Food and Farming in Prehistoric Britain

by Paul Elliott

  Beef and beer stew, with mushrooms and Jack-in-the-Hedge. This is a fragrant plant that adds tones of garlic and mustard to the dish; it is best added at the very end of the cooking process.

  Cooking pork in an earth oven. The joints have been covered in a protective coat of dough before being placed into the stone-lined fire pit. It was then covered over with more hot stones, turf, and soil for two hours.

  Pork joint freshly dug out of the earth oven. It was cooked well, right through to the centre. Note the baked crust that has protected the meat.

  1

  British Prehistory

  Who the first inhabitants of Britain were, whether natives or immigrants remains obscure; one must remember we are dealing with barbarians.

  Tacitus, Agricola 2

  A sensible place to begin the history, or prehistory, of Britain is the end of the last ice age, during which vast and hostile ice sheets blanketed the country. For tens of thousands of years these ice sheets prevented humans from settling here; it was only as the ice melted and retreated that plant and animal life began to slowly take hold. Into this chilly tundra landscape stepped the first Britons, whose flint tools suggest an origin in the Low Countries. The open tundra plains of 12,500 BC were still home to mammoth and giant deer.

  By 9500 BC the climate had warmed sufficiently for birch, pine, and hazel trees to take root in Britain, effectively transforming the post-glacial steppe into a vast deciduous woodland. Into this forested landscape came red deer, wild horse and cattle, elk (known as moose to the Americans), wolf, bear, wild boar, and even lynx. Hot on their heels were groups of human hunter-gatherers who were drawn to these lands by the promise of abundant prey and edible plant life. These groups, these families, of intrepid hunters were entering an uninhabited wilderness and had to rely on their wits, their resilience, and the skills they brought with them to survive. The climate at the start of this period, known as the Mesolithic (or Middle Stone Age), was a little cooler than today, probably resembling that of Scotland or southern Scandinavia. Trees of oak, beech, and ash (the hardwoods) were latecomers to these Mesolithic woodlands.

  Mesolithic (9000 BC to 4200 BC)

  Do not imagine these first bands of hunters paddling across the Channel to Dover. A vast amount of seawater was still locked up in ice sheets further north, and as a result sea levels were much lower, enabling the Mesolithic groups to walk across to Britain. Low-lying marshlands and reed swamps spread out across what is now the North Sea forming ‘Doggerland’, a fertile plain filled with hunting opportunities. Although the nets of trawlers often pull up artefacts from this lost world below the waves, archaeologists are unsure how many people lived there. In all likelihood Doggerland formed the focus of life for the hunting communities of the north and as sea levels rose throughout the Mesolithic, the rocky uplands of the lands we know as Britain provided a retreat from the threatening waves.

  Sites in Britain known to have been used by Mesolithic bands seem to have been occupied only at certain times of the year. The hunters moved on to other locations where prey or wild plants were known to thrive at certain times of the year. In this way the groups were always moving on to new resources—resources that were annually replenished. For much of the time these hunter-gatherers seem to have lived in portable or temporary shelters, much like the Yukaghir of Siberia. However, the recent discovery of permanent houses at Howick in Northumbria, Queensferry in Scotland, and at Star Carr in North Yorkshire indicate that some sites were probably occupied throughout the year, and for decades.

  Star Carr is crucial for our understanding of life in the Mesolithic. Only twenty minutes’ drive from my own house, this ancient hunting settlement was once sited on the edge of a large glacial lake, called Lake Flixton. Nothing remains of the lake today—it had silted up by the end of the Mesolithic. The dense birch woodland and reed banks that once surrounded it, as well as the wild fowl and deer that roamed its shoreline, have also gone, to be replaced by modern field systems and drainage ditches. Here, circa 9000 BC, a large timber platform had been constructed at the water’s edge and used as the centre for hunting and fishing activities. Tools of flint, antler, and bone were found at the site, along with animal bones, a paddle (suggestive of a boat), and barbed spear and arrow points. Remarkably, a house has recently been excavated on drier ground, away from the shore, and Nicky Milner, site director at Star Carr, suspects that there are probably several more houses at the site.

