A History of Ancient Britain (50 page)

Britain and the British struck terror into the hearts of Romans in 55
BC
– not into the heart of Julius Caesar perhaps, but those of the rank and
file faced with the prospect of invading the place. We can imagine their fear, unfocused and amorphous, and all the darker as a result. The fear born of suspicion, of the sort that citizens of
modern, civilised states often harbour about places where things are done differently, by people with beliefs they regard as unholy or at least unclean.

The Roman world was bounded by Oceanus and any lands within or beyond that ocean-sea were at best mysterious and at worst forsaken by the gods themselves. The archipelago to the north and west
of Gaul was therefore a kind of Ultima Thule – a furthest land – and surely there were good reasons why those islands were cut off from the civilised world?

In many ways the inhabitants of Britain liked it that way. The society that had evolved there by the mid to later Iron Age was insular in the extreme and obsessed with
boundaries, with drawing lines that defined who was within and who was without. It was good to import wine, olive oil and other luxuries from the Continent but there were limits to how much actual
contact was needed or wanted. (It is one thing to enjoy the fruits of a delivery from a supermarket’s online service, quite another to contemplate having a megastore built at the end of the
road.) Each tribe had what you might call a very clear sense of its own personal space. They were xenophobic, almost paranoid.

It seems to me that the people of Celtic Gaul understood and let them be. Many archaeologists working in the first half of the twentieth century imagined successive invasions of southern Britain
by Gallo-Belgic Celts, but now it is thought cultural behaviour crossed the Channel without the people themselves.

From 800
BC
three states had begun to emerge in the Mediterranean – the Greeks, the Phoenicians and the Etruscans. The Etruscans had their centre on the Italian
peninsula but in 509
BC
the warriors of Rome, their southern neighbour and one-time subordinate, finally overthrew them. During the following two hundred years or so the
Romans took control of more and more territory, like a cuckoo in the Mediterranean nest. By the middle of the second century
BC
they were all-powerful, having eclipsed and
overwhelmed both the Greeks and the once-mighty Phoenician city-state of Carthage.

For hundreds of years the Mediterranean world of the south had developed alongside that of the Celtic world in the north. Each had fed something into the other – through trade and also by
a certain amount of cultural osmosis. But the time finally came when the Romans were no longer content just to be trading partners and interested observers.

Around 100
BC
the English Channel was more of a gateway than a barrier, and therefore a comfort to those living on either side. For the people of Britain it acted like a
kind of customs point, through which trade goods and travellers could pass in both directions but with a reassuring element of control.

The presence of the European mainland, visible from the south coast of England on a clear day, therefore presented the chieftains of Late Iron Age Britain with something of a quandary. For while
on the one hand they were obsessively protective of the borders of their territories, on the other they
needed prestige goods with which to impress their neighbours. Finds
made as far north as Scotland reveal it was not just the rich men and women of southern and eastern Britain who had developed educated tastes in the finer things in life.

Just eight years after the discovery in 2001 of the Arras Culture-style chariot burial at Newbridge, in Edinburgh, a metal detectorist made the discovery of several lifetimes beside a
farmer’s field outside Stirling.

David Booth, a game warden at the Blair Drummond Safari Park a few miles outside the city, had decided to spend a day off practising with his latest purchase. He had just taken delivery of his
first-ever metal detector and had previously tried it out only in his kitchen and garden. Having decided to really see what it could do, he first located a likely-looking field and then sought
permission from the landowner before driving over in his car and parking at its edge.

Picture the scene if you will: it is a pleasant day in the late September of 2009 and Booth has just climbed out of his car. He is parked on an area of clear, flat ground and he decides to check
the gadget is working properly. ‘I thought, “I’ll just scan this first before I head out into the field”,’ he said. So he switches on the metal detector, takes half a
dozen or so steps away from the car and hears his first ‘bleep’. Pleased and encouraged, he sets down the machine and starts digging.

