A History of Ancient Britain (41 page)

Excavation of the houses in hill forts like Tre’r Ceiri reveals they were all more or less the same size. There is seldom anything that would have satisfied the ego of a ‘big
man’ or a chief. Instead they evoke a sense of equality, of people pooling labour and resources, co-operating with one another to achieve ends that benefited all. Some archaeologists (notably
those with left-wing leanings) even imagine our Iron Age ancestors living together in the sort of communist collective that would have appealed to any iron-worker who believed that property was
theft.

Strange to say, it may also be the case that there was a direct relationship between the apparently isolated, inward-looking hill forts and the communal feasts of the midden sites. The livestock
and other foodstuffs consumed at the great gatherings in the lowlands may have had their origin in the farms of those whose homes were on the hilltops. If their locations made them seem distant and
cut off from their neighbours, then the
connections established through the display and sharing of animals and grain would have served to close the gap.

These were farming communities and where there was plenty of grain or of livestock, it could be traded. Better yet, surplus grain from a good year might be set aside, in pits or other storage
spaces within places like hill forts, for a rainy day. In this new, emerging world it was food and not objects of bronze that represented wealth. So it followed that larger tribes, larger
communities could work more land, grow more crops and husband more animals – becoming more prosperous in the process.

By around 500
BC
something else had changed as well: iron objects began to appear all across the country – and in useful quantities. Society had evolved in the
absence of metal. Bronze had disappeared from the picture but life carried on, as it had to, and people had adapted. If its disappearance had torn a hole in the fabric of society, then within a
couple of centuries it had been repaired. The pattern was different but it was every bit as strong as before, perhaps even stronger. By the time iron tools and weapons begin to appear in volume,
Iron Age society was already fully formed. It was people and not iron that had made the difference.

Iron might have lacked the glamour of bronze but it got the job done even better; and in the space of just a few hundred years its masters made some huge leaps forward in technology. The same
site in Lincolnshire that produced tantalising evidence of human sacrifice in the form of ‘Fissured Fred’ also offered up evidence of a more workaday sort. But for all that the iron
tools of the so-called Fiskerton hoard speak of the life of a working man, they are as evocative and as moving as any bronze sword.

The contents of a toolkit, they include an iron hammerhead, fragments of an iron saw together with its elegant horn handle and an iron file. I challenge anyone to hold those treasures in their
hands and not feel a connection to them. Although corroded, the teeth on the saw blade are still plainly visible; the business ends of the hammerhead are battered and flattened by much use. Perhaps
the file is most affecting of all, the individual cutting edges still sharp to the touch. If someone were to show you the Fiskerton tools and say they were from their grandfather’s toolbox,
you would believe them. They are utterly and unmistakably modern – and yet they were put aside for the last time 2,500 years ago.

By around 400
BC
the time of the Bronze Crisis (if there had ever really been a crisis) was a distant memory. The climate was reliable once more – enough rain to
make the crops grow, enough sunshine to ripen them – and
the fertility of the soil, plants and animals meant the human population could grow as well. It was
agriculture and agricultural surplus that lay behind it all and the making and storing of surplus depended heavily upon the new metal – iron.

While the casting of bronze had been the preserve of secretive specialists, iron-working became a central part of village life. Men like Hector Cole – blacksmiths with the know-how that
enabled them to make, maintain and repair the iron tools of day-to-day life – were right at the heart of it.

At Butser Ancient Farm, near Chalton in Hampshire, archaeologists and other specialists are engaged in a longstanding project that seeks to recreate Iron Age agriculture – and the skills
that made it possible. Dave Freeman has spent much of his life unpicking the weave of Iron Age life, learning to make and master the tools, understanding what was going on in the minds of the
builders of roundhouses, the cultivators of fields.

He showed me the difference made to the lot of the Iron Age ploughman by the addition of an iron ‘shoe’ to the cutting edge of a simple scratch-plough, or ard. An ard is little more
than a long wooden shaft supporting a wooden spike that points down towards the soil at an acute angle. Dragged behind a pair of oxen, the spike excavates a shallow furrow that may then be planted
with seed. By adding an iron cover to the end of the spike – a cover with a cutting edge – its effectiveness is increased manifold, along with its lifespan. As well as cutting deeper,
into heavier soils, the shoe can be mended or replaced whenever required. Suddenly the ard has been transformed into the kind of plough we might almost recognise today.

The Iron Age also saw the invention of some of the first ‘machines’ – tools with moving parts. The best of these were nothing less than some of the earliest labour-saving
devices known to mankind. The saddle quern had been an absolute necessity for millennia. A large, flat, gritty stone provided the base plate upon which a smaller, rounded stone was rubbed back and
forth. Grain trapped between the two was gradually ground into flour, but the ‘daily grind’ was a backbreaking chore. It was in the Iron Age that the rotary quern first came into play.
Two circular stones, each with a hole through the centre, were loosely mounted, one on top of the other, on a wooden shaft. A wooden handle fitted on the side of the topmost stone meant it could be
rotated on top of the lower, setting up an effective grinding action. Grain poured into the hole in the top was steadily forced – and so ground – between the two opposing surfaces. What
eventually worked its way to the outer edges was coarse but usable flour.

