Читать книгу Britain AD: A Quest for Arthur, England and the Anglo-Saxons - Francis Pryor - Страница 10

IT IS MY BELIEF that one cannot understand what was happening in late-Roman and ‘Dark Age’ Britain unless one has a grasp of what life was like before the Roman Conquest. The Roman period was indeed important to the development of British history, but the actual number of incomers was relatively small, given a minimum estimated population in Britain then of about 1.5 million. Certainly large elements of the southern British populace were fully Romanised by the close of the period, but others outside the south-east were not. It makes no sense to discuss post-Roman events against a backdrop of Roman Britain alone. One must look farther back in time.

When the Roman legions came ashore in the first of Caesar’s two visits to Britain in 55 BC, they encountered well-orchestrated and stiff resistance. The Roman army was the most formidable military machine in the ancient world, yet the British tribesmen were able to give almost as good as they got (as Edward Gibbon would not have put it). The great Caesar’s second expedition to Britain a year later, in 54 BC, was on a much larger scale, and it met with greater military success. Then he departed. The Romans did not invade Britain again for three years short of a century, in AD 43. This time the Roman Emperor was Claudius, and the general who commanded the invading armies was one Aulus Plautius. South-eastern Britain was overrun relatively swiftly, between AD 43 and 47, which Barry Cunliffe puts down to ‘a measure of incipient Romanisation’.¹ In other words, as we will see in Chapter 5, the invaders were not entirely unwelcome, especially to those tribal leaders who had already formed political alliances with the Roman Empire.

The facts, as baldly stated here, do not suggest that pre-Roman Britain was a thinly populated peasant society with a weakly developed sense of political purpose. Far from it. What emerges from a study of pre-Roman Britain is that the islands featured a diverse mix of different societies. Often these cultural groupings were in conflict - or perhaps a state of rivalry - with each other, but there are archaeological reasons to believe that they were also united by strong bonds of belief and ideology. Put another way, it seems likely that the various inhabitants of later prehistoric Britain shared a common ‘world view’ or cosmology.² Many aspects of this world view would have been shared with Iron Age people on the Continental mainland, but in certain respects even Roman writers acknowledged that Britain was preeminent. For example the Druids, those politico-religious leaders perhaps best seen as the Iron Age equivalents of the Muslim Mullahs, helped rally resistance to the spread of Roman rule both in Britain and on the other side of the Channel.³ Graham Webster describes the stiffening effect that Druidism had on British resistance to Roman rule:

Perhaps it is not surprising that the most savage and devastating wars Rome ever fought were against the Jews and the Britons, since Judaism and Druidism had a strong political bias and the passions they aroused were directed against Rome with a fanaticism which could be broken only by a crushing defeat that destroyed the majority of the devotees.⁴

We will see, however, that while many of the most militant followers of Druidism were slaughtered by Roman troops, both during Boudica’s revolt in AD 60-61 and on the island of Anglesey in AD 59, it takes more than martyrdom - albeit on a large scale - to destroy a society’s long- and deeply-held religious convictions, especially if those beliefs are fundamental to one’s world view. We will also see that the religious beliefs behind Druidism had roots that may well have extended as far back as the Bronze Age, or even earlier. There is increasing evidence for the survival of prehistoric British religious customs through, and indeed beyond, the Roman period. I will discuss this further in Chapter 5.

I remember being taught at university that the Druids had nothing whatsoever to do with Stonehenge, which had been built over a millennium before the Iron Age, the period when Druidism flourished. The emphasis on this chronological separation was a way of saying that the modern Druids and their New Age fellow-thinkers had got it all wrong. How laughable, we were told it was, that the latter-day Druids dressed up in sheets and pranced around the stones on the night of the midsummer solstice. How misguided they were! Today, however, most prehistorians would accept that the religious beliefs that formed the core of Druidism had very ancient roots indeed, at least as old as Stonehenge, and probably a great deal older.⁵

It came as no surprise when we found that the small Early Bronze Age timber circle known as Seahenge was entirely made from oak trees. The choice of oak must have been deliberate, because other locally occurring woods such as ash, willow, alder or poplar, would have been just as suitable, and rather less work to cut down. Oak was, and still is, the best British constructional timber, and it must have been held in high regard in prehistory. It was the structural steel of its day. Barry Cunliffe quotes a revealing passage from Pliny the Elder, writing about the Druid priesthood:

