A History of Ancient Britain (49 page)

It turned out the field had kept the best for last. Just when the archaeologists thought they had swept the site clean, they found a shallow pit containing a number of bronze and silver torcs.
Then, like something out of a movie, the ‘bottom’ of the pit collapsed into a void beneath. Shining in the loose soil below were two bronze bracelets, two torcs made of silver and 10
made of pure gold.

The Snettisham Treasure is astonishing, almost beyond belief. It amounts to nearly five stones of gold and silver and fills whole display cases in the British Museum. Much of it is in the form
of broken pieces, scrap waiting to be made into something new, but the rest is a stunning collection of torcs and solid ingots bent into bracelet shapes. There are also more than 230 gold and
silver coins.

Shining brightest of all are the torcs – thick necklaces of twisted gold or silver. A grand total of 175 were found, 75 more or less complete and the rest in pieces. Some of the Snettisham
Treasure has been placed on a par with the Crown Jewels. I have had the privilege of handling one or two of the grandest torcs and I would say they are of such dazzling brilliance it is hard to
accept they are real. No matter how many times you tell yourself they are made of pure gold, your eyes continue to insist they must be fakes. They simply look too good, too weighty, to be true.

The intricacy of the design, the skill of the goldsmiths – the whole effect is overwhelming; and that is the impression they make on someone born in the twentieth century. Their impact on
a population of farmers 2,000 years ago can only be guessed at.

No traces of a settlement contemporary with the treasure were ever found. To all intents and purposes the hoard had simply been buried in a field. It has been suggested the gold and silver were
indeed ‘crown jewels’ – the stored wealth of the ruler of the Iceni in the decades before the coming
of Rome. What is undeniable is that even one of the
torcs would have represented extreme wealth. A man seen wearing such a treasure – while he led his warriors into battle, or while he addressed his followers at some grand occasion –
would surely have seemed more than a mere chieftain. In his own eyes, and perhaps more importantly in those of his followers, he was their king.

It was not just about the leader’s personal adornment either. While a gold torc worn around the neck would underline an individual’s authority in the eyes of those who saw him
wearing it, something more pervasive was going on at the same time. During the first century
BC
coins of gold, silver and bronze – portable symbols of authority
– were passing through the hands of at least some of the people.

Coins are viewed as evidence of increasing levels of contact between Britain and Gaul between around 125
BC
and 50
BC
. They are often discovered
as hoards, whole collections buried in the ground either for safekeeping or as offerings to the gods. The earliest of them were Gallo-Belgic ‘staters’ – coins minted in northern
France or Belgium – and crossed the English Channel either as payment for trade goods or as gifts exchanged between chieftains. It has even been suggested by some numismatists that the
Gallo-Belgic staters of mid-first-century date arrived in Britain as payment for mercenaries and other supplies sent to Gaul to support the struggle against Rome.

In any event, by the time such coins reached Britain, they were already part of a long story. Study of their designs has revealed the Gallo-Belgic tradition had its origins in coins made
hundreds of years earlier by Macedonian Greeks. What started out in the fourth century
BC
as a coin with the head of King Phillip II of Macedon on one side, and a
horse-drawn chariot on the other, had gone through a stylistic evolution in the hands of the Celtic tribes during the intervening centuries. The gold staters that crop up in the south-east of
England in the first century
BC
feature heads that are so stylised as to be almost unrecognisable as representations of anything human. Similarly the chariot is played
around with until it features usually as an abstract horse surrounded by bits and pieces that may or may not be parts of a vehicle.

When the British chieftains started commissioning their own coins they continued the practice of retaining the original elements of Continental coins, while reflecting their own artistic
sensibilities at the same time. It must have been a tricky business. On the one hand individual leaders
wanted unique coins; but on the other they had to pass muster in the
wider world. (The practice of copying coins from elsewhere – particularly those regarded as trusted currency – was one that would continue for centuries. A gold coin made during the
reign of the eighth-century Anglo-Saxon King Offa has ‘OFFA REX’ on one side and the inscription ‘THERE IS NO GOD BUT ALLAH ALONE’on the other. For a while it was claimed by
some as evidence Offa had converted to Islam – until it was identified as a copy of an Arabic coin. Islamic gold coins of the Abbasid dynasty were the most trusted in the Mediterranean world
at the time and Offa’s coin-makers were simply giving their own output the best chance of being accepted as credible tender.)

British coins had to be suitable for circulation in Roman markets as well and so increasingly began to feature Classical designs and motifs. British chieftains had developed tastes for
Mediterranean luxury goods including wine, olive oil and pottery and so in addition to declaring their status at home, their coins gave them access to yet more prestige items available from the
Classical world to the south.

Underlying all of it was the power of the emergent state. By the time coins were in general use, for buying and selling among individuals in Britain, they were a constant reminder of the power
of the leader. A coin might secure a purchase; but since it bore the likeness or name of the chieftain it also made clear the transaction had been validated in some way by his authority.

