A History of Ancient Britain (43 page)

By virtue of their visibility in the archaeological record, hill forts may have attracted a level of attention from us that is disproportionate to their real significance. Large sections of the
population in eastern and southern Britain were apparently living in open settlements in the lowlands, and such a lifestyle may have been just as representative as any centred around a hill fort.
Wrote Bradley: ‘For all the labour invested in their construction,
the hill forts could have been a rather peripheral phenomenon’.

Suffice to say, hill forts have long preoccupied many archaeologists, but still there is little consensus concerning their function. Symbols of power; tribal capitals; places of refuge in a
war-torn land; centralised grain stores; places of trade and manufacture – all of these labels and more besides have been invoked to explain why people expended so much effort enclosing
hilltops. Perhaps all of the explanations have been correct . . . but at different times.

Why expect a single unifying explanation anyway? One hilltop may have been used several different ways, down through the years. Do we do justice to the life of a 70-year-old by understanding
only how he lived out his last decade? What does seem to make sense is that the high ground of Britain has drawn people for millennia. The reasons for going there changed through the years and even
today the locations of many of them continue to command our attention.

Sir Barry Cunliffe has been studying Danebury hill fort, in Hampshire, for the past 40 years. During that time more than half of the interior – a space covering around 12 acres – has
been excavated, along with parts of the defences. It is one of the most comprehensively investigated hill forts in the whole of western Europe.

It has been established that Danebury was built early in the story of hill forts – around 600
BC
– and then occupied continuously for the next 500 years.
Around the same time that work got under way at Danebury, three other large hill forts were constructed in the surrounding countryside. On a clear day Bury Hill, Figsbury Ring and Quarley Hill are
all visible from the summit of Danebury Hill. In a part of Hampshire where the land rarely rises more than 300 feet above sea level, all four sites occupy dominant positions. Danebury Hill is
nearly 500 feet high, giving the hill fort commanding views over the surrounding farmland as well as towards the three neighbouring hill forts. They are equally spaced, all within similarly sized
territories.

It is fascinating to imagine the world in which they were first built – to think that perhaps all four communities were at work at the same time, consolidating their territorial claims by
digging deep ditches and raising great banks and ramparts of earth and timber. All the time they sweated and toiled, their neighbours might have been similarly employed; so that whenever a worker
lifted his head from his labours he would have looked off into the distance to see the emerging chalk-white defences of one or all
of the other three picked out against the
green of the grass.

Sir Barry explained how the population living in that part of Hampshire in the middle years of the first millennium
BC
gradually filled the place to capacity. The
farmland was good and rich and the agricultural practices of the time were producing more and more food. More food provided for yet more people and so the problems intensified.

Walking through the eastern entrance of Danebury today is still an unsettling experience. The drop from the top of the great sloping bank to the bottom of the accompanying ditch was once more
than 50 feet. Two and a half thousand years of weathering have softened the profile somewhat, infilled some of the ditch and lowered the bank, but still they loom menacingly above the head of
anyone seeking to pass through to the interior. The long curve of bank and ditch is no mere architectural affectation. If Danebury was designed to repel invaders, then would-be attackers had a lot
of ground to cover before they even reached the stout wooden gates barred against them. All the time they passed in front of the bank they would have been at the mercy of defenders ranged above
them, armed with slings and stones, longbows and arrows and spears.

Even an approach in a time of peace, to share bounty at a feast or to gather together with allies to reinforce ties, might have been intimidating. Being overlooked by the residents observing
from above, friends or not, would have reminded the guests they were approaching an important place that was home to people of substance. All of it is cleverly designed to give the advantage
– of status or of defence – to those in possession of the hill fort. If not purely defensive then at the very least there is something theatrical about a site like Danebury, so that at
times people were ‘on stage’ there, performing roles that helped define relationships and pecking orders.

But according to Sir Barry, by 400 or so
BC
the time of the peaceful farming collective was over. In parts of Britain pressure on the land had pushed the emergent society
to breaking point and a hill fort like Danebury was a visible response, a veritable clenched fist. Alongside all of the detailed evidence of life in the fort – grain pits and store rooms,
roundhouses, shrines raised to honour gods or spirits – excavation has revealed copious evidence of awful dying there too.

Under a clear blue sky and a warm sun, Sir Barry unpacked cardboard boxes filled with Iron Age weaponry – along with piles of human remains that showed all too clearly the lethal use to
which they had been put. It was a grisly haul, all of it collected from within Danebury itself. First there were
beautifully crafted iron spearheads, long slender shanks
culminating in triangular points as big as beech leaves. One look at them confirms they were only ever intended for killing large animals, like men.

But if the weapons were chilling, they were as nothing compared to the butchered skulls. Sir Barry handed me the crown of one – the top halves of the eye sockets were clearly visible. It
was punctured by a hole that exactly – exactly – matched the profile of the iron spearhead I had marvelled at moments before. If it was not the actual weapon that had done the deadly
damage then it was one exactly the same, perhaps crafted by the same smith. It was a man’s skull and it was easy to imagine him in action on some other bright day long ago in the moments
before a well-aimed throwing spear arced down out of the blue. Then Sir Barry pointed out other, older damage on the same skull. At some point the warrior had received a fearsome blow to the top of
his head from something like a hammer, or perhaps an axe. It had been enough to cave in a piece of bone the size of a man’s thumb, but not enough to kill. Turning the crown upside down
revealed how much hurt had been sustained on the inside. Heaven knows what kind of headache resulted, not to mention brain damage; but his skull had healed, the fragments knitting themselves
together into a rough, pitted bump. It was gruesome, but graphic evidence of how much punishment a man can withstand.