It was one of those metal detectors that, while not top of the range, could at least distinguish between precious metals and scrap. The machine indicated it had located gold, but such signals
– from the more basic models – usually turn out to be no more exciting than the brass caps on the ends of spent shotgun cartridges.

What Booth found, however, six inches down, is the most valuable hoard of Iron Age gold ever recovered in Scotland. Glinting in the soil, as lovely as the day they went into the ground 2,000 or
so years previously, are four solid gold torcs. Booth described his ‘disbelief’ in an interview with a reporter from
The Times
some weeks later. ‘I saw a glimpse of one of
them, then uncovered the rest of the hoard. They were in a wee group. Half of me was saying, “that does look important,” but I was thinking I couldn’t be that lucky on my first
go. ‘I took them home, gave them a wee clean up and went online. I looked at some torcs and kind of guessed this was Iron Age history.’

Most archaeologists look down their academic noses at metal detectorists – and the illegal activities of so-called ‘nighthawks’, those who raid
archaeological sites without permission and under cover of darkness are indeed beneath contempt – but Booth’s behaviour was quite different and he played completely by the
rules. For a start, he immediately reported his find to the authorities. Having emailed a photograph of one of the torcs to the National Museum of Scotland (NMS) in Edinburgh, he was joined on site
by the experts within hours.

Now in the care of the museum, the Stirling hoard has given archaeologists an unexpected insight into the tastes of at least one individual, or perhaps a handful of individuals, living in
Scotland in the later years of the Iron Age. Two of the torcs, single ribbons of elegantly twisted gold, are typical of the sort of jewellery known to have been made and worn in Scotland 2,300
years ago. The other two are different. One find is in two pieces and amounts to approximately half of a broken torc. It is of an ornate style previously unknown in Britain and appears to have been
imported from the Toulouse region of southern France, where similar items have been found.

The prize among prizes, however, is the fourth torc, a wonder created by twisting together eight separate delicate strands of gold and fixing them into two elaborate terminals decorated with
tiny swirls and coils of gold wire (it even features a gold safety chain, making it clear the item was valued then just as it is valued now). Iron Age specialists at the NMS believe it represents a
fusion of traditions – some elements home-grown in Scotland and others inspired by fashions among metalsmiths trained in the Classical world of the Mediterranean.

Whether it was made by a local goldsmith who had trained in workshops far away in the Roman world or was something commissioned and imported from there by a local worthy, it speaks of
international connections at a time when the tribes of northern Britain were traditionally believed to have been especially inward-looking. The find in the past decade of both a hoard of exquisite
gold and a chariot burial make clear the reach of Rome was great, and welcome, long before anyone thought about invasion.

Subsequent investigation suggested the torcs had been buried beneath some sort of circular building. Stirling sits at the centre of Scotland, both geographically and historically. The castle
there was home to kings and queens long before Edinburgh rose to prominence, and all around are sites of all periods that make clear the area has long been a hub for lives and events. Stirling has
been described as the brooch that fastens together the
Lowlands and the Highlands of the country and so it seems appropriate that such a rich find should have come to light
there.

Archaeologists have estimated that by about 100
BC
Britain was home to between one and two million people, ruled over by perhaps a score of men best described either as
great chieftains or little kings. At that time those leaders had much in common with their peers in Gaul, including the opinion that Rome presented not a military threat but an economic
opportunity.

It was during those halcyon days that Hengistbury Head, in Dorset, rose to become, for a while at least, the busiest port in Britain. A great promontory of sandstone, it juts out eastwards into
the English Channel. A narrow spit of land turns abruptly northwards from the end of the headland to create the narrow entrance into the sheltered waters of Christchurch harbour. Viewed from high
above it looks like a finger curled in the act of beckoning the Isle of Wight towards it. It is easy to see why the place was attractive to mariners plying their trade along the south coast. Tall
cliffs provide protection from storms and from 100
BC
onwards the settlement that grew on the level plain on the leeward side of the headland turned into something of a
boomtown.

