A History of Ancient Britain (42 page)

The Iron Age in Britain lasted from 800
BC
until the arrival of the Romans in
AD
43.

Archaeologists make statements like that all the time, swiftly bundling prehistory into tidy, manageable blocks – each with a name or, more often than not, an age. The billions of empty
years after the Big Bang, the aeons required for the movement of tectonic plates across the face of the Earth, the millions of years spent by Mother Nature making the continents even vaguely
liveable for the likes of us – someone – cosmologists, geologists, archaeologists – had to try to put it all in order.

People, of one sort or another, began making stone tools around two and a half million years ago, a few drops in the ocean of geological time but an eternity for folk. After the Stone Age
– an expanse of time that found room for not one but several species of humankind – came that of Bronze, beginning in Britain just over 4,000 years ago. The iron tools that gave the
Iron Age its name were commonplace in these islands by about 500
BC
. One by one or in batches, the centuries could be filed neatly away.

Spend too much time thinking about ‘Ages’, however, and it is easy to overlook the seconds, minutes, hours and days of which human lives are actually made. Having contemplated
billions, millions and even thousands of years, a few hundred – like those encompassed by the Iron Age – can seem like the stuff of moments. This is an unhelpful illusion, one that
blinds us to the lives of individual men, women and children.

Silbury Hill, near Avebury in Wiltshire, standing 130 feet high and with a base that covers all of five acres, is one of the largest man-made prehistoric mounds in the
world. It is often referred to, casually, as the work of ‘Neolithic farmers’, almost as though there were just a few of them and they all knew each other. Study of the construction
process, however, has offered a variety of possibilities – most of which suggest the mound was generations in the making. Estimates vary from 100 to 500 years of work and it is at least
certain the vast majority of the men, women and children who contributed to the building of Silbury Hill did not live to see it finished. If work was indeed under way there for 500 years then it is
as though the Millennium Dome, the O2 now squatting by the Thames in London, had been commissioned by King Henry VIII on the day of his coronation in 1509. It can be easy to make the mistake of
compressing 500 ancient years, so that we trick ourselves into believing a mortal soul could see from one side to the other of such a vast landscape of time.

Some of the most recent thinking suggests the final shape of Silbury Hill – the finished article – was never the point anyway. Successive generations of architects and builders paid
no heed to the objectives and motives of those that went before and instead set about putting their own identity, their own stamp on the thing. By the time work got under way on that most enigmatic
of Neolithic creations, the surrounding landscape was peppered with tombs, circles, cursus monuments and long avenues of giant stones. Those farming peoples had a virtual mania for adding to,
adapting and completely remodelling the man-made architecture that gave shape and meaning to their daily lives.

But then, as now, people were hardly likely to have seen themselves merely as parts of a continuum, small cogs in a giant machine. Each generation does mostly what it wants. If the ancestors
were invoked at any point, then surely it was only so their ‘wishes’ could be co-opted, exploited in line with whatever the dominant party had in mind anyway. The Neolithic farmers who
were there at the start of Silbury Hill were dry bones and dust in the hands of those who took in the view from its summit.

From 800
BC
until
AD
43 is a span of almost eight and a half centuries – room for more than fifty generations of our species. If life
expectancy in the Iron Age was 40 years – a generous estimate – then the era was more than 20 lifetimes long. Our own world is a consequence of the eighteenth-century Industrial
Revolution. No more than fifteen generations have passed, just over three lifetimes of threescore and ten, since that tumultuous
period – the Industrial Age –
began and yet consider how much has changed and how distant seems the time of Richard Arkwright and his water frame, of James Watt and his steam engine.

The lives and times of people living in 800
BC
were unimaginably lost and forgotten by the time the Roman Emperor Claudius arrived in Britannia with his elephants. The
people living in the middle of the first century
AD
likely felt no more connection to the last of the bronzesmiths than we feel to those who gazed in wonder at
Stephenson’s Rocket.

The time of monument-building during the Stone Age, the duration of the Iron Age – these are spans of time we should struggle to comprehend. Does any living person anyway count themselves
part of an age? The bigger picture is visible only from the distance provided by time. So when we look back at the centuries during which iron was or was not being used for tools we must allow
that, at any given moment, people just like us were simply dealing with day-to-day life. The world turned and they coped with it as best they could, without bothering to notice whether or not
theirs was an Iron Age.

The world has been home to people who are, first and foremost, individuals fighting to look after themselves and their close kin. Remembering this simple fact makes it possible to allow
different interpretations for sites that are separated not just by geography but by time – even when they are remarkably similar in outward appearance.

When it comes to looking at sites separated by centuries a word like ‘hill fort’, already loaded with connotations of warfare, becomes doubly misleading. Not only were hilltops
occupied for reasons other than defence, they were also selected and used for different reasons at different times in our history. So the motivations of people choosing lofty locations in the
Bronze Age, or in the early years of the Iron Age, might well have been quite different from those who settled similar places hundreds of years later.

People in Britain first thought about enclosing patches of land during the Neolithic, the New Stone Age. The causewayed enclosures and henges they created in those far-off days were probably
inspired by the need to make contact with others. Scattered tribes and clans felt isolated in a mostly empty land and so took steps to establish places where they might congregate at special times
of the year. The very act of coming together in the first place, to dig the encircling ditches and pile up the earthen banks, began the process of forging ties. Agreeing to meet there on
pre-arranged
days meant the connections could be maintained and deepened down through the years.

