Hierarchy was marked out with chieftains and sub-chieftains,
warriors and priests, farmers and craftsmen, workers and slaves. Slave irons
have been found at a site near St Albans. A gang chain has been discovered on
Anglesey. The funereal practices for the elite dead became more and more
elaborate. In the burial places of the Iron Age chieftains the body was
surrounded by molten silver, cloth of gold, ivory, suits of iron chain mail,
precious cups and bowls. They pre-date the wealth of Sutton Hoo by a thousand
years. Trampled earth was uncovered around the base of one mortuary chamber,
suggesting dancing. The graves of women of high status contained many
ornaments, including mirrors, brooches, bangles, beads, tweezers and bowls. In
one burial a great bowl of bronze had been placed over the woman’s face.
Strong regional identities were in place. In the east
undefended settlements, very much like villages, lay among open fields. In the
south-west small communities lived in defended homesteads, together with
unenclosed settlements sited at a distance; this has been interpreted as a
division between tribal leaders and their subject people. In the north-east was
found a pattern of defended homesteads, while in the north-west a tradition of
roundhouses known as beehive huts existed. The culture of Salisbury Plain,
sometimes known as ‘Wessex culture’, demanded a pattern of large territorial
groupings based around hill forts. There are of course variations on all these
themes, from the pit dwellings carved out of the chalk in Hampshire to the lake
villages of Somerset where round huts were built upon floating islands of logs.
The hill forts themselves are evidence of a strongly ranked
society. They seem to have originated in the neighbourhood of the Cotswolds and
then spread over the whole of central southern England. They demonstrated the
mastery of land and resources, and were therefore a symbol of proprietorship.
Linear earthworks often mark out the boundaries of the territory controlled by
each fort. They became more heavily defended over the period of the Iron Age
and were sometimes occupied for hundreds of years. They resembled towns as much
as forts, with clusters of buildings, streets, temples, storage facilities and
‘zones’ for separate industrial activities. The houses were circular, built of
upright posts, woven together with wattle and sticks of hazel; they had doors
and porches, facing east, and the roofs were generally thatched with reeds or
straw. The thatch was held in place with a daub of dung, clay and straw; since
soot from the peat fires was a valuable manure, it is likely to have been
replaced each year. Archaeologists, reconstructing the interiors of these
houses, have found small cupboards in which weapons were stored. Although their
populations ranged only from 20 to 200 people, we may see in them the
beginnings of urban life in England. The author believes that London was once
just such a hill fort, but the evidence for it is now buried beneath the
megalopolis it has become. All the evidence suggests, however, the existence of
many small tribes living in a state of constant alert against rivals.
There were indeed cattle raids, conflicts between warriors
and large-scale wars. Some hill forts were stormed and burned. Bodies have been
found in the ramparts, their bones marked and hacked. We can expect a tradition
of heroic songs and tales in which the exploits of an individual warrior or
leader were celebrated. They are to be found in the early Irish epics, for
example, which may incorporate stories and refrains from the prehistoric age of
Irish tribes. An analogy with Homer’s Iliad can be made. Indeed it has been
suggested that the epic poem in fact adverts to events in England, in myths and
tales that were then carried by bards eastward to Anatolia.
Yet the various tribes or regional groupings did come
together in a network of alliances and ties of kinship; how else could trade in
commodities such as iron and salt flourish throughout the country? Many of
these smaller clans were in time integrated and, perhaps in the face of threat,
became large units of territory. These were the tribes of England whom the
Romans confronted in their slow progress towards ascendancy. By the end of the
Iron Age certain hill forts had become dominant and assumed the role of
regional capitals. As the population steadily increased, so agriculture became
ever more intensive. The clearance of woodland and forest continued without a
break. The farmers began to work the thick clay soils in earnest, with the help
of the heavy wheeled plough. This was the solid basis for the agricultural
economy of England over the next 2,500 years. Wheat was grown in Somerset, and
barley in Wiltshire; that broad pattern is still the same.
A visitor sailed to England’s shores. The Greek merchant and
explorer Pytheas made landfall in 325 BC. He named the island as Prettanike or
Brettaniai. This is the origin of the name of Britain. The land of the Picts
was known by the diminutive of Prydyn. Pytheas visited Cornwall, and watched
the inhabitants work the ore and purify the metal. On another stage of his
journey he was told by the natives that the mother of Apollo, Leto, was born on
this island ‘and for this reason Apollo is honoured among them above all other
gods; and the inhabitants are looked upon as priests of Apollo’.
