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The Settlement Patterns of Britain
Past, Present and the Future Foretold in Eight Essays
Nick Green
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eBook - ePub
The Settlement Patterns of Britain
Past, Present and the Future Foretold in Eight Essays
Nick Green
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About This Book
In writing The Settlement Patterns of Britain Nick Green was inspired by the short story genre. His book is a collection of eight non-fiction short stories or essays, where the characters are the places, some of which appear more than once, usually as bit-part players, occasionally as the main protagonist. Preceded by a prologue describing Britain's prehistory as a European peninsula, each essay covers a fixed period in the history of the development of Britain's settlement patterns, sometimes long, more often quite short, beginning around 2, 500 BC and ending about one hundred years in the future.
Nick Green chose those periods that are particularly instructive in revealing how settlement patterns come to exist in the form they do and how they might develop in the future. Settlement patterns are not just about where a place is, but about how that place relates to others. They wax and wane with circumstance, and around each settlement's fixed core, the patterns of living and working shift constantly, driven by forces beyond the control of any individual town or city or village.
From Bronze Age communities to computer simulations, from the mediaeval wool trade to the hyper-networked society, from Viking invasions to the post-industrial era, the essays cover a broad sweep of history. They appear in chronological order, but are not intended to provide a continuous, linear historical narrative â nor do they: each essay is freestanding so they can be read in whatever order the reader prefers.
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1 Of Hillforts and Homesteads
Settlement Patterns in the Bronze and Iron Ages
Butser Ancient Farm village from Windmill Hill, 2011, showing reconstructions of Iron Age roundhouses. (Photo: CC geni, modified by author)
It is 55 BC.Julius Caesar has just completed his first, ill-fated foray onto British soil. His fleet of ships was poorly prepared, his army inadequately briefed; but he has persevered primarily for reasons of domestic Roman politics. Preceded by a failed diplomatic mission, ending wit h an ignominious withdrawal, Caesarâs campaign of 55 BC is nonetheless hailed as a great triumph in Rome. The following year he tries again, this time with more success. Both invasion attempts are hollow victories, palliated only by improved trade links between Britain and Rome. Then Romeâs gaze is diverted elsewhere in its empire. For the next century, Britain is left alone (Jones and Mattingly, 1990).
Julius Caesar had invaded a land of numerous small tribes, who were so frequently involved in destructive internecine warfare that by 43 AD, when Claudius embarked on his rather more successful invasion, he found fewer and larger tribes. Over the previous century the smaller tribes had been either absorbed by other tribes or wiped out. There were considerable concentrations of power across relatively large areas, and these had sparked the creation of confederations and large tribal gatherings. The Trinovantes and the Catuvellaunni, for example, controlled much of the area north of the River Thames: roughly the current counties of Essex and Hertfordshire, and part of Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire. The loosely-knit confederation of the Brigantes, made up of sub-tribes, covered the north of England, while in Scotland there were three rough tribal groupings: those of the Scottish Lowlands south of the ClydeâForth isthmus; those of Moray, Aberdeenshire and Strathmore; and the tribes of the outer Hebrides and northern and western seaboards. In short, both Caesar and Claudius found an island with a reasonably well-defined social-political structure, more-or-less distinct geographical boundaries, and a landscape that was already as much the product of human intervention as of nature. This structure became a cornerstone of the Roman political regions around which the administration of Roman Britain was eventually set up. It was the culmination of six millennia of continuous human occupation (ibid.).
Neolithic Britain
According to the archaeological record, previously peripatetic hunter-gatherer societies began to settle in one place in around 4,000 BC, and in so doing they embarked on something of an 'agricultural revolution.' Tools such as sickles, querns (simple hand mills for grinding corn), axes, and pottery made their first appearance, along with longhouses, settlements, and ceremonial monuments. Rather than subsisting as hunter-gatherer communities, it seems that people were now beginning to rely on a stable environment that bequeathed them an annual harvest of plants such as wheat and barley which were being selectively bred, as well as farm animals such as cattle, pigs, sheep and goats. Such communal projects required basic forms of civil engineering. People now manipulated the environment for their own ends rather than simply existing within it, and here too they began to move on from the ways of their itinerant predecessors (Darvill, 2010).
