ANCIENT BRITAIN
AND
THE INVASIONS OF
JULIUS CAESAR
BY
T. RICE HOLMES
Hon. Litt.D. (Dublin)
AUTHOR OF ‘A HISTORY OF THE INDIAN MUTINY’
‘CAESAR’S CONQUEST OF GAUL,’ ETC.
‘There seems no human thought so primitive as to have
lost its bearing on our own thought, nor so ancient as to
have broken its connection with our own life’.—E. B. Tylor.
OXFORD
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1907

HENRY FROWDE, M.A.
PUBLISHER TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD
LONDON, EDINBURGH
NEW YORK AND TORONTO

PREFACE

This book is in one sense a companion of my Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul; and much that was written in the preface of that volume is equally applicable here. The last three chapters of Part I, and the later articles in Part II, are intended to do for Britain what I formerly tried to do for Gaul; but whereas the main object was then to illustrate the conquest, and the opening chapter was merely introductory, my aim in these pages has been to tell the story of man’s life in our island from the earliest times in detail. What has been called ‘prehistory’ cannot be written without knowledge of archaeology; but from the historical standpoint archaeological details must be handled, not for their own sake, but only in so far as they illustrate the development of culture. The two books are constructed on the same principle: in this, as in the other, the second part is devoted to questions which could not properly be discussed in narrative or quasi-narrative chapters, though I am encouraged by the judgement of expert critics, British, American, and Continental, of Caesar’s Conquest of Gaul, to hope that general readers who are interested in these matters may not find the articles which deal with them tedious. Those on Stonehenge, Ictis, and the ethnology of Britain, although they controvert certain opinions which are commonly accepted, will, I hope, tend to place facts in their true light. Two articles deal with well-worn themes,—the identity of the Portus Itius, and the place of Caesar’s landing in Britain. These problems have been pronounced by eminent scholars, including Mommsen, to be insoluble; nevertheless, I venture to affirm that in both cases the inquiry has now been worked out to demonstration. Critics who may be disposed to regard this claim as arrogant or frivolous will, I trust, read the articles through before passing judgement upon them. The questions would have been settled long ago if any competent writer had bestowed upon them as much care as has been expended in investigating Hannibal’s passage over the Alps.

Books and articles on various branches of the study of ancient Britain are practically innumerable; no other book, intended to treat it comprehensively from the beginning to the Roman invasion of A.D. 43, has, so far as I know, yet appeared.

I wish to express my gratitude to all who have in any way helped me. I am indebted to Sir John Evans for figures 1-6, 8-11, 14, 15, and 18-29, as well as for an opinion, most kindly given, in regard to certain coins which are not mentioned in his Coins of the Ancient Britons; to the Director of the British Museum for figures 30, 36-9, 41, 43, and 44; to the Society of Antiquaries for figures 7, 13, 16, 31, 35, and 40; to the Delegates of the Oxford University Press for figures 12 and 32-4; to Dr. Joseph Anderson for figure 17; and to Canon Greenwell for a proof of a valuable and interesting article—‘Early Iron Age Burials in Yorkshire’—which, I believe, is to appear in Archaeologia. Captain Tizard, R.N., F.R.S., kindly answered various questions which I asked him about tidal currents. Mr. E. J. Webb, Sir George Darwin, Professor Postgate, Professor Haverfield, Mr. Clement Reid, F.R.S., Mr. George Barrow, F.G.S., Captain J. Iron, Commander Richmond, R.N., and Commander Boxer, R.N., gave me information, which, in every instance, will be found, acknowledged either in footnotes of Part I, or in Part II, on various points of detail.

It is vain to plead that work would have been better if circumstances had been more favourable. But if any indulgence may be accorded to an author who, except on holidays, can only find leisure for writing or research after he has fulfilled the duties of an exacting profession, and who, in order to gain time, has worked steadily throughout his vacations for nearly thirty years, I am entitled to it.

11 Douro Place, Kensington, W.
October 19, 1907.

CONTENTS

[The maps of South-Eastern Britain and East Kent, like all maps of Ancient Britain, are inevitably inexact; but the errors are unimportant. The Dover cliffs, for instance, have lost by erosion, but one cannot say how much (see pages 528-30); nor is it possible to indicate the exact nature of the slight change which the coast has undergone between Sandown Castle and Walmer Castle (pages 521-5). Again, I have not attempted to delineate the coast west of Pevensey or west or north of Reculver precisely as it was in 55 B.C., because, even if such an attempt had been successful, nothing would have been gained for the purpose of this book. As far as possible, however, the maps represent the conclusions reached in the article on the configuration of the coast of Kent in the time of Caesar. The outline of Richborough harbour and of the estuary between Thanet and the mainland is intended to show approximately the high-water mark of spring tides. At low tide the channel was very narrow (page 519).]

ANCIENT BRITAIN
AND
THE INVASIONS OF JULIUS CAESAR

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

When Caesar was about to sail on his first expedition to Britain, he summoned the Gallic traders whose vessels used to ply between Gaul and the Kentish coast, and tried to elicit from them information; but, to quote his own words, ‘he could not find out either the extent of the island, or what tribes dwelt therein, or their size, or their method of fighting, or their manners and customs, or what harbours were capable of accommodating a large flotilla.’ Even after he had seen the country and its inhabitants with his observant eyes he was not much better informed: all that he could learn about the aborigines he summed up in a single sentence; and later writers, Greek, Italian, and mediaeval—Strabo, Diodorus Siculus, Augustus Caesar, Pomponius Mela, Tacitus, Suetonius, Dion Cassius, Herodian, and the rest—added very little to the knowledge which he had gathered. Yet the materials which are now available for a description of prehistoric and pre-Roman Britain, however limited their range, are so abundant that the difficulty is to use them with discrimination and to fashion the essential into a work of art. How have these materials been obtained? When the general reader takes up a history, he accepts the narrative in a spirit more or less sceptical. He knows that it has been composed, either directly or at second hand, from written, perhaps also from oral testimony; and he rarely troubles himself to inquire what the evidence is, or with what diligence and acuteness it has been sifted. But when he is invited to read an account of the evolution of culture among people who recorded nothing and of whom nothing was recorded, it is natural that he should insist upon peering into the writer’s workshop that he may judge for himself what the materials are worth.

During many centuries, while the materials were most abundant, they remained unused. Many of them were rifled by treasure-seekers, carted away by builders, or destroyed by the plough. Even when the Renaissance turned men’s minds to the study of the past, they had no thought of any sources of information except the written documents which they were only beginning to learn how to use. The Italian scholar, Raymond de Marliano, the Dutch geographer, Abraham Ortels, made futile guesses about topographical questions suggested by Caesar’s Commentaries, but never dreamed that there was anything to be learned of a people who had lived in Britain when the South Foreland and Cape Grisnez were still undivided. Camden travelled over the length and breadth of England, amassing stores of information, much of which he did not know how to interpret, and built up geographical theories upon place-names, which, in default of linguistic science, were of necessity worthless. Even the great French scholars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—Chifflet, Du Fresne, Scaliger, Sanson, and d’Anville—although their geographical essays are still worth reading, failed to determine the port from which Caesar had sailed to Britain. Stukeley, who was one of the first to excavate barrows and describe their contents and who made valuable observations of some of our megalithic monuments, encumbered his folios with fanciful speculations which only served to entertain his contemporaries and to mislead posterity.[1] But these men had no access to the sources which are now open to many who are intellectually their inferiors; and, notwithstanding the smallness of their achievement, they did their work as pioneers.

About the middle of the eighteenth century a spirit of antiquarian curiosity was aroused in England. The Society of Antiquaries, which had been founded in 1717, received in 1752 a charter from George the Second; and in 1770 appeared the first number of their principal organ, Archaeologia, which is still in course of publication. Many of the earlier papers were crude and superficial, showing keen interest in the things of the past, but naturally betraying ignorance of the methods by which alone the significance of antiquarian discoveries could be ascertained. Early in the nineteenth century, however, Sir Richard Colt Hoare and his friend, William Cunnington, began to excavate the barrows of Wiltshire; and with their labours the era of scientific investigation may be said to have begun. Hoare had in earlier life been an ardent fox-hunter; but, as he grew older, he found that barrow-digging was a pastime more exciting still. Craniology was at that time unborn; and Hoare omitted to measure the numerous skeletons which he discovered or to utilize them for the advancement of ethnology. Even the work that he professed to do was often marred by a lack of thoroughness which, although it was inevitable in a pioneer, irritated the critical spirit of later explorers.[2] But with all its limitations the Ancient History of North and South Wiltshire, the first volume of which appeared in 1812, was an important work. A few years earlier, John Frere had recorded in Archaeologia[3] the discoveries of stone implements which he had made at Hoxne in Suffolk. Such discoveries had of course in innumerable instances passed unrecorded. In the British Isles, as in many other lands, flint arrow-heads were regarded by the peasants who found them as fairy-darts; while stone axes, which in Scotland, Ireland, and Cornwall, are still deemed to possess medical virtues, were said to have fallen from the sky.[4] In the time of Charles the Second, however, Sir Robert Sibbald, greatly daring, affirmed that the fairy-darts had been made by man;[5] and nearly a century before the time of Frere an implement, which has since been assigned to the Palaeolithic Age, had been found near Gray’s Inn Lane, and had been vaguely described as ‘a British weapon’. But Frere saw that the tools which he had collected were not to be ascribed even to the ‘painted savages’ who had resisted the invasion of Caesar; and although even he did not suspect their immeasurable antiquity, he declared that they must have belonged to ‘a very remote period indeed’ and to ‘a people who had not the use of metals’. In 1824 Dr. Buckland, who had spent some years in exploring ossiferous caves, published an account of his work in Reliquiae Diluvianae, a book which, by attributing the phenomena that it recorded to an universal deluge, impelled geological research in a wrong direction, and delayed for many years the recognition of the truth that the earlier human occupants of the caves had been contemporary with the mammoth and other extinct animals. Soon afterwards MacEnery, whose example was followed by Godwin Austen, examined Kent’s Cavern near Torquay, a task which was systematically completed some five-and-twenty years ago by a committee of the British Association. It was not, however, before the middle of the nineteenth century that the knowledge of the Stone Ages began to be built up on a sound foundation. From 1841 to 1860 Boucher de Perthes was patiently exploring in the neighbourhood of Abbeville and Amiens the gravels which the river Somme had deposited in the Pleistocene Period, and collecting flints which were proved to have been shaped by the hands of man. Lyell, Prestwich, John Evans, Lubbock, and Flower visited the scene of his labours, and testified to the authenticity of his discoveries; and after long controversy the most reluctant were forced to admit that the human race had existed at a period infinitely more remote than had hitherto been imagined. Similar discoveries were soon made in England, in various European countries, in Africa, Asia, and America. In our islands, as well as on the Continent, as antiquarian zeal became more widely diffused, the need of organized effort was felt; and, side by side with the leading academies—the Society of Antiquaries, the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, the Royal Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, the Royal Irish Academy, the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland, and the Cambrian Archaeological Association—local societies were gradually formed in every important provincial town. Accident from time to time revealed objects for which no search had been made. Ploughmen guiding their teams, navvies working upon roads or in railway-cuttings, miners and quarrymen, labourers draining land, sportsmen groping after game which they had shot, came upon antiquities of the nature of which they were ignorant. Evans, in the intervals of leisure which he could win from a busy life, indefatigably collected implements of stone, bone, and bronze, systematized the discoveries of a host of minor workers, and marshalled facts and deductions in volumes which have become classical; and, not content with this, he supplemented the labours of Akerman, Hawkins, Roach Smith, and others, and revealed to his countrymen the origin, the varieties, and the geographical distribution of the coins which their British ancestors had minted, and the historical value of which he was the first to emphasize. His son, who has lately become famous as the explorer of Crete, carried his researches further afield, but often found time to grapple with British problems; contributed to our knowledge of Stonehenge and other megalithic circles; and by his discoveries at Aylesford in Kent threw a beam of light upon the history of the Celtic Iron Age. Boyd Dawkins explored the caves of Somersetshire, Derbyshire, and Wales. Bateman, Thurnam, Davis, Warne, Greenwell, Mortimer, and Atkinson of Danby continued in a more scientific spirit the labours of Hoare,[6] and recorded the discoveries which they had made in numerous barrows. General Pitt-Rivers brought the experience of a soldier, the sagacity of a man of the world, and the genius which was his own to the investigation of archaeological and anthropological problems; demonstrated the value of thorough excavation[7] and of accurate pictorial illustration; impressed upon the rising school of students the need of precision in recording the circumstances of every find; and by expending a considerable fortune in adding to knowledge set an example of enlightened generosity. Sir Arthur Mitchell, in a series of lectures[8] which have been described as a masterpiece of sceptical irony, warned antiquaries, but in no didactic spirit, to think, and to think again, before they drew conclusions from the records which the spade had revealed. The Devonshire Association appointed committees to examine the antiquities of their richly dowered county, and printed a series of reports upon the megalithic monuments, the graves, and the ‘hut-circles’ of Dartmoor. John Abercromby traced from Great Britain to the original seat of manufacture the sites where the so-called drinking-cups, which accompanied so many British interments of the earlier round barrows, have been found; while Romilly Allen, following in the steps of Wollaston Franks, helped to elucidate the development of the art of the Bronze Age and the Late Celtic Period. Professor Gowland disclosed by excavation the origins of Stonehenge, and by his metallurgical knowledge enabled us to understand the methods of prehistoric miners. Charles Read made intelligible, even to casual visitors, the collection of antiquities in the British Museum which illustrates the culture of the Ages of Stone, Bronze, and Iron. Francis Haverfield, scholar, archaeologist, and practical excavator, while making himself the foremost authority on the history of Roman Britain, incidentally enlarged the records of pre-Roman times. Joseph Anderson carried on the work which Daniel Wilson had begun, and described the successive stages of culture through which the inhabitants of Scotland had passed from the earliest to the beginning of the historic period. Coles, Christison, and Bryce added significant details to the information which his lectures had given. But it would be tedious to prolong the list of workers. Everywhere the success with which the last resting-places of the dead had been made to tell their tale stimulated antiquaries to search for fresh relics that might help them to realize more fully how those dead had lived. Flint quarries and workshops, where primitive tools were fabricated, hut-circles, Scottish brochs, lake-dwellings, pits, and ‘earth-houses’ were explored; and, in response to the exhortations of Pitt-Rivers, camps and other earthworks were patiently excavated, although, for lack of funds, research of this kind has not progressed very far. The exploration of the far-famed marsh-village at Glastonbury is nearly complete; and the results which have been obtained, collated with those that were yielded by the examination of the camps of Cissbury, Lewes, Hod Hill, and Hunsbury, have done much to dispel the old fancy that the ancient Briton was a savage.

But perhaps no intelligent man ever progressed far in archaeological study without discovering for himself this caution:—though the relics of man’s handiwork, unlike his written history, cannot lie, their meaning may in divers ways be misinterpreted. They will not yield it up except to the trained and discerning eye.[9]

Meanwhile toilers in other fields were co-operating with the archaeologists. Physical anthropology began to make strides. Since Davis, Thurnam, and Rolleston described the skeletons which had reposed in the long barrows and the round barrows of Wiltshire, Gloucestershire, Yorkshire, and Northumberland, since Huxley wrote his memoirs on the river-bed skulls of England and Ireland, greater accuracy of method has been evolved, and Beddoe, Turner, Garson, and Haddon have supplemented and corrected their predecessors’ work. Geologists endeavoured to determine the configuration of the land at the time when man first lived in Britain; and a definite result was attained when borings made in implement-bearing beds showed the relative chronology of the period during which palaeolithic hunters had inhabited the eastern counties. Burial customs revealed by the opening of barrows and cists, holes drilled in the stones of dolmens, strange devices sculptured on graves and on rocks, suggested problems as to the religious ideas of the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, which the archaeologist, the ethnographer, and the folklorist attempted to solve. Philologists studied the Celtic languages, and succeeded in some measure in deducing from place-names and other relics of the ancient dialects information bearing upon the history of the invasions and the distribution of the two great branches of the Celtic stock.

A great advance was made when the Comparative Method was brought to bear upon the study of primitive culture. It was recognized that the antiquities of our own island could not be adequately comprehended without reference to those of other lands. For at every turn the inquirer found himself arrested by obstinate questionings. Whence had the immigrants of the Old and the New Stone Age, the Bronze Age, and the Early Iron Age set out? Whence was the knowledge of bronze derived? What was the starting-point of the culture of the Iron Age? What were the first beginnings of Late Celtic Art? How was one to account for the existence in remote countries of this or that British custom? The British archaeologist who would intelligently ponder these questions must take account of the work which has been done by Cartailhac, the brothers Siret, Bertrand, Edouard Piette, Salomon Reinach, Montelius, Sophus Müller, Arthur Evans, Ridgeway, Myres, and Flinders Petrie in elucidating the antiquities of France, Spain, Italy, Central Europe, Scandinavia, the Aegean Sea, North Africa, and Egypt; and the British ethnologist cannot afford to be ignorant of what Broca, Hamy, de Quatrefages, Salmon, Hervé, Manouvrier, Virchow, Ranke, and Sergi have done for the ethnology of Europe. Pitt-Rivers saw that ethnography, which informs us about the arts and crafts, the manners and customs of surviving savage tribes, can give archaeology indispensable aid;[10] and all who have compared the contents of the American Room and the Ethnographical Gallery in the British Museum with what they have seen in the Prehistoric Room will believe the Keeper when he assures them that ‘in all probability the resemblance between the perishable productions of the modern savage and those of prehistoric man, which are now lost, was as great as that which undoubtedly exists in the case of implements of stone and bone which have remained’:[11] but in endeavouring to apply their knowledge to the elucidation of the antiquities of a particular country they will not forget to be on their guard. Nor may we neglect the facts which folk-lore societies have in late years so diligently collected; but those who have learned from the great works of Tylor how much of primitive custom still lingers in the depths of modern civilization will become sceptical when they are invited by less sober reasoners to trace the origin of this or that surviving superstition to any one race or tribe or period of the remote past; and readers who have accepted with enthusiastic admiration the seductive theories of The Golden Bough should weigh well the criticism which Sir Alfred Lyall, qualified by intimacy with primitive peoples as well as by a sceptical and cultivated intellect, has published of that brilliant and truly epoch-making book.

When we have finished our survey of prehistoric times we shall find that while we can still rely upon the aid of the archaeologist and the anthropologist, other materials have been accumulating which will enable us to read our classical texts with an insight that was impossible for the old-fashioned historian. The texts themselves have been purified and restored. Inscriptions have yielded new information on matters of history, ethnology, and religion; and the vast labour which has been expended by those who have striven to elucidate the most interesting of all subjects cannot wholly fail to help us when we inquire what the British Celts thought of man’s relation to the universe. As one scholar after another has noted the significance of dates recorded in Cicero’s correspondence, and compared them with the relevant passages in the Commentaries and other ancient writings, chronological difficulties have gradually disappeared. Physical geography and geology, supported partly by written documents, partly by archaeological discoveries, have combined to reconstruct the map of the coast on which Caesar landed. Astronomers and hydrographers have perfected our knowledge of tidal streams, and thereby forged a key which, for those who possess the indispensable knowledge of seamanship and of ancient military history, can unlock the secrets of Caesar’s voyages. Military experts and soldiers who have served in the field are willing to help us to understand the story of his campaigns.

But after the student has digested all the information which he can extract from books and manuscripts, from museums, from travel and observation, perhaps from practical experience in digging, and, above all, from those who combine learning with knowledge of the world, of affairs, and of men, he will find that his materials are still, and on certain points must always remain inadequate. Some branches of research, indeed, are virtually complete. All, or nearly all, that sepulchres and skulls and coins can teach us of Ancient Britain and its inhabitants we know. Many more implements, weapons, ornaments, and urns will be accumulated; but it may be doubted whether they will add sensibly to that knowledge which is really worth having. But much still remains to be learned. The geological record is still incomplete; and one of our most accomplished field-geologists is hopefully looking forward to a time when it may be possible to determine the uttermost antiquity of man and to illuminate the dark era that intervened between the Pleistocene Period and the apparent commencement of the Neolithic Age.[12] His experience has enabled him to tell archaeologists that in order to solve chronological problems, they cannot afford to neglect even the shells which abound in many burial-mounds.[13] There is room also for many labourers in excavating stone circles, camps, and earthworks, and determining their age, in exploring habitations, wherever they can be found, and learning what they can teach about those who constructed them.[14] What has been already done in this department has produced the most fruitful results: the speculations of Dr. Guest, for instance, in regard to the so-called ‘Belgic ditches’, have been stultified by pick and shovel.[15] But such work, which in other civilized countries is an object of national concern, languishes here for want of funds. No British Government can expect support from the intelligence and the public spirit of its constituents in spending money upon archaeological research, or has the courage to give them a lead;[16] and where are the wealthy Englishmen who will follow the example of their American cousins in endowing such work?

Nevertheless, enough is already known to justify an attempt to create a synthetical work, the aim of which shall be to portray in each successive stage and to trace the evolution of the culture—nay, in some sort even to construct a history—of prehistoric Britain, and to rewrite the history of the period which is illustrated by contemporary records. Not only is the subject fascinating; it is an indispensable introduction to the history of England. I have tried to bear ever in mind the interdependence of all the sciences which can help to restore the past, and to remember the warning, ‘Let him that thinketh he standeth take heed lest he fall.’ It is easy to laugh at the guesses of Camden and the theories of Stukeley; but they were only framing the hypotheses which are as necessary for the progress of archaeology as of other sciences; and certain theories which in our own day have been acclaimed with enthusiasm, while serving their purpose like theirs, will, like theirs, be found open to criticism.

But we need not exercise ourselves overmuch in the region of theory. Though we must be content to remain ignorant of many things, the story of Ancient Britain, gaining as it progresses firmness of outline and fullness of detail, can be constructed upon a basis of fact.

CHAPTER II

THE PALAEOLITHIC AGE

Reasons for devoting a chapter to the Palaeolithic Age.

A chapter devoted to Palaeolithic Man may perhaps appear irrelevant to a work the aim of which is to serve as an introduction to English history; for it has been questioned whether in this country he left any descendants, and therefore whether he exercised even the smallest influence upon the later immigrants. But in France, if not here, the Palaeolithic merged, perhaps by a long period of transition, into the Neolithic Age:[17] the neolithic inhabitants of Britain were of course descended from palaeolithic ancestors; and in every part of the world in which it existed the palaeolithic culture was apparently much the same. There are therefore other reasons besides that of sentiment for attempting in this book to describe the life of primitive men and the surroundings in which they lived: yet sentiment has its weight; for no one who is not heedless of the past would forget the efforts of those who, in hard struggle with nature and with fierce beasts, were the unconscious founders of European civilization. Without the faith of the Shinto ancestor-worshipper one may share his daily repeated pious gratitude,—‘Ye forefathers of the generations, and of our families, and of our kindred, unto you, the founders of our homes, we utter the gladness of our thanks.’[18]

Tertiary man.

The palaeolithic people had acquired a degree of skill in the manufacture of stone tools which is only attainable by the most practised modern imitators. But the progress which they made during the incalculably long period of their existence was so small that they must have needed ages to ascend to the level at which we are able to observe them. Therefore, although no skeletons, no implements have yet been found which can be referred, in the opinion of all experts, to the Tertiary Period, the most sceptical are willing to believe that man, even if he did not deserve the appellation of Homo sapiens, did then wander upon the face of the earth.[19] But how, when he had assumed the erect position and had begun to make intelligent use of the hands which gave him such an advantage in contending with other carnivorous animals more powerful than himself, he learned slowly and by repeated efforts to chip the flints that he picked up into serviceable shapes; how in the struggle for a livelihood the stronger or the more cunning prevailed; how with developing intelligence came keener susceptibility to pain as well as to pleasure; how men’s fancies were quickened by light and darkness, sun, moon, and stars, and their fears excited by storm and flood and fire; how they strove to communicate to each other their alarms, their desires, and their joys—these things may only be imagined; and the imagination of those who have read most wisely and have most observantly studied the ways of modern savages will lead them least astray.