They choose groves of oak for the sake of the tree alone and they never perform any sacred right unless they have a branch of it. They think that everything that grows on it has been sent from heaven by the god himself.⁶

Pliny goes on to describe how mistletoe is cut from oak trees, with a great deal of ceremony and the use of a golden sickle; a superb Late Bronze Age sickle, complete with its wooden handle, was found alongside a contemporary timber causeway through wet ground at Shinewater Park, near Eastbourne, and we now know of several sites in Britain where identical Bronze and Iron Age religious rituals continued without a break. When it comes to the matter of pre-Roman ritual and ideology, I’m now inclined to think that the much-derided people wearing sheets actually had a better idea of what was going on in prehistory than my lecturers at Cambridge, who were unable to take a sufficiently long or broad view of the way that prehistoric beliefs arose, developed and matured through the centuries of later prehistory.

Most prehistorians are now agreed that the modern Western distinction between the sacred and the profane - between religion and domestic life - is a product of the way we organise our time. If you like, it reflects our world view, which is largely based around the need to work - and to work with the greatest possible efficiency. In medieval times the Church impinged on domestic life to a far greater extent than it does today, and a sizeable proportion of the population, who lived in the hundreds of monastic foundations across the land, devoted their entire lives to the service of God. The sixteenth-century Reformation was to change all that. Over succeeding generations religion became increasingly confined to church on Sunday. In most households today people no longer say grace before meals - the last vestige of religion within the domestic sphere.

In pre-Roman times religion and daily life were closely integrated. People would probably not have been aware of when their thoughts were within the realms of ideology or practicality, because the distinction was meaningless. The shades of the ancestors inhabited the countryside around them. Their presence within burial mounds along the edges of communal grazing ensured that animals were not allowed to stray too often onto pastures where they were not welcome. The prevailing cosmology in pre-Roman Britain seems to have been structured around the cycle of the seasons, and the movements of the sun and moon in the sky. These things gave form not just to the great religious (archaeologists prefer the term ‘ritual’) monuments such as Stonehenge, but to the arrangement of ordinary houses, which in Britain were almost invariably circular in plan. By the same token, the interior arrangement of communal tombs, such as Maes Howe in Orkney, replicated the way that houses were laid out. The one was seen as a reflection of the other - which tells us something about the way in which the sacred and the profane were seen as being part of the same entity.

If we see integration, we also see longevity, which suggests that prehistoric religious beliefs addressed themes that were deeply rooted within society. These themes doubtless included the role of the family as a means of structuring society, the place of human institutions within the natural world, and of course the continuing cycle of the seasons - and with it the replenishment of food, fuel and shelter. Today many of these concerns can be addressed through science and secularity. Religion does not need to be invoked. Having said that, prehistoric ideologies also addressed the traditional territory of religion, which may be seen as ‘rites of passage’, to use an anthropological term: birth, puberty, marriage and death.

When we look at prehistoric ritual activity it’s hard not to see constant reiteration. There is a long-standing concern with water, for example: all sorts of things are placed in or thrown into rivers, bogs, lakes, ponds and wells - swords, shields, weaponry in general, pottery vessels, bones, bodies and so forth.⁷ Sometimes these things are fabulously valuable, at other times they are more humdrum. Sometimes they have been deliberately smashed before being offered to the waters, at other times they are in perfect condition. Items used in the preparation of food, and particularly corn-grinding stones, known as quern stones, are often placed in the ground or in water as offerings.

It would be a mistake to regard the items placed in the ground or in water as mere things. Certainly they could be very beautiful, but like many objects they possessed a symbolic life of their own. Thus a sword could indeed be a weapon, but it could also be a symbol of an individual’s rank or authority, so that its breaking before being offered to the waters would have symbolised that its owner had passed out of this life. Maybe the broken sword was thought to become whole again in the realm of the ancestors.

