Food and Farming in Prehistoric Britain

by Paul Elliott

  Archaeologists have identified the water pits as locations for the heating of water and determined that the fire-cracked stones were part of this process. Initially heated in the fire, the stones were then dropped one at a time into the lined pit until the water within began to boil. Theories around the purpose of burnt mounds and their use in boiling water have polarized around two main ideas: that water was used to create steam inside an American Indian-style ‘sweat lodge’ or that the water was used either in cooking or brewing. When the stones were thrown into the trough they passed their heat into the water, but were often shattered as a result of the great temperature change. Once the work was done, the cracked stones were scooped out and thrown onto a nearby pile, which inevitably grew larger over time. This is the burnt mound that is observed by archaeologists today. The presence of a mound suggests that the water pits were not designed for a single event, but were used to boil water repeatedly, on many different occasions.

  Burnt Mounds.

  Top: Wooden trough for boiling water at Killeens, County Cork.

  Bottom: Excavated fulacht fiadh, showing excavated mound, troughs, and stream, Ballyvourney, County Cork.

  (C. Burgess)

  The Greek scholar Athenaeus, quoting the earlier writer Poseidonios, tells us that the food of the Celts ‘consists of a few loaves of bread and of large quantities of meat prepared in water or roasted over coals or on spits’ (Athenaeus 4.151). Is Athenaeus talking about cooking meat in a water pit? If so, it would certainly suggest that the burnt mound deposits found in Britain and Ireland were cooking apparatus, rather than sweat lodges.

  In Ireland, burnt mounds are known as fulachta fiadh. Famously, in 1954, Professor Michael O’Kelly constructed his own water pit in order to test the hypothesis that burnt mounds were the product of cooking. By adding fire heated stones to the water, Professor Kelly was able to bring the water slowly to the boil. His pebbles were heated in a fire that had been built close to the pit and they were transferred from log fire to water trough using a dampened wooden shovel. In this way, the water temperature was maintained and the 5-kg leg of mutton he was cooking was ready to eat after three hours and forty minutes. What had at first seemed like a perfectly sized pit for the task at hand was, by the end of the experiment, almost full of ash and stones. The ash had little effect on the meat that was wrapped up in a protective jacket of straw. The use of straw in water pit cooking is mentioned in The History of Ireland, dating from 1908. In it, the servants of Irish hunters build a couple of fires and begin heating stones, meanwhile they dig two pits close by. Next they ‘bind [the meat] with sugans (grasses) in dry bundles and set it to boil in the larger of the two pits, and keep plying them with stones that were in the fire, making them seethe often until they were cooked’.

  Grass or straw is tightly bound around the joint of meat with string. Pebbles that are either igneous or metamorphic are needed to heat the water, since rocks such as shale or sandstone will split and break under intense heat. After about an hour in the fire the stones can be transferred to the water pit and this is done one at a time, giving each stone ample time to transfer its heat to the water. It takes around quarter of an hour for a good-sized stone to do this with the aim of boiling water, at which point the grass-shrouded meat is lowered into the pit. Stones are continually added to maintain a simmer. Two or three hours should be sufficient time for the cooking process, after which the joint is brought to the surface.

  Artefacts called ‘flesh hooks’ by archaeologists have been recovered from some Bronze Age and Iron Age sites. A fine example, discovered by Irish turf cutters at Dunaverney in 1829, had an oak handle decorated with bronze birds. At its tip sat two bronze hooks. In Little Thetford, Cambridgeshire, a similar flesh hook was discovered and although its wooden handle had not survived, a socketed metal end sporting two hooks, which would have been used to lift a joint of meat out of the water, was recovered. A rounded bronze cap decorated the opposite end of the instrument. Undoubtedly, these hooks were used to pull cooked meats from both water pits and from metal cauldrons that hung over roundhouse hearths. They are indicative of wealth and status, an item that was flashy and not just utilitarian. They also suggest that water-pit cooking, as well as the boiling of meat in cauldrons, was a social event, a feast with guests to both feed and impress.

