A History of Ancient Britain (48 page)

These are the tattered fragments that remain when all else has been lost. Imagine what Iron Age Britain might have sounded like, with all those variations on the theme of a Celtic language. The
words of ancient Britain are utterly unintelligible to us now, alien to all but a handful of scholars, and yet they were spoken in those islands for uncounted thousands of years before the advent
of the Romans with their Latin, or the Angles and Saxons and the beginnings of what became spoken English.

Paul Russell, Reader in Celtic at Cambridge University, described how confused and disorientated a modern English-speaker would feel if somehow transported back to an Iron Age marketplace where
they could
hear the language of the time. ‘I think the most striking thing for them would be that they wouldn’t understand a word of it,’ he said.
‘This is a language group that is unrelated, or only distantly related, to English.’

And just as a journey through Britain today from the south-west of England to the north-west of Scotland would take a traveller through scores of regional dialects of English, so the sounds of
ancient Celtic would have varied across the land. ‘That is probably the case, by virtue of the fact that this is a language that developed into different languages – Welsh as separate
from Cornish, and so on and so forth.’ ‘So there probably was that kind of variation – so that mile on mile, neighbour to neighbour, they would understand each other perfectly
well – but if you moved someone all the way from the south-west to the north-east they would probably struggle.’

More than anything else it was the advent of Latin Rome that sounded the death knell for the older languages. On mainland Europe, where the Roman grip was firmest, the Celtic tongues all but
vanished. Only in the archipelago, on the islands of Britain and Ireland in relative isolation in Oceanus, did anything survive. Beyond reach on the westernmost fringes – in Wales, in the
deep south-west of England, in the north-west of Scotland and in Ireland – the last vestiges have clung on like rare plants in a lost valley.

The very word ‘Celt’ was buried away in the ashes of the fallen Roman Empire and not heard again until the ‘Celtic Revival’ of the early eighteenth century. The linguist
Edward Lhuyd paid particular attention to the surviving Celtic languages as well as to relic traces in the Iberian Peninsula. His studies persuaded him that since the peoples along the Atlantic
seaboard had spoken Celtic languages, they must themselves have been Celts. Soon public imagination was captivated by the thought of giving a name to Britain’s original inhabitants –
those who had raised the stone circles in the fields and made the tools and weapons occasionally fished from the rivers and lakes. The Victorian enthusiasm for the notion of a separate, older race
– the rightful owners of the land – has never really gone away for some.

Celtic-speaking Britain – the Britain of Celtic art and Celtic sensibilities, of legendary swords and mounted warriors – was also a Britain of rival tribes. Two centuries after the
life and death of the Kirkburn Warrior the people might have been united by a common Celtic culture but they were still divided by all the tensions and stresses born of human nature.

In order to survive and to thrive, communities needed leaders who were
warriors, skilled at defending and extending borders. If those leaders were themselves to survive
and thrive, however, they required more than just a strong sword arm, and archaeological finds recovered from the waters of a Scottish loch make it clear that the dark arts of politics and public
relations are as old as the hills.

The territory centred around Loch Tay, in Perthshire, has always drawn and held people. During the Neolithic it was the crags above the water that focused some of their attention. The slopes of
the hill they call Creag na Caillich, formed of an easily splintered, fine-grained stone known as hornfels, or hornstone, are littered here and there with the rough-outs and flakes left behind by
axe-makers. The axe factory is 2,000 feet above sea level, however, and nowadays there is a more accessible visitor attraction in the form of the Scottish Crannog Centre. The centrepiece is a
completely convincing reconstruction of an Iron Age crannog, inspired by one of nearly 20 crannogs already discovered in the shallows of the Loch.

People all over Scotland and Ireland (and perhaps in Wales, though only one has been found there so far) began building and living in such dwellings at least 5,000 years ago, and found reason to
go on doing so up until the 1600s. Where the builders had access to timber the crannogs sit on platforms perched on huge piles driven into the bed of the Loch. If there were no trees around then
tons upon tons of rock were dumped into the shallows to create an artificial island on which a stone building could be erected.

