Charles Darwin kindly posing for a picture… by tranchis

From the Darwin 200 website -

Darwin is now a household name whose ideas over the last 150 years have revolutionised our understanding of nature and our place within it.

Darwin challenged the thinking of the day because his observations – that every living thing is related and belongs to one big family – placed humans firmly within the natural world.

As the following quotes indicate, Darwin’s innovative thoughts are just as important to our lives today…

‘Charles Darwin’s concept of evolution through natural selection is one of the most illuminating scientific ideas of all time for understanding our biosphere and humanity’s place in nature. As an iconic figure, Darwin is matched only by Newton and Einstein – indeed, he has perhaps had a more pervasive influence on human culture than any other scientist.’ Lord Rees of Ludlow, The Charles Darwin Trust’s Science Advisory Panel

‘The two governing ideas of modern biology are first, the molecular basis of all life processes and second, the origin and evolution of all life processes by Darwinian natural selection.’
Professor E O Wilson, The Charles Darwin Trust’s Science Advisory Panel.

Through a combination of meticulous observation and innovative thinking, Darwin came up with an explanation for the incredible variety of living things: that evolution was driven by natural selection. By this process, organisms most suited to their environment survive and reproduce and pass their advantages to their offspring.

‘There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.’ Charles Darwin

Although Darwin had already presented his theory to fellow scientists, it was the publication of his book, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, in 1859 that shook the rest of the world.

‘We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities… still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.’ Charles Darwin

Initially greeted with controversy, Darwin’s ideas now form the foundation of modern biology.

‘It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.’ Charles Darwin

A natural life

Charles Darwin was born on 12 February 1809. As a child he loved the outdoors and collecting beetles.

He abandoned his studies of medicine to study theology but then, when he was just 22 years old, joined a voyage around the world on the ship, the Beagle. During this five-year adventure, he keenly observed and collected hundreds of different types of plants, animals, fossils and rocks.

He spent the rest of his life carefully studying and interpreting what he had seen. Darwin came up with his original explanation for the variety of living things, the theory of evolution by natural selection, soon after his return from the Beagle voyage, but it was many years before he had accumulated enough evidence to publish his work.

‘I can remember the very spot in the road, whilst in my carriage, when to my joy the solution occurred to me; and this was long after I had come to Down. The solution, as I believe, is that the modified offspring of all dominant and increasing forms tend to become adapted to many and highly diversified places in the economy of nature.’ Charles Darwin

Although Darwin is the most familiar name associated with evolution, he was only persuaded to publish his work when another young scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace, came forward having independently come up with a similar explanation for how evolution occurs.

• Shrewsbury, Shropshire

Charles Darwin was born and raised in the family home in Shrewsbury and also attended school in the town.

The Mount

Charles Darwin was born in the Mount on 12 February 1809. The large Georgian house was built by his parents, Robert and Susanna Darwin. It has been used as offices but is currently being renovated and is due to open to the public in 2009.

St. Chad’s Church

Charles Darwin was christened at St Chad’s Church, which is now used as a venue for an annual Darwin Festival.

Shrewbury School

In 1818, aged just 9 years, Darwin was sent to Shrewsbury School, an Anglican boarding school in the centre of town. He boarded despite it being less than a couple of kilometres from his home, and only a few months after losing his mother.

Darwin hated the harsh environment of the school but made some good friends there. Charles, aged 12, wrote in a letter to a friend, ‘I only wash my fe[e]t once a month at school, which I confess is nasty, but I cannot help it, for we have nothing to do it with’.

His older bother, Erasmus, also attended the school and the brothers were renowned for their chemistry experiments, conducted in a self-equipped ‘Lab’ in an outbuilding of The Mount.

The school building has been renovated and now accommodates the town’s library with an imposing statue of Darwin outside.

The Bellstone

Darwin’s first introduction to geology was a granite boulder, called the Bellstone, situated in a courtyard in the town centre. As a child he was told that this sort of stone was only found much further north in Cumbria or Scotland and there was no explanation for how it ended up in Shropshire.

It was only when he studied geology at Edinburgh that Darwin learned that during the last ice age moving glaciers had transported massive rocks across the country.

An annual toast is now held at the Bellstone on Darwin’s birthday, 12 February.

St Chad’s Church, Montford

Darwin’s mother and father were buried in St Chad’s Church in the village of Montford about 10 kilometres from Shrewsbury. Darwin’s father, Robert Darwin was buried here in 1848.

• Maer Hall, nr Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire

Maer Hall was the Wedgwood family home, located near to the Wedgwood factory.

Maer Hall

Maer Hall was the family home of Emma Wedgwood, who was born there in 1808. The house was near to the Wedgwood factory owned by Emma’s father Josiah Wedgwood, who was also Charles’ uncle.

Charles Darwin was a frequent visitor in his youth. He greatly enjoyed the countryside for walking and shooting and the informal evenings with the Wedgwood family. It was in the fields around Maer that Charles first investigated the role of earthworms, recording that cinders spread on the surface became buried over several years.

After his return from the Beagle voyage, his attentions turned to courting Emma and they married in the church in the grounds. Charles and Emma continued to make frequent visits to Maer Hall with their growing family, spending many summer holidays there.

St Peter’s Church

Charles married Emma in 1839, two weeks before his thirtieth birthday, at St Peter’s church in the grounds of the Jacobean mansion.

Welsh holidays

During his childhood and student days, Darwin spent several family holidays in North Wales, staying, on different occasions, near Abergele, Tywyn, Pistyll Rhayader, Barmouth and Mount Snowdon. He enjoyed riding and beetle collecting.

After graduating from Cambridge, in 1831, he was Adam Sedgwick’s assistant on a field trip to North Wales surveying red sandstone in Llangollen, Ruthin, Conwy, Bangor and Capel Curig. He returned in 1842 to study the geology at Capel Curig, Bangor and Caernarfon. Darwin’s last visit to Wales was for a family holiday in 1869 to Caerdeon and Barmouth.

Edinburgh University

In 1825, aged 16, Darwin enrolled at Edinburgh University to study medicine, following his father and grandfather. Although it offered the best medical education in Britain, Charles found the lectures dull and the clinical studies distressing. He was horrified to witness the pain patients had to suffer when operated on with no anaesthetic.

During his second year, Darwin pursued his interests in natural history through a small student group called the Plinian Society. He became close to Robert Grant, a sponge expert, with whom he explored and studied the marine life of the coastline near Edinburgh. Grant moved on to University College, London, where he established the Grant Museum.

After two years Darwin finally abandoned his medical studies and left Edinburgh in 1827.

• Cambridge

Darwin studied theology at Cambridge University but also spent much time developing his passion for natural history.

Christ’s College, Cambridge University

In 1827, Darwin enrolled at Christ’s College, Cambridge University where he studied theology for just over three years.

During his time at Cambridge, Darwin continued to enjoy the countryside and spent much time with his cousin, William Fox, who introduced him to beetle collecting. He also became friends with William Paley, who promoted natural theology, and the geologist Adam Sedgwick.

In his last two terms Darwin spent much time with the Rev John Henslow, a professor of botany, and became known as ‘the man who walks with Henslow’.

It was Henslow, himself restricted by family commitments, who recommended Darwin as a suitable companion and naturalist for Captain FitzRoy on the Beagle expedition.

Darwin lived in the same first floor rooms in College from late 1828 until he graduated in 1831.

Today, the College Hall has a portrait of Darwin and a stained glass window depicting him.

A large bronze bust by William Couper, presented by an American delegation in honour of the centenary of his birth, is displayed in the Shrine in the college grounds.

Sidney Street

Darwin only moved up to Cambridge early in 1828, and at first lived in lodgings above a tobacconist’s in Sidney Street. He later moved into rooms in one of the college’s courtyards.

Fitzwilliam Street

Years later, after he returned from the Beagle voyage in 1836, Darwin revisited Cambridge many times. Needing time to sort his specimens from the voyage, he rented a house in Fitzwilliam Street for a few months, which can now be identified by a stone plaque.

• Plymouth, Devon

The Beagle set sail from Plymouth in 1831 with 22-year-old Darwin on board as the gentleman naturalist and companion to Captain FitzRoy.

HMS Beagle

Darwin spent two months in Plymouth before setting sail while Captain FitzRoy was supervising alterations to the ship. He stayed in lodgings in Clarence Baths with John Lort Stokes, one of the two survey officers with whom he would share a cabin on board.

The waiting and increasing anxiety about the impending voyage caused Darwin to refer to this time as ‘the most miserable which I ever spent’.

Darwin commented to Henslow on the ship’s cramped interior, ‘The corner of the cabin, which is my private property, is most woefully small. – I have just room to turn around & that is all.’

The Beagle finally set sail from the Devonport Dockyard in Plymouth on 27 December 1831 with Darwin on board.

• Falmouth, Cornwall

After five years spent circumnavigating the globe the Beagle returned to Falmouth harbour on 2 October 1836.

Epic voyage

During the voyage Darwin experienced extreme hardship and exhilarating discovery. Often having to cope with illness, hunger, tiredness, turbulent weather, natural disasters, and disagreements within the crew, Darwin dedicated his time to studying and collecting thousands of fossils, plants and animals previously unseen by his contemporaries back home.

• London Societies linked to Darwin

After his return from the Beagle voyage, Darwin developed contacts with many eminent scientists and scientific societies based in London.

Geological Society of London

Darwin was an active member of the Society as he was elected a Fellow in 1836, became a Secretary in 1838, and Vice-President in 1843. He had regular interactions with Charles Lyell, whose book, Principles of Geology, Darwin had fervently studied while on the Beagle voyage using it as a basis for developing his ideas on the formation of coral reefs.

Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons

After Darwin returned from the Beagle voyage, he needed to find people to identify the thousands of specimens he collected on his travels. In October 1836 he met Richard Owen, who was the new Hunterian Professor at the Royal College of Surgeons. Later that year he handed over his prized fossil mammals for Owen, a skilled anatomist, to identify. Owen’s assertion that the fossils belonged to extinct giant mammals of similar types to smaller living mammals in South America, provided Darwin with evidence of common ancestry.

Linnean Society of London

On 1 July 1858 Joseph Hooker and Charles Lyell read out Darwin’s and Alfred Russell Wallace’s papers on the tendency of species to form varieties and species by natural means of selection to a select group of scientists.

The timing was prompted by a letter Darwin received from Wallace a month before. Darwin was alarmed to find out that Wallace, who was collecting specimens in the Far East, had come up with almost the same theory as Darwin’s of evolution by natural selection. He was now forced to make his ideas public.

Hooker and Lyell arranged to read Wallace’s letter and extracts of Darwin’s unpublished manuscripts to the next meeting of the Linnean Society. Wallace was far away and Darwin’s youngest son had recently died of scarlet fever so they were both absent from the meeting.

Later that year, the president of the Linnean Society wrote in his annual report that the year had not been marked by any discoveries which “revolutionize science”.

The Natural History Museum

During the Second World War a number of Darwin’s fossil mammal specimens were taken to the Natural History Museum when the Hunterian Museum suffered bomb damage.

Today, the Museum stores hundreds of specimens collected by Darwin, including parrotfish preserved in jars of spirit, domestic pigeon skins, beetles, stuffed armadillos, giant ground sloth fossils, fragments of coral, and dried mosses and lichens.

There are many specimens from the Beagle voyage, including the finches and mocking birds from the Galapagos Islands that helped to crystallise his ideas. Darwin’s barnacle collections, which he studied later in his life to establish himself as a senior and serious systematic scientist, are also held at the Museum.

The Museum has recently acquired the Kohler Darwin Collection, the world’s largest collection of works by and about Charles Darwin, which includes a first edition presentation copy of On the Origin of Species.

Royal Institution of Great Britain

In 1880 Thomas Huxley gave an address on ‘The coming of age of The origin of species’, which was published in Nature. He talked of the significant accumulation of fossil evidence in favour of evolution that had occurred since 1859, when On the Origin of Species was first published.

Royal Society of London

Darwin was elected fellow of the Society on 24 January 1839. In 1853 he was awarded the Royal Medal for his exhaustive work on barnacles, and in 1864 he was awarded the prestigious Copley Medal for his outstanding researches in geology, zoology and botanical physiology.

Royal Zoological Society of London

Darwin became a fellow of the Royal Zoological Society of London in 1837. John Gould, who was then employed by the Zoological Society, described the birds Darwin had collected on the Beagle voyage. It was Gould who realised that the finches found on the Galapagos Islands belonged to a new group and that different species were confined to different islands.

In March 1838, Darwin saw his first ape in London Zoo, which had recently acquired an orang-utan named Jenny. Darwin observed a keeper teasing her with an apple and was fascinated by the similarity between the ape’s reaction and a child’s tantrum, later writing to his sister, that the ape ‘threw herself on her back, kicked & cried, precisely like a naughty child’.

• London locations linked to Darwin

Darwin lived in several locations in London and is buried in Westminster Abbey.

Great Marlborough Street

Darwin lived in rented accommodation here from 1837-8, soon after his return from the Beagle voyage.

Upper Gower Street

Number 12 Upper Gower Street, which later became number 110, was the first home of Charles and Emma Darwin after their marriage in 1839. Charles Darwin moved in on 31 December 1838, and Emma joined him after their wedding on 29 January 1839. They rented it, furnished, and called it Macaw Cottage after the gaudy colours of its furnishings.

Their eldest two children, William Erasmus and Anne Elizabeth, were born here. They moved out in September 1842.

The house was bombed in 1941 and the site is now part of the Department of Biology, University College London. A modern block called the Darwin Building stands on the exact site of Macaw Cottage.

Grant Museum

The Darwin Building, which bears a blue plaque commemorating Darwin, houses the Grant Museum of Zoology and Comparative Anatomy. The collection was started by Robert Grant, an early mentor of Darwin’s at Edinburgh University.

Westminster Abbey

Charles Darwin was buried in Westminster Abbey in April 1882. His gravestone and a bronze memorial relief are inside the Abbey.

• Glen Roy, Scotland

Darwin studied the unique geology of Glen Roy when he returned from the Beagle voyage.

Parallel roads of Glen Roy

In 1838 Darwin made observations on the parallel roads of Glen Roy, and of other parts of Lochaber in Scotland, with an attempt to prove that they were of marine origin. He published his paper but later wrote, ‘I do believe every word in my Glen Roy paper is false’.

It is now known that the famous geological feature is the remains of ancient shorelines. They formed at the end of the last ice age when an advancing glacier pushed up the water level of a lake that filled the valley.

• Downe, Bromley, Kent

Darwin moved to Down House with his growing family in September 1842, and lived here for 40 years until he died in 1882.

Down House

Darwin bought the house, with 18 acres of land, from the vicar of Downe for just over 2000 pounds. Soon after they moved in, Charles and Emma began extending and renovating the house and gardens to create the home they wanted.

Down house is now owned by English Heritage and is open to the public

Darwin’s study

Darwin’s study at Down House remains much as it was when Darwin was alive.

The writing desk and chair were used by Darwin as he developed his theory of evolution.

Gardens and greenhouses

The gardens and greenhouses have been restored and some of Darwin’s experiments on orchids, carnivorous plants and honeybees have been recreated.

Sandwalk

Beyond the garden was a path around a small wood, that Darwin referred to as his ‘thinking path’ as he paced around it fives times every day at noon.

Emma Darwin, Charles’ wife was buried in Downe churchyard in 1896.

Downe Bank

Darwin’s observations here of orchids and their insect pollinators gave him evidence of co-evolution and led to the publication of his famous book Fertilisation of Orchids in 1862.

Experts now agree that Downe Bank is indeed the species-rich setting that inspired Darwin’s conclusion of On the Origin of Species where he refers to an ‘entangled bank’.

High Elms

This large estate of about 370 acres of woodland and species-rich chalk grassland is now a Local Nature Reserve. The land once belonged to John Lubbock, the renowned biologist and politician, who Darwin encouraged as a boy to study the local wildlife. He helped Darwin illustrate his great barnacle work and later wrote a book on the social insects.

Keston

Darwin used this area in his earthworm research, investigating their presence and absence in different parts of the heath.

Darwin also spent much time observing round-leaved sundew at Keston Bog. He noticed how insects became stuck to the leaves of sundew, which led him to investigate how it trapped and digested insects, pioneering work which led to the publication of Insectivorous Plants in 1875.

Keston Ponds were the most likely source of the mud from which Darwin germinated plants in a sequence of experiments into the geographical distribution of freshwater plants.

• Malvern, Worcestershire

Darwin had several long stays at this spa town between 1849 and 1851, and again in 1863.

Malvern spa

Darwin stayed at The Lodge on Worcester Road and took daily water cure treatments at Dr Gully’s hydrotherapy facility. This therapy involved cold showers, wet wraps, steam baths, strict diets and long walks in the countryside intended to stimulate the circulation and drive out toxins from the blood and organs.

Malvern Priory

His eldest daughter, Annie, was taken to Malvern for treatment in 1851, suffering from a fever, and died there aged 10. She was buried in Malvern Priory.

• Moor Park nr Farnham, Surrey

Moor Park was a water cure establishment that Darwin visited often between 1857 and 1859.

Moor Park

Darwin referred to Moor Park as, ‘Dr. Lane’s delightful hydropathic establishment’. As well as the water therapy and relaxation, Darwin enjoyed solitary walks around the beautiful grounds.

Although Moor Park House is not open to the public, there is a short heritage trail in the grounds.

• Ilkley, nr Otley, Yorkshire

Darwin was staying in Ilkley and taking water cure treatments when On the Origin of Species was published in November 1859.

Water cure treatments

He finished working on the proofs on 1 October then travelled to Ilkley on 2 October, recording in his diary, ‘I am worn out & must have rest…’ Darwin and his family stayed here at Wells Terrace while he took water cure treatments, which included cold water baths.

• Oxford

Oxford was the location of the infamous debate on evolution and religion in 1860.

Oxford University Museum of Natural History

In June 1860 the newly opened Oxford University Museum of Natural History hosted one of the most famous debates in scientific history. It was the ‘great debate’ between Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Oxford and Thomas Huxley, the biologist and writer.

They argued furiously about Darwin’s theory of evolution by natural selection and the questions it raised about man’s place in the natural world and religious belief. Darwin himself was not well enough to attend the debate but Huxley was nicknamed ‘Darwin’s bull-dog’ for his ardent defence of Darwin’s work.

Today the Museum displays a statue of Darwin and some of the crabs he collected during his voyage on the Beagle.

From the BBC (published 18th July 2007) -

Some event, or combination of events, resulted in a huge lake breaching the chalk ridge between what is now Dover and Calais. Scars from the torrent are still evident in sonar images of the Channel floor today, presented (right) as a processed 3D perspective view.

Britain became separated from mainland Europe after a catastrophic flood some time before 200,000 years ago, a sonar study of the English Channel confirms.

The images reveal deep scars on the Channel bed that must have been cut by a sudden, massive discharge of water.

Scientists tell the journal Nature that the torrent probably came from a giant lake in what is now the North Sea.

Some event – perhaps an earthquake – caused the lake’s rim to breach at the Dover Strait, they believe.

Dr Sanjeev Gupta, from Imperial College London, and colleagues say the discharge would have been one of the most significant megafloods in recent Earth history, and provides an explanation for Britain’s island status.

“This event, or series of events, that caused [the breach] changed the course of Britain’s history,” Dr Gupta told BBC News.

“If this hadn’t happened, Britain would always have been a peninsula of Europe. There would have been no need for a Channel Tunnel and you could always have walked across from France into Britain, as early humans did prior to this event.”

Tremor trigger?

The idea of a great flood stems from scientists’ understanding of northern Europe’s ice age past.

It is believed that hundreds of thousands of years ago, when ice sheets had pushed down from Scotland and Scandinavia, there existed a narrow isthmus linking Britain to continental Europe.

This gently upfolding chalk ridge was perhaps some 30m higher than the current sea level in the English Channel.

Palaeo-researchers think it bounded a large lake to the northeast that was filled by glacial meltwaters fed by ancient versions of the rivers Thames and Rhine.

Then – and they are not sure of the precise date – something happened to break the isthmus known as the Weald-Artois ridge.

“Possibly this was just the build-up of water behind. Possibly something triggered it; it’s well known today that there are small earthquakes in the Kent area,” explained Imperial’s Dr Jenny Collier.

Re-routing rivers

Either way, once the ridge was broken, the discharge would have been spectacular.

The Imperial College and UK Hydrographic Office study used high-resolution sonar waves to map the submerged world in the Channel basin.

The images detail deep grooves and streamlined features, the hallmarks of landforms that have been gouged by large bodies of fast-moving water.

