England -- Description and travel; England -- Social life and customs
Here were discovered the bases of what are considered to have been the
remains of the hut-dwellings of the occupiers of the camp. Of these some
three hundred were found filled with black earth and mould, and from them
many most interesting articles were obtained. There were many iron relics,
such as swords, daggers, spear heads, knives, saws, sickles, adzes, an axe,
plough-shares, nails, chisels, gouges, bridles (one with a bronze
centre-bit), and a well-formed pot-hook made of twisted iron. In bronze
there were remains of two sword scabbards, four brooches, some fragments
belonging to horse harness, pins and rings, and a small spoon. There were
also glass beads and rings, a fragment of jet, a number of spindle
whorls for spinning, bone combs used in weaving, and about twenty
triangular-shaped bricks pierced through each corner, considered to be loom
weights to keep the warp taut; more than a hundred querns or millstones,
some of the corn which was ground in them (this fortunately happened to be
charred and so preserved), and remains of about four hundred pots, nearly
all used for domestic purposes. One of the bronze scabbards bears on the
top an engraved pattern of the decorative art of the period, showing the
Triskele, a sun symbol often found on remains of the Bronze Age in Denmark
as well as elsewhere.
Similar pre-Roman relics have been obtained from the Marsh Village near
Glastonbury, from Mount Coburn near Lewes, and from near Canterbury. The
unmistakable evidence of these relics is that the pre-Roman Briton could
spin and weave, knew how to plough and when to sow, was an excellent
carpenter, and was an expert in metal work, both in iron and bronze, and
possessed a decorative art. He was therefore not a "savage" as savages were
understood in those days.
We must consider the Britons, then, of Cæsar's time as possessed of some
degree of civilisation. They understood fabrics, pottery, metals,
architecture. They had come into contact with the civilisation of the
Mediterranean Sea long before his day. The Scilly Islands off the coast of
Cornwall can reasonably be identified as the Casserterrides of the
Phoenicians, where the merchants of Tyre and Sidon bought tin, giving
cloth in exchange. It is said, indeed, that an ingot of tin with a
Phoenician mark upon it was dredged up once from Falmouth Harbour.
Probably the very earliest mention of Britain is by Hecatæus (B.C. 500,
about the time when Marathon was fought). He described Britain then as an
isle of the Hyperboreans, and alleged that the inhabitants "raised two
crops in the year and worshipped the sun."
[Illustration: NORTH SIDE, CANTERBURY CATHEDRAL]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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