The attractions of the crannog are fairly obvious. The inhabitants have the security of being surrounded by water, their home accessed only by an easily defended causeway. At times when arable
land was at a premium, a home built over the water of the Loch was freeing up ground for crops and animals that would otherwise be occupied by buildings. Then there is the visual impact of such
dwellings – a huge roundhouse seemingly floating above the water. A leader able to marshal the raw materials and the expertise for such a venture would advertise his status and power to all
who laid eyes upon his home.

Nowadays crannogs survive only as mounds of material under several feet of water. Excavation of them is therefore undertaken only by divers. The reconstructed crannog on Loch Tay is the product
of years of work by the Scottish Trust for Underwater Archaeology (STUA) and in the process they have amassed a huge amount of detailed evidence of life on the loch over 2,000 years ago.

Sealed beneath the waters for all that time, the organic materials used by
the crannog dwellers have survived in unusually high quantities. Along with the materials used
in the construction of the buildings and platforms, STUA archaeologists have also found personal belongings and even food remains. On one crannog site on Loch Tay they recovered traces of around
160 different edible plants – a unique insight into the diet of the Iron Age inhabitants.

What is immediately apparent is the absence of foods taken for granted in modern Britain. None of the familiar staples were available, so there are no potatoes, no onions. Instead it is clear
that even after millennia of farming, foraging for wild foodstuffs was still key to a healthy and varied Iron Age diet. Edible wild greens like sorrel, chickweed and wild mushrooms were plentiful
and popular, along with cultivated crops like barley. Meat was available as well, both from hunted animals and those kept in the fields.

As well as the food remains, the waters of the Loch have also preserved wooden plates – the sort of item that almost never survives on sites on dry land, where the processes of
decomposition are so much more aggressive. All in all it is an assemblage of material that hints at the importance of food to Iron Age society – its production, collection and, most
importantly of all, its distribution. Central to the control of power was the feast.

Human beings make eye contact with one another while they eat. This is unique in the animal kingdom. For every other creature, eating is a stressful business. Consider a pride of lions around a
kill. Each knows his place – or if they do not, they will quickly learn it. It is all flashing teeth, furtive glances at those higher and lower in the hierarchy, bite, chew and swallow as
fast as possible. For many beasts feeding is a solitary business. Get some food and then scurry away to somewhere safe and private where the eating can be done out of sight of prying eyes. Even our
closest relatives, the chimpanzees and gorillas, avoid looking one another in the eye.

Homo sapiens sapiens
evolved differently. Eating is sociable for us, friendly. Our companions are quite literally those with whom we share bread, from the Latin
panis.
Dinner
parties are still the height of sophistication. Going out for dinner with friends is a high point of the day, or the week, and while we sit around the table eating and drinking, we chat and look
each other in the eye.

It was in the later Iron Age in Britain that people first began thinking about individual place settings, about accompanying food with alcoholic drinks. We know that people then were in the
habit of eating communally.
What is fascinating is the way Iron Age communities used food and feasting as key tools for brokering power. Social standing was no longer
demonstrated only by the wearing of ostentatious jewellery or fine swords. It was also about the ability of a leader (or would-be leader) to draw supporters to his side and keep them there. A
chieftain in control of surplus food would therefore be able to use a feast as an opportunity to show his generosity and, more specifically, to make it clear who was in favour with him and who was
not. The feast was almost a ritual in its own right, with a clearly defined etiquette. Every guest at the table, as well as everyone looking on, would have read and understood every nuanced move.
Who was seated closest to the chieftain? Who was served first and who was served last? Who was offered the finest cuts of meat and who was fobbed off with the cold shoulder? A skilled operator, a
chieftain with the resources and the confidence to carry it off with style, would leave no one in any doubt about the status quo.

