The Boundless Sea

by David Abulafia

  The Atlantic Bronze Age was out of phase with that in the eastern Mediterranean. According to the rough definition applied by archaeologists, it lasted until around 600 BC, when iron technology spread more widely in the Atlantic lands; its high point, the Late Bronze Age, can be dated to its last 300 years, beginning in 900 BC. It may or may not be important that the Late Bronze Age was a period of cooler climate throughout Europe, after several warmer and drier centuries, though the effects of a changing climate in Atlantic Europe and in the Mediterranean were not necessarily the same.4 This is just when the discussion of ancient Italy or Greece adopts the label Iron Age. Of course, this well-established way of defining societies by the materials out of which their members made their tools is crude and one-sided. One very good reason for preferring bronze was quite simply the ready availability of copper in the Atlantic lands, along with tin; tin could be found in the north-west of Iberia and copper in the south-west, while the area round Nantes, where the Loire debouches into the sea, was a source of both metals, and eventually of a distinctive type of sword.5 Although bronze implements were not as strong as the best iron ones, early ironmaking was unsophisticated, and in a duel between the two an iron sword was as likely to shatter as a bronze one was to bend. Many other criteria, such as political and social organization, cannot be used as labels because the evidence is so hard to unearth. On the other hand, there is almost certainly a political dimension to the appearance and diffusion of bronze weapons. Precisely because bronze remained precious and because it provided material for sharper weapons, the people who owned bronze goods were members of the warrior class, or merchants who aimed to sell metalwork to the warrior class. This means that the finds of bronze objects from Atlantic Europe, plentiful though they are, speak much more loudly about princes and nobles, and occasionally about traders, than they do about the vast majority of the population, who still relied on their traditional stone tools.6

  Although a number of archaeologists have been keen to present the Atlantic arc as a single interacting zone of culture and contact, there was great variation between, say, southern Portugal, which was exposed to influences coming out of the Mediterranean, and lands to the north such as Brittany or Ireland. Broadly, Ireland, Wales and southern Britain display differences but had much in common; Brittany had close relations with the British Isles but a strong identity of its own; within Iberia one can distinguish Galicia and northern Portugal from southern Portugal, but the Iberian coastlands also had much in common; and, taken together, an Atlantic world can be drawn on the map, stretching from the Scottish isles to Cape St Vincent, though Scotland was less well integrated into this world than it had been in the days of Maes Howe; western France, south of Brittany, was oddly disconnected from this network.7 The linked areas shared styles of metalwork, which was quite distinct in appearance from that produced in inland France and western Germany, home to the Urnfield Culture, of which more in a moment. Even so, weapons and implements brought into Britain from the Continent were probably melted down and refashioned in the specific shapes that had become traditional on the island.8 The important question here is whether these societies remained in maritime contact with one another or whether the deep dip in trade and contact within the Mediterranean was matched by similar inward withdrawal among the communities living beside the Atlantic.

  Certain features of Atlantic Bronze Age society reveal new ritual practices. The custom of casting precious bronze objects such as shields and swords into rivers and lakes presumably had a powerful religious significance. These were not objects that one would simply discard as rubbish. The abandonment of the custom of building megalithic chamber tombs covered by great barrows is equally mysterious, because it is not obvious how people now disposed of the dead – cremation seems the obvious answer, but, in contrast to the large number of urn burials in central Europe (which have given a whole culture the name ‘Urnfield’), urns were not adopted and cremated remains must have been scattered – most likely into rivers, along with some of the bronze objects just mentioned. When rituals change significantly – notably the shift from inhumation burial to cremation – it is tempting to assume that this indicates that migrants have arrived, marrying into, outnumbering or entirely replacing the existing population, but a moment’s thought about religious change in more recent centuries (for instance, the rise of Protestantism) should be enough to show that radical changes can occur without a sudden shift in population. DNA tests suggest that a significant proportion of the inhabitants of south-western England, specifically the area around Cheddar, are descended from Neolithic forebears. And some experts would like to claim that what united the Atlantic peoples was their use of Celtic languages; but the lack of written texts makes this just a hypothesis.9

