The Intimate Bond (10 page)

The same droveways separated individual landholdings and served as boundaries that subdivided what eventually became an organized landscape, seemingly a patchwork of fields, ditches, hedges, and tracks, but easily decipherable to those who used and maintained it. The working landscapes of ancient times, wherever they were located, were both material and social landscapes.

Efficient stock raising relied on carefully monitored grazing that used barriers of all kinds. Hedges and ditches may have kept out wild animals and predators, but they were far more important as a means of controlling grazing, especially in crowded landscapes. Such devices would have allowed individual plots to recover, and permitted dung lying on the surface to break down and become incorporated into the recovering, grazed vegetation. Allowing land to lie fallow for a while also offers some relief from microscopic parasites, such as fluke, that can cause serious problems. If the quality of the grazing was good and
abundant, then herds and flocks would have wandered quite widely, with only children or young men controlling them.

Enclosed grazing land tended to develop when flocks became larger, graze was of poorer quality, and land in shorter supply. Much closer control was necessary. For thousands of years, earthworks, sometimes including burial mounds—as was the case in southern Britain—may have served as territorial markers that delineated landholdings, perhaps by kin groups. These mounds, or tumuli, dotted an open landscape where herds and flocks grazed, tended by young men and boys, and watched over by the revered ancestors lying under conspicuous burial mounds. As farming populations rose in number, so the importance of boundaries increased, not just shallow banks and ditches, which even a young lamb can traverse, but substantial hedges. Francis Pryor believes that winter hardwood cuttings taken from nearby forests formed such hedges for thousands of years—tough, easily geminated, and often with their own natural protection in the form of thorns. He points out that such hedges were commonly used many centuries later, during the days of the infamous Enclosure Act of the early nineteenth century
CE
.

At Fengate, the herders practiced what Pryor calls a carefully “structured mobility.”
²
The mobility was vital, but it was far from random. Each winter, the farmers lived on high, flood-free ground, in small farms dominated by a single round house. Both the land and the dwelling might have been occupied for only a generation or so. Come late April or May, the water levels in the nearby marshland fell slowly. Part of each family would move out into the lush, open fen pastures, taking most of their sheep and cattle with them. Young men and children would supervise the herds. In autumn, the now-fattened and well-fed beasts would be driven back to higher ground. This was the season of feasting and ritual, when people gathered from a wide area of surrounding countryside. Animals would be culled, marriages arranged, and livestock exchanged between different families.

The Fengate excavations revealed a landscape divided into a series of blocks separated by ditched driveways (or droveways) that ran perpendicularly down to the flooded land, giving each farmer access to both higher- and lower-lying ground, just as their descendants possessed in medieval
times. At first the excavators were unable to follow a driveway to water's edge, but fortunately the construction of a large power station gave them a chance to trace two driveway ditches to the water, where the ditches bifurcated and ran along the boundary between wet and dry terrain. Here was convincing evidence that the people had driven their flocks. Phosphate analyses of the soil in what Pryor was now calling the Main Drove provided evidence of large quantities of deposited manure. This proved that large numbers of animals had passed through the Drove. There were clear signs of extensive trampling by animals where it terminated.

Francis Pryor manages his own sheep within small areas, so he has, effectively, firsthand experience of what it must have been like herding sheep in Fengate times. It was a crowded working landscape, but sheep and other stock are easier to manage when closely confined. This is why modern farmers jam as many animals as possible into a truck. Both cattle and sheep are herd animals, for being a member of a herd gives them a sense of security. Confining the animals within a small space also makes it easier to work with them, and to sort them into different categories. The methods of working different animals vary considerably. Pigs, for example, are often best handled individually, using a piece of wood to push their heads and to steer them in one direction or another. Sheep respond well to dogs, both in the open and in enclosed areas, where wild and domesticated sheep have a tendency to gather into close-knit groups when they sense a threat. Modern-day shepherds call the process of introducing a dog to a herd “dogging.” Basically, the shepherd puts the fear of a dog into the sheep so they are clumped and easier to handle. The behavior is entirely natural for the dog and goes back to wolf-pack days, when the junior members of a pack would drive animals up to a top wolf, who would kill them, eat some flesh, and leave the rest for the pack. Pryor believes that dogging goes back deep into the past, to long before the days of medieval monks and the time when Britain supplied wool to much of the European world.

Most traditional ways of managing sheep and other farm animals take advantage of the beasts' instinctive behavior. Droving, batching, confining, inspecting, and sorting sheep was part of herding routine probably long before Fengate times, and surviving field systems reflect this. The
farmers of thirty-five hundred years ago were, above all, practical managers who knew that well-nourished, carefully managed animals were the foundation of good stock keeping. Behind their expertise was an intimate knowledge of what sheep and other animals would and would not do, unless one tricked them. A case in point is the placing of gateways in fields. Place them in the middle of the edges, and the sheep will balk. Build the exit at a corner, where the converging fences funnel the animals through the defile, and the flock will pass through readily. From such an exit, the farmer, if he or she wished, could steer the herd into a narrow “race,” funneled in by wooden hurdles or some temporary structure. There the flock could have been inspected for age, condition, and so on. The beasts would have passed through the defile and emerged in a three-way gate, which would have allowed the farmer to separate the herd into different categories, perhaps with the help of children using hurdles.