At its peak, it is believed that the megaflood could have lasted several months, discharging an estimated one million cubic metres of water per second. And from the way some features have been cut, it is likely there were at least two distinct phases to the flooding.

“I was frankly astonished,” said Dr Collier. “I’ve worked in many exotic places around the world, including mid-ocean ridges where you see very spectacular features; and it was an enormous surprise to me that we should find something with a worldwide-scale implication offshore of the Isle of Wight. It was completely unexpected.”

The researchers tell Nature that the ridge breach and the subsequent flooding would have helped reorganise river drainage in northwest Europe, re-routing both the Thames and the Rhine.

Fossil filling

The megaflood theory has been around for some 30 years; but the sonar images represent the clearest narrative yet for the story.

Previous studies of prehistoric animal remains from the past half-million years have already revealed the crucial role the English Channel has played in shaping the course of Britain’s natural history.

The Channel has acted as a filter through time, letting some animals (including humans) in from mainland Europe but not others.

And even when water was locked up in giant ice sheets and sea levels plummeted, the Rhine and the Thames rivers would have dumped meltwater into a major river system that flowed along the Channel’s floor.

Scientists can see all of this influence written in the type and mix of British fossils they find at key periods in history.

Professor Chris Stringer is director of the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain (Ahob) project, which has sought to fill out the details of the British Isles’ prehistory.

“The timing and method of formation of the Channel has been a long-running argument – after all, it really makes Britain what it is today, geographically,” he commented.

“The evidence presented in this paper is spectacular. It certainly explains and reinforces the picture the Ahob project has been putting together of the increasing isolation of Britain from Europe after 400,000 years ago.”

From the BBC (published 26th September 2006) -

A study of prehistoric animals has revealed the crucial role of the English Channel in shaping the course of Britain’s natural history.

The Channel acted as a filter, letting some animals in from mainland Europe, but not others.

Even at times of low sea level, when Britain was not an island, the Channel posed a major barrier to colonisation.

This was because a massive river system flowed along its bed, UK researchers told a palaeo-conference in Gibraltar.

Today the English Channel is 520km long, 30-160km wide, about 30-100m in depth and slopes to the south-west.

Even now, the bed of the Channel is incised by a network of valleys, the remains of the river system, which may have been cut by catastrophic drainage of meltwater from further north.

“It would have been an incredible barrier at times of high sea level, but it would also have been a formidable barrier at times of low sea level for populations trying to move south to north,” said Chris Stringer of London’s Natural History Museum.

Professor Stringer presented the results here at the Calpe conference, a meeting of pre-history experts from all over the world.

The big flood

The evidence comes from the Ancient Human Occupation of Britain Project (AHOB). This five-year undertaking by some of the UK’s leading palaeo-scientists has reassessed a mass of scientific data and filled in big knowledge gaps with new discoveries.

Chris Stringer’s co-researchers Andy Currant, Danielle Shreve and Roger Jacobi have been studying how the mammal fauna of Britain has changed over the last 500,000 years.

During that period, animals have colonised, abandoned and re-colonised Britain many times as the climate shifted from warm to cold and back to warm.

The Channel is thought to have formed during a cold period 200,000 years ago or more.

Meltwater from an ice sheet formed a lake, which then overflowed in a catastrophic flood – cutting through a chalk ridge that previously connected Britain to France.

Changes in climate were accompanied by changing sea levels. At the height of an ice age, these would have been low. During interglacial periods, when the climate was warm, sea levels rose.

But even when water was locked up in the ice sheets and sea levels plummeted, the Rhine and the Thames rivers dumped meltwater into a major river system that flowed along the floor of the Channel.

Unusual collections

This means that once the Channel formed, there was never again a simple land crossing to be made from northern France to Britain.

“We find we’re getting only a selection of the mammals during the British interglacials that there are in mainland Europe,” said Professor Stringer.

For example, at one pre-historic site, researchers found hippopotamus and fallow deer; but unlike mainland Europe at the time, there were no horses and no humans.

“This suggests that the Channel, or the Channel river system, is acting as a filter to prevent the movement of some of these [mammal] forms into Britain,” Professor Stringer added.

Once sea levels rose high enough for Britain to be an island, the select fauna that had made it across from mainland Europe could develop in extraordinary ways.

During one warm stage, about 80,000 years ago, fossils from Banwell Cave in Somerset show Britain was populated by some very unusual animals. These included reindeer, bison, and a giant bear similar to a polar bear.

Interestingly, there are no hyena fossils at Banwell Cave, as there were in mainland Europe. Instead, it appears, their role in the food chain may have been taken up by wolves.

“The wolves were developing much larger jaws. Their teeth show incredible signs of breakage and wear as if they’re chomping bones like hyenas,” said Professor Stringer.

The mammals at Banwell seem to be the kinds of animals normally found today in cold regions. But they lived in Britain during a warm stage and seemed to be adapting to their new environment.

The team thinks the antecedents of these animals must have arrived in Britain when the climate was cold. But when conditions warmed up, sea levels rose and isolated Britain, marooning this cold-adapted fauna in a warm land.

From Showcaves.com -

Goat’s Hole Cave, better known under the name Paviland Cave, has its important entry in science history. It is the place where for the very first time the discovery of fossil human remains is recorded. Rev. William Buckland discovered in 1823 a skeleton, and he was the first who recognized that is was a remain of a former time, and wrote about it. Subsequently the new sciene archeology developed, so this is the birth place of a new science.

However, each birth is connected with pain, and the discovery of William Buckland is connected with complete error: he misjudged both its age and its sex. [...] Buckland believed the skeleton was from Roman times. And as it was discovered with decorative items, including perforated seashell necklaces and ivory jewelry, he thought it was a woman. The person was covered by red ochre, so soon it was commonly known as Red Lady of Paviland.

Modern archaeology identified the Red Lady of Paviland as a man, no older than 21, who lived 29,000 years ago (26,350 ± 550 BP, OxA-1815) at the end of the Upper Paleolithic Period. The skeleton was found along with a mammoth’s skull, which has since been lost. The formal burial ceremony, the number and kind of items, suggest he was a tribal chieftain. This is the oldest known burial in the UK and western Europe.

When the man was buried, the cave was about 120km from the sea. The cave was overlooking a plain similar to present day Siberia with tundra vegetation. The ice sheet of the Devensian Glaciation, the last ice age, advanced towards the site, and the weather was cold, 10°C in summer, -20° in winter.

From British Archaeology (published Oct 2001) -

Goat’s Hole cave, Paviland, on the Gower Peninsula in South Wales, has long been renowned as the site of one of the best-known prehistoric burials in Britain – the notoriously misnamed ‘Red Lady of Paviland’ which was discovered in 1823. Yet it has taken archaeologists nearly two centuries to unravel the mysteries of this remarkable site, with the definitive report published only last year.

The story begins not in 1823 but during the previous year, when Daniel Davies and the Rev John Davies, respectively surgeon and curate at Port Eynon on the south coast of Gower, explored the cave and found animal bones, including the tusk of a mammoth. The Talbot family of Penrice Castle was informed and Miss Mary Theresa Talbot, then the oldest unmarried daughter, joined an expedition to the site and found ‘bones of elephants’ on 27 December 1822.

William Buckland, Professor of Geology at Oxford University and a correspondent of that well-connected family, was contacted. He arrived on 18 January 1823 and spent a week at Goat’s Hole – a week in which his famous discovery took place. He later wrote:

[I found the skeleton] enveloped by a coating of a kind of ruddle . . . which stained the earth, and in some parts extended itself to the distance of about half an inch [12mm] around the surface of the bones . . . Close to that part of the thigh bone where the pocket is usually worn surrounded also by ruddle [were] about two handfuls of the Nerita littoralis [periwinkle shells]. At another part of the skeleton, viz in contact with the ribs [were] forty or fifty fragments of ivory rods . . . [also] . . . some small fragments of rings made of the same ivory and found with the rods . . . Both rods and rings, as well as the Nerite shells, were stained superficially with red, and lay in the same red substance that enveloped the bones. (Buckland, Reliquiae Diluvianae, 1823)

In the field, Buckland had identified the skeleton as male, suggesting that the bones were those of a Customs Officer murdered by smugglers. By the time of publication later that year, however, the gender had changed with a new and better story.

The ochre-stained skeleton had become a ‘painted lady’ who serviced the needs of the Roman soldiers garrisoned in the camp on the hill above the cave. It was a good story. But by the early years of the 20th century, it could be seen not to add up: the burial was male, the mammoth ivories were Palaeolithic and not modern products made from fossil ivory as Buckland had claimed, and the camp was an Iron Age promontory fort.

Buckland had found a burial, representing a single event in the human history of the site, but found no more than a few flints, even though the site has since yielded thousands. Indeed, in subsequent excavations the site was to produce diagnostic or dated material – flint, ivory and bone artefacts, and the burial itself – spanning more than half a dozen Palaeolithic events over at least the period 35,000-11,000 BP (before present). Buckland did not know this. What he did know, as Dean of Westminster and Curate at Christchurch – or strictly speaking what he believed – was that the bones of such animals as mammoth and woolly rhino found in the cave could not be contemporary with the burial since such species, he thought, had not made it onto the Ark and so had been drowned in Noah’s, or an earlier, flood. His belief in such a deluge is shown by the title of his book, Reliquiae Diluvianae (‘Evidence of the Flood’).

He therefore regarded the ‘Red Lady’ as intrusive, a reasonable inference given the intellectual context of his day and the undeveloped nature of archaeological excavation as a technique. But did he really miss the flints because of his mindset? The answer may be yes, but Buckland’s elevation drawing of the site suggests that the burial may have lain at the lowest level then exposed. The many thousands of lithics, now interpreted as earlier than the burial, were not found until 85 years later through the excavations of William Sollas, also holder of Oxford’s Chair of Geology.

The ‘Red Lady’ would now be interpreted as a ceremonial interment of the Gravettian period of the Palaeolithic (c 28-21,000 BP), such as are now known across Europe from Paviland to Moscow and south to Portugal. But at the time when the ‘Red Lady’ was unearthed she – or rather he – was not only the first such burial to be found but also the first human fossil ever to have been recovered anywhere in the world.

The radiocarbon dating technique was not invented until the late 1940s, so neither Buckland nor Sollas could have known the true age of the interment. Sollas did, however, work on the assumption that the burial was Palaeolithic. He confirmed the burial site by finding a spread of ochre associated with ivory rods parallel to the cave wall, and added to our understanding of how the body – which was incomplete at the time of discovery probably because of marine erosion – had been interred.

The bones were deeply stained with red ochre, and the grave goods – ivory rod and bracelet fragments, and perforated periwinkle shells – were all similarly stained. In addition, small limestone blocks may have been placed at the head and feet. Perhaps, too, the skull of a mammoth found nearby may have been part of the grave furniture – this was the interpretation of the Abbé Breuil who had joined the Sollas expedition in the role of lithics analyst. Sollas correctly identified the body as that of a man.

Sollas’s fieldwork at Paviland in 1912 had been prompted by a visit to Oxford of the French scholar Emile Cartailhac, then preparing his magnum opus on the caves of Grimaldi in Liguria. Cartailhac dated these burials as Upper Palaeolithic and suggested that the mode of burial at Paviland was comparable. It was not until the 1960s, however, that an attempt was made to date the burial scientifically, when Kenneth Oakley published a radiocarbon determination made on the actual bones of the ‘Red Lady’.

The result of 18,460 ± 340 BP coincided with the peak of the last Ice Age when the edge of the ice lay only an hour’s walk north of Goat’s Hole. The date conjured up a picture of great charm and power, with a later suggestion that the body could have been transported from somewhere further south to a distant, venerated site at the edge of the ice for a summer burial when temperatures rose.

Things were beginning to hot up, however, for John Campbell’s 1977 study of the Goat’s Hole lithic assemblage showed convincingly that it belonged to the later part of the Aurignacian period of the Palaeolithic (c 40-28,000 BP) and was perhaps 30,000 years old. He suggested, however, that the burial might be younger, specifically Gravettian, on the basis of the dating of comparable European ivory bracelets.

At much the same time, hitherto little known material from Belgium was being studied by Marcel Otte and became widely known through his publication of a synthesis on the earlier Belgian Upper Palaeolithic. This was complemented, in 1980, by Roger Jacobi’s ground-breaking study of the British Upper Palaeolithic. Jacobi undertook a rigorous analysis of both the ‘Red Lady’ burial and human presence at Goat’s Hole and concluded that parallels could be found within the Belgian Aurignacian for the ivory artefacts associated with the interment and that the ‘Red Lady’ was therefore likely to be of that age.

He dismissed the 18,460 bp date on the grounds that human presence was simply lacking from north-western Europe at this time. Jacobi pointed also to continental parallels to artefacts termed ‘leaf points’ that should be contemporary with or, even, predate the Aurignacian and reaffirmed the presence there of a flint ‘Font Robert’ Gravettian spearpoint and of Late Upper Palaeolithic artefacts that related to the recolonisation of the British peninsula after the peak of the last Ice Age sometime after 13,000 bp.

In other words, it was quite clear by 1980 that Goat’s Hole had been the scene of a number of apparently discrete phases of human presence spread over 20,000 or more years of the Palaeolithic. But all this knowledge depended largely upon typological parallels and on one very suspect radiocarbon date.

The stage was clearly set for a scientific re-evaluation of Paviland. In 1989, a new and far more plausible result of 26,350 ± 550 BP was produced by the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator on bone powder residual from the original Oakley sample. Because contamination of ancient samples normally results in ages that are too young, it was reasonable to assume that the ‘Red Lady’ died around 26,000 years ago in radiocarbon years (calendar years are possibly several thousand years older than radiocarbon years at this date). Even so, this dating was at least a couple of millennia too young for the Aurignacian.

Could he be yet older? A visit that I made myself to the site in 1989, following a massive storm that had exposed apparently in situ deposits, convinced me that further work would be useful. There the matter rested, however, until 1995 when I received an unexpected letter from Erik Trinkaus revealing that he had made a comprehensive study of the ‘Red Lady’ skeleton some years previously. Since then, Erik had been sidetracked into Neanderthal studies to the great benefit of palaeoanthropology. But now he was once more involved with the study of anatomically modern humans and the ‘Red Lady’ paper was just awaiting a publication outlet. This was the final spur to action.

The new study began with a radiocarbon dating programme and resulted in the dating of some 40 radiocarbon samples of fauna, artefacts and the bones of the ‘Red Lady’ himself. The skeleton was re-dated to 25,840 ± 280 BP and an age of the order of 26,000 years confirmed. None of the ivory or shells associated with the ‘Red Lady’ was dated because of problems of potential contamination by preservatives, but charred bone dates are earlier and centre on 28,750, and so are plausibly Aurignacian.

Of the ivory pieces, 75 per cent are ornaments, virtually all associated with the burial of the ‘Red Lady’, although the well known perforated ivory pendant made from a growth in a mammoth’s tusk is later at 24,000 BP. Bone artefacts include three bone spatulae dated to 23,000 BP. The latest phase of human presence with a firm radiocarbon date is represented by ivory-working of 21,000 BP.

At the time when the young man was ritually interred, there is no substantive evidence in this remote part of Europe for a human presence that was other than episodic. Indeed, faunal compositions and densities probably oscillated over time and space. Human presence in the British early Upper Palaeolithic may plausibly be linked to a ‘biomass expansion’, an overall increase in the availability of animals and other forms of food, centred on the 29th millennium. The coincidence of the dating of burnt bones to this period, combined with the presence of burnt Aurignacian artefacts, supports this as the most likely time for Aurignacian presence at Paviland. Radiocarbon dating of an Aurignacian bone spearpoint to around 28,000 bp at nearby Uphill lends additional weight to this interpretation.

Gravettian visitation is attested by a scatter of large tanged points occurring across southern Britain, including Paviland. Such points are generally dated to 28-27,000 BP, although their use may possibly extend down to the time of the ‘Red Lady’ burial.

As part of the radiocarbon dating process, the ‘stable isotope values’ of carbon and nitrogen within the bone sample were measured. These values provide important information about ancient diets and show that the ‘Red Lady’ had a penchant for seafood – either collected when living on the coast then 100 kilometres distant, or in the form of salmon fished out of the palaeo-Severn, which bears from Paviland are also known (from stable isotope values) to have eaten.

The ‘Red Lady’, when alive, was a healthy young adult male – aged 25-30, about 5′ 8″ (1.74 metres) in height, and possibly weighing about 11 stone (73 kg) – but less robust than might be expected for this period. Whilst the earliest anatomically modern humans in Europe were characterised by tropically-adapted body proportions, arising from their African ancestry, this is not reflected in the skeleton of the ‘Red Lady’, probably because the Paviland individual was a product of perhaps 10,000 years of evolution of modern humans within Europe.

Molecular biologist Bryan Sykes has shown that the ‘Red Lady’ skeleton has a DNA sequence corresponding to the commonest extant lineage in Europe. As such, the Paviland evidence lends support to the argument that the roots of modern Europeans lie not with Neolithic farmers but with the ingress into Europe of human populations who were to replace the Neanderthals.

Restudy of the Goat’s Hole lithic collections has confirmed material ranging from about 40,000 BP to about 13,000 BP (including Mousterian, leaf point, late Aurignacian, early Gravettian, Creswellian, and Final Upper Palaeolithic phases), although the earliest and latest phases are not dated by radiocarbon. Aurignacian finds form the dominant element. These artefacts were made from a range of imported and local raw materials. It is interesting that analysis of the ochres is consistent with a local origin, probably within Gower.

Clearly, the people responsible for the interment possessed considerable local as well as more far-flung knowledge. Preferential use of imported flint for ‘busqué burins’, a specialist kind of engraving tool, and blade blanks, suggests the import to the site of curated items. A type of Aurignacian inversely retouched scraper is special to the site and may reflect the long term isolation of a social group.

The ceremonial burial of the ‘Red Lady’ involved the interplay of art and consciousness which combine in an act that is simultaneously creative and symbolic. The rite possesses features replicated, in regionally changing modes, across Europe in other ceremonial Gravettian burials. These include an extended burial position, positioning of the corpse along the cave wall, the presence by the grave of large herbivore remains, the placing of stone slabs at head and feet, the use of ochre, the deposition of personal ornaments, and the possibility that the body may have been headless when interred. No head was found at Paviland, and other headless Gravettian burials are known.

In chronological terms, Paviland is early in the European series of burials and is actually the earliest with a firm radiocarbon date measured directly on human bone. These burials are resonant of a complex early European society in which status may have been inherited rather than acquired by merit – as evidenced by several very rich child burials elsewhere.

In the ancient world, the sacred and profane were inextricably intertwined. Paviland cave was occupied by the hunters of the Gravettian mammoth steppe as a functional shelter; but there may also have been an aura of sanctity attached to the place, explaining the burial here of the ‘Red Lady’. We may wonder whether one reason for visits to Paviland, as the climatic downturn accelerated and the British peninsula was increasingly abandoned, may have lain in its status as a special place.

From wikipedia -

The Red Lady of Paviland is a fairly complete Upper Paleolithic-era human male skeleton dyed in red ochre, discovered in 1823 by Rev. William Buckland in one of the Paviland limestone caves of the Gower peninsula in south Wales, dating from c29,000 BP.^[1]

When Buckland first discovered the skeleton, he misjudged both its age and its sex. As a creationist,^[2] Buckland believed no human remains could have been older than the Biblical Great Flood, and thus wildly underestimated its true age, believing the remains to date back to the Roman era. Buckland believed the skeleton was female in large part because it was discovered with decorative items, including perforated seashell necklaces and ivory jewelry. These decorative items combined with the skeleton’s red dye caused Buckland to mistakenly speculate that the remains belonged to a Roman prostitute or witch.

Later that year, writing about his find in his book Reliquiae Diluvianae (Evidence of the Flood), Buckland stated:

“[I found the skeleton] enveloped by a coating of a kind of ruddle … which stained the earth, and in some parts extended itself to the distance of about half an inch [12 mm] around the surface of the bones … Close to that part of the thigh bone where the pocket is usually worn surrounded also by ruddle [were] about two handfuls of the Nerita littoralis [periwinkle shells]. At another part of the skeleton, viz in contact with the ribs [were] forty or fifty fragments of ivory rods [also] some small fragments of rings made of the same ivory and found with the rods … Both rods and rings, as well as the Nerite shells, were stained superficially with red, and lay in the same red substance that enveloped the bones.”