  But among the [Celts of Galatia], says Phylarchus in his sixth book, it is the custom to place on the tables a great number of loaves broken plentifully, and meat just taken out of the cauldrons…

  Athenaeus 4.34

  It is interesting to note that the introduction of large bronze, and later iron, cauldrons for the boiling of meat, replaced the need for water pit cooking. Vessels like the bronze Battersea cauldron are found throughout Britain and on the continent. Dating from the Early Iron Age, the Battersea cauldron was found in the River Thames, it stands 40 cm high and has a diameter of 56 cm. The cauldron is generally representative of the types and sizes of feasting cauldrons used in both the Late Bronze Age and throughout the Iron Age. There was no need for heated stones here, the cauldron hung by a chain from the rafters of the chief’s roundhouse and boasted to everyone seated around it of the wealth of its owner. Of course the community at large would not have been invited to these feasts, the intended audience of the chief was his own following of warriors (his war band) as well as important visitors. Iron Age cauldrons were symbols as well as cookpots; in Irish mythology the Dagda, one of the greatest of the Celtic gods, owned a huge magical cauldron. Warriors who had been killed in battle were lowered into the cauldron in order that they might be brought back to life.

  The burnt mound structures that have such a wide distribution, in both area and time, will have served the communities that were responsible for their deposition. Just as with the traditional Hawaiian feast called the luau, complete with its earth oven-roasted pig, the Celtic water pit was probably the focus of community celebration. Funerals, marriages, victories, and other important events would be marked with a communal feast, and, as with the luau, everyone will have chipped in to get it ready.

  On a much smaller domestic scale, stones can be used to heat up liquids in bowls and cooking pots. Heaps of heat-shattered pebbles are often found on Dartmoor, associated with the cooking hearths of Bronze Age roundhouses. It isn’t large joints of meat that are being cooked here, but instead soups or other preparations, away from the fire. The pebbles that are being heated in the hearth are removed from the fire with wooden batons or tongs. Milk can be heated like this in order to make soft cheese (see Chapter 8), and both soups and pottages can be cooked quite easily. By far the most compelling reasons for the use of these ‘pot-boilers’ is the ability to cook foods in wooden bowls and also to be able to cook away from the fire. When meat is being spit roasted or grilled over the flames, and when havercakes and flat breads are baking on fireside stones, space at the hearth would be at a premium. Fire-heated pebbles carry the energy of the fire with them and must be dropped into the pot at regular intervals, rather than all at once. The goal is to keep the food at a gentle simmer. I have found that it is best to pour the cooked contents of the pot into a large wooden bowl ready for dishing out, as this allows the pebbles to be dried and then dumped back into the fire if needed.

  Bread Stones

  At the Iron Age village of Glastonbury an unusual doughnut-shaped piece of bread was discovered. It has been suggested that this bread was baked using a hot stone. The technique, when I tried it, proved extremely simple. Dough is rolled out into a rectangle about a centimetre thick and long enough to wrap around the fire stone. This stone is heated for a good thirty minutes in the hearth and then brought across with wooden tongs to be carefully placed into the centre of the dough. Quickly, so as to not lose any of the heat, the dough is then rolled around the stone to form a doughnut. The bread is left to bake for an hour or two until the heat dissipates completely. Obviously the dough touching the stone is burnt and ined
ible, but the rest of the loaf certainly claims the definition of bread.

  12

  Feasting and Drinking

  The drink of the wealthy is wine imported from Italy…. This is unmixed, but sometimes a little water is added. The lower classes drink a beer made from wheat…

  Athenaeus 4.36

  While the Greeks came together in the wine-drinking symposion and the Romans gorged themselves within their private triclinia, Celtic warriors and their chiefs lived for the feast. The literary theme of the drunken Celt was a common one in the ancient world, but there are enough observations of barbarian drinking and feasting by authors like Polybius, Dionysus, and Strabo to give us a good idea of what occurred at these events.

