*
In these Scenes I’ve tried to capture snapshots of the past, rather as an archaeologist does on an excavation. Most of a digger’s day is lived firmly in the present, wheeling barrows, sipping mugs of tea or looking for mislaid finds trays, trowels or labels; but every once in a while one is brought face to face with the past. Almost invariably, that moment happens when one is alone, but not always: I recall the day on a Time Team excavation of a Victorian railway navvies’ camp at Risehill, high in the Yorkshire Dales, when my digging companion, Raksha Dave, and I simultaneously sniffed the dark, peaty-looking stuff that we were gingerly scraping with our trowels and realized that it wasn’t peat at all.12 It was human excrement and we had located the latrine site. Normally, cesspits and latrines lose their smell quite fast, as soil fungi and bacteria break them down in a few years, but that excavation was quite literally up in the clouds, at an altitude of some 365 metres (1,200 ft), and the thin soil was very acid indeed. So the micro-organisms couldn’t get a grip. The smell was made more poignant by the knowledge that the Population Census of 1871 had noted that one of the navvies in the camp had taken his own life in the latrines. So we were sniffing precisely what he would have been smelling in his final minutes on this Earth. That moment still haunts me.
As readers will no doubt be aware, I do like to visit old buildings. Over the past two decades, Maisie and I have taken our breaks and holidays in Britain, partly because we both dislike crowded airports and beaches, but mostly because we love Britain and the extraordinary variation you can experience in its landscape over quite small distances. Having lived in Canada, where you can sit in a train for whole days while vast, identical tracts of plain or prairie glide past the windows, the only relief being provided by the occasional group of grain-storage silos, I love the fact that every British country station and each parish church or nonconformist chapel has a different story to tell, and they’re all so close together – even in such supposedly ‘lonely’ parts of the country as the Black Fens or the Lincolnshire Wolds.
So we have tended to take our vacations in holiday cottages and converted old buildings that allow us to gain a sense of place. Neighbours are best avoided. We have had some wonderful breaks: in an old Tudor banqueting house, in a couple of medieval gatehouses, in a gardener’s cottage built on Lord Byron’s estate at Newstead Abbey13 and, perhaps most memorable of all, in a holiday flat built into the ruins of a medieval Carthusian monastery at Mount Grace, in the North York Moors.14
Carthusian monks lived in solitary, self-contained cells and it was marvellous to be able to walk through and around the buildings in the late evening, when all the tourist parties and visitors had gone home. I’ve always been a fairly sociable sort of person and I couldn’t even begin to understand the appeal of a hermit’s life. But our stay at Mount Grace has subtly changed my attitudes. Maybe I’ve become a little less sure of things. I think I can now sort of understand why somebody would choose to opt for a solitary life – even if I would never do it myself in a thousand years. I actually think my stay at Mount Grace might have helped me cope a bit better with the imposed solitude of the Covid pandemic lockdown. Carthusian monks led extremely ordered lives; that was the key to their success. Mount Grace was certainly an experience to treasure. But I’ve left the best until last.
When you live and work in such a distinctive regional landscape as the Fens, it’s very easy to become introspective and to see the relatively specialized landscapes that our long history has bequeathed to us as being somehow typical – which they’re not. No landscape is typical: all are unique, just like the communities who created and inhabited them. That’s why I also like to study, visit and think about the counties that border Fenland. It’s rather like people at a party: you can soon spot groups of friends and in time you can identify what it is that unites them. Some may be old pals from school or college; others might share hobbies or professional interests, such as lawyers, writers or musicians. But the really interesting time for any avid people-watcher is when a few drinks have been taken and one or two brave individuals start to venture outside their groups. Usually these adventurers are the prominent, perhaps more self-confident members of a group.
In the Middle Ages, the equivalent of the confident social adventurers were the merchants who travelled between market towns, selling their wares. As time passed, the scale of such deals increased and long-distance trade links between the different regional economies of England became more firmly established. The process was further strengthened by the success of certain abbeys and priories that had built up substantial farmed estates, which were managed by paid agents, who were often known as the abbot’s or prior’s man – and hence the long-forgotten medieval origins of my own family name. Peterborough Abbey was very prosperous indeed, possessing substantial estates along the Nene Valley,f which runs like a spine down the centre of Northamptonshire. In the 1980s I was becoming increasingly interested in the links between the Nene Valley and the Fens in the Middle Ages and how they subsequently developed in early industrial and modern times. For me, the past only comes into its own if somehow you can relate it to the present. That, at least, was my theoretical justification for many journeys down the Nene Valley into the heart of rural Northamptonshire. But then I discovered something remarkable that made all such justifications irrelevant.
Northamptonshire is sometimes known as the county of spires and squires and I have long been an admirer of its many fine country houses and churches.15 I had just driven past the superb Saxon church at Earls Barton and was sitting in the car with my sandwich and a copy of Pevsner’s Northamptonshire, when the book fell open at the entry for another village church nearby. I glanced at it, the way one does, but there was something about the entry that held my attention. The more I read, the more excited I became. I honestly can’t remember if I even finished my lunch, because the next thing I knew I had set off at a cracking pace through the outer suburbs of Northampton; then north for about 5 kilometres (3 miles), to the small town, or large village, of Brixworth. In retrospect, it seems odd that I had hurried so much to get there, as of all British churches, that at Brixworth had been there for a very long time indeed – and it was certainly not about to go anywhere.