We can only speculate as to what these things originally symbolised, but there are now literally thousands - maybe tens of thousands - of prehistoric offerings known in Britain alone, and certain patterns are beginning to emerge. Water probably symbolised both separation and travel. Beneath it you died, yet it was also a substance in which you saw your own reflection - something we take for granted today, but which rarely happened in prehistory. A journey across water, whether by boat or on foot along a causeway, could symbolise the journey from this world to the next - or any other rite of passage. Prehistoric causeways which played an important ritual role often led to offshore islands, which again could be seen as symbolising other worlds or states of being. As for the corn-grinding stones, they possibly reflected the importance of the meal as a means of keeping the family together, but they could also have expressed a wealth of other ideas, including the role of women within society, motherhood or family life.

These rites first become evident archaeologically from around 4200 BC, at the onset of the New Stone Age or Neolithic period, but there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that their roots lie even further back in time - maybe even as far as post-Glacial times, around ten thousand years ago. The prevalence of certain themes over thousands of years does not indicate that a particular religion held sway for that length of time; it’s doubtful whether one could have talked of ‘a religion’ in Neolithic times. What this longevity or persistence indicates is a phenomenon termed by French anthropologists the longue durée. Practices which persisted in certain cultures over huge stretches of time owed their longevity to the fact that they were embedded or rooted within aspects of society that were seen to be essential to that particular community. In prehistoric Britain, the most persistent theme was a concern with the cycle of time and the movement of the celestial bodies.

One could speculate endlessly on what it was that made the passage of the seasons, the sun and the moon so important in prehistoric Britain, but it may owe something to the prevalent way of life, which was based on animal husbandry, a choice which in turn was influenced by the British maritime climate, which grows grass superbly well. We always suppose that the ancient arable farmer worried about the germination of the next season’s crops, and that this gave him an interest in seeing that the days lengthened after the midwinter solstice. The same goes for the livestock farmer: grass too effectively ceases to grow in winter, and the appearance of calves and lambs was, I am sure, as eagerly awaited as the first sprouts of a freshly germinated crop of wheat. Farmers have a natural concern for the passage of the seasons.

Nevertheless, I’m doubtful whether one can attribute something as fundamental as a society’s world view merely to climate or livelihood. Such things come from deep within people themselves. Fully formed ideas need time to appear, but when they do, they are taken up very rapidly if they are right for the society and the times. This is what probably happened in the Later Neolithic period in Britain and Ireland, with the first appearance of circular tombs known as passage graves, whose entrances were often aligned on the sun at solstice. Before that time (say 3200 BC), many of what were later to prove persistent ritual themes had been in existence for several centuries or more, but it was the appearance of passage graves beneath round mounds, and slightly later the erection of the great henge monuments, that gave formal expression to these long-held beliefs.

The longevity of the religious ideas of pre-Roman Britain suggests they were deeply embedded within society. They were not mere superstitions. The placing of swords and shields in a river was not the pre-Roman equivalent of tossing coins in a fountain ‘for luck’. We should think more in terms of christening, Holy Communion or the funeral service. If these rites were deeply rooted within British culture, they were also part and parcel of everyday life: they fitted that life and expressed the way people viewed themselves, their families and their world. They were, if you wish, a ceremonial or ritualised expression of the beliefs that motivated people to get up in the morning.

The idea of the longue durée also suggests that when we find pre-Roman rites surviving into Roman and post-Roman times, we are witnessing the survival of far more than mere ritual or superstition.We are actually seeing the survival of ancient patterns of social organisation, family structure and cosmology too - because you cannot separate the rituals from the societies and the belief systems that gave rise to them. Certainly some will have been modified through time and changing circumstances, but the core of the beliefs must remain constant, or the rites become irrelevant - in which case they wither and die.

With certain notable exceptions, such as Navan Fort in Northern Ireland, the religious sites of the last prehistoric period, the Iron Age, are less obviously eye-catching than the elaborate monuments of the Later Neolithic and Bronze Age periods such as Stonehenge and Avebury in England,Maes Howe in Orkney and Newgrange in Ireland.⁸ By this period, too, the archaeological evidence for actual settlement is becoming more prominent, largely as a result of the steady growth of the British population. In this chapter I want to give an impression of what Britain might have looked like to a visitor arriving in, say, AD 42 - the year before the Roman Conquest. I start with a simple question: was Iron Age Britain very different from Roman Britain? I believe that it wasn’t, for the simple reason that, setting aside shortlived introductions such as towns, the army and the imperial administration, Roman Britain was Iron Age Britain.