  Life in Mesolithic Britain was small scale, groups of related families travelling together from one site to another as the seasons dictated, hunting game and gathering edible plants, berries, and nuts. They would split up and then meet one another later on in the year. Everyone would have been a hunter or a gatherer (or both), everyone would be able to work wood and flint, and to twist plant fibres to manufacture twine and make basketry. These were essential skills of survival. Clothing consisted of animal skins that were carefully tailored to fit and sewn up with animal gut. To bring down their prey, the Mesolithic hunters used bows, harpoons, and spears, and reached the perfect ambush position either by foot, or dug-out canoe.

  Was life in the Stone Age ‘poor, nasty, brutish and short’ (to quote the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes)? These hunter-gatherers, like many nomadic tribes today, still had time to create art, to carve elaborate designs into paddles or pieces of antler, and to engage in religious practices that helped bind their communities together. There is evidence for the belief in ancestor spirits, and even for spirit-priests or shamans.

  Did this religion extend to the construction of temples? The substantial houses already mentioned may themselves have served as holy places, just as more recent hunting communities in Patagonia live in temporary structures, but build more substantial buildings for their religious ceremonies. But they might just as easily have been used for long-term habitation. On my last visit to Stonehenge, Britain’s famous Neolithic monument, I must have baffled a group of tourists in the car park who were disembarking from their tour coach. While the enigmatic stones stood right behind me, just across the busy A344, I was instead kneeling down to take photographs of markings painted on the tarmac by the local council. Three circles of white paint denote the precise location of three post holes dated to the Mesolithic, thousands of years before work on the much later Stonehenge monument had begun. These holes were sunk for three huge pine posts, all between 60 and 80 cm in diameter. It is generally agreed that these posts were probably carved, much like North American totem poles, and that the straight-line alignment of the posts had a religious meaning. Yet the posts date back to around 8000 BC, they show us that the Mesolithic was far more than some desperate struggle for existence. One, or most likely more than one, community of early Britons, came together for several days or weeks to construct this imposing timber alignment. It is certainly no coincidence that Stonehenge sits only metres away from the site of this ancient timber alignment. Mesolithic hunter-gatherers marked out that point in the landscape as a holy site, a site that continued to retain an aura of mystery and magic, for 6,000 years more.

  Neolithic (4200 BC to 2200 BC)

  By 6000 BC, the rising waters of the North Sea had flooded the rich hunting grounds of Doggerland and cut the British Isles off from continental Europe. However, this inundation did not cut Britain off from new ideas and innovations. In the centuries after 4500 BC, immigrants crossed from France and brought with them animals, seed corn, and the knowledge of farming. This was not an invasion, but seems to have involved small groups of farmers moving in to clear and then cultivate the land. Once here, their ideas spread and indigenous British hunter-gatherers began to switch from their nomadic existence to one of cattle herding and cultivation. Communities settled down into permanent or semi-permanent farm houses, and they adopted a new style of flint working that included broad blades and polished stone axes. Where these new tools are found, they are usually associated with the bones of dome
sticated animals and shards of pottery—another new innovation from the Continent.

  Early farmers may have continued to hunt and gather in the traditional manner for some parts of the year, but eventually the indigenous Britons were all lured by the farming lifestyle. Some aspects of agriculture had already been adopted by the hunter-gatherers: they had domesticated dogs, they were using fire to clear vegetation, they processed certain plant seeds to make flour, and they coppiced hazel and willow trees in order to secure a source of long, straight poles.

