Food and Farming in Prehistoric Britain

by Paul Elliott

  Oats with Nettle and Pork

  •300 g oatmeal

  •250 g nettle leaves

  •One bunch of chives

  •1 tsp sea salt

  •25 g lard

  •150 g pork

  Nettles seem an unlikely food source, but the leaves, once boiled, are perfectly edible. In fact the plant as a whole is incredibly valuable. I have attended several flint-knapping courses over the years and perhaps the most useful skill I learnt was to make fibre (string) from the stems of nettle.

  The basics are easy to describe. We first snapped a nettle stem off at the base and, upending it, used our bare hand to strip off the leaves (which sting only on their upper surfaces). Next the stems were gently crushed with a stone so that the long fibres within the stem were exposed. These were then picked out from the woody outer layers and laid to dry. Later we took three of the dried inner fibres at a time and twisted them together in a method that is simple to do, but very difficult to describe. As we reached the ends of the fibres, it was time to pick up three more and introduce those to the twisting process, in this way a continuous length of nettle fibre could be made. As we perfected our skills, the tutor revealed a coil of rope that he had been working on for several weeks. It had required many phases of fibre twisting, eventually feeding thicker and thicker lengths of the nettle thread together to create the rope. Rope like that, I pondered, probably hoisted the great sarsen stones that formed the latest and grandest stage of Stonehenge.

  Whatever use the ropes and cord were put to, whether it was tying up beams during the construction of the roundhouse, creating a binding to haft an axe or flint blade on to its handle, weaving a fishing net or creating a simple belt, the process would have created a lot of nettle leaves—and these could be eaten. Doubtless, then, this summer activity must have been accompanied by various nettle-based dishes. Oats with nettle and pork is presented in that spirit.

  Fry the pieces of chopped pork in lard within a clay pot, which has been warmed by the fire. When browning nicely, add the oatmeal and just enough water to cover it. As it cooks, check frequently that the mixture does not dry out and do not hesitate to add extra water if needed. Once the oatmeal begins to swell, add both the chopped chives and nettles. Next, add the salt. Simmer the mixture for around an hour, but be careful that it does not dry out and always be ready to add a little water if required. The nutritious nettle greens are put to good use in a filling dish (the oatmeal sees to that) that is tasty and appetising (the bacon sees to that). It certainly beats eating nettle leaves that have simply been boiled in water.

  Gruel

  Prehistoric communities probably relied on gruel, perhaps serving it up at least once a day. Societies throughout history have eaten this basic dish; after all, it is simply flour boiled in plenty of water or milk. If there was neither meat nor vegetables to be had, then there was always barley or wheat flour, which could be added to water and boiled in a clay pot over the fire. It was a subsistence food that tapped into the staple food source of the prehistoric—cereal grain. Gruel, along with frumenty and unleavened bread, formed the true taste of British prehistory. Talk of pork loins, spit roasted goose, and beef in beer stews hides the fact that these were luxury foods, meals for feasts and high days and for days of plenty. Day in and day out, gruel, frumenty, and flat breads dominated the serving bowls of the poorest farmers, particularly in winter when fresh vegetables, fruits, and foraged greens were in desperately short supply.

  Evidence of gruel in the diet of Iron Age folk comes from the remarkably well-preserved bodies that have been found in bogs across northern Europe. The anaerobic environment of these peat bogs prevented decay and effectively stopped time for these unfortunate Iron Age victims—nearly all seem to have been murdered. Archaeologists have been able to study with great intimacy their final hours; Tollund Man, for example, had been drinking water rich in sphagnum moss and his last meal was cooked over a fire of burning heather wood. Of interest to us are the contents of Tollund Man’s stomach—his last meal. It seems he ate gruel, a dish containing neither meat nor green vegetables. All of the ingredients (and there were forty different kinds) were seeds or grains, many of which were from low-yield grass cereals, hard to harvest runt-grains, and plants that we now recognize as weeds. There was plenty of chaff in evidence as well as a little grit or sand within the gruel, too. What kind of a meal was this? Immediately we can say that this was not part of a normal diet; chaff and dirt, essentially the scrapings from a roundhouse threshing floor, were obviously not on the typical Celtic menu. Perhaps it would help us to explore the nature of these deaths and the status of these victims. Almost universally, the bodies had been murdered—some had their throats cut (Grauballe Man), some were hanged or strangled to death (Huldremose Woman and Tollund Man), and there were others who had their heads smashed in (Clonycavan Man). Some unfortunates, like Lindow Man, had been stabbed, strangled, and beaten to death.