  The period before 950 was a rather quiet phase of contact. The evidence for contact before then has to be teased out of bronze objects as diverse as Irish cauldrons and Portuguese or British flesh-hooks, while the exact design of a sword handle often reveals significant long-distance contacts. The cauldrons, whose weight and craftsmanship made them into highly prized objects, turn up in south Wales, the lower Thames region and, interestingly, Galicia and northern Portugal, though there they are often of a slightly different design.10 Since rather few have been found in the French interior, it is plain that they reached Iberia by sea, either by way of Great Britain or directly, while swords of a type found frequently in the lower Thames area quite often reached south Wales and Ireland. They are evidence for an Atlantic society that took delight in noble feasting, as great hunks of meat were stewed in cauldrons and the meat extracted with hooks that were sometimes elaborately decorated with figures of birds that resemble swans and ravens, their necks and beaks cleverly moulded to make them function as the teeth of these hooks.11

  Many of these cauldrons must have been offered by chieftains to one another as magnificent gifts. Feasts at which gifts were exchanged speak of contact between centres of power, and of warriors travelling short and long distances to seek one another’s company. For this elite was not simply a local aristocracy; the cauldrons are evidence of a shared culture along the Atlantic arc. The voices of these warriors are silent, but what one sees in the literature of Anglo-Saxon England, such as Beowulf, or in the Icelandic sagas, may portray a similar sort of culture, given to braggardly display and, no doubt, the consumption of large amounts of beer and mead. It was also a culture in which fighting with a sword as well as a spear was the mark of a noble warrior. Close combat also required good protection for the body, so armour, more often of thick leather than of bronze, was an important part of a warrior’s equipment. The expense of producing or acquiring these goods increased the distance between those who could afford to do so and the wider population. For swords became prestigious articles of trade. There were distinct cultural preferences in the design of high-quality weapons, rather as in much later centuries scimitars were favoured by Turks and straight swords by Spaniards – in other words, there is a hint here of a common sense of identity, at least among the warrior elites who used these fine weapons. In order to be socially respectable, it was important to follow the traditional British fashions. Unfamiliar continental ways were regarded as socially unacceptable.

  The best evidence for wide contacts comes from what are known as ‘Carp’s Tongue swords’, on the basis of a rather remote resemblance between the ribbing along the length of these swords and the appearance of a carp’s tongue. ‘The Carp’s Tongue sword’, it has been said, ‘is truly an Atlantic armament.’12 This ribbing greatly strengthened the blade, so it had a practical as much as an aesthetic purpose. Since these swords did not vary very much in appearance, and were also regarded as a high-quality product, there is a whole history to be reconstructed out of their first appearance in north-western France, and out of their diffusion to other places, at first by trade and subsequently through the spread of technology. Soon, such swords were being produced in south-eastern Britain, though the design followed in Iberia was not
exactly the same as that used in northern Europe. Still, there is enough similarity between Iberian and northern swords to suggest cultural influences and maritime trade along the Atlantic arc, and the adaptation of a model known through sea contact to local needs and conditions. In the late eighth century BC, these contacts reached as far as the bay of Huelva, on the Atlantic coast of south-western Spain, where a substantial bronze hoard was found underwater in 1923. The hoard contains plenty of these swords and may be the remains of a shipwrecked vessel carrying metalwork that was cast in Spain and was being taken out to sea, rather than being delivered from afar, although mixed in with this were cloak pins (fibulae) from distant Cyprus; another view is that this was a sacred deposit, such as an offering to the sea gods.13 The list of places where these swords have been found is impressive: northern Germany, southern Portugal, but also within the Mediterranean.14

  Overall, there was an increase in, or rather renewal of, contact between Brittany and Britain, on the one hand, and Spain and Portugal, on the other, by 600 BC.15 The English Channel was regularly crossed by Bronze Age boats, so that Brittany and Normandy (or Armorica) and southern England (or Wessex) were in close and constant contact, without losing their cultural individuality, made evident, for instance, in different burial rites. North-western France had more in common with southern England than with eastern France, well away from the ocean; Breton biconical urns turn up in Wessex.16