The “lady” has since been identified as a man, probably no older than 21. His are the oldest anatomically modern human remains found in the United Kingdom, as well as the oldest known ceremonial burial in Western Europe. The skeleton was found along with a mammoth‘s skull, which has since been lost. Scholars now believe he may have been a tribal chieftain. Tests made in the 20th century suggested he lived about 26,000 years ago (26,350 ± 550 BP, OxA-1815) at the end of the Upper Paleolithic Period: however, a more recent examination of the remains by Dr Thomas Higham of Oxford University and Dr Roger Jacobi of the British Museum suggests they may be 4000 years older. ^[3]. Although now on the coast, at the time of the burial the cave would have been located approximately 70 miles inland, overlooking a plain. When the remains were dated to some 26,000 years ago it was thought the Red Lady lived at a time when an ice sheet of the most recent glacial period, in the British Isles called the Devensian Glaciation, would have been advancing towards the site, and that consequently the weather would have been more like that of present day Siberia, with maximum temperatures of perhaps 10°C in summer, -20° in winter, and a tundra vegetation. The new dating however indicates he lived at a warmer period. Bone protein analysis indicates that the “lady” lived on a diet that consisted of between 15% and 20% fish, which, together with the distance from the sea, suggests that the people may have been semi-nomadic, or that the tribe transported the body from a coastal region for burial. Other food probably included mammoth, the woolly rhinoceros and reindeer.

When the skeleton was first found, Wales had no museum in which to keep it; instead, it was housed at Oxford University, where Buckland was a professor. In December 2007 it was loaned for a year to the National Museum Cardiff. Subsequent excavations of the area in which the skeleton was found have yielded more than 4,000 flints, teeth and bones, and needles and bracelets, which are on exhibit at Swansea Museum and the National Museum in Cardiff.

From the BBC (published Oct 2006) -

The cave skeleton was found by clergyman William Buckland

A world famous archaeological find – a 26,000-year-old skeleton discovered in the Paviland cave on Gower – is set to return to Wales.

The skeleton, known as the Red Lady of Paviland, was discovered in the 1820s and taken to Oxford University.

The National Museum of Wales said a deal had been struck in principle with the university to borrow the remains.

It said the skeleton would be on display for a year as part of its centenary celebrations in 2007.

Last month, druid Chris Warwick spent a weekend in the cave where it was found to campaign for the return of the bones.

The Dead to Rights group, set up by Mr Warwick, said the removal of the skeleton was a “desecration” of a sacred site, and has previously called for the bones to be reburied in the cave.

The remains have been on display at Oxford University

The skeleton was discovered by the Reverend William Buckland, also a palaeontologist, who removed the bones.

As the skeleton was stained with red ochre and elaborately buried with artefacts, Buckland misinterpreted the find as a young female prostitute from Roman times.

But the body turned out to be that of a young man, who was many thousands of years older, and had been buried with great dignity and ritual.

The skeleton is set to feature in a new archaeology gallery at the museum called Origins: In Search of Early Wales

The museum’s director general Michael Houlihan said: “The national museum is delighted with this decision as it will provide an excellent focus for the opening of this exciting new gallery.”

However, Mr Warwick still insists he wants the bones returned to the cave saying something is “amiss” with the cave since the bones and artefacts were removed.

William Rufus Hunting, from Heritage History

From Our Island Story, by H. E. Marshall (Chapter 26) –

The Normans talked a great deal of “right,” but the more they talked of right, the more wrong they did. The very sheriffs and judges, who ought to have seen that the laws were kept and that justice was done, were more greedy than thieves and robbers, and the king was greediest of all. He made the people pay tolls and taxes until they had hardly any money left. Much of this money he took away with him to France, much he kept locked up in his strong treasure-room.

As if he had not already spoiled enough of the country in battle, William next laid waste a great part in the south, simply because he was very fond of hunting and he wanted a good hunting-ground. He turned the people out of their houses, burning and ruining whole villages in order to make a great place in which to ride and hunt. He called this place the New Forest and it is so called to this day.

Having made this forest, William also made forest laws. These laws were very cruel. If any person was found hunting or killing the deer or other wild animals, his eyes were put out or his hands and ears were cut off. So the poor people, who had been driven from their homes dared not even kill the wild animals for food.

From Wikipedia -

William I, original enactor of the Forest Law in England, harshly penalized offenders. He “laid a law upon it, that whoever slew hart or hind should be blinded,” according to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. William Rufus, also a keen hunter, increased the severity of the penalties for various offenses to include death and mutilation. The laws were in part codified under the Assize of the Forest (1184) of Henry II; he also afforested large tracts.

Magna Carta, the charter forced upon King John of England by the English barons in 1215, contained five clauses relating to royal forests. They aimed to limit, and even reduce, the King’s sole rights as enshrined in forest law. The clauses were as follows (taken from the text of Magna Carta):

• (44) People who live outside the forest need not in future appear before the royal justices of the forest in answer to general summonses, unless they are actually involved in proceedings or are sureties for someone who has been seized for a forest offence.

• (47) All forests that have been created in our reign shall at once be disafforested. River-banks that have been enclosed in our reign shall be treated similarly.

• (48) All evil customs relating to forests and warrens, foresters, warreners, sheriffs and their servants, or river-banks and their wardens, are at once to be investigated in every county by twelve sworn knights of the county, and within forty days of their enquiry the evil customs are to be abolished completely and irrevocably. But we, or our chief justice if we are not in England, are first to be informed.

• (52) To any man whom we have deprived or dispossessed of lands, castles, liberties, or rights, without the lawful judgement of his equals, we will at once restore these. In cases of dispute the matter shall be resolved by the judgement of the twenty-five barons referred to below in the clause for securing the peace (§ 61). In cases, however, where a man was deprived or dispossessed of something without the lawful judgement of his equals by our father King Henry or our brother King Richard, and it remains in our hands or is held by others under our warranty, we shall have respite for the period commonly allowed to Crusaders, unless a lawsuit had been begun, or an enquiry had been made at our order, before we took the Cross as a Crusader. On our return from the Crusade, or if we abandon it, we will at once render justice in full.

• (53) We shall have similar respite [to that in clause 52] in rendering justice in connexion with forests that are to be disafforested, or to remain forests, when these were first afforested by our father Henry or our brother Richard; with the guardianship of lands in another person’s `fee’, when we have hitherto had this by virtue of a `fee’ held of us for knight’s service by a third party; and with abbeys founded in another person’s `fee’, in which the lord of the `fee’ claims to own a right. On our return from the Crusade, or if we abandon it, we will at once do full justice to complaints about these matters.

After the death of John, Henry III was compelled to grant the Charter of the Forest (1217), which further reformed the forest law and established the rights of agistment and pannage on private land within the forests. It also checked certain of the extortions of the foresters. An “Ordinance of the Forest” under Edward I again checked the oppression of the officers, and introduced sworn juries in the forest courts.

The Great Perambulation and after

In 1300 many (if not all) forests were perambulated and reduced greatly in their extent, in theory to their extent in the time of Henry II. However, this depended on the determination of local juries, whose decisions often excluded from the Forest lands described in Domesday Book as within the forest. Successive kings tried to recover the “purlieus” excluded from a forest by the Great Perambulation of 1300. Forest officers periodically fined the inhabitants of the purlieus for failing to attend Forest Court or for forest offences. This led to complaints in Parliament. The king promised to remedy the grievances, but usually did nothing.

Several forests were alienated by Richard II and his successors, but generally the system decayed. Henry VII revived “Swanimotes” (forest courts) for several forests and held Forest Eyres in some of them. Henry VIII in 1547 placed the forests under the Court of Augmentations with two Masters and two Surveyors-General. On the abolition of that court, the two surveyors-general became responsible to the Exchequer. Their respective divisions were North and South of the river Trent.

By the Tudor period and after, forest law had largely become anachronistic, and served primarily to protect timber in the royal forests. James I caused enquiries to be made into assart lands of various forests. The commissioners appointed raised over £25000 by compounding with occupiers, whose ownership was confirmed, subject to a fixed rent. Under Charles I, several forests were disforested, the king receiving a portion of the waste land of the forest, which he then sold. The last serious exercise of forest law by a court of justice-seat (Forest Eyre) seems to have been in about 1635, in an attempt to raise money.

After the Restoration

A Forest Eyre was held for the New Forest in 1670, and a few for other forests in the 1660s and 1670s, but these were the last. From 1715, both surveyor’s posts were held by the same person. The remaining royal forests continued to be managed (in theory, at least) on behalf of the crown. However, the commoners’ rights of grazing often seem to have been more important than the rights of the crown.

In the late 1780s, a Royal Commission was appointed to inquire into the condition of Crown woods. North of the Trent only Sherwood Forest survived. South of it there were the New Forest and three others in Hampshire, Windsor Forest in Berkshire, the Forest of Dean in Gloucestershire, Waltham or Epping Forest in Essex, three forests in Northamptonshire, and Wychwood in Oxfordshire. Several of these no longer had swainmote courts, so that there was no official supervision. They divided the remaining forests into two classes, according to whether the Crown was or was not the major landowner. In certain Hampshire forests and the Forest of Dean, most of the soil belonged to the crown and these should be reserved to grow timber, to meet the need for oak for shipbuilding. The others would be inclosed, the Crown receiving an allotment in lieu of its rights.

In 1810, responsibility for woods was moved from Surveyors-General (who accounted to the Auditors of Land Revenue) to a new Commission of Woods, Forests, and Land Revenues. From 1832 to 1851 “Works and Buildings” were added to their responsibilities. In 1851, the commissioners again became a Commissioner of Woods, Forests and Land Revenues. In 1924, the Royal Forests were transferred to the new Forestry Commission.

From A Concise Guide to Medieval Forest Law and Bow Hunting, by Mark Tustian, at Companions of the Longbow -

When I’m arranging a shoot I’m always looking to put a bit of a medieval slant on the proceedings, if only to give me a bit of inspiration or provide a pinch of extra interest.  So with the arrival of our new 3D targets I was looking forward to putting a bit of medieval hunting techniques into the mix.  The only thing was I didn’t know much about hunting, let alone medieval hunting.  In films and on TV it’s either a lone archer stalking a deer or a nobleman and his soldiers crashing through the forest.  Was that really the case?  Call me cynical but I suspect that TV and films don’t always provide an accurate picture.  There are also some tantalising NFAS round names such as Woodsman round, Forester round and Poachers round.  Did these have any bearing on the medieval hunt?

In this short article I’ll be covering, all be it briefly, forest laws, forest officials and enforcers, the skills & equipment of a forester, the medieval classification of game and medieval hunting styles such as stalking with the bow & hunting alone with a bow.  There’ll also be a very, very short bit about bird hunting with bow & arrow, wild boar hunting, and hare hunting.  Finally there’s something on medieval hunting dogs (which is probably worth an article on it’s own) before putting it all together to present a run down on a medieval Bow & Stable hunt & a Par Force hunt.

The Forest

Today when most of us think about a forest we think of lush green woodland densely populated with trees, providing dappled shade to a soft forest floor covered with shrubs, saplings, fallen twigs, branches and the occasional fallen tree.  Close on to a nine hundred years ago though the term forest meant something totally different.  From large game such as wild boar and deer to small animals such as hare & rabbit, all of them came under the protection of a regulation that came from the new Norman ruling elite; it was called forest law and came from the Latin foris which meant outside.

William the Conqueror introduced forest law shortly after 1066 to protect and preserve his favourite sport of hunting.  This meant that not only the game but their habitat, or vert as it was called, was protected.  Therefore within a forest boundary, which could include not just trees, but grassland, heath and marsh, it was forbidden to farm, to cut peat, to cut trees, to collect firewood or even to gather acorns without special permission.  A whole industry of officials and enforcers grew up in and around these royal forests to implement the forest law as well as maintain the habitat and conduct the royal hunts.

The legal term for the declaration of land as a royal forest was “afforestation”, a process which though started by William I (he established 21 royal forests by the time the Doomsday Book was compiled in 1086) would peak under Henry II (1133-1189) who had 80 royal forests covering three tenths of the entire country of England.

Originally people living in the newly established royal forests, like the one established by William the Conqueror in Hampshire (which was imaginatively called “the New Forest” and still exists) were moved out and their homes destroyed.  However as the area covered by royal forests became so large this became impractical and so new laws & restrictions were introduced to enable complete villages and towns to function inside the forest jurisdictions.  For example, in the 1184 Assize of the Forest King Henry II commanded that no tanner or bleacher of hides shall dwell in his forests outside a borough.

These restrictions, designed solely to preserve the venison and vert of the forest, were many (the word “venison” comes from the Latin word for hunting and originally covered all game animals).  These included requirements for the passage of bows, arrows and hunting dogs that were not part of an official hunt.  For example anyone passing through a forest was required to carry their bow with their arrows bound to the limbs with the bowstring.  Any hunting dogs, such as brachets and gazehounds (more on the types of dogs later) were to be tied together in twos. If you owned a mastiff for use as a guard dog there was the requirement for your dog to be “lawed”, that is to have the 3 claws on it’s forepaws cut off.  If a dead or wounded deer was found with an arrow the arrow was sent to the forest verderer and enrolled as evidence (more on verderers later too).

The penalties for breaking the forest laws started as quite severe – death or mutilation.  For example, under William I you could have an eye put out just for disturbing the deer. Later these punishments were relaxed to fines or imprisonment and it’s probably of no surprise to learn that it was found to be quite profitable for the crown to grant certain rights and privileges inside the forest in return for cash.  The King’s army could also gain by granting pardons in return for military service.

However within the medieval society the concept & privilege of forest law rankled with the general populous and gave rise to the popularity of the tales and ballads of those who fought against forest law and took sanctuary in the greenwood; the most famous subject for these tales was of course Robin Hood.  Terry Jones, in his book Terry Jones’ Medieval Lives hypothesises that this early empathy and tolerance of the outlaw was a concept that was carried to other parts of the world by the British.  He states that this fondness and acceptance of the rogue outlaw led to later phenomena like Billy the Kid & Ned Kelly.  However, it may be surprising to learn that many nobles also objected to the extent of these privileges and in fact several clauses in the Magna Carta (1215) imposed limits on the King’s powers when it came to royal forests.

What started just after 1066 would not end until 1653 when Parliament passed the “Act for the Disafforestation, Sale, and Improvement of Royal Forest”.  It was this act that the bulk of royal forests were sold off.  Indeed Sherwood Forest was one of these that was “disafforested” at the time.

So what were the restrictions and privileges imposed and granted on the people who lived in and around a forest?  Who were the officials and enforcers of forest law?

Forest Laws

The Assize of the Forest (also known as the Assize of Woodstock) in 1184 laid down in detail the organisation and administration of forest Law

Offences against forest law were outside the area of common law and were divided into two categories.  The first was trespass against the venison, which is the game and is the one offence everyone immediately thinks of thanks to all those films and TV shows showing Robin Hood shooting deer and being chased by the sheriff’s men.  The second less well-known one was trespass against the vert, which is the environment that supports the game.

Although forest law was originally concerned with protecting the deer, the boar and the wolf (which didn’t seem to have worked since the boar and the wolf eventually became extinct in England) the categories of animals have historically been listed under “beasts of the chase” and “beasts and fowls of warren”.  The beasts of the chase were the likes of the doe (female deer) and buck (male deer), the roe deer and the fox.  The beasts and fowls of warren were the likes of the rabbit, hare, pheasant and partridge.  As has been mentioned before, for a fee, the rights of chase and of warren could be granted to the local nobility.  If you weren’t a noble the only way you could hunt the likes of a deer were if you were a legitimate forester or you fancied running the gauntlet and trying your hand at a bit of poaching.  The historical record seems to indicate that it wasn’t just your down and out peasant who liked a bit of poaching though.  Minor nobility might hunt without license as well as the occasional clergyman and even the odd wayward forester who was paid to know better.

As simple as the trespass against the venison was i.e. don’t shoot the animals, the trespass against the vert was a bit more complicated.  Clearing land for agriculture by felling trees and clearing shrubs was called “assarting”.  Enclosing land for buildings or for pasture was called “purpresture”.  The right of taking firewood was called “estover”.  The right to pasture swine in the forest was called “pannage”.

The right to cut turf for fuel was called “turbary”.  Rights of pasturage was called “agistment”.  Disafforested lands on the edge of a forest were known as “purlieu” which meant that the land after having been included in a royal forest, was restored to private ownership and therefore could be used for agriculture.  Although these purlieu were still subject to the operation of the forest laws!  It wasn’t until the Charter of the Forest in 1217 that all freemen owning land within a forest enjoyed the universal right such as agistment (rights of pasturage) & pannage (pasturing swine).  Amazingly this charter was still in force right up until 1971.

Forest Officials and Enforcers

You’ve got the laws, so who’s going to enforce them?   Well, Hollywood might have us believe that in the forest that’d be exclusively the remit of the sheriff and his chain mail clad solders, but that was not the case.

At the top of the forest law official tree (if you pardon the pun) was the Warden of the Forest.  At least that was the title used between 1311 and 1397 as before and after these dates the title was Justices in Eyre (Eyre meaning “circuit”, referring to the movement of the court between the royal forests).

Below this, although not directly answerable to the Warden, was the verderer.  This title comes from the Norman word ‘vert’, a word that means green & thus refers to woodland. Verderers were often knights or persons of high social standing who were elected by the county court.  Verderers investigated and recorded minor offences and dealt with the day to day forest administration.  For example, swainmote (or swanimote) was a minor court held before the verderer who acted as the judge with the swains or freeholders within the forest composing of the jury.  Several 13th & 14th century verderers graves have an axe symbol on them symbolising the control they had over the felling of vert .

Next were the main foot solders, the foresters.  Foresters were charged with preserving the vert, venison and apprehending offenders against the forest law.  Each forester was assigned a patch of forest to look after called a ward, a walk or a bailiwick.  The forester would also enforce chiminage (a toll for passage through the forest a.k.a. road tax) for chiminagium (right of way) and also levy the exaction of ale, or the equivalent in money, in the event of a festivity. The later Charter of the Forest (1217) defined & restricted chiminage and scotage (the keeping of an ale house by an officer of the forest) which seems to indicate that these duties were routinely abused by unscrupulous foresters.  We’ll be looking at the foresters in greater depth later in this article.

The agisters were charged with supervising the pannage (the pasturing of swine) and the agistment (all other rights of pasturing) which generally meant the collection of fees for the privilege.

The literal eyes and ears were the surveyors who determined the boundaries of the forest and the regarders or regardors (from the French, regarde, to see).  These officers reported up to the Warden when there were infringements on the forest and incursion on the royal rights as stipulated under asserting (clearing of forest) and purpresture (enclosing of land for pasture or building).  Regarder and surveyor visits provided a check against collusion between the foresters and local offenders which, as the historical record shows, did happen occasionally.

The Forester

The hierarchy for foresters was on the face of it fairly simple.  There were foresters-in-fee who could be classified (from lowest to highest) as under-foresters, foot or walking foresters & riding foresters. The Crooked Stick by Hugh D. H. Soar says that “in addition to regular foresters there were in the Royal Forest of Kingswood near Bristol arrow men who’s day-to-day task, it would seem, was to keep order within the forest boundaries.  Housed within a tower of Bristol’s castle, contemporary documents suggest that they had a less-than-savoury local reputation.”.

There is also evidence that the foresters-in-fee were colloquially called woodwards and that the under-foresters were called rangers, however the term ranger (coming from the fact that the forester ranged across the land) does not appear until after 1350. The riding foresters were also called bow-bearers because they had the right to carry a strung bow in the forest, where as their sub-ordinates needed a warrant from the Warden to do so.

To confuse things further the term serjeants-in-fee can also come up as a term for a form of forester that held land in return for service.  This was because the term serjeant was the holder of a serjeanty, a type of feudal land-holding in England and should not be confused with the later army rank of sergeant!

The foresters would be paid around 2d per day and in addition receive a certain amount of wood and venison.  If you’ve read the other article on 14th Century Coins and Costs you’ll realise 2d does not seem much in comparison to an unskilled labourer, however the wood and game would certainly make being a forester materially attractive.

It’s worth noting that according to the 1184 Assize of the Forest the forester’s own responsibilities and penalties for not protecting the King’s wood are quite clear;

And the lord king has commanded that, when a forester has the lord king’s own woods in his charge, if those woods are destroyed and he can by no means show good cause for the destruction of the woods, vengeance shall be taken on the forester’s own body and not otherwise.

Skills of a Forester

So you want to be forester?  Well in order to be a good one, according to Le Livre du Roi Modus et de la Royne Racio (The Book of King Method and Queen Reason) a 15th century French treatise on hunting, a forester must have the following minimum skills;

Shoot a bow – to be used against the venison and against poachers in equal measure!

Train a scenting hound – there were a number of jobs and titles that were associated with the different types of hounds.  These will be detailed later in this article.