The knowledge he had been so grievously wounded before painted an even more vivid picture of the man’s life and death. On his last day on Earth he had gone into battle knowing full well
what might happen, what he might have to endure in order to survive. He was not to be so lucky, however (if lucky is quite the right word), and instead he was felled for the last time, perhaps by a
missile he never even saw coming. And there were plenty more bits and pieces to add further detail to a gory picture of at least one aspect of Iron Age life. Another skullcap bore evidence of
multiple glancing sword wounds. On more than one occasion the individual in question had received the most radical of haircuts, right down to the bone. Whole flakes had been lifted from his crown
before the moment came when the blade swung and a portion of skull as big as a child’s hand was parted from his head, killing him instantly.

Sir Barry had chosen a spot near the elaborate eastern entrance for his demonstration – and just when I thought things could not get much worse for the Iron Age occupants of Danebury he
pointed to a part of the interior of the fort just yards away. ‘Close to where we’re standing was a very large
pit into which they had thrown body parts –
clearing up after a battle presumably. A large number of body parts and some of these skulls came from there.’

What he was describing was a charnel pit. When the death toll after a battle is too great to permit formal identification and separate handling of the fallen, there is sometimes no option but to
heap the dismembered body parts and heads into a mass grave. Just such a horror had evidently unfolded at Danebury, on at least one occasion. So here had been a community well used to brutal hurt
and death.

In our antiseptically clean, bubble-wrapped world we shy away from the wounded. News coverage of soldiers home from theatres of war like Iraq and Afghanistan can be hard to watch. Young men with
faces destroyed, or missing limbs and condemned to lifetimes in wheelchairs – many of us find it easiest just to look away and forget.

But there have been times when some wounds were viewed differently. In the medieval world, for example, a man was hardly a man at all unless he had the scars to prove it – scars won in
battle. Prince Henry, the future King Henry V, was lucky to survive the Battle of Shrewsbury, on 21 July 1403. Just sixteen years of age, young Hal was among a force of men-at-arms struggling to
save the life of his father, Henry IV, when a rebel archer found his mark. Hal was felled by an arrow shot from a longbow, the missile penetrating his face ‘overwharte’ – meaning
it came in from the side, Hal’s left, plunging deeply into his cheekbone and burying the arrowhead in the bone behind his nose. It was five days before the royal surgeon, John Bradmor, was
able to remove the thing, using a purpose-built tool he designed and made himself. The bespoke arrow-extractor was a fearsome-looking shaft of iron with a three-part head that Bradmor inserted into
Hal’s wound. By turning a screw on the other end, he was able to make the three wings open outwards, much like a rawlplug, so that they gripped inside the socket of the arrowhead. Once there
was enough purchase, he pulled the offending article from the boy’s face.

Needless to say, Hal was left with a scar that must have been disfiguring; but the war wound would have been worn with great pride for the rest of his life. Here was boy who had fought with men
– and no ordinary boy, but a prince, and a king-in-waiting. His standing among his fellows – not to mention in the eyes of female admirers – would have been enhanced beyond
words.

Although we have no name or date for the Iron Age battle that filled a charnel pit with a heap of slain, it is reasonable to imagine the scarred survivors telling and retelling their stories
with all the pride of any that stood with Henry at Agincourt 2,000 years later. Limbless or not, scarred or battered, they lived in a society that had learned to value the warrior, so that such men
would have carried their wounds with a bearing won only in combat.

A charnel pit is indisputable proof that, for at least part of the Iron Age, might was right. Sir Barry described a time not of constant war, but of heightened tension. For some of the second
half of the first millennium
BC
, Danebury, Bury Hill, Figsbury Ring and Quarley Hill were home to communities in competition with one another. The outer edges of their
territories rubbed together, creating friction, and in that febrile atmosphere young men would have swaggered around, vying for respect and acknowledgement of status.

From time to time, said Sir Barry, raiding parties would have set out from one or other of the hill forts looking for trouble or just an opportunity to let off steam. When two such groups came
together it would hardly take much before someone got hurt, perhaps badly. In the aftermath of such an incident – once word got back to the home fort of the wounded – outright,
large-scale violence could well be the result. Around that time the great wooden gates of Danebury’s eastern entrance were burnt to the ground on at least one occasion – yet more
evidence of terrifying strife.

If the time of the peaceful farming collective really was over by 400
BC
, then it is interesting to speculate about the kind of personality that might have prospered in
the newly dangerous world. If the latest trade was war, then its natural practitioners would come to the fore, as they must.

We cannot know for certain but it is tempting to imagine that, during times of peace, society was run by councils of elders, or by the headmen and women of prominent families. But cometh the
hour, cometh the man and in times of violent trouble the leadership of communities would likely have fallen into the hands of those able to wield swords, defend and extend territories, bring
troublemakers and upstarts to heel. If archaeologists like Sir Barry Cunliffe are correct then during the Middle Iron Age Britain entered a period during which local power bases – like that
at Danebury –
fought it out for overall control, for power and for prestige. It was a time when individual status might best be established, improved and secured in
battle.

The warrior was hardly invented in the Iron Age. At least as early as the Bronze Age men were going to their graves accompanied by items that might suggest a martial life and death. The same is
probably just as true for at least some of the Stone Age skeletons that have been found with flint knives, arrowheads and axes.

In 1834 a landowner excavated a burial mound on his estate near Scarborough, in north Yorkshire, and found the remains of man buried within a tree trunk that had been hollowed out to form a
coffin of sorts. Named Gristhorpe Man, after the farmland on which he was found, he has been described by modern archaeologists as a warrior chieftain.

In life he had reached a height of six feet. Given that he also had a full set of good teeth and had lived to an age of perhaps 40 years or more, it seems likely he had access to a privileged
diet as well. Forensic examination of the remains concluded he had died of natural causes; but his bones bore the signs of many healed fractures, suggestive perhaps of the hard life of a
warrior.