  II

  Maritime trade across the English Channel was also fed by more remote contacts. An extraordinary discovery from Langdon Bay near Dover, together with a similar but smaller find at Moor Sand in Devon, sheds light on the character of trade within and beyond Atlantic waters. The overwhelming advantage of looking at evidence from wrecks is that one can see goods in transit, gathered together, and clearly in these cases intended for trade. At Langdon Bay, underwater archaeologists found forty-two ‘median-winged’ axes, thirty-eight palstaves (another type of axe-head), eighty-one dagger blades and sundry other bronze goods; Moor Sand yielded seven French bronzes, including four daggers.17 The axes would not have found their way to the bottom of the bay had not a Bronze Age ship, most probably bound for what is now Dover Harbour, foundered, perhaps in a gale that blew the boat beyond its destination. By looking closely at the origins of these objects archaeologists have concluded that the cargo was gathered together in the mouth of the Seine, for it did not all originate in the same place – the winged axes are typically eastern French, and yet the palstave axes are recognizably Breton. The winged axes belong to a type not actually found in the British Isles, so these axes were not imported to be used, even though they seem to have been in good condition when the ships sank. Rather, the bronze objects were valued for their metal content, and were melted down on receipt, so that they could be turned into bronze objects of the sort Bronze Age Britons preferred. The traders of Langdon Bay and Moor Sand were scrap metal merchants – though in addition they doubtless carried all sorts of perishable goods such as food and textiles that have decomposed.18 Among foodstuffs, salt was being traded around the Atlantic shores, as it would be for many centuries to come; and nothing of that can survive a shipwreck in saltwater.19

  Some of the bronze goods moving around the Atlantic region may have been used in payment as ingots of standard weight, rather than as tools and weapons, for, as has been seen in the Indian Ocean, the history of money does not begin with the invention of coinage. The modern history of these ingots began in 1867, when a clog-maker called Louis Ménard discovered the first great pile of them, which his friends thought were a hoard of gold, but which he insisted on taking to the local museum.20 By now 32,000 socketed axes of several standard designs have been discovered at sites not far distant from the Atlantic, originating in Brittany and Normandy, and generally called ‘Armorican axes’ after the classical name for Brittany. They turn up in southern Britain, in Ireland and along the shores of the Netherlands and northern Germany, but not in Galicia and Portugal. By the late seventh century BC they were being produced with a bronze alloy that used lead rather than tin, and this would have rendered them extremely inefficient as tools or weapons, strengthening instead the argument that they were a way of storing wealth. Many have been found packed in cylindrical holes in the ground, or in jars, and neatly arranged in circles, with the cutting edge pointing inwards. Two hoards from Finistère contained 800 at a time, and at another site archaeologists uncovered more than 4,000 axe heads in several deposits. They have been described as ‘currency axes’, objects that were versatile enough to be used as a form of money but also as ingots, and in some cases as tools too.21

  Evidence from settlements is scarce, but it enables archaeologists to reach closer to the domestic life of these Atlantic people. Away from the coast, banks and ditches divided up the land, indicating that ownership of territory was now sharply defined. These field systems were created in areas close to the Atlantic before this type of land division became widespread in continental Europe. The availability along the Atlantic arc of copper ores and of the tin needed to make the alloy bronze stimulated community life by creating specialist activities: mining, smelting, manufacturing, exchanging and selling. Just as political elites became more visible and more powerful through their acquisition of deadlier weapons and stronger armour, smiths and traders acquired a distinct place in these societies, which grew in complexity.22 One expression of this complexity was the creation of soundly built circular villages with dry-stone house foundations, themselves circular, and strong perimeter walls. Circular stone houses were not themselves a novelty – they have been encountered already at Skara Brae on Orkney. The novelty lay in the spread of this type of structure from Britain and Ireland down to the coasts of Iberia, though unfortunately the surviving remains from Brittany are few. On the one hand, this type of village speaks for a sense of insecurity, whether from warlike neighbours after one’s land or from brigands after one’s goods; after all, this was, as the evidence from the swords and spears reveals, a society dominated by warriors. On the other hand, this type of settlement speaks for permanence, the intention to stay put. Interestingly, these villages are characteristic of the Atlantic arc, while in central Europe the preference was for oblong houses; so it is tempting to think that they are the product of a common culture embracing the British Isles and the Atlantic flanks of France, Spain and Portugal, a culture with deep roots in Neolithic Europe that gave the settlements along the Atlantic edge of Europe a different appearance and that expressed a distinct identity. Whether that identity was expressed in a common language is less clear.23

