Our Legal Heritage: King AEthelbert - King George III, 600 A.D. - 1776: June 2011 (Sixth) EditionReilly, S. A.
History
Our Legal Heritage: King AEthelbert - King George III, 600 A.D. - 1776: June 2011 (Sixth) Edition
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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