known as Druids who worshipped
and performed their rites in woods by the light of the moon beneath bunches of
mistletoe clinging to the branches of oaks. According to Julius Caesar, the
Druids offered up human sacrifices to their gods, sometimes single victims, at
other times groups of men in immense wicker-work cages, criminals when these
were available, slaves or poor men when they were not.
ROMAN BRITAIN ANGLO-SAXON PERIOD NORMAN RULE HOUSE OF PLANTAGENET
Crown and People Twilight of Middle Ages Tudor
England Early Stuart England
EMPIRE AND INDUSTRY THE AGE OF REFORM 20th century