At the centre of the feast was the firedog – an elaborate piece of ironwork upon which the meat, be it pork, lamb or a side of beef, might be suspended over the flames of the hearth for
cooking. Sometimes they were displayed in pairs, either side of a fire and helping to keep the burning timbers in place. The mere sight of such things would have been impressive –
unmistakable status symbols and a clear sign that here was the home of rich and powerful man.

One of the most impressive ever found is the so-called Capel Garmon firedog, found in a field at Carreg Goedog Farm in Capel Garmon, in Conwy, north Wales, in 1852. It had been laid on its side
in a deep hole, deliberately buried as a gift to the gods. Comparison with firedogs from elsewhere suggested the Capel Garmon example had been made and used sometime between 50
BC
and
AD
75. Such was the complexity of the work – with elaborate animal heads depicting a bull and a horse – it may have taken as much as three
years to make.

Capel Garmon was not the only site of a buried firedog. In 1967 workmen using a bulldozer to clear the way for a new road in the town of Baldock, in north Hertfordshire, turned up what they
initially thought was just a lump of scrap metal. Archaeologists were later called in to investigate and found not one but two iron firedogs. They were in a circular grave containing cremated human
bone together with a Roman amphora, a bronze cauldron, two wooden buckets, two bronze basins, half a pig and bones from a bear’s paw. It appeared the departed had been dispatched into the
next world after a feast in his or her honour. The bear bones suggested either the corpse had been wrapped in a bearskin when it was cremated, or that a bear had been the
main course. Burials like this, alongside all the apparatus of a feast, are described by archaeologists as Welwyn-type and are an occasional feature of the later Iron Age. Whether the feasts were
shared by the mourners – or intended for the dead person and the ancestors – will never be known.

Britain had been reshaped – if not by iron then by the more modern world of which it was a part. A warrior elite had arisen, men whose status was displayed by the weapons they wielded. By
the final years of the Iron Age power was centralised in the hands of regional chieftains, those who controlled the land and the food it produced. Warriors themselves, they drew towards them other
men of war and, by force of personality, had them do their bidding. They dominated the hill forts in the south, the brochs and crannogs in the north. It is thought that by around 100
BC
some of these chieftains had risen to an even more exalted level. They were likely few in number but each controlled so much land and so much trade they became the first of the
super-rich.

During the first century
BC
modern-day Norfolk was the territory of the Iceni tribe. It seems that, by perhaps 70
BC
, their leader exerted a
gravitational pull so powerful he had drawn towards himself treasures that were beyond the dreams of avarice.

In 1948 a ploughman working in fields outside the village of Snettisham, a few miles north of King’s Lynn, turned up a large, shiny piece of metal. Responsible man that he was, he showed
it to the farm manager, who took one look at the thing and said it must be part of a brass bedstead. The ploughman kept on ploughing – and kept finding more and more pieces of metal. Soon a
whole pile lay scattered around the original find, on the grass by edge of the field. Heaven knows how long they might have lain there if it had not been for the arrival of a visitor, who spotted
the pile and realised at once the metal was old, and possibly valuable. When the hoard was carted into Norwich Museum in search of an expert opinion, the curator must have fallen off his stool. The
ploughman had found a huge hoard of Iron Age gold jewellery.

Buried gold is like that. Because it never corrodes it comes out of the ground in the same condition as when it went in. After hundreds or even thousands of years in the soil it looks brand new;
a quick brush with a cloth and it is ready to wear. Usually when people find ancient gold – while
digging a ditch perhaps, or waving a metal detector around –
they persuade themselves it must be fake, or at least not very old. Gold looks too much like gold actually to be gold.

Between 1948 and 1973 the gold just kept coming out of the ground at Snettisham. For a while there were no more finds and it was assumed the field had given up all its secrets. Then in 1989 a
local metal detectorist was given access and soon began finding more of the same; modern technology was penetrating well beyond the reach of any plough. Experts from the British Museum were called
in and soon the Snettisham Treasure had doubled in size.