The human history of Hengistbury Head neither starts nor finishes in the Iron Age. A mining company extracted ironstone from the headland in the nineteenth century and modern excavations have
found evidence of large-scale flint tool-making there as early as the Upper Palaeolithic. (These were people of the same sort – the same vintage – as those who carved the little
likeness of a horse’s head onto a rib bone in that cave in Creswell Crags, near Sheffield.)

Hengistbury Head is just a tourist attraction now, mainly drawing walkers and beachcombers, but in the long story of Britain’s history that headland has had important lines in key scenes
since the very beginning.

The lifeblood of the Iron Age boomtown was international trade. Only a small part of the interior has been excavated, but there is enough to suggest a whole complex of homes, shops and
workshops. In the centuries before the Roman invasions the place would have been a hub, busy with the sounds and smells of cooking, of metal, glass and leather-working, of jewellery-making.
Merchants and traders from all over the known world would have spent time there, browsing the wares and haggling over prices. For native Britons Hengistbury Head must have been a real thrill:
exotic and tantalising smells from all that unfamiliar food; the sounds of talk and
banter in foreign tongues; the sight of men and women with different-coloured skins and
differently shaped features, wearing all manner of outlandish clothes.

According to the Greek writer Strabo, the native peoples of Britain were in the business of exporting cattle, corn, gold, animal hides, hunting dogs, iron, silver and slaves. In return they were
importing all manner of European luxuries. It may well be that the first wine tasted in Britain was enjoyed at Hengistbury Head. Archaeological finds also feature copious evidence of glass-making,
including blocks of coloured glass that would themselves have been extremely valuable. The site was clearly one of the doorways through which the future entered Britain.

However much Britain benefited from all the to-ing and fro-ing at Hengistbury Head, from the import and export business that made many of them rich, it could not last for ever. Between 50 and 60
BC
the flow of wine, along with much else, slowed to a trickle and then stopped completely. This was the period when Caesar broadened his offensive against the Celts of Gaul
to take in the native tribes of Britain as well. For the time being, the good times were apparently over.

It has been said by some that in the early days it was Celtic sophistication and civilisation that impressed the Romans, rather than the other way around, and that in time they became what they
had once beheld. Whether or not that is true, as the first century
BC
wore on Roman attitudes towards their northern neighbours began to harden.

Julius Caesar was the prime mover against the Celtic tribes. The Republic already controlled a part of northern Italy they called Cisalpine Gaul and before ending his term as a Roman consul (a
senior government leader) he made himself Governor of the place. Students of Roman history say Caesar then made war on the rest of the Gallic tribes as a cynical ploy to raise both cash (to help
pay off the many debts he had spent buying friends in high places) and his political standing. Gallic tribes had threatened Rome in the past, however, and his homeland’s best interests may
have played at least some part in his thinking.

In any event he was at war with one tribe after another from 58
BC
onwards – and was soon infuriated by the support being supplied to his enemies by the inhabitants
of the British Isles. Mercenaries and other resources were being sent across the water in return for Gallic coins and it could only be a matter of time before a belligerent like Caesar sought
revenge for the meddling.

By the late summer of 55
BC
, with much of Gaul under control, he had 20,000 soldiers aboard a fleet of nearly 100 ships, ready to conquer a new
territory – Britannia. But while the move made perfect sense to a political and tactical genius like Gaius Julius Caesar, for his men it meant a voyage into the heart of darkness.

Apart from anything else the islands across the water were known to be under the thrall of a mysterious priestly caste called druids. The Romans had encountered them before, among the Gauls.
They were keepers of knowledge of all kinds, including medicine, as well as judges and arbiters, advisors to kings. Apparently they had means of divining the future but, worst of all, they presided
over human sacrifices. As well as seeing to it that enemy captives were put to death, they meted out the same fate to their own people whenever the gods required it.