The Ice Age.

The Tertiary was merging into the Quaternary or Pleistocene Period when the climate which had before fostered the palms and crocodiles whose fossils have been discovered in the London Clay,[20] but had been gradually changing, became intensely cold. Snow fell thickly upon the mountains of Scandinavia; glaciers began to creep down the valleys; and gradually the ice accumulated until it overspread the whole of Northern Europe, filled the basins of the Baltic and the North Sea, hid mountains and uplands in Scotland, and choked the dales of Northern England, of the Midlands, and of Wales; while isolated glaciers were formed even so far southward as the valleys of the Beaujolais and the Lyonnais. The ice has left its record upon the Highland and Cumbrian mountains, whose rugged crags it moulded into flowing curves; upon rocks which were scratched by stones embedded in slowly moving glaciers; in the mud, stiff and tenacious, which they deposited as they grided over many kinds of rocks, and which, being interspersed with stones, large and small, is called boulder-clay; in rocks which they transported and dropped far from their native sites, and by which the directions that they followed can still be traced; in moraines which mark the limits of their descent and their recession; in lakes that were formed, after the ice had disappeared, in glens which moraines had dammed;[21] in the Arctic plants which survive on mountains, and in those whose fossil remains have been found in Norfolk near the level of the sea. In many places the boulder-clay lies in two or more layers, separated by stratified sands and gravels, from which it has been generally inferred that the Ice Age was interrupted by a period—here and there by short intervals—during which the climate was mild. Told briefly and in general terms, the tale which a learner might piece together from geological textbooks[22] is something like this. The cold was most intense during the earlier stage, when the lower boulder-clay was being deposited, and, little by little, Britain rose until it became one with the Continent, with Ireland, and with Scandinavia, and extended far westward into the Atlantic Ocean. Then, we are told, the ice-sheet that covered Scandinavia was six thousand feet thick; and though it became thinner as it advanced southward, it shrouded the hill-tops in Scotland, where boulders were lifted right over the water-parting, and dropped on the western side, and scored its marks upon rocks in the Lake District at heights of two thousand five hundred feet; while, spreading over Ireland, it went out to sea beyond Cork and Kerry, where the wall of ice broke off and floated away in bergs. Then the land slowly sank until in the interglacial period only the hills stood out above the sea, and Great Britain became an archipelago. Again the movement was upward, though often interrupted and perhaps not general in extent: the climate was again becoming severe; and, although the rigours of the first period were not repeated, local glaciers crept down the higher valleys north of the Midlands, while icebergs floated over the parts that remained submerged and over the North Sea. Now too, as in the earlier period, the cold was not everywhere continuous: there were oscillations during which the glaciers alternately advanced and retreated. As the Ice Age was beginning to near its end, the land continued to rise until the North Sea, the English Channel, and the Irish Sea once more disappeared. In the latest stage of all, when Arctic conditions were about to vanish even in our northern latitudes, there was a gradual subsidence: Scotland was lowered about one hundred feet beneath the present level of the sea, as the highest ‘raised beach’ along the shores of the great estuaries testifies; and the waters rushed in over the sinking valley of the Dover Strait.

Such was the orthodox faith: but the rising geologists have discarded some of its articles; and even among the faithful there are pious doubters. Many authorities deny that the sea-shells which are found on hills in North Wales, Cheshire, and elsewhere, prove that they were once submerged: those shells, they insist, were ploughed up by glaciers out of the sea-floor; and they require us to believe that they were carried up the sides of the hills to heights of thirteen hundred and fifty feet above the sea-level.[23] But although these shells are probably not in their original position, and the mere presence of marine organisms is no sufficient proof of former submergence, shells have been found near Inverness, five hundred feet above the sea, in the very place where they lived and died. Still, it does not follow that the submergence which they attest was interglacial.[24] Some inquirers believe that the glaciers advanced and retreated once and no more;[25] that there was only one slight elevation of the land and one slight subsidence: others that Britain was not only elevated twice, but also twice partially submerged; others that it was finally severed from the Continent in the earlier part of the Ice Age, when the drainage of Northern Europe, pouring into the North Sea and barred by the ice-sheet from escaping northwards, cut for itself a channel across the isthmus which now lies below the Dover Strait.[26] One expert still insists that when man first entered Britain the whole country stood at least six hundred feet above its present level:[27] another, in the same work, denies that its greatest elevation was more than seventy feet;[28] and their editor looks helplessly on. One writer suggests that there may never have been an Ice Age, in the strictest sense of the term, at all, but only local glaciers, such as now exist in Greenland.[29] Another has laboured to show that the accumulation of ice-sheets ‘merely marked one or more culminating epochs in a period when the climate was at least as commonly temperate as Arctic’.[30] Others even now maintain that not one only, but five interglacial periods interrupted the intense cold;[31] others again that there was no interglacial period at all, but only local ameliorations of climate.[32] Another fertile theme of controversy has been the origin of the boulder-clays. But the confession of a Fellow of the Royal Society, who, as a member of the Geological Survey, lived in Norfolk for eight years, studying its geology, suggests that, after all, a sense of humour may compensate for inability to fathom the mysteries of the Ice Age. ‘After spending about a year in Norfolk,’ he says, ‘I began to believe I knew all about the drifts, but during the following seven years of my sojourn in that county, as I moved from place to place, I somehow seemed to know less and less, and I cannot say what would have been the result, but fortunately the geological survey of the county came to an end.’[33] Fortunately, too, it is not essential to our study of palaeolithic man to decide in every case between the theories of rival geologists. All admit that in Britain the Thames was the extreme southern limit of glacial movement, although even in the southern fringe Arctic conditions prevailed; that glaciers covered a large part of the country north of the Thames, and on the higher regions coalesced into ice-sheets: the view that the lower boulder-clay was a moraine profonde has at last been generally adopted;[34] while almost all agree that there was at least one interglacial period, and that there were climatic variations in certain tracts. Nevertheless one of the ablest and most experienced of our field geologists has recently given weighty reasons for his own conviction that even this solitary age of amelioration should not be regarded as an established fact.[35]

Continental Britain.

But, if we are to study the Palaeolithic Age intelligently, we must endeavour to test for ourselves the dogma that Britain was then continental. That dogma has recently been questioned by geologists who have minutely re-examined in the field the phenomena of the Glacial Epoch. Mr. Clement Reid, for instance, holds that in the Palaeolithic Age England never rose more than seventy feet above its present level,[36] and that men first entered it across a narrow strait which was formed in the earlier period of glaciation.[37] It is certain that the sea then washed the coast of Sussex and the western counties; for near Selsea there is a patch of boulder-clay—the only one south of the Thames—which must have been deposited by shore-ice, and there are rocks belonging to Bognor or the Isle of Wight, to the Channel Islands, and to Brittany, which were transported by icebergs and dropped when they melted under the summer sun.[38] Again, before the first English boulder-clay was formed Arctic plants flourished near Cromer; and, says Mr. Reid,[39] ‘as these occur just above the present sea-level, and lie evenly on the strata below without deeply channelling them, the height of the land at the commencement of the Glacial Epoch, in Norfolk at any rate, must have been almost the same as it is now’. The same observer assures us that in Southern Britain the first intense cold was succeeded, after an interval of which geology has nothing to tell, by an interglacial period in which the land sunk about one hundred and forty feet below its present level, so that shingle was deposited on what is now Portsdown Hill;[40] and that it then gradually rose until, long before the second glaciation began, its level, marked by fresh-water and estuarine deposits, once more virtually coincided with the present line.[41] But, he tells us, at some time after the disappearance of the ice which deposited the latest boulder-clay of Norfolk the land stood rather higher than now;[42] and he holds that even in the early part of the Neolithic Age Britain must have been almost connected with the Continent, for many of the river valleys were excavated to depths of from sixty to seventy feet below the present level of the sea.[43] The submerged forests of Devonshire, Cornwall, and the Bristol Channel, which contain traces of neolithic handiwork, flourished at a time when the land stood from fifty to seventy feet above its present elevation.[44]

But there are other facts which demonstrate that at some time after the first period of intense cold—perhaps in that interval of which geology has nothing to tell—the Continent must have included Britain. As we shall presently see, not only the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the glutton, and other Arctic animals, but also many species which prefer a temperate climate, and others which are now tropical, lived in this country side by side with palaeolithic man. Nearly all of them had been represented here before the earliest glaciers of Scotland were formed.[45] But even on the southern side of the Thames the cold was so intense during the earlier part of the Ice Age that none of the tropical, none even of the temperate species could there have lived: since the land was barren, treeless, and frozen,[46] even the mammoth, protected though it was by its woolly coat, could have found little food;[47] and large herds of Arctic animals travelled as far southward as Italy and Spain.[48] It is therefore evident that the beasts of tropical and of temperate climes whose remains have been found in the river-drift and in caves along with palaeolithic implements must have entered Britain after the coldest period had ceased.[49] Moreover, vast quantities of bones of Pleistocene mammals, some of which, such as the reindeer, have never been found in Britain in preglacial deposits, have been dredged up out of the bed of the North Sea, principally from the Dogger Bank;[50] and it is therefore clear that at some time after the climax of the Glacial Period that sea or a large part of it did not exist. It cannot indeed be proved that the men of the river-drift and the caves entered Britain as soon as the other animals;[51] and possibly the Dover Strait may have existed as a narrow channel at the time of their arrival: but since the bones that were raised from the Dogger Bank appear to belong to the time when the Thames was laying down the gravels in which men’s tools have been found,[52] it seems probable that the land bridge was standing in some part of the Palaeolithic Age.

The relation of palaeolithic man to the Ice Age.

It has been demonstrated that palaeolithic men were living in East Anglia after glaciers had finally disappeared from that part of the country. The valleys of the Ouse and its tributaries, in the gravels of which their implements are to be found, were worn down through boulder-clay.[53] Excavations at Hoxne in Suffolk have shown that the people who left their tools there lived at a time which was separated by two climatic waves, attested by the flora of two sets of strata, from the age in which the latest boulder-clay of that district had been deposited.[54] Moreover, in many cases in which evidence has been adduced to show that palaeolithic remains are of glacial or interglacial date, doubts have arisen either as to the artificial character of the flints or as to the age of the beds in which they were found.[55] When, for instance, a member of the Geological Survey announced that he had found palaeolithic implements at Brandon in Suffolk in three interglacial beds, separated by layers of boulder-clay,[56] Sir John Evans suggested that the clay was not in its original position, but had slipped down from a higher level.[57] Again, Dr. Henry Hicks and Sir Joseph Prestwich were convinced that the cave of Cae Gwyn in the Vale of Clwyd had been inhabited before the climax of the Ice Age.[58] Here a flint flake was taken out of earth separated by a superincumbent bed of clay from a layer of sand and gravel, above which again rested boulder-clay that, in Hicks’s judgement, showed no sign of having ever been disturbed, and which, in the opinion of Mr. Clement Reid,[59] must have been deposited before the last glaciation of the district. Even this evidence, however, is not unanimously accepted. Flints have also been found in the Cromer Forest Bed at East Runton, which was certainly preglacial; but Sir John Evans cannot see on them the faintest marks of human workmanship.[60]

Nevertheless, it is not improbable that when the hunters whose tools have been exhumed from the drift of South-Eastern Britain were living in a comparatively mild climate, Scotland, the Lake Country, and the highlands of Yorkshire and Wales may still have been partially buried beneath ice.[61] The high-level drift of the Thames valley, which has yielded so many implements, is believed by eminent geologists to have been laid down at a time when ice spread over Northern Britain;[62] and in support of this view it has been contended that in those regions no palaeolithic implements have been found.[63] The argument cannot be easily set aside; but it has been pointed out that in the northern districts, owing to the extreme scarcity of flint, stone tools could only have been made of harder rocks, on which it is not so easy to detect marks of human agency; that the alluvial deposits in those parts are not readily accessible to search; and that, if they are patiently explored, implements may yet be recovered from them.[64] Some years, however, have elapsed since this suggestion was made; and it has not yet been verified. Moreover, the absence from the country north of Yorkshire, save in a few preglacial deposits, of such bones as have been found with palaeolithic remains seems to indicate that the animals contemporary with palaeolithic man were unable to find food in Northern Britain owing to the continuance of an Arctic climate.[65] Man was undoubtedly living in Southern Britain in the cold period that succeeded the so-called interglacial period of Sussex and Hampshire; for the plateau gravels that cap the Bournemouth cliffs, in which his tools have been found, are older than the valley gravels of the Hampshire Avon and the Stour, which were formed towards the end of the Ice Age by torrents that streamed over frozen chalk downs impervious to water and swept away the fragments of their crumbling surface.[66] Furthermore, stone implements have been found at Caddington below, and near London embedded in, a stratum known as ‘contorted drift’, which is believed to have been formed in a period of great cold;[67] and it is merely a question of words whether this period is to be included in the last phase of the Ice Age.[68]

‘Eolithic’ man?

But there is one district from which evidence has been obtained that has convinced many who sought conviction, that there were men in Britain before the first British palaeolithic tool was made. In the village of Ightham, near Sevenoaks, lives a tradesman, named Benjamin Harrison, whose discoveries have caused much searching of heart, if they have not revolutionized our knowledge of the life of early man. In 1885 he began to search for old stone implements on the chalk plateau between the valleys of the Medway and the Darent. There, embedded in patches of gravel that must have been drifted on to the plateau from hills higher still, which had been already worn down by denudation even when palaeolithic hunters were roaming among herds of mammoths in the valley of the Thames, he found flints of divers shapes which seemed to him to bear sure traces of man’s handiwork, and which have been termed ‘eoliths’, or stone implements of a dawning age. Nearly all of them, indeed, were so rude that the chipping on their edges has been ascribed by sceptics to the action of nature. But if even a small fraction of them could be proved to be authentic, the contention of their finder would be established. They recur, again and again, in certain well-defined and peculiar shapes; the chips have in many cases been removed not from the exposed parts but from concave sides which, he would have us believe, natural agents could hardly have affected;[69] if Sir John Evans and other experts are unable to accept them as artificial, Canon Greenwell,[70] Pitt-Rivers,[71] and Prestwich[72] were convinced that they had been wrought by man; even the labourers who picked them out of the gravel hardly ever failed to distinguish them from the surrounding flints;[73] and, if we may believe the champions of their authenticity, those who assert that they were shaped by nature have failed to produce stones of similar forms from the valley-drift.[74] Now when the hunters of the Thames valley were making their tools, Britain had the same main features of hill and dale that it has to-day; but when the gravels were being drifted on to the Kentish plateau, Thames and Medway were yet unborn; and, filling the great valley that now lies between the North Downs and the Lower Greensand hills, some five miles further south, the plateau rose southward to Central Wealden uplands two thousand feet or more above the sea. With no special knowledge of geology the antiquary who spends a holiday in walking from Sevenoaks or Wrotham on to the plateau may satisfy himself that this is true. Mingled with the eoliths in the patches of drift are fragments of chert that must have been washed down from the Lower Greensand at a time when it rose high above the plateau’s level; for south of the eolithic area, inclining upward below the chalk and below the Upper Greensand, the outcrop of the Lower Greensand shows itself still. The plateau drift lies upon rock of preglacial age;[75] and although there is no evidence that it is itself older than the Pleistocene period, some geologists hold that it was deposited soon after, perhaps before, British glaciers began to form.[76]

But assuming that the eoliths are artificial, does it follow that they are older than the oldest palaeoliths, or that they were wrought by a race different from the men of the valleys? Mr. Clement Reid has pointed out that the gravel at Alderbury, some three miles below Salisbury, in which multitudes of eoliths have been found, is on exactly the same level as that of a gravel three miles lower down the valley, where Prestwich picked up a palaeolithic implement which had fallen from a yet higher elevation.[77] If the position of this implement was an index of its age, eoliths were being used in Wiltshire after palaeoliths had begun to be manufactured.[78] On the other hand, it is asserted that eoliths have lately been found in Tertiary deposits on the high plateau above the Avon;[79] and one geologist, who rejects all eoliths, would argue that Benjamin Harrison’s labours have not been vain. Many palaeolithic implements have been found on the Kentish plateau, but never embedded in association with eoliths: most of them are unworn, and look as if they had remained on the very spot where they were lost; and it is easy to see that they are far less ancient than the eoliths. But certain implements have also been found there which, although they were not lying in the gravels, appeared to bear marks of having been derived from them and washed down in the same drift that contains the eoliths. Like the latter they were stained deep brown, covered with glacial scratches, and coated with the white deposit of silica.[80] If this argument had been generally accepted, one might conclude that the greater antiquity of British man does not depend for its proof upon the authenticity of the eoliths. What all admit is that in France flints of eolithic form have been found even in Tertiary beds.[81]

But while the extreme antiquity of many eoliths is certain, the question of their authenticity has recently been debated with renewed and redoubled vigour. About two years ago an eminent French palaeontologist, Monsieur Marcellin Boule, announced that in the process of manufacturing cement at Mantes many flints had been converted into eolithic forms;[82] and it has been contended that the conditions which were actually observed in the factory were analogous to those of the torrential streams by which flints may have been dashed hither and thither as they were swept on to the Kentish plateau in primaeval times.[83] An ardent advocate of the authenticity of eoliths insisted that some of the Kentish types would be looked for in vain among the machine-made specimens from Mantes;[84] but a sceptic affirmed that he had himself found an eolith, manifestly untouched by man, with its notch accurately fitting against another stone, the two having been ground together by a natural process which he described as the slipping, sliding, and foundering of the insoluble surface material from higher to lower levels.[85] Although it was objected that certain rectangular eoliths with blunt edges could not have been produced except by art,[86] it is permissible to doubt whether the human origin of eoliths will ever be established beyond dispute; and he who reflects that they have been met with not only in Tertiary beds but in those immeasurably later deposits which were contemporary with or but little older than palaeolithic man[87] will leave them for the present without regret to the consideration of enthusiasts.

The environment of palaeolithic man in Britain.

Let us then try to conceive of the environment of those palaeolithic hunters of whose culture we have clearer indications in a late phase of the Ice Age, when the glaciers of Southern Britain had passed away. Then the configuration of the country was very different from that which we behold. The chalk ranges of Kent and of Picardy were unbroken. The Thames, fed sometimes by torrential rains, flowing rapidly and fitfully in the broad shallow valley which it was excavating, was depositing gravels on the slopes that bordered it, a hundred feet above the level of its existing waters,[88] and wandering far eastward across a plain from whose now sunken surface bones of mammoth and reindeer, of hyena and bear have been dredged, to swell that greater Rhine which found no outlet till it reached a far northern sea. Mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and giant elks with antlers ten feet across, roamed in the forests; hippopotamuses swam in the streams;[89] brown bears and grizzly bears and lions and hyenas made their dens in caves, and dragged into their dark and sinuous recesses the prey which they had torn down in the open.

Whence did he come?

The earlier palaeolithic immigrants, impelled perhaps by scarcity of game, had crossed the valley of the Dover Strait doubtless from the nearer parts of France or Belgium; but the original home of the race is unknown, for palaeolithic tools have been found not only in this island and almost every European country except Scandinavia, but also in North Africa, in the valley of the Nile,[90] in Palestine and Asia Minor, the Euphrates Valley, Somaliland, India, and North America: as a high authority has remarked, they are ‘so identical in form and character with British specimens that they might have been manufactured by the same hands’;[91] and the same may be said of those which were wrought by the Tasmanians, who, fifty years ago, had not yet been exterminated by the pioneers of Christian civilization.[92]

Chronological puzzles.

Many attempts have been made to calculate the number of millenniums that have elapsed since our Palaeolithic Age began and since it came to its end. Croll, the author of the astronomical theory of the Ice Age, finally concluded that that epoch ceased about eighty thousand years ago;[93] and Sir Archibald Geikie laboured in his youth to estimate the time which the rivers would have taken to excavate their valleys from the days when they were depositing the high-level gravels to the era when they reached their present depth.[94] But any one who uses his powers of reflection will see how many elements of uncertainty must stultify such a method as this;[95] and, since the cause of the Ice Age remains unknown, the calculations of Croll were futile.[96] Indeed, if it were possible to prove that eighty thousand years have passed since the beginning or since the end of the Palaeolithic Age, not much would be gained; for whose mind can conceive what such a period means? The wiser archaeologists have given up the quest of chronological precision; and they know that the imagination may be stimulated by more legitimate means. Go to Caversham and stand upon the gravels washed down by the Thames in his lusty youth:[97] one hundred and twenty feet below he is flowing now; think of the ages that passed while his waters were hollowing out that valley, which was as it is still before the Palaeolithic Age had passed away. Walk along the cliff near Bournemouth, and look out over the Solent Sea. That cliff was once a river bank; and even the cautious geologist who has described how Hampshire was wrought into its present form is willing to believe that man had then appeared in our land. Where you see salt water he would have seen dry land, bounded far away by a range of hills which linked the downs of the Isle of Wight to those that rise behind Weymouth Bay, and of which the Needles remain as lonely relics: he would have seen the Solent flow, a mighty river, enriched by the tribute of the Stour, the Avon, the Itchen, and the Test.[98] Ascend the hill on which stands Dover Castle, and gaze upon Cape Grisnez. Let the waters beneath you disappear: across the chalk that once spanned the Channel like a bridge men walked from the white cliff that marks the horizon to where you stand. No arithmetical chronology can spur the imagination to flights like these.[99]

Palaeolithic skeletons.

