A History of Ancient Britain (33 page)

A sense of something spiritual was all around for sure, and had been since time immemorial. There were ancestors to consider, heaven also. By the middle of the second millennium
BC
there were earth- and water-bound gods to take into account too – those that had to be appeased and appealed to by the giving of gifts.

Great trees that had been on the land as long as the reach of tribal memory, rocky outcrops, boulders, mountains – any and all and more besides may have seemed special and likely to be
home to deities worthy of worship. Water and watery places appear to have been held in even greater reverence, perhaps suggesting portals between worlds, and in one form or another command some
vestige of respect even today. Natural springs that were once home to this or that god are still revered in locations the length and breadth of the country. Islands and islets were chosen as
retreats for hermits and other holy men and women right up into the modern era. Wells and fountains are still offered coins in return for good fortune and even bends and meanders of rivers became
home to great abbeys and churches.

But almost all of the people were still farmers, and despite the technological advances they were seemingly still fairly mobile, moving within the landscape as the seasons dictated. Apart from a
few exceptions there is scant evidence of permanent homes or settlements. During the centuries following 1500
BC
, however, all of that began to change.

Archaeologist Francis Pryor began excavating the site of Flag Fen, near Peterborough in Cambridgeshire, in 1982. A writer too, Pryor is first and foremost a working farmer who grew up within a
large, rural family living among the chalk hills and fields of Cambridgeshire and Hertfordshire. Like
the Bronze Age and later peoples he has made his archaeological
speciality, he has the land in his bones.

There is really no other site in Britain quite like Flag Fen. Sometime around 1300
BC
there was a man-made timber causeway running for about two-thirds of a mile across
what was then an increasingly waterlogged landscape. The climate at the time was becoming wetter and wetter and farming peoples had to build such walkways as means of getting between the steadily
shrinking areas of land dry enough to support crops and animals. Ironically it is modern drainage, to reclaim the land for farming, that has dried out the landscape of which Flag Fen is a part
– and which is threatening the survival of timber and other organic material that had been preserved for thousands of years precisely because it was under water.

Pryor and his team have found many examples of personal items cast or carefully placed into the water either side of the walkway, and one theory has it that Bronze Age peoples were asking their
gods to stop the rain, stop taking away the land. In addition to metal items there are animal bones and also many white beach pebbles – suggesting people were coming to Flag Fen from far away
in order to make their votive offerings.

As well as evidence of ritual and religion, Pryor’s work has also found plentiful traces of the day-to-day. A section of the timber walkway has been preserved in-situ, covered by part of a
purpose-built visitor centre and protected from drying out by a steady, comforting spray of mist that keeps it waterlogged.

But in many ways the most instructive part of the visitor experience at Flag Fen are the reconstructed Bronze Age houses. Archaeologists find traces of foundations of such structures, but the
only way to get even a hint of what life within must have been like for the occupants is to use the available evidence – and best guesses – to rebuild a few.

Those at Flag Fen are a collection of roundhouses, with walls of timber posts and wattle, daubed with dry clay-mud. Families or extended families of perhaps a dozen people shared the large
circular room, with its central hearth. The interior might have been partly subdivided, perhaps around the perimeter, but it was undoubtedly a more communal way of living than anything we are used
to, with much less importance granted to personal space or privacy. The roundhouses are roofed with turf and thatch and in the gloom of the windowless interiors it is just possible to catch a
glimpse of at least the setting for Bronze Age family life. ‘People were very relaxed, they knew their place in society, they ate well,’ said Pryor. ‘The
archaeological evidence doesn’t suggest that there was, let’s say, an under-class – a lower class that wasn’t properly nourished. I mean, whenever you dig up a
Bronze Age burial, nine times out of ten or ninety times out of a hundred, the body is well nourished, the bones are well formed, so they had plenty of calcium and they ate a decent diet. One of
the things that there isn’t much evidence for in the Bronze Age is actual strife. The population hadn’t got so big that people were at each other’s throats. You know, everyone
knew what land they owned . . . people lived in families . . . your week was organised. Life, I think, in the Bronze Age would have been pretty good.’

The idea of living in families within permanent homes – houses that are built to last a lifetime and that are themselves part of permanent settlements – sounds utterly unremarkable
in our modern world. But it was all a construct, a concept that was invented in the Bronze Age and matured and became ever more complicated from that time on. Whether we choose to live in a
village, a town or a city, our circumstances are altered only by scale. Unless you live in some remote location, out of sight of other houses or the roads that connect them, then you are living in
a way that was unknown in Britain until around 1,500 years ago. The decision to stay in one house for years, perhaps a lifetime, is entirely at odds with the approach to existence practised by our
kind for almost all of human history.

Now we settle for the same views, through the same windows, day after day and month after month. We tolerate neighbours on the other side of the wall, or separated from us only by a few feet of
garden and a fence. We see the same faces, the same people walking the same streets. This is, to us, normality; but until 3,500 years ago at the very most, it was shockingly new.

The best-preserved evidence in the whole of Europe of the advent of this radical new way of living is on the windswept moors of Dartmoor. Covering over 360 square miles of the county of Devon,
Dartmoor today is a wild and intimidating landscape. No doubt the trees began falling to Neolithic stone axes, but during some later period of improved climate a steadily expanding population
started spreading into upland zones like Dartmoor, a place that might once have been on the periphery. The most visible features now are the tors, the exposed granite summits of the hills. They are
other-worldly, strangely angular and even up close have something of the look of ancient masonry. Natural cracks and fissures in the rocks seem too straight and ordered and often the effect is of
looking at the massive
foundations of giants’ castles, rather than anything natural.

