Britain AD: A Quest for Arthur, England and the Anglo-Saxons. Francis Pryor
- the last vestige of religion within the domestic sphere.
In pre-Roman times religion and daily life were closely integrated. People would probably not have been aware of when their thoughts were within the realms of ideology or practicality, because the distinction was meaningless. The shades of the ancestors inhabited the countryside around them. Their presence within burial mounds along the edges of communal grazing ensured that animals were not allowed to stray too often onto pastures where they were not welcome. The prevailing cosmology in pre-Roman Britain seems to have been structured around the cycle of the seasons, and the movements of the sun and moon in the sky. These things gave form not just to the great religious (archaeologists prefer the term ‘ritual’) monuments such as Stonehenge, but to the arrangement of ordinary houses, which in Britain were almost invariably circular in plan. By the same token, the interior arrangement of communal tombs, such as Maes Howe in Orkney, replicated the way that houses were laid out. The one was seen as a reflection of the other - which tells us something about the way in which the sacred and the profane were seen as being part of the same entity.
If we see integration, we also see longevity, which suggests that prehistoric religious beliefs addressed themes that were deeply rooted within society. These themes doubtless included the role of the family as a means of structuring society, the place of human institutions within the natural world, and of course the continuing cycle of the seasons - and with it the replenishment of food, fuel and shelter. Today many of these concerns can be addressed through science and secularity. Religion does not need to be invoked. Having said that, prehistoric ideologies also addressed the traditional territory of religion, which may be seen as ‘rites of passage’, to use an anthropological term: birth, puberty, marriage and death.
When we look at prehistoric ritual activity it’s hard not to see constant reiteration. There is a long-standing concern with water, for example: all sorts of things are placed in or thrown into rivers, bogs, lakes, ponds and wells - swords, shields, weaponry in general, pottery vessels, bones, bodies and so forth.7 Sometimes these things are fabulously valuable, at other times they are more humdrum. Sometimes they have been deliberately smashed before being offered to the waters, at other times they are in perfect condition. Items used in the preparation of food, and particularly corn-grinding stones, known as quern stones, are often placed in the ground or in water as offerings.
It would be a mistake to regard the items placed in the ground or in water as mere things. Certainly they could be very beautiful, but like many objects they possessed a symbolic life of their own. Thus a sword could indeed be a weapon, but it could also be a symbol of an individual’s rank or authority, so that its breaking before being offered to the waters would have symbolised that its owner had passed out of this life. Maybe the broken sword was thought to become whole again in the realm of the ancestors.
We can only speculate as to what these things originally symbolised, but there are now literally thousands - maybe tens of thousands - of prehistoric offerings known in Britain alone, and certain patterns are beginning to emerge. Water probably symbolised both separation and travel. Beneath it you died, yet it was also a substance in which you saw your own reflection - something we take for granted today, but which rarely happened in prehistory. A journey across water, whether by boat or on foot along a causeway, could symbolise the journey from this world to the next - or any other rite of passage. Prehistoric causeways which played an important ritual role often led to offshore islands, which again could be seen as symbolising other worlds or states of being. As for the corn-grinding stones, they possibly reflected the importance of the meal as a means of keeping the family together, but they could also have expressed a wealth of other ideas, including the role of women within society, motherhood or family life.
These rites first become evident archaeologically from around 4200 BC, at the onset of the New Stone Age or Neolithic period, but there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that their roots lie even further back in time - maybe even as far as post-Glacial times, around ten thousand years ago. The prevalence of certain themes over thousands of years does not indicate that a particular religion held sway for that length of time; it’s doubtful whether one could have talked of ‘a religion’ in Neolithic times. What this longevity or persistence indicates is a phenomenon termed by French anthropologists the longue durée. Practices which persisted in certain cultures over huge stretches of time owed their longevity to the fact that they were embedded or rooted within aspects of society that were seen to be essential to that particular community. In prehistoric Britain, the most persistent theme was a concern with the cycle of time and the movement of the celestial bodies.
One could speculate endlessly on what it was that made the passage of the seasons, the sun and the moon so important in prehistoric Britain, but it may owe something to the prevalent way of life, which was based on animal husbandry, a choice which in turn was influenced by the British maritime climate, which grows grass superbly well. We always suppose that the ancient arable farmer worried about the germination of the next season’s crops, and that this gave him an interest in seeing that the days lengthened after the midwinter solstice. The same goes for the livestock farmer: grass too effectively ceases to grow in winter, and the appearance of calves and lambs was, I am sure, as eagerly awaited as the first sprouts of a freshly germinated crop of wheat. Farmers have a natural concern for the passage of the seasons.
Nevertheless, I’m doubtful whether one can attribute something as fundamental as a society’s world view merely to climate or livelihood. Such things come from deep within people themselves. Fully formed ideas need time to appear, but when they do, they are taken up very rapidly if they are right for the society and the times. This is what probably happened in the Later Neolithic period in Britain and Ireland, with the first appearance of circular tombs known as passage graves, whose entrances were often aligned on the sun at solstice. Before that time (say 3200 BC), many of what were later to prove persistent ritual themes had been in existence for several centuries or more, but it was the appearance of passage graves beneath round mounds, and slightly later the erection of the great henge monuments, that gave formal expression to these long-held beliefs.
The longevity of the religious ideas of pre-Roman Britain suggests they were deeply embedded within society. They were not mere superstitions. The placing of swords and shields in a river was not the pre-Roman equivalent of tossing coins in a fountain ‘for luck’. We should think more in terms of christening, Holy Communion or the funeral service. If these rites were deeply rooted within British culture, they were also part and parcel of everyday life: they fitted that life and expressed the way people viewed themselves, their families and their world. They were, if you wish, a ceremonial or ritualised expression of the beliefs that motivated people to get up in the morning.
The idea of the longue durée also suggests that when we find pre-Roman rites surviving into Roman and post-Roman times, we are witnessing the survival of far more than mere ritual or superstition.We are actually seeing the survival of ancient patterns of social organisation, family structure and cosmology too - because you cannot separate the rituals from the societies and the belief systems that gave rise to them. Certainly some will have been modified through time and changing circumstances, but the core of the beliefs must remain constant, or the rites become irrelevant - in which case they wither and die.
With certain notable exceptions, such as Navan Fort in Northern Ireland, the religious sites of the last prehistoric period, the Iron Age, are less obviously eye-catching than the elaborate monuments of the Later Neolithic and Bronze Age periods such as Stonehenge and Avebury in England,Maes Howe in Orkney and Newgrange in Ireland.8 By this period, too, the archaeological evidence for actual settlement is becoming more prominent, largely as a result of the steady growth of the British population. In this chapter I want to give an impression of what Britain might have looked like to a visitor arriving in, say, AD 42 - the year before the Roman Conquest. I start with a simple question: was Iron Age Britain very different from Roman Britain? I believe that it wasn’t, for the simple reason that, setting aside shortlived introductions such as towns, the army and the imperial administration, Roman Britain was Iron Age Britain.
The survival of ‘native’ British culture and traditions into post-Roman times only makes