The dwellers on the plateau, if they did exist in preglacial times, have left us no memorial save their tools: but can we picture to ourselves the lineaments of the palaeolithic hunters who came after them? Human bones, including two perfect skulls, closely associated with the bones of hyenas, have been recovered from a cave near Plymouth. The average height of the people to whom they belonged was little more than five feet: the skulls have hardly been described with sufficient accuracy to enable us to compare them with others of the same period; but, in regard to breadth and to the degree of projection of the lower jaw, they were not very different from the majority of modern British skulls.[100] Two other human skulls have been found in England for which palaeolithic age has been claimed—one near Swanscombe in Kent, the other near Bury St. Edmunds; but the former may not be as old as the bed from which it was unearthed; and the other was so broken that its contour could hardly be restored.[101] But almost all the older palaeolithic skulls that have been found in Western Europe belong to the same type, which is generally called after the famous specimen that was exhumed nearly half a century ago in the Neander valley in Rhenish Prussia, and of which the most characteristic examples were derived from a cavern at Spy in the province of Namur. The Swanscombe skull has somewhat similar characters; and it has been supposed that the earlier palaeolithic inhabitants of Britain belonged to the Neanderthal race. Unfortunately, however, the dates of the Neanderthal and Spy specimens cannot be fixed. The latter may belong to the comparatively advanced period in which the best palaeolithic stone implements of France were manufactured: the former was not seen in place by a competent observer, and its age is quite uncertain.[102] If the very few skeletons that we possess are typical, these men were short, big-boned, and powerfully built. Their heads were long and narrow, their foreheads amazingly low and retreating, and their jaws heavy and projecting. But their most striking features were enormously massive and outstanding brow ridges. Although the Neanderthal skull was described by Huxley as the most ape-like of all human skulls, and although for some time after its discovery it was the subject of animated discussion, it and its congeners were thenceforward regarded by all anatomists until the beginning of the present century as human in the strictest sense of the word. Within the last few years, however, a German anthropologist has endeavoured to prove that it and the two skulls of Spy may only be called human in a limited sense: he refuses to class them under the head of Homo sapiens, and refers them to an older species, which he calls Homo primigenius. This view, however, has not made influential converts: the Neanderthal skull was capacious enough to lodge a brain as large as that of many a living savage; and trained observers have pointed out that skulls of like contour have belonged in modern times to men of considerable mental power.[103] A considerable number of skeletons have lately been discovered in Moravia, which, although like the Neanderthal race they had long skulls and prominent brows, belonged to a higher type, and, as the length of their thigh-bones showed, were of great stature;[104] while the caves of Baoussé-Roussé, near Mentone, were the resting-place of very ancient men, in whose skeletons anatomists have detected certain negroid characteristics, although their skulls must have contained a large volume of brain.[105]

But the Palaeolithic Age was of such vast duration that Palaeolithic artists. before its close Britain may well have been invaded by new races. In the latest period there were living in the Riviera a people whose physical features connect them with the earliest French neolithic race; and in South-Western France skulls of like type have been found at Laugerie-Basse and Chancelade in the valley of the Lozère.[106] The relics of these men which have been discovered in the caves in which they dwelled show that some of them were worthy to be called forerunners of Pheidias and Praxiteles. With their tools of flint or chert they carved ivory dagger-handles, or, as we are now assured, objects of uncertain use,[107] adorning them with figures of the heads of reindeer, and scratched on horns or tusks drawings of mammoths, deer, horses, and hunters spearing salmon, of which the finer examples are recognized by modern artists as true works of art.[108] A single specimen, found in the Robin Hood Cave in Creswell Crags, is all that we can show:[109] but implements with which it was associated present points of likeness to those of the French caves which justify the assumption that the primitive artists of France sent emigrants to our land.

Range of the palaeolithic hunters in Britain.

The palaeolithic nomads, whether of the earlier or the later race, pushed their way as far north as Lincolnshire, Derbyshire, and Denbighshire, perhaps even into the East Riding of Yorkshire; and as far west as Glamorganshire, Caermarthenshire and Devonshire:[110] but almost all the remains of their handiwork have been found in the south-eastern district of England,—in Kent, especially the neighbourhood of Reculver, Sussex, Hampshire, Essex, Middlesex, and Surrey, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Northamptonshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk, and Suffolk.

Where their tools have been found.

The places in which these relics lay buried may be grouped in four classes,—the plateau gravels, already described; gravels which were apparently deposited not by rivers but by heavy rains which, falling upon frozen chalk downs, destroyed the shattered surface and swept it away in floods;[111] the river-drift, and caves; and, unlike the belongings of the neolithic herdsmen, those of the older inhabitants are not to be found, except in special cases, on or near the surface of the earth. The amateur who has acquired the rudiments of geology and has learned to discern stone implements among the fragments of rock which surround them, knows that in the gravels and sands which rivers deposited at various elevations when they were flowing now here now there in higher and wider channels he may hope to find specimens to add to his collection. Common sense too teaches him that in the same valley the higher terraces were formed before the lower, and that the tools which they contain, however closely they may resemble those which are embedded below, are nevertheless, as a rule, far older.[112] If he asks himself how they found their way into these gravel beds, reflection will soon suggest the answer. It would seem that although the palaeolithic hunters dwelled sometimes near lakes or ponds, they usually settled on the banks of streams. Fishing, hunting, wading through fords, warned by swiftly rising floods to quit their habitations, they lost or abandoned the weapons which now serve our purpose instead of theirs. But in some cases beds which contained palaeolithic remains are so situated that a tiro would never suppose that they had been deposited by running water at all. Few even of professed geologists would have thought of searching on the hill-tops at Caddington, near Dunstable; yet old stone implements have been found there in profusion. When the men who made them were alive the hills were valleys, and the valleys which now lie below the hills did not exist. Nor would it have occurred to any but a geologist that the tools which were espied lying at the foot of the cliffs between Reculver and Herne Bay had fallen from the gravels which line their summit.[113]

Inhabited caves.

Kent’s Cavern and the Brixham Cave, near Torquay, the Wookey Hole ‘Hyena Den’, near Wells, the Long Hole Cave in Glamorganshire, and the caves of Creswell Crags, on the north-eastern border of Derbyshire, are perhaps the most famous of their class. Heaps of bones have been found in all of them, which proved that the men who, from time to time, inhabited them were contemporary, like those whose tools are recovered from the river-drift, with animals of which some, like the mammoth, the straight-tusked elephant, and the ‘sabre-toothed’ tiger, have disappeared from the face of the earth, and many have long been extinct in Britain. Generally in the lower strata the stone tools are exactly like those found in the river-drift; while in the higher they are as a rule more elaborately finished, and are associated with needles, harpoons, and other implements of bone. The same sequence is discernible in the palaeolithic caves of France and Belgium.[114]

Cave implements and river-drift implements.

Let us compare in some museum the sets of tools and weapons which have been taken from caves with those of the river-drift. Are the latter older than the former, and is it possible to establish in either or in both a chronological succession of types? Taken by itself, the form of palaeolithic implements, at least in this country, is not generally a criterion of their age; but neither the forms of those that have come from the caves nor the bones which accompanied them forbid us to believe that the oldest are at least as old as any that belonged to the drift. Generally speaking, the fauna of the caves and of the river gravels are identical.[115] It is therefore certain that, although in general aspect a collection of implements derived from the former source is unlike one from the latter because the two were deposited in different circumstances, some of the deposits in the drift and in the caves were contemporaneous.[116] Since a few implements of river-drift form have been found in caves along with those of higher types, it seems reasonable to conclude that the same men possessed both; and if those which are characteristic of the caves are almost entirely absent from the drift, is not the explanation partly that they were more perishable, partly that many of them would not have been used in the field? In other words, there is no reason to believe that the later occupants of the caves were men of different race or of different habits from the contemporary hunters whose lost tools have been given up by the drift.[117] Long ago Monsieur de Mortillet framed a chronological classification of French and Belgian palaeolithic implements according to their types, which, though of late years it has been modified, has been provisionally accepted; but in this country it has been found impossible to follow his example: the same types exist here, but the relative antiquity of the specimens can seldom be determined; for implements of the oldest French types have been found in deposits which belong to the close of our Palaeolithic Age.[118] Even when implements from the high-level terraces are compared with those of the lower, no marked distinction is observed. In certain cases of course a local classification has been established. Thus the stone implements in the upper strata of two of the caves of Creswell Crags belonged to the advanced type which is called after the settlement of Solutré in the department of Saône-et-Loire;[119] and the implements of North-East London which, from their position at the bottom of the excavations as well as their colour, were evidently the oldest, were also inferior in workmanship to newer specimens found above them some twelve feet beneath the surface, and far inferior to the newest of the same district, which were recovered from an old land-surface, two or three feet below the existing ground, generally called the ‘Palaeolithic Floor.’[120] Again, in the brick-fields of Caddington excavation revealed an ancient land-surface on which a palaeolithic colony had made their tools. At a later time a new surface about two feet higher was formed by brick-earth, which must have been swept down by heavy rains from the hills above; and on this more implements appeared. Above it again is a bed of contorted drift, containing implements whose deep ochreous colour would seem to show that of the three series they are the oldest: evidently they were washed down from the hill-tops on which perhaps lived the earliest inhabitants of the district, and which, as they were gradually worn away, formed a deposit in what were then valleys, but are now in their turn hills. The lowest implements, which were of course older than those next above them, belong to the type called after the cave of Le Moustier in the valley of the Vezère, which is itself later than the type associated with the high-level gravels of the Somme.[121] It has been suggested that when the evidence of plants or of strata is wanting, the relative age of palaeolithic implements may be provisionally estimated by the animal remains with which they are found. The straight-tusked elephant, the ‘big-nosed’ rhinoceros, and the hippopotamus were characteristic, we are told, of the earliest palaeolithic times;[122] the mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros, the cave-bear, and the hyena of a later period; and the reindeer was specially abundant towards the close of the age. But it is now generally recognized that if this orderly succession of fauna existed in Aquitaine, it cannot be distinguished either in our island or in Northern Gaul. When we find Arctic and tropical animals commingled, when we see that the bones of big-nosed rhinoceros and woolly rhinoceros, of straight-tusked elephant and hyena and reindeer have been dug out of the same beds,[123] we may conclude that it is hardly worth while to gauge the antiquity of the works of palaeolithic craftsmen by such tests as these.

On a general review it should seem that the French chronological classifications of palaeolithic implements, even applied to England, contain a measure of truth. The implements which are commonly found in the river-drift and other deposits in the open field undoubtedly began to be manufactured before those which are characteristic of the caves; and those of Mousterian type were first made, both in England and in France, long before the development of the elegant Solutrean forms and the period in which flourished the artists of South-Western France.[124] But both in France and in England Mousterian implements were still used during the later period;[125] and even drift implements of the oldest kind continued to be used by palaeolithic hunters of the latest generation.[126]

Divers forms of tools.

In order to apprehend the culture of the palaeolithic races, it is necessary to be conversant with the forms of their tools. The great majority were made of flint; but in places where flint was scarce or difficult to obtain other stones, for example, chert, quartzite pebbles, sandstones, and felstone, were used. The principal forms were flint flakes, which were probably intended to serve as knives, sometimes even as saws (for a few of them are serrated),[127] and, in certain instances, as scrapers for dressing hides; implements or weapons, pear-shaped or tongue-shaped in outline, more or less acutely pointed, and more or less truncated at the butt, some of which look like spear-heads, though they may have been grasped in the hand; and oval, almond-shaped, and occasionally heart-shaped or triangular implements, which have a cutting edge all round. Each of these forms of course comprises many varieties, not only in contour but also in the mode of chipping; and a few tools of abnormal shapes have also been found, as well as natural blocks of flint, called ‘hammer-stones’, which were used in the process of manufacture, and most of which were slightly trimmed in order to make them more serviceable. Near Ipswich a lady has recently discovered a tiny implement which, it has been fondly suggested, some hunter may have wrought as a toy for his child.[128] Among the bone implements were harpoons, barbed sometimes on one, sometimes on both sides, which have been found in Kent’s Cavern and other caves, and which closely resemble those that are used by the Eskimos of our own day; and needles drilled by bone awls, with eyes so small that the threads of reindeer sinew which they received could hardly have exceeded a thirtieth of an inch in diameter. Moreover, it is more than probable that clubs, wooden tools, and utensils and vessels of skin were also used, which, from their perishable nature, have long since disappeared.[129]

Palaeolithic workshops.

The explorations of antiquaries have revealed more than one of the open-air workshops in which the primitive tool-makers plied their trade. Near Crayford, on a sandy beach beneath an old chalk cliff that overhung the Thames when on its southern side its bed was nearly two miles wider, excavation discovered the surface, strewn with flint flakes, in actual contact with mammoths’ bones, on which the workers had lived and toiled until a great flood drove them away, leaving the sediment which for countless ages concealed their remains. The inferior quality of the flint showed that they had not known how to win it by mining from the rock, but had been obliged to content themselves with such stray blocks as they could find. The enthusiast who discovered the site was actually able to fit many of the flakes together, and to reconstruct the original blocks from which they had been struck off.[130] At Caddington, where hammer-stones and punches, great blocks of flint which had been used as anvils, and innumerable flakes and cores bore their silent testimony, Mr. Worthington Smith inferred from the confusion in which finished and unfinished tools were left that the settlers, terrified perhaps by some violent storm, had suddenly quitted their abode. He found an implement which had been ruined by an ill-directed blow of the hammer, and one which had been re-flaked and re-pointed by a later worker; and his practised eye detected that the craftsmen had flaked their tools differently from those of Crayford.[131] Speaking generally, however, the methods of working were the same as those which are still followed by the ‘knappers’ of Brandon in Suffolk, who manufacture gun-flints for African savages. The flakes which were to be used as knives or scrapers were detached from the blocks by a stone hammer; and the larger implements were trimmed into the various shapes which have been described, by blows along their edges, which chipped off small splinters. The effect of the hammer was to produce on the flake, just below the point where the blow was delivered, a protuberance, which is called the ‘bulb of percussion’, and which of course left a corresponding cavity on the block from which the flake was detached. This bulb is the mark by which a manufactured flint may be recognized; but on tools whose artificial origin is manifest even to an untrained eye it has often been obliterated by the process of chipping.[132]

Fig. 1.

Fig. 2. ½

Fig. 3. ½

Fig. 4. ½

Handles.

Inquisitive antiquaries have raised the question whether any palaeolithic implements were furnished with handles. The Tasmanians simply grasped their tools in their hands;[133] and there is little evidence that the Britons mounted theirs:[134] but the triangular sharply-pointed flints which have been already described might sometimes have been used as arrow-points or javelin-heads.[135] Some were doubtless missiles and nothing more.

Uses of tools.

But, as experts who have passed their leisure in recovering, comparing, and classifying these things confess, it is impossible to define the various purposes to which this or that stone tool was applied. ‘Who,’ says Lord Avebury,[136] ‘could describe the exact use of a knife?’ We only know that with his rude implements the palaeolithic hunter did all the work that his hand found to do,—felled trees, chopped wood to feed his fire, dug up esculent roots, scooped out canoes, killed and cut up the animals on which he subsisted, skinned them and dressed their hides to clothe himself withal, encountered his enemies in battle, and defended himself in conflict with the beasts against which his keen sight and hearing, his intellect, and these weapons, which it enabled Culture of the palaeolithic inhabitants of Britain. him to fashion, were his sole protection.[137] Yet as we look at the tools in a museum, nearly the same at the end as the beginning of our immeasurably long Palaeolithic Age, we marvel even more at the mental stagnation of the primeval savage than at the skill which he had laboriously attained; and we wonder how it was that men who had learned to chip their blocks of flint so accurately remained content, generation after generation, with the art which they had acquired, and never thought of grinding the cutting edge against another stone and thus producing a better and sharper weapon. ‘We see in our own times,’ wrote Sir Charles Lyell,[138] ‘that the rate of progress in the arts and sciences proceeds in a geometrical ratio as knowledge increases; and so, when we carry back our retrospect into the past, we must be prepared to find the signs of retardation augmenting in a like geometrical ratio.’ It would seem that in the Palaeolithic Age men had no pottery and grew no corn: they certainly had no cattle; and, though they lived by hunting, they had no dogs.[139] Perhaps they sometimes dug pits to trap their game; for one of the engravings from La Madelaine may have been intended to depict a beast impaled upon a wooden stake.[140] Their numbers must have been very small; for people who live by the chase alone require for their sustenance forests of vast extent.[141] Some, as we have seen, lived in caves; others, as we may infer from the remains that have been picked up beneath the cliffs of Oldbury,[142] by Sevenoaks, under projecting ledges of rock; generally perhaps, and especially in districts in which no caves were available, the dwellings were huts or shelters made of trees and boughs. Some of the bones that were found in Kent’s Cavern, some even of the gravels that have yielded eoliths,[143] show traces of fire, which was probably produced by the friction of sticks or by striking flint against iron pyrites;[144] and one is tempted to infer that the hunters or their women learned to make their food more palatable by cooking. The numberless fractured bones which were strewed in the caves had evidently been pounded for the sake of the marrow, which in every age was a dainty dish for prehistoric folk; and in the closing period, when harpoons had been invented, men were able to vary their diet of meat and herbs and wild fruit with divers kinds of fish. By that time too they had acquired the art of sewing, and doubtless they made themselves coats of skins, perhaps even, like the cave-dwellers of the Pyrenees, long gauntlets of fur;[145] while fossils that have been found with natural holes artificially enlarged may justify the assumption that, like the cave-dwellers of France, they adorned themselves with necklaces.[146] The figure of a horse engraved on a bone that was disinterred from one of the Creswell caves suggests, as we have seen, that in this country, as in France, there were men who were not destitute of the artistic faculty: but this solitary specimen can hardly compare with the best of the drawings that delighted the explorers of the contemporary French caves. It is difficult for any one who looks at these life-like sketches to believe that those who made them were not inspired by love of art; but the ingenuity of a modern archaeologist, who observes that the Australian aborigines scratch on rocks the likenesses of animals as charms to promote their fecundity, has suggested that they were merely talismans intended to supply the hunter with abundant game. As he insists[147] that the animals which the artists represented were all edible, one may fairly ask whether they were accustomed to feed upon the glutton,[148] the serpent, and the wolf;[149] whether they counted each other as legitimate prey; what could have been the utilitarian motive for depicting an otter chasing a fish;[150] and what was the object of engraving the strange quasi-human creature which the antiquary who discovered it in the cavern of Mas d’Azil described as an ‘anthropomorphic ape, nearer akin to man than the anthropoids that we know’.[151] Nevertheless it is not improbable that religion, which has stimulated savage as well as mediaeval and modern art, may have been one of the motives of the cave-dwellers; and perhaps the artist was sometimes a magician, though it would be idle to speculate on the purpose of his spells.[152]

Disciplined imagination, working upon a basis of ascertained fact, may help one to picture the lives of those primitive inhabitants of our island. We can see them returning at evening to the fires which their women had kindled, and which served at once to warm them, to cook their food, to keep off beasts of prey, and to scare away the malignant spirits of whom, if they were like other savages, they were yet more in dread. We may see a vast herd of reindeer crossing the ford at Windsor, and wolves watching for their chance to spring upon stragglers. We may hear the trumpeting of the elephant, the roar of the lion, the bellowing of the wild bull, the howl of the hyena, the snort of the hippopotamus, as it splashed or swam in the waters of the Thames or the Ouse. We may imagine the hunter striving by sign, or gesture, or rudimentary language, to express his delight when he has succeeded in the chase, his despair when ill success leaves him and his to pine with hunger, his terror when the eclipsed moon turning to red, when flood, or lightning, or pestilence warns him that the spirits of nature are wroth, his grief when bear, or bison, or famished wolf has slain his wife or child. How he disposed of his dead he has left no sign: but in the caves near Mentone, which were inhabited in successive periods of the Palaeolithic Age, there were evidences that the corpses had been decently interred;[153] and the skeletons found in Moravia[154] had been carefully protected by a rampart of stones.[155]

Religion.

Had the primitive people of Britain any religion, or any ideas that contained the germs of religious belief? It is not enough to point to modern savages like the Tasmanians, whose material culture was lower than that of the palaeolithic Britons, but who certainly believed in a spiritual world.[156] The cave-dwellers of Mentone were interred with their implements and ornaments, perhaps intended for use in a future state;[157] but such evidence is not forthcoming here. The painted pebbles, however, and the ‘bull-roarers’ which were treasured in the caves of South-Western France may well have had analogues among the inhabitants of this island[158] who were in the same stage of culture; and doubtless, like the similar objects which are shown by the natives of Central Australia, they were connected, more or less closely, with religious ideas.[159] No savage tribe, indeed, has yet been observed of whom it can be proved that they were without religion; for some travellers who have affirmed the contrary have been unable to comprehend ideas which differed wholly from their own; some have recorded facts which gave the lie to their own denial; some have confessed that after long intercourse they had discovered the existence of beliefs which they had never suspected; and all who have been qualified by tact and sympathy to deal with savages have recognized how hard it is to induce them to disclose their inmost thoughts.[160] But much depends upon the sense in which the word Religion is to be understood. The great anthropologist whose writings have given the most powerful impetus to the study of primitive culture has taken as his ‘minimum definition of religion’ the belief in spiritual beings;[161] and although it might be rash to affirm that materialism is inconsistent with religion, and no sympathetic reader would deny that the Latin poet who denounced ‘foul religion’ with such fierce earnestness had a religion of his own, Professor Tylor’s words may serve as our guide.[162] It is true that the conception of a spiritual being formed by a primitive mind has hardly anything in common with that approved by a theologian or a philosopher: for the savage, as for Tertullian and Origen, spirits are not immaterial; they are exceedingly subtle, but still corporeal. Nor, indeed, are they necessarily immortal. Savage religion is utterly different from that which has been the guide of life to men who, though they had put away all hope of everlasting life, retained their sense of the nobility of human nature,—‘to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world’; utterly different from that which inspires the idealist to whom theology is a vain thing and the supernatural unreal, but who clings to his belief that man’s punishment or reward hereafter is simply to be what he has become, that his destiny is to grow in grace, lapsing perhaps, but again aspiring, until his spirit becomes one with the indwelling spirit of God. Yet, although the orthodox may refuse the name of religion to an animism begotten of fear and unconnected with ethics, though idealists may scoff at the conception of spiritual beings which invests them with bodily form and ponderable and mortal albeit ethereal substance, that animism was the seed out of which their own faith—its framework but not its nobler part—was evolved.

He whose mind is informed by the teaching of ethnography may conceive, if he has a sympathetic imagination, the mental state that gave birth to primitive religion; but if his reading has not been wasted, he will understand how vain would be the attempt to ascribe to this or that prehistoric people any known savage creed. For, alike in origin and in essence, the forms of modern animism are manifold. To the palaeolithic Briton fire, leaping roaring and devouring, devastating flood, rushing wind, lightning flash, disease, death itself,—all may have been animated by spirit, or have been themselves spiritual beings. Elves, goblins, phantoms may have been created by his brain, and have seemed to flit before him when prolonged fasting had stimulated the creative power of his fancy. The conceptions that were ultimately to become the greater gods of polytheism may have arisen in his mind as in the minds of other savage men. At least we may believe that, unless he differed greatly from the modern savages whose handiwork resembles his, he began to people the universe with spiritual beings when he became conscious of his own soul; that the phantasms which he saw in dreams were for him real and alive; that every spirit in which he believed originated in the curiosity that led him to seek the cause of every natural phenomenon; that, although social friction had compelled him to recognize a moral code, his religion and his morality were not one but two, not mutually supporting but distinct; and, finally, that no thought of future retribution or reward troubled or comforted his heart.

Totemism.

Intimately connected with primitive religion is totemism, that strange institution which has been observed in various stages of survival among the North American Indians, the forest tribes of South America, the aboriginals of Western and Central Australia, the Malays, the hill-tribes of Central India, certain Mongoloid tribes of Central Asia, in Bechuanaland, and in the Bantu district of South Africa;[163] which in every case began before those whom it affected had come to domesticate animals, to till the earth, or to fashion pottery;[164] and which tends to decay when hunting gives place to pasturage.[165] One cannot but inquire whether an institution so widespread existed among the prehistoric inhabitants of Britain; and, although no distinct case of totemism has been found or recorded in Europe,[166] the inquiry is not perhaps so hopeless as it may at first sight appear.