Some settlement sites show signs of considerable continuity: at Mull, Argyll and Bute; at Warcott in the Kennet Valley; West Berkshire; at Eton, Windsor and Maidenhead; at Runnymede, near Egharn, Surrey. The sites themselves vary in date from 6,500 BC to 3,000 BC, yet they share much in common. For while their rubbishheaps include pottery carrying evidence of dairy farming, and of the collection of pig fat and beeswax, they also suggest that hunting and gathering were still an important part of subsistence. This was a society in the throes of the long transition from itinerant hunter-gatherers, to settled agricultural communities (Darvill, 2010).
Farming had been established in the valleys of the Rhine, the Meuse and the Weser well before 6,000 BC. These were the farming communities of the Linearbandkeramic Culture (also known as the Linear Band Ware, Linear Ware, Linear Ceramics or Incised Ware culture), who lived in longhouse villages, reared cattle and cultivated both wheat and barley. Over the next thousand years or so, farming groups migrated west to central France, and east to Poland and the Czech Republic, eventually spreading throughout France and the Rhine Delta and encircling the hunter-gatherers of the North European Plains. As the newer ideas displaced the old, so too the new society absorbed the old (Darvill, 2010).
Britainâs story was doubtless much the same: a combination of 'limited migration, extensive interaction and rapid acculturation' (ibid., p. 83). Pioneer communities probably absorbed or annihilated the indigenous cultures and populations alongside a more diplomatically-led series of changes based on contacts and alliances. The new settlers mostly came from three places: Iberia and western France along the Atlantic seaboard; across the southern North Sea; and across the northern North Sea from Scandinavia. They must have brought seed corn and livestock with them, for neither was indigenous to Britain at the time.
By 4,000 BC recognizable settlements had already formed, based around farming, but with a certain amount of hunting and gathering. To the modern eye, these settlements would look isolated, for agricultural activity revolved around single farmsteads scattered across the landscape; most were built of timber, a few of stone. These physical changes may have been mirrored by intellectual and spiritual changes that saw the development of belief systems to do with how people related to the wider world. Farming perhaps provided a Europe-wide context for the spread of a common proto-Indo-European language that would be the fountainhead of the Slavonic, Germanic, Hellenic and Celtic language families; and perceptions changed, as society began to dissociate itself from a landscape to which it had previously been existentially bound (Darvill, 2010).
Yet feasts around pits, shafts and natural features of the landscape seem to have played a significant ceremonial role. East of Stonehenge, on Coneybury Hill, a pit two metres in diameter and over a metre deep, was apparently dug 'for a feast held around it'. Once the feast was ended, the pit was filled with the debris: forty pottery vessels, flint tools for hunting and butchering animals; and the remains of the animals themselves: cattle; roe deer; red deer; a pig; a beaver and a brown trout. Similar pits have been found across the southern half of Britain: in Cornwall, Dorset, Wiltshire, Cambridgeshire, Norfolk and Suffolk (ibid.).
The Neolithic Age gave way to the Bronze Age in around 2,500 BC. The climate was marginally but significantly warmer and drier than today. A thousand years earlier, much of the landscape had been wildwood, dominated in the south by alder, oak, elm and hazel; and in the north by birch and pine. Yet the remote far north of Scotland and the Western Isles may already have been treeless. For Britainâs landscape, already much altered by the addition of Neolithic monuments, little would change. This ancient process of perpetual metamorphosis that had already transformed the pastures, the fields and the forests of Britain would continue as new technologies ushered in the Bronze Age.
Earlier Bronze Age 2,500-1,400 BC
Besides being geologically rich, Britain, and western Britain in particular, is especially rich in tin, copper and silver; Wales is rich in gold; and Ireland has gold and copper (Parker Pearson, 1993).