He also reports that he had seen ‘a wonderful sacred
precinct of Apollo and a celebrated temple festooned with many offerings’; it
was ‘spherical in shape’ and close by there was a city ‘sacred to this god’ whose
kings are called ‘Boreades’ after the god of the cold north wind. The identity
of this precinct, temple and city have long been a matter of debate. Some argue
that Pytheas was describing the sacred landscape of Stonehenge and Silbury
Hill; others believe that it refers to a temple of Apollo where Westminster
Abbey now stands, and the adjacent ‘city’ of London.
It is clear, however, that Pytheas was reporting the claims
of a people deeply imbued in ritual worship, with the names of Apollo and
Boreas simply being used by him as tokens of holiness. The Parthenon had
already been built in Athens, and all foreign gods were seen by the Greeks in
classical terms. The religion of the Iron Age in England, however, has always
been associated with the cult of Druidism.
It may also be glimpsed within the sacred geometries of Iron
Age art (still known inaccurately as Celtic art). It was an art of vision,
penetrating beyond the appearances of things. It traced living lines of energy
and purpose with spirals and swastikas, curves and circles, whirling together
in an intricate network of shapes and patterns. It is in no sense primitive or
barbaric; on the contrary it is ingenious and complex, showing a mastery of
artificial form and linearity. These intricate patterns are clearly related to
the whorls, spirals and concentric circles carved upon Mesolithic passage
graves several thousand years earlier; they suggest a broad continuity of
belief and worship throughout the prehistoric age.
At the core of Iron Age religion were the persistent and
continuing native beliefs of England, enshrined in certain sacred places. Caves
were often holy. The Druids themselves are known to have congregated in sacred
groves, where ancient trees provided the setting for ritual practice. Powerful
gods had to be propitiated. An early Bronze Age barrow in Yorkshire yielded up
certain drum-shaped idols carved out of chalk, with what seem to be human
eyebrows and noses. 2,000 years after these images were carved a British
writer, Gildas, was still moved to condemn the ‘diabolical idols … of which we
still see some mouldering away within or without the deserted temples, with the
customary stiff and deformed features’. So there was a long tradition of
worship that may have had its earliest origins in the Neolithic period. The
image of the horned god Cernunnos has been found at Cirencester. The horse
goddess Epona has been discovered in Wiltshire and in Essex. A carving of the
hammer god Sucellus has been unearthed in East Stoke, Nottinghamshire. The mysterious
god, Lud or Nud, is still commemorated by Ludgate Hill and Ludgate Circus in
London.
Religious sanctuaries were established all over the land,
and it is safe to assume that even the smallest settlement had its own central
shrine. They have been discovered in hill forts, within ditched enclosures,
along boundaries, and above barrow graves; they are often marked by the
subsequent presence of Roman temples or early Christian churches. Certain
places were deemed to be blessed. Many English churches will be lying upon
prehistoric originals. In Iron Age England, it was believed that the cock
served as a defence against thunderstorms; that is why cocks are still to be
found on church steeples. They became known as weathercocks.
Human sacrifice helped to sanctify the land. A male body was
found in a bog in Cheshire; he had been bludgeoned in the head, and his throat
cut before being deposited in the marsh. Many skeletons have been found at the
bottom of pits in southern England, their bodies flexed in an unnatural
posture. There is also the known prehistoric affinity for severed heads,
believed to be the site of the soul or spirit. Skulls have been found lined up
in a row. The bodies of defeated enemies were often beheaded, and their heads
buried or placed in running water. Three hundred skulls, dating from the
Neolithic to the Iron Age, have been found in the Thames. The river was once an
English Golgotha, the place of skulls.
Caesar’s account of the high priests of England, the Druids,
adverts to the practice of human sacrifice. They created images of wicker-work
which ‘they fill with living men and, setting them on fire, the men are
destroyed by the flames’. In his account the Druid priests are the lawmakers of
the land who determine rewards and punishments. They settle disputes over
boundaries and over property.
The Roman writer Pliny records that they ‘esteem nothing
more sacred than the mistletoe’; the high priests ‘select groves of oak, and
use the leaves of the mistletoe in all sacred rites’. The sacrificial victim
was tied to the trunk of the oak tree, and his priestly killers wore chaplets
of oak leaves. They practised divination, magic and astrology; they believed in
the immortality of the soul that passes through various incarnations. This
doctrine of immortality was considered by the Roman writers to make clear the
contempt for death revealed by the native English; the English were noted for
this quality of indifference in subsequent centuries.
The Druids worshipped the sun and moon also, but their solar
belief persisted long after the passing of the priestly caste. A butcher from
Standon in Hertfordshire was accused, in 1452, of proclaiming that there was no
god except the sun and the moon. In the second chapter of Tess of the
d’Urbervilles Thomas Hardy remarks that ‘old customs’ last longer on clay
soils. The power of the Druids was retained by the bishops of the Anglo-Saxon
church, just as the tonsure of early Christian monks may reflect Druidical
practice.
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