LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER THREE Ancient Britons

      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

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