  At the Feast

  According to some of these ancient authors, although barbarian Celts were known to eat voraciously, they still maintained a certain etiquette while feasting.

  They eat their meat in a cleanly manner enough, but like lions, taking up whole joints in both their hands and gnawing them; and if there is any which they cannot easily tear away, they cut it off with a small blade.

  Athenaeus 4.36

  Guests and hosts, alike, were seated not on chairs, but on the ground using wolf skins or other animal hides as cushions. Some lay hay on the floor and sat on that. The food and drink was served on little wooden tables raised slightly off of the ground. If the customs of the Celtic Galatians were representative, then loaves of bread, broken and ready to eat, were placed on the tables along with meat that had been hooked out of the cauldrons or roasted on spits over the hearth. Food was served on plates of silver, bronze, or wood, or in woven baskets—as the wealth of the household dictated. Youths, both male and female, served up the food—Celtic society was not generally slave-owning and it is likely that these children were the chief’s own daughters and foster-sons (sons were usually sent away to be brought up by a male relative or a trusted ally).

  During formal gatherings or feasts, as in most social occasions, there was a precedence and a public recognition of status. The diners sat in a circle, with the chief or heroic warrior most likely sat opposite the doorway, behind the hearth. His warrior brothers, his attendants, and his guests were seated around the circle in a manner suggestive of the Arthurian Round Table. This arrangement seems to fit with our observations of life within the roundhouse, but there was in fact no tangible connection—Celts in Gaul, Iberia, and elsewhere on the continent dwelt in rectangular houses, rather than round ones. To be sat close to the chief was an honour. Strangers could be invited to the feast, but in common with other heroic societies of the ancient world, no one could ask these strangers about their business or intentions until after the meal. This was guest-friendship.

  When drinking began, a cupbearer would pour wine from a jar of earthenware, silver, or bronze. Guests and fellow warriors alike had to be impressed with the feast and so for the richest Iron Age tribes of southern England, wine was the only drink on the menu. It was a luxury, imported by Roman merchants from southern Gaul and traded up the Rhône valley to Celtic tribes further north. Some of this wine made it across the Channel to Britain, and some of that made its way into elaborate Iron Age burials. A barrow burial at Lexden, near Colchester, for example, contained more than eighteen wine amphorae along with a host of expensive luxury goods. The chieftain buried at Welwyn, Hertfordshire, was accompanied on his journey to the Celtic otherworld by five amphorae of wine and all of the drinking cups, serving jugs, bowls, and plates he would need in order to host a grand feast. Each amphora of imported wine was paid for with a single human slave, probably captured from a rival tribe for that very purpose.

  Wine was usually drunk unmixed or ‘neat’ as is the fashion today, but occasionally it was mixed with water, a practice that the Greeks and Romans found much more acceptable. It seems that drinks at a Celtic feast were served into a drinking bowl and passed around the circle, clockwise, with each diner taking only a mouthful, although they were known to take frequent draughts. Our own Iron Age feasts around the hearth often involved two bowls of mead being passed around the circle in opposite directions. In a wonderful touch of detail, Diodorus describes how the large moustaches of the Gallic aristocrats acted as strainers, through which the wine or beer was passed.

  The wine bowl (or bowls) must have been passed around fairly frequently, because it is clear that the Celts were prone to squabbling and arguing at their feasts. Fights were also known to break out:

  And it is their custom, even during the course of the meal, to seize upon any trivial matter as an occasion for keen disputation and then to challenge one another to single combat, without any regard for their lives…

  Diodorus 28

  Nothing sparked the competitiveness and jealousy of a British or Gallic warrior more than missing out on the honour of the ‘champion’s portion’. The bravest warrior was traditionally awarded the choicest portion of meat and was slighted if he did not receive it. This was not some trivial fit of pique, but an act of face-saving; chiefs and warriors alike earned their position at a king’s side through reputation and skill in war. A slight to their reputation could see their status fall, their followers melt away, and another, more fêted champion, rise to fill his position. And so it was that a piece of meat could cause the death of a man:

  There was a custom that a hind quarter of pork was put on the table and the bravest man took it; and if anyone else laid claim to it, then the two rose up to fight till one of them was slain.

