New Views over Megalithia

[Boreades]

The Beeb calls it a Farming Collective. Whatever happened to the painted savages in animal skins who frightened Caesar so much?

The Beeb was quoting a hopeful District Council person. Perhaps the District Council is harbouring some unrepentant Corbynistas who yearn for the good-old-days of Collectives and Co-Ops?

Mind you according to the beeb on normal occasions we didn't have any crops before they were all brought here by kind strangers. Potatoes, wheat, carrots, and all the rest. So what were these southern farmers growing?

Barley. To make beer. To trade with the Bretons for their wine. Cheers.

[TisILeclerc]

How about apples to make cider with. Very popular in the south west, Brittany and Normandy.



http://cideruk.com/cider_making/origins_of_cider

[TisILeclerc]

The Daily Mail has finally caught up with the BBC and done a report on it with a bit more information and a map of the area.

Also a video showing the process of getting the image.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... Downs.html

It would be interesting to see how far these fields stretch in all directions. I imagine the entire country would have been covered.

What size of population would be needed to farm all that lot. In addition to which there would be the various specialists in tool making and whatever else the farmers needed. It's close to Portsmouth and Southampton. Perhaps they were supplying those to places and the ships going in and out?

[TisILeclerc]

The Archies are really getting excited about the Pompeii of the north as they call it. I wasn't aware of volcanoes in East Anglia although I was always warned about going there.

Anyway they have now established trading links with the middle east. And believe it or not the linen threads they have found are some of the finest ever seen. So much for bearskins and woad. I want my hairy ancestors back not a load of fairies in Laura Ashley clobber.

Duncan Wilson, chief executive of Historic England, said: "This has transformed our knowledge of Bronze Age Britain.
"Over the past 10 months, Must Farm has given us an extraordinary window into how people lived 3,000 years ago.
"Now we know what this small but wealthy Bronze Age community ate, how they made their homes and where they traded.
"Archaeologists and scientists around the world are learning from Must Farm and it's already challenged a number of longstanding perceptions."

Still there are a few manly objects lying about. How about this one?

Animal remains suggest they ate a diet of wild boar, red deer, calves, lambs and freshwater fish such as pike. The charred remains of porridge type foods, emmer wheat and barley grains have been found preserved in amazing detail, sometimes still inside the bowls they were served in

That's more like it.



http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-ca ... e-36778820

And of course the Daily Mail has more detailed photographs on its site.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/ ... -East.html

[hvered]

My server has been working but I haven't been getting notified of posts so apologies for lagging behind. I was interested to read about the evidence of farming as I've been looking at the evidence for "pre-Conquest monasteries" and so far haven't come across any. Nichts. Nada.

The most common finds in burial sites are practical, clearly non-religious, objects such as knives, farming tools, tweezers etc. Occasionally part of an inscribed stone gets dug up and assumed to relate to an important person's grave; it is then dated eighth-century which can only be based on the "documentary evidence" (Bede in 9 out of 10 cases) because there isn't any other.

[TisILeclerc]

That patch of farming land is quite large. But even so is it just a coincidence that they've hit the right spot by chance or could it be a fragment of a farmed landscape that stretches from one end of the country to the other?

It's often been wondered about who fed the builders of Stonehenge and other such places.

To feed such massive building sites would take a lot of food with a large population of farmers and others providing the necessary. Same goes for the mining and sailing projects.

British Steel in its heyday at my local site had canteens all over the place just to keep steelworkers fed.

All of that takes detailed organisation.

[Boreades]

I was interested to read about the evidence of farming as I've been looking at the evidence for "pre-Conquest monasteries" and so far haven't come across any. Nichts. Nada.

The most common finds in burial sites are practical, clearly non-religious, objects such as knives, farming tools, tweezers etc. Occasionally part of an inscribed stone gets dug up and assumed to relate to an important person's grave; it is then dated eighth-century which can only be based on the "documentary evidence" (Bede in 9 out of 10 cases) because there isn't any other.

Not saying it's evidence, just that some on this list claim to be pre-Conquest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_m ... in_England

[hvered]

Thanks for the list, Borry. They're Norman houses apart from those that disappeared presumed victims of 'Viking raids'.

[TisILeclerc]

Big fleas have little fleas etc. Where there was a monastery I'm sure there were a handful of churches nearby.

The ruins of Whitby Abbey are not the abbey that Hilda knew. The same goes for the rest of the country and as the north was really part of the Irish church it would be unusual for monasteries not to have existed.

The small All Saints church in Great Ayton is a Norman church. But inside there are stones which are definitely Celtic or Anglo Saxon knotwork. An occasional one is still built into the wall. What we have is a destroyed church rebuilt by the new rulers. As happened all over England. In fact similar things go on all over the world.

The Domesday Book records that there was an Anglo Saxon church in 1086, probably on the same site. Many local churches were destroyed in the “Harrying of the North” but the Great Ayton building appears to have survived. Despite this, the invaders wished to make their mark by building a new church in the twelfth century. Using the warm local sandstone they erected what was possibly the only stone building in the village.

http://greatayton.wdfiles.com/local--fi ... tayton.com

Not far away is Nunthorpe named after a group of Cistercian nuns who had been evicted from Hutton Lowcross at Guisborough for 'rowdy behaviour'. The same thing happened at 'Thorpe' as it was known and they were evicted again to Baysdale which has Knights' Templar and Hospitaller connections.

This is all post conquest but usually things are built on what has gone before. Much easier especially as the convenient control centres have been long established as well as farming and trading practices.

http://www.nunthorpehistorygroup.org/nunthorpe_hall.htm

http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/yo ... /pp413-417

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gisborough_Priory

Guisborough Priory is set up not too long after the Conquest by none other than the Brus family. All of these locations are strategically important especially given it was a new country to the invaders and hostile.

And then along came Henry and destroyed the lot in his turn. Unlike the Normans he wasn't interested in rebuilding. A habit that has persisted through the ages in the London mindset.

I would imagine that underneath or beside every monastery there is an older one with the original records conveniently hidden. Rather like the ancient field systems in the article above that nobody knew about but must have walked over every day.

[hvered]

The ruins of Whitby Abbey are not the abbey that Hilda knew.

Quite right. There was no abbey in "Hild's" day according to the archaeological report

No clearly communal chapterhouse, refectory or dormitory was found and the relative scarcity of Saxon material suggests that the larger part of the Saxon foundation lies below and to the south of the church, beneath the cloister of the post- Conquest abbey. Similarly, there is no evidence as yet of the pre-Conquest abbey church.