My version of Pevsner then was an older edition with just one black-and-white photo of the interior of Brixworth Church, which didn’t really do it justice. It was the exterior, without any of the thick mask of whitewash that so disfigured British church interiors in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, that made such a strong impression on me. It was quite unlike any other church I had ever seen. By now, I was walking along the tarmac path towards a plain wooden door, set in a double-arched doorway, on the south side.
To many people with an archaeological background, the bricks and stones of a wall are like the layers of a ditch or a pit: they preserve the story for posterity. To read that story, you have to work in reverse. So the highest things are usually the most recent, and original structures tend to lurk below, or behind, newer ones. Two clear examples were evident as I walked up that path. The upper part of the tower, from about a metre (3 ft) below the clock face, was clearly much later, as was the Lady Chapel, which had been built on to the south-west end. But everything else seemed consistent, although quite unlike other Saxon churches I was familiar with, such as Earls Barton, nearby, or Barnack on the very edge of the Fens, in south Lincolnshire.
I walked round the outside twice, before venturing inside, where the dreaded whitewash was much in evidence, but there could be no doubt that this was a very early church indeed. My copy of Pevsner suggested that the main body of the church had been constructed in the late seventh century, but a series of excavations between 1972 and 2010 have clearly shown it was actually built about a century later: towards the end of the eighth or the beginning of the ninth century.16 All Saints’ Brixworth is the largest and among the earliest of Anglo-Saxon churches surviving in Britain, but it was originally even larger, with a series of s
ide chambers on either side of the nave. These had been demolished by the time the Lady Chapel was added to the south side, in the thirteenth to fourteenth century, but their existence probably explains the height of the arches over the ground-floor doors and windows in the main body of the church.
Much of the masonry struck me as odd. It was a bit of a jumble, with what looked like reused Roman bricks, which were sometimes laid in a herringbone pattern in imitation of Roman walls. One or more courses of reused Roman bricks formed the arches over doorways and window openings, but they weren’t laid in a methodical way, with firm, buffer-like ends and a central wedge-shaped keystone piece to hold the arch together. They had been placed in the wall to look good, rather than to carry a load.
Recent excavations have shown that the Roman bricks didn’t come from any local villas but had been brought to Brixworth from the neighbouring Roman towns at Towcester (about 24 kilometres/15 miles to the south) and Leicester (some 42 kilometres/26 miles to the north). This suggests that even four centuries after the Romans had departed, their town buildings were being used as sources of building materials – and in quite an organized fashion. The quantities are remarkable and the condition of the bricks is good. Incidentally, Brixworth isn’t unique in reusing Roman bricks. The tower of St Albans Abbey (Cathedral) contains vast numbers of them, removed in the later eleventh century from the ruins of the abandoned town of Verulamium, very close by.
15.2 All Saints Church, Brixworth, Northamptonshire. Much of this church was built in the late eighth or ninth century. It is the largest and finest surviving Saxon church in Britain and indeed Europe. Note the apsidal end to the left (west). The tower is Saxon to just below the clock, as are the nave and eastern apse (not visible here); the small Lady Chapel to the south-east is later (thirteenth/fourteenth century). Note the distinctive thin Roman bricks re-used in the arches over the doors and windows.
© Francis Pryor
When I first learned about the reuse of Roman building materials in the early post-Roman centuries, we were told it was a sign of the poverty that prevailed in Saxon times. In effect, people were eking out a grim existence by pilfering the buildings of the past. But we now realize that most post-Roman houses and other buildings were made from timber. Bricks and masonry were ideas imported from the Mediterranean, along with towns, most of which didn’t thrive for very long after the Roman withdrawal. The British had returned to using what they were familiar with: building materials and carpentry that had mostly been developed in later prehistoric times. But people hadn’t forgotten about the Roman buildings. They had largely been abandoned, but everyone knew where they were, so when building in stone was starting to come back into fashion, in the seventh and eighth centuries (which is also when the earliest true towns of the post-Roman period were being established), Roman bricks were in effect being quarried for use elsewhere. The scale of their reuse in St Albans, and indeed at Brixworth, is remarkable and suggests that traders and dealers were probably involved. It certainly wasn’t just casual pilfering.
Whenever I visit Brixworth and look at the bricks above those arched windows, I can’t help wondering whether the people who quarried, traded and then relaid them were aware of what they were doing. There is a tendency when we think about the post-Roman centuries to suppose that people were ignorant of their own past; that once the Roman army and civil servants had gone, people simply forgot about them. But if I have learned anything from a life spent scraping through the debris of the past, it is that people have long memories.