The leading principles of totemism have been so often defined that they are doubtless familiar to many readers. Evidently it originated at a time when men were not possessed by the fancy that they were a distinct branch of creation, but felt their kinship with other animals, which they had hardly begun to regard as inferior.[167] The members of the clans which form a totemic tribe trace their descent generally from some animal, sometimes even from a plant or an object which we should call inanimate, and bear its name. But how did the conception of relationship between a clan and an animal or vegetable species arise? It has been suggested that metempsychosis may supply the explanation. Some great man perhaps gave out that after his death no hare was to be eaten by his clan because a hare would be possessed by his soul. Thus not only his own children and grandchildren but also hares would be his descendants; and he would be the founder of a totem-family, which might develop into a totem-clan.[168] On the other hand, it has been argued that when totemism began descent was necessarily reckoned in the female line, and that it is therefore useless to search for its origin in anything—for example, ‘a paternal soul tenanting an animal’—which was deemed to be inherited from a male ancestor.[169]

Until a recent date it was an article of faith among anthropologists that, except in special circumstances, the life of a totem-animal was, in the eyes of the clan which belonged to it, sacred, and that marriage between the members of any one clan was absolutely tabooed. If a clansman of a Crocodile clan desired a wife, he must seek her from a Wolf clan or from some other. But within the last few years totemism has been carefully and minutely observed among the Arunta tribe of Central Australia; and the records of these observations mark a new era in anthropology. With the Aruntas totemism does not forbid the slaughter of the totem-animal and does not prescribe exogamy: it is based upon the belief that they are descended from ‘quasi-human animal or vegetable ancestors, whose souls are still reborn in human form in successive generations’.[170] It has, however, been maintained that in the organization of this tribe there are still discernible traces of totemism of the primitive type, involving both exogamy and respect for the life of the totem-animal;[171] and also that their totemism is so decadent that nothing can be learned from it as to totemic origins.[172]

Totemism is indeed a subject of extraordinary difficulty: its literature is enormous and rapidly growing; and it is out of the question in this book to do more than point out its problems, and put the reader in the way of pursuing the study for himself. The problem of its origin can never be solved with certainty; for the institution cannot now be observed in its primitive state; and any attempt to trace it backward must start from conjecture as to the original social condition of man.[173] Perhaps the most plausible and ingenious theory rests upon the assumption, for which considerable evidence has been adduced, that groups of men originally designated one another by animal and plant names, and that these names were accepted even when they were bestowed in derision. Such a group, finding itself called, let us say, by the name of the pig, and not knowing how it had come by the name, would naturally believe that there was an intimate connexion between itself and the porcine species.[174] The taboos which forbade the slaughter of the totem-animal and marriage between a man and a maiden of the same kin would, it is argued, follow when once the universal belief, that ‘the blood is the life’ and therefore sacred, was evolved.[175]

There are superstitions and names which suggest that totemism may once have existed in Britain; but even if their evidence is accepted, it is of course impossible to point out the source from which they were ultimately derived. They may have belonged to our early Neolithic Age, or they may have been introduced later, when totemism had died out, by invaders who had received them from inferior tribes with whom they came in contact. We are assured that Cornish fishermen believe that drowning men sometimes assume the form of animals;[176] that in the village of Burchurch in Shropshire it is deemed unlucky to kill a bat;[177] that at Great Crosby in Lancashire the goose is held sacred;[178] and that certain Scottish clans derived their names from animals.[179] The familiar passage in which Caesar observes that the Britons counted it impious to taste the flesh of hares, fowls, and geese[180] has also been interpreted as a survival of totemism.[181] But this is a mere guess. The greatest of anthropologists has warned us not to assume that every sacred animal is a totem:[182] the association with a clan of a species of animals is only one form of animal-worship. It is, however, quite possible that if these animals had once been totems, they were revered by clans with whom the ancestors of the British Celts had mixed before they emigrated from Gaul; for broken bones of the hare, which were found in one of the caves of Perthi-Chwareu in Denbighshire, show that at all events in that part of neolithic Britain the animal was eaten.[183]

Was the domestication of animals a result of totemism?

Some anthropologists have argued that the domestication of animals and even agriculture resulted from totemism.[184] Thus Monsieur Reinach insists that the domestication of the boar is an irrefragable proof of its former sanctity; for, he argues, if men had always thought themselves entitled to kill and eat boars, boars would never have multiplied under human protection, and become the ancestors of domestic swine. Domestication, he considers, implies a long truce between men and animals, something analogous to the Golden Age, celebrated by poets of antiquity, in which men were vegetarians. One may be pardoned for maintaining a sceptical attitude towards a theory which is obviously incapable of proof, which to men who live remote from libraries but in the midst of animals presents insuperable difficulties, and which, moreover, seems to imply that prehistoric tribes were excessively stupid. If it were true, one would expect to find that oxen, sheep, and pigs had been reared in the Palaeolithic Age, and that modern totem groups had domesticated or were now domesticating totem animals. But the only animal which the cave-dwellers of South-Western France apparently domesticated was the horse, which was doubtless lassoed and fastened not because it was sacred but for food;[185] and the Aruntas have no domestic animals. A hungry Australian would have no scruple in killing and eating an animal, not belonging to his own totem-species, which by his wife would be deemed sacred: the Bantus have sheep and oxen, but neither the ox nor the sheep is among their totems. What motive could savages have had for keeping totem-animals in captivity in large numbers unless they had desired to eat their flesh or to drink their milk, and why should they have toiled to provide food for them in winter? Why should the domestication of any species be impossible unless the lives of the animals were spared for a long term of years; and why, if every bull and ram were suffered to gratify its sexual instincts unchecked, and cows and ewes were unmilked and unused, should they become tame.[186] It is surely not incredible that primitive hunters, not belonging to Bull or Boar clans, who saw that wild oxen and wild boars were good for food, should have conceived the idea of ensuring a more constant supply by trapping young animals, taming them, and breeding from them. Totemism may conceivably have had some influence upon the domestication of animals; but it seems probable that there was room for common sense.[187] And the mere fact that a piece of sculpture representing an ear of barley was found in a cave at Lourdes hardly seems sufficient to justify the conclusion that barley was an object of worship in the Palaeolithic Age, and that its subsequent cultivation was due to totemism.[188] What we may safely conclude is that exogamy, with which totemism is commonly associated, although they may have been originally distinct, was one of the chief factors in consolidating groups and allying them together.[189]

Magic.

The subject of totemism naturally leads on to that of magic; for in Australia totemic groups have developed into co-operative magic-working societies; and there is no rashness in assuming that magic flourished everywhere before the end of the Palaeolithic Age. We are often told that magic was based upon a confused association of ideas; that it was the embryo of science;[190] and that priest and magician have ever been foes. There is much truth in this: but magic is not to be so easily explained; and most of us are still far from sympathetically understanding the mental state in which it originated. To say that one kind of magic is an outgrowth of the law of similarity, the magician fancying, for example, that by making drawings of animals he can cause their species to multiply; that the other depends upon the law of contact, when, for instance, it is supposed that whatever is done to a weapon will correspondingly affect the person whom it wounded,[191]—to say this is not to fathom the magician’s mind. Magic, notwithstanding the hostility with which priests have regarded magicians, cannot be separated from religion by a line of demarcation; nor indeed is it always possible to differentiate magicians from priests.[192] It has been well said that magic, as observed among primitive tribes, is ‘part and parcel of the “god-stuff” out of which religion fashions itself’.[193] Australian magicians believe that their powers are conferred upon them by supernatural beings;[194] and the magicians of many tribes call upon spirits to aid them in working their spells.[195] One of the most important functions of the magician is to ensure an adequate fall of rain; but in New Guinea this duty belongs to the priest of the god by whose favour the rain is believed to fall.[196] Vast learning has been expended to prove that monarchy originated in magic;[197] but we only know that magicians have sometimes succeeded in making themselves kings;[198] and doubtless in certain cases magic may have helped to sow the seed out of which gradations of rank were evolved.[199] But this would be but one more illustration of the accepted truth that family, tribe, priesthood, monarchy—all our institutions—are rooted in savagery.[200]

Was there a ‘hiatus’ between the Palaeolithic and the Neolithic Age?

The close of the British Palaeolithic Age is veiled in obscurity. ‘Mesolithic’ implements, whose form might show that they belonged to a period of transition between Palaeolithic and the Neolithic Age, have been diligently sought for; and some of the seekers insist that they have found them:[201] but the claim has not won general acceptance; and even if it could be established, a doubt would remain whether the makers of those implements belonged to the palaeolithic race of Britain or to a race which had come from abroad after our Palaeolithic Age had passed away. In the words of a high authority[202] ‘there appears, in this country at all events, to be a complete gap between the River-drift and Surface Stone Periods, so far as any intermediate forms of implements are concerned; and here at least the race of men who fabricated the oldest of the palaeolithic implements may have, and in all probability had, disappeared at an epoch remote from that when the country was again occupied by those who not only chipped but polished their tools.’ It has been urged by those who would extend this characteristically guarded conclusion that out of forty-eight mammalian species which were living in Britain in the older, only thirty-one survived into the later period; that Britain was united with the Continent in the former, and was an island in the latter; and that in caves which were inhabited in both periods the strata that contained palaeolithic remains were separated by a layer of stalagmite, the formation of which would have required many centuries, from the upper neolithic stratum. But all these arguments do not prove that there was a breach of continuity between the two ages. If seventeen mammalian species perished, thirty-one did survive. If Britain was continental in the Palaeolithic Age and insular in the Neolithic, the contrast does not exclude the possibility that man survived with his fellow animals from the former into the latter: at the time when the Hoxne implements were lost the land stood only a few feet above its present level,[203] and a strait must have separated Britain from Gaul; nor, on the other hand, is it absolutely certain that the earliest neolithic immigrants did not cross the Channel valley on foot. And if the stalagmite which lay between palaeolithic and neolithic implements proved that in certain caves the stage of culture represented by the lower strata was separated by a vast gulf of time from that represented by the higher, it still remains possible that some descendants of the primitive hunters may have survived to meet the neolithic invaders. Whoever maintains that there was a ‘hiatus’ between the two stone ages in Britain must frame some theory to account for the disappearance of the palaeolithic race. Either they must have been utterly destroyed by some cataclysm which could hardly have been less fatal to the thirty-one mammalian species that survived; or they must have been struck down by a pestilence, such as has never been recorded, that spared none; or they must have died out, although there was no civilized race to expedite their fate; or they must one and all have emigrated for some reason which cannot be explained. It is true that in the valley of the Lea near London and at Caddington the old land-surface on which they lived is covered by ‘contorted drift’, above which no undisturbed palaeolithic relics have been found; and it has been supposed that the cold to which the formation of this deposit was due forced the inhabitants to migrate southward. But this evidence has not been taken seriously; and it has also been suggested that the emigration, if it took place, was caused by an outbreak of disease, which, if it was real, may have been merely local. Again, it has been asserted by the most persistent advocate of discontinuity that the ‘cave men’ fled in terror before neolithic persecutors;[204] that their line of retreat is indicated by implements in the caves of Germany and in refuse heaps of Siberia; and that the extinction of certain mammals and the flight of others was due to the change of climate which resulted from the new-born insularity of Britain.[205] But if the cave-men were driven away by neolithic invaders, what becomes of the alleged hiatus? why should implements in Germany and Siberia be connected with British fugitives? and if mammals abandoned Britain because it had become an island, how did they get away? Somewhere or other the newer was evolved from the older culture: the palaeolithic skeletons which have been found in the caves near Mentone are not distinguishable from those of the same Ligurian coast which were interred in the Neolithic Age;[206] and evidence from stratified deposits in the valley of the Seine, lying one above another in unbroken succession, as well as the remarkable discoveries at Mas d’Azil and in the Riviera, have convinced the anthropologists of France that in their country a hiatus did not exist.[207] Therefore those of us who cling to the belief that the neolithic immigrants who first ventured to launch their frail canoes on the narrow Channel and ran them aground on the Kentish coast may have found the new-born island inhabited by men of an older race have some reason to show for our pious faith.[208]

CHAPTER III

THE NEOLITHIC AGE

The early neolithic immigrants.

No one can say how long after the close of the Ice Age the first neolithic immigrants appeared;[209] nor can it even be positively affirmed that in Northern Britain the last glacier had then melted away. If they sailed across the Dover Strait, it was, as we have seen, extremely narrow; and we can hardly be sure that it existed at all.[210] Neolithic hunters, who may not have belonged to the earliest horde, roamed in forests which now lie buried beneath the Bristol Channel and the waves that break upon the Land’s End;[211] and from the depths at which their remains have been dug up it may be reasonably inferred that Southern Britain then extended at least as far as the line which is marked upon our maps and charts by the ten-fathom contour. But while in England the land stood above the modern level, in Scotland it lay below; for along the margin of the fifty-foot raised beach there are heaps of refuse left by men who lived at a time when the estuary of the Forth ran up to Falkirk, and the lands which form the Carse of Stirling were submerged:[212] dug-out canoes have been found embedded in the basin of the Clyde more than twenty feet above the present high-water mark;[213] and in a cave which was discovered by quarrymen in a cliff facing the bay of Oban, a hundred yards from the existing beach, dwelled hunters and fishermen, whose mode of life is attested by their deer-horn harpoons, the remains of the oxen and deer on which they partly subsisted, and the bone pins with which they fastened their clothing.[214] The character of the relics has led experts to the conclusion that the people to whom they belonged were among the earliest of the neolithic inhabitants of Western Europe; indeed it may be that they were descendants of a British or a Pyrenaean palaeolithic stock. The harpoons are of the same type as those which in the caves of South-Western France are assigned to the close of the Palaeolithic Age and to a time of transition between it and the following epoch, and which in recognized neolithic deposits have never been found either in Britain or in Gaul; and the general aspect of the Scottish and the Gaulish remains is virtually the same.[215] There are, moreover, other indications that the British Neolithic Age began long before the period to which the great majority of the antiquities that lie in our museums belong. A few years ago there were brought to light traces of a settlement which some primitive clan had formed on the bank of a stream that flows through Blashenwell Farm, hard by Corfe Castle. These settlers had lived in great part upon limpets, which they must have eaten raw, since the broken shells showed no trace of fire: they did not till the soil; they had no domestic animals and no pottery; and their tools were of the rudest kind.[216] Moreover, besides the implements that lay beneath the submerged forests, there have been found in the bed of the Trent, and in the Ham Marshes, thirty feet below the surface, skulls which are so far different from those that have been recovered from barrows and cairns as to suggest that the oldest neolithic invaders may have belonged to another stock.[217]

The origins of British civilization were neolithic.

But whoever they may have been, whatever the date of their arrival, it was an era since which the history of this country has been continuous. Their descendants are with us still: they or later comers brought with them the seeds of cereals and plants which are cultivated still, and animals the descendants of which still stock our farms; they practised handicrafts and arts from which the industries of modern Britain have been in part evolved.[218]

Geography of neolithic Britain.

The subsidence which is proved by the submerged forests was going on throughout the Neolithic Age, and only ceased about three thousand years ago. While the forests were insensibly sinking, the valleys that stretched behind them were flooded by the advancing sea, which penetrated through the chalk downs into the Weald in long fiords, and doubtless often carried the canoes of the later invaders.[219] But we cannot fix even approximately the period at which these people began to arrive.[220] All that can be said is that it was many centuries before the Bronze Age, which probably began in this country about eighteen hundred years before the Christian era.[221]

Who were the later neolithic invaders?

These hordes doubtless set out from various parts of northern Gaul; but to determine their origin is perhaps impossible.[222] The skeletons that have been exhumed from the neolithic tombs of England, Scotland, and Ireland, except some which were interred in the very latest period, when invaders of a widely different race were beginning to arrive, belong, for the most part, to the same general type. All, or almost all, had long narrow skulls: their faces were commonly oval, their features regular, and their noses aquiline: most of them were of middle height, and their limbs, as a rule, were rather delicate than robust. Men with the same physical characters lived contemporaneously in Gaul and the Spanish peninsula, and are still numerous in the basin of the Mediterranean; and the race to which they belonged is often called the Iberian, though there is no reason to believe that its British representatives belonged to the Iberian rather than to some other branch of the Mediterranean stock.[223] But it is remarkable that while early in the Neolithic Age Gaul and Spain, as well as Central Europe, were overrun by invaders of a totally different kind, who were extremely short and sturdy and had broad round heads, there is no evidence that men of this race reached Britain until the very end of the period, and then only in comparatively small numbers.[224] One would be inclined to infer that tribes of the Mediterranean stock began to migrate into Britain before many of the round-headed race had settled in Gaul. Vain attempts Evidence from dolmens. have been made to trace the migration to its original starting-point by the distribution of the dolmens, or rude stone sepulchres,[225] which are found in many European countries. A dolmen, in the strict sense of the word, is composed of large stones set on end, which wholly or partially enclose a space, and are covered by other stones or by a single stone, which rests upon their upper ends. Most of the chambers in our chambered barrows virtually answer to this definition; and if the enclosing mounds were removed, would appear as dolmens.[226] Some few, however, as well as chambers which have been explored in Brittany, were roofed over, like the so-called beehive huts, by layers of stones, which, as they rose, gradually approached each other, the highest supporting a flat slab whose weight kept them in place, while the pressure of the superincumbent cairn or barrow gave solidity to the whole.[227] But although the dolmens which are generally so called may be older than the chambered barrows,[228] they also were almost always covered or at least fenced by earthen mounds or cairns, which, in many cases, were still visible little more than a century ago.[229] There is no reason to suppose that in this country or in Ireland they were built by tribes of a different stock: it is impossible to draw a sharp distinction between the two classes of graves;[230] and for our present purpose they may safely be grouped together. They abound in Syria and Northern Africa, along the western side of the Spanish peninsula, over nearly the whole area of France, in Northern Germany, Wales[231] and the west of England, Ireland, South-Western and Northern Scotland, Denmark, and Scandinavia. Some archaeologists conclude that a dolmen-building race gradually moved westward from Syria, crossed the Straits of Gibraltar, and thence passed through Spain and Gaul into Britain; while others insist that the place of their departure was Scandinavia. But it is not improbable that dolmens, which exist also in India, Japan, and many other countries, and which might have been built all over the world if stones had been everywhere available for their construction, were not originally designed by any one people, and that the resemblances which have been pointed out between those of widely separated regions were simply due to the similarity with which different tribes acted in similar circumstances. The neolithic skulls and the neolithic sepulchral pottery of Scandinavia are unlike those of Britain; while, on the other hand, the British dolmens belong to an earlier stage of culture than those of Africa. Everything points to the conclusion that the earliest dolmen-builders of Britain retreated from Gaul before the sturdy round-headed invaders;[232] and it is useless to inquire whether the Mediterranean stock, to which the British, like the earlier French dolmen-builders, belonged, originated in Europe, in Asia, or in Africa. We only know that the oldest traces of the race were discovered in the Riviera.[233] Some philologists, however, affirm that the modern Celtic dialects are distinguished by peculiarities of syntax which show that they were influenced by contact with an older language akin to the Hamitic dialects of Africa.[234]

Relics of the neolithic population: their settlements.

Relics of the neolithic population have been found over the whole extent of Great Britain and in the adjacent islands, from Kent to Cornwall, from the Isle of Wight to Shetland, not only in barrows and cairns, but also in caves in which they lived and died, in the neighbourhood of the quarries from which they obtained flint for manufacturing their tools, in pit-dwellings, on the margins of lakes, in the beds of rivers, in ditches, in peat-mosses, in sandy wastes where the sand had been blown away from the soil which it had long concealed, in fens, on open downs, and in fields by the accidental impact of a plough. Their sepulchres, as we shall afterwards see,[235] remain in comparatively few regions; but on the more cultivated lands many have doubtless been destroyed. It is reasonable to suppose that the settlements were made successively throughout a long period; and that the earliest comers took possession of the choicest lands in the south. Those who came later would displace their predecessors if they had the power, and if the prize seemed worth a struggle: otherwise they would move on to the nearest vacant lands; and so in the course of ages, and after much bloodshed, the whole island came to be occupied. But each successive horde found large tracts of the country through which they plodded overgrown by forests or covered by morasses; and they must often have had to travel far before they could obtain a suitable abode. Except the gigantic Irish elk and the wild ox known as the aurochs, which survived into the Bronze Age, and which, later still, Caesar found roaming in the German forests,[236] the great beasts which had lived in Britain with palaeolithic man were no more; but brown bears and grizzly bears, beavers and wild cats, still survived; herons, swans, and cormorants flitted over the fens; red deer, wild boars, and even a few reindeer remained to supply the new comers with game; and in every forest wolves were lurking to prey upon their cattle.[237] If we were to mark upon a map all the places at which neolithic implements have been found, it would correspond more or less closely with one constructed a priori by a geographer, ignorant of the results of archaeological research, who appreciated the requirements of early settlers. He would expect to find that they had avoided as far as possible the toil of cutting down woods, and that they had selected dry uplands, where the subsoil was porous and their cattle could find pasture, and which overlooked river-valleys, where they themselves could get water and fuel, and on the slopes of which they could build sheltered dwellings. He would not therefore be surprised to learn that the traces of occupation are most numerous on the chalk downs, the Derbyshire moorlands, the Pennine Range and the Yorkshire Wolds, the Malvern Hills, and other high lands which fulfilled the necessary conditions.[238]

Without his tools the settler could not build his hut, cut his firewood, or kill and dress a calf or a kid from his herd. Let us therefore try to ascertain how he made them, and how far he had improved as a craftsman upon the rude methods of his palaeolithic predecessor.

Flint mines and implement factories.

Within the last half-century archaeologists have succeeded in revealing some of the factories in which the prehistoric cutlers wrought. The nature of their materials of course still depended upon the rocks which were to be found in the district where they lived. Those who could get no flint used quartzite, basalt, felstone, greenstone, porphyry, diorite, or whatever stone they could obtain.[239] But flint was still the staple material. The palaeolithic hunters were obliged, as we have seen, to use stray blocks: their successors had learned how to win the flint from the bed of chalk in which it lay. Among the chief centres of mining and manufacture were Brandon in Suffolk and Cissbury, which is on the South Downs, about three miles north of Worthing. Grime’s Graves, the mines which supplied the famous factory of Brandon, are situated in a fern-clad wood, and occupy more than twenty acres. The so-called graves are circular shafts, about twenty-five feet in diameter at the mouth, from thirty to fifty deep, and on an average twenty-five feet apart. Most of them were connected by galleries, which had been tunnelled in directions that followed the seams of the flint. The tools with which the excavations were made were stone ‘celts’, or hatchets, and picks made of the brow-tines of the antlers of reindeer. Unlike modern picks they were one-sided; and a specimen encrusted with chalk on which the owner’s finger-prints are still visible, is now lying in the Prehistoric Room of the British Museum. More than one of the lamps were found by the aid of which the workmen had groped their way through the galleries,—small cups hollowed out of chalk, which they had evidently filled with oil or fat and furnished with some kind of wick.[240] When the flint had been hewn out with the hatchets, which have left their marks upon the sides of the galleries, it was hauled up to the surface, perhaps in baskets made of wicker or hide, and carried to the workshops, where it was wrought into implements, which were afterwards bartered for such articles as the manufacturers required. Innumerable flakes and chips of waste flint were found, which testified to their activity. One of them at least was a sculptor as well. A fragment of a human limb, modelled out of chalk, was discovered by the antiquary who first explored the site; and he tells us that the anatomical features were ‘rendered with an accurate knowledge of the parts’.[241] But what most impressed him was to find in one of the galleries a set of tools lying upon a piece of unfinished work in the position in which they had been laid some four thousand years ago.[242] Walking through the wood to the open heath of Broomhill, he came to the pits that yield the material which the ‘knappers’ of Brandon still manufacture into gun-flints for African tribes. The industry has been carried on since neolithic times, and even then it was ancient; for Brandon was an abode of flint-workers in the Old Stone Age. Not only the pits but even the tools show little change: the picks which the modern workers use are made of iron, but here alone in Britain the old one-sided form is still retained. Only the skill of the workers has degenerated: the exquisite evenness of chipping which distinguished the neolithic arrow-heads is beyond the power of the most experienced knapper to reproduce.[243]

The flint works at Cissbury have a general resemblance to those of Grime’s Graves; but the pits were sunk on a different principle.[244] They are contained in an entrenchment which did not exist at the time when the earliest were made, but was almost certainly constructed in the Neolithic Age.[245] The extreme rudeness of the tools which were found in them has led to the belief that they are older than Grime’s Graves;[246] but, on the other hand, stone implements of the rudest kind were manufactured for special purposes long after the Stone Age had passed away.[247] Moreover, many of the ruder Cissbury tools appear to be unfinished; and it may have been intended that they should be perfected by the people with whom they were exchanged. Many of the smaller pits contained not only stone implements but also fragments of pottery and remains of horses, goats, deer, and horned cattle; and from this Pitt-Rivers, who first explored them, concluded that they had been used as dwellings after they had ceased to serve their purpose as quarries, or had been inhabited by the workers who obtained their flint from the larger pits. On this site also deer-horn picks were found; and Pitt-Rivers, wishing to test their value, provided a set of similar tools, with which he and one of the labourers whom he employed dug a pit three feet square and three feet deep in an hour and a half.[248]

Difficulty of determining age of stone implements.