  The Roman writer Tacitus, in his treatise on the German tribes, tells us about executions in the northern bogs:

  Penalties are distinguished according to the offence. Traitors and deserters are hanged on trees; the coward, the unwarlike, the man stained with abominable vices, is plunged into the mire of the morass, with a hurdle put over him. This distinction in punishment means that crime, they think, ought, in being punished, to be exposed, while infamy ought to be buried out of sight.

  Tacitus, Germania 12

  Tacitus later describes the religious rites associated with the Germanic goddess Nerthus. A statue of her was paraded throughout the region and venerated by all who saw it. When the goddess on her cart is returned to the sacred lake from which she came, the cart, the holy symbols, and the goddess herself, are washed.

  This service is performed by slaves, says Tacitus, who are immediately afterwards drowned in the lake. Thus mystery begets terror and pious reluctance to ask what the sight can be that only those doomed to die may see.

  Tacitus, Germania 40

  Julius Caesar likewise reported the practice of human sacrifice amongst the Celtic tribes of Gaul:

  The Gauls believe the power of the gods can only be appeased if one human life is exchanged for another and they have sacrifices of this kind regularly established by the community…. They believe that the gods prefer it if the people executed have been caught in the act of theft or armed robbery or some other crime, but when the supply of victims runs out, they even go to the extent of sacrificing innocent men.

  Julius Caesar, Gallic War, 6.16

  Either the bog bodies are criminals who have been formally executed by the community, or they are human sacrifices to one of the Celtic or Germanic gods. The violence inflicted on some of the bog victims, and the way in which a number were bound or staked to the ground, certainly favours the former, while the neatly trimmed nails of Lindow Man and the care with which some bodies were placed into the bog, favours the latter. Perhaps it is immaterial. Tollund Man had eaten gruel before his death, as had Windeby Girl, Lindow Man, Grauballe Man, and dozens more. If they had been criminals, tied to a post for days while the tribe decided their fate, it is not unreasonable to suggest that these outcasts would be fed the roughest of food, a gruel made up of the floor sweepings, the dropped seeds and chaff, and unhusked barley grains. And if these bog victims had been ritual sacrifices, perhaps willingly, then how might we interpret such a meagre and demeaning last meal? Historically, human sacrifice was only performed during times of great crisis within a community. We might easily imagine that famine marked the most common crisis that a farming community might encounter. It might be that Tollund Man had no meat in his gut and that his last meal was an inadequate, desperately scraped together bowl of gruel because that was all his tribe could offer. Starvation and famine might have triggered the need for some of these human sacrifices and the evidence for their desperation might well be the gruel within the victim’s stomachs.<
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  11

  Using Hot Stones

  With the wind roaring in the tops of the trees, the four men made their way along the base of the cliff, stumbling now and then with the weight of the doe. Rain looked likely and so the hunters hurried on. Soon enough the comforting smell of wood smoke reached them through the birch wood forest. There, in a small glade beneath the naked rocks of the cliff, sat the family camp. A dozen people—men, women and children were busy there, preparing the evening fire, baking hazelnuts, and tidying up after leatherwork or flint-knapping. The light was fading and the rain would be here soon.

  Many hands helped with the red deer, in skinning, jointing and processing. Still, much could be left till the morrow. Tonight there would be fresh venison to eat, along with baked hazelnut, roast pignut root and acorn cakes cooked on a fireside stone. One family had baked bread using wheat grains which had been traded from families further south who (it was said) were cultivating the new crop in organised plots.