Stand properly in your tree (stable stand) – construction of a stable stand for his own use as well as for the use of other “higher ranking” hunters would have no doubt been a necessity.  Incidentally if the prey was to be hunted in open country artificial stands called “hays” were also constructed.  A derivative of the word “hay” was said to be used when driving game towards stable stands and it’s from here that the archers alleged war cry of “Hahay, hahay!” is said to come from.  During the Weardale Campaign of 1327 the archers of Edward III’s army while at York got into a fight over a game of dice with the servants of the Hainaulter knights.  Jean le Bel recounted that “all the other archers of the town and the others who were encamped among the Hainaulters gathered up their bows, [crying] hahay hahay like pigs, and wounded many of the servants and forced them to retire to their hostels … these archers, of whom there were a good two thousand, had the devil in their bodies and shot, with amazing skill, to kill everyone, both lords and varlets”(P181 “The Great Warbow: From Hastings to the Mary Rose” by Matthew Strickland and Robert Hardy).  The Hainaulter men-at-arms counter attacked and by the end left 316 archers dead.—history does not record whether there really was cheating at the dice or not.

Remember the placement of archers who shoot with you – before high visibility jackets and risk assessments safety was still a concern.  William II (died 1100) had been killed by a stray arrow while out hunting (one account blamed the king’s red hair – it apparently made another archer mistake him for a squirrel).  Great stock was placed on a forester who knew where bowmen in his vicinity were placed and where their arrows would go.  Just like today really.

Observe the wind – as any hunter will tell you, if you’re upwind from an animal the wind will carry your scent down to them and alert the prey to your presence.  “Knowing which way the wind is blowing” would certainly be important and its a phrase that’s entered common usage for predicting which way things are going.

Cut arrow shafts – you can imagine the forester sitting down with a spare few minutes and whittling a few arrow shafts can’t you?
Skin a hart – not only skin it, but butcher it and prepare the meat and hide for transport.
Direct your scenting hound – an obvious skill if you’re dealing with hounds.

Sound your hunting horn – one of the best low tech ways of keeping touch with such a large group of people, especially important with a large group of armed people, was to use sound.  As such, the hunting horn with its one note sounding in a series of strokes and mots could be used to convey a surprising number of messages.  Sadly today we apparently don’t know the exact sounds made but perhaps the remnants of the medieval hunting signals can be heard in the modern day fox hunting calls.  It may be of little surprise to hear (geddit?) that some people surmise that these hunting calls were the forerunner to the bugle calls of later armies.  Indeed there is partial evidence to suggest that the Menée stroke (assembly call) was used as a prelude to the battle of Agincourt (1415).  Classes were held to instruct all those who needed to know the different calls and although we don’t have the full English list, the French versions, which could not have varied very much are listed below:

• Assemblée: The gathering.
• Chemin: The Road or way to the meet.
• Queste: The search for the quarry.
• Requeste: The search anew when the quarry turned to cover.
• L’eaue: A water obstacle.
• Chasse: The hounds running.
• Retraite: The withdrawal & return homeward.
• Ayde: At bay or a request for help.
• Vehue: The sight of the quarry.
• Mescroy: The changing of the line of scent.
• Relaies: The need for a relay of hounds.
• Prise: The death of the quarry.
• Appel de Chiens: Calling together of the hounds.
• Appel de Gens:  Calling the hunters together.

Equipment of a Forester

Three classic items would’ve apparently marked someone out as a forester; a bow, their green garb and possession of a hunting horn.

A good hunters’ horn was said to be made from horn 12” to 14” long, curving up no more than 4” from end to end.  A slight curve along its length was preferable so that it could hang against the contours of the forester’s body when not in use.  The horn was bound with fibres to provide extra protection and should always sound louder than the fewterers’ (the gazehound handler – see later) or the woodsmens’ horn.

The optimal type of hunting bow listed in Roi Modus is one that should be around 6’ 5” in length, made of boxwood or yew, strung with a silk bowstring (because apparently a silk bowstring was quieter, would last longer and could cast a heavier arrow than a hemp bowstring), have horn nocks and have a buckskin arrow pass to reduce the noise of the arrow against the bow when shot.

The fistmele (bracing height between the belly of the bow and the strung string) should be one palm’s width and two fingers which is very low in comparison to the standard fistmelé which is the height of a clenched fist with the thumb held upright (the thumbs up sign – where we get the phrase “rule of thumb”).

Roger Ascham writing in the 16th century says that a low strung bow will shoot faster as opposed to a high strung bow which is easier to draw because it’s already “partially drawn” but will shoot slower.  Most modern bowyers would probably argue that a bow strung low or high will break faster (you’ve been warned!)

Roi Modus says that the arrows should be at least 35” in length and fletched with low cut and short fletchings if using a light shaft, or high cut and longer fletchings if using a heavier shaft.  The arrow head should be barbed and be 4 fingers width across (4”) and 5 fingers width long (3 ½ “).  The arrow head should be aligned so that the barbs are in the same plane as the arrow nock.  When shooting a Mediterranean draw should be used (three fingers) as opposed to the two fingered Flemish draw (no reason given although the Mediterranean draw, like now, was probably just more popular).

Barbed arrow heads were forbidden within a forest area unless of course you had leave to use them as part of your duties as a forester or you were part of a legitimate hunting party.  Although Roi Modus lists this ideal type of bow it’s doubtful that all foresters would be able to afford to routinely use silk bow strings.  In Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Canterbury Tales” the yeoman archer is described as having arrow shafts fletched with peacock feathers and being dressed in Lincoln green.  Peacock feathers are certainly listed as being a high quality fletching feather and so, unlike the mass produced goose fletched war arrows, the forester could and would expect to retrieve these good arrows after they’d been shot.

Lincoln green was a colour named after the cloth woven in the city of Lincoln and certainly would’ve helped the forester blend in. There are numerous references to foresters disguising themselves with leaves and foliage to help mingle into the green wood.  As modern hunters and the military know today, it helps to arrange any branches or twigs so that they point down towards the ground rather than up in the air as movement will be exaggerated by any foliage arranged to point skyward.

From Robin Hood Of Loxley –

By the time of Domesday Book in 1086 William the Conqueror had himself established twenty-one Royal Forests and the Norman Kings continued apace until at one time there were eighty “royal forests” encompassing virtually all of England’s vast wooded areas, which covered a staggering thirty percent of England.

The Royal Forests were so extensive that it was impossible for any monarch to hunt all of the forests during his lifetime even working at it around the clock, so the common belief that the royal forests were established for the pleasure of the kings hunting is incorrect and in most cases the hunting was done by professionals in order to provide meat for feasts and as gifts.

The medieval kings were actually quite poor, and their ability to give presents of venison as rewards to those who served them well, meant much in terms of their authority, and the fact that they were able to make presents of rare timbers large enough to build ships and houses gave them still further influence among their barons.

In reality there were tremendous benefits that accrued to the Crown from extensive afforestation. First, policing of the forests demanded a large network of forest officials who formed what was virtually a private army of the king. (These officials along with the sheriffs and clergy will have been the bane of Robin Hood’s life.) Secondly, fines and special forest taxes extracted by this bureaucracy provided a considerable and perpetual source of revenue for the Crown so it is not surprising that the monarchs fought as hard as they did to protect their forest prerogatives and what began as a reasonable idea to reserve some large game to royalty grew into a power base that the monarchs were reluctant to relinquish.

COVERAGE

The legal boundary of a royal forest was frequently much larger than that of the woodland contained within it, so in the case of Sherwood the actual boundary of the forest may have been much larger than the wooded area itself. The boundaries of the forests were set by the king’s surveyors and were periodically renewed in people’s memories by people actually walking round the boundaries.

The royal forests occupied strategic positions, and unfortunately the history of the forests during the reigns of William I to Edward I is one of repeated royal abuse which affected the lives of the villagers and townsfolk who lived within the forest boundary whether they were rich or poor. The forests were fertile, they were a valuable resource and every Norman king from William I to Edward I was at one time or another condemned for his particular brand of jurisdiction in relation to the royal forests but even so the kings sought to extend their boundaries by whatever means possible in order to impose their forest prerogative.

The East Midlands particularly was a forest strong hold and it contained what appears to be about one-third to one-half of all the royal forests. The Forest of Essex, which was the largest single forest of all England, was situated on the north bank of the Thames and there was an unbroken chain of six or seven forests, which extended for approximately one-hundred miles across the centre of the East Midlands extending to Sherwood Forest on the north bank of the River Trent.

THE TERRAIN

A forest for the Normans and their successors was an area of unenclosed countryside, consisting of a highly variable mixture of woodland, heathland, scrub, and agricultural land. Its purpose was to raise deer, which needed a variety of land, i.e. woodland to rest and hide in during the day, and more open land in which to feed at night. It does not necessarily denote a wooded area in the modern meaning. Even in William’s time a lot of what was called Forest was actually heath. It was a place for the keeping of deer and certain other animals. In 1598, Manwood in his Treatise of the Laws of the Forest defined a Forest thus: “A forest is a certain territory of woody grounds and fruitful pastures, privileged for wild beasts and fowls of the forest, chase, and warren, to rest and abide there in the safe protection of the King for his delight and pleasure. “The four beasts of the forest were red deer, fallow deer, roe, and wild pig, which together were called “the venison”.

LEGALITIES

The origin of the word forest comes from the Latin phrase forestis silva, where silva meant “woodland” and forestis meant “outside.” The word “afforestation” is a legal term and means outside or “beyond the main central area of administration, or outside the common law” and although in time the phrase became shortened to forest it still retained a sense of separateness and exclusion and it was this sense that the Normans brought with them when they invaded England in 1066. In common with other large areas within the country, Forest Law imposed a kingdom within a kingdom, where the inhabitants were subjected to draconian laws to preserve, increase and protect game of all species and in this context a Forest, is land subject to special laws designed to protect deer and other animals of the hunt which the king reserved for his own right to hunt for himself and those he authorised.

Within afforested areas, Forest Law was applied in addition to Common Law, it was a distinct legal system with its own courts and officers and the sole aim of forest law was to preserve the venison and vert (green undergrowth for feeding the venison) for the King’s pleasure and Royal edicts were administered by Crown officials, with no appeal or redress. The primary purpose was the supply of venison; it is likely that it was professional hunters, not the monarch who did most of the hunting.

William the Conqueror said in his defence that the Saxon Kings had always applied forest law, but that is untrue, it is a fact that Cnut claimed hunting rights in his own woods, but only his own woods and trespassers and poachers were punished by Common Law, not a Forest Law. Forest Law was a Norman institution imported from the continent and in English eyes it was an unprecedented tyranny.

EFFECT ON THE PEOPLE

In a few early cases, for example when William the Conqueror created the New Forest, which technically is called afforestation it meant that the inhabitants were disposed of their homes and whole villages and churches were demolished, but such drastic actions became impractical as the number of royal forests increased, simply because there was nowhere else for people to go, so they had to stay where they were, which meant that they became “residents” of a forest, and that caused them tremendous hardship because of the additional laws and regulations that were imposed on forest dwellers.

The restrictions of Forest Law were very harsh, a forest resident could not cultivate land, he could not hunt the large game which was the possession of the king, and very often neither could he hunt the small game, such as hares, also the felling of timber was prohibited, and it is recorded that in some cases inhabitants were even forbidden to gather acorns which was deemed as offences against the “vert” and this control of the under-wood by the Crown meant they had no wood to burn for fuel. Neither could they cultivate the ground nor enclose their land to keep the deer out, and as modern farmers will confirm deer can be very destructive. In effect, the imposition of a royal forest was a burdensome tax on its inhabitants which cost them dearly in terms of inconvenience and loss of crops, so that the king’s own crop, i.e. the deer could thrive. To compensate for the restrictions on enclosure of land so that it didn’t interfere with the run of the deer, the forest dwellers were permitted to turn their stock out into the waste, which is a privilege that continues to this day as a legal right (common land) and was something that had always been allowed before afforestation was imposed, but this custom was regularized in new laws which imposed additional restrictions at certain times of the year, such as winter, to preserve the browse for the deer and other common practices such as cutting peat for fuel were also regulated.

Even worse, was the burdensome “forest law” which was stricter than the common law of England and was administered by an army of forest officials who were often corrupt and were only answerable to the king. (The setting for Robin Hood) This was not only unpopular with the poor but also with the nobility whose lands might also be included in a royal forest, and although the wealthy could expect to be granted limited forest privileges by the Crown, they had as much reason to despise the royal practice of afforestation as did the lower classes. This is evident from the Magna Charta to which King John’s signature was compelled not by the lower and middle classes but by great barons, who required that the royal prerogative in regard to the extension and jurisdiction of the forests should be curbed.

William II (Rufus) (1087-1100) increased the severity of penalties for flouting Forest Law. For killing the King’s deer the punishment was death and for other offences the punishment was mutilation. Those that shot at a deer had their hands cut off and blinding was the penalty for disturbing the deer.

Henry I (1100-1135) at his coronation issued a Charter promising to modify or abolish the excesses of Forest Law. In fact he maintained the system and increased its efficiency. He used it to his pecuniary advantage by extracting financial penalties for misdemeanours. But he did grant rights of warren for those under Forest Law (hunting of fox, wolf, cat, hare, rabbit, badger & squirrel) and he also protected a small number of cultivated enclosures within the Forest and he may also have introduced fallow deer into England.

Henry II (1135-1154) extended the boundaries of the Forest, thereby increasing pressure on the surrounding cultivated land but he was rather more merciful regarding breaches of Forest Law, trespassers were committed to prison, although by the end of his reign the forests in England had been increased to their largest extent.

THE FOREST ADMINISTRATORS

The word PUTURE was applied to the allowance of meat and drink given to foresters and their attendants; ASSARTS were areas of forest grubbed up for arable use; AGISTERS controlled the letting of cattle into the forest to feed and a DRIVE was the process of collecting together these cattle to count them; a LODGE was temporary housing in a forest during the hunting season and a STANDING was an observation point where the hunter stood; the official name for a forest controlled by a magnate other than the king was a CHASE and there was a panoply of rites for those involved in formal hunts which included the ceremony of presenting the FEWMETS (faeces or droppings) of the deer to the presiding magnate to show the quality of the stag pursued, and the ceremonial GRALLOCHING or EVISCERATION of the deer after the kill.

The forests had an army of staff to look after them: SENESCHALS, JUSTICIARS, REGARDERS and VERDERES administered the forest laws (of these, only the verderers now survive as a titled office, and that only in one place – the New Forest, one of William the Conqueror’s original first forests). The courts that heard offences were either COURTS OF EYRE (travelling courts to hear serious offences, from the Latin iterare, ‘to travel’, which also gives us words like ‘ITERATION’), or of SWAINMOTE (a court held three times a year principally to control the pasturage of pigs in the forest; this word comes from Old English and literally means ‘a meeting of swineherds’ – The LARDINERS (sometimes important magnates) stored the carcasses of the deer; foresters cared for the animals and vegetation.

A BAILIFF is the Sheriff’s officer: a legal officer who serves under a sheriff and is empowered to take possession of a debtor’s property, forcibly if necessary, to serve writs, and to make arrests. A FORESTER is an officer of a forest (not a woodsman as some think) who works for the King (or another landowner) and he is sworn to preserve the Vert and Venison of the same forest, and to attend upon the wild beasts within his Bailiwick, and to attack offenders there, and the same to present at the courts of the same forest. The VERT was the medieval name for the growing things in the forest, especially the timber trees used for construction and the underbrush cut for firewood; venison here means the live animals of the chase, not necessarily deer. The foresters were assisted by under-officers called variously wardens, rangers, underkeepers, bow-bearers, and under-foresters (Chaucer was once one, as a sinecure, another way the medieval kings could use the mechanism of their royal forests to reward people). An example of the sort of petty bureaucracy forest-dwellers had to put up with was LAWING, or EXPEDITIAN, in which the claws of mastiffs and hounds belonging to local people were removed to prevent them from attacking the royal deer; the only excepted animals were those small enough to wriggle through a specially-sized iron stirrup.

Rev. Dr William Stukely’s image of the serpentine Avebury Complex, published in 1743

From pages of the website, Avebury – A Present from the Past -

Situated in southern England in the county of Wiltshire the village of Avebury is close to two small streams….the Winterbourne and the Sambourne which unite to form the source of the River Kennet. After being re-inforced by a number of springs this beautiful English river rapidly gains in stature as it passes through the North Wessex Downs on its way to Reading where it eventually flows into the River Thames of which it has become the main tributary. The waters of the Kennet therefore pass through London before reaching their ultimate destination in the North Sea.

Around 4,500 years ago, when the site of England’s capital was a thinly inhabited marshland, the area around Avebury almost certainly formed the Neolithic equivalent of a city. By coincidence this waterway has become a link between the two largest cultural centres of their day to have ever existed in the British Isles. As London now contains most of England’s largest buildings Avebury is the location of the mightiest megalithic complex to have ever been constructed in Britain. This henge with its enormous ditch, bank, stones and avenues survives in a much depleted state but the nearby Silbury Hill which is the largest man-made mound in pre-industrial Europe still dominates the surrounding landscape. The two largest surviving British long barrows of West Kennet and East Kennet are also prominent a short distance away and in recent years the remains of two massive palisaded enclosures have also been found. The quote that antiquarian John Aubrey made of Avebury……”it does as much exceed in greatness the so renowned Stonehenge as a Cathedral doeth a parish church” recognises the true importance of what has now been largely absorbed into the modern landscape of Wiltshire. If we could return to the time when the Romans occupied the British Isles it is a sobering thought that we would have to go back as far again to find an Avebury that was already several centuries old.

The history of the modern village is inevitably linked to the prehistoric monuments that surround it. Abandoned for several thousand years the land around the stones became occupied oncemore when people of the Saxon period began to settle in the area. Their arrival and subsequent development of the present village was to have a dramatic effect on the history of the stones. The relationship between the local inhabitants and the monuments has now added an unfortunate dimension to the Avebury story that helps make it one of the most fascinating historical sites to be found in the British Isles if not the world.

It remains a magical place as so many who have been there will agree. A visit to Avebury is a very personal event. It still seems to retain, somehow, the spirits of all those who laboured in its creation or whatever it was that led them to create it. If you have never been there a visit will not be an empty experience. You will come away with a head full of questions and probably a realisation that somewhere over the years modern society has lost something important.

[...]

Trying to successfully solve the riddle of Avebury’s purpose is much of what attracts us to it in the first place. I wonder if it would appeal to us in quite the same way if we knew, beyond doubt, the solution to the riddle. Throughout Europe are many magnificent cathedrals which are equally as awesome in conception, construction and demanding of manpower as anything our Neolithic forefathers have left us. However we know what cathedrals are, how they were built and the motive for building them, but apart from being some of the most wonderful examples of what religious belief can drive us to achieve they contain no mysteries. Avebury, though, in common with all of the many megaliths of the Neolithic period, is something that lies outside of our experience, its purpose still demanding an explanation by our modern, scientific minds. These days my personal attitude towards it is merely one of delight that it exists. I’m certain that the people who built it had a perception of life and sensitivity to nature that is now quite alien to us. I like to imagine that they were also very altruistic, a trait that the love of money has largely eradicated from our modern world. Considering these points I now accept that the 4,500 years of history since has probably rendered us incapable of finding a path that would lead us to the correct explanation of Avebury’s many enigmas. Our minds are now, in a sense, corrupted with such a mass of knowledge that seeing the world through the eyes of the Neolithic people exceeds even our imaginations……We can go a short way but I think their motivation will always remain beyond our comprehension.

It seems amazing to me that we now consider ourselves to be living in the space-age yet we show a total disregard for the awesome beauty of the night sky by first filling the atmosphere with the by-products created by our insatiable desire for power and transport and then floodlighting the resulting pollution with an, often as not, waste of that same power we didn’t need in the first place! We now need to travel to the remote areas of the world to obtain a sense of what our ancestors once took for granted and perhaps appreciate the huge influence the ever-changing and complex sky must have had on their lives. It therefore seems natural to assume that Avebury’s builders would have been motivated to somehow encode all manner of astronomical alignments into their creations and almost impossible to believe that they wouldn’t. In reality, though, any evidence that celestial events were the primary influence on the construction of the megaliths remains elusive. However such evidence isn’t totally absent as rudimentary alignments exist at the coves which are orientated towards the solstices. There can be no great surprise in this for at a time when clocks and calendars didn’t exist the extreme positions of the sun would have been the events that marked out each year for our ancestors. Some researchers claim significant alignments in the inner circles and evidence that lunar cycles have a strong influence on the monuments but with so much missing it is difficult to advance things beyond theories. The trouble with lines is that they all point to something and the number of permutations that can be derived from the positions of celestial objects and the stones at Avebury allow many options for imaginative research!