History survives among ordinary folk in tales and stories, so I would be very surprised indeed if the Saxon masons who removed, traded and then relaid those bricks at Brixworth were in any doubt at all about what they were doing. I don’t think of them as vandals or pilferers, and they certainly wouldn’t have felt any guilt: they were recycling – which is something we must all be doing today, if, that is, we are to moderate the impact of climate change and the threat of irreversible environmental damage that currently confronts us. But it will require humility. We could learn so much from those skilled Saxon tradesmen.
a The blue face-paint was made from a dye extracted from the leaves of woad (a plant of the cabbage family, Isatis tinctoria), which was grown in the Fens until the 1930s.
b See Scene 11, page 203.
c See Scene 13.
d See also Scene 9, page 175.
e The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, vol. II (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1978), p. 1413.
f Upstream of Peterborough, the River Nene is known as the River Nen.
Acknowledgements
The writing of this book has been a work of two parts: before and after Covid-19, which struck in March 2020, more or less when I was making the transition out of the Neolithic and into the Bronze Age (Scenes 6 and 7). Subsequently, I have been in self-imposed isolation and while I have lacked for few comforts, thanks to a productive vegetable garden and a very proficient cook (my lovely wife, Maisie), the lack of other close human contact has been palpable. This has meant that the writing of this book has played an important part in preserving some sense of ‘normality’ in a world that was becoming increasingly unstable not just due to the pandemic, but to other widespread problems, such as the rise of populist politicians and ‘fake news’, civil unrest in parts of the Middle East and the emergence of China as a world power. So I am more than usually grateful to the many people who went to such trouble to help me in so many ways, with pictures, with information and with editorial advice. Thank you all for doing it so well and with such kindness. I hope you benefited from the experience as much as I did.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Marion Dowd, for providing me with copious information on Irish cave sites. Thanks are also due to Kevin Blockley (Canterbury Cathedral), Andy Richmond (Tower’s Fen bucket) and Dave Stewart (Dorset hillforts). I have received continuing help and advice from Chris Evans, Mike Parker Pearson, Maisie Taylor and Michael Bamforth. The editorial team at Head of Zeus have been superb throughout. In particular I have received clear guidance from Anthony Cheetham and from my editor, Richard Milbank, who has been most helpful and understanding. His expertise in the development of Old English was particularly useful; he kindly, but ruthlessly, exposed my hopeless attempts to make sense of a difficult subject, in Scene 15. Copy-editing was by Jenni Davis, design by Ben Cracknell, index by Ben Murphy.
Notes
Introduction
1 Chris Scarre (ed.), The Human Past: World Prehistory and the Development of Human Societies (Thames and Hudson, London, 2005). This huge and beautifully illustrated book provides a remarkable overview of world prehistory, set against environmental change.
2 Farmers in Prehistoric Britain (Tempus Books, Stroud, 2006) and Home: A Time Traveller’s Tales from Britain’s Prehistory (Penguin Books, London, 2014).
3 Brian Fagan, A Little History of Archaeology (Yale University Press, London, 2018), chapter 9.
Scene 1
1 Brian Fagan, A Little History of Archaeology (Yale University Press, London, 2018), chapters 7 and 8.
2 Clive Waddington, ‘Battling the Waves’, British Archaeology, November/December 2014, pp. 34–9.
3 N. Pevsner and B. Watson, The Buildings of England. Norfolk 1: Norwich and North-East, 2nd ed. (Yale University Press, London, 2002), pp. 539–42.
4 A. D. Mills, A Dictionary of English Place-names (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1991), p. 324.
5 S. Parfitt, N. Ashton and S. Lewis, ‘Happisburgh’, British Archaeology, September/October, 2010, pp. 14–23.
6 www.selrc.org.uk/maplocation.php?location_id=38
7 ‘First Impressions: Discovering the Earliest Human Footprints in Europe’, Current Archaeology, 289, April 2014, pp. 12–16. N. Ashton, ‘One Million Years UK’, British Archaeology, March/April 2014, pp. 20–1. See also: http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/research_projects/all_current_projects/featured_project_happisburgh/discovering_the_site.aspx
8 B. J. Coles, ‘Doggerla
nd: A Speculative Survey’, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, vol. 64, 1998, pp. 45–81.
9 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/West_Runton_Mammoth
10 ‘Colonising Britain’, Current Archaeology, vol. 288, March 2014, pp. 14–21.
11 The definitive report on Boxgrove is by M. B. Roberts and S. A. Parfitt, Boxgrove: A Middle Pleistocene Hominid Site at Eartham Quarry, Boxgrove, West Sussex, English Heritage Archaeological Report 17 (English Heritage, London, 1999). For an excellent summary see ‘Boxgrove’, Current Archaeology, No. 153, July 1997, pp. 324–33.
12 paleoleap.com/eat-this-bone-broth/
13 I discuss the agricultural recession of the 1870s in The Making of the British Landscape (Penguin Books, London, 2010), pp. 492–7.
Scene 2
1 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sapiens
2 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Buckland#The_Red_Lady_of_Paviland
3 Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (Warner Books, New York, 1991), pp. 204–5.
4 For a good overview, see Stephen Green and Elizabeth Walker, Ice Age Hunters: Neanderthals and Early Modern Hunters in Wales (National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, 1991).
Scenes from Prehistoric Life Page 30