  Around 5000 BC (near the end of the Mesolithic) scenes like this must have occurred at Bouldnor Cliff, a submerged site off the north-west coast of the Isle of Wight. Here on the seabed in 1999, a Mesolithic campsite was identified when divers caught a local lobster in the act of digging up flint microliths while he excavated his burrow. Today the waters of the Solent wash between the Isle of Wight and Southampton. Back in 5000 BC there was no island and the land there was dominated by a wide river valley filled with marsh and forest, through which bands of Mesolithic hunter-gatherers roamed. As the ice sheets retreated, water levels rose and the region now known as the Solent was flooded. Before the onset of this watery cataclysm, one group of hunters had settled for a time beneath a cliff that is now submerged in 10 metres of water, just off the Isle of Wight.

  Divers discovered burnt flints and pieces of charcoal at Bouldnor Cliff as well as worked timbers, hazelnut shells, and even traces of wheat DNA. The wheat was a strain not native to Britain, however, and must have been traded with people from much further south who had already begun to cultivate it. This was family life in the Mesolithic, life around the cooking fire, where food had to be prepared without that most useful of human inventions—the cookpot.

  In the Middle Stone Age, food could be heated on flat stones by the camp fire or on wooden spits. Some cuts of meat might even have been cooked directly on the coals, as we have seen in Chapter 7. Venison could always be cubed and threaded onto greenwood skewers to be grilled, barbeque style, but, with a dozen people waiting to be fed, another alternative was needed. We have already seen how spit roasting can effectively cook portions, or indeed the whole carcass, of an animal, but the process is intensive. It requires that the cooks remain at the fire for several hours and that the fire is constantly fed with fuel. Hunters of the Mesolithic were obviously able to spit roast their meat, and probably did. But was there another, less labour-intensive way?

  Earth Ovens

  Visitors to the South Pacific today may be invited to a feast where the food is cooked underground, in a pit. In New Zealand the Maori call this pit a hangi, while in Fiji it is known as a lovo and Hawaii as an iuau. They are all earth ovens and function in essentially the same way. Their principle use is in baking large amounts of food efficiently for a celebration or feast where many people must be fed. While we have no direct evidence for the use of earth ovens during the British Mesolithic, it is likely the technique was employed for the cooking of large joints of meat; it consumes far less fuel than spit roasting and can be left unattended.

  The principle of cooking within a hangi or iuau hinges on the use of heat that is radiating from stones. A pit is dug and lined with flat stones, and a fire is then lit within the pit. While it burns, meat is prepared for cooking and given a protective wrapping of banana leaves. After two hours or so, the embers are raked out of the pit and the wrapped meat is placed on to the layer of stones (which are now fiercely hot). In some traditions more hot stones are added on top, and above these sit a layer of leaf-wrapped vegetables. Finally, the entire contents of the pit are covered with banana leaves and then a covering of sacks, tarpaulins, or earth in order to prevent heat escaping. After several hours the cooking pit is uncovered and the meat extracted and unwrapped.

  My first attempt at building an earth oven was a venture into the unknown. I planned to cook two joints of pork and protect them from the ashes with a dough case, rather than banana leaves. The entire project had to be planned carefully, how long would it take the joints to cook? Unknown. How long would it take to dig and prepare the pit? How long should the fire burn for? All unknown.

  Helped by hungry colleagues, I decided to pull the joints of meat out of the ground at 2 p.m., after exactly two hours of cooking. That meant the fire in the pit would need to be scraped out to expose the hot stones at midday. Working backwards, that meant we needed the fire to burn for a good hour, starting at 11 a.m., and so digging and preparing the pit needed to have been underway by 10 a.m. There was a good deal of work to be done and it was shared out between all those present. Everyone understood that to eat the food you had to help with the oven, and this proved a great motivation. Tasks were rotated, and included taking up the turf and digging the pit, chopping firewood, and collecting large stones from elsewhere on the site. Turf was lifted and a pit dug on the bare soil, but we also lifted the turf off of an area directly adjacent to the pit—this is where we would scrape the hot ashes once the fire had burnt down. We even cut a slope from the pit up to this ash area.