  Judging from the finds at Langdon Bay and Moor Sand, stretches of water were crossed by several routes, including a route from Brittany to south-west England and one from the mouth of the Seine north-eastwards to the Strait of Dover; the English Channel is exposed to gales and strong tides, so the best route across is not necessarily the shortest, and even these longer routes would not generally follow a straight line.24 A few rock carvings from Spain give some idea of the appearance of ships around this time, though they are difficult to date and the outlines are crude: several images are of sailing ships, and in at least a couple of cases sail power was combined with oar power.25 Sturdy watertight boats constructed out of a wooden shell covered in hides, some quite sizeable, are attested from Iron Age Britain and are hardly likely to be an Iron Age invention; the description of these ships by Julius Caesar will be examined later.26 A number of log-boats found near Peterborough in eastern England give a good idea of what sort of boat could be used along rivers and in open water such as the Wash, and similar boats have been found in France in a tributary of the Seine, dating right back to the Middle Neolithic (roughly 4000 BC).27 How far out to sea such boats were wont to go is unknown. Landing places lay within existing natural harbours, for at this period there is no evidence that ports had been set up. Occasional rock carvings from Denmark, Sweden or Galicia offer crude outlines of oared and sailing vessels.

  Once built, a shi
p was put to maximum use, for trade, fishing and transporting people. And people were constantly on the move. Colin Renfrew has listed eleven reasons why one might have travelled in prehistoric Europe: to obtain goods; to sell goods; for social meetings; out of sheer curiosity or to acquire exotic information; to a holy place as a pilgrim; to learn or train; to find work; as a mercenary; to visit friends and relatives; as an emissary; and, in his view one of the most important and most easily forgotten reasons, to find a spouse.28 The fact that the British Isles were a distinct but not a totally separate cultural world provides simple proof of the readiness with which Bronze Age sailors traversed the English Channel over many centuries.

  III

  One element missing from this picture of the Atlantic world, already fragmentary and tentative, is the connection between the ocean and the Mediterranean. For although the eastern Mediterranean, during its own Bronze Age, had experienced little or no direct contact with Iberia, in the age of the Minoans of Crete and the Mycenaeans of Greece (who were hardy navigators), the Mediterranean network of trade and settlement that the Phoenicians created from about 900 BC onwards stretched right across, and beyond, the Mediterranean; legend attributed the foundation of a Phoenician trading settlement on the island of Cádiz to 1104 BC, which is certainly too early, but there can be no doubt that Cádiz, or Gadir as the Phoenicians called it, was up and running in the ninth century BC, well before the Iberian ship – if it was Iberian – foundered in the bay of Huelva with its bronze cargo. It is no surprise that the Phoenicians were attracted to this area. It gave access to the silver-rich realm of Tartessos in the southern Iberian hinterland; and around the bay of Huelva lay several settlements that had flourished since at least the end of the Neolithic era, attracted by rich supplies of salt and fish, while the Phoenicians were attracted by sources of tin in Iberia and in further reaches of the Atlantic; whether they reached Cornwall, as is often maintained, is far from clear. They still had to meet the considerable challenge of battling their way against contrary currents and often strong winds as they made the passage past Gibraltar (coming in was always much easier). Some Phoenicians stopped at Gorham’s Cave, a fissure in the Rock of Gibraltar, to invoke the gods before daring to enter the open ocean, leaving behind pottery and votive objects.29