A History of Ancient Britain (45 page)

The shield exudes even more power. Pulled from the Thames, like the spearhead, it is called the Battersea Shield and is thought to have been made sometime between 350 and
50
BC
. It is a boy’s dream of a warrior’s shield – shining like gold and lavishly decorated with all the extravagant flair a hero could wish for. If I am
honest, my first thought was that it looked like a prop from a swords-and-sandals epic movie, like
Gladiator
or
300
.

Standing proud of the flat surface of the shield are three circular areas filled with ornate decorations. These are the roundels and each is an exuberant display of technical skill and artistic
genius. Elegant curls and circles mirror each other on either side of the long axis. Some experts insist they can see, in the centrepiece, the stylised head and antlers of a stag. Much of the
raised decoration has been created using a technique called repoussé, which meant hammering the bronze from the reverse side until the design stood out from the front surface. In a final
flourish, 27 red enamel jewels were incorporated into the circles and swirls so that the shield appears studded with rubies.

Circles and swirls: something at the heart of human beings is possessed by the spin. The Megalithic art of the Neolithic is filled with them, etched and pecked into stones again and again. Then
there were the stone and timber circles themselves, inspired perhaps by the movement of the night sky. Natural laws saw to it the circle was everywhere – from the shape of the sun and the
Moon to the tiny depressions made by the stalks of windblown sea grass shivering in the sand.

Inside the passage grave of Newgrange – on a stone forming part of the chamber that is illuminated by the sun once every year – there is a triple spiral. This perfect form, three
interconnected spirals with no beginning and no end, occurred to artists again and again. The triple spiral – or triskele – is also a recurrent feature of Celtic art.

As far as artists were concerned, once the circle was set in motion it never stopped. W.B. Yeats was obsessed with it and referred to it over and over:

The vortex is also central to the universe. Physicists have their ‘Law of the conservation of angular momentum’, descriptive of the spin that set everything in place and keeps it
there. It began billions of years ago and must not stop and since it is everywhere – from smallest to greatest, inside
the nuclei of atoms and driving galaxies –
it is hardly surprising someone noticed. Having spotted the spin very early on, it seems artists were especially taken with it.

Almost as impressive as the artistry is the inventiveness displayed by the metal-working itself. For one thing the shield has not been fashioned from a single sheet. Instead several individual
pieces of beaten bronze have been fitted together with riveted joints that have in turn been concealed beneath the details of the roundels. The overall rigidity of the piece has been improved by an
encircling strip of bronze around the outside rim that binds the whole.

What is not immediately obvious at first sight is that the Battersea Shield is in fact a shield cover. For all the evident skill of the smith, it is still just a hopelessly thin sheet of metal
supporting three heavy roundels. What survives today would once have been fixed onto a wooden shield; but thousands of years in the Thames have ensured that only the metal has lasted. While certain
to make the heart of any small boy beat faster, the Battersea Shield could never have been intended for action. Instead it is more likely it was carried by an already victorious warrior chief,
perhaps at the head of a celebratory parade that made its way to the banks of the river for a service of thanksgiving. We can imagine some appropriate speech-making – thanking the gods for
all their righteous energies – before the masterpiece was consigned to the waters for ever. Something similar happened to the spearhead as well.

It is not enough to gaze in wonder at great artworks like the Thames Spearhead and the Battersea Shield. We are also obliged to ask about their makers. Who were they and what inspired the
glorious flowering of art and design in Britain that archaeologists have dated to the years after about 350
BC
?

The simplest answer has long been that they were Celts, part of a culture said to have permeated and shaped the thinking of many of Europe’s inhabitants for a thousand years or more before
the eventual ascendancy of Rome. It was Roman historians and geographers who first used the label Celt – but they applied it only to tribes they encountered on Continental Europe. Those
writers actually borrowed ‘Celt’ from the Greeks, who used their own word
Keltoi
to describe any foreigner, so that it meant anyone who was not Roman. It is even fair to say they
used the word as an alternative way of referring to people they normally called Gauls – meaning the
inhabitants of the swathe of territory they named Gaul, occupied
now by Belgium, France, northern Italy and Switzerland.