Despite our assumption that we are something apart from the animal world the ever increasing contamination of the internet is unfortunate evidence that procreation and its attendant activity remains the fundamental force that drives us all. The part it played in the lives of Avebury’s builders must have been no less influential so it would be surprising if there wasn’t a sexual component evident in the enigma they have left behind. Indeed this is an aspect of the monuments that is obviously represented and must be considered as one of the primary motives for their construction.

It has been suggested that Silbury Hill is a representation of the huge pregnant belly belonging to a massive Earth Goddess figure….an idea that seems to fit the general ethos of the monuments.  Quite how the megalith builders perceived death still seems vague….Even including the long barrows its signature on Avebury’s Neolithic monuments remains ill-defined and difficult to interpret.

From the website, retrobhikku

When theorising about Avebury it is very easy to ignore the huge timespan over which the monuments were built and developed. Six hundred years cover the period from the initial building of the Cove in the Northern Inner Circle to the the final form of the henge when the avenues were added. At a time when the average lifespan barely exceeded 40 years it would seem far more likely that Avebury’s construction was a process of evolution rather than the result of some “grand plan” the result of which would never be seen by its conceivers. It can’t be discounted that the henge and avenues may have been “operative” in some rudimentary form ( ie.wooden posts) before being consolidated later by the erection of the stones, but any evidence that this was the case has yet to be found.

Many researchers become consumed by the positions of stones but ignore trying to explain the purpose of the immense ditch and bank which must originally have been truly awesome. It is also easy to ignore the existence of the hundreds of other megalithic structures that were constructed throughout the British Isles during the same period and to view Avebury in isolation. So much of what existed in the Neolithic period has now disappeared but each year pieces of the jigsaw are being rediscovered. Despite its importance amazingly little of the henge has ever been investigated and the surrounding fields must still hold many secrets. There is always the chance that something relating to the monuments might yet be found that dramatically alters ideas about them.

The quest for the “Holy Grail” of solving the Avebury mystery will no doubt continue far into the future as it seems a part of human nature to believe only what we want to believe and no matter how seemingly perfect a solution there will always be those who will remain convinced that it was something else. Each “solution”, convincing or not, though, adds something to our knowledge of Avebury and it will be a sad day if we stop searching for the truth about this wonderful place……. Perhaps the only truth now is that it is what each of us wants it to be and therein will always lie the power it has to capture our minds.

[...]

Whereas Stonehenge has long been one of Britain’s most famous pre-historic sites, Avebury was to remain relatively unknown until recent times. This is easy to understand when one realises that much of the monument we see today had disappeared until Alexander Keiller resurrected it from the obscurity into which time and human behaviour had driven it. Stonehenge has stood upon Salisbury Plain always obvious to the eye and defiant of the weather but Avebury’s magnificence lay hidden, vandalised and ignored. Keiller’s achievement has allowed it to oncemore assume its rightful role as one of the most important ancient sites in the British Isles.

The Ringstone by Moonlight

Whatever drove our ancestors to such stupendous efforts in creating the Avebury monuments is perhaps beyond the understanding of our space-age minds but those of us who are captured by the incredible legacy they have left can share one thing with its creators – it fulfils a need. In a world that forces us along at a pace few of us want to go it provides an escape from the modern madness we have created for ourselves. It reminds us that there was a time, before money was invented and the destruction of the planet began, that we could achieve great things by mutual consent.  We can indulge ourselves in a great variety of theories to explain its mysteries and as such it has become many things to many people, but no matter how diverse our ideas it remains one thing to us all……..a place to dream.

An excerpt from the book, The Great Cosmic Mother by Monica Sjoo Barbara Mor, copied from the website, Son Eagle Metaphysical -

Avebury, on the Wiltshire Downs in the south of England, was the sacred center of megalithic culture in Britain. Avebury’s stone circle is the largest yet found in England. It dwarfs Stonehenge. (There are seventy-seven other stone circles, or henges, dating from the late Neolithic and early Bronze Age.) Avebury was built by pre-Celtic people, living in a farming community circa 2600 B.C.

For thousands of years before its construction, the entire landscape of the surrounding area, stretching for about 37 miles, had been seen as the outline of the body of the Goddess. Every hill, mound, stone, and long barrow was believed to form part of her maternal body. The three stone circles at the causewayed camp at Windmill Hill nearby predated Aye- bury by more than six hundred years.

Willow-rag tree at Swallowhead Spring, by Graham Harvey

The Avebury monuments, which include Silbury Hill and West Kennet long barrow, form a “condensed sequence of visual sculpted images within the center of the larger and more ancient presence. They express together journeys of cosmic range and the entire yearly agricultural cycle within the space of three fields.”

The monuments are aligned within the “pubic “triangle of two rivers meeting. These rivers were seen as superhuman bloodstreams gushing from the earth womb of the Goddess.

Here, every year anew, the Goddess was born, grew into maiden and lover, became mother, and finally the old hag of death. The temples were her seasonal reality, and the people moved with her from place to place in rhythm with the changing farming year.

Our solar year is divided by solstices and equinoxes, but in the ritual 1 calendar the quarter-days in between were used as the major days and nights of celebration. To the ancients, the lunar and solar manifestations of these days were equally important. The celebration nights fall in early August, November, February, and May on the appropriate lunar phase nearest to the solar quarter-day. These are the witches sabbats of Lammas, Samhain, Imbolc, and Be]tane. At the August (summer) and February (winter) quarter-days/nights the moon and sun rose and set in alignment with the axis joining the two sacred springs at Avebury.

Avebury circle originally had 98 stones, some up to 18 feet high, enclosing an area of 28 acres. Two smaller circles stand within the large outer one. The earthworks surrounding the horseshoe or circular space are bounded by a ditch, with a bank beyond. Using only red-deer-antler picks and shovels made of ox shoulderhlades, the people raised the earth-bank nearly 50 feet above the ditch bottom, stretching almost a mile in circumference.

Two serpentine stone avenues led into the circle. They were 1miles long, 50 feet wide, and were defined by 100 pairs of stones set at intervals of 80 feet. In shape, the stones were broad-hipped and long forms of the Goddess, alive and powerful in her stance.

The Christian church began its long fight against the Avebury stones in 634, smashing them or exorcising them with the sign of the cross. Both inner circles were destroyed sometime after 1700, and many of the other stones were demolished or simply buried. This was at the height of the witch-hunts, and these ritual stones of the Goddess-just like her priestesses, the witches-were actually “tortured”and “exorcized” by Christian priests: the stones were burnt, chipped, mutilated. The institution of private property finally brought about the end of the sacred stones, with the enclosure of common land by private, wealthy farmers. The emergence of the landless proletariat and the modern notion of individual progress at the expense of the community fittingly coincided with the fall of the Great Mother at Avebury.

Of the original stones in West Kennet avenue, 72 were left in 1722; by 1934 only four were still standing, with nine left fallen. In 1937 a Scots industrialist bought up the land, restored the ditch and earthworks (which had been serving as a rubbish dump!), and dug up and reinstalled 43 of the buried megaliths.

The long Avebury avenues represented the bisexual Snake/Dragon Goddess, female and male in one. The West Kennet avenue originated, at the serpent’s tail-end, from the “sanctuary”, once a circular temple-labyrinth of complex timber structures covered with a conical roof. This might have been the puberty temple, where young women of the community were initiated into the mysteries of farming, sexuality, and childbirth in the springtime season of ploughing and preparation of the seed bed. The young women reentered her womb within the sanctuary, which is Silbury Hill at a different season.

Here the Goddess is the hibernating spring-quarter serpent, just reawakening from her long winter death/sleep. On February 1, at lmbolc, the “Feast of Lights” was celebrated, torches carried processionally in the night to help the Goddess return from the underworld and to be reborn again.

At the tail-end of Beckhampton stone avenue, with its more phallic- shaped stones, was the male counterpart to the “sanctuary, doubtless a temple for male initiation.

Avebury circle is where the young women and men met, after dancing and winding their way up the avenues in imitation of the serpent, at midnight of the waxing moon of the May quarter-day. This stone circle forms both an enlarged cunt and a great head, the inner circles forming the lunar and solar eyes. It is also a world island surrounded by the cosmic ocean, and its hidden power and secret is the sacred underground water that seeps into the ditch in the spring. Here the unborn fetuses dwell.

Avebury henge was the Goddess of Love incarnate, the proper place of conception. Here was celebrated the communal yearly May festival- wedding in orgiastic rites, the entire community dancing with upraised arms on the outer banks, in imitation of the horned new moon. This was Beltane.

The maiden becomes a mother, and so the next stage of the cycle was centered at Silbury Hill, the pregnant womb of the Goddess, “the Creation Cone.” Here, as already described, the people gathered on the summit on The Goddess at Avebury in Britain the night of the full moon at Lammas, the August quarter-day/night, to watch the harvest child being born.

With oncoming winter, the Goddess becomes the Lady of the Tombs, the Hag of Death, the Mother of the Dead. Her dwelling is now at West Kennet long barrow, where she retreats into the underworld after Samhain, or Hallowmas. This barrow is 340 feet long and shaped in her gigantic image. The image of the Silbury Mother is repeated within the chambers that represent vagina, birth passage, and uterus-but here is made hollow to receive the dead, who were buried within her in fetal position. The 30 chamber stones of West Kennet might form a lunar monthly count. There is no water associated with this barrow, no spring, no stream; all is dryness and barrenness. There are only rivers of stone.

West Kennet long barrow was built in 3500 B.C. It is a Stone Age horned grave/tomb/womb/temple, and it is older than Avebury and Silbury Hill. The people were buried within it collectively, without distinction of class or hierarchy. It was ritually frequented by the living as well as by the dead.

Megalithic culture is far older than was once supposed. Traces of a megalithic farming community have been found in County Tyrone, Ireland, dating from 4500 B.C. Patriarchal Bronze Age culture was first brought to Britain circa 2000 B.C. by the taller, warlike, and aggressive Beaker people.

In 2600 B.C., the entrance to the West Kennet long barrow was sealed off with huge megaliths (great stones). These stones form the body of an ox. The Goddess was moon and ox, one and bisexual. She is the Ox-Lady. She emerges miraculously out of death through the sacred bull. There was continued veneration of the tomb during late Neolithic culture. On Sam- ham in November-the winter quarter-day-a winter eve ox was sacrificed here on the night of the no-moon. The ox was ridden by the Queen of Death, and this ox is miraculously reborn with the spring.

The Winter Goddess lived on in folk memory as Black Annis. She was remembered as a great mountain builder, and was a gigantic hag. There are also sacred hills in Ireland named for her: the Paps of Annu, or Annu’s Breasts.

Pervading all the earthworks and stoneworks of Avebury was the desire to be close to the earth. The people drew strength from her in birth, in life, and in death. The monuments could clearly not have been built with slave-labor, but were the love-labor of farmers, women and men, who were in tune with great psychic-physical powers. To carry through such a task, they lived a peaceful existence. Perhaps natural magic-energy was released from the earth, and used on an everyday basis by the people.

Ancient myths of the dragon-serpent guarding a mysterious and symbolic treasure perhaps refer to lost secrets of crop fertility-a hidden power running in fertility currents through the countryside. The story goes that anyone who tastes the dragon’s blood becomes at one with nature, and forever understands the songs of birds. Perhaps this is the bloodstream of the Mother gushing from the earth at sacred wells.

The ancients knew that some wells and stones, drunk or touched or embraced in a certain way, and at certain times of the year, could regenerate and revitalize people and animals. Sacred stones seem to contain and emit a force that periodically waxes and wanes. Beneath each “active” standing stone, there appears to be a crossing of underground water streams, The movement of water through a tunnel of earth-particularly through clay soil-creates a small electrical field, for which the stone acts as an amplifier. When this energy/power emerges from the ground, it does so in the form of a spiral ascending in seven coils, the lowest two beneath the ground. This is not a stable phenomenon, but waxes and wanes, changing polarity every month. After waning it dies away for a few days, and then waxes in the opposite direction; it cyclically increases and decreases until the end of the lunar phase.

The study of the moon’s orbit was essential to megalith builders-the people of the moon, the stones, and the Serpent Goddess. The stones might also have functioned as a means of communication over long distances, since the magnetic force that activates the stones also links them in a continuous chain of vibrations. The ley-lines, paths for the force, interlock in a cobweb of stones, circles, mounds, and harrows all over the earth.

But the stone circles would not have been fully activated unless the calendrical events were accompanied by human rituals and dance, sometimes sacrifice, which focused the forces and fixed them in the stones.

Fire, like water, was essential to the workings of the monuments and their hidden power. At May Day/Night was the moment when Beltane fires were lit from hilltop to hilltop, to celebrate the coming of the new moon. On May Day the people drank from the sacred well and circled it nine times.

The May Day sunrise links Avebury in a direct line with Glastonbury Tor some 40 miles away. Glastonbury looks as human made as Silbury Hill, but it was actually shaped by volcanic rock violently thrown into the sky, in an otherwise flat and marshy land. Glastonbury’s spiral path, however, was molded by human hands; it is a three-dimensional labyrinth, rising up the Tor in seven circuits. Nearby is sacred Chalice Well, anciently called “Blood Well” because of its miraculously healing red-stained waters.

Not far from Glastonbury is Wookey Hole, an ancient cave where the rites of the Winter/Death Goddess were probably enacted. According to the myth, in this cave lived a terrible and bloodthirsty “witch” who demanded human sacrifice. She was supposedly finally exorcized by a Christian monk from Glastonbury.

The persistent British myth of the slumbering giant Albion, and the return of King Arthur and the Golden Age, is really the legend of the reemergence of the Goddess and her people, the Great Mother and cosmic harmony we lost with Avebury. Today we live truly in the mythic “wasteland” of patriarchy, awaiting her rebirth and return with the spring of reemerging women cultures.

From The Independent, reproduced here in full -

Capability Brown, originally uploaded to Flickr by londonconstant. Here’s londonconstant’s accompanying text -

For the past 4,000 years we humans have been making an impact on our natural landscape – whether it be exploiting our natural resources, cutting down trees for building, firewood and to expose agricultural land, or searching for precious metals like gold and silver to make weapons, jewellery and coins. We have even used our landscape to make religious and political statements, like the Cerne Abbas Giant chalk figure.

While we can all understand ‘historical time’, like the Medieval period, the Romans, Saxons and Vikings, which takes us back to about 2,000 years ago; ‘archaeological time’ takes us back even further through the Iron, Bronze and Stone age, Neanderthals and back to the first Homo Sapiens, almost a 100 thousand years ago. But this is nothing, ‘geological time’, measured in millions of years, takes us right back to the beginning of the earth over 4,600 million years ago.

What’s beneath our feet?
Most of us have probably picked up an attractive pebble on the beach, or found an unusual rock in the garden, or maybe your house or local church is made out of a particular stone. Depending on where you live the rocks beneath your feet will be quite different, because they formed at different times and in different environments.

The rocks of Britain provide a physical record of the past and ancient history of our island and they have changed over time according to the climate and the movement of the earth’s plates. They show that the UK has been drifting like a ‘passenger’ on its tectonic plate, beginning somewhere south of the equator and ending up in the northern latitudes where we are now. On the way the UK has formed rocks and sediments typical of those environments. Going out and looking at the rocks in your local area will give you a clue to the ‘geological history’ of the UK. But how do you know what you’re looking at?

We mainly see rocks in cliffs and road cuttings, but rocks also lie below the vegetation and soil in every landscape. Some of these rocks are useful as building stones, others are the source of valuable and precious metals. Rocks can seem to be a permanent feature of our landscape, but in fact they are being created, destroyed and recreated all the time. Over millions of years, volcanoes erupt, mountains are built, these are eroded by water and ice, and the rock fragments are laid down in rivers and on the seabed, only to be crumpled up to form mountains and eroded again, in a continuous cycle of processes that goes on to the present day.

The different rocks making up the surface of the earth form in different ways, and the processes involved leave their mark on the rocks they produce.

At a basic level it’s important to be clear about what is a rock and a mineral.

A “mineral“ is a solid material, formed by natural processes and with a chemical composition that falls within certain narrow limits. Minerals are made up of atoms which are arranged in a regular pattern, so they form ‘crystals’ with characteristic shapes, like cubes, sheets or pyramids. A “rock“ is a solid collection of mineral grains. These may be fragments of crystals or whole crystals and they can be mm to cm in size. A rock may have only one type of mineral, but usually it consists of several different minerals. Look at this rock – it’s made of three different kinds of minerals – black, grey and white crystals:

New rocks are formed where ‘magma’ or molten rock flows out onto the surface of the earth, like lava flows on the volcanoes of Hawaii, but they can also be formed by the weathering and erosion of existing rocks. The earth is a dynamic planet and the rocks are continually being recycled. There are 3 basic types of rock which are produced by three different processes acting to form rocks on the earth.

‘Igneous rocks’ are formed from molten rock that becomes solid when it cools, either on a volcano or deep in the ground in the earth’s crust:

They usually contain crystals. The number and size of crystals depends on how long they took to grow. Rocks which cool slowly, deep underground, grow big crystals, like granite. Rocks which cool very quickly at the surface like lavas, have minute crystals and can even be glassy.

‘Sedimentary rocks’ are made up of grains which have been eroded from other rocks, like igneous rocks. The grains are small rock fragments or individual mineral grains, and are often rounded because they have been transported by water or wind. The grains are laid down as sediments, in layers, like sand on the beach or mud in a river. Over time they get buried, become compacted and cemented into solid rock. Sedimentary rocks can contain fossils of plants or animals which were living at the time the rock was being deposited, or in some cases they are made completely of the fossil skeletons of plants and animals, forming a rock like limestone.

‘Metamorphic rocks’ are existing rocks which have been ‘changed’ or ‘metamorphosed’ by high temperature and pressure, usually after being buried deep within the earth. These rocks are made up of crystals, and are often banded, contain veins and can be flaky or sugary. Metamorphic rocks make up some of our most useful and beautiful building materials, like slate and marble.

Slate is a metamorphic rock with very tiny crystals. It was originally laid down as a soft mud, but it has been recrystallized into a hard, water resistant rock that can be split into thin sheets, making excellent roofing tiles. Marble is formed from limestone, but unlike slate it is not flaky. Marble doesn’t break into sheets like slate, therefore it is a good material for statues, as smooth surfaces can be carved in any direction.

Igneous and metamorphic rocks give us some clues about what is happening deep within the earth, or at the surface, where magma forms new rocks. Sediments give us a record of what has been happening at the earth’s surface over the past thousands and millions of years.

Different sediments are laid down in different environments, with different climates. If we look at the rocks around us they give us a clue to the past ‘geological history’ and climate of Britain. The geology of Great Britain records the passage of our island from south of the equator to its current position.

• In the South East of Britain the rocks are mainly chalk, sandstone and clays. Chalk is a well known type of rock made up of minute skeletons of billions of tiny sea creatures.

• In the North of England, the commonest type of rock is limestone, which is also made up of the skeletons of sea creatures, shells and corals.

Both of these rocks were laid down in the warm seas of a tropical climate, imagine that England once had a climate like the Bahamas has today, with warm seas and coral reefs.

• Parts of Wales, Scotland and Ireland have rocks that indicate another period when the British climate was much hotter than it is today. Red sandstone in these areas was laid down in a hot, arid desert environment.

• At the other extreme, North Wales and the English Lake District have rocks like shales and mudstones, that were formed in deep cold water. Intruding into all these sedimentary rocks are igneous rocks like granite, and we even have ancient volcanoes and lava flows.

Of course our landscape is not only characterised by the rocks that form it, it has also been shaped by the weather. In the ice age, glaciers and great ice sheets carved out deep wide valleys in the landscape and left mounds of gravel and sheets of boulder clay when the ice melted and retreated.

From the OU & BBC’s pages on ’The Big Freeze – from Icehouse to Greenhouse’ -

From Icehouse to Greenhouse
Almost all the present day landscape features of the British Isles were shaped during the last 2 million years. Most of us think of this period of time as the ‘ice age’, and there were indeed some very cold spells! But it was not continuously cold. The ice age is not a single age at all, but a series of cold periods separated by times when the climate was as warm as today, or even warmer. Sedimentary rocks deposited throughout this time show us that the climate was quite varied, swinging from cold ‘glacial periods’ with widespread ice, to warmer, temperate, humid and semi-dry spells which we call ‘interglacial periods’. The transitional time when the climate is switching from one extreme to the other is called a ‘periglacial period’, during which conditions were characterised by no permanent ice, but ground frozen solid all year round, like the tundra on the Russian Steppes today.

