A History of Ancient Britain (38 page)

The working of iron – from naturally occurring ore to finished object – is a challenging prospect even for people used to casting bronze. For one thing, iron has a much higher
melting point than copper or tin (around 1,500 degrees centigrade, compared to 1,100 for bronze) and so could not
be poured and cast like bronze until the advent of blast
furnaces that were well beyond the technological reach of the first smiths.

Instead the early iron-workers found they could use charcoal to achieve temperatures inside their simple clay furnaces that were sufficient to coax powdered iron ore into a lump of metallic
iron. While never quite becoming liquid, the ore could nonetheless be persuaded to form a solid clump of material. This lump, called a bloom and looking like a cross between a misshapen loaf of
black bread and a sponge, was a mixture of iron and various impurities known collectively as slag. The bloom was then reheated in a fire – one agitated by bellows to achieve the highest
possible temperatures – and hammered and hammered upon an anvil until as much as possible of the slag became molten again, so that it could be separated from the iron. The continual working
and reworking of the bloom in this way, driving out more and more of the impurities, produces a reasonably pure metal that is properly described as wrought iron. It is this that can be reheated
until white-hot and then beaten and shaped by a blacksmith into just about any weapon or tool imaginable.

I had the great good fortune to spend a day with a man called Hector Cole, a blacksmith and an expert in the production of ancient iron tools and weaponry. I defy anyone to stand in front of the
gaping maw of a blacksmith’s forge (hearing it breathe, like Darth Vader, the air from its bellows, watching the flames pulse from red to orange to dazzling white and back again, as though
driven by a beating heart) and not believe there is more going on in there than simple physics.

Iron-working happens in a half-dark world of giant shadows and dancing sparks and always to the accompaniment of the bell-like ringing of hammer on anvil. There is magic there too, but of a
different sort than that which attends the casting of bronze. The alloy of copper and tin completes its metamorphosis – from liquid into ringing blade – in seconds. The transformation
of shapeless bloom into regular, even bar and then to finished object, however, is the work of muscle and sweat – part coaxing and part bullying – and all of it a race against time. The
metal is malleable only while close to white-hot and as its lustre fades, to orange and then ever darker red, so it becomes less and less amenable to change.

Watching Hector cajole and persuade the raw material, stooped over his anvil with hammer and tongs, was hypnotic. Having begun his apprenticeship as a child (legend has it he made his first iron
piece aged four and a half!) he has partly forged himself. He makes iron, and iron has made
him. His hands are not like mine – nor like those of anyone else who has
spent a cosseted life shuffling paper around a succession of desks. His look like men’s hands used to, fingers and joints enlarged and toughened by proper work. They also look clever somehow
– capable and sure.

Hector’s working day is all about rhythm and perseverance, nudging the reluctant iron bar ever closer to the desired shape. He has also to mind his fire all the while, managing it and
tending it. Without the right kind of fire there can be no ironwork and he always has at least half an eye on the mood of the flames. I was there with a second hammer, ineptly handled, while Hector
made a sickle for me. It was in the moments after the final hammer stroke, while the newly finished article glowed cherry-red and perfect, that it appeared best of all – not just a tool for
harvesting a crop but a testament to the dogged, restless inventiveness of man.

For all its challenges and difficulties, the practical beauty of iron is that hematite, or iron ore, is infinitely more plentiful than copper or tin, the constituents of bronze. Instead of
depending on complex exchange networks – bringing together rarities like copper and tin – usable iron ore could be collected from the surface of just about every other ploughed field.
While the scarcity of its ingredients had made bronze a material controlled by an elite, iron had the potential to become the metal of the common people.

Hector explained how the blacksmith would have been much more use to his neighbours than a man skilled only in the casting of bronze. ‘They would get far more out of an ironsmith,’
he said. ‘For those sorts of tools they needed every day – sickles and so on – iron is much better than bronze. It’s that little bit more elastic, so it’s not going to
break if you hit it against something hard. If it gets bent you can straighten it, if it breaks you can weld the two pieces back together. If an edge gets blunt you can sharpen it –
it’s much more versatile.’