Gold had been worked into trinkets in the Near East since at least 4,500 BC, and Balkan tools and axes made of copper have been dated farther back still, to 4,600 BC. The earliest artefacts of copper and gold found in Britain are much newer, dating from 2,700 BC to 2,000 BC: copper axes and daggers too valuable to be buried with the dead, too precious for use, status symbols, to be carried and displayed. Yet Britain had no obvious 'copper age', but jumped straight to bronze, a harder, more resilient alloy of copper and tin. Once the basic process of creating it had been mastered in around 2,300 BC, Britain became a late but enthusiastic adopter of the new metal technology. A bowl containing smashed copper ore would be heated to 1,083°C using charcoal, so that the copper would melt and form a puddle of liquid in the bottom. Tin, which melts at the much lower temperature of 273°C, could then be added in a proportion of approximately 12 per cent to create a molten alloy that could be poured into moulds. The people who carried this out, who mysteriously drew shining liquid from smashed rocks, and then turned that liquid into metal artefacts, would have seemed like magicians to those who did not understand the process (Parker Pearson, 1993).
The growth of the bronze industry at this time, around 2,000 BC, was mirrored by a period of expansion, colonization and forest clearance across large parts of southern Britain, and northwards into the Midlands. 'Crops of wheat, barley, pulses, oats and flax' and 'pastoralism was probably a determining element of the Early Bronze Age economy' (Parker Pearson, 2009, p. 120). Field boundaries were perhaps marked by small ditches.
Only a few Early Bronze Age settlements have been excavated in Europe, and the best preserved tend to be in western Britain. These survivals are often due to exceptional preservation circumstances if they are of wood, or simply because they are of stone. The lack of evidence for houses from the Early Bronze Age led to suggestions that Early Bronze Age society was either nomadic or at least only semi-sedentary, and so a society of pastoralists. From about 1,600 BC onwards, fixed allotments of land with long linear boundaries had been established in upland areas, such as Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor, as well as on the chalk uplands and in river valleys.
We do have some idea of what a Bronze Age dwelling may have been like. This comes from evidence found in the Western Isles of Scotland. It would have been more than 30 square metres in area, oval or circular in plan and with a central hearrh. With a few exceptions, such as a settlement of substantial houses at Durrington Walls near Stonehenge, it seems that most Early Bronze Age houses would not have been especially durable; nor would the settlements they comprised have been particularly large, since the social group at the time was probably made up of the larger kinship groups who met up for funerals or monumental construction projects. The settlements grew over the centuries nonetheless, as innovations such as ditched enclosures and properly laid out field walls and banks expanded their boundaries (Parker Pearson, 2009).
The Early Bronze Age landscape was continually reworked and remade and the Neolithic monuments were modified and transformed. It became simultaneously a mystical space for spirits and ancestors and monuments â here a tamed landscape of pastures and fields, elsewhere a forested wilderness. Large areas were cleared for farming, so that from around 2,500 BC the Wessex chalklands, and many of the river valleys of southern England, Yorkshire, Northumberland and eastern Scotland were given over to grassland around monuments and sacred spaces. By 1,800 BC, the lower Pennine slopes were cleared; by 1,700 BC, the Cumbrian lowlands were completely bare of forest; and by 1,200 BC the upper Pennines were all but treeless. About a thousand years later, northern Scotland followed a similar trajectory, so that areas of only partial forest clearance were able to regenerate (Parker Pearson, 1993).