Threaded between the tors, though, and running for miles in faint criss-crossing straight lines that turn whole areas into enormous patchworks, are walls built by Bronze Age farmers. These are
the Dartmoor reaves – boundaries of earth and stone that enclose the land into regular squares and rectangles. More than anything else, it is the scale of the endeavour that boggles the mind.
This is a field system that covers tens of thousands of acres and, even more astonishingly, it does not appear to have grown piecemeal. Instead the whole is so ordered it was most likely a grand
scheme laid out in advance, and then set in place all in one go by a highly organised society.

Some of the reaves are aligned on older structures, such as Late Neolithic or Early Bronze Age burial mounds, but in the main they pay little heed to the natural topography. It is as though the
plan was drawn up by someone, or some group, who had not even seen all of the land their scheme would cover – so that the reaves crossed rivers and leapt off cliffs.

Archaeologist Richard Bradley is one of many who have studied the field systems and noticed how some of the major lines seem to have been orientated on the winter and summer solstices. Where
visible, this alignment has been followed even when it has meant some of the resultant fields are cast into shadow by the natural topography.

Partly because field walls are so utilitarian, so simply functional, and partly because the passage of time has diminished much of the scheme to the point where it can only be properly
appreciated from the air, the Dartmoor reaves were for long overlooked as evidence of great endeavour or effort. For a long time too they were thought by many archaeologists to have been the work
of later societies – at least those of the Iron Age. But more recently both their early date and the colossal achievement they represent have begun to be fully realised.

In
The Prehistory of Britain and Ireland
, Bradley wrote about how generations of archaeologists were lulled into underestimating what they were looking at on Dartmoor because burial
mounds – the monuments more traditionally used as markers for the ambitions of ancient society – became less impressive during the Bronze Age: ‘It is easy to be misled by the
evidence of burial mounds which became much smaller during this phase, for the amount of labour invested in the subdivision of the land was probably equivalent to that devoted to monument-building
in earlier periods,’ he wrote. ‘It would be quite wrong to suppose that workforces could no longer
be mobilised for large-scale projects – it is the nature
of those tasks that had changed.’

I visited the Dartmoor reaves with another Bronze Age specialist, archaeologist Niall Sharples, who carefully explained how much the evidence of the reaves – and more particularly the
houses clustered within them – has to say about the social revolution that was taking place while they were being planned and built.

In contrast to the timber, wattle and daub houses reconstructed by Francis Pryor and his team at Flag Fen, those on Dartmoor were built, at least in part, of the naturally occurring granite. No
doubt this was for straightforward reasons – a general absence of trees but plentiful boulders – but the circular floor plans defined by walls of huge stones only add to the air of
permanence, the intention to stay put for a lifetime.

Sharples explained how the interior would have been lived in as a communal space, but one lightly subdivided into areas of different activity – sleeping, weaving, tool-making, cooking. The
point though was that a man and his new wife would have moved into such a house and then spent their adult lives there. Gone were the days of moving through the landscape from pasture to pasture,
opening up new fields on virgin soil. Settlements were not entirely unknown before 1500
BC
but from that time on they became increasingly commonplace, spreading onto every
part of the available arable land as the population steadily expanded.

There was something else new as well. For the first time there was a seeming determination to impose a man-made design onto the natural world. The Bronze Age communities that divided and
subdivided Dartmoor were fundamentally different, in terms of their thinking about the world, from all those that had gone before them. It appears that less importance was being placed on the great
monuments that had overshadowed people’s lives for thousands of years. Rather than congregating within a circle of standing stones to listen to a priest interpret the cosmos for them, now
people were making their homes and fields the centre of their existence.

If there was praying to be done – favours asked of the gods or precious things surrendered – then that kind of thing could go on now within the home. It is almost as though, as the
Bronze Age wore on, ‘English men (and presumably ‘Scots’, ‘Welsh and ‘Irish’ men as well) began to see their homes as their castles. Ties to the land that were
once tribal and ancestral had become personal and practical. Domestic life was at the heart of everything those people thought and believed and did. Britain had come a
long
way since 2500
BC
and the arrival of the first metal-workers. During the course of 10 centuries or so people had begun to settle down and to build the kind of lives more
familiar to us today.

Archaeologists like Sharples believe there could have been something of a sexual revolution as well. Now that there were fixed settlements, people became familiar not just with those living
right next door but also with the inhabitants of farmsteads and hamlets over the hill, in the next valley, or even further afield. If you sent a daughter or a son to be wed to the son or daughter
of a neighbouring family, then you would have an ally. Over generations your family, your clan might build whole networks of alliances – friends who could be called upon for help when times
were bad: Bronze Age insurance policies.

Those early settlements on Dartmoor did not last, however. During the next few centuries – and probably as a result of a deteriorating climate combined with over-farming of the land
– the upland moors and other peripheral areas were rendered infertile. Permanent though they had seemed, built of stone and imbued with lifetimes of meaning and significance, they were
nonetheless abandoned, and for ever. The field systems, laid out with such optimism and so much vision, were left to be submerged beneath the tireless, ever-advancing peat.

Through thousands of years of prehistory the building blocks of the world we know today had all been invented and set in place: society and class; religion and trade. Between 1500 and 1000
BC
– the later Bronze Age – the seeds of the first permanent villages were sown. In time, cities would grow too. From the strange, distant, almost unknowable
days of the first hunters, a Britain recognisable to us had begun to emerge.

The ice retreated for the last time around 10,000 years ago. Shifts and innovations in technology and in belief had laid the foundations of modern Britain. In so many ways it was as though we
had reached a kind of young adulthood. We had the keys to our own front doors. The world beyond was there to be shaped in our own image, by us as individuals, looking after our own families. But
with that realisation around 3,000 years or so ago – that we really could impose our own vision of the world onto the Britain we had claimed – came a suitably grown-up responsibility:
What kind of world did we want to shape? What kind of Britain did we want to build?