During the Bronze Age the population of Britain increased considerably. There may have been a contraction in the Late Bronze Age and during the early years of the Iron Age, due to a worsening
climate, but the return of warmer, drier summers and the development of new farming technologies saw to it that numbers rose once more in the second half of the first millennium
BC
. After all the seemingly endless years of hunting and gathering and the time of the earliest farmers, when Britain was a land largely empty of people, some parts of the place
actually began to fill up. For the first time there was genuine pressure on some of the available arable land. Instead of wanting ways to meet people and stay in touch, during the Middle and later
Iron Age what folk needed was space, room to breathe.

Not every upland enclosure or henge was turned into a hill fort, that much is true. But as the years wore on some people, in some of the busiest parts, must have looked up at the airy hilltops
and ridges above them with fresh eyes.

Folk are always the same; it is their circumstances that vary. Now, instead of places at which all were welcome – for feasting, trading and negotiation – some of the high ground
became valuable because it overlooked the fields, filled with crops and livestock. In some parts of Britain, notably in the south, land – and the animals and harvests that could be raised
upon it – were the basis of wealth and power.

The earliest of the Iron Age hill forts were in use from around 600
BC
. Crickley Hill in Gloucestershire – scene of that bloody battle during the Neolithic –
was a fort again 3,000 years later. Inside were several roundhouses and one of them, close by the entrance, was conspicuously larger than all the others. Later the houses on Crickley Hill were all
of a uniform size – suggesting that for a time social distinctions ceased to exist, as people battened down the hatches in the face of adversity and co-operated more closely.

Just as in the Neolithic, the fort on Crickley Hill was attacked and destroyed during the Iron Age, indicating that by the later years of the period defence was part of what at least some of the
hill forts were about. Where they do appear defended, the houses and other domestic buildings were usually slight, almost ephemeral. When this is the case, the most noticeable and numerous
structures inside are raised grain stores built of timber, and storage pits dug into the earth – suggesting that often the most
important function of the interior of
the later hill forts was the display of valuable surplus food supplies. It appears that as the Iron Age progressed it became important to defend not just people, but food.

Archaeologists have struggled to understand how some of the vast earthwork and timber defences, elaborate though they were, could ever have worked in practice. Some of the hill forts –
like Maiden Castle in Dorset and Danebury in Hampshire – are so huge it would have been impossible to man the miles of encircling ramparts effectively. Rather than working like castles
– places within which to withstand a siege – hill forts make more sense as grand locations in which the arable wealth of a community was centralised . . . where it could be seen and
appreciated by all. A scattered population might have gathered behind the banks and ramparts during times of strife, finding strength in numbers, but the defences were likely always more about show
than for any straightforward, practical military application.

If people’s circumstances vary, then so do their responses to them. As the Iron Age progressed the building and occupation of hill forts was more a feature of southern and western Britain.
In eastern Britain, as far north as southern Scotland, settlement was often more open in character – villages and undefended homesteads surrounded by carefully organised fields.

There is a well-used maxim that goes, ‘Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence’. Archaeologists have taken it almost for their own and it is certainly worth bearing in mind
when looking at archaeological remains. The point is that hill forts in the most inaccessible locations would be those most likely to survive the passing of years. Modern farming and land use would
tend to leave such sites alone, so they are still with us today. Defended sites built in the lowlands, within land that continued to attract farmers and the rest of the modern world, may well have
long since been ploughed away or otherwise removed. This is an important caveat. Just because we do not find as many hill forts or other defended settlements in the generally lower land of eastern
Britain does not mean they were never there.

For all that, the absence of large-scale defended sites might be interpreted another way. It may be that people in the more open, arable landscapes of eastern Britain found other ways to get
along with one another. The apparent tendency towards open settlements may well be a reflection of people coming together to make best use of the available land. The need for manned boundaries and
distance – privacy even – may have been set aside, sacrificed in favour of the benefits to be had from tolerance.

Certainly the archaeological evidence in eastern England is of farmsteads and villages spread across wide areas. The differences are not hard and fast – there are
some hill forts and some defended enclosures – but in the main it appears that in the east of England and into East Anglia the trend in the Iron Age was for different communities to accept
one another, to pool resources and put up with the consequences of greater population density without feeling the need to man the barricades against one another.

The presence of too many people has always provoked a variety of responses. The nineteenth-century scholar Thomas Malthus wrote, ‘The power of population is infinitely greater than the
power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.’ That statement fell upon his world like a hammer blow – the first inkling for society that Mother Earth could not cope indefinitely
in the face of unrestricted human breeding. Apparently there were limits, and one day they might be reached and breached. It seems pressures on land, as the Iron Age progressed from around 300
BC
onwards, also encouraged ancient peoples across Britain to find ways to confront a new reality.

The archaeologist Richard Bradley has suggested that the surviving hill forts have skewed our view of how the majority of people were actually living in the second half of the first millennium
BC
.

By their very nature hill forts are impressive – suggestive of people in ancient times quite literally taking the high ground, the better to look down on those around and below them: the
homes of an elite. It is impossible to walk around sites like Danebury, or Maiden Castle, or Hod Hill, and not feel as though the ancient occupants must have been nothing less than the lords of the
land. But in
The Prehistory of Britain and Ireland
Bradley questioned whether such places were ever really centres of civilisation for the majority. He wrote: ‘They are strongly
defended, they were built in dominant positions, and they enclose the sites of many roundhouses, but it is difficult to see how they could have been inhabited continuously.’ He added that it
was ‘tempting to suggest that these were aggregation sites, used on an occasional basis and possibly in the course of summer grazing’.