Inconveniently – and confusingly for us – they never used Celt or Celtic to describe the peoples of Britain after the conquest of them. It seems that whatever they knew, and then
learned, of the inhabitants of the archipelago off to the north-west, all but lost in the seas that bounded the world that they called Oceanus – they always considered them significantly
different from those barbarians they had encountered closer to home: different enough indeed to require their own name, and that name was ‘Britanni’. So the Celts as the Romans
understood them were land-locked, separate not just from the Britanni but also from another northern European population, known to the same writers as the ‘Germani’.

During the Iron Age some of the Celtic leaders grew rich from trade along the great Continental rivers that gave them access to the wider world. Archaeologists see the influence of things Celtic
spreading in time not just to the British Isles and Ireland, but also to parts of the Iberian Peninsula and as far east as Turkey. Whatever the truth of the Hallstatt and La Tène
‘cultures’, they were apparently influenced in turn both by the emerging Classical world to the south, and by that of the Scythians to the east.

The Scythians were horse-riding nomads who, during the first millennium
BC
, steadily spread westwards from their homeland on the steppes between the Black and the Caspian
Seas. They were pastoralists to begin with but climate change back home gradually turned their grasslands into dust. Driven to follow their herds into greener pastures, they encountered the peoples
of eastern Europe – and found they were able to subjugate many of them. As they became more successful and dominant in their new demesne, they settled into the life of arable farmers and
aggressive slavers.

This, then, was the rich mix flowing through the heartlands of the Celts. As well as enjoying imported luxury goods from east, west and south, they also developed a decorative style that was all
their own. This was the birth of Celtic art.

Whoever the Celts were, whatever Celticness was, they and it were changed by Britain, made different. When artists in Britain began encountering Continental Celtic art around 350
BC
, they used it as the seed crop from which to grow something unique. It has been said by art historians that the innovation and sophistication of British Celtic art was the single
greatest contribution ever made by these islands to the world of design.

Evidence in support of that bold claim is to be found in the third piece
of Iron Age artwork I was permitted to handle in the British Museum, alongside the spearhead and
the shield – the so-called Kirkburn Sword. Found during the excavation of an Iron Age cemetery in east Yorkshire in 1987, it is regarded as perhaps the finest sword of the period to have been
found anywhere in Europe. It was made between 300 and 200
BC
and is as far removed from a cast bronze sword as is a Ferrari from a horse-drawn chariot.

It is a composite item, comprising a total of 70 separate pieces, all of which had to be designed and made before the finished object could be assembled. The hilt alone comprises 37 pieces of
bronze, horn and iron. Once the more functional parts had been put together, the sword and its scabbard were decorated – with La Tène scrolls and curls cut into the metal, but also
with pieces of specially made red glass that would once have suggested the grim lustre of freshly spilled blood. Even more fascinating, analysis of the metal has shown evidence of repairs,
suggesting this was a working sword that was damaged in battle on at least one occasion.

The art of the European Celtic Iron Age is rightly celebrated. It was in the hands of artists and craftsmen in Britain, however, that it was elevated to a whole new level of mastery and
sophistication. British Celtic art is unique, made different by the peoples of the islands in which it was made. It is also worth noting that British Celtic art finds its most exquisite expression
not in jewellery but in the sorts of things desired and required by a new elite – the warriors. They had grown in stature so that by the later years of the Iron Age the most powerful among
them could demand the very best, the most glamorous tools of their specialist trade.