  By midday the fire had burned down to embers and hot white ash. We used metal farming tools and wooden boards to scrape away the ashes and expose the hot, blackened stones beneath. One of us had coated the joints in bread dough while the fire burned, but this dough was not for eating, it was there only to add a layer of protection to the meat from ash and soil.

  Once the dough-encrusted pork joints had been placed into the pit and a single large, flat stone was manoeuvred on top of the meat, the soil from the pit was back-filled and the turf replaced. The ground steamed for two hours. At 2 p.m. it was time to expose the earth oven and dig up the joints of meat. Unfortunately, although I knew where the pit was, I did not know the exact location of the joints. My first attempt at spade-work sliced into one of the joints and it came out of the ground a doughy, soil-encrusted mess. I was far more careful with the second joint and lifted it out whole. Cutting it in half to create a cross section, I could see clearly the crust of the baked dough and the air gap between meat and dough—it looked a little like the pastry around a meat pie.

  We all dutifully tasted the pork and to our great relief it was cooked to perfection through to the middle; it tasted wonderful. The earth oven experiment had been a great success and I realised at the time that it had been good judgement to cook two joints of pork, rather than just one. With such an investment in time and energy, it makes sense to prepare a back-up in case anything goes wrong. With a communal effort and packing lots of joints into the pits, we could envisage a clan or tribe using this method of cooking during a feast or celebration. The earth oven technique of roasting meat was certainly not something the roundhouse cook was going to carry out on a daily or weekly basis, however.

  Returning to our community of hunters and gatherers camped beneath Bouldnor Cliff at the end of the Mesolithic, how would they build their earth oven? Pacific islanders use banana leaves, tarpaulins, and sacking to protect and insulate the roasting food. In my first earth oven reconstruction, I had protected the meat with bread dough. For Mesolithic tribes, using dough was not an option, even if they could get their hands on imported wheat. They certainly had no banana leaves, although some native British plants such as dock might serve as a practical alternative if the leaves are of sufficient size. As for turf, without grazing animals and pasture land to create it, there was little around during the Mesolithic. Even digging out the pit and manipulating the hot stones had required iron tools that were unavailable durin
g this period.

  Those hunters carrying the red deer into camp will have excavated their cooking pit with digging sticks, the improvised tools used by some gatherer cultures today. They are discussed in Chapter 5. A length of wood, roughly wrist-thick, makes a good digging tool. With an axe, a blunt, chisel-shaped point can be cut at one end. Once the pit is complete, it would be lined with flat stones that would later radiate heat back into the meat.

  A fire was set in the pit and, after a couple of hours, was raked back with the digging sticks. It will have been wasteful not to reuse the embers, and so it made sense to build a new fire next to the earth oven on which other foods could be cooked while the joint was roasting nicely in the ground. The meat will have been simply laid onto the hot stones unprotected, but then covered with a simple latticework of twigs and branches. On top of this, large damp clumps of moss, which were available throughout the Mesolithic forest, were then piled up several layers deep. Finally, any soil left over from the excavation of the pit could have been added to the pile, further insulating the meat as it cooked. Within two or three hours the men would have uncovered their roasted venison and shared the feast with the rest of the family. The building of an earth oven was best done by many hands, and those hands all expected to be fed at the end of it all.

  Burnt Mounds

  British archaeologists have identified a common prehistoric feature that they term the ‘burnt mound’. Burnt mounds are large oval or crescent-shaped piles of fire-cracked stone. These structures are typically found on the banks of fast-flowing streams as well as adjacent to some sort of clay or wood-lined water pit. Burnt mounds are typically found in highland areas, usually in the north and west of Britain. Most are found in Scotland, but this may simply reflect the intensive cultivation (and thus destruction of such mounds) carried out in the lowlands of Britain. Nearly all were deposited during the Bronze Age, although a small number have been dated to the Neolithic.