Why is the ice age so important and how did it begin?
Ice develops at the Earth’s poles when the Polar Regions become isolated from the Earth’s main atmospheric and oceanic currents, which cycle warm air and water up from the equator and cold air and water back down from the poles. The South Pole or Antarctica has had a permanent ice cap since about 38 million years ago, when the movement of the Earth’s plates split it away from Australasia, South America and India. The ice age is special because it is the only time when both the South and the North Pole were, and still are, covered by ice – we are still in an icehouse period right now.

In the northern hemisphere the spread of polar ice began about two and a half million years ago, when the passage of water between North and South America was cut off. This caused a whole new ocean current system to develop in the Atlantic, like the Gulf Stream which helps keep the British climate so wet and mild. At the same time water in the Bering Strait between Alaska and Asia became very shallow and at times cut off. This prevented the circulation of water from the warmer Pacific Ocean and the cold Arctic Ocean. So, with the North Pole now cut off from any warming influence, the climate in the northern hemisphere began to deteriorate. The first major glaciation in Europe was about two and a half million years ago when many of our local or indigenous trees became extinct. After that the ice sheets and glaciers spread out rapidly and began to carve out their imprint and shape our present landscape.

What is glacier ice and how does something so solid and heavy move?
Bodies of ice are the major stores of the Earth’s fresh water. If all the ice on our planet were to melt and flow into the oceans, the world sea level would rise by about 70m. Over time ice sheets expand and shrink, responding to changes in the environment and therefore they can give us valuable records of climate change.

Glacier ice is not the same as you would make in your ice tray in the refrigerator at home. To start with it does not begin as liquid water. Glacier ice begins life as snow. Fresh snow is a mass of fragile ice crystals, much lighter than water and far more delicate. As the snow lies on the ground, melting and re-freezing changes the delicate filigree crystals into round solid crystals. We call this melted, compressed snow ‘névé’:

Névé is much denser than real snow because all the ‘branches’ have been knocked off the original snow flakes. After about a year névé compacts into still denser snow called ‘firn’, which has very small rounded ice crystals. If you bury and squash firn even more it forms glacier ice. The whole process can take from 25 to 1,000 years.

How does solid glacier ice move?
When ice on a slope gets thick enough it begins to deform and spread outwards under its own weight. Gravity takes over and the glacier moves downslope. The ice crystals in the glacier start to slide along internal planes, like playing cards in a deck slide over each other. At the same time the ice crystals recrystallize into new shapes, moving downslope all the time.

The size (or mass) of a glacier changes as the environmental conditions change – if there is more snow to be turned into ice, the glacier will get bigger. On the other hand, in warmer periods there will be less snow, so the glacier will melt and its front end will retreat backwards. Glaciers and ice sheets stop spreading out when they meet the ocean. This is because they start ‘calving’ or breaking off into the sea forming icebergs and ice floes.

As glaciers move they carve out the landscape. They scoop up and remove soil and weathered rock fragments as they travel across the surface. They flow because the weight of the overlying ice causes the bottom layer of ice to melt, this liquid layer then freezes onto bedrock and plucks out bits of rock as the glacier moves forward, all the time melting and re-freezing at its base. The rock fragments are trapped in the ice as it moves, acting like coarse sandpaper, grinding out even deeper crevices and valleys. This is called ‘scouring’ – it’s a process that can form all kinds of features, like glacial ‘striations’ or scratches on the rocks, which show where the ice sheet passed over them.

Glaciers especially follow pre-existing river valleys, but they make them their own by turning them into wide ‘U’ shaped valleys:

The rocks and fragments that are carried along in the base of the ice are called the ‘load’ of the glacier. This consists of boulders, pebbles, gravel and very finely ground up rock called ‘rock flour’. The load cannot be sorted out according to size like a river would do, so it is deposited all mixed up together when the glacier melts. It is either plastered on the ground or released at the glacier margins in humps and lumps which we call ‘moraine’ – you may have heard it described as ‘boulder clay’.

Ice sheets are also capable of transporting huge boulders over great distances. When the ice melts the boulders are left behind, often in regions where the local rocks are quite different. They are called ‘erratics’ – look out for them in your local area.

What happens next?
Scientists have speculated on whether we are really out of the ice age, or if we are simply in an interglacial warm period. If this is the case, when will our present interglacial end? Most interglacials last for about 11,000 years. Our current interglacial has been going on for about 10,000 years, so perhaps the end is not far away. Using evidence from the past, it could end abruptly with rapid fluctuations between warm and cold conditions, and then prolonged cold. But what about ‘global warming’, won’t that help to keep us warm? No! In fact it might have the reverse effect. Global warming could cause more rain in the northern latitudes, which could lower the salinity of the surface sea water in the northern Atlantic. This would shut down the oceanic circulation which brings warm water northwards from the equator … the result – rapid cooling of our climate and another big freeze!

William Smith’s ‘Great Map’ (1815-17) of England and parts of Scotland’s geology, copied from the University of New Hampshire USA’s website.

From wikipedia, on the geology of Britain -

The Geology of the British Isles is hugely varied and complex, and gives rise to the wide variety of landscapes found across the islands. This varied geology has also meant that the country has been an important source for the formation of many geological concepts.

Seismographical results

Seismographical research shows that the crust of the Earth below the British Isles is between 27 and 35 km (17 to 22 miles) thick. The oldest rocks are found at the surface in north west Scotland and are more than half as old as the planet. They are thought to underlie much of Great Britain and Ireland (although boreholes have only penetrated the first few kilometres), but next appear extensively at the surface in Brittany and the Channel Islands. The youngest rocks are found in south east England.

Bedrock

The bedrock consists of many layers formed over vast periods of time. These were laid down in various climates as the global climate changed, the landmasses moved due to continental drift, and the land and sea levels rose or fell. From time to time horizontal forces caused the rock to undergo considerable deformation, folding the layers of rock to form mountains which have since been eroded and overlain with other layers. To further complicate the geology, the land has also been subject to periods of earthquakes and volcanic activity.

Deposits by glaciers

Overprinted on this bedrock geology (“solid geology” in the terminology of the maps) is a somewhat variable distribution of soils and fragmental material deposited by glaciers (boulder clay, and other forms of glacial drift in the recent past. Maps showing the distribution of this “drift” geology are frequently produced as either separate maps, or as literal overprints on the solid geology maps. When ordering maps, this distinction should be kept in mind. Catalogues often distinguish them as “S”, “D” or “S+D” maps. “Drift” geology is often more important than “solid” geology when considering building works, drainage, siting water boreholes, soil fertility, and many other issues.

Geological history

Proterozoic Era

The Gneisses, the oldest rocks in Britain or Ireland, date from at least 2,700 Ma (Ma = millions of years ago) in the Archean period of this era, the Earth itself being only about 4,600 Ma old. They are found in the far north west of Scotland and in the Hebrides, with a few small outcrops elsewhere. Formed from rock originally deposited at the surface of the planet, the rocks were later buried deep in the Earth’s crust and metamorphosed into crystalline gneiss.

South of the Gneisses are a complex mixture of rocks forming the North West Highlands and Grampian Highlands in Scotland, as well as the Connemara, Donegal and Mayo mountains of Ireland. These are essentially the remains of folded sedimentary rocks that were originally 25 km thick, deposited over the gneiss on what was then the floor of the Iapetus Ocean. The process started in about 1,000 Ma, with a notable 7 km thick layer of Torridon Sandstone being deposited about 800 Ma, as well as the debris deposited by an ice sheet 670 Ma.

Paleomagnetic evidence indicates that 520 Ma, what is now the UK was split between two continents, separated by 7000 km (4500 miles) of ocean. The north of Scotland was located at about 20° south of the equator on the continent of Laurentia near the Tropic of Capricorn, while the rest of the country was at about 60° south on the continent of Gondwana near the Antarctic Circle.

In Gondwana, England and Wales were near a subduction zone. Both countries were largely submerged under a shallow sea studded with volcanic islands. The remains of these islands underlie much of central England with small outcrops visible in many places. Around 600 Ma, the Cadomian Orogeny (mountain building period) caused the English and Welsh landscape to be transformed into a mountainous region, along with much of north west Europe.

Paleozoic Era

Cambrian period

In the early Cambrian period the volcanoes and mountains of England and Wales were eroded as the land became flooded by a rise in sea level, and new layers of sediment were laid down. Much of central England formed a stable block of crust which has remained largely undeformed ever since. Sandstones were deposited in the north of Scotland. As this is when the first hard shells evolved, fossils become much more common from this period onwards.

Ordovician period

500 million years ago, in the Ordovician period, southern Britain, the east coast of North America and south-east Newfoundland broke away from Gondwana to form the continent of Avalonia, which by 440 Ma had drifted (by the mechanisms of plate tectonics) to about 30° south.

During this period north Wales and south Mayo experienced volcanic activity. The remains of these volcanoes are still visible, for example Rhobell Fawr, dating from 510 Ma. Large quantities of volcanic lava and ash known as the Borrowdale Volcanics covered both Wales and the Lake District, still seen in the form of mountains such as Helvellyn and Scafell Pike.

The Ordovician also saw the formation of the Welsh Skiddaw slate deposits around 500 Ma.

Silurian period

Deposition continued into the early part of the Silurian period, with mudstones and sandstones being laid down, notably in Wales.

Avalonia had now joined with the continent of Baltica, and the combined landmass collided with Laurentia at about 20° south between 425 and 400 Ma, joining the southern and northern halves of the British Isles together. The resulting Caledonian Orogeny produced an Alpine-style mountain range in much of north and west Britain. The continental collision was probably at an oblique angle rather than a head-on collision, and this probably led to movement along strike-slip faults trending north-east to south-west across Scotland, the Great Glen Fault being the best example (some of these fault zones may have been old lines of weakness from earlier earth movements).

Volcanic ashes and lavas deposited during the Silurian are still found in the Mendip Hills and in Pembrokeshire.

Devonian period

The collision between continents continued during the Devonian period, with continuing uplift, and more volcanic deposits such as those now forming Ben Nevis. Sea levels varied considerably, with the coastline advancing and retreating from north to south across England. The uplifted region was gradually eroded down, resulting in the deposition of numerous sedimentary rock layers in lowlands and seas. The Old Red Sandstone of Devon gave the period its name, though deposits are found in many other places, such as the Brecon Beacons, the midland valley of Scotland, and the Orkney Islands.

The Caledonian mountains had largely been eroded away by the end of the period during which the country would have experienced an arid desert climate and been located between 10° and 15° south of the equator.

Carboniferous period

Around 360 Ma during the Carboniferous period the British Isles were lying at the equator, covered by the warm shallow waters of the Rheic Ocean, during which time the Carboniferous Limestone was deposited, as found in the Mendip Hills, north and south Wales, in the Peak District of Derbyshire, north Lancashire, the northern Pennines and southeast Scotland. Caves have developed more recently in the limestone in some of these areas.

These were followed by dark marine shales, siltstones and coarse sandstones of the Millstone Grit. Later, river deltas formed and the sediments deposited were colonised by swamps and rain forest. It was in this environment that the cyclic Coal Measures were formed, the source of the majority of Britain’s extensive coal reserves that powered the Industrial Revolution. Coal can be found in many areas of Britain and Ireland, as far north as the midland valley of Scotland, as far south as Kent and in Ireland, though it has largely been mined in the English midlands, northern England and Wales.

Throughout the period, southwest England in particular was affected by the collision of continental plates. The Variscan orogeny (mountain building period) around 280 Ma caused major deformation in south west England. Towards its end granite was formed beneath the overlying rocks of Devon and Cornwall, now exposed as Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor, giving rise to mineralised deposits of copper and tin. The general region of Variscan folding was south of an east-west line roughly from south Pembrokeshire to Kent. The main tectonic pressure was from the south or south-east, and may have resulted in dextral strike-slip faulting. The Devon-Cornwall massif may originally have been some distance further east, then to be moved westwards. Lesser Variscan folding took place as far north as Derbyshire and Berwick-upon-Tweed.

By the end of the period the various continents of the World had fused to form one super-continent of Pangaea, with Britain in the interior, where it was again subject to a hot arid desert climate, with frequent flash floods leaving deposits that formed red beds, somewhat similar to the later, Triassic New Red Sandstone.

Permian period

The Permian was characterised for 30 million years by arid desert and erosion of the areas uplifted in the Variscan Orogeny (southwest England and adjacent areas in the present-day English Channel). Later, much of the British Isles were submerged in shallow waters as the polar ice sheets melted and the Tethys Ocean and Zechstein Sea formed, depositing shale, limestone, gravel, and marl, before finally receding to leave a flat desert with salt pans.

Mesozoic Era

Triassic period

As Pangaea drifted during the Triassic, the British Isles moved away from the equator until they were between 20° and 30° north. Red beds, including sandstones and red mudstones form the main sediments of the New Red Sandstone. The remnants of the Variscan uplands in France to the south were eroded down, resulting in layers of the New Red Sandstone being deposited across central England, and in faulted basins in Cheshire and the Irish Sea. A basin developed in the Hampshire region around this time. Rifting occurred within and around Britain and Ireland, prior to the breakup of the super-continent in the Jurassic period.

Rock fragments found near Bristol appear to indicate that in 214 Ma Great Britain was showered with a fine layer of debris from an asteroid impact at the Manicouagan Impact Crater in Canada, although this is still being debated.

Jurassic period

As the Jurassic started, Pangaea began to break up and sea levels rose, as Britain and Ireland drifted on the Eurasian Plate to between 30° and 40° north. With much of the Isles under water again, sedimentary rocks were deposited and can now be found underlying much of southern England from the Cleveland Hills of Yorkshire to the Jurassic Coast in Dorset, including clays, sandstones, greensands, oolitic limestone of the Cotswold Hills, corallian limestone of the Vale of White Horse and the Isle of Portland.

The burial of algae and bacteria below the mud of the sea floor during this time resulted in the formation of North Sea oil and natural gas, much of it trapped in overlying sandstone by salt deposits formed as the seas fell to form the swamps and salty lakes and lagoons that were home to dinosaurs.

Cretaceous period

The modern continents having formed, the Cretaceous saw the formation of the Atlantic Ocean, gradually separating northern Scotland from North America. The land underwent a series of uplifts to form a fertile plain.

After 20 million years or so, the seas started to flood the land again until much of Britain and Ireland were again below the sea, though sea levels frequently changed. Chalk and flints were deposited over much of Great Britain, now notably exposed at the White Cliffs of Dover and the Seven Sisters, and also forming Salisbury Plain. The high sea levels left only small areas of land exposed. This caused the general lack of land-origin sand, mud or clay sediments around this time – some of the late Cretaceous strata are almost pure chalk.

Cenozoic Era

Paleogene period

In the early Paleogene period between 63 and 52 Ma, the last volcanic rocks in the British Isles were formed, with the major eruptions that formed the Antrim Plateau and the basaltic columns of the Giant’s Causeway. The volcanic Lundy Island in the Bristol Channel also dates from this period.

The Alpine Orogeny that took place about 50 Ma was responsible for the shaping of the London Basin syncline, the Weald-Artois Anticline to the south, and also the North Downs, South Downs and Chiltern Hills.

During the period the North Sea formed, Britain was uplifted. Some of this uplift was along old lines of weakness from the Caledonian and Variscan Orogenies long before. The uplifted areas were then eroded, and further sediments were deposited over southern England, including the London Clay, while the English Channel consisted of mud flats and river deposited sands. Much of the midlands and north of England may have been covered by Jurassic and Cretaceous deposits at the start of the Paleogene, but lost them through erosion. By 35 Ma the landscape included beech, oak, redwood and palm trees, along with grassland.

Neogene period

Miocene and Pliocene epochs

In the Miocene and Pliocene epochs of the Neogene, further uplift and erosion occurred, particularly in Wales, the Pennines, and the Scottish Highlands. Plant and animal types developed into their modern forms, and by about 2 million years ago the landscape would have been broadly recognisable today.

Pleistocene epoch

The major changes during the Pleistocene have been brought about by several recent ice ages.

The most severe was the Anglian glaciation, with ice up to 1,000 m (3300 ft) thick that reached as far south as London and Bristol, took place between about 500,000 to 400,000 years ago, and was responsible for the diversion of the River Thames onto its present course.

There is extensive evidence in the form of stone tools that southern England was colonised by human populations during the warm Hoxnian interglacial period that followed the Anglian Glaciation. It is possible that the English Channel repeatedly opened and closed during this period, causing Britain to become an island from time to time. The oldest human fossils in the Isles also date from this time, including the skull of Swanscombe Man from 250,000 years ago, and the earlier Clactonian Man.

The Wolstonian glaciation, between about 200,000 to 130,000 years ago, and thought to have peaked around 150,000 years ago, was named after the town of Wolston south of Birmingham which is thought to mark the southern limit of the ice.

The Wolstonian was followed by the Ipswichian interglacial, during which hippopotamus are known to have lived as far north as Leeds.

During the most recent Devensian glaciation, which is thought to have started around 115,000 years ago, peaked around 20,000 years ago and ended a mere 10,000 years ago, the Usk valley and Wye valley were eroded by glaciers, with the ice sheet itself reaching south to Birmingham. The oldest human remains in Britain or Ireland, the Red Lady of Paviland (29,000 years old) date from this time. It is thought that the country was eventually abandoned as the ice sheet reached its peak, being recolonised as it retreated. By 5,000 years ago it is thought that the British Isles were warmer than they are at present.

Among the features left behind by the ice are the fjords of the west coast of Scotland, the U shaped valleys of the Lake District and erratics (blocks of rock) that have been transported from the Oslo region of Norway and deposited on the coast of Yorkshire.

Holocene epoch

Over the last twelve thousand years (the Holocene Epoch) the most significant new geological features have been the deposits of peat in Ireland and Scotland, as well as in coastal areas that have recently been artificially drained such as the Somerset Levels, The Fens and Romney Marsh in England.

Since humans began clearing the forest during the new stone age, most of the land has now been deforested, speeding the natural processes of erosion. Large quantities of stone, gravel and clay are extracted each year, and by 2000 11% of England was covered by roads or buildings.

At the present time Scotland is continuing to rise as a result of the weight of Devensian ice being lifted. The rest of Britain is sinking, generally estimated at 1 mm (1/25 inch) per year, with the London area sinking at double the speed partly due to the continuing compression of the recent clay deposits.

In addition, rises in sea level thought to be due to global warming appear likely to make low lying areas of land increasingly susceptible to flooding, while in some areas the coastline continues to erode at a geologically rapid rate.

The British Isles continue to be subject to several very minor earthquakes each month, and occasional light to moderate ones. During the 20th century 25 earthquakes with a magnitude of 4.5 to 6.1 on the Richter scale were felt [1], many of them originating within the Isles themselves.

Geological features

• Cheddar Gorge – the largest gorge in the British Isles
• Jurassic Coast – a UNESCO World Heritage Site
• Great Glen Fault
• Highland Boundary Fault
• Southern Uplands Fault
• Salisbury Plain
• Tees-Exe line
• Whin Sill
• Siccar Point in Berwickshire provided early proof of the immense age of the Earth.
• The Moine Thrust was the first thrust belt to be discovered by geologists.

Geological resources

• Coal
• North Sea oil
• Stone

Events

• Storegga Slides, caused a tsunami circa 8150 BC
• Bristol Channel floods, 1607 (possible tsunami)
• Colchester earthquake, 1884
• 2002 Dudley earthquake

Institutions

• Geological Society of London
• Edinburgh Geological Society
• British Geological Survey

Pioneers of British Geology

• Mary Anning 1799-1847
• Thomas George Bonney 1833-1923
• William Buckland 1784-1856
• William Conybeare 1787-1857
• James Hutton 1726-1797 the “Father of modern geology”
• Charles Lapworth 1842–1920
• Sir Charles Lyell 1797-1875
• Gideon Mantell 1790-1852
• Sir Roderick Murchison 1792–1871
• John Phillips 1800–1874
• Adam Sedgwick 1785-1873
• William Smith 1769-1839 the “Father of English geology”

Awards

• Wollaston Medal

See also

• British Geological Survey

• Geology
• Geologic timescale
• Coal Measures
• Chalk Formation
• London Clay
• Gault Clay

• Geology of Scotland, Geology of Ireland, Geology of Wales, Geology of England
• By English county: Bedfordshire, Berkshire, Bristol, Buckinghamshire, Cambridgeshire, Cheshire, Cornwall, Cumbria, Derbyshire, Devon, Dorset, Durham, East Riding of Yorkshire, East Sussex, Essex, Gloucestershire, Greater Manchester, Hampshire, Herefordshire, Hertfordshire, Isle of Wight, Kent, Lancashire, Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, London, Merseyside, Norfolk, Northamptonshire, Northumberland, North Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Rutland, Shropshire, Somerset, South Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Suffolk, Surrey, Tyne and Wear, Warwickshire, West Midlands, West Sussex, West Yorkshire, Wiltshire, Worcestershire

• UK topics
  • List of natural disasters in the United Kingdom
  • Rock formations in the United Kingdom

External links

• UK Earthquakes
• UK Peak District Geology
• Northern Ireland Geology
• UK Geology/Fossil locations
• Geology map of Europe

Map of the Geology of Ireland from the Geological Survey of Ireland website -

From wikipedia on the geology of Ireland -

Geological development

Slieve League in Donegal is a fine example of early Irish rock formation.