The Kirkburn Sword was the property of a man known to archaeologists as the Kirkburn Warrior. In life he was the owner of that splendid sword and in death he was treated to an altogether special
send-off. The burial party – surely his comrades-in-arms – laid him in his grave lying on his left side and accompanied by his sword. While the body was still exposed to the air, or
only lightly covered with earth, three spears were thrust points-first into the grave. They may even have been thrust into the man’s body.

Imagine the impact of that moment on those gathered to witness the funeral rite. (Archaeologists have established that the man was aged somewhere between 20 and 35 years old and there were no
signs of injury on the body. Perhaps death by natural causes was deemed beneath the dignity of such a man, and those closest to him were moved to grant him the posthumous honour of a
warrior’s death.) Whatever the explanation, the shafts
were left sticking out of the grave as it was backfilled. When they were finished the mourners created a mound
that bristled with spears – so it was clear to any who saw it that here was a great man, a man of war. The ends of the shafts appeared to have been scorched to black in the flames of a fire,
the better to resist the effects of decay and so last longer.

The Kirkburn Warrior was not alone in his glory. Nearby in the same small cemetery a man of similar age had been buried with a disassembled chariot, another fighter no doubt. His body had been
covered with a shirt of chainmail, laid upside down upon him so the hem of the garment was across the chest, the shoulders across the legs. He had been provided with food for the journey as well, a
pig’s skull neatly split in two.

At a time when most bodies were simply exposed to the attentions of scavengers, something quite different was happening in part of east Yorkshire. In the Wolds and in the East Riding are Iron
Age cemeteries that seem out of place in Britain, even alien. Archaeologists have decided they represent nothing less than another culture – the Arras Culture – and its eccentricities
have been the subject of fierce debate since the first graves came to light in the nineteenth century.

Arras is more familiar as the name of a city in north-eastern France and the battle fought in and around it during April and May 1917; and a French connection has long been cited as part of an
explanation for what was going on in east Yorkshire during the later Iron Age. When archaeologists first came upon the cemeteries close by the east Yorkshire towns of Arras and Kirkburn, they
assumed the different burial practices were evidence of invasion. Archaeologist Melanie Giles, however, has studied the cemeteries for several years and is among a growing number of experts who
dispute the notion.

We spent some hours together weaving our way between the low, eroded barrows of an Iron Age cemetery at Scorborough, near the town of Beverley. The sky seemed low enough to touch and dank mist
hung in the air or clung to our clothes and hair. It was the right sort of day for talking about the dead.

Giles explained that, while fairly common in parts of east and north Yorkshire, such barrows are unknown elsewhere in the British Isles and Ireland. Something similar, however – their
nearest relatives, as it were – is to be found in the Marne-Moselle region of northern France. ‘There are lots of different ideas about this, lots of different debates,’ she said.
‘Some people thought it was a massive invasion, a kind of war band coming across.
But in fact most of these people look as if they are local, they were born and
brought up here.’

‘We might be looking at just a small group of important or powerful people coming across from the Continent,’ said Giles. ‘And some of the grave goods we find in the barrows
reinforce that sense that there are contacts with the Continent.’ Contact with the Continent – but no invasion. According to the work of archaeologists like Melanie Giles, the Celtic
culture that came to represent an entire era of the history of ancient Britain may have had its genesis in the Continentally connected warrior elites of east Yorkshire. If they are right, then the
handful of individuals that did cross from northern France to the east of England certainly left their mark. The locals may have been thoroughly impressed by the clothing and jewellery fashions of
the incomers. If foreign meant exotic, and desirable, then local craftspeople might have sought to ape what they saw so as to appeal to their customers among the resident population.

When the incomers died it would have made sense for them to be buried in line with the customs they had brought with them from back home. A trend was set then for fashion in death as well as
life and local funerary traditions may have been set aside in favour of new ones. The skeletons in the barrows face east, suggesting perhaps that in death it was thought best to face the direction
from which the revered ancestors, and their ideas, had originally come. But, as usual, formal burial was for the few; and often in the British Celtic Iron Age the few were great warriors.