With the better material which was thus obtained the neolithic craftsmen fashioned implements of which some can hardly be distinguished, even by experts, from those of the older period, though the greater number are recognizable even by a tiro. It must, however, be remembered that in many cases one cannot tell whether a find of stone implements belongs to the Neolithic or to the Bronze Age; and some are probably later still. Indeed it would be impossible to point to any kind of stone implements which ceased to be manufactured in Britain when bronze was introduced.[249] Indefiniteness of the prehistoric ‘Ages’. One of the first cautions which the student of archaeology gives himself is that the epochs into which it has been found convenient to divide the Prehistoric Period were not definitely separated. It has been well said that they shade into one another like the colours in the solar spectrum.[250] The age in which we are now living affords an illustration. In one sense what might be called the Mechanical Age began when the first motor-car appeared on a London street; but we are still living in an era of transition, which will not end until, if ever, horses shall have ceased to be used for traction. Similarly stone tools continued to be used throughout the Bronze Age and the Late Celtic Period; and in certain remoter parts of the British Isles they are being used to-day.[251] When they are found associated with primary interments in long barrows or chambered cairns, or when they are met with in large numbers in other deposits which there is no reason to assign to a later period, they may as a rule be safely referred to the Neolithic Age; but, as we shall presently see,[252] there are certain implements of stone which were undoubtedly used in the Bronze Age, and of which it cannot be said with certainty that in this country they were used before. Some interments, however, which are ascribed to the Age of Bronze may have belonged to the older race, who still remained in their neolithic age although they were glad to use any bronze tools upon which they could lay their hands. Similarly the grave of an Australian savage who was buried some sixty years ago was found to contain, besides a piece of flint, a clay pipe, an iron spoon, and the handle of a pocket-knife.[253]

Stone implements.

The several kinds of tools that first began to be used in the Neolithic Age present numerous varieties of form which, in this book, it would be irrelevant to describe. To deal with them is the province of archaeology; and the reader who wishes to make himself acquainted with them can do so, after he has mastered the literature of the subject, by visiting the collections in our museums and by himself becoming a collector. Here we desire only to learn so much as may help us to understand how neolithic man lived, and from what origins the culture which succeeded his was evolved.

The Neolithic Age is sometimes, especially on the other side of the Channel, called the period of polished stone:[254] but most of our flint implements were neither ground nor polished; they were merely chipped. Many specimens indeed, from one cause or another, have never received their finishing touches; but many others were of such a kind that grinding or polishing would have been labour lost.[255]

The two main divisions of flint implements.

Neolithic flint implements may be grouped in two classes. In one, which comprises the larger kinds—axes, hammer-stones, and the like—the implement was made out of a block of flint, and the splinters struck off during the process of manufacture were either mere waste or utilized for making smaller tools.[256] The other class consists of tools which were made out of flakes, the core, after all the required flakes had been detached, being thrown away.[257]

How flint implements were made.

Flint fresh from the quarry was easier to manufacture; and accordingly the cutlers established their workshops close by the mines. Their methods were perhaps not everywhere the same; but it is easy to form a general idea of them from observing the processes which are followed by tribes which are still in their stone age and by the knappers who ply their trade near Grime’s Graves. Sometimes, like the Cloud River Indians, the workers may have applied a pebble or a punch of deer-horn to the surface of the flint block, and produced flakes by striking it with his stone hammer; but Sir John Evans believes that the flakes were generally struck off with a hammer or a pebble alone; and he has found experimentally that by this simple method a practised hand can attain almost perfect precision. Laying the flakes which he had thus removed with the flat face uppermost upon a smooth block of stone, he has succeeded by blows of a pebble in chipping their ends into whatever form he desired. Similarly hatchets were first rough-hewn by striking splinters from the flint block, and afterwards gradually chipped into the proper shape. Whether the material was flint or some other stone, the method would have remained the same. When it was desired to attain the utmost perfection, the implements were ground, not upon a revolving but upon a fixed stone, and polished by stone rubbers in conjunction with sand.[258] The process by which the arrow-heads and spear-heads were manufactured, whose exquisite workmanship entrances all who see them, cannot be described; for the modern tribes who make such weapons work in various ways. Small stone tools, however, are often found, with blunted ends, made out of thick flakes, which may have been used in arrow-flaking, and which accordingly have been termed ‘fabricators’; and as they are most numerous in the districts which have yielded the greatest number of arrow-heads, the appellation is probably correct. Arrow-heads have indeed been recently made with them, but with somewhat obtuse edges; and it has therefore been suggested that the fabricator was only used for removing irregularities from the flake, and that the final chipping was accomplished with a tool of deer-horn, which, pressed deftly against the edge of the flake, detached minute splinters. The surface of many flint arrow-heads and javelin-heads is, however, covered with beautifully uniform fluting, like ripple-marks on sand; and the most experienced modern operators confess that they do not understand how this effect was produced.[259]

Fig. 5. ½

Fig. 6. ½

Fig. 7.

Celts

It may be well to enumerate the various tools which would have formed a complete outfit for a neolithic household. The kinds which were made from a block of stone were celts, which comprised hatchets and adzes, and of which some may have been used as chisels and knives; axes perforated for the insertion of a handle; chisels and gouges; hammer-stones, pestles, and whetstones. Most readers are familiar with the term ‘celt’; but not every one is aware that it has no connexion with the name of the people who were the latest prehistoric invaders of these islands, and is simply an Anglicized form of a Latin word, meaning a chisel, which does not occur except in the Vulgate.[260] Some celts were ground or polished only on the edge; some over their whole surface; and a few are so exquisitely finished on both sides that the labour which was devoted to them would have seemed excessive unless it had been a labour of love.[261] On the other hand, many were neither ground nor polished; and some of the ruder ones may have been used as agricultural implements.[262] Several have been found with pointed butts and extremely elongated oval sections, which have the closest resemblance to celts from the West Indies, and illustrate the truth of the observation that identity in form of implements, weapons, and other objects belonging to widely separated lands does not necessarily prove community of origin, but as a rule merely shows that similar wants in similar circumstances produce similar results.[263] Although those celts which were used as hatchets or adzes were evidently mounted, there are some that show grooves on both sides or notches on one side, which seem to have been intended to enable them to be easily grasped.[264] Most of the handles, having been made of wood, have naturally perished; but two hatchets, now in the British Museum, have been found with their handles complete,—one in Solway Moss by a man digging peat for fuel,[265] the other in the bed of a Cumbrian lake called Ehenside Tarn.[266] Unlike the Swiss lake-dwellers, who had learned to fix their blades in deer-horn sockets, which were sufficiently elastic to prevent the wooden hafts from being injured by concussion,[267] the makers of these hatchets had simply mounted them in a hole which fitted the butt, but which, by the jar of repeated blows, must soon have become split.[268]

Their uses.

Fig. 8.

Like the stone hatchets of the Maoris, neolithic celts were doubtless used not only for felling trees,[269] chopping firewood, and slaughtering cattle, but also as battle-axes; and the profusion in which the ruder kinds have been found at Cissbury and Grime’s Graves shows that they also served as miners’ tools.[270]

Chisels and gouges.

Among the chisels some of the most interesting are small specimens, which came from Suffolk and the Yorkshire Wolds, and which may have been designed for wood-carving, and one from the Fen country, the end of which is described as exactly like that of a narrow ‘cold chisel’ of steel, used by engineers.[271] Gouges, which are abundant in Denmark and Sweden, are very rare in this country. It has been suggested that canoes, for making which they were perhaps chiefly used, were more necessary in Scandinavia than in Britain; and it is significant that the best British gouges all come from the fens, where canoes must have been needed for crossing the floods.[272] It is probable, however, that although gouges may have been used in finishing the vessels, the heavy work of hollowing the trees out of which they were formed was largely performed by the agency of fire, as among the North American Indians of comparatively recent times.[273]

Fig. 9. ½

Axes, axe-hammers, anvils, and mullers.

No stone implements are more familiar to students of antiquities than the axes, axe-hammers, and hammers, in which, as in those of our own day, holes were drilled for the insertion of handles. Many of them were probably used as weapons of war. Some of the axes are double-edged, though the edge is often blunted, as though it had been intended rather for striking than for cutting; while the axe-hammers resemble an ordinary hammer at one end, and are sharpened at the other.[274] It would perhaps be impossible to prove that any of these tools were used in Southern Britain in the Neolithic Age, although they were not uncommon on the Continent;[275] and most of those which are to be seen in our museums undoubtedly belong to the time when bronze was common:[276] but some few have been found in Scotland in chambered cairns.[277] Not one of them is made of flint.[278] Of the implements which are known as hammer-stones some which have deep cup-shaped depressions may have served as anvils or mortars; and others again—quartzite pebbles or flint cores, which were found at Cissbury, Grime’s Graves, and other places—were apparently used for chipping flints. Some nearly globular stones, whose battered surfaces testify to hard wear, were doubtless for triturating grain or edible roots.[279]

Fig. 10. ½

Implements made by flakes.

The varieties of tools which have been made out of flakes are too numerous to particularize. Simple flakes, flat or triangular in section, varying in length from nine or ten inches to one inch, are the most abundant of all stone implements, and are to be found in every quarter of the globe. Here they are generally made of flint and are rarely ground. Some of them may have been used as surgical instruments; for, as we shall presently see, trepanning of the human skull was practised in the Neolithic Age.[280] Others were made into saws, the teeth of which are occasionally so fine that to the unaided eye they are hardly visible.[281] Many, shaped like horse-shoes, ducks’ bills, oyster-shells, or short spoons, or nearly round, were used for dressing hides, for scraping haematitic iron ore in order to obtain the red pigment which served primitive man as rouge,[282] and perhaps, in conjunction with nodules of iron pyrites, for producing fire.[283] Some were fashioned into awls and drills;[284] others into knives, daggers, and curved blades, which may perhaps have Javelin-heads and arrow-heads. been sickles.[285] But the most beautiful weapons made out of flakes were javelin-heads and arrow-heads, which in this country are almost always of flint. If British neolithic workmanship did not on the whole reach the level of that of Denmark, in fashioning missile weapons our armourers could hold their own. Whether any given specimen was an arrow-head or a javelin-head, a javelin-head or a spear-head, can generally be decided only by size. Many are so small that no one can mistake the purpose for which they were intended; but it is not certain whether the largest were attached to spear-shafts, properly so called, or served as javelins. Arrow-heads and javelin-heads may be grouped in four classes, each of which has several varieties,—leaf-shaped, lozenge-shaped, stemmed, and triangular; but some five or six arrow-heads have been picked up whose outline was characterized by ogee curves. The stemmed heads are generally, and the triangular, which are rare, occasionally barbed. Although the various kinds were used contemporaneously, barbs were perhaps of comparatively late invention,[286] and may have been evolved in the struggle for existence as the population became more dense.[287] Not a single barbed arrow-head or javelin-head has ever been found in a long barrow;[288] but they occur in the chambered cairns of Scotland, as well as in certain English round barrows which were erected towards the end of the Neolithic Age;[289] and a fine specimen was associated with many beautifully finished implements in a neolithic village at West Wickham.[290] A leaf-shaped arrow-head was found in a peat-moss at Fyvie, in Aberdeenshire, still fixed in a cleft in its shaft; but the cord or sinew by which it had doubtless been secured had disappeared.[291] Arrow-heads may also have been made of hardened wood or bone, which holds poison better than flint.[292]

Fig. 11. ½

Fig. 12.

Fig. 13.

Fig. 14.

Fig. 15.

Bone implements.

The archers of many countries use wrist-guards to protect their arms against the recoil of the bowstring; and for this purpose the prehistoric Britons made rectangular plates of stone or bone, curved to fit their wrists and perforated near the angles with holes to enable them to be fastened. Most of those which have been collected belonged to the Bronze Age; but they probably came into use before.[293] Various other implements of bone—awls, needles, chisels, and perhaps daggers and lance-heads—were also common in the Neolithic Age;[294] and it is worth noticing that a well-known collector has found palaeolithic tools which, as his practised eye discerned, had been picked up and reflaked by neolithic men.[295]

Pygmy flints.

Of all stone implements the most curious are the tiny objects which are known as ‘pygmy flints’, and which have been found not only in certain parts of Britain[296] and Ireland,[297] but also in France, Belgium, Spain, North Africa and Egypt, Palestine and India. They are all made of minute flakes; and in one of our collections the marks of working could not be detected without the aid of a microscope, while sixty-four specimens, many of which were no more than a quarter of an inch long, weighed less than half an ounce. Numerous guesses, which need not be repeated, have been made as to their use. Everywhere their forms are identical; and, partly for this reason, partly because in many places no other implements were associated with them, it has been supposed by lovers of the marvellous that they were the work of a peculiar race.[298] If the latter reason were valid, we should be compelled to assume that the Lilliputians had sent out many colonies from the land where Gulliver found them. But every archaeologist knows that tools and other articles of identical form are to be found in divers continents; and pygmy flints may often have lain with others and have escaped observation.

Specialization of industries.

A survey of the implements and other relics arranged in a representative collection teaches us that men had already learned the necessity of a division of labour. Some clans who used flint implements could only have obtained them by barter. Even in the great factories of Grime’s Graves and Cissbury the miners were evidently distinct from the cutlers, as were both from the herdsmen. But in other settlements, where mining and cutlery were apparently not predominant industries, implements have been found of such perfect finish that their manufacture would seem to have been the special or the sole occupation of skilled members of the community.[299]

A lost art.

But there was one thing which the forerunner of neolithic man had done, and which he could not do. Among his relics we may look in vain for the carved dagger-handles, the engraved antlers, and the other works of art of the palaeolithic caves. Except in Grime’s Graves, not a single attempt to portray the human figure, or animal, or plant has ever been found among the deposits of the Neolithic Age. If the artists of Derbyshire and Aquitaine had left descendants, perhaps they were massacred or enslaved, perhaps their individuality withered under oppression: whatever may have been the cause, the old creative art was dead.[300]

Dwellings.

Provided with their tools, the neolithic herdsmen were able to construct dwellings which, humble as they were, must have been comfortable in comparison with the shelters that had satisfied the hunters of the older time. Unfortunately, however, the evidence relating to the domestic life of the neolithic people is far less complete than that which has been preserved in regard to their Swiss contemporaries. In that age and for many centuries after it had come to an end the inhabitants of northern and western Europe, like the ancient Romans whom Horace[301] eulogized, were content to live in habitations which were small and mean, while, under the influence of superstitious terror as much as of reverence, they constructed the mansions of their dead chieftains on a magnificent scale. Thus, while neolithic sepulchres are still conspicuous upon the western hills, few buildings have left traces which can be referred with absolute certainty to the same period.[302] Many of the ‘hut-circles’ and pit-dwellings which have been excavated contain no trace of metal; but it is generally impossible, in any given instance, to dismiss all doubts as to their antiquity when we find others, precisely similar, which were certainly occupied, if not built, by people who used implements of bronze. Still it is not credible that such dwellings were constructed for the first time after the introduction of metal working; and it is reasonable to believe that they were common before the earliest bronze implement was imported into Britain. Indeed a pit-dwelling has been found at the eastern end of a long barrow near the village of Hanging Grimston on the Yorkshire Wolds; and, as it was proved by excavation to be older than the barrow,[303] it must have been dug in the Neolithic Age. There were of course villages of some sort at Cissbury and Grime’s Graves; and at Grovehurst, near Sittingbourne, are the remains of huts which were occupied by implement-makers.[304] A group of pits on the sheltered southern slope of Croham Hurst, about a mile south of Croydon, the fields near which are thickly strewn with flint flakes, probably formed the winter abode of a small community:[305] on Hayes Common a village has been explored, comprising about one hundred and sixty pits, the period of which was determined by the discovery of a neolithic workshop, on the floor of a pit of identical form, at Millfield in the immediate neighbourhood; and the neolithic age of a settlement at West Wickham was as clearly proved by the nature of the implements.[306] At these places, at Weybourne in Norfolk, on the Hampshire Downs, and elsewhere, the sites of such dwellings are indicated by circular depressions, ranging in diameter from six to thirty feet and from two to six feet deep, which, though they generally occur in groups, are sometimes isolated. Each is surrounded by a bank, formed of the excavated earth, in which the entrance is marked by a gap. The bank was in certain cases prevented from falling in by a stone circle; and upon it was reared a hut, sometimes perhaps formed of stones, but more often of interlaced boughs, while the roof, in which a hole was left for the escape of smoke, was probably thatched with fern or heather or turf, and, if it happened to be large, supported by a pole or the trunk of a tree, the position of which seems to be indicated by a mound in the centre of the pit.[307] A cluster of huts was apparently sometimes surrounded by an entrenchment, which protected the inhabitants and their cattle from night attacks.[308] Rude as these structures were, they fulfilled their purpose. The soil on which they were built was generally dry: the pit not only ensured warmth but also enabled the roof to be carried to a sufficient height: the bank, by throwing off the rain, kept the interior dry; and while in certain cases the remains of a hearth made of flints are found in the centre, in others it would seem that cooking was performed outside. Thus one group of pits on Hayes Common, the dimensions of which are within the ordinary range, is associated with smaller depressions, which apparently contained cooking-hearths.[309] A small fire might have been safely lighted inside the hut to warm the inmates; but a large one, such as would have been necessary for cooking a joint or an entire hare or sucking-pig, might have ignited the inflammable roof.[310]

A remarkable group of pits has recently been excavated in Wigtownshire.[311] Piles had been driven into them to support a wooden floor, the object of which was doubtless to keep them dry; and the marks on the piles seemed to their discoverer to show that they had been cut with stone hatchets.[312]

Three entirely subterranean chambers, of a kind which has been met with nowhere else in the British Isles, have lately been discovered by navvies who were digging a sewer-trench at Waddon, near Croydon. They were about twelve feet in diameter and seven feet high; and although they contained fragments of Romano-British pottery, the flint flakes and blocks which lay upon the floors were assigned by the experienced antiquary who explored them[313] to the Age of Stone. While he was impressed by their exact resemblance to certain Portuguese neolithic chambers which were used for burial,[314] he suggested that they might also have served as shelters in times of excessive heat or cold.

Unlike their Swiss contemporaries, who built their huts on platforms, supported by piles driven into the beds of lakes, the neolithic Britons lived mainly if not exclusively on land. Lake-dwellings indeed abound in the British Isles; but exploration shows that almost all were erected in the Late Celtic Period; and the only one in Britain which can with any show of reason be referred to the Age of Stone is in Holderness, which, before it was drained, was covered with marshes and shallow meres. One of a group of five, called the West Furze dwelling, contained a large number of flint flakes: but a bronze spear-head was also found in it; and the evidence is not sufficient to show that it was built in a pre-metallic period.[315]

Food and cookery.

The food of the neolithic population has left more abundant traces than their homes. The bones which are strewed in their sepulchres and settlements show that they lived in great part on venison and the flesh of the wild boar;[316] and the skull of an aurochs, which was found in the Fen country with a stone weapon sticking in it,[317] proves that they also followed the largest game. Unlike the palaeolithic hunters, they used dogs in the chase; and it has been plausibly conjectured that these animals were the first to be domesticated. For man was a hunter before he was a herdsman; and the dog would soon begin to lick the hand that rewarded it with a share of the slaughtered boar or deer.[318] It would seem, however, that when with advancing age dogs had become too slow for hunting, they were killed and eaten; for canine bones, apparently of old animals, were found at Grime’s Graves.[319] Neolithic immigrants introduced sheep,[320] goats, and pigs as well as horned cattle; and all the bones of the latter which have been collected from their refuse-heaps and graves were those of small oxen, the scientific name of which—Bos longifrons—is familiar to all students of antiquities, and which resembled their living descendants, the Kerry cattle of Ireland and the small black animals of the Welsh mountains. Some authorities believe that these and all our varieties of domestic oxen are descended from the aurochs, which, as we have seen, was living in this country in palaeolithic times, and suggest that its calves were trapped and tamed;[321] while others maintain that Bos longifrons was introduced by neolithic immigrants. The extreme smallness of the prehistoric domestic oxen is as easily accounted for as that of the mountain cattle of the present day. The tribes who kept them had but limited pasturage: forage in winter was probably scanty; and the milk which was needed by their calves was largely consumed by their owners.[322] The broken bones of cattle which were found at Grime’s Graves belonged to very young animals, which the implement-makers who bred them evidently could not afford to rear.[323] The meat was boiled in rude hand-made vessels of earthenware heated by red-hot flints, or, as we may infer from the frequent occurrence in barrows of charred bones, roasted or broiled over the fire; and the remains of each meal were left to accumulate in the huts.[324] It has been suggested by one of the most eminent of living anthropologists that the ornament, so often observed on prehistoric earthenware, which was produced by impressing a cord upon the clay while it was soft, may be traceable to an earlier time when the art of the potter had not been evolved, and vessels were made of plaited cords and also perhaps of skins and hollowed wood.[325]

Agriculture.

Although agriculture was practised by the later neolithic inhabitants of Denmark[326] and the lake-dwellers of Switzerland,[327] there is very little evidence that their contemporaries in this country tilled the soil. A few of the stone pestles which have been found belong, it is true, to that period,[328] but it is impossible, except perhaps in a very few instances, to affirm that they were used for grinding corn;[329] and although, as we have seen, certain rough-hewn celts may have been agricultural implements,[330] it is doubtful whether they all belong to the Age of Stone. Cereals and textile flax-fabrics, which are abundant in the lake-dwellings, are absolutely wanting in every British neolithic deposit that has been explored.[331] Negative evidence of this kind may not be worth much: nevertheless there is reason to believe that agriculture was rare in Britain before the introduction of bronze. Barrow-diggers have often noticed that the teeth of neolithic skeletons are, as a rule, remarkably perfect; while those of the skulls found in round barrows and unchambered cairns are very much worn down; and it has been reasonably argued that the difference was due to food. The people of the Bronze Age, who were undoubtedly cultivators, subsisted in great part upon grain, which was probably ill cooked, and must have been largely mixed with stony grit from contact with the rude mullers by which it had been ground. The neolithic people, on the other hand, lived mainly upon milk and flesh-meat.[332] Pastoral tribes do not turn to agriculture until their numbers have increased to such a degree that they have no prospect of being able to live by hunting and on the produce of their flocks and herds alone: they prefer an easy life; and agriculture, especially to those whose implements are primitive, is difficult and laborious.[333] If corn was grown, it was probably on the open chalk downs.[334] The richer soils were covered with forest; and, although the stone axe was a better tool than any which the primitive hunters had possessed, the neolithic herdsman must have shrunk from the labour of cutting down the trees and dragging them away. Fire would have been of no avail. Men who have cleared forests in New Zealand will tell you that the fiercest flames will not destroy standing trees: twigs and leaves burn like tinder; but the trunk remains unconsumed.

Treatment of women.