The Bronze Age had lasted for more than a thousand years. More than just a metal for making tools and weapons, bronze had become the foundation of society itself. Relationships between
individuals, between families, between tribes and clans and between peoples scattered all across Britain and Europe rode upon, and were therefore dependent upon, a ceaselessly flowing river of
bronze. Long before the advent of money it was bronze that made the world go round.

Iron, however, was utterly different. It could be used to make the same objects as bronze but it would never have the same cachet. After all, anyone
could get their hands
on iron. It was commonplace and cheap and could never appeal to any self-regarding elite for whom exclusivity was everything. And if it was bronze that made the world go round, it empowered that
elite and forced people willingly or unwillingly into contact with one another over great distances; if it was bronze that oiled the cogs and wheels of human interaction, what would happen now
there was a rival material?

The answer to that question takes us on a journey into one of the most mysterious periods of our ancient history. Just as the first people to board the abandoned
Mary Celeste
, adrift in
the mid-Atlantic, struggled to make sense of all they beheld, so the Late Bronze Age and Earliest Iron Age of Britain seems to defy all attempts at rational explanation.

For over a thousand years it had been bronze that had made sense of society. But over a relatively short space of time, after about 800
BC
, the magic apparently stopped
working. At first there was still plenty of the metal around, of course; the Great Orme and every other copper mine in Europe had been working solidly for countless generations, churning out
thousands upon thousands of tons of copper. In Cornwall, Brittany and Iberia the other part of the equation – tin – had been exploited just as enthusiastically. Whatever else was going
on, there could have been no shortage of the stuff itself.

In Britain, from around 1000
BC
onwards, bronze was increasingly being recycled – melted down and recast over and over again, and it was increasingly of European
origin. But it was to hand and it was plentiful. Progressively, however, the once unassailable bronze was being dumped, quite literally thrown away – and in vast quantities. While the
deposition of collections like the Llyn Fawr hoard could be said to have a certain logic to them – earnest attempts to win favour with the gods or the ancestors, or both, by offering up
valuable gifts – more and more bronze objects were ending up in holes in the ground, around the same time, in circumstances that are only bizarre.

Around 600
BC
or so, a smith or a team of smiths in Dorset sweated and toiled to produce more than 300 socketed bronze axes. It must have taken considerable effort and
guile just to get enough of the raw material in the same place at the same time even to embark on the job. Then there was the skill and time required to produce the items in such numbers. Analysis
by bronze specialists indicates the axes were not mass-produced – from moulds capable of making several items at a time – but cast one by one in a process just about as time-consuming
as it sounds. This is the Langton Matravers
hoard, found by a metal detectorist in the Purbeck region of Dorset in 2007. We can only imagine the expression on his face as he
turned them up. A signal that returns just one bronze axe would be cause for celebration – but 303!

Most of the sockets are still plugged with clay – a result of the casting process – and that they were left in that unfinished condition makes it clear they were never used, or even
intended for use. The ancient patina still visible on their surface suggests they may have been polished to look their best, but the very high tin content would have made them brittle and next to
useless as tools. Not to put too fine a point on it, everything about them is odd. Oddest of all, however, is that as soon as they had been shined up they were carted into a field and buried in
four large pits.

So far so strange, but in fact the Langton Matravers hoard is far from unique; it is not even unusual. All over Britain and northern and western Europe it was the same. Vast quantities of just
about the most sought-after material in the world at the time was being thrown away. In parts of France archaeologists have found literally tens of thousands of bronze axes in massive pits –
all of them seemingly put into the ground as soon as they were cool enough to handle after their casting. Usually, in these finds, the copper alloy is so corrupted with excessive amounts of lead or
tin as to make the axes formed of it every bit as useless as those in the Langton Matravers hoard. (It has been suggested that the hoards are simply collections of axes rejected as sub-standard.
But it would have made more sense simply to melt them down and start again.)

