Our Legal Heritage: King AEthelbert - King George III, 600 A.D. - 1776Reilly, S. A.
History
Our Legal Heritage: King AEthelbert - King George III, 600 A.D. - 1776
Reilly, S. A.
Law -- England -- History
These fields were usually enclosed with a hedge to keep animals
from eating the crop and to define the territory of the settlement from
that of its neighbors. Flax was grown and made into linen cloth. Beyond
the fields were pastures for cattle and sheep grazing. There was often
an area for beehives. This was subsistence level farming.
Pottery was given symmetry when formed with use of a wheel and
heated in increasingly hot kilns. From kilns used for pottery, it was
noticed that lumps of gold or copper ore within would melt and assume
the shape of what they had been resting on. These were the first
metals, and could be beaten into various shapes, such as ornaments.
Then the liquid ore was poured into moulds carved out of stones to make
axes [small pointed tool for piercing holes in leather, wood, or other
soft materials] and daggers, which were reheated and hammered to become
strong. Copper-tipped drills, chisels, punches and awls were also made.
The bodies of deceased were buried far away from any village in
wood coffins, except for kings, who were placed in large stone coffins
after being wrapped in linen. Buried with them were a few personal
items, such as copper daggers, flat copper axes, and awls. The deceased
was buried in a coffin with a stone on top deep in the earth to keep
the spirit of the dead from coming out to haunt the living.
It was learned that tin added to the copper made a stronger
metal: bronze. Stone hammers, and bronze and iron tools, were used to
make cooking pots, weapons, breast plates, and horse bits, which were
formed from moulds and/or forged by bronze smiths and blacksmiths from
iron extracted from iron ore heated in bowl- shaped hearths. Typically
one man operated the bellows to keep the fire hot while another did the
hammering. Bronze was made into sickles for harvesting, razors for
shaving, tweezers, straight hair pins, safety pins for clothes,
armlets, neck-rings, and mirrors. Weapons included bows and arrows,
flint and copper daggers, bronze swords and spears, stone axes, and
shields of wood with bronze mountings. The bows and arrows probably
evolved from spear throwing rods. Kings in body armor fought with
chariots drawn by two horses. The horse harnesses had bronze fittings.
The chariots had wood wheels, later with iron rims. When bronze came
into use, there was a demand for its constituent parts: copper and tin,
which were traded by rafts on waterways and the sea. When iron came
into use, there were wrought iron axes, saws, adzes [ax with curved
blade used to dress wood], files, ploughshares, harrows [set of spikes
to break clods of earth on ploughed land and also to cover seed when
sewn], scythes, billhooks [thick knife with hooked point used to prune
shrubs], and spits for hearths. Lead was mined. There was some
glassmaking of beads. Wrought iron bars were used as currency.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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