There is evidence, though it is hardly needed, that the inevitable hardships of life were not equally shared, and that the lot of the women was worse than that of the men. Judging from the measurements of the neolithic skeletons, the disparity between the sexes in stature was as great as it is among modern savage tribes. The average height of the men was about five feet six inches, of the women only four feet ten inches: the difference in civilized communities is about half as much.[335] It is perhaps safe to conclude that when food was scarce, the men thought first of themselves, and that the women not only suffered from the effects of early child-bearing,[336] but had more than their Duration of life. share of toil. No doubt disease, the attacks of wild beasts, and frequent accidents, as well as intertribal wars, tended to shorten the duration of life: at all events Thurnam calculated that the average age of the people whose skeletons he had examined was not more than forty-five years.[337]

Clothing and ornaments.

The sheep and goats and the wild red deer which supplied the tribes with food doubtless clothed them as well; and it may be questioned whether in this respect they had advanced much beyond the primitive denizens of caves. The lake-dwellers of Switzerland were expert spinners: the textile fabrics which lay unnoticed for millenniums in their settlements show what they could achieve.[338] Our own forefathers may have been as skilful: but evidence is lacking; and their pottery was so inferior to that of the Helvetians, they lagged so far behind them as tool-makers, that we may reasonably assume that their women also were less proficient in domestic arts.[339] The perforated disks of stone and baked clay, called spindle-whorls, by which the spindle was made to rotate, have indeed been found in great numbers here; but not a single specimen can be assigned with confidence to the Neolithic Age.[340] British ornaments too of that period are very rare.[341] No doubt the Britons were as fond of display as other barbarians: there is, as we have seen,[342] some evidence that they decorated their bodies with red paint; but a few lignite beads, found in the long horned cairn of Yarhouse,[343] and a single bead of shale, found in a long barrow in Gloucestershire,[344] are all the personal ornaments that we can unhesitatingly refer to the Age of Stone. An ingenious archaeologist, who perhaps knows less of human nature than of books and museums, has argued that the origin of jewellery was rooted in superstition;[345] and those who know that natural holed stones are still prized as amulets in the more primitive villages of this country[346] may easily persuade themselves that savage men and women had faith in the prophylactic properties of the perforated teeth and beads which they hung round their necks: but nobody who can understand the passion for sparkling gems which possesses many women and some men will believe that the love of adornment for its own sake was not as deep-seated in primitive human nature as superstition.[347]

Trepanning.

But amulets of a different kind, which are abundant in other lands, appear to be almost entirely wanting in our own. It is not difficult to understand that in material culture the prehistoric inhabitants of Britain should have been outstripped by those of the Continent; but it is remarkable that a practice, the motive of which was mainly superstitious, and which was prevalent not only in every European country but also in America, has in this island apparently left but one vestige, which belonged to the Late Celtic Period. Sixty trepanned skulls were found in the cavern of Baumes-Chaudes in the department of Lozère; and twenty years ago a French physician had collected one hundred and sixty-seven. The operation was evidently performed either by scraping the skull with a stone implement or with a stone saw;[348] for an eminent surgeon has remarked that saw-cuts are distinctly visible on some of the French trepanned skulls. In a few cases the object was to remove dead bone; but as most of the skulls show no trace of disease, it has been conjectured that the patients were afflicted with epilepsy, and that the operator’s aim was to relieve them by permitting the escape of the demon who was believed to be the author of their sufferings. It is, however, certain that the skull of a corpse was sometimes trepanned; and the edge of the perforation in specimens of this class generally shows signs of an old cicatrization. The explanation may easily be found. Some of the fragments which had been removed from trepanned skulls were evidently used as amulets, for they are carefully rounded, polished, and perforated for suspension; and one was actually found hanging from a Gallic torque, or gold collar, of the Early Iron Age. Most probably, as the famous anthropologist, Paul Broca, concluded, these amulets were taken posthumously from the skulls of persons who had survived the operation, being regarded as potent prophylactics.[349]

The couvade.

Folk-lore societies have collected countless instances of beliefs or customs preserved by the lower classes of modern nations, many of which are certainly of very remote origin, although it is generally impossible to say where they originated, or whether they belonged to this or that people of antiquity. But there is evidence that one custom which appears utterly meaningless to those who have not inquired its original meaning, which is retained by peoples who have long forgotten what that meaning was, but which with others is still or was in comparatively recent times not merely a survival but a reality, existed among our neolithic ancestors. Every one has heard of the couvade, or hatching, which ordains that when a child is born the father should take to his bed, and there remain for days or weeks after the mother has resumed her ordinary mode of life. We learn from Greek writers that it prevailed among the ancient Corsicans,[350] the Tibareni of Pontus in Asia Minor,[351] and the Iberians of Northern Spain;[352] and with various modifications it exists or has existed among the Basques and the Caribs of the West Indies, in South America, California, Greenland, West Africa, Southern India, the Indian archipelago, and Eastern Asia. It originated in a belief that the real parent was the father, and that between him and his child there was a physical union so intimate that unless he rested and were nursed and abstained from ordinary food, his child would suffer. But this belief was not primitive. Matriarchy, it would seem, was the root of family life: descent was reckoned through the mother, for the father was often unknown. It has been conjectured that when paternal relationship began to be acknowledged, fathers felt the need of insisting upon their rights, and that accordingly a parody of lying-in gradually became a custom.[353] An Irish legend shows that the couvade survived in Ulster into the Christian era;[354] and a few years ago a similar custom was observed in a remote district of Yorkshire.[355] Although the peoples who have retained the couvade in modern times, like those among whom its existence was noted by ancient writers, are, with hardly an exception, neither of Aryan nor of Semitic origin, it is perhaps conceivable that it may have been brought into the British Isles in post-neolithic times by invaders who had accepted it from races whom they had subdued; but it is far more probable that it was a widespread custom of the Neolithic Age belonging to tribes of the Mediterranean race, to which the neolithic Britons, as well as the Iberians and Corsicans, belonged.[356]

Hill-forts.

Although the neolithic tribes of Britain had common customs and superstitions,[357] and were, for the most part, sprung from one stock, they were not of course a nation. Arriving in successive hordes, and settling wherever they could find room, they were separated by mountain, stream, forest, and morass, as well as by the lack of horses, vehicles, and roads. But as their numbers multiplied and it became more and more difficult to find sufficient food, the struggle for life must have led to intertribal war, and men’s minds must have been exercised to improve their weapons and to fortify their settlements and cattle-pounds not only against the wolves, which they had ever with them, but also against depredation. Every one who knows the South Downs and the hilly districts of the midlands, the west, and the north, has noticed the camps and earthworks which crown almost every height; but, as we have already seen, there are only a few of these entrenchments of which the period of construction is known, although we have abundant evidence that many have been occupied by successive races or in successive stages of culture. Almost all of them have been superficially explored, and implements of neolithic form have been found in many; but the reader knows that such implements were used in the Bronze Age and in the Iron Age even in those parts of the country where bronze and iron were common. If stone tools were found in the original body of a rampart or beneath the silt in a trench, without any objects of metal or any such tools or pottery as were characteristic of the Bronze Age or of later times, it might fairly be presumed that the people who built the camp were in their neolithic stage.[358] Except the camps that are known to be Roman, and others which have been proved by excavation to be Norman, most of those that have been thoroughly explored were evidently constructed after the art of metal-working had become known; and this is also true of those that have been scientifically examined in France.[359] There are, however, not a few British strongholds for which neolithic age has been claimed, though perhaps in some instances on insufficient grounds. Thus it has been asserted that Whit Tor camp on Dartmoor has yielded ample evidence of neolithic origin;[360] but all the excavations of hut-circles, kistvaens, and barrows that have been made on Dartmoor tend to show that it was not occupied before the Bronze Age.[361] A few of the pits which abound in the hill-fort of Eggardun in Dorsetshire have been explored; and it is said that one of them contained ‘typical neolithic pottery’.[362] But, in the absence of an exact description of the vessels, such an argument is unsatisfactory, although it might have some weight if they resembled the coarse unornamented bowls which were found in the long barrow of North Bavant in Wiltshire[363] or the neolithic bowls of the Scottish chambered cairns.[364] Still there are entrenchments, such as Chanctonbury Rings,[365] on the downs some six miles north of Worthing, Beltout,[366] within which stands the Beachy Head lighthouse, the Maiden Bower camp near Dunstable,[367] and some on the Surrey Hills,[368] in and around which flint implements have been found in such profusion that they may be provisionally referred to the Neolithic Age.[369] Even Cissbury camp, which contained numerous relics of the Early Iron Age, may have been constructed in the age of stone: a single cutting, only eleven yards long, revealed numerous worked flints lying, without pottery or metal, on the chalk bottom; and Pitt-Rivers suggested that the entrenchment might have been made for the protection of the mines.[370] It is true that no bronze implement was found, from which it might be argued that the camp was not constructed before the Iron Age: but, for aught that we can tell, bronze may still be lying beneath the soil; for the cost of excavating the whole camp, without which it is impossible to prove the negative, would be enormous. Certain small entrenchments in Franche-Comté were unquestionably constructed in neolithic times;[371] and it may be safely said that in an age when life and property were so insecure every isolated settlement must have been in some way fortified. Many of the entrenchments on the South Downs are, however, so slight that they could only have protected flocks and herds against wolves; and this may also have been the purpose of the thickset hedge, undoubtedly of prehistoric origin, that marks the line along which the downs were bounded by the Wealden Forest.[372]

Primitive writing.

Although the historian who endeavours to press archaeology into his service is struck by the general similarity in material culture between the peoples of different lands, and is sometimes inclined, overlooking the differences in detail, to think that in describing one he would be describing all, he presently remembers that if historical records were to be destroyed, much the same state of things would confront the archaeologist of the remote future; and in his own researches he meets with differences which lead him to believe that in every land the first beginnings of a national culture and of a national character were already being evolved. In this country or in that significant relics are discovered of which in others there is not a trace. One of the more sensational discoveries of recent years may set us wondering whether in prehistoric Britain vestiges of primitive writing will ever come to light. Many people have heard vaguely of the painted pebbles and the frescoes of Mas d’Azil and the other caverns in the Western Pyrenees which the veteran archaeologist, Edouard Piette, has for many years diligently searched. On one of the objects found in the cavern of Lorthet—a spirited engraving on reindeer-horn representing reindeer and salmon—are to be seen two small lozenges, each enclosing a central line: ‘justly proud of his work,’ says Monsieur Piette, ‘the artist has appended his signature.’[373] Be this as it may, other explorers have exhumed from the Placard cave at Rochebertier and the caves of La Madelaine and Mas d’Azil antlers incised with signs which exactly resemble various Greek and Phoenician letters, and may be compared with signs that have been found in an island of the Pacific. These signs are not letters but symbols: they are not combined in such a way as to form words or inscriptions.[374] But, says Monsieur Piette, being symbols, they do constitute a kind of primitive writing.[375] True writing is, however, evident on a potsherd taken from a neolithic settlement at Los Murciélagos in Portugal.[376] If this fragment could itself be proved to be of neolithic age, it would follow that in that remote time the art of writing was already known to at least one branch of the Mediterranean stock. But not a trace of writing, not even one of the alphabetiform symbols which were so widespread in the Pyrenees even in the late Palaeolithic Age, has yet been found in any prehistoric deposit in this island.

Sepulture: barrows and cairns.

So far we have been trying to piece together an account of the life of neolithic man. But it is of the last scene of all that the vestiges which he has left behind are most unmistakable. His sepulchres have been thoroughly and scientifically explored. Moreover, it is from them that much of the knowledge which we possess of his daily life has been gleaned. They afford evidence about his political and social organization, his religion, and his customs; and when we have examined them we shall be able to form a more vivid idea of the way in which he lived.

We have seen that the dead were sometimes buried in caves wherein they or their forefathers had dwelled;[377] and the humbler folk who had not the means of erecting sepulchral monuments must have dug graves of which no apparent trace remains; but the funerals that have told their own tale were those of chieftains, their families, and perhaps their favourite slaves, who were buried beneath mounds which, in divers forms, are found all over the world.[378] Savage communities indeed are commonly ruled by councils of elders; but in the period when the neolithic barrows were being erected the Britons had certainly passed beyond this stage. The means by which the revolution was effected were probably various. If the most adroit magician in a community of which every member practised magic may sometimes by force of character have made himself a chief,[379] it is certain that when property accumulated and group began to prey upon group, the instinct of self-preservation must have led men to submit to the rule of him who was marked out as the fittest to command in war.[380] Those who love to look for the places in this land that are hallowed by their associations with an older world may have seen the long barrows which are conspicuous on the hills that command Salisbury Plain and on other western heights, the chambered cairns of Scotland, and the dolmens of Cornwall and Wales. These sepulchres are far rarer than those of the Bronze Age, not more than sixty having been counted in Wiltshire, where they are most numerous, while the round barrows of the same county number nearly two thousand;[381] and the area of their distribution is far less extensive. In Gloucestershire, Somersetshire, and Dorsetshire they are not uncommon; a few are to be seen in the East Riding of Yorkshire; and Kent, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Durham, Cumberland, and Westmorland have each one.[382] Chambered cairns which are related to chambered long barrows are found near St. Asaph and in Caithness;[383] and other chambered cairns and chambered round barrows, which belong to the latest period of the Stone Age or to a time of transition, exist in Orkney, Inverness-shire, Argyllshire and some of the adjoining islands, the Holm of Papa Westray, Derbyshire, Wales, Cornwall and the Scilly Isles, and the islands of the Channel.[384]

The materials of which these monuments are composed vary of course according to the nature of the country in which they were erected. Stone was used where it was abundant, and earth or rubble where stone was not to be obtained. The significance of the barrows lies not in their substance but in their form; but it is probable that the absence of chambered barrows in South Wiltshire and Dorsetshire, where unchambered ones are common, is due simply to lack of the necessary stones.[385] The eminent Swedish archaeologist, Nilsson, argued that the ‘passage-graves’, or chambered barrows, of Scandinavia were designed on the model of subterranean dwellings; but the little evidence that remains tends to show that no such analogy existed here; and the Eskimos and Lapps, whose dwellings Nilsson had in view, bury their dead in tombs of a different kind.[386] Antiquaries who have had experience in opening chambered and unchambered barrows consider that the two classes were erected in the same period;[387] and the nature of the interments, as we shall presently see, justifies this conclusion.

The orientation of the long barrows and of the chambered cairns which are classed with them seems to show that the builders intended that the spirits of the dead might look upon the rising sun. The axis of the barrow or cairn generally lies either due east and west or in a direction approximating more or less closely thereto; and the broader and higher end of the barrow, where, as a rule, the sepulchral deposits are found,[388] generally faces eastward. In a few instances the axis lies between the north and the south, the broad end pointing sometimes northward, sometimes southward. When the direction is not due east, it varies between north-north-east and south-east; and one may reasonably conclude that this variation depended upon the place of sunrise at the time of the year when the barrow was erected. Similar varieties, combined with the same general tendency to point the barrow towards the east, have been observed in the neolithic tombs of other countries.[389]

Fig. 16.

Long barrows vary greatly, not only in their materials and orientation, but also in their size and shape. Many of them exceed a hundred feet in length; and the chambered barrow of West Kennet is three hundred and thirty-five feet long and seventy-five broad at its eastern end.[390] More striking, however, than the mere dimensions of a long barrow is the disproportion between its whole extent and that part of it in which alone the dead were laid. The immense toil which must have been expended in constructing such a monument by labourers who had only deer-horn picks and stone tools proves not only density of population, effective organization, and the despotism which the chiefs must have exercised, but also a religious awe the compelling force of which we, who live in a world that has grown old, can hardly conceive. Some of the mounds might in outline be compared to a very elongated egg, others to one-half of a pear cut lengthwise and laid upon its flat side.[391] The trenches from which the material was excavated extend along their sides, but never encircle the ends.[392] The chambered barrows are of many kinds, no two being exactly alike. Some have a central gallery, entered by a doorway at the broad end, so low that it is necessary to stoop or even to crawl. Generally the chambers, placed opposite one another in one, two, three, or even six pairs, open out of the gallery like the chapels in a Gothic cathedral; while occasionally, as at West Kennet, the gallery leads to a terminal chamber; and in other instances both lateral and terminal chambers are found. At Rodmarton and Nether Swell in Gloucestershire there is no gallery; and the chambers open externally. Galleries and chambers are alike built of stones set on edge, which (the interstices being filled in with dry walling) support flags laid horizontally across; though occasionally, as at Stoney Littleton in Somersetshire, the roof is constructed of converging layers of stones which form a rude arch.[393] Some so-called chambered barrows, for instance Littleton Drew in Wiltshire, have no chambers, but only cists, or shallow graves excavated in the soil and built up with stone slabs. The mounds were generally faced with dry walling; and on the chalk downs of North Wiltshire, where blocks of sandstone abounded, the wall was often, as at West Kennet, surrounded by a peristalith formed of stones erected at regular intervals. These stones have disappeared; but drawings, made in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, show what they were like.[394] The architects were inspired by a vivid sense of beauty. The enclosing wall, as it approached the broad and high end of the barrow, was turned inwards by gradual and graceful curves, which generally terminated in great stones that served as the jambs of the entrance. Even when there was no gallery, this symmetrical curve was still adopted, and its termination marked by monumental pillars.[395] The Wor Barrow on Cranborne Chase, an oval mound of such uncommon form that Pitt-Rivers, before he opened it, felt doubtful whether it did not belong to the Bronze Age, appears to have been a chambered sepulchre of an abnormal kind. When the tumulus had been removed, a trench, enclosing an oblong space, appeared in the chalk which had formed the old surface. Stake-holes were detected in the trench; and the famous antiquary concluded that the stakes had been simply ‘a wooden version of the long chambers of stone’.[396]

Fig. 17.

Intimately related to certain chambered long barrows are the famous horned cairns, which exist only in Caithness. Although their forms also are various, the larger cairn of Yarhouse being extremely elongated while that of Ormiegill might be almost exactly contained within a perfect square, the ruling idea remained the same. The exterior wall, which is always double, develops eastward and westward into horn-shaped projections, which curve outwards. Thus the four sides form four symmetrical concave curves; whereas in English chambered barrows, like that of Uley and some of the barrows at Upper Swell in Gloucestershire,[397] the curvilinear projections which correspond with the horns exist only at the eastern end. An opening between the eastern horns in the Scottish cairns gives access to the chamber, which is commonly divided into three partitions by two pairs of stones, crossing the side walls and leaving a passage between.[398]

Just as the long are earlier than the short horned cairns, so the latter are earlier than the round chambered cairns of Scotland; for no horned cairns were erected after the Scottish Bronze Age had begun, whereas, although the round chambered cairns were developed towards the close of the Neolithic Age, and although metal has never been found in them,[399] their external form was reproduced in the Bronze Age, when chambers were no longer built.[400] The chambers of the round cairns also are divided into sections; and one of them, near Loch Etive in Argyllshire, shows traces of an encircling trench and rampart.[401] In Southern Britain the chronological sequence was probably the same: the round chambered cairns seem to be later than the chambered long barrows. The Park Cwm tumulus in the peninsula of Gower, which has a central avenue and two pairs of opposite chambers opening out of it,[402] has been likened to the Uley barrow; but its form is round. The chambered tumulus of Plas Newydd Park in Anglesey, which is roughly oval,[403] may possibly represent an earlier and transitional form.[404]

Round chambered barrows exist in Derbyshire, the design of which is purely local. Thus the Five-Wells barrow, near Taddington, has two chambers, each of which was approached by a gallery entered through a kind of port-hole on either side of the mound. The skulls that have been found in these tombs are of the neolithic type: but a barrow on Derwent Moor, which is commonly assigned to the same period,[405] contained an urn, ornamented with designs characteristic of the Bronze Age, in which a piece of copper was found;[406] and an experienced antiquary has remarked that in cataloguing the remains found in the Derbyshire barrows he ‘found it almost impossible to separate the Neolithic from the Bronze Age interments’.[407] In West Cornwall also there are gigantic chambered cairns, round or oval, the date of which is uncertain. No bronze has been found in them, but abundance of pottery, and cists which are undoubtedly later than the chambers. One, standing on the cliff which rises above Cape Cornwall, contained a double-walled dome, and reminded its explorer of the huge tope at Bhojpur.[408]

Chambered cairns of a peculiar kind remain in Argyllshire and the islands of Islay and Arran, the like of which have been discovered nowhere else except on the opposite coast of Ireland.[409] Nearly all the pottery that has been found in them closely resembles that of the dolmens of North-Western France and the Pyrenees, while none exactly like it has been exhumed in England; and, combining these facts with the geographical position of the sepulchres themselves, the antiquary who has explored them concludes that their builders came late in the Neolithic Age from Brittany, and, sailing up St. George’s Channel, settled on the opposite shores of Scotland and Ireland.[410] Physically, however, they belonged, as their skeletons show, to the same stock as the great majority of the neolithic people of Britain.[411]

Inhumation and incineration.

Here, as also in France[412] and Northern Germany,[413] funerals were performed both by inhumation and incineration. In the barrows of South-Western Britain, cremation, although not unknown, was very rare;[414] in Yorkshire[415] and the chambered cairns of Bute,[416] almost universal. Judging from the analogy of other countries and from the fact that inhumation persisted into the Bronze Age, and then for a long period was generally superseded by cremation,[417] it seems probable that the latter was not introduced until a comparatively late epoch.[418] The two modes of burial were, however, contemporaneous not only in different parts of the country but in the same district and in the same grave. Burnt and unburnt bones have been found lying together in such a manner as to prove that they had been interred at the same time.[419] Cremation was generally performed in the chamber or on the floor of the barrow where the body was deposited.[420] When the corpse was buried entire, it was usually laid upon the ground[421] with the knees doubled up towards the chin, or placed sitting in a similar posture by the side of the tomb.[422] This custom, which was almost universal in prehistoric times, and is still practised by many savages, is best explained by the assumption that it was thought seemly to bury the dead in the position in which they had slept, and that, for the sake of warmth, they had commonly lain down to rest in an attitude which most of us have occasionally adopted for the same reason.[423] In some barrows only single skeletons have been found; but generally in unchambered barrows, where more than two persons had been buried in one grave, the bones lay heaped together as though the bodies had been unceremoniously flung down;[424] while in certain cases they were found disjointed in such wise that it was evident that the dead had not been buried entire, or, as is often the case in savage countries and even in Brittany and the Catholic cantons of Switzerland, until long after the flesh had decayed.[425] The Balearic islanders, in the time of Diodorus Siculus,[426] used to sever the bodies of their dead in pieces and inter them in urns; and the same practice prevailed in Spain in the Age of Bronze.[427] British explorers, moreover, have often noticed, in opening barrows, that skeletons were incomplete, many of the bones being absent.[428] Since the piled skeletons belonged to old and young, male and female, it can only be concluded that corpses were often stored, as in a mortuary, until a sufficient number had accumulated, and then buried all together.[429] In a barrow situated at Upper Swell in Gloucestershire, Rolleston found evidence which convinced him that interments were sometimes made successively upon the same spot. An undisturbed skeleton was here surrounded by a great quantity of bones, the arrangement of which was such that he was forced to conclude that they had been displaced in order to make room for it.[430] In chambered barrows successive interments were of course regular, gallery and chamber being designed to admit them.

Human sacrifice.