The size of the race would have depended on the number of sheep. Pryor uses a seven-meter (twenty-three-foot) race to handle some two hundred fifty beasts, but there is no means of estimating flock populations in Bronze Age times. He estimates that the entire Fengate field system handled “considerably less than ten thousand animals—even at the height of summer when all lambs were present.”
³
The figure for the excavated area of the field system may have been between two thousand and three thousand animals. This, says Pryor, is a reflection not of small-scale subsistence farming, but of something more intensive, perhaps akin to the level of production during the height of the medieval wool trade.

This was an impressive achievement, possibly based on an ancient version of the small and hardy Soay sheep, which behave well in large flocks and yield excellent wool and high-quality meat.

All this worked because of the availability of seasonal grazing and extremely nourishing summer pastures. Between 1800 and 600
BCE
, the margins of the Fens provided a superb environment for intensive sheepherding, the farmers using simple methods that form the basis for much sheep farming to this day. This abundance of sheep might have triggered changes in local society, perhaps differences between individuals and kin groups in terms of wealth in head of sheep. Larger flocks gave their owner greater social influence, in that he or she had the ability to throw feasts, use gifts to reinforce obligations and ties with other people, and create advantageous marriages and other alliances. But when sudden epidemics could wipe out entire flocks in days, wealth in animals was volatile, often transitory. The only protection was to distribute animals across the landscape with fellow kin.

Figure 5.1
  Excavations at Fengate showing the general topography. Courtesy of Francis Pryor.

Social differences may have played out in numerous ways, especially in a context where meat consumption was a sign of prestige, and where
feasting was an important part of the annual round. At Flag Fen, close to the Fengate field system, Francis Pryor recovered a remarkable series of bronze artifacts, including axes, swords, and a flesh hook that had been cast into the marsh as offerings; these were often bent before being cast into oblivion.
⁴
We'll never know the significance of these offerings, but they may well have been made to the powerful ancestors, guardians of the land, whose spirits lurked in the dark, symbolically charged waters of the Fenland marshes. Here, as elsewhere, the ties between the living and those who came before, between the supernatural realm and the material world, must have lain at the very core of human existence, defined in part by the flesh of beasts raised on farm and marshland.

Social Instruments

Both sheep and goats were workaday animals. They provided meat, milk, skins, and wool or hair, plus tallow and other by-products. They were a reliable source of flesh, far more predictable than game, even if hunting continued to be part of the subsistence equation for thousands of years. Surplus males culled from the flock or herd provided a steady meat supply and also important social benefits in farming societies that, in their attitude toward animals, were totally different from hunting peoples. For the first time, people owned beasts other than dogs—not just a single animal, but males and females. These both formed breeding populations that maintained the herd and were also a vital source of social currency: surplus males.

Judging from modern subsistence societies, individual ownership of animals by family and kin transformed society in fundamental ways from the beginning. Those who owned animals possessed assets that passed from one generation to the next. At the same time, the size of a herd became a token of wealth, and often social standing, within a kin group or a settlement. A flock owner might know his animals individually and watch them closely at lambing time, but in the final analysis, the members of his flock were powerful social instruments. Within a very short time, the surplus males from a founder flock assumed important symbolism, especially as gifts, whether given alive or slaughtered for a
communal feast. Owners with proliferating flocks or herds acquired social standing and prestige, as animals became wealth on the hoof.

At issue here were wealth and the delicate matter of the inheritance of animals and the pastures upon which they grazed. Unlike a hunter's prey, animals were now tangible property and wealth, as were dwellings and grazing grounds, which had to pass from one generation to the next. Property and rights to land passed through the father or mother's side, following what had to become well-established rules that affected both social and economic status. Land ownership and grazing rights were surely carefully guarded from the beginning, especially among people who knew from hard experience just how devastating voracious small stock could be on the surrounding landscape.

Kin ties had always been important in Ice Age hunting societies. Links between widely separated bands were of paramount importance for survival. Kin could take refuge with other groups after hunting accidents and could make use of another group's territories. But the dynamics changed profoundly with the domestication of animals, for, like cereal cultivators, each community was tied to its land, usually owned by kin groups. Cultural practices were often similar among farmers and herders. Many ancient farming communities possessed farm animals, for full-time herders are, and probably were, rare and almost invariably obtain some grain or grow it to survive in lean times. With both farmers and herders, farming and grazing tracts passed from one generation to the next down through a continuous sequence of descendants whose line of ancestors reached back far into the past. New rules for human existence accompanied the process of adapting to animal domestication, rules that defined the nature of inheritance and drastically enhanced the importance of marriage ties between different families and fellow kin in ways unimaginable among hunting groups.

Marriages and inheritance, whether through the male or female line, became serious business, cemented by careful negotiation and by the exchange of gifts, notably of livestock—bride price. This is where surplus males came in: as gifts to a new couple starting their own flock, as ritual offerings to be sacrificed during marriage ceremonies, or to honor important guests. Deep ties of sharing and mutual obligation were a
necessity in all farming societies, especially those with animals, whose welfare often depended on people spreading their beasts widely over the landscape to avoid epidemics, drought, or even human raiders. Now, for the first time, animals became individual property—something to be cherished, valued, and counted—to be given as calculated gifts, not necessarily as currency in the sense we would use the word today, but as part of the equation of survival and wealth accumulation that became central to human life in ways unimaginable among hunters and foragers.