So much of what archaeologists find tells the story of men – hunters, warriors, chieftains. The picture is also unhelpfully skewed in favour of the elites, the rich. Those accorded burials
of the sort that survive to be found thousands of years later were clearly special people singled out for unusual treatment and sent into eternity accompanied by treasures of their time. It is
therefore not just women who often seem invisible, but also the rank and file. And if the mass of men and women have disappeared without a trace, the lot of the poorest of the poor is even
worse.

For every king or queen, every chieftain or warlord enjoying Roman luxuries there had to be hundreds or even thousands of men and women whose lives were so hard as to be all but unbearable.
Hardest of all were the lives of the lowest of the low – the slaves.

For most people in modern Europe, slavery is an evil associated with Africa. But it happened in Britain and Ireland too. In relatively modern times – at least from the seventeenth century
onwards – Barbary pirates
preyed on those coastlines. The examples are as numerous as they are heartbreaking. In 1631 the entire population of the village of
Baltimore, in County Cork in the south-west of Ireland – 109 men, women and children – were taken by African pirates, loaded onto ships and sold in the slave markets of North Africa.
Not one of those souls ever saw the old country again and between 1630 and 1730 it is estimated Barbary pirates took a million Europeans from their homes and sold them into slavery.

Some of us seek to distance our own nations from the business of African slavery – or at least shift responsibility for it – by pointing out that the African chiefs were active
slave-sellers. The argument goes that since they were selling their own people, or at the very least their neighbours’ people, then their descendants cannot simply blame the
‘middlemen’ of Europe who bought them and shipped them to the New World. But the unavoidable fact is that during the Iron Age our own ancestors were themselves valuable trade items. In
the European markets one commodity above all else was in great demand – tall, strong British manpower.

Back in the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff, close by the display featuring those first iron treasures of the Llyn Fawr hoard, is proof of part of the price that had to be paid for all those
Continental luxury goods imported into Britain during the first and second centuries
BC
.

During the building of the airfield at Valley, on the island of Anglesey, during the Second World War, workmen found scores of ancient iron and bronze objects sealed in peat. The peat had formed
in antiquity, as an ancient lake had dried up, and the artefacts – eventually numbering more than 150 – had been votive offerings thrown into the water to honour and appease the
gods.

This was the Llyn Cerrig Bach hoard – a rival to that found at La Tène. Alongside numerous swords and fragments of at least one shield, horse gear and the metal parts of chariot
wheels, blacksmithing tools, spearheads, iron ingots and parts of cauldrons, were two lengths of heavy iron chain. The links were still strong – so strong in fact the chains were put to work
pulling trailers behind tractors – and at first no one guessed their darker purpose.

The Llyn Cerrig Bach chains were made for the restraint of human beings. Made around 90
BC
, they are as chilling as they are impressive. Just a foot and a half of chain
would have separated each person in the line. The links are still a great weight in the hands and the dull clanking sound they make now is an echo of the same that would have accompanied the
shuffling
steps of whichever souls were imprisoned by them 2,000 and more years ago. The parts shaped to go around the neck are quite small and would have all but throttled
anyone larger than a child.

Just a few hundred years earlier many people in Britain had lived in egalitarian farming communities. By the time of the slave chains of Llyn Cerrig Bach, all of that had changed. As the last
century before the birth of Christ progressed, Britain was a land of hard social divides. For every petty king with a golden torc around his neck there were uncounted thousands of men, women and
children more accustomed to the chafing of tight-fitting iron.

By now the days of the hill forts were numbered too; even giants like Danebury were in decline. A privileged few had grown accustomed to great power and great wealth. They had acquired a taste
for Mediterranean cuisine and the stylish bowls from which it was to be eaten and drunk.

By the middle of the first century
BC
many of the tribes of southern Britain had grown comfortable with the thought of all the luxuries they could obtain from across the
water. Archaeological sites around the south-east of England yield amphorae of the sorts that were in use from perhaps 100
BC
onwards. It was these that contained the wine
and oil so desired by the first of the British nouveaux riches. Some of it was from the vineyards and groves of Rome itself.

Those commodities were a feature of Britain at the height of the Celtic Iron Age, with all its warring and kingly display and sophisticated art. But by the middle of the century, Rome was on the
move. Gaul, just across the English Channel, she had already taken for her own. Not content just to trade with her neighbours, Rome wanted domination and ownership as well.

Around
AD
98, Tacitus would finish ‘
De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae
’, better known to us as ‘the
Agricola
’, a biography and
tribute to his father-in-law Gnaeus Julius Agricola, conqueror of much of Britannia. During Tacitus’s account of the defeat of the Caledonians at the Battle of Mons Graupius in
AD
84, Calcagus (almost certainly a fiction created by the author for dramatic effect): exclaims: ‘Romans . . . Brigands of the world . . . the wealth of an enemy excites their
greed, his poverty their lust for power . . . Robbery, butchery, rapine . . . they create a devastation and call it peace.’ Tacitus understood not just how powerful the Empire was, but also
how it was seen by others.

Whether or not the British tribes and their chieftains knew it, they might
soon have to finish their drinks and pick up their swords for one last, climactic battle
– this time against the Brigands of the world.

There was a storm coming.

CHAPTER SEVEN

INVASION