Everything about the rotary quern shows a leap forward in thinking, in technology. It is a composite machine made from multiple parts and its use would have transformed
the daily life of anyone keeping house in the Iron Age. More flour could be produced in less time, with less effort, and the production of the daily bread was made infinitely less arduous. They
must surely have been treasured items in every home.

Another Iron Age innovation transformed surplus grain into a nest egg. Some or other genius discovered that freshly harvested grain sealed into a pit beneath an airtight cap of clay would be
prevented from germinating. Held in a kind of suspended animation, such a cache could be kept for at least a year and potentially even longer. Grain pits – many of which are large enough to
have been mistaken at times for subterranean shelters – have been found by the hundreds and thousands within the interiors of most excavated hill forts. By laying down stores in times of
plenty a community could withstand the impact of a subsequent bad harvest. Better yet, an accumulation of such wealth might be traded with neighbours for other essentials or luxuries. A nearby
community might one day come cap-in-hand, asking for help, and if they were bailed out with surplus grain they would be in debt. Such a marker might be kept in the back pocket, as it were, to be
called in at some unspecified time in the future. In this way grain was transformed into something much more powerful than food. From now on it was a source of power and influence as well.

The Iron Age farmstead of Little Woodbury, just south of Salisbury, was found to have over 300 grain pits clustered around one large roundhouse. Excavated by the German archaeologist Gerhard
Bersu just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Little Woodbury became for archaeologists the archetypal Iron Age farming settlement – the model they subsequently applied everywhere
else.

The Little Woodbury roundhouse revealed itself in the form of a circle of large postholes but Bersu, for all his undoubted talents, was unable to visualise what form the building they supported
might have taken. He imagined all sorts, including a wigwam and a roof with multiple gables. Finally the English archaeologist Peter Reynolds, original director of Butser Ancient Farm, attempted a
reconstruction. The solution he found – a simple conical roof supported on a low wall of posts – is so familiar now it is hard to understand why the form eluded archaeologists for as
long as it did.

Bersu’s work at Little Woodbury was cut short by the outbreak of war in
1939. He was interned on the Isle of Man as an enemy alien, along with many other German,
Austrian and Italian nationals, and never returned to the site that had made his name.

From 400
BC
there was something of a population explosion in Britain. Improved climate, better technology founded upon iron – the fields had never been so
productive. Another chapter had been opened, one profoundly different in many ways from any that had gone before.

Bronze had created an elite. Iron was utterly and only practical but its edge, one that could be endlessly resharpened, carved Britain into a new shape. Iron technology put agriculture and the
land at the heart of society. Wealth and power were no longer mysterious, or the unattainable preserve of a cosseted elite. Wealth could be grown and stored; power might be bought and sold.

We are the first creatures in the universe to pay attention to time and all that has happened. It was the unimaginable temperatures at the hearts of stars great and small, living and dying, that
cooked the stuff of us. We have been 13 billion years in the making, from dust and scraps left over.

As of 2011 there were 118 elements in the periodic table. Iron is number 26. It was the Russian chemist Dmitri Ivanovich Mendeleev who first arranged the elements into that regular pattern, like
bricks in a wall. Such was his genius he left gaps for more – elements yet to be discovered but which he knew must exist, and whose properties he could predict. Of the 118 elements we know
today, 100 or so occur naturally. The rest, those heavier than uranium, are the product of man-made nuclear reactions, or carefully choreographed high-speed collisions in particle accelerators.

Elements are made of atoms but atoms are not the least of it. Within every atom is a nucleus and every nucleus is like an infinitesimal planet, orbited not by moons but by electrons. Every
nucleus is made of neutrons and protons, and it is the precise number of protons that gives each element its unique atomic number. The nucleus of an iron atom contains 26 protons, and so iron is
number 26 in the periodic table.

All of this is fantastically complicated for a lesser mortal like myself – hovering on the outer edge of my understanding – but I persevere because it is important, and somehow
revealing. In the most fundamental, the most elemental way, iron is special. Nature herself has decreed that its 26 protons combine with its neutrons to make it incredibly stable. In fact iron is
the most stable element in the universe. Other elements – light ones like hydrogen and helium, heavier ones like gold and uranium – have chaotic
storms raging in
their tiny hearts; conflicting forces throwing them off balance.

Iron is not like that. The heart of iron is a place of balance and calm, where balance is restored. Every other element strives, wants to be more like number 26, needs to be more stable and more
iron-like. Lighter elements like hydrogen would be more at peace if only their atoms had more protons. Heavy ones like uranium and polonium are so naturally unstable, with too many protons, they
fall apart in a bid to shed the excess – a physical breakdown we call radioactivity.

Here, then, is the nature of the universe – ceaseless, restless change as elements try to lose or gain protons, to become more stable. Stable is what they and the universe want to be. It
turns out iron is the benchmark, the universal standard that makes the difference, all the way up and all the way down.

Change is the natural state of life on Earth as well. As a species we are driven by it. More than three millennia ago some of us, living in the eastern Mediterranean, discovered iron for
ourselves. While bronze, its predecessor in our lives, had been all about magic and mystery, iron was practical and stable. After all those tens of thousands of years of flux iron promised
something reliable and enduring.

There was never any hope of a modern world built of a metal as fickle as bronze. A scaffold forged in iron, however – flexible and stable iron – might support any future we cared to
design.

CHAPTER SIX

WARRIORS