Foundation (History of England Vol 1) (2 page)

The study of prehistory must also be the study of geography. When the settlers arrived in England, 15,000 years ago, the North Sea was a great plain of lakes and woodland. It now lies submerged, rich in the unseen evidence of the past. Yet we can in part rescue that which has been lost. Oak woods, marshes covered by reeds, and open grasslands covered the land. It was a warm and humid world. Red deer and voles inhabited the landscape; but they shared it with elephants and macaque monkeys. Among them wandered groups of humans, twenty-five or more in each group, pursuing their prey. They fired upon the animals with flint arrowheads, and used carved reindeer antlers as axes; they carried wooden spears. We do not know how they were organized but the discovery of ‘butchery sites’, where tools were manufactured and food prepared away from the main settlements, suggests a measure of social control.

We can still see the people walking towards us. On the sand at Formby Point, on the north-west coast of England, there are human footprints continuing for 32 feet (9.75 metres). The prints of many children are among them. The men were approximately 5 feet and 5 inches in height (1.55 metres), the women some 8 inches shorter (20 centimetres). They were looking for shrimps and razor shells. Footprints are found in other parts of England. Some appear on the foreshore of the Severn estuary; they fade away at the point where, 7,000 years before, the dry land became swamp. Now, on the flooding of the tide, they are gone.

These are the prints of what have been called Mesolithic people. The term, like its counterparts Palaeolithic and Neolithic, is loose but convenient. These people cleared the woods and forests by burning, in order to make way for settlements or to render the hunt for game more effective. Pine was also burned to make way for hazel, whose autumnal nuts were a popular source of food; they knew how to manage their resources. The early English have been called ‘hunter-gatherers’, with dogs employed for hunting, but their life was not that of undisciplined nomadic wandering; their activities took place within well-defined boundaries. They ranged through group territories that adjoined one another. They liked the areas where land and water meet.

Some 11,000 years ago a great lake covered what is now the Vale of Pickering in Yorkshire. On the bank of this lake was built a platform of birch wood. It might have been used to expedite fishing, but it is more likely to have been a site of ritual ceremonial; the people wore amber beads, and left behind the bones of pig and red deer, crane and duck. A round house has also been discovered, 11.5 feet in diameter (3.5 metres), that has been dated to approximately 9000
BC
; it was constructed of eighteen upright wooden posts, with a thick layer of moss and reeds to furnish a sleeping area.

Its inhabitants used barbed antler points, flint knives and scrapers; they started fires by means of iron pyrite. The house itself seems to have possessed a hearth. They used canoes to travel over the lake; one paddle has been found, but no craft is now visible. It has disintegrated through time. But there are survivals. At this site, known as Star Carr, were discovered twenty-one fragments of deer
skull, some of them still with antlers. Were they a form of disguise for hunting? More likely, they were part of a shamanistic covering to enter the spirit of the deer. It might have been an early form of morris dancing, except that the numinous has now become simply quaint.

The Mesolithic English lived in settlements such as that found at Thatcham in Berkshire; the modern town itself is in fact the latest version of human community on the same site. Some atavistic impulse keeps habitations in the same place. 10,000 years ago the people lived on the shore of a lake. Burnt bones, burnt hazelnuts and patches of charcoal used for fires, were found; here, in other words, was all the panoply of daily domestic life. Cleared spaces represented the floors of small huts. The first English house was made of flexible saplings, bent over and covered with hides. It measured approximately 20 feet by 16 feet (6 metres by 4.8 metres).

Hundreds of other such settlements existed, many of them in coastal regions that now lie upon the seabed. The coasts were once between 70 and 100 feet (between 21 and 30 metres) higher than their present level and, as the seas rose, so the settlements were lost in the deluge. We may never know very much more about the Mesolithic English because their remains are beneath the waves. One submerged village came to light when some divers peered into a burrow made by a wandering lobster off the Isle of Wight; the crustacean was flinging out pieces of worked flint. A settlement of craftsmen and manufacturers, as well as hunters and fishermen, was then revealed. A wooden pole, with a flint knife embedded in it, was rescued from the waters. A canoe was found, carved from a log. The remains of structures like houses could clearly be seen. They were workers in wood as well as in stone. This is part of the lost English world under water.