Some of the landscapes were funerary in nature, with groups of barrows and cemeteries which were sited 'in relation to earlier henges, long barrows, cursuses, stone circles and standing stones'. These were sacred lands, pastoral and empty of settlements. Neolithic monuments were adapted and modified to form closed burial chambers, and the long era of massive public works drew to a quier close. For while monuments such as Stonehenge (3,000-1,500 BC) and Silbury Hill (2,400 BC) needed huge amounts of labour, rhe Early Bronze Age barrows could be constructed by a single kin group (Parker Pearson, 2009, p. 120). These landscapes were relatively open, well-suited to pasture, and though sacred, may âhave marked the summer grazing lands for cattle and sheep for different territories, thus embodying the ancestral heartlands of different kin groupsâ. It is possible that the ploughing was carried out within distinct fields bounded by small ditches: the main crops were wheat, barley, pulses, oats and flax (ibid.).
The bronze-maker of 1,500 BC, were he able to review in his mindâs eye the previous millennium, would have had much to ponder. The stone axe had long since been superseded by the bronze dagger; and that had evolved into more fearsome weapons such as the rapier, accompanied perhaps by bronze spearheads. Conceptions of territory, of land, of domesticity and of identity itself altered immeasurably. Landscapes were no longer zones of movement around sacred monuments and burial mounds, but fixed places of occupation, with immutable blocks of agricultural land rooting our bronze-maker and his society to a single domain with its own rough boundaries. Identities, previously unconnected to notions of place, were now tied to regions; and they were expressed through regional variations of material culture, and regional expressions of belonging.
Our bronze-maker would perhaps reflect on the larger and better-built settlements enclosed by ditches or palisades, as the household domain grew to a scale more suited to monuments. The houses, clustered inside a wall or rampart in small groups, were large round affairs of stone or wood, more robust than hitherto, with a thatched conical roof of reed or straw, an east-facing doorway, and internal partitions of wood. The food storage and preparation areas, with a central hearth, were more complex and consumption was more elaborate: for the household group and its domestic rituals and routines now had a new emphasis.
And perhaps, as a maker of goods and weapons for the rich and powerful, he observed that control over people now seemed to count for less than control over land; and that people, himself included, defined themselves less by their lineage, and more by their territory (ibid.).
Later Bronze Age 1,400-700 BC
From about 1,500 BC to 650 BC, four developments become increasingly apparent: the construction of the first hillforts, as well as other fortifications; more intense farming practices; the disappearance of burial monuments and ceremonial centres characteristic of previous centuries; and an increase in overseas trade.
The changes of the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age, driven by the development of agriculture, had been enabled in part by a climate which was marginally warmer and drier than it is today. In such conditions, human populations could and did spread across Britain. By the close of the Bronze Age however, the population reached the limits of expansion and began to fall. The new settlers had cleared forests to make way for arable and grassland, supporting an agricultural system which drew on intensive methods of exploiting the landscape for both animals and crops. To be useful, animals no longer had to be dead, one-off providers of food, bone, skin and sinew. Alive, cattle could provide traction for ploughs; and sheep could provide a steady supply of wool for clothing (Champion, 2009).
By 1,000 BC, climatic conditions had begun to worsen, turning colder and wetter, reducing the growing season for crops, leaving the uplands soils waterlogged and encouraging the development of peat. The acid heathlands of the Hampshire and Dorset basin had also been over-exploited, and this combination of natural and human processes made the environment less favourable for human settlement. Societyâs more powerful members consolidated their positions at the top of the hierarchy, and paraded and con spicuously disposed of fine weaponry and gave lavish feasts to demonstrate their status. Societyâs material culture also changed. In around 1,500 BC, Deverel-Rimbury pottery-ware first appeared in southern Britain, and over the following centuries cross-channel transactions brought in a wide range of pottery styles and forms, and different regions developed their own styles (figure 1.1).
As well as the developments in livestock farming, arable agriculture saw the adoption of new varieties of wheat and barley, and the introduction of beans and rye as entirely new crops. Grain was now stored in granaries and pits. Meat could be preserved by salting, and then stored, or transported, or both. Meanwhile, the ritual activities concerned with feasts and festivals developed alongside the technical advances (Champion, 2009).
Figure 1.1. Regional pottery styles, late second millennium BC. (Sources: Map outline © Ordnance Survey; map information based on Darvill, 2010, pp...