Thurnam was convinced that in the barrows which he explored there were unmistakable evidences of human sacrifice. In nearly all of them he found fractured skulls, the broken edges of which were so sharp that he inferred that the skull had been cleft in life by a club or a stone axe; while in some cases one skull only was unmutilated. His conclusion was that the few entire skulls were those of chiefs or their relatives, while the others belonged to slaves or captives who had been sacrificed. In one instance, in which only two interments were met with, the broken skull was that of a woman, while the bones of the other corpse, which belonged to a man, had been imperfectly burned. Thurnam argued that the burnt bones belonged to a chief, and that the woman was his wife.[431] Rolleston, on the other hand, could see no reason for believing that the broken skulls had been cleft deliberately.[432] He pointed out that the fragments were so numerous that if the persons to whom they belonged had been sacrificed, they must have been slaughtered by a succession of wanton blows; that the fractures were utterly different from those of skulls which are known to have been broken by deliberate blows, and resemble those which have been caused by the shifting of soil or the collapse of stones; and he argues that from what we know of the sentiments of savage and barbarian peoples it is in the last degree improbable that slaves or captives, if they had been sacrificed, would have been allowed to repose side by side with their lords. Nevertheless it is not safe to reject all the evidence which Thurnam adduced. In a round barrow near Stonehenge Hoare found a skull which appeared to have been cut in two as deftly as by a surgical instrument;[433] and one may believe that what was done in the Bronze Age was not unknown in the Age of Stone. When we remember that evidences of human sacrifice have been detected in French neolithic tombs,[434] and that the practice was universal in ancient times,[435] we shall be safe in assuming that neolithic Britain was no exception to the rule that after a chieftain’s obsequies his dependents were immolated in order that their souls might be set free to minister to his.[436]

Traces (?) of cannibalism.

But Thurnam also believed that the long barrows contained evidences of cannibalism.[437] The numerous passages in which ancient writers accused the inhabitants of the British Isles of devouring their own kind refer mainly to the Irish:[438] but they were speaking of their contemporaries; and when some of the Yorkshire barrows were opened it was evident that the flesh had been removed from the bodies before they were interred.[439] But even if cannibalism was practised in our Neolithic Age, the motive was not hunger. The numerous bones of oxen, swine, red deer, goats, and horses[440] which are found in the barrows, mingled with fragments of pottery, prove that a funeral was an occasion for a feast, and may show that, as in later times, offerings were made to the ghosts of the dead.[441] If human flesh was eaten, it was doubtless in the hope that moral qualities which had distinguished the dead might be absorbed by the living.[442]

Interment of animals.

Perhaps the most curious feature in neolithic interments is that animals were sometimes buried entire.[443] It is not indeed surprising that at Eyford in Gloucestershire there was buried with a woman a dog which may have been her companion;[444] but in a long barrow near Stonehenge was found the skeleton of a goose which had evidently not been eaten.[445] Was it a sign that neolithic people had the same religious prejudice against eating geese which Caesar noted,[446] or had this goose been sacrificed?[447]

Religion.

We can hardly err in regarding the sepulchral monuments on which such stupendous labour was expended as witnesses of a belief which may be called religious, and perhaps as a further illustration of the apophthegm, ‘The first begetter of gods on earth was fear’.[448] For if the spirits of ancestors are believed by savage tribes to be on the whole well disposed towards those whom they leave behind, yet when their bodies do not receive due burial their wrath is terrible.[449] The most eminent of modern French archaeologists maintains that the dolmens, chambered tombs, and standing stones of France were erected under the influence of Druids;[450] and in this country also the belief has long been growing that Druidism was of non-Celtic and neolithic origin: but since our knowledge of it is confined to the period when it was a Celtic institution, we must defer our consideration of it.[451] But, apart from the graves themselves, there is hardly any certain evidence in our neolithic interments of religious belief. While in France, Scandinavia, Northern Germany, and other lands, the tombs of this period were stored with implements, ornaments, and weapons, the spirits of which were doubtless consecrated to the service of the dead,[452] such relics are so rare in Britain[453] that unless the barrows were despoiled in bygone days by heedless explorers, we can only suppose that it was not generally thought necessary to provide those who had passed away with the means of continuing their life in another world; and it may be that the few arrow-heads, flakes, and other objects which have been found in graves were rather intended as marks of reverence or affection than for use.[454] On the other hand, some of the implements found in neolithic barrows are said to have been intentionally broken;[455] and this is often done by savages in the belief that the souls of the implements[456] may thus be set free to be of use to the spirits of the dead.[457] The holes that are to be seen in the stones of dolmens in many lands are here so rare[458] that we may hardly regard them as evidence of a belief that spirits must be allowed an exit from their graves; although such a belief has been common to many peoples, and may even linger on among ourselves, as in France and Germany, in the superstition which often impels survivors to open door or window when life is ebbing away[459]. It must be confessed that we know little more of neolithic than of palaeolithic religion. Fetichism, which is ubiquitous—the belief that spirits inhabit or operate through stocks and stones and what not; the belief by which the Dorsetshire peasant who treasures his holed pebble for luck is still animated—may be assumed to have belonged to both.[460] The worship of saints may be a survival of the worship of ancestors.[461] The traces of the adoration of wells and lakes and rivers which may still be observed in the remoter parts of Great Britain and Ireland, where peasants offer pence to the spirit of the spring, and children were lately bidden to beware of the river-sprite who was waiting to drown them, are undoubtedly linked to a prehistoric faith;[462] and so is that superstition which prevails in New Zealand, in the Malay Archipelago, and on the banks of the Ganges, and which among the islanders of St. Kilda and the Shetlanders of Scott’s day impelled men to refuse aid to a drowning comrade because they feared to balk the marine demon of his prey.[463] Nor need we doubt that, like other savages, our neolithic forefathers saw sun, moon, and stars as living beings, or that, like the Australian aboriginals and the nameless tribes who passed on to the Greeks the myths which were by them invested with poetic form, they invented stories to account for the wonders which they saw in the starry heavens.[464] Neither need we hesitate to believe that, as each clan had its chief, so the clansmen saw, above elves and kelpies, gnomes and goblins, rock-spirits and tree-spirits, the mightier deities of Heaven and Earth, Sun and Moon, Fire, Water, and Thunder.[465] We may believe, if we please, that they prayed, as savages, nay Christians, often pray, not that they might become better, but that they might be better off.[466] We may suppose too that magic, which is even now used in remote villages as an engine of extortion,[467] was still a power by which men strove to ensure supplies of food or to make rain fall in time of drought, perhaps also a weapon by which the man of intellect made himself obeyed. But when we consider the infinite variety of forms which superstition assumes, we see that it would be vain to contend that any one belief now held by this or that savage tribe was identically part of the faith that was professed in Britain in the Neolithic Age. Even the fancy that an ethereal soul survived bodily death may not have been universal; and as the Tonga islanders and the Virginians are said to have believed that only the souls of chiefs would live again,[468] so it is conceivable that the slaves by whose sweat were built the barrows in which their lords were to be interred were regarded as doomed to annihilation. And when we are told that some quaint superstition which the folklorist discovers in Devonshire or the Highlands is non-Aryan, and must therefore be traceable to the people who were here before the first Celtic invader arrived, we may ask how it is possible to disprove that it had been inherited by the Celt from remote ancestors or had been borrowed by him from non-Aryan tribes while he was still a wanderer. We must be content, if we can but catch something of the spirit of neolithic religion, to remain in blank ignorance of its details. We must keep in mind that in unnumbered centuries it cannot have remained the same, and that in diverse regions its manifestations must have been various. We must not ask for more than the assurance that to the herdsmen who pastured their cattle on our downs all Nature was animated; that in their eyes ‘as the human body was held to live and act by virtue of its own inhabiting spirit-soul, so the operations of the world seemed to be carried on by the influence of other spirits’;[469] and that, like all savage and half-savage peoples, they were enslaved by custom, fettered by taboos, and compelled, when they were driven by necessity to violate them, to expiate their offence by complex rites.[470] It may, however, be presumed that the religion of neolithic man progressed when he ceased to be a wanderer, and especially when he began to till the soil. Supernatural beings were not of necessity gods to be worshipped; but when the god of a community became the lord of its land, he was its protector, nay, its father, who, in return for due reverence and sacrifice, would do his utmost to guard it against human enemies and hostile deities.[471]

And perhaps, since primitive worship concerned the community rather than the individual,[472] common superstitions and participation in sacrificial feasts were already beginning to do their work of creating the sense of kindred between divers groups, out of which, ages later and after successive new invasions, war and policy were to develop a state.[473]

We have gathered some scraps of information from the tools and weapons and pottery, the dwellings and mines, the graves and the skeletons of neolithic man. Can these dry bones live? Only for him who has imagination, which, as the historian whose own was supported by a vast armoury of solid knowledge declared with splendid paradox, ‘is the mother of all history as of all poetry.’[474] It is not when we are reading the memoirs in which discoveries are recorded, not when we are wandering through the galleries of a museum, that those happy moments come in which we discern the faint outlines of the prehistoric world, but rather when we are roaming over sand or moor or upland, looking for the tools that those old workers wrought, in the midst of the monuments which their hands upreared. Not the outward life alone comes back to us—the miner with lamp and pick creeping down the shaft; the cutler toiling amid a waste of flints; herdsmen following cattle on the downs; girls milking at sundown; lithe swarthy hunters returning from the chase; fowlers in their canoes gliding over the meres; serfs hauling blocks up the hillside to build the chambers in yonder barrow; the funeral feast; the weird sepulchral rites; the bloody strife for the means of subsistence between clan and clan:—we think also of the meditations of the architects who created those monuments in memory of the dead and of the adventurous lives of those who were thus honoured; of their survivors’ desperate denial of death’s finality; of the immeasurably slow, age-long movement of expanding civilization; of the influence of superstition, paralysing, yet ever tending to consolidate society; of the enthusiast whose thoughts soared above the common level; of the toil that spent itself in millenniums past, but is still yielding fruit; of unrecorded deeds of heroism and of shame; of man’s ambition and of woman’s love.

An alien invasion: period of transition.

Before the Neolithic Age came to its end invaders began to appear who had not yet learned the art of metal-working, but who belonged to a race of which the people in possession knew nothing.[475] Sepulchral customs began to change. Long barrows were erected still, but, as in France, Holland, and other lands,[476] mounds of circular form were rising, and at last supplanted them. It was a time of transition; and although in the far west and the far north the Stone Age lingered on, another was approaching, which had long since dawned in more favoured lands,—the Age of Bronze.

CHAPTER IV

THE BRONZE AGE AND THE VOYAGE OF PYTHEAS

A Copper Age preceded the Bronze Age in certain countries, but has not been proved to have existed in Britain.

Those who have learned to realize the extreme slowness with which material culture was evolved in its earlier stages would be disposed to doubt whether the first metallic implements were made of bronze, and to ask whether, at all events in some part of the world, the Neolithic must not have merged into a Copper Age. It is easy to imagine that the accidental melting of a piece of copper ore may have suggested the possibility of fashioning the metal into tools; and that inventive cutlers took impressions of stone axes in clay, and found that they could make from them copper axes which were not liable to break:[477] but one can hardly believe that simultaneously the discovery should have been made that the softness and bluntness of copper could be remedied by mixing with it a small proportion of tin. It is indeed not inconceivable that bronze was the first metal which was ever manufactured; for near the surface copper ores often contain tin oxide; and it has been proved that by smelting such ores bronze can be produced.[478] But of course only experiment could have shown that tools made of this metal were better than copper. The Egyptians were acquainted with the use of copper long before they began to manufacture bronze;[479] and in many parts of the British Isles as well as of the Continent copper implements have been discovered which belonged to prehistoric times.[480] But such discoveries do not necessarily prove the existence of a Copper Age: they may often be accounted for by the supposition that tin, which is far less widely distributed than copper, was temporarily wanting. In many cases implements of copper and of bronze have been met with in intimate association; and sometimes copper implements of advanced type with primitive bronze.[481] When, on the other hand, copper implements are repeatedly found in deposits which are known to be older than the oldest bronze in the districts in which they occur, the conclusion is irresistible that they were used there before bronze was manufactured.[482] There was certainly a Copper Age in Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Cyprus; and probably also in Hungary, Northern Italy, Spain, and Ireland, with which, in ancient times, Spain was closely connected, and in which copper celts were unmistakably modelled upon those of stone: but for Britain the evidence is not sufficient.[483] We must assume then provisionally that in our island the metal which was first used for cutting-tools was bronze.

Bronze implements used for many centuries in Europe before the Iron Age.

Certain metallurgists, however, maintain that a Bronze Age, properly so called, may never have existed; and that iron may have been manufactured during and even before the period to which the bronze tools that are exhibited in museums belong. Iron was undoubtedly known to the Egyptians at a very remote date, perhaps as early as bronze.[484] Primitive methods of extracting iron from its ore, which are still practised in India and Africa, require far less skill than the manufacture of bronze: the metallurgists argue that since iron is rapidly oxidized by air and moisture, the iron tools which they assume to have been made in the so-called Bronze Age must have perished in the conditions to which most of the bronze tools that have been discovered were exposed; and they insist that iron tools have actually been found in association with objects of the early Bronze and even of the late Neolithic Age.[485]

The inconsistency of these arguments is self-evident; and if their authors had known the rudiments of archaeology, they would never have published them.[486] Hundreds of iron weapons have been recovered from the Thames: a competent archaeologist has affirmed that there was not one which could not with certainty be attributed to some period later than the Bronze Age; and since numerous articles of stone and bronze have been found in the same bed, he reasonably concludes that if iron implements had been used in the Bronze Age, some few at least must have come to light.[487] Nor is there any reason to suppose that if iron tools had been laid in graves of the Bronze Age, they would necessarily have perished beyond recognition; for in the famous Tyrolese cemetery of Hallstatt, and in many other deposits that, like it, belonged to the transitional period when bronze and iron were simultaneously used, the iron objects, oxidized though they are, retain their distinctive forms.[488] Yet in the numerous British barrows of the Bronze Age, and in the hoards of the same period that have been unearthed in England, Scotland, and Wales, not a trace of iron has ever been found.[489] Nothing then can be more certain than that in Britain, as in the rest of Europe, the Iron Age was preceded by a long period during which the only metals used were copper and bronze.[490]

Where did the European bronze culture originate?

Every antiquary knows that bronze did not reach this country until long after it was first used in Southern Europe, and that it was common in Egypt many centuries before; but in what part of the world it was first manufactured remains an unsettled question.[491] The oldest piece of bronze that has yet been dated was found at Mêdûm in Egypt, and is supposed to have been cast about three thousand seven hundred years before the birth of Christ. But the metal may have been worked even earlier in other lands; for a bronze statuette and a bronze vase, which were made twenty-five centuries before our era, have been obtained from Mesopotamia; and the craft must have passed through many stages before such objects could have been produced. Yet it would be rash to infer that either the Babylonians or the Egyptians invented bronze; for neither in Egypt nor in Babylonia is there any tin. Some archaeologist who shall explore the virgin fields of the Far East may one day be able to prove that bronze was worked by the Chinese, in whose country both copper and tin abound, earlier than by any other people; but even so it will still remain doubtful whether the art was not independently discovered elsewhere. There is no evidence that the bronze culture of Mexico and Peru did not originate in America;[492] and although it was once believed that all the tribes of Europe ultimately derived their knowledge of the metal from Asia,[493] there are many who now maintain that it is impossible to detect in European deposits of the Bronze Age the slightest trace of Oriental origin.[494]

Origin and affinities of the bronze culture of Britain.

But whatever may have been the case in Southern lands, there is no doubt that the knowledge of bronze came to this country from abroad. The old theory that it was a result of Phoenician commerce with Britain has long been abandoned;[495] and British bronze implements are so different from those of Norway and Sweden, Denmark, and Hungary that it cannot have been derived from any of those countries.[496] German influence was felt at a comparatively late period;[497] but from first to last the British bronze culture was closely connected with that of Gaul, and through Gaul with that of Italy.[498]

Period of its commencement.

The period when bronze first appeared in Britain can only be approximately fixed. It is certain that in the south-eastern districts iron tools began to be used not later than the fourth century before the Christian era.[499] The final period of the British Bronze Age is marked by the discovery of bronze-founders’ hoards, all of which contain tools or fragments of tools which are known as socketed celts, or other socketed instruments which were contemporary with them. These hoards are so numerous and so widely diffused, and the objects of which they are composed are so varied in form, that the time during which they were deposited cannot, in the opinion of experts, have been less than four or five hundred years. But before the first socketed celt was cast the bronze culture passed through earlier stages, during which the flat celts that resembled those of stone were being used, and then gradually giving way to improved forms, which in their turn were succeeded by later developments. The veteran archaeologist who has handled and examined almost every specimen of these numerous varieties has arrived at the conclusion that the British Bronze Age must have begun at the latest between 1400 and 1200 B.C.;[500] and while no one would now contend for a later date, there are some who maintain that bronze was first used in Britain twenty centuries before the Christian era.[501]

Physical characters of the late neolithic and early bronze-using invaders of Britain.

After the Bronze Age set in, as before the close of the preceding period, bands of invaders, wholly different in physical type from the neolithic aborigines, landed successively through long ages upon our eastern and southern shores. They came from the Netherlands, from Denmark and its islands, perhaps also from Scandinavia and from Gaul. They must not, however, be identified either with the invaders who introduced the Celtic language into Gaul or with any Celtic-speaking people. There is no evidence, and it is in the last degree improbable, that any Celtic tribe had appeared in Gaul at the time when the alien immigrants began to settle in Britain, or that Celtic had then taken shape as a branch of the Indo-European language. Those immigrants have often been described as a tall, stalwart, round-headed race; but the evidence of sepulchral remains shows that they sprang from various stocks. Those of the type which is commonly regarded as specially characteristic of the Bronze Age were taller and much more powerfully built than the aborigines: their skulls were comparatively short and round; they had massive jaws, strongly marked features, enormously prominent brow ridges and retreating foreheads; and their countenances must have been stern, forbidding, and sometimes almost brutal. Similar skulls, which have much in common with the primitive Neanderthal type,[502] have been exhumed from neolithic tombs in Denmark and the Danish island of Falster. But the skeletons which have been found in some of the oldest Scottish cists belonged to men whose average height, although they were sturdy and thickset, was barely five feet three inches, and whose skulls, shorter and rounder than the others, as well as their milder features, proved that they were an offshoot of the so-called Alpine race of Central Europe, of which there were numerous representatives in Gaul. Again there were tall men with skulls of an intermediate type; while others, who combined harsh features and projecting brows with narrow heads, and whose stature was often great, would seem to have been the offspring of intermarriage between the older and the newer inhabitants. Not a single skeleton of the characteristic British round-barrow type is known to have been discovered on French soil: the round-headed inhabitants of Gaul were as conspicuously short as those of Britain were generally tall; nor, excluding the Britons of the Alpine stock, was there any physical resemblance between the two peoples. The British invaders of the Alpine stock, judging from the pottery which was found with their skeletons, came for the most part, as we shall afterwards see, not from Gaul but from the valley of the Rhine. Moreover, the round-headed people of Gaul settled there first early in the Neolithic Age, before a Celtic word was spoken; and although their descendants formed the substratum of the Gallic population who, in Caesar’s time, called themselves Celts, that name was introduced by conquerors of a wholly different stock. Probably a Celtic invasion of Britain took place before the British Iron Age began: but the remains of such invaders are not recognizable in any British graves.[503]

Their social organization.

Each of the invading clans was doubtless ruled by a chief; for many of the burial mounds which they erected were intended for the great alone, and could only have been constructed by the organized labour of many hands.[504] They must have respected family ties; for women and even babies were interred with scrupulous care; and more than one barrow was reared for the reception of a single child.[505] Yet infants have so often been found buried along with women that one can only conclude that infanticide was as prevalent in ancient as in modern Britain.[506] Only the children were slain because their mothers could no longer nurse them, not because they desired to rid themselves of trouble.

Character and results of the invasions: the invaders poor in bronze weapons.

In Wiltshire and other parts of Southern Britain the old population would seem to have been largely dispossessed or subdued; but the skeletons found in the barrows of Derbyshire and Staffordshire, of Yorkshire and the other northern counties, indicate that there the immigrants mingled more or less peacefully with the people whom they came among.[507] Fighting no doubt took place everywhere; but the notion that bronze weapons gave the first invaders victory is disproved by the fact that in the earlier part of the era bronze was both costly and rare.[508] If chieftains had bronze, their clansmen were still armed with old-fashioned weapons; and until the new age was far advanced, the neolithic tribes, in so far as they were conquered, must have yielded to superior numbers, superior skill, or superior strength. Probably in certain districts they were never conquered, and never permitted the intruders to dwell among them. Among a vast number of stone implements that have been found lying on the moors west of Rochdale and Ashton-under-Lyne bronze was searched for in vain;[509] and one may provisionally infer that these hillmen were protected by the strength of their territory.

Evidence of finds as to the settlements of the invaders.

Bronze implements or other relics of the Bronze Age have been found in almost every county of England, Wales, and Scotland, and in some of the adjoining islands;[510] but their distribution appears to imply that, as might have been inferred from the geographical features, some districts were far more densely populated than others. The lands which the new comers selected were mainly those which were already occupied by the neolithic inhabitants. The relics are most abundant in those which are now most sparsely peopled, but which were then sought after because, even when the soil was poor, it was dry, well-watered, and comparatively open. The moors of Derbyshire, Yorkshire and other Northumbrian counties, Devonshire and Cornwall; the bracing uplands of East Anglia; the downs of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Berkshire, Hampshire, Dorsetshire, and Wiltshire; and the wolds of Lincolnshire,—these were the tracts which the immigrants occupied in the greatest numbers. The Midlands, on the other hand, would seem to have attracted comparatively few: Durham, for some unexplained reason, was generally avoided;[511] while the northern and north-western tracts of Scotland were almost entirely neglected.[512] The Yorkshire Wolds afford an interesting example of the motives which determined the choice of abode. Their scanty vegetation could not have tempted a people who depended for their subsistence mainly upon their flocks and herds; yet the numerous barrows with which they are studded and the flint implements which have been picked up in thousands from their surface prove that they were as thickly peopled as any other part of Britain. The reason was that they were unencumbered by the forests which could only have been cleared by arduous labour; their climate was healthy; and, above all, they were so completely isolated by the wooded valley of the Derwent, the swamps of Holderness, the broad estuary of the Humber, and the morasses which then covered the plain of York, that their occupants were secure from all attack.[513]

In certain parts of England the routes by which invaders advanced may be traced by the sites at which bronze implements have been found. In Worcestershire, for example, these spots have been mapped along the line of the Avon from Warwickshire to the Severn, and again in the valley of the latter river, where it was apparently crossed by ancient trackways. The implements in these two counties belong to comparatively late periods.[514]

The settlements must often have been desperately resisted, more and more as time passed and unoccupied lands became rare. But it would be a mistake to assume that the struggle was always between aboriginal communities and round-headed invaders. There must have been much intermingling between the old population and the new: gradually the use of bronze weapons must have spread to neolithic clans or to those who could obtain them by barter or theft; and by the time when the Bronze Age was far advanced tribes of mingled stock must often have presented a united front to enemies from over sea. Even when the invaders had slowly made their way from the Channel to the far north, and from the German Ocean to the Irish Sea, hunger or the lust of booty would often lead to intertribal raids. Gradually weapons were improved; and we shall presently endeavour to trace their evolution. Even to the very end of the period, however, not only the rank and file but the wealthiest chief, who had a complete set of bronze implements and weapons, and who could afford to decorate the handle of his blade with ivory, amber, or gold, to wear gold buttons on his clothing, sometimes even to adorn his charger with a gold peytrel, shot arrows tipped with flint. Flint arrow-heads, leaf-shaped and barbed, have been found by thousands in deposits of the Bronze Age, but in this island never one of bronze. Even when daggers had given place to swords and bronze spears were common, battle-axes were made not of bronze but of stone.[515]

Stone implements used long after the introduction of bronze.