The oldest known Irish rock is about 1.7 billion years old and is found on Inishtrahull Island off the coast of County Donegal. In other parts of Donegal, scientists have discovered rocks that began life as glacial deposits, demonstrating that at this early period, part of what was to become Ireland was in the grip of an ice age. However, because of the effects of later upheavals, it is almost impossible to sequence these early rock layers correctly.

About 600 million years ago, at the end of the Precambrian era, the Irish landmass was divided in two, with one half on the western side of the Iapetus Ocean and the other at the eastern side, both at about the latitude that South Africa currently occupies. From the evidence of fossils found at Bray Head in County Wicklow, Ireland was below sea level at this time.

Over the next 50 million years, these two parts drifted towards each other, eventually uniting about 440 million years ago. Fossils discovered near Clogher Head, County Louth, show the coming together of shoreline fauna from both sides of the original dividing ocean. The mountains of northwest Ireland were formed during the collision, as was the granite that is found in locations in Donegal and Wicklow.

The Irish landmass was now above sea level and lying near the equator, and fossil traces of land-based life forms survive from this period. These include fossilised trees from Kiltorcan, County Kilkenny, widespread bony fish and freshwater mussel fossils and the footprints of a four-footed amphibian preserved in slate on Valentia Island, County Kerry. Old Red Sandstone also formed at this time.

Between 400 million and 300 million years ago, northwest Europe – including Ireland – sank beneath a warm, calcium-rich sea. Great coral reefs formed in these waters, eventually creating the limestone that still makes up about 65 per cent of the rock mantle of the island. As the waters receded, tropical forests and swamps flourished. The resulting vegetable debris eventually formed coal, most of which was later eroded. This period, known as the Carboniferous era, ended with further plate movement which saw Ireland drift further northward. The resulting pressure created those Irish mountain and hill ranges that run in a northeast to southwest direction.

Karst landscape in the Burren

By 250 million years ago, Ireland was at the latitude of present-day Egypt and had a desert climate. It was at this time that most of the coal and sandstone were eroded. The thinner layers of limestone in the south of the country were also partially affected by this erosion. The limestone that was exposed by the disappearance of its sandstone mantle was affected by carbon dioxide and other factors resulting in a karstic landscape that can still be seen in The Burren in County Clare.

Shortly after this period, organic debris in the seas around Ireland began to form the gas and oil deposits that now play an important role in the island’s economy. Then, about 150 million years ago, Ireland was again submerged, this time in a chalky sea that resulted in the formation of chalk over large parts of the surface. Traces of this survive under the basalt lava that is found in parts of the north.

About 65 million years ago, the volcanic activity that formed this lava began. The Mourne Mountains and other mountains in the northern part of the island formed as a result of this activity. Climatic conditions at this time were warm and vegetation thrived. Vegetable debris in the Antrim depression formed deposits of brown coal or lignite which remain untouched down to the present time. The warm conditions produced high rainfall that accelerated processes of erosion and the formation of karstic landscape forms.

By 25 million years ago, Ireland was close to assuming its present position. The long period of erosion had resulted in considerable soil formation and most of the rock mantle was covered. In areas with good drainage, the covering consisted of brown or grey soil, while in poorly drained areas the black clay tended to dominate. As the climate cooled, soil formation slowed down, and a flora and fauna that would, millions of years later, be familiar to the first human inhabitants began to emerge. By about three million years ago, the present landscape of Ireland had more or less formed.

Since about 1.7 million years ago, the earth has been in the grip of a cycle of warm and cold stages and these have, inevitably, affected Ireland. The earliest evidence we have for this effect comes from the period known as the Ballylinian Warm Stage, some half a million years ago. At this time, most of what are now considered to be native Irish trees were already established on the island. The action of the ice during the cold stages was the major factor in bringing the Irish landscape to its current form.

Obvious impacts of the ice on the landscape include the formation of glacial valleys such as Glendalough in Wicklow and of corries, or glacial lakes. The depositing of mounds of debris under the melting ice created drumlins, a common feature of the landscape across the north midlands. Streams also formed under the ice and the material deposited by these formed eskers (Irish eiscir). The greatest of these, the Esker Riada, divides the northern and southern halves of the island and its ridge once served as the main highway connecting the east and west coasts. About one half of the coastline consists of a low lying dune pasture land known as Machair.

Rocks and soil types

Layers of siltstone, shale and sandstone can be seen in the Cliffs of Moher, near Doolin in County Clare

The large central lowland is of limestone covered with glacial deposits of clay and sand, with widespread bogs and lakes. The Bog of Allen is one of the largest bogs. The coastal mountains vary greatly in geological structure. In the south, the mountains are composed of old red sandstone with limestone river valleys. In Galway, Mayo, Donegal, Down and Wicklow, the mountains are mainly granite, while much of the north-east of the country is a basalt plateau. An area of particular note is the Giant’s Causeway, in County Antrim, a mainly basalt formation.

The soils of the north and west tend to be poorly drained peats and gleys, including peaty podzols. In contrast, in the south and east the soils are free-draining brown earths and brown and grey-brown podzols. This is reflected in the rainfall distribution on the island, with the poorly-drained regions being those with the highest rainfalls.

An unusual environment is present in north County Clare, in an area known as The Burren. This karst-like landscape consists of limestone bedrock, with little or no soil in the inner-most areas. There are numerous sink-holes, where surface water disappears through the porous rock surface, and extensive cave systems have been formed in some areas. The Pol an Ionain cave, near Doolin, is the site of one of the world’s longest known free-hanging stalactites.

From wikipedia -

The Paston Letters are a collection of letters and papers, consisting of the correspondence of members of the gentry Paston family, and others connected with them, between the years 1422 and 1509, and also including some state papers and other important documents.

History of the collection

The huge collection of letters and papers were acquired from the executors of William Paston, 2nd Earl of Yarmouth, the last representative of the family, by the antiquary Francis Blomefield in 1735. On Blomefield’s death in 1752 they came into the possession of Thomas Martin of Palgrave, and upon Martin’s death in 1771 many were purchased by John Worth, a chemist at Diss, whose executors sold them three years later to Sir John Fenn of East Dereham. Some others passed into the hands of John Ives after Martin’s death. In 1787 Fenn published a selection of the letters in two volumes, and general interest was aroused by this publication. In 1789 Fenn published two other volumes of letters, and when he died in 1794 he had prepared for the press a fifth volume, which was published in 1823 by his nephew, William Frere. In 1787 Fenn presented the originals of his first two volumes to King George III, and shortly afterwards received a knighthood, May 23.

These manuscripts soon disappeared, and the same fate attended the originals of the three other volumes. In these circumstances it is not surprising that some doubt should have been cast upon the authenticity of the letters. In 1865 their genuineness was impugned by Herman MerivaleFortnightly Review; but it was vindicated on grounds of internal evidence by James Gairdner in the same periodical; and within a year Gairdner’s contention was established by the discovery of the originals of Fenn’s fifth volume, together with other letters and papers, by Serjeant Frere’s son, Philip Frere, in his house at Dungate, Cambridgeshire. Ten years later the originals of Fenn’s third and fourth volumes, with ninety-five unpublished letters, were found at Roydon Hall, Norfolk, the seat of George Frere, the head of the Frere family; and finally in 1889 the originals of the two remaining volumes were discovered at Orwell Park, Ipswich, the residence of Captain EG Pretyman. This latter batch of papers are the letters which were presented to George III, and which possibly reached Orwell through Sir George Pretyman Tomline (1750-1827), the tutor and friend of William Pitt. in the

The bulk of the Paston letters and associated documents are now in the British Museum; but a few others are in the Bodleian Library, Oxford; at Magdalen College, Oxford; and a few at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

Fenn’s edition of the Paston Letters held the field until 1872, when James Gairdner published the first volume of a new edition. Taking Fenn’s work as a basis, the aim of the new editor was to include all the letters which had come to light since this publication, and in his careful and accurate work in three volumes (London, 1872-1875) he printed over four hundred letters for the first time. Gairdner’s edition, with notes and index, also contained a valuable introduction to each volume, including a survey of the reign of Henry VI; and he was just completing his task when the discovery of 1875 was made at Roydon. An appendix gave particulars of this discovery, and the unpublished letters were printed as a supplement to subsequent editions. In 1904 a new and complete edition of the Paston Letters was edited by Gairdner, and these six volumes, containing 1,088 letters and papers, possess a very valuable introduction, which is the chief authority on the subject.

Chronology

The early Pastons

The family of Paston takes its name from a Norfolk village about twenty miles north of Norwich, and the first member of the family about whom anything is known was living in this village early in the 15th century. This was one Clement Paston (d. 1419), a peasant, holding and cultivating about one hundred acres (40 hectares) of land, who gave an excellent education to his son William, and enabled him to study law. Making good use of his opportunities, William Paston (1378-1444), who is described as a “right cunning man” in the law, attained an influential position in his profession, and in 1429 became a justice of the common pleas. He bought a good deal of land in Norfolk, including some in Paston, and improved his position by his marriage with Agnes (d. 1479), daughter and heiress of Sir Edmund Berry of Harlingbury, Hertfordshire.

Consequently when he died he left a large and valuable inheritance to John Paston (1421-1466), the eldest of his five sons, who was already married to Margaret (d. 1484), daughter of John Mauteby of Mauteby. At this time England was in a very distracted condition. A weak king surrounded by turbulent nobles was incapable of discharging the duties of government, and only the strong man armed could hope to keep his goods in peace. A lawyer like his father, Paston spent much time in London, leaving his wife to look after his business in Norfolk; and many of the Letters were written by Margaret to her husband, detailing the progress of affairs in the county. It is during the lifetimes of John Paston and his eldest son that the Letters are most numerous and valuable, not only for family matters, but also for the history of England.

In 1448 Paston’s manor of Gresham was seized by Robert Hungerford, Lord Moleyns (1431-1464), and, although it was afterwards recovered, the owner could obtain no redress for the loss and injury he had sustained. More serious troubles, however, were at hand. Paston had become very intimate with the wealthy knight Sir John Fastolf, who was probably related to his wife, and who had employed him on several matters of business. Sir John Fastolf was a prominent soldier in the Hundred Years’ War who gave his name to Shakespeare‘s character Falstaff.

In 1459 Fastolf died without children, leaving his affairs in rather a tangled condition. In accordance with the custom of the time, he had conveyed many of his estates in Norfolk and Suffolk to trustees, among whom were John Paston and his brother William, retaining the revenues for himself, and probably intending his trustees after his death to devote the property to the foundation of a college. However, it was found that, a few days before Fastolf’s death, Paston had executed a fresh will in which Fastolf had named ten executors, of whom two only, John Paston and another, were to act; and, moreover, that Fastolf had bequeathed all his lands in Norfolk and Suffolk to Paston, subject only to the duty of founding the college at Caister, and paying 4,000 marks to the other executors.

At once taking possession of the lands, Paston soon found his rights challenged. Various estates were claimed by different noblemen; the excluded executors were angry and aggressive; and Paston soon found himself in a whirlwind of litigation, and exposed also to more violent methods of attack. Something like a regular warfare was waged around Drayton and Hellesdon between John de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk, and the Pastons under Margaret and her eldest son, John; Caister Castle was seized by John Mowbray, 3rd Duke of Norfolk (d. 1461); and similar occurrences took place elsewhere. Some compensation, doubtless, was found in the fact that in 1460, and again in 1461, Paston had been returned to parliament as a knight of the shire for Norfolk, and, enjoying the favour of Edward IV, had regained his castle at Caister. But the royal favour was only temporary, and, having been imprisoned on three occasions, Paston died in May 1466, leaving the suit concerning Paston’s will still proceeding in the church courts.

John Paston’s sons, and descendants

John Paston left at least five sons, the two eldest of whom were, curiously enough, both named John, and the eldest of whom had been knighted during his father’s lifetime. Sir John Paston (1442-1479) was frequently at the court of King Edward IV, but afterwards he favoured the Lancastrian party, and, with his brother John, fought for Henry VI at the battle of Barnet. Meanwhile the struggle over Paston’s estates continued, although in 1461 the king and council had decided that Paston’s ancestors were not bondmen, and consequently that his title to his father’s lands was good. Caister Castle was taken after a regular siege by John Mowbray, 4th Duke of Norfolk (1444-1476), and then recovered by the Pastons, and retaken by the duke. But in 1474 an arrangement was made with William Waynflete, bishop of Winchester, the representative of the excluded executors, by which some of the estates were surrendered to the bishop for charitable purposes, while Paston was secured in the possession of others. Two years later the opportune death of the duke of Norfolk paved the way for the restoration of Caister Castle; but in 1478 a fresh quarrel broke out with the duke of Suffolk.

Sir John, who was a cultured man, had shown great anxiety to recover Caister; but in general he had left the conduct of the struggle to his mother and to the younger John. Owing to his carelessness and extravagance the family lands were also diminished by sales; but nevertheless when he died unmarried in November 1479 he left a goodly inheritance to his brother John. About this time the Letters begin to be scanty and less interesting, but the family continued to flourish. The younger John Paston (d. 1504), after quarrelling with his uncle William over the manors of Oxnead and Marlingford, was knighted at the battle of Stoke in 1487. He married Margery, daughter of Sir Thomas Brews, and left a son, William Paston (c. 1479-1554), who was also knighted, and who was a prominent figure at the court of Henry VIII. Sir William’s second son, Clement (c. 1515-1597), served his country with distinction on the sea, and was wounded at the battle of Pinkie.

The family was continued by Sir William’s eldest son, Erasmus (d. 1540), whose son William succeeded to his grandfather’s estates in 1554, and to those of his uncle Clement in 1597. This William (1528-1610) was knighted ~fl 1578. He was the founder of the Paston grammar-school at North Walsham, and made Oxnead Hall, near Norwich, his principal residence. Christopher Paston was Sir William’s son and heir, and Christopher’s grandson, William (d. 1663), was created a baronet in 1642; being succeeded in the title by his son Robert (1631-1683), who was a member of parliament from 1661 to 1673, and was created earl of Yarmouth in 1679. Robert’s son William (1652-1732), who married a natural daughter of Charles II, was the second earl, and, like his father, was in high favour with the Stuarts. When he died in 1732 he left no son, and his titles became extinct, his estates being sold to discharge his debts.

The perturbed state of affairs revealed by the Paston Letters reflects the general condition of England during the period. It was a time of trouble. The weakness of the government had disorganized every branch of the administration; the succession to the crown itself was contested; the great nobles lived in a state of civil war; and the prevailing discontent found expression in the rising of Jack Cade and in the Wars of the Roses. The correspondence reveals the Pastons in a great variety of relations to their neighbours, friendly or hostile; and abounds with illustrations of the course of public events, as well as of the manners and morals of the time. Nothing is more remarkable than the habitual acquaintance of educated persons, both men and women, with the law, which was evidently indispensable to persons of substance.

Family tree

References

In addition to the editions of the Paston Letters already mentioned, see:

• F Blomefield and C Parkin, History of Norfolk (London, 1805-1810)
• Article in the Dictionary of National Biography
• Norman Davis (ed.), Paston Letters And Papers Of The Fifteenth Century, (1971-1976, the authoritative version)
• Richard Barber (ed.), The Pastons: The Letters of a Family in the Wars of the Roses (1981)
• Helen Castor, Blood and Roses: One family’s struggle and triumph during the tumultuous Wars of the Roses (2006)

External links

Online version

Paston letters on BBC

Revellers leaving Stonehenge after the Summer Solstice, Copyright Andrew Dunn

Stonehenge at mid-summer (from wikipedia). Original source Nordisk familjebok (1918)

All that follows is from wikipedia (accessed 7.1.09).

Prehistoric Britain was a period in the human occupation of Great Britain that was the later part of prehistory, conventionally ending with the Roman invasion of Britain in AD 43, though some historical information is available about Britain before this. The period of prehistory prior to occupation by the genus homo is part of the Geology of the British Isles. The prehistoric period is conventionally divided into a number of smaller periods but their boundaries are uncertain and the changes between them are gradual. The times of change are generally different from those of continental Europe.

Contents 1 Preface 2 The Palaeolithic 2.1 Lower Palaeolithic 2.2 Middle Palaeolithic 2.3 Upper Palaeolithic 3 Mesolithic 3.1 The Mesolithic-Neolithic transition 4 The Neolithic 5 The Bronze Age 6 The Iron Age 6.1 The Late pre-Roman Iron Age (LPRIA) 7 See also 8 References 9 External links

Preface

Britain has been intermittently inhabited by members of the Homo genus for hundreds of thousands of years and by Homo sapiens for tens of thousands of years. DNA analysis has shown that modern man arrived in Britain before the last ice age but retreated to Southern Europe when much of Britain was ice covered, with the remainder being tundra. At this time the sea level was around 127m lower than today so that Britain was joined to Ireland and to the continent of Europe.

After the end of the last Ice Age (around 9500 years ago) Ireland became separated from Britain and later (around 6000 BC) Britain was cut off from the rest of Europe. By 12,000 BC Britain had been reoccupied, as shown by archaeology. By around 4000 BC, the island was populated by people with a Neolithic culture.^[1] However, none of the pre-Roman inhabitants of Britain have any known surviving written language. No literature of pre-Roman Britain has survived, so its history, culture and way of life are known mainly through archaeological finds. Though the main evidence for the period is archaeological, there is a growing amount of genetic evidence which is still changing. There is also a little amount of linguistic evidence, from river and hill names, which is covered in the articles on Pre-Celtic and Celtic.

The first significant written record of Britain and its inhabitants was by the Greek navigator Pytheas, who explored the coastal region of Britain around 325 BC. However, there may be some information on Britain in the “Ora Maritima” which is lost but incorporated in later authors’ writing. Ancient Britons were however involved in extensive trade and cultural links with the rest of Europe from the Neolithic onwards, especially in exporting tin which was in abundant supply. Julius Caesar wrote of Britain around 50 BC.

Located at the fringes of Europe, Britain received foreign technological and cultural achievements much later than mainland areas did during prehistory. The story of ancient Britain is traditionally seen as one of successive waves of settlers from the continent, bringing with them new cultures and technologies. More recent archaeological theories have questioned this migrationist interpretation and argue for a more complex relationship between Britain and the continent. Many of the changes in British society demonstrated in the archaeological record are now suggested to be the effects of the native inhabitants adapting foreign customs rather than being subsumed by an invading population.

The Palaeolithic

Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age) Britain is the period of the earliest known occupation of Britain by man. This huge length of time saw many changes in the environment, encompassing several glacial and interglacial periods which greatly affected human settlement in the region. Providing dating for this distant period of time is difficult and contentious. The inhabitants of the region at this time were bands of hunter-gatherers who roamed all over northern Europe following herds of animals or supported themselves by fishing.

Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) analysis suggests that 21% of the maternal lines in modern Britain came in the pre-glacial period and 51% in the Late Upper Palaeolithic^{[citation needed]}.

However, by stark contrast, several studies of the Y-chromosome have shown that a mass migration of 50–100% of English males occurred in the past 2,500 years, most probably during the Anglo-Saxon invasion. For example, the 2002 study: “Y-chromosome evidence for Anglo-Saxon mass migration”^[2] and the 2005 study: “The place of the Basques in the European Y-chromosome diversity landscape”.^[3] Both these studies found that only in Wales was there a significant population of pre-Anglo-Saxon Y-chromosomes and that the English Y-chromosome was indistinguishable from that of Friesland in the Netherlands.

Recent (2006) scientific evidence^[4] regarding mtDNA sequences from ancient and modern Europe has shown a distinct pattern for the different time periods sampled in the course of the study. Despite some limitations regarding sample sizes the results were found to be non-random. As such, the results indicate that, in addition to populations in Europe expanding from southern refugia after the last glacial maximum (especially the Franco-Cantabrian region), evidence also exists for various northern refugia.

Other studies have shown genetic links between the people of the British Isles and Basques.