The water rose so much that, after the melting of the ice sheets of the glacial era, it encircled what had become the archipelago of England, Scotland and Wales. 8,000 years ago, the marshes and forests of the plain lying between England and continental Europe were obliterated by the southern North Sea. It may not have come as a tidal wave, although earthquakes can precipitate great masses of water. It is more likely to have happened gradually, over 2,000 years, as the land slowly became swamp and then lake. In earlier
ages of the earth, two catastrophic floods had already created the Channel between England and France. With the influx of new waters the archipelago (we may call it an island for the sake of lucidity) was formed; 60 per cent of the land surface became what is now the land of England.

The land then becomes the object of topographical enquiry. Where, for example, is the exact centre of England? It is marked by a stone cross at the village of Meriden in Warwickshire; the consonance of Meriden with meridian or middle of the day is striking, and that may indeed have been reason enough for a cross to be raised there. In fact the true centre of the country is to be found on Lindley Hall Farm in Leicestershire. The property was recently owned by a couple with the surname of Farmer.

The effects of this novel insularity eventually became evident in the tools which were fashioned in England. They became smaller than those shaped on the continent, and certain types of microlith were in fact unique to this country. Yet the island was no less inviting to the travellers who came across the waters in boats manufactured of wood or of osier covered with stitched skins. They came from north-western Europe, proving that the Anglo-Saxon and Viking ‘invasions’ were the continuations of an ancient process.

They also came from the Atlantic coasts of Spain and southwestern France, but that migration was not a recent phenomenon. The Atlantic travellers had been colonizing the south-western parts of England throughout the Mesolithic period, so that by the time of the formation of the island a flourishing and distinctive civilization existed in the western parts of the country. The travellers from Spain also settled in Ireland; hence the relationship between ‘Iberia’ and ‘Hibernia’. The Iron Age tribe of the Silures, established in South Wales, always believed that their ancestors had come from Spain in some distant past; Tacitus noted that these tribal people had dark complexions and curly hair. These are the people known later as ‘Celts’.

So differences between the English regions already existed 8,000 years ago. The flint tools of England, for example, have been divided into five separate and distinct categories. The artefacts of the south-west had a different appearance to those of the south-east, encouraging trade between the two areas. Individual cultures
were being created that reinforced geographical and geological identities. There is bound to be a difference, in any case, between those cultures established upon chalk and limestone and those built upon granite.

A division is to be observed within England, established upon two broad zones. The Lowland Zone – comprising the midlands, the Home Counties, East Anglia, Humberside and the south central plain – is built upon soft limestone, chalk and sandstone. This is a place of low hills, plains and river valleys. It is a place of centralized power and settlement. It is soft, and various, and pliable. The Highland Zone in the north and west – comprising the Pennines, Cumbria, North Yorkshire, the Peak district of Derbyshire, Devon and Cornwall – largely consists of granite, slate and ancient hard limestone. This is a place of mountains, high hills and moors. It is a region of scattered groups or families, independent one from another. It is hard, and gritty, and crystalline. These two regions do not face each other; they face outwards, towards the seas from where their inhabitants came. We can see the changes upon the ground itself. In Wessex the border of the ‘finds’ from one settlement stops at the point where the chalk meets the Kimmeridge clays. These people would move no further west. So regional differences began to spread.