  Why did these independent and mobile groups swap hunting and gathering for farming? Farming requires that a community stay in one place for much of the year, it requires hard work to clear forest, break the soil, sow seed, manage animals, and harvest crops. It also requires manpower—the more hands on the farm, the more land could be cultivated and so a population explosion naturally coincided with the start of the Neolithic. Was life as a hunter so bad? Was the availability of game on the decline? Increasing competition for resources must have forced families to look at new ways of securing sources of food. We should not ignore the fact, too, that farming was a social development that further extended a community’s control over its environment. We should not perceive the Mesolithic hunter as a ‘noble savage’, perfectly at peace with, and attuned to, the natural world. As we have seen, these communities worked hard to manipulate the world around them; farming provided even more control, and gave these clans and tribes more power over their own destiny.

  It is interesting to note that some of these Neolithic settlements were established on previously occupied Mesolithic camps. These are the same communities, changing their ways, adapting to a new shift in society. Soon after 4000 BC these settled communities begin investing vast amounts of manpower in the building of impressive monuments. What they built provides a host of clues about the new way of life. These ‘causewayed enclosures’ began to spread across southern Britain, and they match similar monuments found throughout northern Europe. Each causewayed enclosure is an area of flat ground, usually on the brow of a hill and surrounded by a series of concentric ditches. At many places around their circuits, these ditches are crossed by earthen causeways, allowing access to the centre from many different directions. Serving primarily as meeting places for neighbouring communities, these enclosures could serve a variety of other purposes. Examples such as Hambledon Hill, Dorset, and Windmill Hill, Wiltshire, were used to deposit offerings within ritual burials. It is likely that separate families held claim to different stretches of the ditch and returned at different times throughout the year to make new offerings to the gods.

  The design of the enclosures, and the apparent lack of substantial Neolithic houses or villages, suggests that the new farmers were mainly cattle herders. Causewayed enclosures allowed clans to bring their herds together in order to breed, to trade with one another, to make alliances, to feast, arrange weddings, to bury the dead, and welcome new adults into the community. In a vast landscape, these scattered cattle farmers could re-establish links, just as they had in the old days, when they had broken the hunt to meet up with groups of relatives.

  In the early third millennium, causewayed enclosures were abandoned in favour of ‘henges’, which were circular ditch and bank monuments, typically situated on lowland sites. These circular meeting places still served as social gathering points and places where rituals and ceremonies that were important to the community could be enacted. The heads of families and clans in the neighbourhood would be able to meet at the henges and tombs, perhaps to discuss differences or make plans for the future.

  Neolithic tombs were communal and are typified by the chambered long barrow, a cluster of stone chambers that was covered by a long earthen barrow mound. Access was made through an entrance with its own ritual courtyard, and it seems that meetings and ceremonies held there would involve the removal of certain bones of the ancestors. These bones were the levers of power, bringing the weight of the ancestors to bear on very real, earthly problems. Once the ceremony was completed the bones, like the bones of Christian saints locked away in their golden reliquaries, seem to have been returned to their place in the stone chamber.

  As the Neolithic progressed, the population expanded, and so did the need for farmland and for sources of decent flint. Forest was felled with polished axes to make room for cattle pasture and cropland, and increasing numbers of long barrows, burial cairns, and henges were constructed. Territories were being marked out and communities were ‘joining up’ with a series of trackways and communal henges. Some of these henges, like Avebury in Wiltshire, Arbor Low in Derbyshire, and the Ring of Brodgar in Orkney, featured a new phenomenon—the stone circle. Meanwhile, borders and frontiers were also being recognised, and it was to be the barrows and burial cairns that helped to mark out the edges of these new tribal areas.

  Flint tools. The three tools on the right are scrapers from Oldbury Camp, Wiltshire. The nine flints on the left are from Flamborough Head, East Yorkshire. Row one is composed of scrapers, useful in cleaning animal hides or working wood, row two contains piercers and hole borers, which, as the name suggests, were used to bore holes into wood, leather, bone, or antler. The long tool is a ‘fabricator’, perhaps the head of a pick or digging tool, and beneath this are a Bronze Age tanged arrowhead and a leaf-shaped Neolithic arrowhead. (Author’s collection)