Stone implements indeed, such as were in use in the Neolithic Age, have been found so often in the graves of chieftains associated with those of bronze that we may be sure that, at least in the earlier part of the Bronze Age, even the wealthier classes could not afford to discard the older material; while among the needy population of the Yorkshire Wolds many barrows contained no implements except those of flint or bone.[516] Bronze saws have very rarely been found in this country, although they were common enough in Southern Europe;[517] and since all our bronze gouges are comparatively late,[518] it may be inferred that during the earlier Bronze Age these tools were everywhere still made of flint. In the west of Scotland, at all events, metal tools were apparently unknown until long after the first round-headed people landed, and probably until long after bronze had begun to be used in Southern Britain.[519] We may indeed be sure that the Stone Age continued for centuries later in remote parts of the country; and perhaps in certain islands bronze may have remained unknown.

Hill-forts.

When a clan had succeeded in establishing itself, it had to provide for its protection against cattle-lifters and slave-hunters; and gradually and by immense labour great strongholds were constructed on suitable sites. Comparatively rare in the south-east, they are conspicuous on nearly all the hilly districts of England, Wales, and Scotland;[520] but it is in the western and south-western counties that they most abound. Devonshire and the adjacent parts of Somersetshire contain not less than eighty; and almost every spur on Salisbury Plain is fortified.[521] The multiplicity of these camps bears witness not only to density of population and constant warfare, but also to the utter disunion which existed at the time when they were constructed. Supposing that the majority of the forts in Dorsetshire, for instance, were built in the Late Celtic Period, we should have to conclude that the Durotriges, who then inhabited that district, were merely a loose aggregate of scores of clans, ever ready to prey upon one another; for if the forts had been destined only to repel the attacks of some other tribe, they would hardly have been so numerous and so widely scattered. It is true that the Gallic Morini in Caesar’s time had not become welded into one state, and that the Kentish clans were under four petty kings; but in the period when the older earthworks were thrown up it would seem that far less progress had been made towards union. But even supposing that most of the prehistoric forts were later than the Bronze Age, their purpose accorded with the methods of primitive warfare. A chain of modern fortresses impedes an invader because, while they remain uncaptured, he cannot pass between them without exposing his line of communication. But in ancient times, when one tribe attacked another, it had no communications to guard: the invaders carried their food with them, and when it was spent trusted for support to the enemy’s country.[522] If a tribe had desired merely to protect its frontier, it would not have erected hill-forts but a continuous entrenchment.

Amongst those which were occupied in the Bronze Age or before may be mentioned Badbury Rings in Dorsetshire;[523] the stone fort on Whit-Tor in Dartmoor[524] and another in the Rhonddha valley in Glamorganshire;[525] Small Down camp near Evercreech in Somersetshire;[526] the fort of Carn Brea in Cornwall;[527] the series of entrenchments which mark the spurs of the hills that command the valley of the Esk from Guisborough to Whitby;[528] those which line the western border of Worcestershire;[529] Oldbury, some three miles east of Sevenoaks;[530] Hollingbury on the Sussex Downs;[531] Lutcombe Castle on the Berkshire Downs, overlooking the Vale of White Horse;[532] and the greatest of all—the Maiden Castle, whose stupendous ramparts are the pride of Dorchester.[533] But it is probable that the greater number may ultimately be referred to the Age of Bronze.[534]

The form, construction, and materials of British forts are naturally diverse. In Cornwall, Devonshire, Wales, and other places they were of course built largely or wholly of stone, the masonry being always uncemented: elsewhere they were true earthworks. Leaving out of sight the question of their date, they may be grouped in three classes.[535] The first comprises those that were erected on promontories or other heights which on one or more sides were fortified by precipice, river, or sea. Such was the fort of Carl’s Wark in Derbyshire, which, on three sides, rises almost sheer above the swamps of Hathersage Moor. On the west, where the ground slopes towards the plain, a huge earthen rampart, faced with dry masonry, afforded secure protection; and the slopes below the eastern and southern sides are strewn with great stones which must have fallen from the walls above.[536] The ‘cliff-castles’ on the coasts of Kirkcudbright and of Wales and on the headlands between the Land’s End and Cape Cornwall belong to the same group.[537] In the second class the entrenchments, traced upon commanding sites, which, however, were nowhere so steep as to dispense with artificial aid, followed the tactical line of defence which the nature of the hill indicated. Most of the heights on which they stand are covered with soil so thin that they never could have been thickly wooded, and if trees had encumbered their sides they would have been cut down; for the object of the engineers was to leave no ‘dead ground’ on which an assailant could conceal himself. If he felt strong enough to lead his clansmen to the assault, he knew that they could not avoid being exposed from the moment when they penetrated within the range of a bow or a sling. General Pitt-Rivers, who did so much to illuminate the study of prehistoric fortifications, was never weary of calling attention to the skill with which they had been designed. Once only, when he was exploring the camp at Seaford, he thought that he could detect evidence of neglect. As he stood upon the rampart he noticed that an advancing force would be able to conceal itself for a while. Presently, however, it flashed across his mind that time had done its work upon rampart and ditch; and soon excavation proved that the latter had lost by silting seven feet of its original depth. The general saw with delight that the designer had been as vigilant as any of his contemporaries. The rampart in ancient times must have been at least five feet higher; and then the garrison who manned it would have been able instantly to detect the first enemy who ventured within range. ‘How carefully,’ he wrote, ‘the defenders economized their interior space, drawing their rampart just far enough down the hill to obtain a command of view, but not one yard further.’[538]

In certain cases, however, the hill was so extensive that if the tactical line of defence had been slavishly followed, the defenders would have been too few. Then the chief engineer modified the accepted principle. Selecting a spot at which he might safely abandon the natural line, he made his sappers build a cross rampart at right angles to it straight across the hill-top until it joined the works on the further side. An example of this device may be seen in the camp of Puttenham in Surrey.[539]

Among the more famous strongholds of the second class are Cissbury on the South Downs, which, as we have seen, was almost certainly erected in the Neolithic Age,[540] Badbury Rings, and the Maiden Castle. This noble fortress must surely have deserved its modern name. No British force could ever have taken it: no other country can show its match. Three lines of ramparts defend the northern and four the southern side: gaining the summit of the road from Weymouth, you see them outlined against the sky; and as you mount the hill-side, they rise, one behind another, like veritable cliffs. Worn by the rains of five-and-twenty centuries or more, they still stand sixty feet[541] above their fosses; and their entrances, on the east and the west, are guarded by overlapping works so intricate that if a column had succeeded in forcing its way across the abatis, it would have found itself helplessly winding in and out as through a labyrinth, pounded on either flank and enfiladed by stones and arrows discharged at point-blank range.

The strongholds of the third class were erected on lower hills or on high ground little elevated above the surrounding country, and therefore depended less for their protection upon natural features.[542] Those that have been explored belong to the Late Celtic Period.[543] It may be doubted, however, whether such forts were generally later than those whose sites were more commanding; for the inhabitants of every district could only choose the best positions which they could find.[544] Cherbury camp indeed, about four miles south-east of Fyfield in Berkshire, was built on a lowland plain.

Some of the Gallic forts which Caesar saw, and of our own, were in his time inhabited by large industrial communities; but although many of the British strongholds which belonged to the Bronze Age contain the foundations of huts and broken pottery,[545] it is doubtful whether they had more than a few occupants except in time of war.[546]

Every explorer who has tried to imagine the conditions of life in ancient British forts has noticed that many of them have no apparent source from which water can be obtained. It has indeed been suggested that where there was neither a spring nor running water within reach the garrison had recourse to dew-ponds, which are still used for watering cattle on the Hampshire downs.[547] But even these reservoirs were generally lacking. Pitt-Rivers, however, argued that in the chalk districts many sites which are now remote from water may have possessed springs. At the village of Woodcuts in Cranborne Chase, after cleaning out a Roman well, one hundred and eighty-eight feet deep, he found no water, but the iron-work of a bucket.[548] But even where there was no spring it is easy to understand how the garrison supplied themselves. None of these camps was ever subjected to a prolonged siege. No army can undertake such an operation unless it can ensure a continuous supply of food; and to do this requires forethought and organization of which barbarous clans are incapable. Again and again the Gauls with whom Caesar contended, whose civilization was far more advanced than that of the Britons of the Bronze Age, were obliged to abandon movements that might otherwise have succeeded, simply because their commissariat had been neglected.[549] When ancient Britons were obliged to take refuge in their stronghold, they knew that the danger would pass if they could hold out for a little while. Women and children who failed to reach the entrenchment in time were doubtless slain or enslaved. But otherwise the worst that was to be dreaded was the loss of crops or stock and the destruction of dwellings. We may suppose that while the cattle were being driven into the fort the women carried up in vessels of skin or earthenware as much water as would suffice for a few days. Such was the practice of the Maoris at a recent time.[550]

Primitive metallurgy.

In spite of war industrial arts were making progress, which was stimulated by war itself. Copper was abundant in Cornwall, Cardiganshire and Anglesey, and near Llandudno: tin was to be had near the surface in Cornwall,[551] and perhaps first attracted attention where it was associated with gold; native smiths began to copy the tools which were brought from abroad; and insular forms were gradually evolved. Among the immigrants there must have been some who were acquainted with metallurgy; and just as the modern coach-builder finds himself obliged to manufacture motor-cars, so, we may be sure, the more enterprising cutlers who had hitherto made stone implements gradually learned to produce tools of copper or bronze. The metals were of course not at first procured by mining. Copper would be obtained from boulders or from lumps of ore on hill-sides, and tin from the gravel beds of streams. The methods, which have been recorded by modern observers, of primitive communities are probably much the same as those of the Britons of the Bronze Age. The original furnaces differed hardly at all from the fires at which food was cooked. The fire was kindled within a fire-place of large stones, underneath which was a pit. The wind, rushing through the crevices of the stones, created a draught, which may have been forced by some rude bellows. After the embers and the slag had been raked away the molten metal in the pit was watched until it was on the point of becoming solid, when the copper cakes were snatched out and broken into the lumps of which specimens have been found in bronze-founders’ hoards. For the smelting of tin a method may have been adopted which was still practised in Germany in the Middle Ages. A trench was filled with brushwood, above which logs were piled; and as soon as the fuel was aglow the ore was pitched on to the fire until a sufficient amount had accumulated. Then the embers were raked away, and the molten tin ladled out.[552] It is worthy of remark that all the Scottish bronze implements which had been analysed up to the year 1880 contained lead;[553] and one may perhaps infer that the tin which was exported from Cornwall to Scotland was not pure.

Bronze Implements:—celts.

Many bronze implements were reproductions, more or less modified, of neolithic models. Stone celts, knives, daggers, spear-heads, awls, chisels, gouges, sickles, and saws have their successors in bronze. Gradually, however, new forms were developed or invented. Bronze was of course at first reserved for weapons; and knives or knife-daggers probably preceded all others, because the metal was originally too scarce and expensive to be used for those which required a large expenditure of material.[554] Flat axes, resembling more or less closely the polished neolithic celts, were, however, manufactured early in the Bronze Age. After some time the sides of the narrow part of the celt, above the cutting edge, were hammered upwards,—probably in order to steady the blade against a lateral strain; and thus by insensible gradations the flat was transformed into the flanged celt; while a projection, commonly called a stop-ridge, was cast on the narrow part of the blade with the object of preventing it from being forced too far into its wooden haft. As the flanges became more marked, they were first confined to the upper part of the tool, and afterwards developed into wings which were hammered inwards so as to form a kind of rudimentary socket.[555] Celts of this form are called palstaves,—a word of Icelandic origin, which denotes a spade. In palstaves of another kind the part between the wings and above the stop-ridge was cast thinner than the rest, so that a groove appeared into which the haft could be securely fitted; and a loop was often added at one side to enable the attachment to be secured by bands of twine.[556] The final improvement was to cast the blade with a socket for the reception of the handle: but palstaves remained in use down to the very end of the Bronze Age;[557] while in some socketed celts the wings survive as mere ornaments upon the sides.[558] Like palstaves nearly all socketed celts are looped on one side, and a few on both.[559] Naturally the socket was not limited to celts, but applied also to knives,[560] chisels,[561] gouges,[562] and other tools. Socketed knives, however, are very rare in Scotland; and on the Continent, except in Northern France, they are almost unknown.[563] On the other hand the patterns of our socketed chisels and gouges appear to have been derived from some foreign source.[564]

Fig. 18. ½

Fig. 19. ½

Fig. 20. ½

Fig. 21. ½

Fig. 22. ½

Fig. 23. ½

The earliest British celts were copied not from stone models but from foreign ones of bronze;[565] and our winged celts and palstaves resemble certain French specimens so closely that they too were probably modelled in the first instance upon the latter.[566] The socket also was invented by some ingenious foreign cutler;[567] for palstaves with the wings bent over are rare in this country, whereas socketed celts with ornamental wings are common.[568] Socketed celts were apparently never widely diffused in Northern Britain; and of course even in the south they did not altogether displace palstaves.[569] Even after they began to be manufactured here the output was supplemented by importation from Gaul: a certain type, the blades of which, instead of expanding, are long and narrow, and the sockets almost square, occurs frequently in North-Western France and our southern counties, but very seldom in the north.[570]

Bronze celts in general, like those of stone, were doubtless used for various purposes—as hoes, hatchets, and possibly battle-axes—and some, which are very narrow or very small, as chisels.[571] Palstaves were sometimes used, as their name would suggest, in the construction of earthworks.[572]

Sickles.

Sickles probably originated in Southern Europe. The few early specimens that have been found here have their closest analogies in France and Denmark; but, for some unknown reason, socketed sickles are almost peculiar to the British Isles.[573]

Fig. 24. ½

The Arreton Down hoard.

A hoard was found early in the eighteenth century on Arreton Down, near Newport in the Isle of Wight, which helped to illustrate the evolution of bronze weapons. Daggers, which differed from knives principally in size, though they began to be manufactured later, were originally hafted with rivets; but afterwards they were cast with tangs or shanks, which were let into the handle, and fastened by a single rivet.[574] The Arreton Down hoard contained nine tanged blades, which closely resemble daggers but may have been spear-heads. Many similar blades have been found since, but hardly any outside the British Isles.[575]

Halberds.

From daggers were derived a class of weapons very rare in this country, called halberds, which in Scandinavia and Northern Germany have been found mounted as battle-axes. Heavier and broader than their prototypes, they were often made of nearly pure copper, which rendered them less brittle and more suitable for dealing heavy blows.[576]

Shields, swords, spears.

Swords, shields, and, with certain exceptions, spears and javelins were not manufactured until the latest period of the Bronze Age. Swords and spear-heads required great skill in casting: shields were so thin that they could not be cast at all, but were wrought by the hammer.[577] Even at the close of the Bronze Age they were probably unobtainable except by the rich, while the rank and file doubtless still made shift with bucklers of wicker-work, wood or leather. The shields of the Bronze Age were invariably circular. Nearly all were ornamented over their whole surface with concentric rings, of which one example has as many as thirty, separated by circles of small studs; and this ornamentation is peculiarly British. One curious shield, found in the Fen country, is adorned with serpentine lines, which may have been intended to represent snakes.[578]

Fig. 25. ⅙

British bronze swords, like those of the Continent, from which they were copied, are commonly of a type which is called leaf-shaped, the blade tapering gently inwards from the hilt, then gradually expanding until, at about one-third of the distance, measured from the point, it attains its greatest width. They, as well as certain rapier-shaped swords, were intended for stabbing, not striking. Their length was generally about two feet, but varied between sixteen and thirty inches. Their sheaths were as a rule made of wood or leather, which, however, were often tipped with bronze; and many of these tips or chapes have been found in the Thames and elsewhere without the scabbards, which had perished.[579]

Fig. 26. ¼

The spears of the earlier Bronze Age were identical with neolithic flint weapons. Probably the earliest bronze spear-heads were some of the larger blades that have been found in Wiltshire barrows, which are commonly described as knives or daggers.[580] Others were derived from the tanged blades of the Arreton Down type, if, indeed, the latter were not themselves spear-heads. A curious and unique specimen, which was found in the Thames at Taplow, and is now in the British Museum, is ornamented with gold studs on the bottom of the blade, which are merely survivals of the rivets that attached to its haft the dagger from which it had been evolved.[581] Spear-heads of this kind, which are invariably provided either with a pair of holes in the blade or a pair of loops below it, intended to secure its attachment to the shaft,[582] are extremely rare on the Continent, and appear to have been invented in Ireland, whence they spread in the course of trade to Britain.[583] Another form of spear-head, which originated in the British Isles and has never been found elsewhere, was barbed, and seems to have been used for hunting rather than in war.[584] The commonest, however, is the continental leaf-shaped type, some specimens of which have analogies in Gaul and the Swiss lake-dwellings.[585] The smaller weapons of the spear-head class were doubtless javelins.[586]

Fig. 27. ½

Moulds.

Many of the moulds in which weapons and implements were cast have been preserved. Open moulds sufficed for flat axes; but the more difficult operations of casting palstaves and socketed celts required that the moulds should be made in halves. All the open ones that remain were of stone; many others, however, were doubtless formed of more perishable materials, such as clay or compact sand. Bronze moulds were also used; but the only specimens which have been found were for palstaves, socketed celts, and gouges. There is a bronze mould in the British Museum that was itself cast in a mould of clay, formed round a model palstave, and attached to it by string, which was of course reproduced in the metal. Leaden celts have once or twice been met with, which of course would have been useless as cutting tools; and it is probable that they were intended simply for making moulds of clay or sand. Bronze moulds were costly, and would soon wear out. It has been suggested therefore that, just as a printer uses in his press not his original wood-block but an electrotype copy, so the bronze-founder generally reserved his bronze moulds for making leaden models from which any number of clay moulds could be formed.[587] Sockets were produced by means of clay cores, which were inserted in the moulds. Socketed celts have so often been found in hoards with the cores remaining in them that we may reasonably conclude that they were bartered by the bronze-founders in this state, and that, as in the Neolithic Age, the purchasers finished them with their own hands.[588] The hammers and anvils which were used in the final stage of manufacture were commonly stone, though a few light bronze hammers have been unearthed; and the decoration was applied by means of punches.[589]

Decoration of weapons.

The patterns with which weapons were decorated are worth noticing even by those to whom archaeology for its own sake makes no appeal. Daggers and flat or slightly flanged celts were incised with rectilinear figures and chevrons only:[590] winged celts, palstaves, socketed celts, and spear-heads have similar designs in a few instances,[591] but for the most part they are ornamented with concentric circles. The significance of these facts will become apparent when we come to deal with certain chronological questions relating to the Bronze Age.[592]

Hoards.

What we know of the metal-work of this period has been learned mainly from buried hoards which were never recovered by their owners, and of which more than a hundred have been unearthed in Great Britain from Cornwall to Sutherland.[593] These hoards were of three kinds.[594] Some, consisting entirely of newly-made articles, belong to traders. Others, which comprise damaged or broken goods, and include moulds and often cakes of copper, represent the stock-in-trade of bronze-founders, who tramped over the country-side, and were ready to cast implements or ornaments of the latest fashion and to melt and recast old ones for anybody who could give them what they wanted in exchange. The tools in these collections were for the most part broken intentionally to make them more portable and ready for the crucible.[595] Other hoards again, which frequently comprise ornaments, alone or associated with implements, were the property of persons who were not in the trade. Hoards were of course buried when robbers were about or when some marauding clan appeared. By far the greater number belong to the latest period of the Bronze Age,[596] which shows that in earlier times the craft had not been specialized, or that people who could afford to buy bronze implements were so few that no travelling dealer could make a fair profit. Those who then possessed bronze tools must have made them for themselves unless there happened to be a skilled craftsman near who could earn a living by working for his neighbours.

The great improvement of tools and weapons would lead us to look for traces of corresponding progress in every department of material culture.

Pasturage.

Pasturage of course continued to be the mainstay of the mass of the population; and although there were probably few households which did not subsist partly upon the chase, the remains of funeral feasts in barrows and the refuse heaps of dwellings show that game was eaten much less than the flesh of domestic animals. It has been said that sheep were not introduced into Britain before the Roman conquest; but excavation has proved that they were bred by the bronze-using inhabitants of Dorsetshire.[597] Besides the small cattle that were common in the Neolithic Age large oxen were reared, at all events on Cranborne Chase and the Yorkshire Wolds; and, as in the Neolithic Age and doubtless for the same reason, animals were commonly slaughtered before they had reached maturity.[598] Although bronze fish-hooks, almost identical in form with our own hooks of steel, abounded in the Swiss lake-dwellings, and were present in more than one of the hoards that have been unearthed in France, only a single specimen has yet come to light in the British Isles: but it need not be inferred that the Britons had no taste for fish; for they probably caught trout and salmon with nets or spears.[599]

The growth of population was indeed making it difficult for men to provide for their families; and they were constrained to toil harder in order to avoid starvation. Under Agriculture. this pressure agriculture began to flourish; and wheat was grown at least as far north as Yorkshire.[600] Armed with bronze axes, the husbandmen were better able to clear forests and to bring new land under cultivation; and at harvest time, when they reaped their reward, then, we may be sure, the clansmen gathered, and sacrificed to their god, and held high festival.[601] Their labours are attested not only by numerous stone mullers and by the sickles that have been already mentioned, one of which was found even in Aberdeenshire, but also, as we have already seen, by the teeth of the skeletons in the barrows.[602] Oxen were probably used in ploughing.[603] Horses, which were very small, were domesticated, and in certain parts of the country eaten,[604] but they were not common; and, although the rock-carvings of Scandinavia and the bridle-bits and wooden wheels that have been found on the sites of Swiss lake-dwellings show that in the Bronze Age men had learned to ride and drive,[605] similar evidence is wanting in Britain. Looped bronze plates, however, have been found in a hoard at Abergele, which are supposed to have been a jingling ornament, attached to harness; and some small bells, found at Dowris in Ireland, resemble those which occasionally form a part of modern horse-trappings.[606] Oxen indeed, if not horses, must have been required for hauling timber even in neolithic times when clearings had to be made; and the wagons which conveyed tin to the coast when Pytheas visited Cornwall[607] had probably been in use long before his time.

Signs of amelioration in the conditions of life.

Certain facts seem to indicate that the conditions of life in the Bronze Age were becoming more favourable to longevity, and in particular that women were better off than before. Famines indeed must still have occurred; for of course there were bad harvests from time to time, and cattle then, as now, were liable to disease, and doubtless often perished in hard winters. But the disparity in stature between men and women was far less than it had been in the Neolithic Age;[608] and Thurnam estimated the average age of the people of the round barrows whose skeletons he had examined at fifty-five, eight years more than that of the aboriginals.[609] It has been affirmed that even the primitive Aryans often put old people to death;[610] but skeletons have been exhumed in Britain which showed signs of extreme age.[611]

Dwellings.

One might be inclined to suppose that this amelioration was partly due to improved housing; but such evidence as exists tends to show that the habitations of the Bronze Age, although, owing to improved tools, they may have been better built, were designed on much the same lines as those of the preceding epoch. Pit-dwellings, like those which have been already described,[612] were still constructed in districts where stone was not obtainable. Very few, as we have seen, can be even approximately dated; but some which have been excavated at Hitcham in Buckinghamshire and in the fort of Eggardun on the Dorsetshire downs contained pottery which made it safe to assign them to the Bronze Age.[613] It may be that some of the Scottish subterranean dwellings which are known as weems belong to the same period, for a bronze sword was found in one at Monzie in Perthshire;[614] and perhaps a few of the so-called Picts’ houses and of the beehive huts in Cornwall and North Britain, which will be described hereafter, were built before iron was there used.

Lake-dwellings.