Differences, in accent and in dialect, may already have existed. There was an original language in the south-east of which traces still survive in contemporary speech – the words ‘London’, ‘Thames’ and ‘Kent’ have no known Germanic or Celtic root. It is possible that the people of East Anglia and the south-east began to speak a language that developed into Germanic, and that the people of the south-west spoke a language that would become Celtic. The Germanic tongue became Middle English before flourishing as standard English; Celtic speech diverged into Welsh, Cornish and Gaelic. It is pertinent that in Wales and Cornwall Celtic inscriptions can be found in stone, carved during the Roman age, while in southern England there are none. Tacitus reports that, at the time of the Roman colonization, the south-eastern English spoke a language not unlike that of the Baltic tribes. But there can be no certainties in the matter. All lies in mist and twilight.

When the mist rises, we see extraordinary things. Beneath a
burial mound in Wiltshire, near Avebury, was discovered what had once been a surface layer of soil dating from 3500
BC
; it had been preserved by the construction of the barrow. The significance of this ancient ground was confirmed by the discovery of tiny grooves running at right angles, one to another, so that they form a crisscross pattern. These grooves were cut by a plough. It was a forked tree branch, strengthened by a stone tip, pulled by an ox. It is the first evidence of a field in England. It represents the beginning of farming. We have entered what has become known as Neolithic England. This small patch of land was cleared by the destruction of dense woodland; it was cultivated with the plough; it then became pasture for sheep and cattle; a boundary fence or hedge was erected; the barrow was then built some 1,500 years later. In this sequence of events we see the slow changes of prehistory.

The transition from hunting to farming was itself a very gradual one; there was no agricultural revolution in any meaningful sense, just the increments of days and years and centuries of habitual practice. Custom was the keystone of life. In this long period flint tools were replaced by sickles and polished axes; pottery was introduced to England; new forms of communal ritual emerged. But in the space of an individual generation, which we may estimate between twenty and thirty years, it must have seemed that nothing had changed. When we use terms like ‘Mesolithic’ and ‘Neolithic’, we should remember the underlying deep continuity that represents the nature of England itself.

The slow expansion of farming can be dated from 4000
BC
. The woods and forests of the country were cleared, at first sporadically but then extensively; the moors of northern and south-western England, and the heaths of East Anglia, were in part created by human activity. On this newly open ground wheat and barley crops were harvested. Domesticated pigs and cattle were kept, as well as sheep and goats. But sheep were not originally English. All of these animals were brought over in ships, not being native to the island, emphasizing the extent to which seafaring visitors contributed to the now familiar landscape.

This was a time of rising temperature, and in the glowing sun the people expanded; during the entire Neolithic period, from approximately 4700
BC
to 2000
BC
, the population trebled and has
been estimated at 300,000. The pressure of ever-increasing numbers helped to accelerate the intensity of cultivation, and by 3000
BC
the available countryside was marked out in small rectangular fields. Where there are fields there will be fences and ditches; there will be stone walls. Fences have been found beneath prehistoric burial mounds, testifying to their ancientness.

The presence of the barrows, where the dead reside upon the landscape, is a further sign of a settled society with its own forms of ritual and worship. Evidence can be found for the construction of houses and of scattered farmsteads with settlement pits, for enclosures where cattle might be herded or fairs and meetings held. One such enclosure, built in Cornwall before 3000
BC
, was guarded by a great stone wall; the remains of houses were found here, sufficient accommodation for approximately 200 people. So the beginning of the English village, or of the English town, is to be found in the Neolithic period.

Roads and trackways were built from settlement to settlement. The Icknield Way took the prehistoric traveller from Buckinghamshire to Norfolk. Lanes led from farmstead to farmstead. The Pilgrims Way linked the great religious centres of Canterbury and Winchester. Ermine Street is now known, in part, as the Old North Road. The Jurassic Way goes from Oxfordshire to Lincolnshire. Watling Street ran between Canterbury and St Albans, passing through what may have been prehistoric London. Long causeways were built across the soft fens of Somerset, from timber that was felled in approximately 3800
BC
; the varieties of wood used in their construction, from ash and lime to hazel and holly, suggest that they were especially grown for the purpose. The specific properties of the wood, utilized by the Neolithic English, are not known to us. Their technology is lost.