Lower Palaeolithic

(up to 250,000 years ago)

There is evidence from bones and flint tools found in coastal deposits near Happisburgh in Norfolk and Pakefield in Suffolk that a species of Homo was present in what is now Britain around 700,000 years ago. At this time, southern and eastern Britain were linked to continental Europe by a wide land bridge allowing humans to move freely. The current position of the English Channel was a large river flowing westwards and fed by tributaries that would later become the Thames and Seine. Reconstructing this ancient environment has provided clues to the route first visitors took to arrive at what was then a peninsula of the Eurasian continent. Archaeologists have found a string of early sites located close to the route of a now lost watercourse named the Bytham River which indicate that it was exploited as the earliest route west into Britain.

Sites such as Boxgrove in Sussex illustrate the later arrival in the archaeological record of an archaic Homo species called Homo heidelbergensis around 500,000 years ago. These early peoples made Acheulean flint tools (hand axes) and hunted the large native mammals of the period. They drove elephants, rhinoceri and hippopotami over the tops of cliffs or into bogs to more easily kill them.

The extreme cold of the following Anglian Stage is likely to have driven humans out of Britain altogether and the region does not appear to have been occupied again until the ice receded during the Hoxnian Stage. This warmer time period lasted from around 300,000 until 200,000 years ago and saw the Clactonian flint tool industry develop at sites such as Barnfield Pit in Kent. The period had produced a rich and widespread distribution of sites by Palaeolithic standards, although uncertainty over the relationship between the Clactonian and Acheulean industries is still unresolved.

This period saw also Levallois flint tools introduced, possibly by humans arriving from Africa. Finds from Swanscombe and Botany Pit in Purfleet support Levallois technology being a European rather than African introduction however. The more advanced flint technology permitted more efficient hunting and therefore made Britain a more worthwhile place to remain until the following period of cooling Wolstonian Stage, 352,000–130,000 years ago).

However, there is little evidence of human occupation during the subsequent Ipswichian Stage between around 130,000 and 110,000 years ago. Meltwaters from the previous glaciation cut Britain off from the continent for the first time during this period which may explain the lack of activity. Overall, there appears to have been a gradual decline in population between the Hoxnian Stage and this time suggesting that the absence of humans in the archaeological record here was the result of gradual depopulation.

Middle Palaeolithic

(from around 180,000 to 40,000 years ago)

From 180 to 60 kya there is no evidence of human occupation in Britain. From 60 to 40 kya Britain was grass land with giant deer and horse, with woolly mammoths, rhino and carnivores. Neanderthal man had arrived in Britain by around 40,000 years ago.

Upper Palaeolithic

(around 40,000 – 10,000 years ago)

This period is often divided into three subperiods: the Early Upper Palaeolithic (before the main glacial period), the Middle Upper Palaeolithic (the main glacial period) and the Late Upper Palaeolithic (after the main glacial period). Evidence of Neanderthal occupation of Britain is limited and by 30,000 BC the first signs of modern human (Homo sapiens) activity, the Aurignacian industry, are known. The most famous example from this period is the burial of the “Red Lady of Paviland” (actually now known to be a man) in modern day coastal south Wales. A final ice age covered Britain between around 70,000 and 10,000 years ago with an extreme cold snap between 22,000 and 13,000 years ago called the Dimlington stadial (with the Last Glacial Maximum at around 20,000 years ago). This may well have driven humans south and out of Britain altogether, pushing them back across the land bridge that had resurfaced at the beginning of the glaciation, possibly to a refuge in Southern France and Iberia. Sites such as Gough’s Cave in Somerset dated at 12,000 BC provide evidence suggesting that humans returned to Britain towards the end of this ice age, in a warm period known as the Dimlington interstadial although further extremes of cold right before the final thaw may have caused them to leave again and then return repeatedly. The environment during this ice age period would have been a largely treeless tundra, eventually replaced by a gradually warmer climate, perhaps reaching 17 degrees Celsius (62.6 Fahrenheit) in summer which encouraged the expansion of birch trees as well as shrub and grasses.

The first distinct culture of the Upper Palaeolithic in Britain is what archaeologists call the Creswellian industry, with leaf-shaped points probably used as arrowheads. It produced more refined flint tools but also made use of bone, antler, shell, amber, animal teeth, and mammoth ivory. These were fashioned into tools but also jewellery and rods of uncertain purpose. Flint seems to have been brought into areas with limited local resources; the stone tools found in the caves of Devon, such as Kent’s Cavern, seem to have been sourced from Salisbury Plain, 100 miles (161 km) east. This is interpreted as meaning that the early inhabitants of Britain were highly mobile, roaming over wide distances and carrying ‘toolkits’ of flint blades with them rather than heavy, unworked flint nodules or improvising tools extemporaneously. The possibility that groups also travelled to meet and exchange goods or sent out dedicated expeditions to source flint has also been suggested.

The dominant food species were the Wild Horse (Equus ferus) and Red Deer (Cervus elaphus) although other mammals ranging from hares to mammoth were also hunted, including rhino and hyena. From the limited evidence available, burial seemed to involve skinning and dismembering a corpse with the bones placed in caves. This suggests a practice of excarnation and secondary burial, and possibly some form of ritual cannibalism. Artistic expression seems to have been mostly limited to engraved bone although the cave art at Creswell Crags and Mendip caves are notable exceptions.

From 12,700 to 11,500 years ago the climate became cooler and dryer, in what is known as the Younger Dryas period. Food animal populations seem to have declined although woodland coverage expanded. Tool manufacture in the Final Upper Palaeolithic revolved around smaller flints but bone and antler work became less common. Typically there are parallel-sided flint blades known as “Cheddar Points”. There are scrapers, some of which are annoted with what may be calendars. However, the number of known sites is much larger than before and more widely spread. Many more open air sites are known such as that at Hengistbury Head.

Mesolithic

(around 10,000 to 5500 years ago)

Around 10,000 years ago the ice age finally ended and the Holocene era began. Temperatures rose, probably to levels similar to those today, and forests expanded further. By 9,500 years ago, the rising sea levels caused by the melting glaciers cut Britain off from Ireland, and by around 6500 years ago continental Europe was cut off for the last time. The warmer climate changed the Arctic environment to one of pine, birch, and alder forest; this less open landscape was less conducive to the large herds of reindeer and wild horse that had previously sustained humans. Those animals were replaced in people’s diets by pig and less social animals such as elk, red deer, roe deer, wild boar and aurochs (wild cattle) which would have required different hunting techniques in order to be effectively exploited. Tools changed to incorporate barbs which could snag the flesh of a hunted animal, making it harder for it to escape alive. Tiny microliths were developed for hafting onto harpoons and spears. Woodworking tools such as adzes appear in the archaeological record, although some flint blade types remained similar to their Palaeolithic predecessors. The dog was domesticated because of its benefits during hunting and the wetland environments created by the warmer weather would have been a rich source of fish and game. It is likely that these environmental changes were accompanied by social changes amongst the Britons of this time. Humans spread and reached the far north of Scotland during this period. Sites from the British Mesolithic include the Mendips, Star Carr in Yorkshire and Oronsay in the Inner Hebrides. Excavations at Howick in Northumberland uncovered evidence of a large circular building dating to c. 7,600 BC which is interpreted as a dwelling. A further example has also been identified at Deepcar in Sheffield. The older view of Mesolithic Britons as being exclusively nomadic is now being replaced with a more complex picture of seasonal occupation or, in some cases, permanent occupation and attendant land and food source management where conditions permitted it. Travel distances seem to have become shorter, typically with movement between high and low ground.

The Mesolithic-Neolithic transition

Though the Mesolithic environment was of a bounteous nature, the rising population and ancient Britons’ success in exploiting it eventually led to local exhaustion of many natural resources. The remains of a Mesolithic elk found caught in a bog at Poulton-le-Fylde in Lancashire demonstrated that it had been wounded by hunters and escaped on three different occasions, indicating unsuccessful-hunting during the Mesolithic. A few Neolithic monuments overlie Mesolithic sites but little direct continuity can be demonstrated. Farming of both crops and domestic animals was adopted in Britain around 4,500 BC at least partly because of the need for reliable food sources. Hunter-gathering ways of life would have persisted into the Neolithic at first, but the increasing sophistication of material culture with the concomitant control of local resources by individual groups would have caused it to be replaced by distinct territories occupied by different tribes. Other elements of the Neolithic such as pottery, leaf-shaped arrowheads and polished stone axes would have been adopted earlier as part of the Neolithic ‘package’. The climate had been warming since the later Mesolithic and continued to improve, replacing the earlier pine forests with woodland.

In 1997 DNA analysis was undertaken on a tooth from a Mesolithic Cheddar Man from 9000 BC whose remains were found in Gough’s Cave at Cheddar Gorge. His mitochondrial DNA was of Haplogroup U5, a subclade of Haplogroup U (mtDNA) found in 11% of modern European populations.

The Neolithic

(4000 – 2000 BC)

The Neolithic was the period of domestication of plants and animals. A debate is currently being waged between those who believe that the introduction of farming and a sedentary lifestyle was brought about by resident peoples adopting new practices or by continental invaders bringing their culture with them and, to some degree, replacing the indigenous populations.

Analysis of the mitochondrial DNA of modern European populations shows that over 80% are descended in the female line from European hunter-gatherers. Less than 20% are descended in the female line from Neolithic farmers from the Middle East. The percentage in Britain is smaller at around 11% with the paternal varying from 10–100% across the country, being higher in the east^{[citation needed]}. However, as already noted, this situation is reversed when looking at English and Scottish Y-chromosomes, which show a large degree of population replacement during the Anglo-Saxon invasion and a nearly complete masking over of whatever population movement (or lack of it) went before on these two countries.^[2][3] Looking from a more Europe-wide standpoint, researchers at Stanford University have found overlapping cultural and genetic evidence that supports the theory that migration was, at least, partially responsible for the Neolithic Revolution in Northern Europe (including Britain).^[5] The science of genetic anthropology is changing very fast and a clear picture across the whole of human occupation of Britain has yet to emerge.

Pollen analysis shows that woodland was decreasing and grassland increasing, with a major decline of elms. The winters were typically 3 degrees colder than at present but the summers some 2.5 degrees warmer.

The arrival of farming and a sedentary lifestyle as shorthand for the Neolithic is increasingly giving way to a more complex view of the changes and continuities in practices that can be observed from the Mesolithic period onwards. For example the development of Neolithic monumental architecture apparently venerating the dead may represent more comprehensive social and ideological changes involving new interpretations of time, ancestry, community and identity.

In any case, the Neolithic Revolution, as it is called, introduced a more settled way of life and ultimately led to societies becoming divided into differing groups of farmers, artisans and leaders. Forest clearances were undertaken to provide room for cereal cultivation and animal herds. Native cattle and pigs were reared whilst sheep and goats were later introduced from the continent as were the wheats and barleys grown in Britain. However, only a few actual settlement sites are known in Britain, unlike the continent. Cave occupation was common at this time.

The construction of the earliest earthwork sites in Britain began during the early Neolithic (c. 4400 BC – 3300 BC) in the form of long barrows used for communal burial and the first causewayed enclosures, sites which have parallels on the continent. The former may be derived from the long house although no long house villages have been found in Britain, only individual examples. The stone-built houses on Orkney such as those at Skara Brae are however indicators of some nucleated settlement in Britain. Evidence of growing mastery over the environment is embodied in the Sweet Track, a wooden trackway built to cross the marshes of the Somerset Levels and dated to 3807 BC. Leaf-shaped arrowheads, round-based pottery types and the beginnings of polished axe production are common indicators of the period. Evidence of the use of cow’s milk comes from analysis of pottery contents found beside the Sweet Track.

The Middle Neolithic (c. 3300 BC – c. 2900 BC) saw the development of cursus monuments close to earlier barrows and the growth and abandonment of causewayed enclosures as well as the building of impressive chamber tombs such as the Maeshowe types.  The earliest stone circles and individual burials also appear.

Different pottery types such as Grooved ware appear during the later Neolithic (c. 2900 BC – c.2200 BC) whilst new enclosures, called henges were built, along with stone rows and the famous sites of Stonehenge, Avebury and Silbury Hill reached their peak. Industrial flint mining such as that at Cissbury and Grimes Graves began, with evidence of long distance trade. Wooden tools and bowls were common, and bows were constructed.

The Bronze Age

(around 2200 to 750 BC)

Main article: Bronze Age Britain

This period can be sub-divided into an earlier phase (2300 to 1200) and a later one (1200 – 700). Beaker pottery appears in England around 2475–2315 cal BC^[6] along with flat axes and burial practices of inhumation. With the revised Stonehenge chronology, this is after the Sarsen Circle and trilithons were erected at Stonehenge. Believed to be of Iberian origin, (modern day Spain and Portugal), Beaker techniques brought to Britain the skill of refining metal. At first the users made items from copper, but from around 2,150 BC smiths had discovered how to make bronze (which was much harder than copper) by mixing copper with a small amount of tin. With this discovery, the Bronze Age arrived in Britain. Over the next thousand years, bronze gradually replaced stone as the main material for tool and weapon making.

Britain had large, easily accessible reserves of tin in the modern areas of Cornwall and Devon in what is now southwest England, and thus tin mining began. By around 1,600 BC the southwest of Britain was experiencing a trade boom as British tin was exported across Europe, evidence of ports being found in southern Devon at Bantham and Mount Batten. Copper was mined at the Great Orme in North Wales.

The Beaker people were also skilled at making ornaments from gold, and examples of these have been found in graves of the wealthy Wessex culture of central southern Britain.

Early Bronze Age Britons buried their dead beneath earth mounds known as barrows, often with a beaker alongside the body. Later in the period, cremation was adopted as a burial practice with cemeteries of urns containing cremated individuals appearing in the archaeological record, with deposition of metal objects such as daggers. People of this period were also largely responsible for building many famous prehistoric sites such as the later phases of Stonehenge along with Seahenge. The Bronze Age people lived in round houses and divided up the landscape. Stone rows are to be seen on. for example, Dartmoor. They ate cattle, sheep, pigs and deer as well as shellfish and birds. They carried out salt manufacture. Pytheas says that the Britons were renowned wheat farmers. The wetlands were a source of wildfowl and reeds. There was ritual deposition of offerings in the wetlands and in holes in the ground. The Lindow man may have been ritually killed as an offering.

There was some debate amongst archaeologists as to whether the ‘Beaker people’ were a race of people who migrated to Britain en masse from the continent, or whether a prestigious Beaker cultural “package” of goods and behaviour (which eventually spread across most of western Europe) diffused to Britain’s existing inhabitants through trade across tribal boundaries. Modern thinking tends towards the latter view. Alternatively, a ruling class of Beaker individuals may have made the migration and come to control the native population at some level. Genetics suggests that there was only a small infux of people to Britain at this time, around a few percent.

There is evidence of a relatively large scale disruption of cultural patterns which some scholars think may indicate an invasion (or at least a migration) into southern Great Britain circa the 12th century BC. This disruption was felt far beyond Britain, even beyond Europe, as most of the great Near Eastern empires collapsed (or experienced severe difficulties) and the Sea Peoples harried the entire Mediterranean basin around this time. Some scholars consider that the Celtic languages arrived in Britain at this time.

The Iron Age

(around 750 BC – 43 AD)

Main article: British Iron Age

In around 750 BC iron working techniques reached Britain from southern Europe. Iron was stronger and more plentiful than bronze, and its introduction marks the beginning of the Iron Age. Iron working revolutionised many aspects of life, most importantly agriculture. Iron tipped ploughs could churn up land far more quickly and deeply than older wooden or bronze ones, and iron axes could clear forest land far more efficiently for agriculture. There was a landscape of arable, pasture and managed woodland. There were many enclosed settlements and land ownership was important.

By 600 BC, British society changed again. Often termed the “Celtic culture“, it had by 500 BC covered most of the British Isles. The Celts were highly skilled craftsmen and produced intricately patterned gold jewellery and weapons in bronze and iron. It is disputed whether Iron Age Britons were “Celts”, with numerous academics such as John Collis^[7] and Simon James^[8] actively opposing the idea of ‘Celtic Britain’, since the term was only applied at this time to a tribe in Gaul. However, placenames and tribal names from the later part of the period suggest that a Celtic language was spoken, for example the people were said to be “Pretanni”. The term “Celtic” continues to be used by linguists to describe the family that includes many of the ancient languages of Western Europe and modern British languages such as Welsh without controversy.^[9]

Iron Age Britons lived in organised tribal groups, ruled by a chieftain.

As people became more numerous, wars broke out between opposing tribes. This was traditionally interpreted as the reason for the building of hill forts, although the siting of some hill forts on the sides of hills undermined their defensive value, hence “hill forts” may represent increasing communal areas or even ‘Elite Areas’. However some hillside constructions may simply have been cow enclosures. Although the first had been built about 1,500 BC, hillfort building peaked during the later Iron Age. There are over 2000 Iron Age hillforts known in Britain.^[10] By about 350 BC many hillforts went out of use and the remaining ones were reinforced. Large farmsteads produced food in industrial quantities and Roman sources note that Britain exported hunting dogs, animal skins and slaves.

The Late pre-Roman Iron Age (LPRIA)

The last centuries before the Roman invasion saw an influx of refugees from Gaul (modern day France and Belgium) known as the Belgae, who were displaced as the Roman Empire expanded around 50 BC. They settled in the area around Winchester. A tribe known as the Parisii, who had cultural links to the continent, were in north-east England.

From around 175 BC, the areas of Kent, Hertfordshire and Essex had especially advanced pottery-making skills. The tribes of south-east England were partially Romanised and were responsible for creating the first settlements (oppida) large enough to be called towns.

The last centuries before the Roman invasion saw increasing sophistication in British life. About 100 BC, iron bars began to be used as currency, while internal trade and trade with continental Europe flourished, largely due to Britain’s extensive mineral reserves. Coinage was developed, based on continental types but bearing the names of local chieftains. This was used in south-east England, but not in areas such as Dumnonia.

As the Roman Empire expanded northwards, Rome began to take interest in Britain. This may have been caused by an influx of refugees from Roman occupied Europe, or Britain’s large mineral reserves. See Roman Britain for the history of this subsequent period.

See also

• List of prehistoric structures in Great Britain
• Genetic history of the British Isles
• Prehistoric Scotland

References

1. ^ Prehistoric Britain 6000BC – 55BC, Guide to Britain
2. ^ ^{a b} Molecular Biology and Evolution 19: 1008–1021 (full text)
3. ^ ^{a b} European Journal of Human Genetics (2005) 13, 1293–1302 (full text)
4. ^ Molecular Biology and Evolution 2006 23(1):152–161 Tracing the Phylogeography of Human Populations in Britain Based on 4th–11th Century mtDNA Genotypes (full text]
5. ^ Overlapping Genetic and Archaeological Evidence Suggests Neolithic Migration, Say Stanford Researchers (2002) (press release)
6. ^ Pearson, Mike; Ros Cleal, Peter Marshall, Stuart Needham, Josh Pollard, Colin Richards, Clive Ruggles, Alison Sheridan, Julian Thomas, Chris Tilley, Kate Welham, Andrew Chamberlain, Carolyn Chenery, Jane Evans, Chris Knüsel, (September 2007). “The Age of Stonehenge”. Antiquity 811 (313): 617–639.
7. ^ Collis, John. The Celts – Origins, Myths and Inventions. Tempus, 2003
8. ^ James. Simon. The Atlantic Celts British Museum Press, 1999
9. ^ Ball, Martin J. & James Fife (ed.) (1993). The Celtic Languages. London: Routledge. ISBN 0415010357.
10. ^ The Iron Age, smr.herefordshire.gov.uk

• Cunliffe, Barry. The Extraordinary Voyage of Pytheas the Greek Penguin, 2002.
• Cunliffe, Barry Facing the Ocean: The Atlantic and Its Peoples, 8000 BC to AD 1500 (2001, Oxford University Press)
• Darvill, T C. Prehistoric Britain.
• Hawkes, J and C. Prehistoric Britain. 1943.
• Oppenheimer, Stephen. The Origins of the British Constable, 2006.
• Pryor, Francis. Britain BC
• Pryor, Francis. Farmers in Prehistoric Britain.
• Sykes, Brian. The Seven Daughters of Eve: The Science That Reveals Our Genetic Ancestry. Bantam, London 2001, ISBN 0-593-04757-5
• Wainright, R. A Guide to Prehistoric Britain.

• British History Encyclopedia. Paragon 1999, ISBN 1-4054-1632-7.

External links

• Ancient Human Occupation of Britain Project
• Britain’s human history revealed
• 700,000 year old remains in Norfolk
• The Boxgrove project
• Ancient Britons come mainly from Spain
• An audio-visual presentation by Dr Mike Weale of UCL talking about genetic evidence for migration
• Prehistoric Burial Sites in Wales