Archaeologists have been trying for decades to come up with sensible explanations for all of this. More than 30 years ago the Bronze Age specialist Colin Burgess suggested the ubiquity of the
metal had driven down its ‘value’. If its power was based on exclusivity, then in a world increasingly awash with the stuff it may have become a challenge to keep people hungry for it.
Keen to push the price back up again, he said, the bronze elite extracted as much bronze from the marketplace as possible. The hoards were therefore a consequence of Machiavellian manoeuvrings on
the part of the ancestors of unscrupulous modern-day commodity traders. Burgess’s explanation has been heavily criticised, however, on the grounds that it implies a level of international
co-ordination and co-operation that was unknown – and impossible – until the modern era.

The sudden wholesale dumping of an erstwhile valuable material has been dubbed the ‘Bronze Crisis’ – as though confidence in the importance
of the metal
was somehow undermined. Like Burgess’s suggestion of manipulation of the market, this too sounds altogether modern. For it to make sense we would have to accept that confidence was as
important to the functioning of the Bronze Age economy as it is to our own. We must therefore imagine the power of bronze being undermined in a manner not unlike the fate that befell the emperor in
his new clothes. After more than a millennium in which the exchange of bronze objects had made everyone happy, one small voice is supposed to have piped up with the opinion that they were all the
victims of a grand hoax – that bronze was nothing special after all – and so Bronze Age society began to collapse like a house of cards.

Neither of those two explanations seems satisfactory. For one thing, the only tangible evidence of a ‘crisis’ is the existence of the hoards themselves – a circular argument if
ever there was one.

Perhaps a different point of view is required, one that looks beyond the metal and takes into consideration what else was going on in Britain and the wider world during the first centuries of
the first millennium
BC
.

For one thing, thousands of years of relationship-building with populations scattered across Europe meant the inhabitants of Britain and Ireland had made themselves vulnerable to changes
hundreds of miles away. From around 800
BC
there began to emerge in the Mediterranean a trio of civilisations that would shortly, and inevitably, change the world –
for ever.

Of the three emerging polities it was the Phoenicians who originated from the furthest east, in the territory occupied today by Lebanon and Syria; the Greeks were centred on lands surrounding
the Aegean Sea and the Etruscans lived in what is now northern Italy (in time they would be first mimicked, and finally overwhelmed, by the people of nearby Rome).

All three began vying for control of the seaways – around the Mediterranean at first but eventually into the Black Sea and the Atlantic Ocean as well. What was happening in Mediterranean
Europe from 800
BC
was nothing less than the formation of states, organised groups of peoples with distinct identities and, more importantly, with international agendas
focused on gaining and maintaining control of commodities ranging from metals to textiles, from ivory to wine, from cattle and sheep to wheat and corn; and from olive oil to slaves.

From 800
BC
those emergent states began to generate the equivalent of a gravitational pull that attracted precious metals like bronze (as well as anything and everything
else of value) away from the periphery and towards
the centre. A sudden and worsening shortage of bronze would have been felt first and keenest in northern France, and on
islands like Britain and Ireland. For a while the shortfall in the north and west was taken up by bronze supplies emanating from the Atlantic coast, but of course it was not the metal that was the
point of the whole exercise – it was the contacts and relationships the metal conferred.

And so perhaps, at least in part, the shock felt on the northern side of the English Channel in the years after 800
BC
was akin to the disorientation that has to be
endured following the break-up of any relationship. And if not a break-up then at least a reassessment of existing ties. Continental Europe was transfixed by what – or rather who – was
happening in the Mediterranean. There was a new flame, capturing hearts and consuming all the oxygen in the room. Attention began to focus on the emergence of what would become the empires and
nations of the Classical world and, unaware, Britain and the rest of the populations on the northern and western peripheries found themselves out in the cold.