The survival of ‘native’ British culture and traditions into post-Roman times only makes sense if we understand its age and scale. Take, for example, the longevity of British society before the arrival of Roman forces in AD 43. In common with other parts of Europe there had been well-organised societies living in settled communities for at least three thousand years before Christ. Before that there were two millennia or so when societies were less settled, but no less organised. Even in the millennia after the Ice Ages (around ten thousand years ago) the British population was thin, but the landscape was already being parcelled up by the people who inhabited it. Life for hunter-gatherer groups was by no means an anarchic free-for-all.

It is simply wrong to suppose that the Romans brought civilisation to a barbarian Europe: they brought their own style of civilisation, which was founded on ideas that flourished in classical Greece in the fifth century BC, and they imposed it, with greater or lesser success, on pre-existing settled populations who possessed their own social rules and regulations. The landscapes that Caesar’s legions marched across were not dense primeval forests: most of them had been cleared of trees for several millennia. His men tramped their way through fields, roadways, farms and villages. I doubt whether the average modern person, if dropped into a rural village in pre- or post-Roman Britain, would be able to tell them apart. He would probably only spot that he was in Roman times if a visiting government or military official was in the neighbourhood, or if he happened to be shown a family’s best dinner service (which seems somewhat unlikely).

If pre-Roman society consisted of a handful of skin-clad savages eking out a frugal existence on nuts and berries, its ideas and culture could not have survived into post-Roman times. There has to be a critical mass of people for their ideas to persist if their culture is overtaken by outsiders. In the case of pre-Roman Europe that critical mass certainly existed. Any lingering notions of skins, nuts or berries should be replaced by woven cloth, wine, beer, bread, cheese, mutton, lamb, beef and pork. Estimates of Britain’s population in the last centuries BC are hard to arrive at, but few would place it much below 1.5 million, and some would put it as high as 2.5 million.⁹ Whatever else it was, it was not a small handful. Who were these people, and what would it have been like to have lived in Britain during the century or so before the Claudian conquest of AD 43?

The second half of the last century BC and the first half of the first century AD is sometimes seen as a period of ‘almost-’ or ‘proto-history’, because although written records had yet to develop in Britain, Julius Caesar and other Roman authors were busily writing in Gaul (France) and elsewhere; sometimes they even referred to Britain. In Britain there are early indications of writing that did not simply arrive, fully finished, from elsewhere: there are, for example, numerous examples of Iron Age coinage, some of which bear clear inscriptions, such as ‘CAM’, which we know was an abbreviation (much needed) of Camulodunum, present-day Colchester in Essex. Writing, rather like farming, seems to have been an idea that people wanted to grasp even before they understood precisely how it worked. Maybe members of élite society in southern Britain liked the concept of literacy before they possessed it fully themselves.

The great Roman general and future Emperor Julius Caesar made two visits to England in 55 and 54 BC. These expeditions were essentially to gather intelligence, and should be seen as a part of his campaigns in Gaul, which began in earnest in 59 BC. Caesar’s first expedition to Britain in 55 BC involved ninety-eight transport ships carrying two legions (each of ten thousand men), plus cavalry and many accompanying warships. The landing in Kent was resisted, and there were numerous skirmishes with the British. Eventually Caesar retreated back to Gaul. The following year he did things on a larger scale. This time there were eight hundred ships, transporting five legions and two thousand cavalry. This huge force met stiff resistance under Cassivellaunus, leader of the Catuvellauni, a tribe centred on Verlamion (St Albans) and parts of what is today called ‘Mid-Anglia’ (Hertfordshire and areas around). Caesar had a hard fight through Kent. He crossed the Thames into the Catuvellaunian heartland, and eventually British morale broke down and Cassivellaunus sued for peace. Caesar returned victorious, with many hostages, but he had met fierce opposition, and was probably relieved to leave Britain with his honour intact.