  Flint was now needed on a prodigious scale, and full-scale mining began at locations like Cissbury hill fort and Harrow Hill, both in Sussex, and of course at the extensive mine workings of Grimes Graves, Norfolk. Flint was extracted and then transported or traded long distances across Britain’s growing network of trackways. Good stone suitable for making sharp, polished axes was also in great demand and the few places able to produce it were found in Cornwall, Wales, the Lake District, and Northern Ireland. These remote outcrops on Britain’s western shores were identified and exploited, and they were no doubt chosen for their spectacular location as much as for the quality of their stone. Axes from these areas were traded the length and breadth of Britain. The quern stone, that essential tool of every prehistoric household, was also quarried from suitable outcrops and similarly traded. In the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, these grindstones were saddle-shaped, and required a top stone to be rocked back and forth over the lower stone, crushing the grain between them and producing flour.

  Early Neolithic houses in Ireland; arrows indicate the direction of north.

  1. Ballyglass, County Mayo.

  2. Ballygalley, County Antrim.

  3. Newtown, County Cork.

  4. Tankardstown, County Meath.

  (C. Malone)

  Houses from the Neolithic are hard to find, but those so far discovered are generally rectangular in shape, with a central hearth and a single doorway. Recent discoveries at Durrington Walls, close to Stonehenge, have uncovered hundreds of houses that were all built to a similar ground plan. The Durrington houses resembled those found in 1850 at Skara Brae, Orkney, although the latter were impressive stone-built affairs, while those at Durrington were post-built, probably with thatched roofs. Evidence for furniture was found in both, in particular box-beds flanking the doorway and the inclusion of a ‘dresser’ or family shrine on the back wall. The similarity in layout between dwellings as far apart as Scotland and Wiltshire, the construction of henges to a similar pattern throughout the British Isles, along with the identification of pottery ‘fashions’ suggests that Neolithic communities were not insular and poverty stricken, eking out a miserable existence of agricultural toil and back-breaking labour. Instead, the evidence suggests a series of interconnected farming clans, dependant on cattle rearing and wheat cultivation. Beliefs and fashions were shared and carried across the land via tracks and rivers and coastal voyages.

  Enough agricultural surplus existed to free up the large amount of collective manpower needed to build the great communal monuments. There is no evidence for great chiefs, tyra
nts, or lords, however; Neolithic society seems to have been governed by the families themselves, probably led by family elders who met at regular periods and at large seasonal gatherings. Violence, raiding, and warfare certainly occurred. There is evidence of a battle or siege of some sort at Hambledon Hill around 2850 BC and also at Crickley Hill, Gloucestershire, where the causewayed enclosure there was repeatedly attacked and rebuilt, to be finally abandoned in the middle of the Neolithic. As the population expanded, friction and tensions between communities naturally developed, alongside good relations and alliances. No one could go back to the relative freedoms of the Mesolithic.

  Early Bronze Age (2500 BC to 1500 BC)

  Of all the greatest innovations of mankind, agriculture and the use of metals must rank at the very top. Yet the first introductions of metal into British society initially caused only a ripple. The first metal to be liberated from the earth was copper, and a distinct Copper Age can be detected in some Near Eastern and European communities. ötzi, the prehistoric man found mummified in the Alps, belonged to this Copper age. His body, clothing, and personal possessions, when lifted out of the ice in 1991, showed a remarkable level of preservation, teaching us a great deal. Ötzi the ‘Ice Man’ dated from 3300 BC and had been carrying a small copper axe at the time of his death, along with a tool kit of flint blades. Following rapidly on the heels of the Copper Age, and in many places leap-frogging it entirely, came bronze. While copper had its uses it was a rather soft metal, but the addition of tin to the crucible created a much harder alloy—bronze.

  Early Bronzework

  Bronze was an expensive product, available only to the elites (like the leaders of clans sitting on the most important trade routes). Small amounts of copper, bronze, and increasing amounts of gold find their way into individual burials. Along with bronze technology came a new type of pottery, the Beaker, and with it an association of new, fashionable items such as tanged arrowheads of flint, the wrist guards worn by bowmen, metal daggers, and jewellery.