  Athenaeus 4.40

  Stories of Irish heroes from this period refer to these honour fights for the champion’s portion. Indeed, the tale of Bricriu’s Feast tells of a plot by the eponymous nobleman, to set rival Ulster champions and their households against one another. He does this by telling each of his guests (Cúchulainn, Conall, and Lóegaire) as they enter his feasting hall, that they will be awarded the champion’s portion. Of course all are furious when they discover that their rivals wish to take the portion of meat for themselves. All three champions then compete for the honour in a series of trials.

  Some of the fighting was simply play, mock combat, and practice thrusts that might have developed during a heated discussion about a particular fight or sword technique. Even these displays might end in wounding, or even death—perhaps this was the drink at work. Polybius tells us that fighting at the dining table was made all the easier because the warriors usually ate and drank far too much.

  Celtic Beer

  Within the records of a Roman fort called Vindolanda, which sits along the line of Hadrian’s Wall, a writing tablet recorded evidence of British beer-drinking around AD 100. Tablet 190 lists all manner of supplies, including Massic wine, sour wine, barley, pork fat, fish sauce, and cervesae or Celtic beer. The stuff was being purchased in batches of either 18 or 27 litres at a time, and it is clear that the soldiers (who were initially recruited in northern Europe along the Rhine) were keen beer drinkers. They would certainly have acquired a taste for beer in their homeland and this is reinforced by the urgent requests of a Roman officer in Tablet 628. Masculus, a cavalry decurion, asks his unit commander, Flavius Cerialis:

  Please, my lord, give instructions on what you want us to do tomorrow. Are we all to return with the standard, or just half of us? … [missing lines] … most fortunate and be well-disposed towards me. My fellow soldiers have no beer. Please order some to be sent.

  Barbarian tastes for Celtic beer may have been satisfied by the local brews that were being produced by Britons who lived in the shadow of the Roman occupation forts. Despite the conquest of Rome and the defeat of the British tribes in AD 43, the inhabitants of Britain continued to live an essentially Late Iron Age existence. Away from the new Roman towns, where wine-drinking, fig-eating, and toga-wearing was catching on quickly, local farming communities continued to bake flat bread and brew barley beer within their roundhouses. This beer may have been transported to the thirsty Roma
n troops who were garrisoning the forts, or alternatively soldiers might actually have been brewing their own Celtic beer. There are references in the Vindolanda tablets to the profession of brewer (cervesarii) as well as to a bracarius—braces is thought to have been the Roman term for spelt wheat, a cereal known to have been used in the production of Celtic beer.

  Athenaeus refers to the Gauls drinking wheat beer, sometimes with the added ingredient of honey, but it is clear from other writers like Diodorus, that beer was also made of barley. The Roman emperor Julian, ruling in the fourth century AD, looked down disdainfully on the beer that was drunk by his barbarian legionaries. In his poem to beer, Julian wrote that ‘it was in their lack of grapes that the Celts brewed thee from corn-ears. So should we call thee Demetrius [after the grain god], not Dionysus [the grape god]’. Although he loved his Celtic legions, Emperor Julian did not like their beer and he describes the stuff as smelling like billy-goat.

  Hard evidence of beer drinking comes from the Celtic site of Hochdorf, in south-western Germany. The chieftains of this community threw elaborate feasts and created a dedicated brewery designed to quench the thirst of their numerous guests. Six specially excavated ditches were dedicated to the brewing process and were found to contain thousands of charred and malted barley grains. This was a malt-making enterprise, a key part of beer brewing. Archaeologist Hans-Peter Sitka of the University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, analysed the ancient techniques and then reconstructed the malting process.